Volumes

Forget the neighbors: build away!

-
0

OPINION Having considered San Francisco something of a utopian American city (certainly compared with others), I assumed the only reason city officials were on the verge of allowing perfect little Valencia Street to be turned into Emeryville West was that they were simply unaware of what a handful of developers and a few folks in the Planning Department were cooking up.

All they needed was to hear from the neighbors, some responsible concerned adults, to call their attention to this under-the-radar remaking of our beloved Mission. Giant, five-story luxury condo blocks would be so obviously wrong for Valencia, so against the will of the vast majority of the citizens who live here, and so clearly in violation the intent of the law we passed to protect our neighborhoods that they would simply say, "Holy cow, thank you!" and stop it.

No. See, it doesn’t work that way.

Proposition M (the law passed by San Franciscans in the 1980s to protect the way our city looks and feels from just such neighborhood-crushing development) is not treated as law or as a defining statement by San Franciscans about how they want their city developed. Rather, it is ignored.

After months of work and research, countless meetings, and coordinating the support of hundreds of concerned neighbors into one large group, we waited more than 20 hours to speak for three minutes in front of the Planning Commission about just one of these giant condo projects, at 700 Valencia.

When we finally got our three minutes (at 11:45 p.m.!), two commissioners were literally asleep. The gavel swung. Approved.

It was like the people of San Francisco never showed up.

Like Prop. M never passed.

Like the Mission didn’t exist as a real neighborhood.

The feeling was like "OK, I’ve finally done something more than vote to actually make this city I’ve lived in and loved for so many years a better place. I’ve joined up with other idealistic San Franciscans, mostly wonderful neighbors I’d never even met before, who worked far more valiantly than I on this process. And it doesn’t matter."

The law, and the people of San Francisco and the Mission, are all simply impediments, nuisances, to developers making their money, the planning commissioners getting home to bed, and the people with degrees at the Planning Department who believe, incredibly, that they should personally get to change and remake ("plan") this historic, world-famously beautiful city.

It’s happening as you read this. The middle-finger building going up obscenely in front of the Bay Bridge is just the beginning. The destruction of Valencia Street may soon be an afterthought.

I’m suddenly very skeptical about the future livability of the neighborhood I’ve proudly been part of for more than 20 years. But it may not be too late to save yours.

Call, write, and visit your supervisors! Remind them that Prop. M is still the voice of the people.*

Dan Hoyle is a Valencia Street activist. He can be reached at savevalencia@gmail.com

Sutter bleeds St. Luke’s

-
0

› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Dr. Bonita Palmer has worked at the embattled St. Luke’s Hospital on the southwest corner of César Chávez and Valencia for 17 years.

Before a packed room of union organizers and religious leaders Sept. 12 at St. Mary’s Cathedral near Japantown, she gave a brief speech about her experiences at the beloved but financially troubled hospital.

"St. Luke’s has been struggling to stay afloat for many years," Palmer told the audience. "Under managed care, reimbursements are down, the numbers of uninsured patients are up, and the growing gap between income and cost of care stresses the health of working people."

Money woes at St. Luke’s are no secret. Its parent company, California Pacific Medical Center, an otherwise lucrative group of San Francisco hospitals owned by Sacramento’s Sutter Health, describes the losses at St. Luke’s as anywhere from $20 million to $30 million annually.

Patient advocates and unions representing St. Luke’s workers have long feared closure of the hospital and its badly needed acute-care services, which thousands of residents — the city’s poorest among them, living nearby in the SoMa, Mission, and Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhoods — often visit when they can’t get expensive medical treatment elsewhere.

The hospital continually faces cuts executed by the CPMC, from its downgraded neonatal nursery to the subacute unit, where, Palmer says, patients who require nonemergency but highly specialized care from professionals are being turned away. "Sutter scrapped its plan for a much-needed upgrade to our emergency room even as we continue to receive the overflow of patients from" San Francisco General Hospital, she said.

Staffers learned most recently that outpatient physical therapy, which had already been trimmed, will be done away with completely, while the hospital’s 36-bed inpatient psychiatric unit and outpatient clinic have already been closed. A woman in the audience confessed afterward that she was nearly brought to tears by Palmer’s tale.

The decisions only worsened Sutter’s reputation across Northern California for dwelling on its bottom line and further enraged the United Healthcare Workers–West union, which represents thousands of Sutter workers and with which the company has regularly battled for a decade.

St. Luke’s contains one of the most active emergency rooms in the city, and aside from General Hospital a mile or so away on Potrero Avenue, it serves more patients benefiting from Medi-Cal and Sutter’s version of charity care services than just about any other facility.

The CPMC, which fully merged with St. Luke’s in January, promises the hospital will be a part of the company’s future. But the CPMC also comes closer every day to beginning construction of a new $1.7 billion hospital on Cathedral Hill, closer to the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. And critics worry that CPMC’s new bid proves not only where its priorities are but also that once-independent St. Luke’s — opened in 1871 by an Episcopal minister — will suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Sup. Tom Ammiano, who’s closely observed the fate of St. Luke’s for years, says the CPMC is slowly amputating one of the few hospitals left in the southern portion of San Francisco while paying lip service to nonprofit health outreach.

"They lie without guile," he said. "Waterboarding would be more enjoyable than dealing with these people."

Sutter initially took over St. Luke’s in 2001 as part of a settlement agreement after the hospital sued Sutter in 1999, alleging state antitrust violations in Sutter’s brokering of an exclusive contract with the Bay Area’s largest network of doctors. St. Luke’s officials claimed the contract stripped wealthier patients away from the hospital, which hurt its bottom line.

The settlement required Sutter to bankroll St. Luke’s with a series of subsidies — and included a promise of up to $20 million for needed retrofit work that doesn’t appear to have been done — while allowing the hospital to remain somewhat independent. The terms expired last year, and St. Luke’s has since been completely folded into the family of San Francisco hospitals known as the CPMC, which includes the Davies Campus, nestled between the Castro neighborhood and the Lower Haight, the Pacific Campus on Buchanan Street, and the California Campus in the opulent Pacific Heights area.

While St. Luke’s can’t complete a fiscal-year cycle without coming up short of cash, the CPMC as a subsidiary of Sutter Health earns tens of millions of dollars in net income annually, much of which is sent to Sutter’s home office in Sacramento. In 2003, for instance, the CPMC transferred $118 million in net income — the money remaining after expenses are covered, which any other business would call profit — out of the city. Other ailing Sutter-owned hospitals around the state receive inflows of money from Sacramento, such as a Santa Rosa medical center that got $16 million in 2003, according to documents Sutter must provide to the state.

"In good times, affiliates share a portion of their revenue in excess of their expenses to help strengthen the network through this shared balance-sheet approach," Sutter spokesperson Karen Garner told us. "And in times of need, our affiliates can count on the network to help ensure that those services can continue to be available to their local communities."

But Sutter has announced that it plans to close part of the money-losing Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa, which faces high seismic retrofit costs, fueling concerns that something similar will happen at St. Luke’s. Sutter also last year moved to sever ties with Marin General Hospital and wash its hands of a costly needed retrofit there. An acute-care facility in San Leandro that loses money may soon be closed as well, as locals there learned just this month when a Sutter employee leaked the news to the San Leandro Times.

"CPMC plans to stop serving unprofitable areas, ignoring their obligation to the community," Helen York Jones, a union steward of CPMC employees, said at a July rally outside St. Luke’s. "How can they be entrusted with a large share of the area’s health care system?"

For a supposedly nonprofit chain of hospitals, Sutter Health is very profitable, having one of its best years in 2006. Its net income from operations amounted to more than $500 million, an increase of 33 percent from the previous year, which its execs attributed to the company’s outsize investments. Sutter controls more than two dozen medical centers throughout California and one located in Hawaii.

The company’s mammoth $2 billion investment portfolio brought the company $159 million in returns last year. Sutter’s CPMC subsidiary also benefited from more than $50 million in local, state, and federal tax breaks during 2005, according to figures maintained by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Meanwhile, Sutter has announced plans to spend $1.1 billion fully replacing facilities in Sacramento and San Mateo. In fact, the company broke records in June when it acquired state-backed bond financing of $958 million — which essentially amounts to a low-interest, tax-free loan — which it intends to use for seismic retrofit projects at several of its hospitals across the state.

But according to state records, the company doesn’t intend to use any of the loan money for retrofitting the St. Luke’s campus, part of which the state has concluded poses "a significant risk of collapse and a danger to the public after a strong earthquake," according to state structural ratings. State law gives hospitals until 2013 to meet strict seismic standards or shut down.

"Sutter wants to use money to fuel their corporate expenses in markets that are making money or have the potential to make money," Sal Roselli, president of the United Healthcare Workers–<\d>West, said.

Roselli believes the CPMC wants to close the emergency room at St. Luke’s and more or less turn the hospital into a clinic, perhaps once the Cathedral Hill location is completed; Sutter, he said, promises to maintain community services during its hospital takeovers but often backslides on those promises within months.

CPMC spokesperson Kevin McCormack doesn’t outright deny the possibility that St. Luke’s will someday see vastly fewer ER patients.

"St. Luke’s is still going to be a vital part of anything we do in terms of providing health care in San Francisco," McCormack said. "We intend to strengthen its role — not just to keep it going, but to make it better. Because right now what happens is that a lot of people don’t have access to preventative care, so they end up using the emergency room when they have a problem with, say, diabetes or asthma."

But Ammiano remains skeptical.

"If we allow this to happen and if we can’t find alternatives," he said of the cuts at St. Luke’s, "it’s really going to not just tear a hole in the fabric of that neighborhood but also the whole southeast section."

Green satellites dying

-
0

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Government-funded satellite systems and sensor networks are supposed to be spook stuff, technologies for surveillance and social control. They’re the "electric eyes" that follow us and turn our private lives into sitcoms for bored intelligence agents, right? Wrong. They may be spooky, but satellite and sensor networks are some of the most powerful tools for studying the way humans are impacting climate change. They allow scientists to create maps showing how land use affects climate, as well as how chemical emissions are linked to rainfall, water levels, temperature fluctuations, and ozone depletion.

And now, according to a distressing report last week from the US Climate Change Science Program, the government is cutting funds to the tools that climate researchers need most. In this report, researchers write that the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System has been severely downsized, "eliminating several key climate instruments," while rollout on four new systems for measuring atmospheric changes has been delayed or cancelled. At the same time, the government has failed to maintain observatories on the ground devoted to climate change and is scaling back on an ocean climate sensor system called the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean buoy array.

Parts of the CCSP’s report are essentially a plea for more sensor networks. We need good data from these networks to create realistic models of global climate change, the researchers say. But more important, scientists need that data to figure out the best ways for people to intervene and make the future greener. That’s why we need sensor networks sampling the air from high above the Arctic and across the ocean, proving that cutting back on carbon emissions can lower temperatures or prevent hurricanes from forming. We need good satellite maps showing exactly how urban developments are destroying local forests.

For these reasons, the report emphasizes that the biggest problem faced by the CCSP is an inability to implement policies for change. CCSP researchers are frustrated that the data they’ve compiled rarely make it into policy recommendations to the government. And only $30 million of the CCSP’s $1.7 billion dollar budget is allocated to programs that investigate the impact of environmental changes on human beings.

Just as news of this report was breaking, New York environmental group Blacksmith Institute released a list of the 10 most polluted places on Earth. Created by the group’s technical advisory board, and based entirely on how much impact the pollution has on local human populations, the list is topped by regions in the industrializing world: Sumjayit, an industrial manufacturing city in Azerbaijan; Linfen and Tianying, coal and lead mining towns in China; and Sukinda and Vapi, chemical mining and manufacturing areas in India. Also included are similar areas in Russia and Peru.

People in the regions highlighted by the Blacksmith Institute are getting cancer and lung disease, as well as passing birth defects on to their children. If we want to prevent the entire world from becoming like Sumjayit — and indeed, to prevent people in Sumjayit from suffering the worst side effects of industrialization — we need the very kinds of data that CCSP scientists worry we can no longer get. As climate sensor networks decay, and green satellites die, so too does the hope that we can build a better climate model, a sane climate model based on how changing social behaviors.

So if you think that having one less satellite in the sky is a good idea, think again. And if you think that the only thing a sensor network can do is invade privacy, think again about that too. As ever, the problem isn’t with technology; it’s with who controls it.*

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants to put toxic emissions under surveillance.

Letters as leverage

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

It’s a thin, seemingly innocuous letter. The Social Security Administration mails it when names and Social Security numbers don’t match on an employee’s I-9 form. The intent is to make sure workers receive their benefits.

But unions and immigrants have long charged that unscrupulous employers use SSA "no match" letters to harass undocumented workers and squelch union organizing efforts. Now, after a failed immigration debate in Congress, the George W. Bush administration wants to pass a regulation that would explicitly turn the letter into an immigration enforcement tool.

Activists fear this could result in massive firings and retaliation against workers organizing with unions. Employers complain it could lead to an economic slump in industries dependent on undocumented labor. A temporary injunction granted by a San Francisco judge is the only thing holding back letters across the country; it ends Oct. 1.

Bay Area activists have been national leaders at the intersection of immigrant rights and labor movements. They are now shaping national policy on this new regulation in the courts and promise wide-scale street action and workplace walkouts if it goes into effect.

A look at past and present related Bay Area organizing may shed light on the future of the national issue.

BAY AREA ORGANIZING


US companies file hundreds of millions of W-2 forms with the SSA every year. The SSA uses them to calculate how much it owes workers at retirement. When the name and the Social Security number do not match, the SSA sends a "no match" letter to the employee to clear up the discrepancy. The letters are also sent to employers who have more than 10 employees with no match. These letters have nothing to do with immigration law, and employers are not required to take any adverse action against these employees.

But under the new Department of Homeland Security regulation, no-match letters may be seen as evidence that an employer knowingly employed an undocumented worker. The letters would include a leaflet from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement informing employers that they must fire workers who cannot resolve no matches with the SSA or reverify their work authorization within 93 days. If the companies do not, they may be subject to fines or criminal charges.

The rule was drafted more than a year ago but was not announced by Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff until Aug 10. "The magnet that brings most economic migrants into this country is work," he explained. "And if we have worksite enforcement directed at illegal employment, we strike at that magnet."

Brooke Anderson, an organizer with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, told the Guardian that this is an unlikely scenario. Workers will not leave the country; they will simply be forced into underground economies, rotate through different jobs, and become even more vulnerable.

Anderson was among a delegation of more than 30 labor, faith, and community leaders that presented a letter Aug. 30 at the regional SSA office in Richmond. The letter outlined their concerns and asked that the SSA send out no-match letters only to employees, not employers.

"DHS is using an incomplete, hodgepodge system intended to ensure our economic security to implement a regressive immigration policy that Bush failed to pass in Congress," Anderson told us. "The SSA as an agency should have a spine and say no to DHS and no to the Bush administration."

If the ICE inserts do go out with no-match letters, she predicts walkouts and massive street actions.

The regulation is also being challenged in a lawsuit filed by the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. The AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the San Francisco Central Labor Council have joined it. The plaintiffs claim that because the SSA’s database is full of errors, many citizens and legal immigrants could end up losing their jobs. They also argue that the DHS has exceeded its authority by seeking to use the SSA to enforce immigration laws.

US District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco granted a nationwide temporary restraining order Aug. 31, blocking the SSA from sending letters with ICE inserts. The order is in effect until Oct. 1, when another federal judge here, Charles Breyer, will decide whether to grant another injunction.

"DHS is trying to create a huge terror, to give the illusion that they are doing something," Bill Sokol, a lawyer with Weinberg, Roger, and Rosenfeld, the firm representing the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, told us. "Workers are afraid, but we must dial down people’s fear and terror under our new gestapo."

He said the law will have little impact if employers understand it and do not abuse it. If employers overreact, however, the result could be disastrous. Sokol said employers are already firing employees immediately after receiving the letters.

HISTORY


Unions and immigrant workers across the country have charged that no-match letters have been used to stifle workers’ rights since the SSA began sending them to employers in 1994. Activists in the Bay Area have played a key role in resisting these efforts, setting national precedents upholding worker rights.

When a San Francisco Travelodge fired workers after they began organizing with a union in 1999, allegedly due to Social Security no matches, the terminated employees took it to court. The next year they won an arbitrator’s decision that the firing, based solely on no-match letters, was a violation of their union contract.

Local community pressure on the SSA also resulted in the inclusion of cautionary text in the letter. The no-match letter now states that employers "should not use this letter to take any adverse action against an employee…. Doing so could, in fact, violate state or federal law and subject you to legal consequences."

Activists at Oakland’s Labor Immigrant Organizers Network wrote a resolution in 1999 asking the AFL-CIO to renounce its support of the employer-sanctions provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, the federal law that for the first time made it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job. Their agitation is credited in part for a resolution the AFL-CIO passed in 2000 calling for the repeal of sanctions and for a legalization program for undocumented workers.

The letters remained a potent tool for antiunion activity. A 2003 survey by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that 25 percent of workers listed in no-match letters reported that their employers fired them in retaliation for complaining about inadequate worksite conditions. More than one in five workers reported that their employer fired them in retaliation for union activity.

San Francisco opposed the DHS no-match regulation when it was proposed last year. An August 2006 resolution by the Board of Supervisors said it may lead to employers "using it as a device to fire, intimidate, harass, or underpay employees." It promised that the city would defy the regulation if it received a no-match letter for a city employee.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce also came out against the regulation.

But some employers embraced the proposed regulation. Uniform manufacturer Cintas fired hundreds of employees across the country, allegedly responding to the proposed guidelines after receiving no-match letters during a union organizing drive. Organizers said the company targeted employees involved in the union and jumped the gun on new regulations.

The Woodfin Suite Hotel in Emeryville fired 21 housekeepers in December 2006, also allegedly due to no-match letters. The workers claim the Woodfin retaliated against them for organizing with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, a labor-affiliated think tank, to enforce the living-wage law (see "Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07).

A yearlong campaign targeting the Woodfin has brought the issue to a national audience.

FALSE INFORMATION


Organizers say the regulations are far less strict than the news media has portrayed them, adding to an atmosphere of hysteria and fear among employers and workers. Francisco Ugarte, a lawyer with the Oakland firm of Leonard Carder, held up several San Francisco Chronicle articles at a Sept. 13 workshop for union organizers as examples of media inaccuracies.

An employer is not required to fire an employee after 90 days, as news accounts have stated. The employer has 90 days to fix discrepancies, and the worker has three days after that to fill out another I-9 form with a new Social Security number. If it appears credible, employers must accept the new I-9, Ugarte said.

The ICE insert in the SSA letter will terrify employers, he predicted, but the rule does not create any new information sharing between the SSA and other governmental agencies. The SSA is actually prohibited by law from sharing private data with any other governmental agencies.

There are also no automatic fines assessed to employers, as news accounts have implied. ICE will only levy fines if it raids employers and finds that they did not address no-match discrepancies. It is unlikely that the DHS will be able to enforce the regulations; in announcing them, Chertoff said the agency would rely largely on self-policing.

Even if this is the case, organizers fear that the DHS’s no-match regulation will provide employers with another tool to squelch immigrant workers’ rights. Comprehensive immigration reform is still needed to reconcile employers’ demands for workers, immigrants’ needs for employment, and US immigration policy.*

Sucks to be you

-
0

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My wife and I are the proud parents of an eight-month-old boy. While I was prepared for the postpartum lull in the bedroom, I was not at all prepared for the combination of sex and nursing.

My wife has gotten really into attachment parenting and co-sleeping and it took me a while to get comfortable with having sex with the baby in the bed, but, generally, my appreciation for the rare opportunity always ends up outweighing any discomfort. However, the last two times we’ve had sex, he has awakened in the middle of things, and rather than stopping, my wife has just put him to her breast and said to go ahead with things on my end. I’m really not comfortable sharing my wife with my son in this way. And frankly, no matter how much she moans and sighs, I just don’t think she can be that into it when her attention is divided like that!

When I’ve brought up my concerns, she accuses me of not having our son’s best interests at heart and points me to all of the attachment parenting literature about how not responding to his needs will hurt his neurological and emotional development. I don’t want to hurt my son, but I also don’t want to sleep with a vending machine. You’re a mom now — am I being a jerk?

Love,

Married to the Lunch Lady

Dear Lady:

My first response to your letter (after the admittedly rude cackling noise I made on reaching the part where she gaily calls out, "Carry on!" as though she hadn’t just grabbed the child and held him out in front of her as a human shield against any further attempted intimacies on your part) was sorrow that it was unprintable. You are not, after all, a sad, snaggy guy being slowly pushed out of the marital bed when the little one said, "Roll over!" You are a (female) online bud of mine who wrote this letter as an exercise following a discussion of what makes for good column fodder, and I bless you for it! It’s a great letter, fictional or not, and hey, lookit, I don’t even have to correct your spelling. So let’s just act as if, shall we?

Your wife has not so much adopted attachment parenting as she has, I wager, been assimilated by the Übermamas, a leaderless cult whose hive mind is headquartered at the MotheringDotCommune Internet forums. It is fashionable in that milieu not only to parent children to within an inch of their lives but to view husbands the way a lady mantis might describe her views on marriage and partnership, if asked: good for one job only, and that easily performed without thought or decision-making privileges or, indeed, a head. Dude, you must reclaim your head and put a stop to this — if not for yourself, then for your son! What sort of model of manhood is this for him?

Actually, he’ll be fine. It’s you I worry about. You must know that attachment parenting does not even require that you adopt what is optimistically known as the "family bed" (often, in practice, a "Mommy and baby while Daddy sleeps on the couch" bed), let alone the abomination that is "Oh, carry on, don’t mind him stuck on my tit here." All shock and revulsion at the actual act aside (about which more in a minute), you must realize that "go ahead with things on my end" means that there’s nothing going on on her end. I’m sure there are readers who will spaz out over the child abuse aspect, but I assure you there is none. This isn’t about sexualizing the child; it’s about desexualizing you. You will soon find yourself consigned to, at best, the couch or, at worst, someone else’s couch. If nobody’s ready to have the baby sleep in his own room yet (I am not a huge fan of banishing baby, myself) then get a side sleeper or a dresser drawer or something and let him snooze away peacefully in there while you and your wife snuggle or sleep or do other things starting with s. Speaking of which, this is serious.

Now, as for what your wife may be feeling, I confess to oversimplifying in an earlier column when I denied that suckling could ever feel anything like, well, sucking. Of course it can. Not only are the sensations superficially similar (although I don’t advise partners to do the weird rhythmic press-and-swallow thing while making a fishy-mouth face, not sexy), we have only so many physiological responses available to us. Nursing can feel good, and it releases the same hormones that sex, or rather having had sex, does. I’d even venture to say that the release of good feelings (mostly hormonal-emotional, but to some extent physical as well) is adaptive, evolutionarily speaking. Then I’d say that that’s all very well but we have evolved pretty far and we can keep these things separate and I heartily encourage us to do so. More later.

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.

Getting salad

-
0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS We sat on a rock wall with our legs dangling over the lake. I didn’t have shoes on. Ducks came around, geese flew low over the water, the lights across the way twinkled, and buildings slowly disappeared as we ate that salad.

It was a pretty famous salad, with halved cherry tomatoes and chunked up cheese in it. Unlike a lot of salads, this one had been in a feature story in the Guardian, even before it happened. Not that it was a main player in the story, but it was there: educational, artistic, and conceptual. "A dude wants to make me a salad."

I believe that was the sentence.

The subject of the sentence, the dude, if you will, was an artist and an educator, so the object of the sentence, the salad, was destined to be artistic and educational. The indirect object, your chicken farmer truly, beneficiary of famous salads and author of sentences both famous and idiotic, was charmed by the suggestion.

Seduced, I believe, was the word that I used. You could look it up.

I’m almost perpetually confused, except when I’m sitting in the bathtub with a chicken leg or pork sandwich. When I’m eating in general, I am often not confused, come to think of it, even if it’s at a restaurant or friend’s house or lake.

One of the many things I love to eat is leafy greens. The way some people look forward to dessert, I look forward to my salad. In fact, I prefer to eat it at the end of a meal, and if it’s a good one, with colorful, crunchy goodies in it and lots of vinegar, I can eat and eat and nothing can stop me except the bottom of the bowl. I am known for this. At dinner parties, when it comes to clearing the table, my friends will, with the same automaticness with which they wrap meat and put it in the refrigerator, hand me the salad serving bowl with a fork in it. I am considered a part of the cleaning process.

The artist who articulated this particularly famous salad for me said, while he was making it, at the lake, "Do you know why I’m making you this salad?"

My bare feet were a couple feet above the water and I was looking down at my toes, at the color of them, which is called Raspberry Rush. It was a pretty color against the green gray depths of Lake Merritt. He was slicing tomatoes into a stainless steel bowl. The bowl was in between us on the wall. No, I didn’t know exactly why he was making me this salad. I just knew that I liked the idea of it.

"Because you said in your column," he said, "that you weren’t getting salad."

"I said that?" I said. (I have since looked it up. I said it. I said, "I don’t mind always minding the grill, but what happens is that by the time I eat there isn’t any salad.")

"This salad is a kind of an art project," he explained, tossing the salad with a very good, very vinegary dressing he had premade at home, and serving it on real plates that he pulled out of his backpack, like the rest of the picnic. There was bread, salami, olives, and something good to drink. "Taking literate people literally," he said.

I’m a literate person, but I’m also a chicken farmer. My eyes went automatically to the horizon, wanting ducks and geese and finding instead an airplane. Landing lights blinking and the sunset blasting off of it, this was pretty too.

How wonderful! I say I’m not getting salad … someone makes me a salad! And how appropriate that the gesture turns out to be an artistic one, since so many of my own gestures are plot driven.

In other words, my friend, an artist, is turning his life itself into art, even while I turn mine into journalism. Life decisions, like where to go when, and who with, may be informed by considerations like it will make good copy. Or in his case, perhaps, it will look nice to look at. And perhaps, because he’s an educator as well, it will mean something.

Meanwhile, inside our rib cages, real hearts slosh with real red blood. Inside our big hard heads real electrical connections get made, synapses fire, or don’t, and chemistry happens. Or not. More important, for our purposes, we have stomachs where everything goes that we swallow, such as — gut check! — salad … words … pride.

I am not getting kissed.*

Destino

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

A venerable bit of wisdom from the Greek sage Heraclitus teaches that you can never step in the same river twice, for neither you nor the ceaselessly flowing river remains the same. Your odds are better at restaurants, which also change, though not quite ceaselessly. (I am extrapoutf8g from Heraclitus here; if the man ever made remarks about restaurants, posterity has forgotten them.) Crowds come and go, of course — but decor and menu can remain little changed for months or even years. In a restless culture, such stability can seem boring or even slightly sinister, a dawdling on the way to some new and improved destiny. Yet there are those of us who like our points of reference.

Destino, which opened a little more than seven years ago in a boxy storefront space previously occupied by a pretty good restaurant called Dame and just a few steps from an ugly freeway overpass, has now donned the mantle of "bistro." Also, the overpass is gone — demolished a few years ago per the edict of some ballot initiative. I would describe both of these developments as improvements, though Destino was always a bistro, really — and is still serving "nuevo Latino" food — while the demise of the overpass failed to produce the expected utopian decline in auto traffic, which now whizzes in every direction at ground level. Let the walker beware.

Once safely inside Destino, the walker will find the restaurant’s look barely altered from its early days. The color scheme is still golden-ruddy, with shades of copper and umber on textured walls, one of which continues to be hung with three large, ornately framed mirrors. The keepers of the bar just inside the front door are young and rakishly handsome; apart from their black garb, they’re scarcely distinguishable from the clientele, whose clothes are tepidly polychromatic in that rich-hipster way, with plenty of untucked, close-fitting shirts in pale blues and grays and many, many fancified versions of those Italian bicycle shoes. Would someone please turn the page? How about a designer version of ski boots, in two-tone Italian calfskin?

Chef-owner James Schenk’s latest menu includes a prix fixe offering, three courses (with a couple of choices at each stage) for $31.95. Not a bad deal. The bill of fare also emphasizes tapas these days, perhaps in part because smaller, shareable dishes are more consistent with the social style of the young, who (I would guess) prefer less hierarchy at the table as elsewhere. The prix fixe, by contrast, is hierarchy embodied, and, as I am a flinty-eyed hierarchist, I regularly submit to its charms.

Item one: a chile relleno, though not the usual kind, batter-fried and slathered in melted cheese. Here the presentation was more subtle; the pepper, a crisp poblano, was charred and skinned, then filled with Niman Ranch ground sirloin, sauced with a creamy chipotle salsa, piped on top with crème fraîche, and plated in sections, for easier eating. Across the way, the ceviche hound was tucking into a martini glass filled with Asian-inflected ceviche: the Destino Chino ($12.50), a medley of yellowtail tuna and tiger prawns glistening with lemongrass oil and wearing a pleasantly assertive perfume of ginger. The hound could have had ceviche — but not the Destino Chino — within the confines of the prix fixe; a larger issue was that the fixed menu’s main courses didn’t appeal.

They all appealed to me, on the other hand, and I was particularly glad to find a lighter entrant among them: a pastel of quinoa — the couscouslike grain of the ancient Inca — tossed with Peruvian artichoke hearts and topped with a crisscrossing of romesco salsa, a rouille look-alike. The dish, served in an earthenware crock, could easily have been passed off to the inattentive as some kind of couscous casserole.

Soon after we were seated, the hound could be seen briefly flirting with the prix fixe because, in the dim light, our failing eyes had misread "Duart" (as in Loch Duart, farmer of salmon) as "duck." When not snapping up ceviche, the ceviche hound is a duck hound. But, on a squinting review, we discovered our error and were chastened. The evening’s poultry choice turned out to be chicken, in the form of aji gallina ($18): shredded flesh bathed in a creamy sauce of aji amarillo (a kind of chili pepper) and served with home-style yucca fries. The chicken was lovely; the fries slightly less so. They were crisp but underseasoned and mealy inside, and I wondered if they wouldn’t have been better if they’d been cut to a slimmer profile.

The gold standard for Peruvian cooking in this city seems to be, by my informal but emphatic tally, Mochica. Destino is good; its aji de gallina is delicious — but Mochica serves a mean aji de gallina too, and unseating Mochica from is perch of preeminence is going to be a wicked project for somebody. Pretenders to the throne might do some of their strategic pondering over Destino’s excellent churros y chocolate ($7) — a trio of ridged, torpedo-shaped, cinnamon-scented beignets suitable for dipping into a demitasse full of warm chocolate sauce — though those with long memories might respond to the suspiro, a dulce de leche treat that’s been on the menu for years. Hip 30-year-olds in tight shirts have to be concerned about their figures, of course (irrespective of sex), but Destino’s desserts aren’t especially fattening, and anyway you can always walk it off, taking care to look both ways — all ways — always.*

DESTINO

Brunch: Sun., 11 a.m.–2 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.

1815 Market, SF

(415) 552-4451

www.destinosf.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Swede ‘n’ hoedown

-
0

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Bad gay hair is back! From Chris Crocker’s "Leave Britney Alone!" bilevel blond bob apocalypse to Perez Hilton’s ever-changing lamebow of neon locks (bitch looks as though the Planet Unicorn creatures from YouTube exploded on her giant head), the homo hair horrors of the past are rising like silk-shirted, Daisy Duked zombies, tearing through a screen near you. Pull up a Rent-a-Center white vinyl sectional and dig into a plate of fried wig. These are the Famous Gays of Our Moment. This is our culture. So fuck your stinkin’ herbal Fructis — plaster me with Queen Helene, suck me into Manic Panic, pump me up like L’Oreal. I wanna be fa-mousse.

Speaking of Planet Unicorn: I went to Oakland. This column’s become San Francisco–centric (not to mention gayer than a third grade playground), and I almost feel guilty. There’s a Bay full of hot boys out there! So, over Labor Day weekend, me and Hunky Beau saddled up the ol’ BART — which, in a windfall for stoned revelers, was running 24 hours a day — and high-tailed it to Bench and Bar, Oakland’s premier queer downtown dance palace for lusty Latinos.

There we found a proud brown Urban Cowboy wonderland. Saturdays play host to La Bota Loca, an overflowing evening for lithesome vaqueros in white Stetsons and kicky Tony Lamas hopping to regional Mexican hits and line-dancing to the Spanish version of "Achy Breaky Heart" ("Mi Pobre Corazón"). I recently bemoaned the lack of queer club nights where I could polka my pixie boots off to norteño and banda music. This is where I finally got a joyous earful of Sinaloense, Duranguense, and "Hey, what’d he say?" I’ve got to learn española.

The 3 a.m. BART ride home was a party. Hazy hyphy kids, tattooed punk nymphs, cowboy-hatted queens, and various future rehabbers piled on to cause unique havoc on the SF streets. Unfortunately, the car with the portable DJ setup was packed — we’d have to squeeze in next to the drunken Cal rugby team, stripping off their shirts and challenging one another to wrestling matches. Hurriedly we acquiesced.

MUCHO MACHO MALMÖ Much like the "Gabbo is coming!" ads on The Simpsons, a mysterious, gaudy poster has been plastered about the city, causing much flurry and flutter. On it, a slick-mulleted playboy with an Angelina-forearm-thin mustache is flanked by two busty blonds in spandex strips. Giant text screams "Günther — LIVE!!!" Who? What? Why?

"Is this some kind of joke?" Hunky Beau asked aloud when he first saw it. But really, isn’t that the cry of a dance floor generation?

In the tradition of, er, Fischer Spooner and Junior Senior, Günther traffics in the kind of poker-faced genius ambiguity that kicks your ass on the dance floor while shoving your tongue far enough into your cheek to block your bowels. (Although maybe that’s the coke.) Günther’s first huge release, "The Ding Dong Song," rides an infectious beat so stereotypically generic techno that it comes out the other side of awful, emerging into brilliance. It’s about his dick. He calls his dick his "tra la la." His press release describes it as a "gangling manhood." I e-mailed him immediately.

"My massage is love," he wrote back from Malmö, Sweden, where he resides. "I start my day off surrounded by Sunshine Girls" — his writhing lesbotronic backup vocalists — "have a champagne breakfast, and spread my massage of champagne, love, sex, glamour, and respect! I have always lived my own glamorous, sexy life of fun!!!" Who could argue? Other bouncy songs — and videos — of head-scratching wonder include "Teeny Weeny String Bikini," "Tutti Frutti Summerlove," and, yes, "Christmas Song." Sweeede …

SEWN UP Fashion Week is more over than irony, but you still need a look. Hit up Thread, an underground fashion blast featuring a plethora of killer local togs, no-host bar grog, and something about lots of great DJs that ends in og. Best part: discounts! OK!*

LA BOTA LOCA

Saturdays, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $20

Bench and Bar

2111 Franklin, Oakl.

www.bench-and-bar.com

GÜNTHER AND THE SUNSHINE GIRLS

Sat/22, 10 p.m., $30

Sound Factory

525 Harrison, SF

www.gunthernet.com

THREAD

Sat/22, noon–6 p.m., $10

Festival Pavilion

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

www.threadshow.com

Ficks’s top six

-
0

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Christian Mungiu, Romania, 2007). This Romanian debut feature possesses a nonjudgmental flow reminiscent of a Dardenne brothers film as it follows two women who negotiate for an illegal abortion during the final days of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Communist regime. You’ll be holding your breath as the characters dash from one nightmare to the next. There’s a reason this movie won the Palme d’Or at the 60th Cannes Film Festival.

2. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, France, 2007). As a rambling red balloon affectionately takes to Simon, a seven-year-old boy in Paris, his single mother — played to perfection by Juliette Binoche — does her best to care for her child, deal with flaky tenants, and continue her professional career as a puppeteer. Don’t be intimidated by Hou Hsaio-Hsien’s reputation; his latest movie is accessible, as is the 1956 French film that it is based on. This tiny, chaotic journey can help you deal with the frantic contemporary world.

3. Cassandra’s Dream (Woody Allen, UK, 2007). Warning: the new Woody Allen movie is not a comedy. Set in the UK, this minimasterpiece pairs Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as middle-class brothers, both of whom want a better financial lifestyle. As the pair close in on their dreams, their moral codes begin to loosen. The acting is extraordinary (Farrell finds finesse), and Vilmos Zsigmond’s camerawork encloses the characters in a strikingly gloomy world immensely heightened by Philip Glass’s original score. Many critics are dismissing this dark drama as a comedic misfire. But like Allen’s 2005 UK production Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream isn’t courting laughs; these films dig into some disturbing human dilemmas at a time when there’s not much of a reason to laugh.

4. Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, US, 2007). For the follow-up to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach creates another bittersweet coming-of-age exposé of a dysfunctional family. Both Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh contribute some of their best work as sisters who compete with more than support each other. Also, Jack Black is wonderful as a schlub whom Leigh is set to marry, and newcomer Zane Pais is as awkward as a young teenager should be in the role of Leigh’s son. But it’s the sincere and audacious writing that gives Margot at the Wedding its powerful kick.

5. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2007). Behold a personal journey through Guy Maddin’s childhood and hometown done by way of archival footage, personal home movies, narration (by Maddin himself!), and reenactments starring his cinematic mother, Ann Savage (the unforgettable leading dame of the 1945 film noir Detour). It’s hilariously self-depreciating and utterly universal — can this man do no wrong?

6. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands, 2007). Carlos Reygadas updates Carl Theodor Dreyer. If that gets your beard in a bunch, then you’re gonna be in heaven for two and a half hours.

Witch, please

-
0

› cheryl@sfbg.com

If you can end your Toronto International Film Festival experience with a movie that climaxes in a 10-minute fistfight (roofs collapse, cinder blocks are smashed, tables become splinters, ankle bones snap like twigs, and vengeance is won … but at what price?), that qualifies as a joyous note in my book. And fortunately, it’s my book we’re talking about — specifically, my TIFF screening list, which by the end of my festival stint was completely mangled by incoherent scribblings and intricate schemes involving cinematic scheduling and basic human needs (chief among them sleep, which was often totally disregarded).

There’s a fine art to festivalgoing. I’m not sure I’ve mastered it yet. But I managed to see 26 (and a half) movies, probably missing some that I should have seen and certainly digesting a few disappointments. Another critic could spend a week in Toronto and see none of the films that I saw; my tastes run toward horror, documentaries, Hollywood and accessible indie stuff by directors I admire, and Hong Kong cinema (like the ankle buster mentioned above, the Donnie Yen–<\d>starring Flash Point). Plus, you gotta work in at least a few totally random selections — otherwise, what’s the point of being surrounded by cinema 24-7?

The big bananas in the horror bunch were Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, the long-awaited conclusion to his witch-happy Three Mothers trilogy, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, hyped as the legendary zombie king’s return to no-frills filmmaking. I also followed my thrill-sniffing snout to Spanish newcomer Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage and the French Frontier(s), directed by Xavier Gens (whose Hollywood debut, video game–<\d>based Hitman, is currently trailered on Death Sentence). I’m a huge fan of Argento’s gialli and flashy, trashy, blood-soaked horror epics — and while I’m aware of the argument that he hasn’t made a great film since 1985’s Phenomena, Mother of Tears offers vintage pleasures galore. You want a coherent story and subtle acting? Look elsewhere (perhaps to the ghostly, Guillermo del Toro–<\d>produced fable The Orphanage). Argento’s tale starts with a cursed urn and snowballs into mad hysteria, grabbing a gold-toothed witch, Argento ex (and Mother star Asia Argento’s real-life mother) Daria Nicolodi, a creepy monkey, and exorcist Udo Kier en route to a church-burningly ridiculous conclusion. In other words, I loved it.

I wasn’t as sold on Frontier(s), a well-made but derivative Texas Chainsaw Massacre descendent that squanders its interesting Paris riots context. And it’s my sad duty to report that Diary of the Dead is hardly essential Romero. Glowing reviews published elsewhere baffle me. Diary works an of-the-moment theme of kids subverting the mainstream media via user-controlled Internet sites — post–<\d>undead apocalypse, the only source of truth for the masses. But it becomes caught up in Making a Statement, and its narrative device — camera-wielding film student obsessively documents the undead uprising — is completely irritating. Sorry, but I’ll take the flawed-but-fun Land of the Dead any day.

Enfolded into my documentary diet were several music-themed entries, including Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Joy Division, and the doclike narratives Control and I’m Not There. We all know things are bad in Iraq, but Heavy Metal puts them on a regular-dude level that CNN reports don’t often facilitate. Metal outfit Acrassicauda love Slayer and Metallica, and they (and their fans) just wanna rock. At the start of the film (exec-produced by Spike Jonze and codirected by Suroosh Alvi, the cofounder of Vice magazine, and Eddy Moretti), the musicians claim they aren’t a political band. Attitudes change, thanks to Scud missiles (which destroy their practice space and all of their instruments), pressure from a culture that frowns on long hair and headbanging, and a post–<\d>Saddam Hussein environment of extreme danger (machine-gun fire is just part of the street noise). Less contemporary but no less absorbing is Joy Division, Grant Gee’s reverent and artful look at Manchester’s pioneering post-punkers. Lead singer Ian Curtis is the focus of Control, a black-and-white wonder by music-video vet Anton Corbijn that focuses mostly on the troubled Curtis’s rocky personal life. Meanwhile, Todd Haynes creatively interprets the music biopic — as he’s done before with Superstar and Velvet Goldmine — with I’m Not There, a freewheeling (yet carefully calibrated) look at Bob Dylan. An array of famous folks — the stunning Cate Blanchett among them — portrays an array of Dylanesque characters. Though I could feel the movie being deliberately arty at times, it worked for me. And I’m not even a huge Dylan fan.

I’m running out of space, and I haven’t even gotten to three of my favorite TIFF films, so I’ll just lump ’em in here. Son of Rambow got mad props at Sundance, and with good reason; you’d have to be completely heartless to not love this tale of two British boys who bond over the one thing they have in common: First Blood. You know you’re gonna see No Country for Old Men anyway, because seeing the new Coen brothers movie — well, that’s a no-brainer. Lucky for you, it’s their best film in years. If Oscar don’t bite, there’s no hope for Oscar. I know the gold guy will totally ignore Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and that’s OK. I doubt the multiplex crowd will go for its sweetly bizarre tale of celebrity impersonators (Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe specifically, but other faux familiar faces, including Abe Lincoln and Buckwheat, make appearances) — and that’s not even mentioning Werner Herzog or the skydiving nuns. Amid all the witches, zombies, and actual movie stars, it was my favorite TIFF film.*

Ride the dark horse

-
0

Is there a single animal on God’s once-green Earth that is as closely equated with drama and pageantry as the mighty horse? Powerful, elegant, showy as all hell — it’s no wonder we’ve cultivated such a fascination for them, particularly when it comes to using them as signifiers. Equus, anyone? Or how about Patti Smith? When she torched the rock ‘n’ roll playbook with her revolution more than 30 years ago, which animals did she pick to lead the charge? Lions? Bears? Squirrels? Ah, didn’t think so.

Montreal’s Besnard Lakes couldn’t have created a better introduction for their distinctive brand of speaker-soaking drama than the title and cover of their sophomore release, The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse (Jagjaguwar). While artists such as Feist, Wolf Parade, and the Arcade Fire have been given the spotlight in the music press’s ongoing celebration of all things Canadian, the intriguingly monikered sextet were able to charge into the ring from out of nowhere, blindsiding indie kids, critics, and record-shop hanger outers far and wide. The cover? A sleek black horse, thundering out of a clamor of flames — a fitting overture for a band best described as majestic.

Like fellow Montrealers the Arcade Fire, the Besnard Lakes are led by a husband-and-wife duo — Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas — who share an affinity for inviting emotional release through stereo epics addressing the darker side of human nature. Instead of conveying such urgency with the same twitchiness as their neighbors, however, they offer slowly unfolding heroics that sparkle and ignite thanks to their ongoing battle between two opposing urges: to remain earthbound by updating classic rock traditions and to propel themselves into space. Witness album opener "Disaster," a string-laden, feedback-driven opus — complete with flute, French horn, and Brian Wilson–informed harmonies — that pushes and pulls between Spiritualized-esque flotation and Beach Boys sunbathing, all the while managing to shine a warm glow on the damning observation "You’ve got disaster on your mind."

Among the many references to war and violence, "Devastation" makes such havoc feel downright liberating, thanks to a full-throttle acid-metal groove, laser beam–shooting synth squeals, and a rousing chorus howled by what sounds like a hippie commune on the wrong side of the law. Lasek and Goreas’s ghostly harmonies frequently billow in the same ether as those of Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, particularly during the unsettling throb of dysfunctional-household narrative "Because Tonight." And while the comparisons to all of the aforementioned artists certainly apply, the Besnard Lakes remain closest in spirit to that horse on the cover: grand, graceful, and tougher than I can ever dream of being.

THE BESNARD LAKES

With Starvin Hungry and DW Holiday

Sun/23, 9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 626-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

Positive hardcore attitude

-
0

› duncan@sfbg.com

Despite their Rasta affiliation, dub jams, and dread heads, Bad Brains are perhaps the greatest hardcore band of all time — black, white, or indifferent. Make a top three list in your head. You can quibble about the order, and you can shuffle bands in and out, but you know damned well that the Brains have to anchor the whole thing. Insert Black Flag or Minor Threat, and you realize the debt that both bands owe H.R., Dr. Know, Earl Hudson, and Darryl Jenifer.

The group officially started in Washington, D.C., in 1979, though its members had been playing together for two years without vocalist H.R. as jazz fusion–progressive act Mind Power. Which shows why Bad Brains are so monolithic in hardcore: a band with lesser musical chops couldn’t play at such finger-blistering, heart-palpitating speeds and make it sound so good. The reggae jams follow logically as necessary restoratives after the full-force pummeling the body takes from classic blasts like "Banned in DC" and "Pay to Cum."

The band’s first, 1982 ROIR cassette-only release, with the iconic lightning bolt striking the Capitol dome on the cover, is still my all-time favorite. It has a purity that just can’t be touched, even by the revamped, rerecorded version with Ric Ocasek at the helm, Rock for Light (Caroline, 1983), or by 1986’s classic I Against I (SST). It is indeed a bolt from above — pure white light, pure energy, a shock to the system of both the individual listener and punk rock in general. As the Ramones, whose "Bad Brain" the band takes its name from, once said, "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment." I listen to "Attitude" on my headphones before I get on the gate for a big bike race; like grabbing a live high-voltage line, it cleans the mind.

How does the new, Beastie Boy Adam Yauch–produced Build a Nation (Megaforce/Osciloscope) stack up? First, it’s a damned good Bad Brains record: Jenifer’s bass rumbles like a herd of disturbed elephants through the whole thing, perhaps a little high in the mix, but so satisfying. As musicians, Bad Brains haven’t dropped the beat over the years, transitioning seamlessly from their early-era blitzkriegs to the moshable tempos of Quickness (Caroline, 1989) in songs like "Pure Love" and "Send You No Flowers." Second, and most important, who gives a fuck how or if it stacks up? Bad Brains are back, playing two shows at Slim’s.

The other night, I was standing in front of Cafe du Nord, talking to a slightly loopy but pleasant woman about the lotto ticket in her pocket, the winnings from which she was already actively planning how to spend. Seems she’d watched the self-help DVD The Secret and was convinced that if she just visualized it, it’d come true. "It’s the law of attraction," she said in a slight Southern drawl.

"Also known by the philosophers in Bad Brains as ‘PMA,’" I replied, referring to the "positive mental attitude" of my favorite prerace headphone jam. "They may have that PMA, but so far as I know, no one in Bad Brains has ever won the fuckin’ lottery."

"Oh, but you’re wrong," my new friend said emphatically. "You’re so wrong." She told me about seeing Bad Brains at the 9:30 Club in D.C. in her youth. "They did win the lottery — they’re the fucking Bad Brains. They change people’s lives."*

BAD BRAINS

With Whole Wheat Bread (Sun/23) and Black President (Mon/24)

Sun/23–Mon/24, 8 p.m., $25

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

New haunts

-
0

When Jake Mann ponders his recent move from Davis to San Francisco, he puts it in terms of a song. "Left behind the right things I know / How does this one go?" Mann muses on "Beat the Drum," as though making your way in a new scene were like playing a tune whose chords you haven’t quite learned. That SF has scenes at all was part of Mann’s concern. "People are specific about their genres here," he notes. "I’ve always felt spread across a lot of sounds."

This is borne out on Mann’s new LP, Daytime Ghost (Crossbill). Made with a backing three-piece band, it’s low-watt singer-songwriter rock that’s almost shoegazily bothered by texture. The first thought — thanks to the skuzzy guitar and dirty-weekend vocals of "Flames at My Feet" — goes to some less vain Marc Bolan: all the seamy T.Rex aesthetics without the bad intent. But a more accurate ancestor may be the Neil Young of 1975’s Zuma (Reprise). Mann lists the album as a recent "obsession," and its meld of fractured melodies and grimy guitars is an obvious influence on Daytime. "Take You for a Ride" plays like unraveling country rock, its broad American horizons — "Those big skies won’t betray us," Mann hopes — as ominous as Young’s had become.

Mann built Daytime over the past couple of years after the breakup of his Davis group the Zim-Zims, and it shows the marks of protracted writing. Evidently, the artist hasn’t quite decided his feelings on laptop beats, which pop up sporadically, though the sublime "Our 1st Assumptions Were Correct" shows he can corral them. Still, the disc sticks together, largely because those guitars have an almost tactile presence — we’ve always got a toehold. Mann knows this is the promise his live show has to keep. With a second guitar added and carte blanche given to vocal improvs, he claims they’re "getting most of it across."

JAKE MANN

Sept. 30, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

The Old-Fashioned Way at Hemlock Tavern

-
0

LOCAL LIVE The first triumph of the night was simply that no one lost an eye. The Hemlock Tavern stage isn’t much more than a low corner deck, and the Old-Fashioned Way work a swooning fiddle into their akimbo art pop, which meant that whenever Marie MacBain launched an arpeggio, her bow looked like a weapon.

Such are the risks of bringing bits of a philharmonic onto the barroom circuit, an increasingly popular move — blame Montreal — that’s rarely handled with the charm of this six-piece. You won’t find bespectacled frontman Chris Wu miming Win Butler. Onstage he’s a picture of basso profundo calm, a seated yogi growling an indie rocker’s version of eightfold-path prescriptions: "Tea early morning, Earl Grey / And coffee all day / Tecate all night / Or just something with bite."

Crowded around their sage leader, the rest of the OFW, who formed in 2005 and will release their first 7-inch this fall, give off the ease of a family band, though no member remotely resembles another. They’re Dickensian orphans, then, who’ve gathered to put on a minstrel show — and who’ve had to find a sound to fit their strange batch of instruments. The two red-blooded guitars and the drum kit give the songs a sturdy rock core when the band wishes it. But there are also, at points, a Paul McCartney–style toy bass, an accordion, a triangle, a wailing keyboard, and a melodica, which pile into a haunted and seductive sort of antipop, mournful and klezmerish on a track like "Robot on Fire" but boppy, harmonic, and needing a restroom on "Take Your Fluids." The latter was a live highlight, thanks to bassist Heather Logsdon’s soft and shy la la las, while "Zeitgeist" was goofy and quotidian but sweeter for it: "I threw on my clothes clumsily / And I kissed you on the head at 1:30 / Out the door and crushed by night / My hoodie reeked of beer and your Lucky Strikes."

THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY Thurs/20, 9 p.m., $8. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. (415) 861-2011, www.rickshawstop.com

My kingdom for a legume!

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com


Today’s homeland traveler must run a gauntlet of tribulation, beginning with the holy sacraments of shoe doffing and toothpaste Ziplocking and continuing to flight delays and $10 for an airborne box of chicken salad, but at the end of all the woe and insult is the comfort of knowing that there’s more where that came from, generally in the form of superfluous starch.

I noticed, in the course of several days spent recently in the heart of the heart of the country, that a broad no-legume policy seemed to be both unstated and strictly observed. Restaurants high and low didn’t offer so much as a lentil or chickpea, and as for breakfast at Denny’s or Perkins, where I went each morning with my squad of elders, you could have potatoes with your bread, or bread with your potatoes, you could have eggs a thousand different ways — in pastry! with cheese! — and cinnamon buns and oceans of weak coffee, and after all that you knew better than to think about glycemic indexes or your blood sugar level. Oatmeal? Consult the small print at the bottom of the laminated page.

At a nice Italian restaurant in St. Paul, Minn., I clicked my heels together three times and waited for Garrison Keillor to come through the door from his redoubt on nearby Summit Avenue. He did not; was this because he too is distressed at the lack of legumes in Lake Wobegon and its environs? Or was he at Perkins, chomping his way through mountainous platefuls of hash browns and bread?

Minnesota’s Twin Cities are hardly unsophisticated. St. Paul, in fact, has a Jewish deli, Cecil’s, that’s at least the match of any such place I knew in Chicago and far better than any deli here. But Jewish delis, no matter how wondrous their rye breads, aren’t known as hotbeds of legume culture, and if a good Italian restaurant doesn’t even have a white-bean soup or salad on the menu, what hope is there?

Does this matter? Yes. Legumes — whether white or black or cranberry beans, lentils, or chickpeas — are among nature’s near-perfect foods. They’re tasty, healthy, and flexible; they make good main dishes and side dishes, and they work in soup and as beds for other things. If you’re on your way to Lake Wobegon, don’t leave home without them.

These charming men

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Last night I dreamed that Morrissey played San Francisco. And waking, stumbling out of the top bunk, and triggering an avalanche of promo CDs, I was happy in the haze of that Estaban-drunken hour, but heaven knows I’m wondering, what difference does it make when that charming man has teased us so often before? Now I know how Joan of Arc felt, charging into Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey’s onetime Los Angeles hood to flyer his street with mash notes. And on the cusp of Mr. Smith’s first San Francisco–<\d>proper shows since his two-night stand at concrete box Maritime Hall in 1999, I can’t help but wonder, my PETA poster child, why you have ignored your acolytes so, playing seemingly everywhere but here since canceling your 2004 Now and Zen Fest turn due to sinusitis and laryngitis. Do we make you sick? Is it my forlorn fashion sense? Our inability to untangle your artful Gordian knots of pop-song allusion? Is it my Kahlua breath?

Pop professionalism is such touchy subject these days — poke it with a stick and turn it over to find the now-chastened Britney Spears. Give it another nudge and find, on the other shining side, perhaps Prince and Morrissey, who’s fired away at his share of prefab stars who have no business fingering the hem of his tear-away dress shirt. Regardless of his latent music- and cultural-crit tendencies, Mr. So-Called Bigmouth is one of the greatest performers alive. I finally saw him in 2002 at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, opening for Los Jaguares and utterly besotting the seething mass with "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores," "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," and plenty of scrumptious previews of his You Are the Quarry tunes, and his magnificent feints and swoons, his fetal and Christlike poses during "Meat Is Murder," his heartfelt "Mexico," and the moment he tossed his shirt to the snatching crowd made me badger anyone who’d listen to give Morrissey a regular Vegas gig, years before Prince held down a brief lounge act there. So all those who have been missing the King (or are so green they don’t even remember one) or never believed he left the building, take (Irish blood, English) heart — Morrissey carries forth his flaming rock ‘n’ roll torch, embodying all the sexiness, expressionism, originality, professionalism, and subversion of long-gone rock regents like Elvis Presley. If you are a follower, this will only fan the fire. If you’re not a fan, you will be. Maybe Brit would have been forgiven if she had mumbled, "Gimme Moz," instead.

SOUNDING OFF James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem knows of what I speak, rasping amiably from New York City before embarking on a tour with the Arcade Fire. Hot on the heels on the infectious electro rock ‘n’ disco of Sound of Silver (DFA/Capitol), Murphy talked up the forthcoming vinyl and CD release of his "Nike thing," 45:33 (DFA) ("It was just a download thing, which infuriates me because MP3s sound like shit!") and a comp EP of remixes evocatively titled A Bunch of Stuff (EMI). Why the release frenzy — add in a Fabriclive mix CD by Murphy and LCD drummer Pat Mahoney — when the DFA Records cofounder could be enjoying his downtime watching The Fashionista Diaries and Ultimate Fighting with the missus?

"I don’t like things coming out on difficult formats," Murphy, 37, grumbles. "I don’t like it if something’s not on vinyl or CD, so I kinda regularly remember my roots as a big Smiths fan, scrabbling around. I know they put out [Louder Than] Bombs and Hatful of Hollow, where they compile all the little things so that you can find them on the right format. I try to diligently do that."

At least he can look forward to some carefree, cutthroat fun with the Arcade Fire. "We have band crush!" raves Murphy, who’s expecting to battle Win and Will Butler over a steaming croquet set. "Win is very competitive — there’s no i in team, but there is one in ‘Win’!"

Not to mention a declarative "Win." But what does the a in "James" stand for? "Aaayiii!"

MORRISSEY

Sun/23–Mon/24 and Sept. 26–27, 8 p.m., $65

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

With the Arcade Fire

Fri/21, 6 p.m., $26–$46

Shoreline Amphitheatre

1 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View

www.ticketmaster.com

For more of the interview with James Murphy, go to the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

PARTY WITH ME, PETA

SAMARA LUBELSKI


The mind-morphing NYC psych songstress partners with Tom Carter and Christian Kiefer in Oakland and Giant Skyflower Band, Glenn Donaldson’s "bummer psych" outing, in San Francisco. Wed/19, 9 p.m., sliding scale. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org. Thurs/20, 9:30 p.m., $7. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

DIPLO


After editing the film Favela on Blast, Wesley Pentz touches down in Jessie Alley with collaborator Switch. Sat/22, 10 p.m., $20 advance. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. www.mezzaninesf.com

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN


The fusion guitar maestro offers a taste of the SFJAZZ fall season. Sat/22, 8 p.m., $25–$80. Nob Hill Masonic Center, 1111 California, SF. www.sfjazz.org

OAKLEY HALL AND MIST AND MAST


The Dead live! Brooklyn’s bucolic sing-alongers strum along with Oakland’s indie chantey rockers Mist and Mast. Sat/22, 10 p.m., $10–$12. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

Let there be bright

-
0

Sol Niger ("Black sun" in Latin) sounds like a contradiction. Not that choreographer–theater maven Keith Hennessy is uncomfortable with oppositional thinking. But if you’ve ever experienced the gray-on-gray blanket that a solar eclipse throws over the world, you’ll understand the appropriateness of the title of Hennessy’s most recent work.

With a Bay Area premiere run kicking off Sept. 20, Sol Niger — Hennessy’s MA project at UC Davis — was partially developed in France, where it was described as his "search for an American identity." Here it is presented as addressing "shifting definitions of war, torture, terror and justice." Hennessy shrugs off the difference in perspectives. French cultural institutions have sponsored several of his works, and he is used to the public there seeing him primarily in terms of national identity. In fact, the distinctions between the stateside and French observations just prove that the nature of the light shining on a object determines our perception of it, which is exactly one of Hennessy’s points.

Hennessy believes that the events since Sept. 11, 2001, define his generation much the way AIDS or World War II did earlier ones. In Sol Niger he examines the shadowy nature of our awareness of what’s going on. A key figure, borrowed from Japanese theater, is a kurogo (black-clad man), who manipulates the lights from the stage, invisible yet all-powerful in determining what we see. "I wanted to look less [at] what we do know about Iraq than what we half-know about, let’s say, Abu Ghraib, about our foreign policy," he says. "Is it really about oil and the oligarchies? These are the issues I want to bring to light."

One reason Hennessy chose to perform at Project Artaud Theater is because of the venue’s high ceilings, necessary for the aerial work that he continues to explore. He was first drawn to trapeze work because of a fascination with risk and danger and the ideas it provokes on dealing with fear. Still, Sol Niger is a departure for him. "There is a lot more choreographed dancing here than I have had in a long time. Some of it is quite beautiful," he says. "Also, I am taking a much less head-on approach." Like an alchemist, he works with symbols, metaphors, and abstractions — away from the glare of certainty but determined to shed light on what the shadows reveal.

SOL NIGER

Thurs/20–Sun/23 and Sept. 26–29, 8 p.m., $25

Project Artaud Theater

540 Florida, SF

(415) 255-2500

www.brownpapertickets.com

Lean and meaty

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The word musical normally connotes light fare. But in its latest Broadway reincarnation, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street lends, in addition to bravura performances, a bracingly morbid bite to American Conservatory Theater’s new season.

Of course, that doesn’t stop Sweeney from delivering vigorous entertainment. Director-designer John Doyle’s attractively reconceived, Tony Award–winning revival of the groundbreaking Stephen Sondheim musical serves up a theatrical feast from, yes, soup to nuts. And it does so with a cost-effective ingenuity that would no doubt impress the economizing baker–cannibal maker Mrs. Lovett (played with inviting brio by Broadway vet Judy Kaye).

Kicking off a national tour in San Francisco, the show’s impressive cast members, drawn overwhelmingly from the 2006 Broadway run, not only act and sing beautifully but also (in what has become a trademark of Doyle’s work in the UK and on Broadway) play all of the instruments themselves. Using brilliantly pared-down orchestrations by Sarah Travis (who also collected a Tony for her effort), Doyle and his cast render Sondheim’s exquisite score an even more integral part of the drama.

To "attend the tale of Sweeney Todd," the drama follows a disturbed barber formerly known as Barker (a memorable David Hess), who returns to Victorian London after 15 years’ penal servitude in Australia on trumped-up charges engineered by Judge Turpin (Keith Buterbaugh), who fancied the barber’s beautiful young wife, subsequently raped her, and now keeps Barker’s daughter, Johanna (Lauren Molina), as his ward. Seeking a room to rent under his new name, Sweeney Todd, the barber finds a garrulous but incompetent pie seller named Mrs. Lovett and befriends her after she breaks the news that his wife committed suicide in the wake of Judge Turpin’s conquest and (clearly smitten as well as sympathetic toward the anguished Sweeney) agrees to help him seek revenge.

Meanwhile, Anthony Hope (Benjamin Magnuson), a young man returning to London at the same time as Sweeney but in the optimistic mood reflected by his name, meets and falls in love with Johanna, only to become the rival of the judge, who has determined to marry her himself. With motives nearly as straight as his razor (the revenge plot soon spirals out of control, taking in all of the inhabitants of his detested London), Sweeney dispatches his victims with a single flourish across their throats — a gesture that in Doyle’s production invariably evokes a single piping wail of woodwind as the lights go red over Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop (done up with deftly augmented plank-board modesty in his striking scenic design), and the victim, after an expressionless pause, dons the blood-streaked apron symbolizing his or her quick passage from palpitating body to lifeless flesh. That’s flesh that the enterprising Mrs. Lovett eagerly bakes into her publicly traded treats, to great repute and profit. (Adding a further Grand Guignol touch, Mrs. Lovett simultaneously occupies herself downstage at such moments in slowly draining blood from a bucket; the attendant noise, as the liquid hits the pan, produces a choice chill in the bone.)

Musically, those opening lines calling the audience to "attend" use a terse melody and a staccato rhythm that wind their way throughout Sondheim’s complex and beguiling score and devilishly clever lyrics. Along the way come passages that, under the circumstances, take one by surprise with their easy, slightly ribald charm (as in Mrs. Lovett’s good-natured confession, "The Worst Pies in London") or their breathtaking gentleness and grace (as in Anthony’s love song, "Johanna," later snatched up by his rival, who lends its lilt a sinister echo).

Hess’s turn in the title role, as the broken husband and father turned cracked serial killer, projects an imposing, warily sympathetic combination of the addled, the fierce, and the weary. Sweeney is at once a towering and a stooped presence, with a somber masculine charisma that commands our undivided attention whenever he’s onstage. That is, except when he shares the spotlight with Kaye’s lovably insouciant (if that word can be used for a woman who bakes people into pies) Mrs. Lovett. Then Sweeney and the audience have together found an ideal match.

It’s all over much too soon, but it leaves a memorable aftertaste that keeps on giving. Which just goes to show what really makes a great piece of musical theater. A great story? A great composer? The answer is both more general and more particular: it’s people!*

SWEENEY TODD

Extended through Oct. 14, $22–$82

See stage listings for schedule

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

A brief history of space vampires in the movies

-
0

70MM MANIA With everyone vulnerable to psychic Taser attacks through e-mail and cell phones, you don’t have to peek over shoulders to be a space vampire today. Is there any doubt that space vampirism is running rampant?

The answer, my friends and fellow Criswell worshippers, is no. This makes the sheer lack of space vampire movies downright shocking. Leave it to Midnites for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks to confront the problem by reviving one of the greatest space vampire movies ever, Tobe Hooper’s 1985 Lifeforce. Now you can ponder space vampirism in its full, bodacious 70mm splendor, as primarily embodied by naked alien Mathilda May, who brought anarchic madness to London almost 20 years before 28 Days Later.

Lifeforce was coproduced by the Cannon Group, a name that — along with fellow producer Golan-Globus — is an absolute guarantee of mind-boggling visions. In addition to the ever-naked (except when wearing a trash bag) May, Lifeforce features Halley’s Comet, a space vampire nun, a screaming Steve Railsback (is there any other kind?), and an overblown score by Henry Mancini, who has wandered a long way from "Moon River." It also includes copious homoeroticism, especially when Patrick Stewart, chrome domed even back then, is possessed by May’s wily feminine spirit. Could Lifeforce have been crazier? It seems impossible. And yet: Klaus Kinski was originally supposed to play one of the film’s mad scientists. (It goes without saying that the scientist is mad.)

Within the It! The Terror from beyond Space–derived upper echelon of the space vampire canon, Lifeforce rivals Curtis Harrington’s 1966 Queen of Blood. In place of a naked May, Harrington’s movie offers a green-skinned alien vampire (the amazing Florence Marly) wrapped in an extratight bodysuit and sporting a hairdo that has been described as a "testy beehive" and a "turnip" by online reviewers and compared to Mister Softee ice cream by me. (Mario Bava’s 1965 Planet of the Vampires is more of an antecedent to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien.) As for Lifeforce’s futurist twist on body snatching, it does live on in at least one 21st-century movie, 2001’s Kairo (a.k.a. Pulse), by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a director who also qualifies as probably the biggest fan on the planet of Hooper’s 1990 Spontaneous Combustion.

MIDNITES FOR MANIACS IN 70MM

Fri/21, 7 p.m. (Ghostbusters) and 9 p.m. (Lifeforce); double feature, $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.thecastrotheatre.com

FEAST Fall 2007

-
0

@@http://www.sfbg.com/feast/fall2007/index.php@@

Black-and-white beatitude

-
0

Given all the media hype and hand-wringing that’s attended the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the upcoming posthumous appearance of Allen Ginsberg in Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan bio-fantasia I’m Not Here — in which the goaty poet, played by David Cross, pays awkward tribute to a limo-driven Dylan (Cate Blanchett) from a speeding golf cart – you’d think the rainbow spectrum of Beats had finally been winnowed down to the twin poles of James Dean-ish sexpotism and portly Zen-molestation.

Sure, there’s Grandpappy William Burroughs in there somewhere, and Neal Cassady, popping up like a scarecrow in a field of blurry mental imagery, but ask kids today who the Beats were and they’ll skip straight past the tilted berets and beaten tablas, the smoke-wreathed faculties of Naropa, and various Coney Islands of the mind, pausing only when they meet their own reflections in whatever Gap-like ad campaign features Jack and Al at the moment.

Which is precisely why photographer Christopher Felver’s handsome picture book Beat comes as a revelation. In the tradition of the Beats’ artistic intentions and pretensions, Felver’s collection of historical black-and-white photographs expands our mental perceptions, including among the pantheonic Beat coterie a plethora of artists and writers who were influenced by, accompanied, or descended stylistically from the well-packaged icons of the era. Scribbled haiku, scrawled excerpts from heartfelt letters, and other typographically authentic ephemera accentuate 187 pages of gorgeously immediate photographs of rapidly fading fellow travelers such as Gary Snyder, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Ed Sanders, Anne Waldman, and Tom Clark — as well as more liberally categorized Beat types such as Kathy Acker, Lou Reed, Kurt Vonnegut, and composer Lou Harrison.

Sometimes this methodology of including every personality possessed of “creative spirit and joyous antics” (as the book’s dust jacket has it) who happened to cross Felver’s lens leads to a little stretching. I have a feeling Denise Levertov, Tatum O’Neal, and Hunter S. Thompson would raise half an eyebrow at their inclusion here. But the pictures are frank and fabulous, so it’s best just to go with the flow.

San Franciscans may be forever hovering at the edge of Beat burnout, but whatever the lasting cultural merits of these pranksters, posers, protesters, tireless Orientalists, and gangly graphomaniacs (Beat’s press materials suggest that these folks all shared “themes of spirituality, environmental awareness, and political dissidence”; one is tempted to add “unbridled onanism” to the list), they sure lived fast and left great-looking corpuses.

BEAT
By Christopher Felver
Last Gasp
240 pages
$29.95

Anemic debut for public mayoral financing

-
0

This year offers the first mayor’s race in which candidates can qualify for public financing to supplement their campaign spending. But of the 14 candidates who originally entered the race, only two — Tony Hall and Chicken John Rinaldi — managed to file the financing paperwork by the Aug. 28 deadline.

Two days later, Hall dropped out of the race, leaving Rinaldi as possibly the sole recipient of money from city coffers. Mayor Gavin Newsom doesn’t qualify because he has already exceeded the city’s voluntary $1.37 million spending limit.

"I’m withdrawing because not enough people are willing to stand up and hold this clown Newsom accountable for the mess he has made of this city," Hall told the Guardian the day after he quit. "I am no longer willing to risk the happiness of my family and the welfare of my supporters, who have been intimidated and harassed."

Hall’s withdrawal invalidates his 2007 financing application, in which he claimed to have raised about $27,000 from city residents. To qualify for public financing, candidates must prove that by the Aug. 28 deadline, they received at least $25,000 from 250 local residents, which then qualifies them for $50,000 from the city.

After that step, eligible candidates who can raise $100,000 and meet various conditions can receive up to $400,000 from the city. The next $400,000 that such candidates raise themselves will be matched dollar for dollar by the city, meaning that successful candidates can receive $850,000 in public funds and even more if the $7 million fund isn’t depleted and an opponent raises many millions of dollars.

With all eyes now on Rinaldi, Ethics Commission director John St. Croix told us that his staff is reviewing Rinaldi’s application and should make a decision this week. "But keep in mind that even if Rinaldi doesn’t qualify initially, we’ll show him where the holes in his application are, and he’ll have a chance to fix them," St. Croix added.

If Rinaldi’s roughly $26,000 in local contributions check out, he’ll receive notice that the city is giving him $50,000. If they don’t, he’ll have the option to resubmit new documentation within five days to prove that all of his qualifying contributions were received before the deadline.

Contributions must be accompanied by a copy of the check, a signed contributor card, and a copy of a utility bill or driver’s license to prove the contributor has local residency. After the election, candidates who receive public funds are subject to a mandatory audit of their campaign expenditures and campaign bank account statements.

With so few candidates even potentially qualifying for public financing, is it possible that the $25,000 qualifying threshold for public financing is set too high? Former Ethics Commission member and staffer Joe Lynn said that finding 250 residents with a C-note each to spare isn’t easy for most candidates, especially this early in the race.

"No one has that many friends, and most money comes in the last week of a campaign, when people are placing their bets," said Lynn, who believes that the $25,000 threshold would have been more easily attainable if better-known progressives had gotten into the race.

"And Tony Hall would have had an easier time raising money if there had been a candidate on the left, instead of just one chicken in the pot," Lynn added, recalling how, at the start of an election cycle, all candidates have big eyes and believe they’re going to raise lots of money.

"But this isn’t a free giveaway," Lynn said. He warned that the city also investigates each contribution to verify its authenticity and that candidates who violate the rules face hefty fines. "Once you get into the ring, you’re a serious player — and they’re going to treat you seriously," Lynn said, noting how complicated it is to meet all of the standards for public financing.

Even if no mayoral candidates make it over the public financing hurdles this time around, Lynn believes such funds are essential if San Francisco wants to nurture its grassroots activism — and with it, the people who may have original solutions to the same old problems.

"The function of the grass roots isn’t to win elections but to present the agendas of folks who differ from the Chronicle," Lynn said, noting that of the $7 million in public funds available this year, any money not used will be available in 2011, when more people are expected to run and qualify for funds.

"It was understood that this year there wouldn’t be as many people running," St. Croix said, "because the incumbent is running, but that there will probably be more in 2011, by which time we will have more experience of public financing and the mayor’s race."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who authored San Francisco’s public financing legislation, said the goal of the law is to "equalize the opportunity" of running a campaign.

"It does help if you have name recognition and advanced preparation, but this isn’t about cutting corners," Mirkarimi told us. "It was designed to reward people for organizing efforts that are commensurate with an organized campaign."

Chicken and the pot

-
0

› steve@sfbg.com

Chicken John Rinaldi — the fake-mustachioed showman and arts facilitator who is running for mayor — was late for our Sept. 7 interview, but his roommate let me into the candidate’s César Chávez Street home–office–performance space to wait for him.

Rinaldi was busy at the Ethics Commission office, trying to become the first and only mayoral candidate to qualify for public matching funds, a goal that requires raising at least $25,000 from among 250 city residents — and having the paperwork to prove it, which is proving the hard part for someone traditionally more focused on big ideas than small details. (See sidebar.)

He says he’s raised about $32,000 since getting into the race last month, including $26,700 from city residents, $12,000 of which came in on the deadline date, Aug. 28. It’s an impressive feat that could transform this marginalized, improbable candidate into one of the leading challengers, despite his enigmatic persona, maddeningly elusive platform, and admission that he can’t possibly win.

But Rinaldi, 39, who makes his living from his many performances and projects, isn’t your typical politician, as his history and home demonstrate. The high ceilings hold rigging and pulleys for the regular performances he hosts, although his bar and a pair of church pews were pushed back against one wall this day to make more space for campaign activities. Dammit the Wonder Dog, one of many characters Rinaldi has promoted over the years, slept on a deflated air mattress still dusty from Burning Man.

The red brick walls of his main room looked like an art gallery, with paintings by Ani Lucia Thompkins listing prices of at least $2,000 each and pieces by James McPhee going for less. On another wall hung the massive sign for the Odeon Bar — which Rinaldi owned from 2000 to 2005 — with Odeon spelled diagonally from right to left.

In the kitchen area, just inside the front door, the walls held framed posters from many of his projects — the Life-Sized Game of Mousetrap, Circus Ridickuless (the poster for which, at its center, has Rinaldi’s face and the label "Chicken John, Ringmonster"), the Church of the Subgenius (in which Rinaldi’s eponymous partner on The Ask Dr. Hal Show is some kind of high priest), and "The Cacophony Society Presents Klown Krucifixation" — as well as a framed poster of Pippi Longstocking.

Suddenly, Rinaldi blew in the front door, apologized for his tardiness, and declared, "The fucking Ethics Commission. I’m in so much trouble. I’ve probably already racked up $5,000 in fines."

Nonetheless, he may still qualify for at least $50,000 from the taxpayer-funded mayoral public financing program that debuted this election season, giving his campaign ample resources to promote his message of nurturing San Francisco as a "city of art and innovation."

My first significant interaction with Rinaldi happened about three years ago, when he and fellow Burning Man artist Jim Mason launched a lively rebellion against Black Rock City LLC’s control over the countercultural event (see "State of the Art," 12/1/04) and created a shadow organization, dubbed Borg2, to promote art.

Rinaldi’s focus and rhetoric then — arguing for a "radical democratization" of the art-grant selection process and the creation of a more inclusive discussion of the direction and future of both Black Rock City and San Francisco — are echoed in his current mayoral campaign.

"What I’m talking about now is the same thing I was talking about with Borg2. It’s the same thing," Rinaldi told the Guardian.

It’s about inspiration and participation, he said, about coming up with some kind of vehicle through which to facilitate a public discussion about what San Francisco is, what it ought to be, and the role that can be played by all the Chickens out there, all the people who help make this an interesting city but aren’t usually drawn into political campaigns or other conventional institutions.

"The number one qualification for mayor is you have to be passionate about the city you’re running," Rinaldi said. "The left of San Francisco can’t agree on anything except the idea of San Francisco."

And it is Rinaldi’s San Francisco that helped him transform his pickup truck into a "café racer" that runs on coffee grounds and walnut shells, an alt-fuel project inspired partly by the Green Man theme of this year’s Burning Man. It is the San Francisco that supports his myriad projects — from wacky trips aboard the bus he owns to offbeat performances at his place — and asks for his support with others’.

"This is part of the innovation thing," Rinaldi said of his candidacy. "Take a mayoral campaign and turn it into an artwork project that raises interesting questions and ideas."

But should that be funded by taxpayers? Mayor Gavin Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye said he has concerns about Rinaldi getting money from that source. "It would be interesting to see public money go to someone’s art project," Jaye said. "This is not the intent. The intent was for this to go to a legitimate candidate."

Yet how did Rinaldi raise $12,000 in one day? "I sent out one e-mail," he said. "At one time there were 12 people outside my door, sliding checks through the slot."

Again: How? Why? Rinaldi responded by quoting Albert Einstein, "’There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.’" But when you try to pin down Rinaldi on what that idea is, why his candidacy seems to have resonated with the underground artists and anarchists and geeks of San Francisco, the answer isn’t entirely clear. And he disputes the idea that this is about him or his connections.

"These aren’t fans," Rinaldi said of his contributors. "They are equals in a city of art and innovation. It’s just my time…. I asked for something, and they gave it to me…. People don’t necessarily support me, my ideas, or my platform."

Among those drawn to Rinaldi’s campaign is Lev Osherovich, a 32-year-old postdoctoral researcher at UC San Francisco who helped with fundraising and administration and eventually became the de facto campaign manager.

"It must be quite a surprise for someone who appears to be a joke candidate to raise so much money and so much awareness," Osherovich told us. "But Chicken has a tremendous energy and a real gift for communication…. Outsider political movements are a great tradition in San Francisco — people using the political process as a vehicle for getting ideas out."

Yet even within his community, Rinaldi has his detractors, such as the anonymous individuals who formed the fake campaign Web sites www.chickenmayor.org and www.voteforchicken.org (Rinaldi’s actual campaign Web site is www.voteforchicken.com, and his personal one is www.chickenjohn.com).

The latter fake campaign site lists Rinaldi’s primary goal as "Chicken John needs attention."

Ask Rinaldi what he does need for this campaign, what his real goals are, and he sounds unlike any politicians I’ve ever heard.

"I don’t need a winning strategy. I don’t need any votes. We just want to raise the level of the conversation," said Rinaldi, who refuses to criticize Newsom on the record, insisting that the incumbent "should be treated with respect and admiration."

That conciliatory treatment has caused some to speculate that Rinaldi is aiming for a job within the Newsom administration, perhaps a staff position on the Arts Commission. But Rinaldi insists that slamming the mayor is an ineffective way to start a productive conversation and that his real goals are less tangible than that.

"The intention of my campaign is inspiration, to leave San Francisco politics better than I found it," Rinaldi said. "When I come out of this experience on the other side, I’ll be smarter…. It’s my intention to get an education and to have the people of San Francisco help give me that education."

As maddening and incomprehensible as that lack of political motivation and policy goals is to seasoned political professionals and journalists, many of his supporters find it refreshing.

"Politicians aren’t the only people who can navigate the world of politics," Rinaldi said, specuutf8g that some of his support comes from people who are disenchanted with conventional politics and drawn to his fresh, outsider approach to the race.

"It’s somewhat different than the usual political campaign," Osherovich said with obvious understatement, noting that the campaign has received so much support from people "because they know Chicken can do great things and great things are going to come out of this."

At the very least, interesting things are bound to come out of this campaign. Rinaldi is deliberately vague about exactly how his campaign will unfold or what his endgame might be, except to remind us that good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And he’s now at the beginning.

"More than half of what I do is a dismal failure," Rinaldi admitted. "But failure is now we learn."

Yet his successful fundraising over the past month is leading some to believe that this campaign won’t be a failure. Rinaldi said he’s been in daily contact with the Ethics Commission and is fairly confident he can satisfy its concerns and win public financing.

"I received a certain amount of funds, and I’m supposed to document where the funds came from by the 5 p.m. deadline. They said it wasn’t good enough, but I now have what’s good enough," Rinaldi said. "They are doing a lot of hand-holding. It’s like the DMV. It’s great."

So now he’s off and running.

"I just hired a staff. This is not a joke anymore. I’m serious," Rinaldi said, later adding an important caveat: "I could definitely go to jail if I do this wrong. I understand that."

PS Rinaldi said he has already booked 12 Galaxies — which has hosted his The Ask Dr. Hal Show and other projects — for his election night party, which he’s dubbed "The Loser’s Ball."

Editor’s Notes

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was talking the other day to the mayor’s chief political advisor, Eric Jaye, who thinks we should endorse his client for reelection. "Gavin Newsom," he told me, "is the most progressive mayor in San Francisco history."

Well, I haven’t been here for all of them, but in my 25 years or so, the competition hasn’t been terribly stiff. Newsom vs. Dianne Feinstein? That’s a no-brainer. Newsom vs. Frank Jordan? Uh, what was the question again? Newsom vs. Willie Brown? Things are pretty bad now, but I never want to go through another era like the Brown years again.

Newsom vs. Art Agnos? Well, Agnos had a lot of potential and did some good stuff, but he also sold the city out to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and became such an arrogant jerk that he alienated a lot of his allies and nobody could work with him anymore.

So on one level, Jaye has a point: we’ve had some pretty rotten characters in room 200 at City Hall, and his guy isn’t by any means the worst.

But I keep coming back to my basic complaint: what has Newsom actually done about the crucial issues facing the city? Where is the leadership?

A few days earlier, I’d had lunch with Jack Davis, the gleefully notorious political consultant, and we got to talking about housing and rent control, which I’ve always strongly promoted and Davis’s landlord clients have always bitterly opposed. And we realized, two old opponents, that on one level that battle is over: it was lost years ago, when San Francisco failed (and then the state preempted our ability) to regulate rents on vacant apartments. The wave of Ellis Act evictions has damaged the situation even more. The limited rent control in San Francisco today can’t possibly keep housing even remotely affordable. The only way to fix the problem would be to roll back all rents to their levels of about 15 years ago; anyone (besides me) want to take on that campaign?

So what, Davis asked, would I do about it?

Since Newsom is going to be reelected this fall anyway, let me suggest how he could live up to Jaye’s billing.

Imagine if the mayor of San Francisco called a meeting of all the key players in the local housing market — the residential builders, the big developers, the nonprofits, the tenant activists, the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition folks, the Board of Supervisors president, the neighborhood groups — and said something like this:

"San Francisco needs about 15,000 new affordable-housing units in the next five years. That’s housing for low-income people, housing for people who work in San Francisco … family housing, rental housing, land-trust housing, supportive housing, a mix of units at a mix of prices, but none of it out of the reach of blue-collar and service-industry workers.

"So here’s the deal: you people sit here and figure out a way to make it happen, including how to pay for it — and until you do, not one new market-rate project will get approved by my Planning Commission."

You suppose we might get a little action here? You think the developers who see a gold rush in the San Francisco housing market might be willing to play ball? You think that the mayor might show leadership on the most pressing problem facing residents and businesses in this town, the most serious drain on the local economy? It sure wouldn’t hurt to try.

1...337338339...431Page 338 of 431

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org