Volumes

Your cassette pet

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW How’s this for a universal truth: if you’ve ever given a good goddamn about music and you’ve ever been touched by someone in your life (or wanted to be touched, as the case may be), you’ve surely sat yourself down and made a mixtape to put all of those feelings into 90 minutes or less. It’s a rite of passage for any music freak who dares to live beyond the safe confines of his or her headphones; many of us revisit that breathless, nerve-racked experience over and over again, freezing our latest crushes in little plastic time capsules, hoping they’ll build to something bigger. The messenger may have changed — we’ve gone from tape to disc and now maybe to the playlist — but the message remains the same: "I like you. Do you like me?"

Rock journalist Rob Sheffield is an expert on such matters, as Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (Three Rivers Press, 224 pages, $13) clearly demonstrates. Taking the reader on a song- and swoon-studded travelogue through the inner workings of his heart, the memoirist begins with the wince-along bumblings of a gangly adolescent mixtaper and continues through to the instant click of meeting his similarly tune-centric wife and eventually to — and here I am not giving away anything that isn’t already mentioned on the book’s cover — her sudden death from a pulmonary embolism. It’s a genuinely moving, thoughtful, and frequently cackle-inducing work, and — perhaps best of all — it bounces as much as a book can with boundless verve about songs that have soundtracked every blunder, triumph, and openhearted, weak-kneed moment of falling in love.

For every smile and nod of appreciation at the mention of particularly meaningful musical moments — Sheffield’s anecdote about Gladys Knight and the Pips’ legendary "Midnight Train to Georgia" resonates so effectively in part because everyone knows the song in the first place — there’s a delightful story about an obscure songwriting gem just waiting to be found, thanks to the enthusiasm with which Sheffield conveys his household’s eclectic tastes. His bright-eyed declaration of love for "In a World Without Heroes" — a fey 1992 glam ballad from a short-lived Mark Robinson one-off named Grenadine — could very well send a few readers scurrying to the record shop.

Love Is a Mix Tape isn’t just a collection of musings about favorite songs from a rock critic; Sheffield celebrates the music by placing it in the context of finding his soul mate and thus allows the tunes to help tell the story of their relationship. Whether capturing the endorphin rush of being introduced to a new all-time classic, grinning unapologetically over so-bad-it’s-good radio cheese, or seeking solace from a country weeper, he offers music lovers a sympathetic reflection of their emotional lives, bumps and all. Readers, in turn, will laugh, shout, and cry — not solely because of the experiences detailed by Sheffield, but also in reaction to the author’s pinpoint prose. At its best, this book is a glowing little wonder that reminds us never to dismiss the joy or comfort we receive from a simple song.

My so-called hell

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This World of Ours, a youthfully nihilistic, epic, and episodic take on nihilistic youth in 21st-century Japan, represents the coming out of its writer and director, Nakajima Ryo, not just as a filmmaker to watch but in a larger sense as well. Nakajima made his debut feature after a period of post–high school isolation when he became a hikikomori, one of the growing number of young Japanese who voluntarily cocoon themselves in their rooms for months and sometimes years.

The fundamental disconnect that drives the hikikomori to solitary confinement is made palpable in the three high school students at the center of Nakajima’s ambitious, unwieldly, and at times ugly film, even as they flit through populated hallways and shopping arcades. At the start of the film Hiroki (Yoshihiko Taniguchi) and Ryo (Satoshi Okutso) spend their time bullying ugly duckling Mitarai (Hasegawa Souta) while enduring the verbal abuse of one of their teachers, Mr. Iwayama (Shinmon Akao). Mitarai is also a plaything for the blankly coy Ami (Arisa Hata), who encourages him to seek revenge when she isn’t shit-talking him with his tormentors.

These schoolyard cat and mouse games give way to the film’s unsettling centerpiece: after a night out drinking, Ami stumbles home alone, while the boys, at the behest of an older peer, take one of their female companions to his lair and brutally gang-rape her. The scene is clearly indebted to 1971’s A Clockwork Orange (as is the film, which also evokes Akihiko Shiota’s contemporary cruel stories of youth and even Wakamatsu Koji’s gonzo 1969 film Go Go Second Time Virgin), down to the reedy, compressed version of Beethoven’s Ninth — which, appropriately, is more suggestive of a ringtone than a symphony — on the soundtrack.

A Clockwork Orange was controversial because of its highly stylized presentation of graphic violence. Like director Stanley Kubrick, its protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is obsessed with aesthetics: it’s not the film’s mere juxtaposition of "Ode to Joy" with heinous acts that is so shocking but rather the criminal’s adulatory investment in something so beautiful. In comparison, Nakajima’s youths hardly have an investment in anything, and the director seems marginally invested in them. Hiroki is clearly paralyzed by what he has done but is so unempathetic that he can only fret over how a criminal record will lower his already dismal prospects of landing a white-collar job. They commit their acts of self-mutilation, bullying, and murder in a zero-sum game of identity formation, with every painful twist caught by Nakajima’s washed-out, often handheld camera. If there are aesthetics at work here, they are clearly those of the YouTube auteur: Nakajima keeps his characters in anxious proximity to the lens. Every shot is practically a close-up.

It is unsurprising then, that these youths talk about Sept. 11 in tones of respectful awe, treating it as the ne plus ultra of how to leave your mark on the world. Ryo, reeling from a bloody confrontation with Iwayama and rejection at the hands of his older sister, decides — much like real-life counterpart Seung-Hui Cho or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the only way out is to commit an act of terrorism. This World of Ours even opens with slo-mo footage of the Twin Towers burning, accompanied by the portentous strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, a juxtaposition that Ryo could have made in a computer lab while cutting class.

The same music wafts over the crowded halls of the high school in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), a far more elliptical take on teen-on-teen violence whose cataclysmic ending is made all the more so by the camera’s constant gentle proximity to the revolving social cross section on display. But while Van Sant’s film seems perfumed by adolescent ennui, that isn’t the only emotion the director trafficks in. (Unfortunately, Van Sant’s most recent foray into the troubled private lives of teens, Paranoid Park — which also screens at SF IndieFest — can’t get out of its funk, despite some beautiful footage of cherubic skater boys lensed by Christopher Doyle.)

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the anger and disenfranchisement on display in Nakajima’s film or want to knock the chutzpah with which he wields them. IndieFest is about first steps, whether they’re accompanied by insecure shrugs or grandly demonstrative gestures. By the time This World of Ours has ended with a bang and much whimpering, it’s offered a few of each.

THIS WORLD OF OURS

Sun/10, 9:30 p.m., Victoria

Mon/11, 9:30 p.m., Roxie

Accidental tranny

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Guilty! I’m totally real-time guilty. Yeps, frenz, I’m that spastic whore on the dance floor whooping like a neon cough, flinging my Mary Kate triceps up when a thump drops in the mix. If a club has one of those heinous black lights at the door, I sneak in the back so no one spots the glowing spunk on my skirt or my phosphorescent VCR. I always ask for extra antioxidant-rich lychees in my pomegranatini, to offset the American Spirits. OK, I’ve blown the DJ. And although I’ve never stuffed a tube sock down my sequined thong or Botoxed my rosy areolae, those are my fake digits you just beamed into your contacts, sweetness. Thanks for the pomegranatini. Call me!

Also, I take things for granted. Some parties in this town have been around since Y2K was ripped-knee-high to a troll doll (New Wave City, 1984, Popscene, Death Guild, Red Wine Social, Qoöl). I’ve surely enjoyed them all. But in my ravenous quest for novelty I’ve watched them gradually fade from my schedule, like tears of joy evaporating on a monitor. Thus I was shocked when word squirted down the pudding pipe that — after 12 years of lunatic antics at the Stud — weekly trash-drag frenzy Trannyshack was slamming its barn door shut in August. Just where the heck will club pervs get their weekly fix of "two trannies, one cup"?

"I never intended to become a professional drag queen, Marke B. It was almost an accident," Trannyshack hostess Heklina said, laughing groggily into the phone when I rang for dish. I’d woken her up: it was 2 p.m. "I was merely dabbling in drag when the Stud approached me a dozen years ago to fill the Tuesday night slot. It’s been wonderful, but I’m ready for a change — and I’m too much of a control freak to let Trannyshack go on without me."

The lady was feeling candid. "I’m done with punk-rock drag," she added. "I’m tired of feeling like I have to haul in my own amps, manage the entire bar, and clean up afterwards. At this point I simply want to walk onstage and have the light show ready and the sound board all cued up. And I want more challenges, to work more in theater, expand my horizons, travel, figure myself out. You get trapped in a persona. This great thing comes along, people love it, and then suddenly it’s your whole life. For 12 years. Time for a breather!"

Hold on to your panicked panties, though. "Trannyshack the brand isn’t going away," Heklina continued. "I’m working on making it a monthly party somewhere nice, and we’ll still do big events like the annual pageant, Trannyshack Reno, international gigs, and maybe bring back the cruise." The weekly Trannyshack’s planning to go out with a bang too: a countdown of greatest hits and command performances has begun, with Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters hosting Feb. 12 and an explosive 12th-birthday blowout Feb. 19.

Heklina is one of the OG rave-era club kids who made San Francisco fabulously unsafe at any speed, and Trannyshack freed drag from its Judy Garland fetters, flooding punk spirit — and oodles of bodily fluids — into the stalls of gay nightlife. The ‘Shack’s now venerable enough to be thought mainstream by some young turks, but it still feels like the scene’s bloody wig’s been yanked off.

TRANSPORTING How’s this for a leap of global proportions? The papacito of the nightlife’s global grooves movement, DJ Cheb i Sabbah — himself a proprietor of one of SF’s longest-running parties, 1002 Nights (now at Nickie’s in the Lower Haight on Tuesdays) — has just released another stunningly internationalist CD, Devotion (Six Degrees), and he’ll be throwing down, celebration-wise, at the huge returning one-off Worldly at Temple. Boosting Cheb’s subcontinental turntable wizardry live will be Pakistani vocalist Riffat Sultana and percussionists Salar Nadar and Mitch Hyare. Also trading on the tables: electrotabla etherealist Karsh Kale and bhangra breakster Janaka Selekta. Fold dem paper planes and twirl.

TRANNYSHACK

Tuesdays, 9 p.m., $8

Stud

399 Ninth St., SF

(415) 866-6623

www.studsf.com

www.trannyshack.com

CHEB I SABBAH AT WORLDLY

Sat/9, 10 p.m., $8

Temple

540 Howard, SF

www.templesf.com

www.chebisabbah.com

Namu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Of the city’s many village centers, I have always had a special fondness for the Inner Richmond enclave along Balboa, from Arguello to Eighth Avenue or so. Here you find Russian bakeries nestled across the street from sushi bars, with a Korean barbecue at one corner, a Chinese joint at the next, and a chic Cal-Med spot a few steps beyond the traffic light. Add a butcher shop, a nursery school, and a cleaners, and you have a self-sustaining little world. It’s like a less-trafficked Clement Street.

The backwater charm has persisted for years, despite the occasional incursions of upscaleness: Katia’s Russian Tea room, with its immaculately starched tablecloths, and, of more recent vintage, the Richmond, which opened a few years ago in the old Jakarta space. The latest spit-and-polish entrant, Namu, isn’t as conspicuous as either of those two restaurants; it opened about a year ago in a midblock storefront, and you could easily walk right by it if you weren’t paying attention.

At least you could in the middle of the day. By night, Namu attracts the young the way a lantern attracts moths on a summer evening; they gather in clusters on either side of the door and along the curb, dressed in night shades of blue, gray, and black, talking on cell phones while waiting for a table to open up or the rest of their party to appear. If you were rushing along the sidewalk, you could probably pick your way past without too much fancy footwork, but you’d notice the crowd, certainly, and wonder what was up.

Part of what is up is certainly chef Dennis Lee’s cooking. (Lee owns the place with his brothers, David and Daniel.) Although Namu’s menu includes elements of both Japanese and fusion cooking, its most striking quality is its elegant recasting of Korean themes. It’s not quite a Korean bistro, but it’s more than a step in that direction and away from the traditional Korean barbecue, an honorable example of which stands at the corner.

Namu does offer that well-known Korean staple, kimchee (cabbage pickled with garlic and red chiles), and it’s just about indistinguishable from the corner barbecue’s: both offer excellent, sour fire. But at Namu the kimchee is served as part of a banchan plate (the first is complimentary, after that $4), in the company of, say, surprisingly rich sautéed chives and coils of pickled carrot, all presented on a museum-of-modern-art dish that looks like a flattened candelabra. There is a sense of stylish balance in both presentation and flavor that announces the kitchen’s sophistication.

You could satisfy yourself entirely with Japanese items, if you were so inclined, and you might even be able to convince yourself that you were at a sushi bar. Although there’s no sushi on the menu, the restaurant’s look is agleam with dark minimalism, including the unframed urban-industrial photographs hung on the walls as if at a hip gallery. Anyway, tataki — lightly seared tabs of fish — is almost like sushi, and Namu’s version ($10), with albacore tuna, is cleverly enhanced by a drizzle of Thai chili ponzu. Seaweed salad is also a sushi bar standard; here it’s called ocean salad ($8) and is made from a jumble of red, green, and wakame seaweed and looks like leftover Christmas wrapping. Nice touches: halved cherry tomatoes beneath the seaweed, and ume vinaigrette (ume is a pickled Asian plum) to give the salad fruitiness that isn’t quite sweet.

Pan-seared dumplings (a.k.a. pot stickers) are a commonplace throughout east Asia. Here ($9) they’re filled with slivered shiitake mushrooms and served in a shallow bowl with yet more shiitake slivers and a dashi broth reduced to dark intensity. (Dashi is one of the basics of Japanese cooking and is a stock made from kelp and dried skipjack.) Fresh rolls are also an east Asian commonplace, but Namu’s version ($6) feature a cross-cultural twist: chunks of grilled skirt steak, for a hint of the American southwest and, simultaneously, Korea. Just as unexpected is the mung bean cake ($6), and if you shy away from mung beans as the principal ingredient of indifferent desserts, you’ll be surprised here by the resemblance to crispy polenta triangles, suitable for dipping in ponzu sauce. And there is an explicitly Italian touch to the buckwheat noodles ($9.50); they’re tossed with shiitake mushrooms but also pesto (from Thai basil!), pine nuts, and garlic before getting a good sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese.

We didn’t particularly respond to the broccolini ($7), which wasn’t bad but wasn’t special despite embellishments of yuzu ponzu and fried garlic. It seemed too much like ordinary steamed broccoli. But we did respond to the prawns ($9), which had been glazed with den jang (a Korean fermented bean paste similar to miso) and grilled in pairs on skewers.

Too much culinary globe-trotting? The hamburger ($9), then, is restful in a juicy, tasty, villagy way, with a first-rate bun and good fries that would be just a bit better if more svelte, more in the frites line. Of course, even B+ fries tend to get gobbled up, even by those who mean to save some room for dessert. Namu’s desserts are well above the ordinary: a chocolate brioche bread pudding ($7) for instance, napped with raspberry sauce (is any dish with brioche disappointing? I say no), and a puddinglike crème brûlée ($7) lifted from the mundane by little butter cookies flavored with our friend ume, the distinctive Japanese preserved plum last observed in the seaweed salad vinaigrette. Some plums certainly get around.

NAMU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10:30 p.m.

489 Balboa, SF

(415) 386-8332

www.namubar.com

Beer, wine, sake

AE/MC/V

Noisy if crowded

Wheelchair accessible

Duck me, I’m sick

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS It had been a few years since I’d been sick, and I’d forgotten how to do it. I walked around in the rain, looking for this party. And when I found it, I stayed until almost the end. Then I called up the Boy Who I’m Kissing and asked if I could come over and kiss him.

In my defense, I didn’t know at the time that I was sick sick, as in the flu. I thought it was just lung cancer or something, from breathing all the smoke that I breathe. One of the advantages of an active imagination is hypochondria, or what I call "my sick mind" — without which I would never have compiled this amazing record of miraculous recoveries.

I have bested brain tumors by closing one eye and opening the other real wide. I’ve conquered cardiac arrest with cups of hot tea and survived strokes by slapping the side of my head, then getting some rest.

So the combination of my sick mind and an actually pretty fucking healthy body means that when I do get sick sick, as in the flu, I tend to think I can lick it by licking the Boy Who I’m Licking, or drinking more wine than usual, or stepping away from my smoky shack in the woods for a weekend.

This is unfortunate, and not just for the Boy Who I’m Infecting. It’s unfortunate for me because I probably would have been better by now if I’d gone, "Oh, the flu," and stayed home in bed with Weirdo the Cat. And it’s unfortunate for Weirdo the Cat, who could have been warm and cozy and well fed while I stayed in bed with her all weekend, albeit moaning and groaning.

As it was, Mookie got to get me in his bed, moaning and groaning, which, on the surface, might have seemed like business as usual, woo-hoo, but trust me, this wasn’t like that. It was the first time ever that we didn’t have sex. I just laid there with my eyes kind of open, coughing inconsolably and gradually realizing that it wasn’t lung cancer, goddamn it, but the flu.

By morning I hurt so bad I couldn’t even speak straight. "You have a sick chicken farmer on your hands," I tried to say. But it came out "chick sicken farmer."

He brought me coffee in bed, as usual, and offered to go to the store for Robitussin.

I was pretty sure I had cough syrup at home with codeine in it. Probably four years old, and certainly someone else’s prescription. But without codeine, cough syrup has never done much for me. It’s like duck soup without duck in it. Or chicken soup. I love chicken soup. And tea, and rest. But only two things can cure the common cold, and they are, in order of efficacy, duck soup and codeine.

Thinking I was closer to duck soup than codeine, I spent an hour on Mookie’s couch with a laptop and a telephone. Oakland’s Chinatown was just on the other side of the tunnel, for crying out loud.

And failing that, Crawdad de la Cooter’s freezer was in Berkeley. I happened to know that there were wild ducks in it. However, restraining orders prevent me from raiding her refrigerator, or coming over without calling first, or, um … writing about her in Cheap Eats.

I’m delirious. How, in other words, did I wind up without my face in a bowl of dark, rich, greasy, spicy duck soup? It was through no fault of Mookie’s. Let me rephrase that: it was all his fault. Because when Thanh Ky had a line out the door into the rain, he remembered for sure seeing duck soup at a place in Alameda. Only they were closed. Sunday.

For future reference, I’m never going to start seeing someone ever again without first finding out where the closest duck soup is to their house and having little cards printed up with business hours and directions. Then, when I’m laid up with flulike symptoms or the flu and they offer to go get medicine, I can hand them the card like a prescription.

"Ask for extra hot sauce."

I’ll either say that or have it printed on the card.

My new favorite restaurant is Bai Som Thai Kitchen. It’s a comfortable, colorful, and fun little place. Its motto is "Cooking with care" … and my soup was almost cold by the time the others at the table were served. So that proves it! Tom yum with salmon and pineapples, superspicy. And mealworthy, with a plate of plain noodles on the side. Look up at the ceiling while you’re there.

BAI SOM

Lunch: Daily, 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Daily, 4:30–9:45 p.m.

2121 Clement, SF

(415) 751-5332

Beer, wine

MC/V

Overdrawn at the sperm bank

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I had a beautiful child via donor sperm from a sperm bank. My partner (female) and I are very happy, but recently I have been having sexual fantasies about the donor. I have not told this to my SO (she would not understand, trust me). I feel an almost spiritual bond with this unknown man and am concerned I may be getting a little obsessed. Have any experience in this minefield?

Love,

A Matter of Sementics

Dear Matter:

Not directly, no, but as we used to say at San Francisco Sex Information when somebody would call looking for a bisexual transman into water sports to answer a question, "We all have the same training! OK if I give it a try?" Of course, we, whoever we are, do not necessarily all have the same training, but if my time in the trenches has earned me anything, it’s an impressive virtual Rolodex of people, many of them good friends, who have done or seen or charged for whatever the experience in question might be. I have produced for your edutainment a professional singer who gives great head without harming her throat, a Realtor who would throw you out on your ear for attempting that "house humping" business, any number of well-spoken hos, a dominatrix who can testify to the fact that men who want to be kicked in the balls never show up for their appointments, and another who can prove otherwise. In other words, here’s your expert, my friend who has worked as a teller at the sperm bank, if you will. Call her Polly. Polly Enmity. She says:

It’s not uncommon for women using sperm banks to get really attached to their donors. No, really attached. When I worked in the semen industry I spent countless hours on the phone with women who wanted to know how hot their donor was, if I would do him (they were asking only hypothetically, I’m sure), what celebrity he looked like, how nice he was, what he wore, if he smelled nice. So yes, it’s supercommon to feel attached. I was offered not insignificant sums of money to divulge donors’ identities (which I never did, and that’s why I’m still broke), and at least one woman asked if we did "live inseminations." In my experience, donor fantasies and attachment are very common, and yours seems to be on the less stalkerish end of the scale.

And even if you never met the guy, you did get some of his most intimate bodily fluids (albeit centrifuged and washed beyond all recognition) inserted into your most intimate parts, so your connection to this donor is, well, pretty understandable. Ever get attached to someone after a one-night stand? It can happen, sure. Now think about a woman who uses the same donor, cycle after cycle, hoping each time to get pregnant and finding out month after month that it hasn’t worked … again. It almost becomes like a relationship, albeit one that involves you picking your partner based on a short description and the kindness of the sperm bank workers who vouch for his character and looks. I’ve seen women feel upset, angry, even betrayed by this person they have never met.

Now, is this just fantasy, or would you want it to play out in reality? Think: Do you really want to know anything more about him? What if he turns out to be your neighbor who had your car towed last week? Or the jerk on his cell phone sitting next to you in a restaurant? If you met him, would you do anything about the sexual feelings, or would they remain in the realm of fantasy? I knew many of these donors, and, well, with a couple of exceptions, many of them were nice, average guys trying to earn a few bucks by selling their genetic material, but most of them weren’t really fertile fantasy fodder. Trust me on this: your fantasy of your donor is probably much better — and hotter — than the reality.

Listen to Polly! She has some hilarious and fairly scarifying stories from the deepest vaults of the sperm bank — tales from the crypt — and many of them involve people or their products not smelling so nice. This is not something you need to think about while cuddling your sweet baby, who I am sure smells lovely. While Polly and I both steadfastly stand by your right to fantasize about any damned thing that pleases you, some fantasies are just inconvenient and ultimately more trouble than they’re worth. You wouldn’t want to fantasize about your boss every morning in the shower, only to have to face him or her and be all professional and not at all sweaty as soon as you got to work, would you? This one isn’t that bad as long as you keep in mind that tracking down the donor would be like suicide, only messier — so that anonymity thing sure was a good idea in this case.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Techsploitation: Information dystopia

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TECHSPLOITATION I was raised on the idea that the information age would usher in a democratic, communication-based utopia, but recently I was offered at least two object lessons in why that particular dream is a lie.

First, a dead surveillance satellite, one roughly the size of a bus, fell out of orbit and into a collision course with Earth. It will likely do no damage, so don’t worry about being crushed to death by flying chunks of the National Security Agency budget. The important part is that nobody knew when the satellite died. Maybe a year ago? Maybe a few days? A rep from the National Security Council would only say, "Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation."

Is this our info utopia, wherein we literally lose track of bus-size shit flying through space over our heads? I mean, how many surveillance satellites do we have? It’s not like I love the techno-surveillance state, but it is a little shocking that the SIGINT nerds who run it are so out of touch that they can’t even keep track of their orbiting spy gear. Still, it’s hard to be too upset when Big Brother isn’t watching.

But that satellite could just as easily have been a forgotten communications satellite dive-bombing our atmosphere. And that would have sucked, especially since last week’s mega Internet outage across huge parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia didn’t bring down the global economy largely because people had satellite access to the Internet. This Internet outage, which took millions of people (and a few countries) off-line, happened when two 17,000-mile underwater fiber-optic cables running between Japan and Europe were accidentally cut. No one is quite sure how they were severed, but it was most likely due to human error — an anchor was probably dropped in the wrong place.

And so big chunks of Dubai went dark, as did many Southeast Asian countries. Businesses couldn’t operate; people couldn’t communicate. The people and businesses that were able to keep running were by and large the ones that didn’t depend on cheap Internet services that use only one or two cables to route their traffic. It’s cheaper to rent time on one cable, but if that cable is cut, you lose everything. Most customers don’t research how their Internet service providers route Internet traffic across the Asian continent — or across the Pacific Ocean — so they don’t realize their communications could be disrupted, possibly for weeks, if some drunken sailor drops anchor in the wrong spot.

In fact, few of us anywhere in the world consider the fact that our info utopia is a fragile thing based on networks that are both material and vulnerable. We think of the Internet as a world of ideas, a place "out there," unburdened by physical constraints. Even if you wanted to research which physical cables your ISP uses to route your traffic, it would be very difficult to do without a strong technical background and the help of the North American Network Operators’ Group list, an e-mail list for high-level network administrators.

So why do a crashing spy satellite and a partly dark Internet mean we’ve entered the age of information dystopia? Quite simply, they are signs that our brave new infrastructure is failing around us even as we claim that it offers a shining path to the future. It’s as if the future is breaking down before we get a chance to realize its potential.

But the information age doesn’t have to end this way, in a world where
can-and-string-network jokes aren’t so funny anymore. There are a few simple things we could do. We could help consumers better understand what happens when they buy Internet access by showing them what routes their traffic might take and giving them realistic statistics about possible outages. People could then make better choices about what services to buy. And so could telcos and nations.

Why shouldn’t we have solid research on which ISPs are most likely to suffer the kind of network outages we just witnessed from the severing of those two cables? Consumer groups could undertake this research. Or, since developed nations suffer more, perhaps the United Nations might want to conduct the investigation as a matter of Internet governance. We know where car traffic and sea traffic go. Why don’t we know where Internet traffic goes?

Another thing we could do to stop the information dystopia is to cut down on spy satellites, but that, as they say, is another column.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is investing in semaphore communication networks.

Political football season

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› sarah@sfbg.com

With Mayor Gavin Newsom predicting a big budget deficit and seven Board of Supervisors seats up for grabs, everyone knew 2008 would be acrimonious.

But few suspected the war between Newsom and the supervisors would get so nasty so soon, even before the lunar Year of the Rat had officially dawned. The most telling development was the swift and nasty retaliation board president Aaron Peskin endured after he requested that Newsom return the $750,000 the mayor siphoned from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to pay the salaries of seven mayoral aides.

At the Jan. 29 Board of Supervisors meeting, Peskin publicly called for "an end to the budget shell game that has resulted in monies being shifted from Muni and other city departments to fund political employees who do not work for or directly improve services for the departments paying for their positions." Newsom’s predecessor, Willie Brown, was the master of such budget games, but Peskin said, "There are those who defend this shell game by saying it is a long-standing practice here at City Hall. That may be true. But it doesn’t make it right."

Peskin’s demands came at a horribly awkward moment for Newsom: two months earlier the newly reelected mayor announced an immediate hiring freeze and across-the-board cuts to city departments, citing a projected $229 million budget deficit in fiscal year 2008–09. His administration blamed this looming deficit in part on the creation of 700 new city positions, including 100 new police officers and 200 public health nurses, plus pay raises for nurses, firefighters, and police officers.

Also blamed were a projected windfall loss of property transfer taxes and a bunch of voter-approved spending requirements, including the November 2007 voter-approved and Peskin-authored Proposition A, which transfers $26 million more annually from the city’s General Fund to the MTA.

Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard defended the use of MTA funds to pay mayoral staff salaries, claiming that all but one of the positions have a direct relationship to the work of the MTA, including the new director of climate change initiatives, Wade Crowfoot. "I know it’s not pretty, but it is an efficient way of getting city business done. We are following the letter and the spirit of the law," Ballard reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But within a week the mayor’s point person on transportation, Stuart Sunshine, announced he’ll be leaving City Hall in February, while the Mayor’s Office scrambled to explain why Brian Purchia, who developed Newsom’s reelection campaign Web site last year and who last month started working in Newsom’s press office for $85,000 per year, was hired as an MTA employee.

"The MTA has not and will not be paying any part of his salary," Ballard responded by e-mail Jan. 24 to a Guardian inquiry. "As of January 28, Purchia will be on a Mayor’s office requisition." Ballard also blasted Peskin in the Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, using incendiary language normally reserved for political campaigns and rarely employed by city employees talking about the president of the Board of Supervisors.

Retaliation for Peskin’s publicly announced MTA refund request has also included two splashy Chronicle hit pieces attacking Peskin and the board that ran on the front page, above the fold, on two consecutive days. One includes a photo of Peskin alongside extracts from a five-month-old letter that was possibly leaked by the Mayor’s Office (the confidential letter was copied to Newsom chief of staff Phil Ginsburg) in which Port of San Francisco director Monique Moyer alleges that Peskin made bullying late-night phone calls last August, when the Port was trying to get a measure passed to increase building heights along the Embarcadero — a land-use issue that was resolved last year.

But Peskin isn’t the only elected official to get his wrists slapped by the mayor in recent weeks.

In mid-January, Newsom upbraided San Francisco’s entire delegation in Sacramento for lending their support to the board-approved affordable-housing City Charter amendment, which will be on the November ballot and seeks to set aside $33 million annually in affordable-housing funds for the next 15 years.

As Sens. Carole Migden and Leland Yee and Assemblymembers Fiona Ma and Mark Leno noted in a Jan. 7 letter to Peskin, local voters have not approved a renewal of the 1996 housing bond, and the board’s proposed amendment builds on prior successful ballot measures to fund libraries, parks, and children’s programs, which have been successfully implemented without significant budget impacts.

But Newsom wrote the delegation Jan. 11 to express his "disappointment."

"I cannot support the Charter Amendment, because it has significant implications for the future fiscal health of our City and the backbone of our public health care system — San Francisco General Hospital," Newsom claimed, noting that the General Hospital bond is also on the November ballot. Then again, Newsom is also backing a Lennar Corp.–financed measure that would approve the building of 10,000 housing units at Candlestick Point but wouldn’t guarantee affordability levels (see "Signature Measures," page 10).

Meanwhile, fearing that Newsom is seeking to exert excessive control over several key commissions, the Board of Supervisors’ progressive majority is seeking to ensure that the seven members of the MTA board are elected officials beginning November 2009 and to divide the power to nominate members of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission between the supervisors and the mayor.

These moves are coming at a time when Newsom has decided to replace three members of the MTA board who had alternative-transportation credibility but whose loyalty he apparently questioned: San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum, Peter Mezey, and Wil Din. To fill those slots, Newsom appointed disabled-rights activist Bruce Oka, attorney Malcolm Heinicke (both of whom served on the Taxi Commission, which Newsom hopes to merge into the MTA this year), and Jerry Lee, a member of the Transportation Authority’s Citizen Advisory Committee.

But the Board of Supervisors can block the mayor’s MTA picks — and that showdown looks likely, in light of Newsom’s alleged misuse of MTA funds and his refusal to heed Peskin’s call for a mayoral representative to appear before the board to explain Newsom’s vision for the MTA.

Meanwhile, Sup. Jake McGoldrick told the Guardian he introduced a Charter amendment to make the MTA board seats elected positions. He argues that Prop. A not only increased the MTA’s budget but also reduced the board’s MTA oversight, so the body now needs to be more answerable to San Franciscans.

"It’s about not having accountability at the legislative branch," McGoldrick said. "The MTA ridership and residents need to have a way to voice their concerns."

McGoldrick said the mayor’s early removal of MTA members and his raid on MTA funds are troubling.

"Their removal reinforces what’s going on, how the MTA is viewed as a milking machine for the Mayor’s Office," McGoldrick said, noting that he asked for a budget analyst’s report on the MTA several weeks ago to keep the discussion objective and that he also asked for an accounting of the 1,600 to 1,700 jobs that Newsom declared frozen last fall. That report should be available at any time.

"I wanted to see which jobs were frozen and which were defrosted," McGoldrick said, "but I didn’t want it to become a political football."

However, with battles between the board and the mayor likely to get even intenser during the coming budget and election seasons, it’s starting to look like 2008 could be one long political football season.

The governor’s spending addiction

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OPINION Just five months after boasting that California’s "budget deficit is zero," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently came back to tell us the state is facing a staggering $14.5 billion shortfall over the next 18 months.

To deal with this amazing turn of events he is now proposing that we slash funding for our court system; virtually close down our state parks system; cut more than $4.5 billion from K–12 education; decimate our AIDS Drug Assistance Program; further reduce reimbursement rates for health care providers; put the children of mothers on state assistance at risk of homelessness; deny the blind, the elderly, and the disabled even a minimal cost-of-living adjustment; and continue to underfund our higher education systems.

Voters should rightfully be bewildered and seriously concerned. How and when did this crisis happen? How could the state go from a budget deficit of zero to one of $14.5 billion in just five months?

The governor’s earlier boast about our nonexistent budget deficit was a great line from a great showman. But it failed to tell the real story.

The fact remains that Schwarzenegger created the beginnings of this budget catastrophe on his very first day in office, when he followed through on a campaign pledge he made during the 2003 recall election. His promise was to rescind the restoration of the vehicle license fee.

The VLF was created in 1935 as a 1.5 percent tax on the purchase price of every automobile sold in California. Iconic Republican governor Earl Warren raised it to 2 percent in 1948. VLF revenue does not go to the state’s General Fund. Rather, it goes to local governments to pay for fire and police protection, keep libraries and parks open, and keep our streets clean.

In 1998, at the height of the dot-com boom, when California had surplus tax revenue, the Stage Legislature offered car owners a temporary relaxation on the VLF. The average 2 percent VLF was then $300. The "good times" tax break lowered the amount car owners paid to just $100. The state picked up the remaining $200 so local governments would continue to receive the entire $300. At the time this cost the GF around $5 billion annually. The deal was to continue as long as there were "sufficient general funds" to make up the difference.

In 2003, after the boom went bust, we faced a $38 billion state budget deficit. Then-governor Gray Davis’s finance director correctly determined that there were no longer sufficient general funds to continue the good times tax break. The VLF was restored to where it had been for 50 years.

Candidate Schwarzenegger seized on the issue, and the rest is history. Unfortunately, the $6.15 billion that Schwarzenegger is now spending annually on the VLF tax break is money we don’t have. Neither are the billions he’s spending to cover that debt, which stands at more than $20 billion over the past four years. Combined, the cost of the VLF tax break and the debt to service it account for almost 90 percent of our current budget deficit.

Without the governor’s reckless and profligate spending habit, our state would have no budget crisis and there would be no need to dismantle essential governmental services.

We need to finally have an honest conversation with the voters of California. One can debate whether or not the VLF spending program is a good idea. What is not debatable is that the ongoing GF cost of the VLF spending program is the main cause of our budget woes.

An immediate intervention is necessary. We must break the governor’s spending addiction to correct the course of our state.

Mark Leno

Mark Leno represents Assembly District 13 in Sacramento.

Guardian trial heats up

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The fireworks have started to explode in the trial of the Guardian‘s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its chain parent corporation as three witnesses testified that the chain’s top executive had vowed to put the Guardian out of business.

Lawyers for the Weekly and Village Voice Media, which owns the San Francisco paper and 15 others, tried aggressively to undermine the critical testimony. The Guardian is claiming the SF Weekly sold ads below cost for years in an effort to damage the local competitor. That’s illegal in California.

The Weekly lawyers aren’t putting up much of a fight so far over whether the paper sold ads at such cheap rates that it was losing money. In fact, evidence presented in court shows that VVM has lost $25 million over the past 11 years in San Francisco and the East Bay, where the chain until recently owned the East Bay Express.

But VVM lawyers H. Sinclair Kerr and Ivo Labar have contended the Weekly and the Express were simply cutting rates to meet competition or were trying to increase market share — and harming a competitor was never a motivation.

Three Guardian witnesses provided evidence to the contrary. Jennifer Lopez, Carrie Fisher, and Andrew O’Hehir all worked for the Weekly when the chain, then known as New Times, bought it in 1995. Lopez sold ads, Fisher was copublisher, and O’Hehir was the editor.

All three testified that Mike Lacey, one of the two top executives at the chain, arrived at the Weekly offices in January 1995 to announce the sale and told a meeting of the staff that he intended to wipe out the local competitor. At one point, Fisher said, Lacey picked up a copy of the Guardian, threw it on the floor, and said, "We don’t just want to compete — we want to put the Guardian out of business."

Two of the early witnesses were Guardian copublisher Jean Dibble and me. Dibble talked about how the paper had survived recessions, economic changes, and legions of competitors over the years but was put on the ropes by the chain’s predatory tactics. I talked about the impact — how the Guardian, which has to live on its revenue and has no chain with deep pockets to subsidize it, has been forced to cut costs, lay off staff, and reduce the size of the paper.

Kerr and Labar pushed us both, trying to make the case that it was the rise of the Internet and the changing demographics of the city that caused the Guardian‘s problems. But in fact, Dibble stated, the Guardian has lost very little display advertising business to the Internet.

On Feb. 4 the Guardian lawyers read from the depositions of Jim Larkin, VVM’s chairman, and Scott Tobias, the chain’s president. Among the fascinating information: Larkin testified that VVM paid between $5 million and $6 million for the East Bay Express and sold it for around $3 million, taking a big loss on the deal. Larkin also said both the Weekly and the Express were profitable when the chain bought them but that they’ve lost money ever since.

Most important, both Larkin and Tobias testified that they received monthly "Guardian reports" focusing on how the Weekly and the Express had been competing with the local alternative newspaper in San Francisco. The depositions were riddled with references to the Guardian as the two VVM papers’ main competitor — which undermines the claim by VVM lawyers that the chain papers were focused on a broad range of other media, not just the alternative-paper market.

In one instance, the depositions show, VVM cut a deal with Clear Channel for naming rights at the Warfield theater that specifically stated the Weekly and the Express would get 85 to 90 percent of the ads from concert promoter Bill Graham Presents, then owned by Clear Channel — and the Guardian would get "15 percent to nothing."

The next phase of the trial will focus on financial data, as the Guardian presents records to the jury that show how the Weekly and the Express were consistently selling ads below cost.

Climate change teach-in

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY For Van Jones, going green is not just about buying a Prius, putting a solar panel on a vacation home, or purchasing groceries at Whole Foods, which he calls Whole Paycheck. It’s also about training former gangsters in green-collar jobs, equitably distributing toxic waste sites, and bringing organic produce into urban ghettos.

According to the Oakland activist, who cofounded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (see "Redefining Radicalism," 9/19/06), there is a serious social injustice on the horizon, and the fight against it may just be the next great political movement in the United States.

Speaking Jan. 30 at San Francisco State University’s teach-in on climate change, Jones called on students to be the next great generation by recognizing that the environmental crisis presents the biggest opportunity for poor people and minorities since the New Deal. Today it seems such grandiose statements calling an entire generation to action tend to lack an inspired audience. However, no one could deny Jones was onto something big after the packed crowd in Jack Adams Hall erupted in an ovation after his challenge to students to make history by addressing poverty and the environment together.

Green pathways out of poverty was just one topic discussed during the SFSU segment of "Focus the Nation" — billed as the nation’s largest-ever teach-in, with more than 1,500 schools and universities participating. The nationally coordinated event aimed to create one day of focused discussion on global warming solutions for the US. Throughout the day expert panels at SFSU discussed green efforts in their respective fields with an underlying message of public involvement.

Keynote speaker Michael Glantz of the National Center for Atmospheric Research jumped on the generational bandwagon, predicting the 21st century would be remembered as the climate century. However, Glantz stressed public pressure would be crucial, as lessons learned about the environment are generally not used during policy making. He cited detailed studies conducted in the early 1970s of melting arctic sea ice due to anthropogenic causes.

When asked how he would reply to arguments that humans aren’t causing climate change, Glantz noted the success of the environmental movement in marginalizing these beliefs: "I don’t think we need to spend time now dealing with the skeptics when Exxon and Shell are worried about global warming."

Faculty from the SFSU geography and geosciences departments presented new trends in climate change data and modeling, focusing on predictions for California. The panel reported the state’s average temperature is on the rise. Even with the best estimates for halting global warming, the Sierra Mountains are expected to lose 40 percent of their snowpack over the next 100 years. Agricultural production and quality in the Central Valley are also expected to decline, as some plants will not get the chill period they need.

Geography professor Andrew Oliphant worked with students to create a carbon footprint calculator for attendees to use throughout the day. Oliphant said the calculator was tailor-made specifically for the event so attendees could analyze their daily habits.

Students were also present throughout the event to answer questions on an informative poster display. The posters depicted breakdowns of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels in the Bay Area, and the formation of acid rain.

Erin Rodgers, an environmental advocate with the California Union of Concerned Scientists, discussed green policies at the state level. Rodgers focused on California’s groundbreaking initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of about 30 percent from current levels.

Experts have established detailed plans on how to reach the target reduction, with a large focus on transportation, although the California Air Resources Board has yet to embrace a comprehensive plan that will get anywhere close to the goals it is charged with meeting.

Cal Broomhead, climate programs manager at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, spoke on local green efforts. He praised the city for keeping the same levels of greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 and its continued use of the "Fab 3" composting and recycling program.

Broomhead also stressed the importance of furthering environmental education efforts: "Through education we can get people to adopt pro-green technologies and behaviors. Once you have the last remaining stragglers, then you can require them to participate through law."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Editor’s Notes by Tim Redmond

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

There are plenty of stark contrasts between the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns, starting with the fact that all of the Republicans sound like morons and both the Democrats have credible policy ideas that they appear to have thought about.

But the thing that struck me most in the week before the California primary was the tone of the GOP debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Ron Paul spent an inordinate amount of time arguing over who was the most authentic conservative.

The c word came up about every five seconds. I’m a right-wing conservative! No, no, I’m even more conservative. Hey, I’m so conservative I think all the immigrants ought to be lassoed with a chain and dragged back to Mexico behind a Hummer. Romney even hit McCain for winning the New York Times endorsement, saying that means he isn’t a real conservative.

And I wondered: what would the world be like if the Democrats were arguing over who was the best liberal?

Imagine if Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought over who can be most trusted to reverse the 25-year trend of economic and social inequality in the United States, who would most effectively tax the rich and shift some of the wealth to the middle class and poor. Imagine if they fought over whose health care plan would move the nation toward a single-payer system with no private insurance participation? Clinton: "I’ll cut the defense budget so fast that the military-industrial complex will think it’s 1976 all over again." Obama: "Yeah? Well, I’ll eliminate 90 percent of the nuclear arsenal, quit selling high-tech weapons to trouble spots around the world, and institute an excess-profits tax on any corporation that milks the taxpayer in a defense contract." Take that.

I have a friend who’s in the political consulting business; he works on big national campaigns and does high-level strategy for the Democratic Party. He’ll laugh when he reads this; when I say this kind of stuff, he shakes his head and says, "This is a conservative country."

But I don’t believe it.

Another political consultant, a guy who’s run some of the most important liberal campaigns in the state over the past couple of decades, stopped by our office a few weeks ago, and after he talked about an energy plan he’s pushing, I took him aside and asked one of my favorite questions:

How much money would it take — what kind of a campaign would you have to run, and for how long — to counter a quarter century of brilliant, effective right-wing propaganda and reconvince the American people to have faith in the public sector? What would we have to do to make people think — as they did during the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — that government is part of the solution, not part of the problem? If some rich person put up a billion dollars, could you do it?

"It wouldn’t take that much," the guy said. But from the look on his face, I suspect he thought it would be close.

I used to blame the media for all of this, but I’ve been in the media for a very long time now, and I don’t think it’s that easy. Somewhere along the line the bad guys figured out that if they repeated their message often enough and funded their think tanks and promoted their political leaders, eventually they’d sell a scam of cosmic proportions to the electorate. We could tell our story too, if we thought it was important enough.

Standing up to the mayor

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom spent a fair amount of time this winter on the presidential primary — but he’s gearing up to spend far more time on the local supervisorial elections this fall. He’s showing a much more aggressive attitude toward the board, particularly President Aaron Peskin, and will be looking for ways to either embarrass or undermine the progressive majority over the next few months. Then he’ll push hard for his more moderate slate this fall.

That’s what this whole flap over Peskin calling Port of San Francisco director Monique Moyer and berating her over a policy disagreement is about. Remember: the incident she’s complaining about happened more than five months ago. Moyer’s letter went to the city’s Department of Human Resources, which took it as a complaint against a city employee and kept it strictly confidential. The City Attorney’s Office also said it was a confidential personnel matter and wouldn’t release it. But Moyer copied Phil Ginsberg, the mayor’s chief of staff, on the letter, and Newsom’s office doesn’t deny that it was the source of the leak.

We aren’t excusing Peskin’s behavior; if he was abusive to Moyer or her staff, that’s a problem. (He says he called and yelled at her over the Port’s development plans, and we don’t doubt he could have been more diplomatic.) But it hardly seems to rise to the level of a major political scandal.

It is, however, plausible payback for Peskin’s very public attack on the mayor’s dubious budget moves (including the diversion of money from Muni to pay for mayoral office staffers) and for the board’s attempt to remove two of Newsom’s public utilities commissioners from office.

With this kind of pressure (and nastiness) coming from the Mayor’s Office, some of the supervisors may be tempted to avoid conflict with the still-popular Newsom, but that would be a mistake: the board needs to fight back on several key fronts.

For starters, the supervisors need to stand up to the increasingly intense lobbying campaign and vote Feb. 12 to remove Dick Sklar and Ryan Brooks from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The stakes are immense, with public power and the city’s energy future on the line, and Brooks and Sklar have been on the wrong side of the key issues. The lobbying effort to save Sklar and Brooks has been unprecedented: Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, who is still officially undecided, told us that "in all my seven years on the board, I’ve never seen such intense lobbying on anything, including multibillion-dollar development projects." Sklar has pulled out all the stops, and at one point his supporters offered to have US Sen. Ted Kennedy speak to the supervisors on his behalf. It will take eight votes to oust Sklar and Brooks — and the vote will be close — but the supervisors should ignore the pressure and stand up to Newsom.

And the PUC should hold off on any decision on general manager Susan Leal until new commissioners are in place.

The board needs to keep pushing on the Muni money and Mayor’s Office staffing too — and take a hard look at the three people Newsom wants to put on the Municipal Transportation Agency. Since the mayor has fired three sustainable-transportation advocates, including Bicycle Coalition director Leah Shahum, the board should insist that the mayor or one of his top deputies appear at a hearing and explain the administration’s long-term plans for the MTA and public transit in San Francisco.

The next chancellor

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EDITORIAL In a few weeks, City College of San Francisco chancellor Philip Day will be gone, headed to Washington DC to head a nonprofit that works on college financial aid issues. He will leave behind a unionized staff that’s relatively happy (Day worked hard to get raises for the faculty), a board that’s bitterly divided, a long list of financial problems — and a legacy of bad feelings in the community. As G.W. Schultz reports on page 14, he’s also leaving behind a scandal involving the diversion of college money to a political campaign.

Three of the board incumbents will be up for reelection this fall, and the seven-member panel desperately needs more new blood. But the current board will be choosing the next chancellor, the person who will have to dig one of the city’s most important institutions out of a deep fiscal and public relations crevice. Running City College isn’t an easy job in the best of circumstances, and Day hasn’t made it easy for his successor. The board will have to weigh a long list of qualifications — but one ought to be at the top.

The next chancellor needs to be someone who respects open government and is willing to work with — not fight against — the neighborhoods, the Board of Supervisors, and other interest groups in the city. Day’s successor needs to understand that San Franciscans don’t like to be pushed around by big institutions, don’t like to be lied to, and don’t like imperious officials who think secrecy is an appropriate response to criticism.

The Community College District has a long history of making it difficult for the public to monitor what the administration is doing. After at least five years of battles, the agency still won’t adopt the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. Day has been recalcitrant when it comes to making documents public, and with the support of a narrow board majority he has been conducting all sorts of business behind closed doors. The administration several years ago quietly shifted millions in bond money that was earmarked for a performing arts center into building a new gym and pool, then signed an exclusive lease allowing a private school to use the pool in the afternoons. One of Day’s senior aides apparently diverted school money into a political campaign — and Day, who makes more than $400,000 per year in compensation, said the district couldn’t afford an internal auditor to keep track of that sort of money.

In Chinatown and North Beach, neighbors have been battling the college over a new campus building — and while the issues (over historic preservation, light and shadow, and appropriate height limits) are ones that could have been resolved amicably, Day’s administration has bullied the neighbors, refused to talk in good faith, and infuriated people who ought to be the strongest allies of a new campus in an underserved part of town.

If the board members want to turn the troubled district around, they need to make sure the new chancellor is willing to embrace the city’s open-government laws, do business in public, and accept that fact that in this city an agency with the powers of the state of California won’t get away will telling communities their concerns don’t matter.

Chancellor Bling-Bling

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Outgoing City College of San Francisco chancellor Phil Day presided over major institutional changes during his decade-long tenure, although he leaves under a cloud of financial scandals involving the misuse of public funds. Now a Guardian review of public records shows the decision to reward Day handsomely and neglect recommended internal auditing controls set the scene for the problems to come.

Day’s high-end compensation and accompanying expense account allowed him to live well. His total compensation last year eclipsed that of the heads of 18 other two-year colleges across California surveyed by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which included community colleges for the first time in its 2007 analysis.

Day’s earnings totaled $403,441 for the fiscal year ending in 2007 and included $25,448 in retirement pay plus $31,975 in deferred compensation. He received $12,000 to cover housing expenses — one of only two chancellors who were awarded the benefit — and the state paid $7,200 more for a car.

No one else surveyed from California came close. The runner-up, at Rancho Santiago Community College, made $80,000 less than Day and received nothing for a home or a car. Chui L. Tsang, head of a two-year college in Santa Monica, where the median home value is higher than in San Francisco, received about $30,000 toward housing and automobile expenses but earned a whopping $140,000 less than Day in total compensation.

Darroch Young, former chancellor of the community college district in Los Angeles, which has more students than any other in the country, earned almost $100,000 less than Day, who first joined City College in 1998. Day even made more money than the chancellors at six University of California campuses, including San Diego, Irvine, Davis, and Santa Cruz.

"Raw politics" was how trustee Julio Ramos described it to the Guardian. "The chancellor has had the majority on the Board of Trustees at City College," Ramos said. "Like with any majority, he can dictate the terms of his compensation package."

Trustee Milton Marks, who along with Ramos represents a frequently critical minority on the school’s independently elected board, added that the terms of Day’s contract were crafted before Marks and others ran for open seats on a reform slate.

As long as the board extended Day’s contract each year, it was difficult to slow his salary increases without convincing a majority to start from scratch and reevaluate his performance to determine if his compensation was reasonable. But it’s too late for that now. Day is leaving the school March 1 for a new job on the East Coast, but Marks wants the next chancellor to receive increases "that are not so rigidly tied to a formula."

Day’s compensation is a small fraction of the school’s $375 million budget. But it reflects the district’s priorities, and a recently unveiled 232-page internal probe of campaign law violations at the college stemming from a 2005 bond election offers a telling look at how the school has been operated under Day’s leadership.

To conduct the investigation, the school hired Steven Churchwell of the multinational law firm DLA Piper, the same group that examined steroids in major-league baseball for former senator George Mitchell. One of first things Churchwell did when he arrived at the school was to search for City College’s internal auditor. He soon discovered, however, that the college doesn’t have an internal auditor or an audit committee.

"It’s very common to have an internal auditor at an entity of this size," Churchwell told the school at a Jan. 24 meeting.

Outside auditors inspect the school’s books annually as required by law to make sure it’s following the rules of basic money management, a limited review compared to what an internal auditor, working full-time for the district, might check.

The Guardian reviewed the school’s annual outside audits going back several years and discovered that each of the reports between 1998 and 2003 advised the school to hire someone to do the job year-round internally.

"Regular internal audits enable timely detection of accounting inconsistencies and deviations from established policies and procedures," the reports state year after year. But each year the inspectors found anew that their recommendations were "not implemented."

Regarding the headline-grabbing mess that began when two school bureaucrats in separate instances illegally diverted public funds to a campaign committee, Churchwell said its causes were mistakes due more to ignorance than knowing attempts to break the law.

"It’s almost like lightning striking twice," Churchwell told the school.

But now it appears the storm might have been averted if Day and others in his administration had listened to the school’s outside auditors 10 years ago. Churchwell concluded that an internal auditor might have immediately caught election law violations but without one "no one person has a firm grasp on all the accounts that are open, what they are used for, or who can deposit checks into them," leading to a "glaring lack of oversight of the college’s involvement in fundraising from college contractors."

Day didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did trustees Lawrence Wong or Anita Grier. But vice chancellor Peter Goldstein argued that the school would set the agenda for an internal auditor, so such a person might focus on how the district reports student attendance or manages financial aid, not necessarily on accounts receivable.

"My response would be that this is a very large and complicated institution from several different perspectives, including the financial one," Goldstein told the Guardian. "While no single person may have a complete understanding of every single account, I believe that we have enough professional staff at the right level with the right background over all the accounts."

It could be that like many bureaucrats, Day is threatened by the possibility of an efficiency expert roaming the school’s halls and compromising the administration’s control over its bank accounts. But Day complained at the Jan. 24 meeting that City College just didn’t have the resources to hire an internal auditor, even though auditors often find enough ways to reduce wasteful spending that they cover their own expense and much more.

Not to mention that if Day had earned as much in compensation as his equivalent in Los Angeles, City College would have had about $100,000 left over for an internal auditor. A district report from 2000 even concluded that an internal auditor at that time would have cost about $105,000.

Two vice chancellors implicated in the election law violations, James Blomquist and Stephen Herman, earned about $200,000 and $170,000 respectively during the 2007 calendar year, compensation figures obtained by the Guardian through a records request.

Blomquist worked as a regular consultant to the school before earning $175,000 his first full year as a City College administrator in 2005. His firm, Blomquist Consultancy, made $401,074 from the college between April 2002 and May 2004, records show.

As for Day, his largest pay increase came after the 2005 bond election, when he was given an 18 percent raise for the 2006 calendar year. He received a 17 percent raise during the year of the 2001 bond election, when the school asked voters for $195 million.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed points out that compensation for community college presidents lags behind what the heads of four-year institutions tend to earn, despite their growing responsibilities, like courting major donors and lobbying legislators. The extreme exception, however, is Day, who last year ranked third nationally in earnings among 68 other community college heads.

"Do I feel guilty at all about being one of the highest-paid college presidents in the country?" Day asked the education rag’s surveyors in November 2007. "Absolutely not."

His supporters argue that Day has attracted millions of new dollars from Sacramento to the district, and along with the school’s trustees, he helped promote a February ballot initiative designed to ensure that a greater portion of the state’s General Fund go toward community colleges. The current formula used by the state for financing two-year schools hinges on how much money is set aside for California’s K–12 system.

Day also took over a school with crumbling buildings, some constructed in the early 20th century. When Day inherited the more than 90-year-old John Adams Campus in the Haight, its bricks were "falling off the side of the building," he said in a glossy 12-page advertorial the college ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Dec. 19, 2007.

The school floated two bond measures totaling about $458 million in 2001 and 2005 to complete projects citywide, but the latter was badly rushed. Poor planning and rising construction costs have forced the school to cancel projects promised to voters.

Diana Muñoz-Villanueva, a student representative on the Board of Trustees, said she lives on about $600 per month, "so I know there are ways to survive on less" than what the chancellor makes. But based on his duties, she said, "I think it’s fair. I hope to make that much money someday."

Day could nonetheless be taking a substantial pay cut for his new job in Washington DC, at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. According to its tax forms, the organization’s last president, Dallas Martin, who led the nonprofit for more than 30 years, earned about $250,000 during 2006 in pay and benefits.


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DAY FLIPS FROM THE FRYING PAN TO THE FIRE

Chancellor Phil Day’s departure from City College of San Francisco is not an indication that he’s easing into retirement. Instead, he’s crossing the country to join a controversy potentially hotter than anything he faced in politically rancorous San Francisco.

Day announced at the end of 2007 that he will be leaving the college in early March to accept the top job at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, one of the nation’s most powerful lobbying groups on issues related to higher education.

But the Washington DC nonprofit has spent the past year mired in a nationwide scandal over how student loan administrators at individual colleges promote certain bank lenders to students in exchange for kickbacks.

Six student loan administrators were fired or resigned and dozens of schools ceased entering into revenue-sharing agreements with lenders following an extensive investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo.

Several schools agreed to reimburse borrowers — i.e., college students — millions of dollars as part of a series of settlements with Cuomo’s office, which is still investigating how major lenders market their products to needy students.

The organization Day is poised to take over has been suffering embarrassing waves of unwanted attention as a result. Officials from Cuomo’s office physically monitored the group’s annual convention last July to ensure that corporate sponsors from banking institutions didn’t ply student loan administrators with lobster dinners, iPods, DVD players, nighttime parties, or trips to vacation resorts, all types of incentives offered to attendees in the past.

In other cases, school employees in charge of handling student loans simultaneously held thousands of shares of stock in lending companies, earned tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from them, and served on their advisory boards.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has followed the investigations closely and quoted a lobbyist in mid-January describing the NASFAA as "radioactive" on Capitol Hill due to the widening tumult. A congressional inquiry led by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) revealed last September that a University of Southern California official accepted Rose Bowl tickets from Citibank, a major national player in student lending.

Aid officials at the University of Texas "were treated to ice cream, lasagna, barbecue, candy bars, popcorn, happy hours, birthday cakes, cookies, and other personal benefits," according to the report.

A spokesperson for the NASFAA refused to comment beyond a statement released following Day’s appointment. But Day told the group’s members in a recent e-mail that national headlines regarding the kickbacks "have diminished the significance of our contributions," and he hopes to ease the criticism by holding "listening sessions" around the country.

"We need to develop a public relations/marketing and communications offensive that paints a more complete and compelling picture of the difference we can make in students’ lives," Day wrote.

The scandal erupted around what are known as preferred lenders lists, which colleges and universities distribute to students struggling to navigate the complex world of school loans, where private banks compete aggressively with direct lending offered by the federal government.

Most students rely on their school’s list of preferred lenders to make a decision, so banking institutions do whatever it takes to get their name on those lists (or their logos on school paraphernalia), from showering student-loan bureaucrats with lucrative gifts to exclusively sponsoring athletic departments and alumni associations.

Schools and lenders have promised to abide by a new list of ethics rules, drafted by Cuomo’s office in addition to other settlement terms, to regulate their conduct, and to restore faith in financial aid administrators.

Paul van Dyk

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PREVIEW In the late ’90s, Paul Oakenfold opted for pop stardom and Sasha and Digweed journeyed into the darker tones of progressive house, leaving Paul van Dyk as the final bastion of trance music’s golden age. Some might argue that one of the Dutch contingency — Armin van Burren, Ferry Corsten, and the prominent DJ Tiesto — has wrested the mantle of trance king from the Berlin DJ and producer. The short answer is a defiant nein. In their own ways, the Dutch headliners have attempted to shift away from traditional trance music’s familiar pattern of build-up then breakdown (now known as Euro or NRG). Trance’s new formula involves grounding a track with vocal talent, then layering melodies and synths on top. While the Hollanders achieve sufficient results, the accomplished van Dyk has overmastered them, even nabbing indie popsters St. Etienne in 2000 for "Tell Me Why (The Riddle)." Since then, his 2003 "Time of Our Lives" with Vega 4 has been played on American TV commercials, and "The Other Side" with Wayne Jackson won Best HI-NRG/Euro Track at the 2006 Winter Music Conference (it was also nominated for Best Progressive House/Trance Track — go figure). Van Dyk’s newest album, In Between (Mute US, 2007), continues the trend with a bevy of guest vocalists, including Jackson, David Byrne, and Jessica Sutta of the Pussycat Dolls. The album title could represent a transitional phase: on well-received single "White Lies" with Sutta, familiar drums and hi-hats mingle with a heavy bass line atypical of the German’s normally fleet-footed sound.

PAUL VAN DYK With Taj and Dirtyhertz. Fri/8, 9 p.m., $40. 1015, 1015 Folsom, SF. (415) 431-1200, www.1015.com

James Blackshaw

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PREVIEW Those seeking musical majesty need to acquaint themselves with the 12-string acoustic guitar playing of James Blackshaw, a Londoner and, at 25, one of an ever-expanding set of John Fahey acolytes. Fahey expanded the purview of folk-blues structures in his 1960s and ’70s prime to accommodate a roving interest in sundry classical forms. The journeying compositions stood apart from the contemporaneous folk revival but immediately attracted disciples, notably Fahey’s Takoma labelmates Leo Kottke, Robbie Basho, and Mark Fosson.

Of the current crop of acoustic shamans, Blackshaw is perhaps the most fluid player and the most frankly transcendental in his musical themes. His song titles are indicative of this mood: "Transient Life in Twilight," "Spiraling Skeleton Memorial," "Stained Glass Windows," and so on. He’s already the owner of a longish discography — three out-of-print early releases are soon to be reissued by Tompkins Square — and his spiral jetty compositions flurry forth with transposed phrases and delicately twisting tempos. The recordings have a pantheistic quality in their detailed sensuousness, a glistening shimmer that begs comparison as much to Terry Riley and My Bloody Valentine as to Fahey and Peter Walker.

Blackshaw has pursued Eastern-tinged, droning passages with increasing frequency over his past two albums, O True Believers (Important, 2006) and The Cloud of Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007), and if these segments are less immediately successful than his Gregorian guitar mode, it’s still gratifying to hear the young talent pushing his limits. The Cloud of Unknowing caps its culminating steel-string swirl with a protracted bout of nail-biting strings, not unlike the effect that closes the Beatles’ "A Day in the Life." It sounds like a promise of things to come, a sonogram of the great depths underlying Blackshaw’s placid surfaces. Catch the guitarist in the flesh in a rare stateside appearance, in support of guitar guru Sean Smith’s Eternal (Gnome Life) record release.

JAMES BLACKSHAW With Sean Smith and the Present Moment, Spencer Owen, and Colossal Yes. Wed/6, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. (415) 861-5016, www.cafedunord.com

Wine + chocolate = love

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PERFECT MATCH Want to seduce someone this Valentine’s Day? Just share a glass of wine (or three) with your sweetheart. Wine is liquid sensuality: its heady bouquet stimulates the appetite and its velvet caress soothes that desire. What other drink is described as both voluptuous and muscular? And when you pair wine with the mouth-coating luxury of chocolate, the combination is impossible to resist.

We asked Natalie Maclean, author of Red, White and Drunk All Over (Bloomsbury, 2006) and the woman behind the food-wine matcher at www.nataliemaclean.com, to give us her romantic suggestions of chocolate pairings with California wines. Here’s her top 10 list:

•Dark chocolate and Cline Ancient Vines Zinfandel, Contra Costa County

•Chocolate-covered biscotti and Beaulieu Vineyard Coastal Cabernet Sauvignon

•Chocolate-orange cake and Andrew Quady Essencia Orange Muscat

•Chocolate with nuts and Santa Barbara Winery Syrah, Santa Ynez Valley

•Milk chocolate and Greg Norman Lake County Zinfandel

•Bittersweet chocolate and Round Hill Cabernet Sauvignon California

•Chocolate-dipped fruit and Gallo Frei Ranch Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma

•Chocolate ganache truffles and Toasted Head Shiraz California

•Chocolate raspberry cheesecake and Bonny Doon Framboise

•Chocolate hearts with cream filling and Francis Coppola Diamond Collection Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon

"The creamy flavors of chocolate go best with full-bodied wines like those that California produces," Maclean says. For more pairings — including a variety of wines from all regions paired with a wide range of foods — visit her Web site, check out her book, or join the 85,000 people who are subscribed to her free e-newsletter.

www.nataliemaclean.com

“Enter the Center”

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REVIEW Full disclosure would take up the full piece, so I’ll just say that in spite of knowing both David Wilson and Frank Lyon well as friends, I’m hardly alone in counting them as two of the Bay Area’s most celebratory and engaging young creators. They’ve largely steered their efforts away from the typical venues that comprise San Francisco’s music-art coordinates thus far, especially in their periodic outdoor music gatherings. A eucalyptus grove in Berkeley, old military tunnels overlooking the Pacific, a comfy crater — all have been transformed into communicative commons under the purview of Ribbons Productions, Wilson and Lyon’s encapsuutf8g entity for performances, small-press books, a blog par excellence, and now their premier SF exhibition, "Enter the Center."

The show — comfortably and spaciously laid out in the Eleanor Harwood Gallery — is a new turn for Ribbons in its expansion beyond direct collaborations, although both artists’ solo contributions echo Ribbons’ overarching ethos involving landscape, temporality, and process. Wilson’s billowy pencil drawings of Contra Costa hills and decorative collections of seeds, fruits, and other fibrous materials possess a persistent attentiveness and loose-limbed appreciation: his gigantic HEAL landscape unfolds over several record-sleeve panels, gently nudging viewers toward an equation of space and time. Lyon’s entrancing collages pose as hats, capes, and tree stumps. Beyond these preoccupying surfaces, the pieces function as windows onto emotional reckoning and magnificent obsession. The exhibit also showcases a new book, which arrives with a DVD including a generous helping of Ship songs — Wilson and Lyon’s music duo, one of the Guardian‘s picks for its class of 2007 — performed in treetops. Finally, it wouldn’t be Ribbons without communion: the second of two special concerts is scheduled at the gallery for Feb. 9 and highlights recent Guardian cover model Arp, a new Brendan Fowler (BARR) project, and Pocahaunted.

ENTER THE CENTER Through Sat/9. Thurs.–Sat., 1–5 p.m. Eleanor Harwood Gallery, 1295 Alabama, SF. (415) 867-7770, www.eleanorharwood.com

G-Spot: Nookie by the numbers

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› culture@sfbg.com

We asked and you answered — oh, how you answered. More than 200 of you responded to our questions about what goes on between your sheets, or at least between your legs. And although there are lots of you happily living your vanilla-and-roses love lives (straight! Missionary style! Share my partner? Never!), there are plenty more proving our city’s reputation for alternative gender and orientation identities, kinky sex, and free love is well deserved. Check out our poll results, as of Jan. 31, below. (Numbers are percentages.)

1. How do you identify, in terms of your sexual orientation?

Straight 59

Gay 12

Queer 10

Bi 9

Depends on how much I’ve had to drink 5

Alternative answers include four kinds of bisexual with caveats such as "bi-affectional" or "bi for political reasons," one transsexual, and one person who identifies simply as "feral." Meow.

2. How often do you have sex?

Once a day 11

Once a week 37

Once a month 10

Once upon a time 2

Alternate answers give even more specific frequencies, most often three to four times per week, as well as the fabulously Victorian answer "fortnightly." Several people said it depends on relationship status (though there was no mention of whether frequency increases or decreases with commitment). The one we identify with most? "As much as possible. Every day if you count with myself."

3. What’s the kinkiest thing you’ve done or would do?

Sex before marriage 15

Spanking 24

Suspension 16

"Two Girls, One Cup" 11

Alternative answers include bondage, multiple partners at one time ("ye olde three-way"), role play, sex in public places (bookstore? Hot), snowballing, sex with someone else’s date, anonymous encounters, homosexual dalliances, and the winner for Most Likely to Have Come from Lolita: "I got my chewing gum caught in a guy’s pubic hair once."

4. Where’s the craziest place you’ve ever had sex in San Francisco?

Mission Bar 8

16th and Mission Bart stop 4

My bed (missionary position, of course) 26

We’ve clearly been shopping in the wrong places. You people are having sex in Noe Valley storefronts, butcher shops, the dressing rooms of upscale retailers (Saks, JCrew, Banana Republic), and phone booths and against a wall in the Haight. How’d we miss this? Perhaps we were too busy with the rest of you in parks (Golden Gate, Balboa, Dolores), parking lots, school yards, and hot tubs. Some of our awards? Most original goes to "bowling alley in the back with the pins." Most ambitious? "Nothin’ crazy yet, but it’s only 9am. Give me a chance to wake up."

5. How polyamorous are you (or were you in your last committed relationship)?

Love is limitless and meant to be shared (my partner and I have other partners) 8

Love has limits, but sex is meant to be shared (my partner and I have other bed buddies) 13

Love and sex have limits, but some fantasies are meant to be shared (my partner and I occasionally invite others into bed with us) 12

Love, sex, and fantasies have limits, but dinner is meant to be shared (my partner and I have friends) 58

Most of you don’t want to share your partners — "I’m a jealous bitch," one person responded — though at least one of you wishes you could. But a good amount of you are open to all kinds of couplings, including the most open-minded of all: "AMA — all mammals allowed."

6. What gets you in the mood?

Gary Danko — foie gras and a 1985 Angelos Gaja 6

Amber — Pabst Blue Ribbon and a shot of well whiskey 15

The Stud — tequila and Trannyshack 8

What doesn’t? 54

For some of you, all you need to do is see your beau or betty and you’re ready for love. Others need drugs (weed and coke are favorites) and porn. And congrats to those of you who know exactly, specifically, without a doubt what you need: Morrissey and a Georges Bataille novel, horny thoughts and Spanish-language TV channel Azteca America, molasses coffee with grits, Madagascar chocolate from Recchiuti Confections, or rain. We love the answer "long tones." (Let’s talk about sax, baby.) And we’re not sure how to feel about the person who needs "a pint of Malibu and a good swift kick in the jewels."

G-Spot: Valentine’s Day events

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PARTIES, EVENTS, AND BENEFITS

Amor del Mar Aquarium of the Bay, Pier 39, Embarcadero at Bay; 623-5326, www.aquariumofthebay.com. Feb 14, 6pm, $100. Celebrate San Francisco’s love affair with the bay and support the nonprofit Aquarium of the Bay Foundation at this gala celebration featuring global cuisine, decadent drinks, live music, and exhibitions.

Erotic Playground One Taste, 1074 Folsom; www.tantriccircus.com. Sat/9, 8pm; $30 single women, $50 single men, $60 couples. The Tantric Circus presents a sexy evening of burlesque, striptease, male lap dance, fruit feeding, DJs, and more.

Eternal Spring SomArts Bay Gallery, 934 Brannan; 1-888-989-8748, eternalspring08.com. Sat/9, 2-10pm, $7. Celebrate life, love, arts, and creativity at this all-day event including a fashion show, performances, free classes (hoop, poi, yoga, and more!), DJs, and shopping.

Heroes and Hearts Luncheon Union Square; 206-4478, www.sfghf.net. Feb 14, 11:30am, $300. Celebrate those who have helped the community and support the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation by attending this luncheon and auction of artist-created tabletop heart sculptures.

My Sucky Valentine XIII ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $15-25. Listen to tales of tainted love and bad sex by good writers including Thomas Roche, Carol Queen, Michelle Tea, and mi blue, all to benefit the Women’s Community Clinic and the St. James Infirmary.

One Night Stand X ARTworkSF Gallery, 49 Geary; 673-3080, www.artworksf.com. Sat/9, 6-11pm, $15-25. Support the Center for Sex and Culture and the SF Artists Resource Center at this sexy multimedia event including live nude models, paint wrestling, erotic food feeding, and performances.

PINK’s 2nd Annual Valentine’s Day Party Look Out Bar, 3600 16th St; 703-9751, www.mypartner.com. Sat/9, 8pm-2am, $25. MyPartner.com cohosts this year’s party and benefit for the GLBT Historical Society. About 300 single gay guys are expected to enjoy an open Svedka vodka bar and hobnobbing with guests like Assemblymember Mark Leno and Sup. Bevan Dufty.

Poetry Battle of (All) the Sexes Beat Museum, 540 Broadway; 863-6306, www.poormagazine.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $20 to fight, $15 to watch. Challenge your partner (or future partner) to a battle of spoken word, hip-hop, poetry, or flowetry in the ring at this benefit for Poor magazine.

Prom Pete’s Tavern, 128 King; 817-5040, www.petestavernsf. Feb 14, 9pm, $10. What’s more romantic than prom? Prom in the ’80s! Enjoy music, decorations, mock gambling, and dancing, all to benefit Voices, a nonprofit that works with emancipated foster youths. Admission includes one drink, gambling chips, and a photo.

Queen of Arts: A Profane Valentine Coronation Sssshh…!, 535 Florida; www.anonsalon.com/feb08. Feb 15, 10pm, $10-20. The production team that brought us Sea of Dreams presents a sexy night of DJs, dancing, art, and performance, including Kitty-D from Glitch Mob, Mancub from SpaceCowboys, Fou Fou Ha!, and Merkley.

Queen of Hearts Ball Mighty, 119 Utah; 974-8985, www.goodvibes.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $25. Good Vibrations and Dr. Carol Queen host this decadent fairy-tale-themed costume party featuring MC Peaches Christ, circus performances by Vau de Vire Society, a fetish fashion show, and dancers from the Lusty Lady.

Romancing the Reptiles: Wild Love! Tree Frog Treks, 2112 Hayes; 876-3764, www.treefrogtreks.com. Sat/9, noon-2pm; $40 adults, $25 kids. Join animal care director Ross Beswick as you learn about how animals pick their mates and where baby animals come from.

Sensualité 111 Minna, 111 Minna; www.celesteanddanielle.com/party.html. Feb 15, 9pm; $15 advance, $20 at the door. Wear something sexy to this multimedia Valentine’s Day event featuring aphrodisiac appetizers, exotic rhythms, tarot readings, performances, a raffle, and a no-host bar.

Sweet Valentine’s Cruise Pier 431/2; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. Feb 14, 5pm; $48 adult, $34 youth. Join the Red and White Fleet for a romantic, fun, two-hour cruise of the San Francisco Bay, including a lavish appetizer buffet by Boudin and a complimentary beverage.

Transported SF Valentine’s Singles Party Pickup at Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom; transportedsf.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm, $21.49. Join DJs Ana Sia and Felina aboard the biodiesel Transported SF bus for sultry sounds, schmoozing with other singles, and stops at gorgeous outdoor dancing locales.

Woo at the Zoo San Francisco Zoo; Sloat at 47th St; 753-7236, www.sfzoo.org. Sat/9, Feb 13-15, 6pm; Sun/10, Feb 17, noon; $75. This multimedia event, conducted by Jane Tollini of the now-defunct Sex Tours, explores the sexual and mating behaviors of animals. Also featuring champagne and romantic refreshments.

BAY AREA

Flamenco, Candlelight and Roses Café de la Paz, 1600 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 287-8700, www.cafedelapaz.net. Feb 14, 5:30, 6, 8, and 8:30pm; Feb 15-16, 6:30pm; $75-115. The nuevo Latino café celebrates the sweet side of love with three days of dinner plus a show, featuring the acclaimed Caminos Flamencos dance company.

Nest Firecracker Valentine Event Nest, 1019 Atlas Peak, Napa; (707) 255-7484. Sat/9-Sun/10, 10am-6pm, $5. Celebrate Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day together while shopping for unique gifts and making art projects with scrapbook artist Janine Beard, all to benefit the "Nest Egg" fund through the Arts Council of Napa.

Sweetheart Tea Yerba Buena Nursery, 19500 Skyline, Woodside; (650) 851-1668, www.yerbabuenanursery.com. Sat/9, noon, $25. Enjoy a traditional tea service with a special Valentine’s Day menu, followed by a stroll through the nursery’s gorgeous gardens.

Week of Valentines at Habitot Children’s Museum Habitot Children’s Museum, 2065 Kittredge, Berk; (510) 647-1111, www.habitot.org. Fri/8-Sat/9, 9:30am-4:30pm; Feb 12-14, 9:30am-1pm; $6 per child, $5 for accompanying adult. Contribute to a large heart sculpture and create handmade cards from recycled materials. Bring valentine-making supplies to receive a free adult admission pass.

FILM, MUSIC, AND PERFORMANCE

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave; 1-866-912-6326, www.legionofhonor.org. Feb 14, 5:30pm, $10-20. The Cinema Supper Club at the Legion of Honor presents this film as part of "The Real Drama Queens" series, including a special exhibition opening at 5:30pm, dinner seating at 6pm (reservations made separately; call 750-7633), and film screening at 8pm.

BATS Improv Valentine’s Day Show Bayfront Theater, Fort Mason Center, bldg B, Marina at Laguna; 474-6776, www.improv.org. Feb 14, 8pm; $10 advance, $15 at the door. Whether you’re flying solo, with friends, or on a date, this audience-participation show is the perfect place to enjoy the funny side of romance.

The Best American Erotica Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia; 282-9246, www.moderntimesbookstore.com. Feb 13, 7:30pm, free. Celebrate the 15th anniversary of the series with this showcase of standout stories, including a hot and edgy piece from Susie Bright.

Boston Marriage Theatre Rhinoceros, 2926 16th St; 861-5079, www.therhino.org. Feb 7-March 2, call or see Web site for schedule, $15-35. Join Anna and Claire and their crazy maid for Theatre Rhinoceros’s version of David Mamet’s same-sex romp.

Brainpeople Zeum, 221 Fourth St; 749-2228, Thurs-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 2pm. Through Feb 16. $20. American Conservatory Theater presents the world-premiere production of this newest work by José Rivera, screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries, about two women who reckon with their pasts in an apocalyptic future.

The Eyes of Love Mechanics’ Institute, 57 Post; 393-0100, www.milibrary.com. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $15 members, $25 public. Back by popular demand, chanteuse Helene Attia will select from her vast repertoire of love songs, classic and contemporary. Admission includes hors d’oeuvres, libations, and dessert.

Hope Briggs and Friends: A Musical Valentine Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.cityboxoffice.com. Feb 17, 3pm, $25-50. Celebrated soprano Hope Briggs shares favorite opera arias alongside 15-year-old singing sensation Holly Stell and virtuoso violinist Dawn Harms.

How We First Met Herbst Theatre, War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness; 392-4400, www.howwefirstmet.com. Feb 14, 8pm, $22-35. Real audience stories are spun into a comedy masterpiece in this one-of-a-kind hit show.

In Search of the Heart of Chocolate Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero; 310-0290, www.chocumentary.com. Tues/12, 6:30 and 7:30pm, $10. Bay Area filmmaker Sarah Feinbloom screens her new chocumentary, about Noe Valley’s Chocolate Covered and its customers. Screenings followed by a chocolate reception featuring art and live music.

I Used to Be So Hot Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia; 626-2787, www.theintersection.org. Feb 14, 7 and 9pm; Feb 15-16, 8pm; $20. InnerRising Productions presents comedian Mimi Gonzalez, a Detroit native who’ll take you on a journey through sexual politics and queer discovery.

Lovers and Other Monsters Hypnodrome, 575 10th St; 377-4202, thrillpeddlers.com. Feb 12-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 7pm; $20-34.50. With a diabolical nod to Valentine’s (and Presidents’) Day, Thrillpeddlers presents a weeklong rotating lineup of live music, exquisite torture, and expert testimony, including Jill Tracy, Jello Biafra, and Creepshow Camp horror theater.

Miss Ann Peterson’s Broken Heart Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom; 1-800-838-3006, www.tangolamelodia.com. Feb 13-16, 8pm, $15. See the premiere of Tango la Melodia’s new multimedia production, a three-night concert featuring original music, poetry, and performance set in the romantic, sexy Roaring ’20s.

Mortified: Doomed Valentine’s Show Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St; www.makeoutroom.com, www.getmortified.com. Fri/8, Mon/11, 8pm; $12 advance, $15 at the door. Share the pain, awkwardness, and bad poetry associated with love as performers read from their teen-angst artifacts. The creator of the nationwide and NPR phenomenon, David Nadleberg, will be in attendance in celebration of the release of Mortified: Love Is a Battlefield (Simon Spotlight).

Not Exactly Valentine’s Show Purple Onion, 140 Columbus; 567-7488, www.talkshowsf.com. Mon/11, 7pm, $18-20. Presented by Talk Show Live, Beth Lisick talks about her latest work and performs from her slam repertoire, chocolatier Chuck Siegel of Charles Chocolates gives an interview and tasting, Vicki Burns performs a program of "sort-of romantic standards," and Kurt Bodden reads a short story by James Thurber.

Philosophy/Art Salon: What is Erotic? Femina Potens Art Gallery, 2199 Market; 217-9340, www.feminapotens.com. Feb 16, 6:30-8:30pm, $10-25. Philosopher Rita Alfonso joins erotica writer Jennifer Cross and artist Dorian Katz for a brief show-and-tell followed by a Socratic dialogue on the question "What makes for erotic art?"

Romeo and Juliet: Gala 40th Anniversary Screening Castro Theatre, 429 Castro; 863-0611, www.thecastrotheatre.com. Feb 14, 7pm; $25 adult, $12.50 youth. Marc Huestis and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura present a 40th-anniversary screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s romantic classic, with star Olivia Hussey in attendance and a live musical performance.

Valentine’s Day Film Program: Labor of Love Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, McBean Theater; www.exploratorium.edu. Sat/10, 2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the Exploratorium presents a program of short, expressive films about people who love what they do.

BAY AREA

The Gin Game Pacheco Playhouse, 484 Ignacio Blvd, Novato; 883-4498, www.pachecoplayhouse.org. Feb 14, 8pm, $10 special Valentine’s Day price. Bay Area theater vets Norman A. Hall and Shirley Nilsen Hall star in D.L. Coburn’s production of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which two residents of an "aged home" find comfort and competition in the constant shuffling of cards and eventually unravel bits of their past they may rather fold than show.

Giselle Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, Lower Sproul Plaza (near Bancroft at Telegraph), Berk; (510) 642-9988. Feb 14-16, 8pm; Feb 17, 3pm; $34-90. Cal Performances presents Nina Ananiashvili and the State Ballet of Georgia performing the beloved ballet, accompanied by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.

Love Fest La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 849-2568, www.lapena.org. Feb 14, 7:30pm; $12 advance, $14 at the door. HBO Def Poet Aya de Leon hosts this alt-V Day evening of spoken word and music that focuses on love of self, spirit, community, family, peace, and democracy, including readings from her collection of "Grown-Ass-Woman" poems.

Songs of Love Two Bird Cafe, 625 Geronimo Valley, San Geronimo; 488-0105, mikelipskinjazz.com. Feb 14, 7-9pm, free. Jazz vocalist duo Mike and Dinah Lee present a Valentine’s Day concert at Two Bird, which will feature a special menu.

Viva la Musica! St. Mark’s Catholic Church, 325 Marine View, Belmont; (650) 281-9663, www.vivalamusica.org. Feb 14, 8-10pm, $15. Share a romantic musical evening with heart-melting chamber music, intimate solos, sassy choral numbers, and gifts of chocolate for audience members.

ART SHOWS

Flowers from a Nuclear Winter: A Live Art Installation by Rod Pujante Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Phyllis Wattis Webcast Studio; 561-0363, www.exploratorium.edu. Feb 16, 11am-4pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Cosponsored by the Black Rock Arts Foundation and the Exploratorium, Burning Man artist Rod Pujante performs a live demonstration of transparent-flower making, converting waste into a dreamscape.

Modern Love Lost Art Salon, 245 S Van Ness; 861-1530, www.lostartsalon.com. Feb 14, 5:30-8:30pm, free. Celebrate Valentine’s Day at an opening reception for this show of work selected from Lost Art’s library of more than 3,000 pieces from the mid-20th century.

BAY AREA

Red Cake Gallery: February Open House Call for directions to private home; (510) 759-4516, www.redcakegallery.com. Feb 23, 6-10pm; Feb 24, March 1, 1-4pm; Feb 25-29, 6-8pm; free. Have your cake and eat it too at this post-Valentine showcase of work by Red Cake artists, to be held in a private San Francisco home.

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Aphrodisiac Cooking Class Sur la Table, 77 Maiden; 732-7900, www.surlatable.com. Feb 15, 6:30pm, $170 per couple. Learn to make a delicious, sensual meal at this couples’ class hosted by chef Diane Brown, author of The Seduction Cookbook (Innova, 2005).

Chocolate, Strawberries and Lapdancing Center for Healing and Expression, 1749 O’Farrell; (510) 291-9779, www.slinkyproductions.com. Tues/12, 8pm; $110 per couple, $160 per threeple. Be the best seat in the house at the Slinky Productions lap dance class for couples, which includes chocolate, strawberries, and champagne.

Letterpress Valentines San Francisco Center for the Book, 300 De Haro; 565-0545, sfcb.org. Fri/8, 2-5pm, $65 (including materials). Experienced and novice printmakers alike can enjoy an afternoon making letterpress cards with Megan Adie.

Valentine Special: Xara Flower-Making Workshop Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, Skylight Area. Feb 14 and 16, noon-2pm, free with museum admission ($9-14). Attorney and Burning Man artist Mark Hinkley teaches attendees how to make fake flowers from recycled bottles. All materials provided; ages 6 and up.

BAY AREA

Celebrating the Masculine and Feminine Odd Fellows Hall, 839 Main, Redwood City; (650) 780-0769. Feb 16, 10am-6pm, $150-175. Join Valerie Sher, Jackie Long, and Jim Benson on a journey toward wholeness as we explore who we are as men and women.

A Night of Bond, James Bond Bay Club of Marin, 330 Corte Madera, Corte Madera; 945-3000. Feb 14, 7pm, $35-45 (includes drinks and appetizers). Skip the prix fixe dinner and join certified matchmaker Joy Nordenstrom for a Bond-themed workshop about cultivating passionate relationships, including a contest for best male and female Bond-inspired costumes.

G-Spot: Don’t fear the jeweler

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› culture@sfbg.com

Poor well-intentioned, misunderstood, Valentine’s Day! For a holiday meant to joyously celebrate the plentiful doses of compassion and generosity love can bring, V Day has a notoriously bad reputation — probably because choosing the right gift on this, the third-largest retail day of the year, always elicits at least a little anxiety, occasionally a good deal of panic, and, in dire cases, even immense fear. Who knew that buying chocolates and flowers could bring on anxiety attacks and performance crises? In an attempt to give the little day that could a chance to redeem itself, we bring you this year’s shopping guide.

GRAB ‘N’ GO


The perfect floral accent to your V Day celebration is a must, and you’re sure to score an electric grin the size of Canada when you show up with a selection from Church Street Flowers (212 Church, SF; 415-553-7762, www.churchstreetflowers.com). With the beautiful arrangements and personalized advice, it’s tough to make a wrong choice. Can’t make it there to pick up les fleurs yourself? The shop offers same-day deliveries within city limits. No wonder it’s won Best of the Bay six years in a row.

Chocolate Covered (4069 24th St., SF; 415-645-8123) in Noe Valley packs a pleasurable punch with delectable sweets and knowledgeable staff. Keep an eye out for the owner, Jack, who will help you select exactly what you need — even if you aren’t quite sure yourself — in sugary cocoa form. Plus, the blue and white custom print boxes can feature almost any picture you want.

In your intrepid search for arm candy for your arm candy, make a stop at Manika Jewelry (11 Maiden Lane, SF; 415-399-1990, www.manikajewelry.com) in Union Square for unique, distinctive designs. A warm staff will help direct you through the wide selection, some of which is locally designed, to find a one-of-a-kind piece. And feel free to try pieces on, as this establishment isn’t shy about giving you a chance to find exactly what you want.

Sexy, snazzy, and a little taste of naughty come together at Agent Provocateur (54 Geary, SF; 415-421-0229, www.agentprovocateur.com). But its Swarovski crystal–encrusted riding crops might break the bank. For more monetarily accessible lingerie, mosey on over to Belle Cose (2036 Polk, SF; 415-474-3494) in Nob Hill. From comfy-cozy to rawr-tastic, a purchase from this store is sure to be worn many times — if not for long.

ADDIN’ A LITTLE FLAIR


Give a jewelry piece (or a pocketknife) extra pizzazz and a touch of thoughtfulness by including a tiny message somewhere on its shiny surface. You’ll be able to cue the oohs and aahs in surround sound if you enlist the help of Alden Engraving (208B Lily, SF; 415-252-9072, www.aldenengraving.com) in Hayes Valley to bring happiness in the form of script.

If you’ve got no time to scour the streets but are big on impressions, check out Apple’s new pink iPod nano (www.apple.com). This ridiculously adorable iPod comes not only in a V Day color favorite but with free laser engraving and free Apple gift wrap if you order online. It’s not quite the MacBook Air, but there will probably be very little complaining if you give something that pretty in pink.

Willing to drop a little more bank? Book a spa date for two at the Nob Hill Spa at the Huntington Hotel (1075 California, SF; 415-345-2888, www.huntingtonhotel.com). The space is picturesque and features an infinity pool overlooking the city, food service, and knockout massages. A day spent here will guarantee that postdate afterglow.

For those who are interested in a little stage-side romance, the American Conservatory Theater (405 Geary, SF; 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org) opens its production of Blood Knot on Feb. 8. Granted, it’s not the most uplifting piece — the story features two brothers having existential crises in South Africa during the apartheid era. But it will still blow the socks off your theater-loving sweetie when you smoothly place the tickets on the table and say, "I thought we’d try something different tonight."

Those willing to trek across the bridge to the East Bay can spend an evening at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre (2025 Addison, Berk.; 510-647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org), which is featuring Taking Over, Danny Hoch’s one-man show in which he hilariously morphs into multiple characters from one neighborhood. Another option? Catch Carrie Fisher’s biting repartee (yes, Princess Leia in the flesh) as she recalls her years in Hollywood in Wishful Drinking.

Of course, if the whole V Day extravaganza is causing unbearable amounts of stress, consider spending an afternoon strolling through the Japanese Tea Garden (Tea Garden and MLK Jr., SF; 415-752-4227) in Golden Gate Park. Its five acres of eclectic gardens and a Japanese-style teahouse mean it shouldn’t be hard for you to find the perfect spot for whispering romantic nothings into each other’s ears.

However, in the event you’re looking to spend an evening in, Good Vibrations (603 Valencia, SF; 415-522-5460. 1620 Polk, SF; 415-345-0400. www.goodvibes.com) is always a safe bet for fun goodies. The store’s recommendations for its wide range of adult toys are helpful and friendly, and you’ll be hard-pressed (heh heh) to not find something you’ll enjoy. Honestly, who could pass up chocolate body pens or a fun-filled match of the Tantric Lovers Game?

G-Spot: Waiter, I’ll take the (status) check!

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› culture@sfbg.com

There’s something smug and even a bit embarrassing about going out to celebrate Valentine’s Day as a couple: you’re in public with all of the other twosomes, participating in an orgy of self-satisfaction.

But being a twosome is rarely a definite "you are" or "you aren’t" thing. It isn’t a static state but a constantly evolving condition. Going out on Valentine’s Day announces to both yourselves and those around you the current status of "the two of you," making it the perfect impetus to assess what stage of development you’ve reached so you can celebrate accordingly.

ONE MONTH


As a rule, never begin dating in January. At one month, the relationship has a heartbeat but is too nebulous and vulnerable to endure a holiday based around the act of coupling. If you do find yourself in a new relationship when Feb. 14 rolls around, it’s probably a good idea to just ignore Valentine’s Day completely — but that, of course, is impossible. The next best thing is dining at a place where you can celebrate the day while not having to acknowledge the fact that you’re doing so. Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack (18 Virginia, SF; 415-206-2086), the funky, cozy Bernal Heights eatery, is dimly lit enough to encourage playful flirtation but doesn’t smack you in the face with romanticism. The well-crafted Italian comfort food is as flavorful as the decor. And the übercool, jeans-clad staff aren’t likely to ask "Aww, how long have you guys been together?"

THREE MONTHS


At this point the relationship is still in the novelty phase. You’ve formed rituals — pizza and American Idol on Tuesdays, harassing the tigers at the zoo on Sundays — you e-mail each other pictures from stuffonmycat.com, and you have yet to have a dull conversation. Why ruin the fun with a stilted, overly formal Valentine’s Day dinner? Instead, try Cha Cha Cha (www.cha3.com) in either the Haight (1801 Haight, SF; 415-386-7670) or the Mission (2327 Mission, SF; 415-648-0504). The Spanish-Cuban small-plates menu means there is no timetable: tapas encourage lingering. Twenty-dollar pitchers of sangria inspire the disclosure of fascinating new tidbits ("You lived in a pygmy village?"), and the collaborative selection of each dish mimics the sense of shared adventure you still enjoy.

SIX MONTHS


Congratulations! You’re officially a couple. No need to keep giving noncommittal answers to your friends’ questions about your status — you are now together. Time to make your grand debut at Luna Park (694 Valencia, SF; 415-553-8584, www.lunaparksf.com), a favorite V Day convergence point for other young, hip, hot couples in the city. Nod to them as you nosh on highbrow reinventions of American classics. Take note of their knowing expressions as you’re led to one of the curtained booths in the back (ask for it when you make reservations). These are your peers now. Welcome to the club.

ONE YEAR


You haven’t seen each other wearing anything but pajamas for months. You haven’t shared a meal that doesn’t involve Tostinos Pizza Rolls in who knows how long. Engaging conversations and lusty sex alike have dissolved into Seinfeld reruns and holey underwear. Whereas last year Valentine’s Day was just another night out, now it is the night out. Dinner at Absinthe (398 Hayes, SF; 415-551-1590, www.absinthe.com) should inspire you to dress up, while the selection of classic rare cocktails — such as the Sazerac and the French ’75 — will give you the feeling of having traveled back to a more romantic era. Plus, imbibing a bit of the establishment’s namesake elixir can bring danger back to any relationship. Imagine how close you’ll feel after you’ve both thrown up in the cab on the ride home.

ON THE ROCKS


You know when you’re there: Your significant other’s adorable half snore becomes your every sleepless night. You’ve heard all the stories a million times ("Enough with the fucking pygmies!"). You know it. Your SO knows it. It’s over. But neither of you has the heart to put your doomed union out of its misery on the most romantic day of the year. Ryoko’s Japanese Restaurant (619 Taylor, SF; 415-775-1028) in Nob Hill provides the perfect distraction from your imploding relationship. When a DJ isn’t spinning, there’s loud ’80s music. The sake bombs offer a satisfying outlet for aggression. And if you need something even stronger, you’re in luck: Ryoko’s is one of the few sushi joints in town to also feature a full bar.

ON THE DL


When engaged in an illicit affair, road-trip! Put a bridge, a tunnel, or any of the Bay Area’s other engineering obstacles between your significant other and your significant other. "Baby, I’m not embarrassed by you — I just know this great little Italian place in Crockett." Try Barolo (404 San Pedro, Pacifica; 650-355-5980, www.barolopacifica.com) for private pasta, Graffiti (101 Second St., Petaluma; 707-765-4567, www.graffitipetaluma.com) for surreptitious seafood, or Petals (639 First St., Benicia; 707-748-5695, www.petalsrestaurant.com) for furtive Asian fusion.

GETTING OVER IT


When having an anti–Valentine’s Day dinner with another recently single friend, you need tequila! Nothing says "I’m so over it" more than shrimp tacos and Cazadores with a totally platonic friend. Playa Azul (3318 Mission, SF; 415-282-4554) has a wide enough selection to keep the shots flowing all night. And if your hands meet, for an instant, in the chip bowl, well …

G-Spot: Everyone’s a wiener

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› marke@sfbg.com

You’d think that amid all of the bell tolling and hand-wringing about DIY online media proliferation, professionally produced gay porn would have gone the way of the floppy disk and dial-up modem long ago. (Remember waiting 20 minutes for free stud-muffin bitmaps to download, pixel by aching pixel, onto your 10-inch monitor? Ah, AOL blue balls. Whither the ’90s?)

But no – gay porn is the new fireplace. You can hardly turn around in most finer homo homes and gardens without some two-dimensional boy butter spattering your delicate cheekbones. Gooey! And every edgy hetero is at least partially versed in the extensive oeuvres of quasi-professional online sites like Bait Bus or His First Huge Cock, if only because sticky fingers often click too quickly on flickering banner ads.

Gay porn’s also big business, of course, and an especially homegrown one. Almost all of the most profitable studios are based in San Francisco – a rare case of several giants of an industry being located within mere blocks of one another. SoMa has become the Wall Street of Crisco.

The reasons behind this multimillions-generating clusterfuck are myriad: mainly, the local economic advantages, cultural environment, and plethora of scruffy multiculti boys (all the rage among a rapidly globalized audience) make SF a much more fertile gay porn hot spot than the traditionally down-and-dirty San Fernando Valley. Also, many big studios are the bastard children of SF’s Falcon Studios, the granddaddy purveyor of male video erotica headed by the late, irascible Chuck Holmes, for whom our groundbreaking Charles M. Holmes LGBT Community Center was affectionately named.

And it doesn’t hurt that Silicon Valley is a whip flick down the freeway. Gay porn studios have been aggressively savvy about riding the online wave to solvency, even if lately that’s meant a hilariously regrettable spate of behind-the-scenes blogs and vids that feature pec-implanted gym queens sashaying nude around Palm Springs pools and fussing over which pair of snakeskin trousers go with which Tony Lamas. Decisions.

Yet despite the buttloads of profit, cornered markets, community accolades, and extensive and rabid fan bases, gay porn studios – like cuddly-wuddly gay porn stars themselves – have massive inferiority complexes. They want recognition, dammit! Thus the annual Golden Globes of filmed homosexual obscenities, the GayVN Awards, presented by venerable gay porn insider news source GayVN (recent headline: "Jock Itch in the Can!"). Last year’s awards presentation at the Castro Theatre — open to the public – was a raucous, substar-studded affair featuring MC Kathy Griffin and more fashion nightmares than you could shake a spangled man boa at. This year’s awards show expands to the Giftcenter Pavilion – because, really, doesn’t this celebration require an entire pavilion? – and although no D-list host has been announced, fan tickets are being snatched up at a robo-thrusting pace.

A quick and gleeful scan gleans from among the 2008 nominees: Gaytanamo for Best Leather Video (when, oh when, will someone make Fahrenheit 9"x11"?); Tiger’s Eiffel Tower: Paris Is Mine!, Gunnery Sgt. McCool, and Rocks and Hard Places for Best Video; the mathematically challenging Bottom of the Ninth: Little Big League 3 for Best Direction, and, inevitably, Buckback Mountain (Best Specialty Release) and Bi Pole Her (Best Bisexual Video, duh). There are awards for Best Box Cover Concept, Best Music, and the always bracingly racist Best Ethnic-Themed Video: (Arabian Tales 1-2? Spilling the Tea? Queens Plaza Pickup 2, surprisingly not about migrant-worker prostitution? Only the judges can decide.

But most enticing of all, barring any prerecorded acceptance speeches — and despite the writer’s strike – there will be actual humans in attendance, the real faces behind the fornication, in all of their fleshy solidity, crossing their powder-encrusted pinkies and gazing hopefully, hazardously into the glare of their peers’ applause or opprobrium. The meltdowns will be spectacular!

GAYVN AWARDS

Feb. 16, 6 p.m., $100

Giftcenter Pavilion

888 Brannan, SF

(415) 861-7733

www.gayvnawards.com

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