Bay Guardian Archives

Bong hits the mainstream

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› johnny@sfbg.com

When I first saw Bong [Joon-ho]’s new film, The Host … I recovered a long-dissolving hope for the future of movies…. I had heard about this Korean monster flick … but nothing had prepared me for the carnivalesque, politically acidic megaspectacle that unspooled, seducing me and the rest of the audience into a state of childlike rapture.

"Gogol in Seoul," by Gary Indiana, Artforum

To inspire "childlike rapture" in Gary Indiana, a wizened contender for the most truthfully caustic novelist and political commentator of our time, one must possess amazing powers as a filmmaker. Amazing powers — of imagination, societal observation, and colorful vérité-based pop symbolism — are exactly what Bong Joon-ho has, in measures that have grown in size and scope with each of his three features to date. Indiana’s recent cover essay on Bong marks the first time in years (if not ever) that a commercial film has taken over the cover of Artforum — just one sign of its subject’s imminent pop art impact. But while Indiana’s excellent piece draws upon Nikolay Gogol, Antonio Gramsci, post-Confucian history, and enthusiasm for the rich pleasures of contemporary South Korean film, it ignores one major stylistic source of The Host‘s ability to induce kidlike joy. With his latest film, Bong announces himself as the heir apparent to Steven Spielberg — an heir who replaces Spielberg’s reactionary tendencies with an acutely observant antiestablishment viewpoint.

It’s easy to see why Indiana would steer clear of citing the man who birthed E.T. He might consider Spielberg the epitome of the "Hollywood tripe" that had just about permanently driven him from movie theaters. If so, he has my sympathy. Within the strange world of film criticism, few phenomena have been more vexing than the penchant of elite East Coast and Hollywood-hooked critics to overlook Spielberg’s cornball antics and project all manner of philosophical profundity onto his flair for spectacle. Is it not fair to assert that, aside from passages of 2001’s A.I. and 2002’s Minority Report, Spielberg has failed to deliver on the promise of his ’70s and early-’80s megamarketable hits?

Filmmakers from outside the United States have a different appreciation of the Spielberg effect — that moment when the adult complexities of movies from the early ’70s gave way to blockbusters. A director such as Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa would pinpoint that change as the moment in 1975 when Jaws generated lines all the way around now-extinct movie palaces. Clearly, from that film through the 1982 summer that brought E.T. and Poltergeist, Spielberg demonstrated a facility for pop imagery that was as potent as Andy Warhol’s, perhaps more resonant, and definitely more lucrative. Lost in his pop dynamism’s wake, however, were infinite degrees of human experience. A case could be made that Spielberg’s brand of humanism is in fact inhumane and in perfect lockstep with a society in which democracy is defined as capitalism.

An isolated viewing of Bong’s first film, the 2000 satire Barking Dogs Never Bite, wouldn’t suggest a predecessor to the young Spielberg. Only Bong’s gift for physical comedy and his eye for everyday pop iconography (such as photocopied missing dog posters) distinguish his debut from likable recent South Korean movies such as Take Care of My Cat, A Good Lawyer’s Wife, and Rules of Dating. Like those movies, Barking Dogs is more naturally multifaceted than Sundance indie drivel. The story line gives a wannabe professor a lesson in class struggle: rather than Marxist platitudes, Yoon-ju (Lee Sung-jae) learns from the street, or more accurately, the subterranean realm Bong often explores. Instead of The Host‘s marauding many-ton guppy, the movie’s beasts are canine and domestic. But there are clear hints of what’s to come in Bong’s career. The director’s eye for bright yellow symbolism and affinity for characters who work in cramped Kwik-E-Marts and offices are already apparent. A shot of a row of cement walls within the basement of the movie’s apartment building will be echoed in The Host by an eerie, signature glimpse of the creature distending its lassolike tail under a bridge to go for another murderous dip.

"Nobody in this country follows rules since the liberation," one character proclaims in Barking Dogs Never Bite, but Bong’s 2003 fact-based follow-up, Memories of Murder, shows that the era of Chun Doo-wan’s dictatorship was certainly no better — equipped with siren calls and an endless variety of misused police force, it’s the perfect oppressive backdrop for South Korea’s first serial killer. Memories seems to obey every basic conceit of serial killer suspense films while enriching and subverting the genre. (The smartest character is a briefly glimpsed female detective whose insight is ignored by the warring male leads.) When Memories had its first SF engagement in 2004, I praised Bong’s ability to fashion a thriller into a societal and political indictment, even likening it to M. At the time I wondered if such praise was too lavish, but now I only regret not noting the influence of the aforementioned Kurosawa, whom Bong has cited as one contemporary. Kurosawa’s peak efforts, 1997’s Cure and the 2001 Japanese version of Pulse, don’t strive for or possess the pop appeal of Bong’s work, but Bong has learned plenty from their maker’s keen critical knowledge of film history — and contemporary madness. Memories is also the first time he proves commercial strictures can be trampoline flexible in terms of revealing individual and group character.

The Host is the Spielberg movie that Spielberg never made, the one where E.T. and the shark from Jaws are fused together into a rampaging tragicomic beast that doubles as an entire country and even a globe overrun by the toxins of US military paranoia. (It’s also a perfect antidote to War of the Worlds‘ abundant US-centric phoniness.) Each member of the film’s core ragtag family, including Bong regulars such as the always endearing Bae Du-na (from Barking Dogs) and the less famous, underrated Park Hae-il (hauntingly fierce in Memories and better in Park Chan-ok’s Jealousy Is My Middle Name), is as nuanced as Homer Simpson–esque protagonist Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), who undergoes wild tortures because he refuses to stop telling the truth. The anarchic hilarity and horror of the creature’s first rampage in The Host are more than matched by Park’s family, whose grieving turns slapstick in an uproarious follow-up scene. One suspects Bong has as many tales as The Host‘s creature has tails. This convert can’t wait to see more of them. *

AN EVENING WITH BONG JOON-HO

Mon/5, 6:30 p.m. Memories of Murder; 9:45 p.m. Barking Dogs Never Bite; $9–$11

Clay Theatre

2261 Fillmore, SF

(415) 267-4893

www.sffs.org

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God of monster

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At the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival — blissfully far from any rivers concealing flesh-eating aquatic life forms — I spoke (through a translator) with Bong Joon-ho, director and cowriter of The Host.

SFBG I’ve read that you make films you yourself want to see. Are you a fan of monster movies, and have you always been?

BONG JOON-HO I’m a fan of several monster films, but I was not necessarily fascinated exclusively by them. I admire John Carpenter’s The Thing and Steven Spielberg’s films — Jaws, for example — but they were not my sole interest.

SFBG The Host contextualizes its monster within a framework of social and political commentary. Was that something you planned from the beginning?

BJ I think it’s the tradition of this type of monster film to have political undertones. What’s interesting is that the first thing you see [in The Host] — an American researcher asking his [Korean assistant] to discard toxic chemicals — was based on a real story in [South] Korea. That incident gave me the idea for this film, because it actually happened and it had that political undertone. So it was very practical for me to start with that.

SFBG How do you think American audiences will view the film?

BJ It’s true that there’s a lot of satire against the American government, but I don’t think it’s as heavy as Fahrenheit 9/11! I worked with American artists [from San Francisco effects studio the Orphanage] while making this film, and when they read the script, they enjoyed it.

SFBG Can you talk a bit about the creature design and how it was working with the special-effects houses that contributed to The Host?

BJ The original design for the creature was by me and a Korean artist named Chin Wei-chen. New Zealand’s Weta Workshop made the model of the creature. Based on that model, the Orphanage created the computer graphics. There are 10 shots focusing on the head of the creature, and this head — it’s one-to-one scale — was created by John Cox Creature Workshop, located in Australia. So those 10 shots were the actual head of the creature, not computer graphics.

SFBG Both in close-up and at full-length, the monster’s appearance is impressive. But the ways in which the Korean and American governments react to its sudden appearance are almost more sinister than the creature itself.

BJ Definitely there is some kind of implication there, but the creature doesn’t necessarily represent the government of the United States. It’s everything combined: the social and political and the possible hardships that an ordinary family, like in the film, might suffer in daily life. The fact is, this family tries to save their daughter by fighting really hard against the creature. But society doesn’t support their efforts. What I tried to convey is the reality that in life individuals don’t get support from society.

SFBG For all its monstrous elements, The Host isn’t really a horror movie. There’s quite a bit of dark humor in the script.

BJ I wanted to add humorous elements, but it was not really intentional. It came out naturally. Like in my previous film Memories of Murder — which was based on an actual, really terrible serial-killing story — I managed [to include] some humorous elements. Combining the humor and fear, comedy and tragedy, that’s part of life. For me, that approach is more realistic than just focusing on one aspect.

SFBG What does the title The Host mean to you?

BJ The first meaning is the biological meaning — that the creature may be the host of a virus. If I expand the meaning of The Host, it also represents all of the evils of life — everything that suppresses the daily lives of ordinary people.

SFBG Will there be a sequel?

BJ I would be happy to see the sequels made, not necessarily by me but by other directors.

SFBG But no American remake, right? Promise?

BJ [Laughs.] I’d like to remain the original creator of The Host. (Cheryl Eddy)

The sushi house rules

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› paulr@sfbg.com

An old rule of prudence teaches that you should never eat raw oysters in a month whose name doesn’t have an "r" in it — from May to August, more or less — the warm-weather months elevating the danger of spoilage. Rain and cold do present their inconveniences and discomforts, but they are also balm in the matter of seafood, most of which is delicate and turns bad easily if the temperature starts to rise. One does not like to think of oysters being hauled along I-5 on some infernal July afternoon.

The rule has never been extended to sushi, so far as I know, but it wouldn’t be the worst idea. Although my best sushi experiences have been in balmy Hawaii, and while I have eaten raw seafood here in every season, even our autumnal summer, I am most at ease doing so in winter, when the world itself seems well refrigerated and the albacore tuna, plucked from cold seas, is rushed to the chilly city, where we eagerly await it in a restaurant that, perhaps — with any luck — is well heated.

Barracuda Sushi, which opened last year on a glam stretch of Market Street that includes Café Flore, Bagdad Café, and Lime, is well heated. It is also quite nice looking, with a rust and jade paint scheme, banquettes upholstered in fabrics with fine geometric patterns, and bars fore and aft (the latter a sushi bar). The place is less clubby-looking than Lime (which is a door or two away), but there’s a powerful nightlife pulse nonetheless. If you knew this space as the onetime home of such restaurants as Tin Pan and Repastoria Satyricon, you might not recognize it.

It is one of my pet theories that oft-flipped restaurant spaces at last achieve stability when they become Japanese restaurants. Après le déluge, sushi. Houses of Japanese cuisine must fail occasionally, but the attrition rate is low. So Barracuda (which has a pair of sibling restaurants down the Peninsula) opens with at least one structural advantage.

Another plus, more sensual or aesthetic in nature, is the swirling of Peruvian and Brazilian touches into the food, a reflection not of the kitchen’s whimsy (or not just of its whimsy) but of the large Japanese migrations to South America in the first half of the 20th century. Who could forget that a recent president of Peru bore the unlikely name Alberto Fujimori? Of course, he was forced out in disgrace, but still.

A nice introduction to this pan-Pacific sensibility is the sushi napoleon ($11.95), a disk of rice about the size of a single-serve cheesecake topped with chunks of tuna and avocado — a pair of roll regulars — along with blueberries, slices of mango, and a slathering of mayonnaise. It sounds awful, like something a latchkey kid might throw together as an after-school snack, but it turned out to be both beautiful (with the colors of some elaborate ice cream confection) and tasty-rich in a way Japanese food seldom is.

Most of the food isn’t so aggressively inventive. Gyoza ($5.95), the Japanese pot stickers, are familiar and friendly, though we found the skins to be thinner than usual, and the ponzu sauce on the side was spiked with some minced jalapeño pepper for added excitement. Seaweed salad ($6.95) was presented as an upmarket trio, with three varieties of seaweed (wakame, goma wakame, and hijiki) given three saucings of aji amarillo (mayonnaise-like and made from the mild yellow Peruvian chile), orange tobiko, and lemon. A sushi set ($11.95) consisted of California roll (crab and avocado) and a selection of nigiri, including tuna, salmon, and shrimp; it was good, but you could get it anywhere, even at the supermarket.

But even the fanciest supermarket probably wouldn’t offer anything to compare with the hamachi ceviche ($11.95), the thin bricks of flesh doused with a basil-yuzu-wasabi sauce — truly a New World combination, which produced a memorable sweet pepper-fire effect — and topped with tiny cubes of purplish bronze geutf8 — like jewels — we could not identify. Also distinctive are many of the rolls, including the Barracuda crunchy roll ($12): broiled tuna and avocado wrapped in a long tube of rice, which is then dipped in a light batter and flash-fried. The result is something like a Japanese chimichanga, tasty but quite rich.

We tend to associate Japanese cuisine so strongly with uncooked seafood that we are at risk of forgetting that the Japanese cook a lot of their food too and with their own sort of élan. The lunch menu offers us a series of vivid reminders of this, from udon (the pho-like noodle soup) to various types of panko-crusted cutlets, or katsu. There is even a breaded calamari steak (the poor man’s abalone), which turned up for me in a bento box ($9.50) in the company of a California roll, a pat of white rice, a mixed salad with creamy dressing, and (most welcome on a leaden, tule-fog day) a bowl of miso soup on the side. Across the table, miso soup was neither necessary nor missed, for there came a great bowl of udon ($9.95), steaming like a caldera on some volcanic plain. In the concentrated chicken broth lurked a Medusa’s wig of fat noodles, with flecks of shiso and scallion and slivers of shiitake mushrooms. The tempura shrimp were presented on the side, and we briefly considered the likelihood that we were expected to dump them into the bowl. We didn’t, and they turned out to do nicely when eaten on the side … but had we broken a rule? *

BARRACUDA SUSHI

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–11:30 p.m.

2251 Market, SF

(415) 558-8567

www.barracudasushi.com

Full bar

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy if busy

Wheelchair accessible

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The power of meat

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By L.E. Leone


› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I’m not really going to no wimmin’s music festival in Michigan this summer, don’t worry. It costs money — are you kidding me? And I’m not camping out at no Camp Trans, either, to protest. I already gave up on political actions, restroom-related or otherwise.

Y’all can have your fucked-up ismicistic world.

I have chickens. I have fire and wheels and weird words that nobody knows but me. Ismicistic means everyone’s got to be a somethingist and embrace somethingism. Not the chicken farmer, not no more. I embrace nothing. I lay down my arms, my sword, my pen, my heart. So that means I give up on romantic embracement too.

Hey, maybe the only time anything really really buttery ever happens is after you’ve already surrendered to the bread: the plain old dry, crusty facts of your actual life, exactly what you actually have (e.g. chickens, chicken shit).

I really am going to Michigan, though. In August. I’m going to karate chop my chickens, pack up my pickup, and pitch my little one-farmer tent right smack in the war zone between the wimmin-born-wimmins and the boy-born-girlies, and I’m gonna eat nothing but raw red meat for a week, and lie around in the dirt, naked. Then when all the mosquitoes that bite me start biting everyone else on their vegetarian asses, they’ll all be infected by a meaty, greasy, good-natured carnivorousness, and the world will have been saved without anyone even realizing it.

My Michigan-born-wimminfriend Kizzer deserves a Nobel Warmth prize for teaching me to go to bed with hot water bottles, in lieu of lovers. I giggle and smile and think of her warmly every night as I crawl in under the covers and play footsy with Mr. Hotbelly. Talk about personal growth … I used to sleep with my socks on!

So Kizzer calls me at my brother’s house on a recent Sunday, says she’s been walking around Berkeley all day, smelling meat.

"Let’s be more specific," I said, searching for my pen, which I’d just laid down. Somewhere. "Barbecued? Braised? Broiled? Barbecued? What? Talk to me."

"Grilled," she says, after honestly thinking about it.

"OK, that’s kind of like barbecue. Let me make a few calls, borrow someone’s laptop, see what I can come up with."

K.C., Everett and Jones … been there, done them. There’s another one now called T-Rex, but it looks like high-brow barbecue, which is an oxymoron. And as much as I love oxen and morons, Kizzer and me had just accidentally dropped 40 bucks apiece at some Italian restaurant in the Mission the night before. We were both still reeling and a little nauseous over that.

So I called up Wayway, my go-to Berkeley eats consultant, and said, "Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. Cheap."

"Chicken farmer?" he said. "Is this you?"

It was!

Taiwan Restaurant, he said. Next door to McDonald’s on University. He said it was his favorite place for cheap Chinese food. Ever. Anywhere. And Chinese food ain’t barbecue, I’ll be the first to admit, but when Wayway described the pork noodle soup with mustard greens, it sounded like soul food to my ears. I told you I have this thing for soup right now. In fact, I’d almost rather eat soup than meat — so long as the soup has meat in it, you understand.

I had to talk Kizzer into this. "It’s Chinese New Year!" I said. "It’s the Year of the Pork!"

She bit, and I slurped and slobbered and spilt my tea, I was so excited over the heap of noodles and greens and pork swirling majestically out of the broth like Alcatraz or other islandy, mountainous tourist attractions. With noodles and greens and pork all over them.

Get this: $4.50! For a meal-size bowl of soup. Six-fifty for a huge plate of beef and snow peas, and the meat was tender and the peas were snappy. And the pot stickers took 20 minutes to make and were so juicy and meaty and flavorous that you could almost believe in Santa Claus all over again.

Fifteen dollars stuffed us solid, and me again for lunch the next day. So … do I have a new favorite restaurant?

I do! *

TAIWAN RESTAURANT

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–12:30 a.m.; Sat., 10:30 a.m.–12:30 a.m.; Sun., 10:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m.

2071 University, Berk.

(510) 845-1456

Takeout available

Beer

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

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Sour milk

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m still breast-feeding my third baby, and my libido is completely gone. I don’t even think about sex. My ob-gyn seemed to think it’s related to breast-feeding. That was months ago, and I still feel the same. I feel bad for my husband. I know he is starting to take it personally.

Love,

Shut-Down Mom

Dear Mom:

I have to admit I’ve been letting your question sit here in my "good question!" file for months. As a newish mother myself, I can’t easily write about this without taking it a bit personally too. I generally try to avoid getting all me-me-me unless it’s particularly amusing, but sometimes it can’t be helped.

Of course it seems related to breast-feeding. It is deeply and inextricably connected to breast-feeding, a process involving sex- and sexuality-related hormones, intimate touch, and boobs. So really, how could it not affect your sex life? Not to say that postpartum libido issues (I hesitate to call them problems since they are so natural, normal, and expected if generally unwelcome) are purely hormonal. You may be a big bag of hormones, but you’re a specific, unique sack of hormones living a unique and specific life. You have a husband, and you have rather a lot of children. There’s a lot more going on than the mere release or reception of this molecule or that.

I’ve read a ton on this subject, if not before I had these kids, then certainly since. And while most of what you see out there is common sense or nonsense, there are a few bits and bobs you may not have heard. Not everyone knows, for instance, that we all release the milk-making hormone prolactin after orgasm, producing a sensation of satiety. Even fewer people will have heard about the researchers who recently measured prolactin levels in laboratory subjects who masturbated to orgasm or had penis-vagina sex to the same end. The screwers released 400 percent more prolactin than the wankers did, possibly explaining why most people find partnered sex more satisfying than masturbation. Much work remains to be done (what about other kinds of sex with a partner? What about homo sex?), but if we in the Lactation Nation are already walking around with high levels of prolactin, which of course we are, we may already be feeling the sort of satiety that other, less milky people have to have partnered sex in order to achieve. We don’t want sex because we feel like we just had some, and the drive to go get some more is suppressed. That’s one theory, anyway.

Breast-feeding also releases oxytocin, that busy hormone with jobs ranging from stimuutf8g uterine contractions and causing your husband to start snoring so soon after sex to making prairie voles (and perhaps everyone else) bond to a partner and stick around to raise the children together. The oxytocin released at orgasm is responsible for the aaaaahhhh feeling you get as you nestle back into your beloved’s arms. It creates similar warm fuzzies at the mere touch of the right person (good hugs release oxytocin, while unwanted or merely social hugs do not). Oxytocin, of course, is released as your baby nurses, but also by just cuddling with her (or in some cases thinking about her). Again, the sensations of calm, happy, shmoopy-pie satiety, while delightful, are not exactly conducive to going out and gettin’ you some.

Add to all this the fact that your usual sex drivers, estrogen and testosterone, are at an all-time low, and the chemical basis of the "just don’t wanna" that can last as long as you keep up the nursing becomes obvious. Add to that the sleep deprivation, the ambivalent (to put it mildly, also inaccurately) feelings that many of us harbor about the changes our bodies have gone through, and the vaginal dryness, and there ya go. Death of sex. For a while. Do not despair.

Here’s my big secret program, which I hope to make some bucks selling to desperate couples: Do not feel guilty. Guilt kills sex. Do not hide or contrive to fall asleep before or after your husband, and do not lie or make excuses. All of these set up a familiar but deadly teenagerish dynamic where you own the sex but won’t be doling much, if any, out. Meanwhile, your husband is skulking around like a starving mongrel trying get whatever scraps you might drop in an unwary moment. Yuck and ew. You are grown-up partners, and you’re on the same side. Do not forget this.

Face your husband, clear-eyed. Remind him that it’s hormonal. Remind him that it will end. Encourage him to keep offering, since your proposition circuits are down at the moment. And — really important — if it doesn’t sound unappealing, take him up on it sometimes. Just because you didn’t crave it doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it. Eventually, you’ll even want it, as long as you don’t have a bunch of stupid fights about it first.

Love,

Andrea

PS A blow job wouldn’t hurt.

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Men are not men

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A couple weeks ago I gave a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science about how journalists often misreport the results of gender research because they have a lot of preconceived notions about men and women. Most of these notions come from popular culture, and since journalists are in the pop culture biz, none of this should be a big surprise.

Still, sometimes a story is so egregiously reported — and based on such flimsy research — that it takes my breath away. Such was the case with a recent Associated Press story about how a Stanford graduate student had proven that men in online virtual worlds behave just like men in real life. The story focused on a study by Nick Yee, who entered the virtual world Second Life (SL) to examine the behavior of avatars, or online representations of people. SL is an experimental virtual world where many avatars don’t have a gender. Many SL avatars are animals or fairies or geometric objects.

Nevertheless, Yee wanted to prove that men in SL act the same way psychologists say they do in real life. A few studies have shown that two men talking, on average, stand farther away from each other than women do. Yee postulated that you would see similar behaviors among male avatars in SL. By recording the interactions between several male and female avatars in various combinations, he and his research crew determined that male avatars do indeed tend to stand farther away from other male avatars than female avatars do. Thus, the AP headline crowing "Virtual Men Also Keep Distance." Ah yes, everybody loves it when science confirms their stereotypes. Even the New York Times jumped on the bandwagon, covering the study uncritically, as if it made perfect sense that men would always be men, even in a virtual space.

I was, however, extremely skeptical. First of all, as I mentioned earlier, SL is already unlike the real world in that people can pick their gender (or lack thereof). My avatar in SL is a Hapa boy with blue hair. In real life, I am a white girl with brown hair. If I were truly reflecting my alleged real-life behavior, my avatar should act like a woman since I am a woman in real life. I wrote to Yee and asked what he thought. He replied, "We are suggesting that male avatars, regardless of whether they are being controlled by male or female users, follow the social norms of men. This point isn’t elaborated in the paper because we didn’t have the right kind of data to prove this one way or another." Too bad that the AP thought he did have the data to prove that and reported it as such.

What Yee really discovered is that avatars don’t reflect social norms at all: women are acting male and vice-versa. This, I can tell you from experience, would not be viewed as the social norm in real life. Moreover, Yee admits in his scientific paper that he and his researchers basically had to guess at the genders of the avatars they met, since it’s hard to tell with many avatars. Are you getting the picture here? It’s a classic example of researchers imposing their preconceptions onto a culture that doesn’t conform to their norms. Upon encountering a society of many genders, where nongendering is part of the norm, Yee and his crew still attempted to figure out a way to find real-world gendered behavior. It’s like Margaret Mead’s work, only worse because we should know better.

Basically all Yee did was go into a virtual world whose gender norms were hard to understand and try to find ways that it reflected gender norms he did understand. He imposed his own notion of male and female on avatars who are often neither. And he topped it off by trying to map real-life body language onto the clunky movements of digital representations. Are you surprised that Yee found exactly what he wanted to prove? No, I’m not either. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who doesn’t appreciate anthropologists coming around and trying to make her world just like theirs. Yee’s study is at www.nickyee.com; the AP story can be found at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17279588.

Sorta, maybe an alcoholic

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

To read about Delancey’s finances, click here.

What exactly is Gavin Newsom doing at Delancey Street?

It’s not counseling, we’re told. It’s not rehab. It’s not detox. It’s not a typical course of treatment at the storied $20 million nonprofit. So what is it beyond a reprieve from the otherwise ugly headlines?

Newsom isn’t talking much about his program. But some mental-health professionals are raising serious questions about his regimen.

San Francisco’s chief executive declared several weeks ago in a public announcement to all the city’s department heads that he was seeking a diluted version of rehab at Delancey Street.

That struck more than a few people as odd. Delancey Street doesn’t do part-time or outpatient treatment. It only takes clients who agree to a long-term, full-time residential program geared entirely toward hardcore alcoholics, drug addicts, and criminals.

It’s not, in other words, a place where someone in Newsom’s condition would typically seek help. And it’s not a place designed to alleviate a comparatively minor thirst for white wine.

The news certainly appalled Dee-Dee Stout.

Stout is a City College of San Francisco professor and an adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University. It’s her job to train city employees working in any major capacity that involves medically treating alcohol and drug abuse, from San Francisco General Hospital to Community Behavioral Health Services to the Adult Probation Department.

Stout, a certified drug and alcohol counselor, told us friends who’d seen the headlines said, " ‘Oh god, Dee-Dee’s going to hit the roof on this one.’ And they were right."

She struggled to figure out how she could broach the subject to one of her classes at City College — but a student beat her to it, quickly pointing out that it was unethical for credentialed treatment specialists to counsel their close friends. The two-year recertification required of caseworkers in the city includes an ethics update, Stout said.

Delancey Street’s executive director, Mimi Silbert, has been Newsom’s friend since he was a child and knows his father well. Silbert, in fact, has openly discussed Newsom’s progress with the press, including the Guardian, while the mayor’s own ear-piercing silence on the matter enables him to appear repentant.

Stout decided to offer the student extra credit if he drafted a letter outlining the concerns of the class, which she had colleagues review before sending it along to the entire Board of Supervisors, the Mayor’s Office, and pretty much every major newspaper in town.

"This relationship is not acceptable under any applicable code of professional ethics," the letter states. Hardly anyone bothered to write back, save for the auto-response letters Stout received from Sophie Maxwell and the Mayor’s Office, plus a letter from Bevan Dufty urging Stout and her students to empathize with Gavin during this difficult time.

Silbert, for her part, told the Guardian that ethics weren’t a concern for her because Newsom wasn’t a full-tilt drunk and hadn’t submitted completely to a detailed treatment plan when he approached her for help.

"The mayor is not a drug addict," Silbert said. "That’s not what he was looking for…. Having stopped drinking, he wanted to take a look at himself. He drank what people would call ‘socially.’ I’ve seen other people when they stopped drinking — even people who didn’t need detox — and there were physical signs of problems. That’s not the shape the mayor was in."

The mayor is attending both group and solo counseling sessions after work each day, a schedule that Silbert told us is still ongoing.

Dannie Lee, a former Delancey Street resident we interviewed, said that during his own stay he attended group therapy three days a week and they were generally no-holds-barred sessions. Lee lived at Delancey Street for three and a half years after spending much of his adult life in California’s prison system. While the program ultimately worked for him, he insists, he’s skeptical that it could benefit anyone who’s trying to attend as an outpatient.

"Maybe it would be great if [Newsom] was actually there as a client or whatever to really sit in a circle and really share his stuff and listen to the group and let the group really attack," said the 49-year-old Lee, who today is one of Stout’s students. "That probably would be fine. But I don’t see that happening…. I think he would really have to tell things I don’t think he wants to tell."

Press accounts have depicted Delancey Street as an abrasive scrub brush for Newsom’s sinful indulgences. "No Nonsense: Toughness Key to Delancey Street, Silbert’s Success," a Chronicle headline announced Feb. 7. Silbert herself told the Guardian, "No one would come near us if they weren’t serious. I’m old, crotchety, and very direct. I have no time to waste."

That may be true — and it’s clear Delancey Street has had some remarkable success in treating people with severe self-destructive impulses.

San Francisco, on the other hand, years ago eschewed the sort of harsh treatment techniques that have made Delancey Street famous.

H. Westley Clark, director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and a one-time clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, told us that federal mental-health bureaucrats are less inclined today to fund groups that use confrontational methods for treating clients.

Any local nonprofit agency that wants to provide help to substance abusers using city money must comply with San Francisco’s harm reduction policy, which discourages hostile interview techniques and was set in stone by the San Francisco Health Commission seven years ago.

The letter from Stout’s class points out that treatment professionals are moving away from tough-love verbal upbraids such as those employed by the Delancey Street model.

" ‘Attack therapy’ often involves yelling at patients who have, in our view, a medical condition…. While we realize that some patients are helped by strong, confrontational methods, we believe that an evidence-based approach offers more consistent successful results."

Silbert’s techniques may be controversial, but she does move easily among Democratic Party rainmakers and philanthropists. Delancey Street enjoys wide popularity with the likes of Robert Redford, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Washington-based Eisenhower Foundation, and executives at the Gap, Pottery Barn, and Bank of America.

Silbert said the mayor deserves credit for whatever help he chooses to pursue. Other prominent friends of Delancey Street have called her before when they needed to "tune themselves up."

"I would never choose to criticize other people’s approaches, so I’m sorry if people are criticizing ours," she said. "We work hard. We do our best…. I’m glad these people feel they have a definitive answer. I don’t, and I’ve been doing it for 35 years."

If Newsom, as Silbert says, isn’t a serious alcoholic, Delancey Street is a peculiar place for him to seek help.

Most people entering the program have hit rock bottom, a step away from death or lifelong incarceration. They’re one-time prostitutes, drug pushers, robbers, and ruthless bangers. Since the organization was formed in the 1970s, it claims to have transformed the lives of 14,000 people through vocational and education assistance in addition to group counseling.

Very few of those people come in for the sort of casual treatment Newsom is seeking. In fact, Delancey Street typically doesn’t accept anyone who isn’t planning on spending a couple years in residence.

Residents living at the Embarcadero Triangle provide labor for several businesses that buoy the nonprofit financially, from its famous Delancey Street Restaurant to a national moving and trucking service.

Newsom for the most part is refusing to answer questions about his now-public battle with booze.

But Stout suggests that Newsom, by allowing the entirety of his treatment to appear on a marquee, has brought the publicity on himself. "Frankly, I don’t think it’s any of our business if he goes to treatment," Stout said. "I wish he would have just quietly gone and did what he needed to do and said he just had some medical things he needed to take care of, period." *

The Wild, Wild West

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› amanda@sfbg.com

As a production assistant for a visual effects studio, Robert Seeley had a job at the Orphanage that was nuts and bolts for the movie industry — handling paperwork, overseeing schedules, arranging deliveries, and making sure folks were fed, clients were happy, and many of the million little logistics for a film project were coordinated.

His days began with an hour-long commute from Pleasant Hill to the Presidio, where the Orphanage is based. Mornings started around 9, and the typical workday ran about 10 hours. Or it did when he started there, in July 2006.

"There was a snowball effect. It started out as a regular 10-hour workday. It slowly built to 12, then 16," Seeley told the Guardian.

At one point, Seeley charges, he was asked to work a 20-hour shift — and return to work two and a half hours later. When he didn’t come in, he was fired.

Seeley sued, and the case was eventually settled. But along the way, the lawyers for the Orphanage raised a startling argument: since the Presidio is a federal enclave, they said, California labor law, which restricts the length of shifts, doesn’t apply.

"This was a really straightforward, meat and potatoes case," Seeley’s lawyer, Steve Sommers, told the Guardian. "And if he worked across the street, it would have been a slam dunk."

If the legal argument advanced by the studio as a response to Seeley’s lawsuit is right — and some labor experts say it may very well be — then none of the private companies that lease space at the Presidio have to follow any state or local labor laws. That means no California or San Francisco minimum wage, no workplace safety statutes, nothing. And since state law is generally far tougher than federal law, the difference could be profound.

There are hundreds of people working for private companies in the Presidio, which operates under a unique arrangement that allows private, commercial development in a national park.

Federal regulations are almost always weaker than California’s — and not necessarily improving. "Federal laws are evolving backwards for the most part," said Katie Quan, associate chair for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley. "There have been attempts to weaken benefits, Social Security, who can and can’t join unions. Even the new minimum wage that’s been passed — there’s a big question as to whether or not [George W.] Bush will sign it."

While California’s minimum wage is $7.50 and San Francisco’s is $9.14, the federal hourly rate is currently $5.15 — and arguably the only one that applies in the Presidio.

Several employment lawyers contacted by us initially suggested that California’s labor statutes would have to apply in the Presidio, but Chris Cannon, a lawyer familiar with the situation, did not.

"I’ve gotten a lot of people acquitted on a criminal basis applying that same validity," he said of the cases the Orphanage’s lawyers used to back up their argument. "It’s like a little piece of Nevada here in California."

Cannon has litigated several cases in the Presidio, most notably on the controversial issue of where and when dogs can be off leash. "Given the history of the Presidio, I think there’s a very good argument that California laws don’t apply."

It’s easy to extrapolate that nothing that’s been passed in Sacramento or at City Hall would apply to the Presidio, including the recent universal health care plan passed by the Board of Supervisors and the paid sick-leave that voters approved.

The upshot: the author of the bill establishing the Presidio park, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is a big favorite of organized labor, may have created a place where private employers can freely flout state and local laws designed to protect workers.

Lieutenant Jeff Wasserman of the US Park Police, which has exclusive jurisdiction over the Presidio, said, "We only have to follow federal laws. However, the US attorney has in the past asked us to adhere to state laws simply because they think it’s the right thing to do."

One of Wasserman’s examples involved a California law that speed limits may only be adjusted based on recommendations from a traffic engineer, which was established to prevent cops from setting speed traps. To Wasserman’s knowledge, California is the only state with this restriction, and it’s been extended to the Presidio. "The US Attorney felt that it was fair that if the surrounding streets followed it, we should too." He added that juvenile arrests in the Presidio have also stood up in local courts because the federal laws are so weak in that regard.

Two dozen companies contacted by us were asked questions regarding employment protocol, and all said they paid San Francisco’s minimum wage or better and insisted they followed both federal and state labor laws. The largest employer in the Presidio, LucasFilm, did not respond to the questions.

Carsten Sorensen, CEO of the Orphanage, said, "We follow the letter of the law. We were told by our attorneys, being in the Presidio, we fall under the federal labor law."

He did say, "Of course we want our employees to be safe and do whatever we can to make sure that happens. There’s no chronic issue of people who are dissatisfied with the working conditions."

But in responding to the lawsuit, his company didn’t even try to defend its practices. Instead, Judith Droz Keyes, a lawyer with the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, argued in a Jan. 24 letter that "California has no jurisdiction either to legislate or enforce its laws within the federal enclave. The fact that the Orphanage is a private company leasing space within the Presidio makes no difference."

The Presidio Trust — the semiprivate agency that manages the park — did not respond to requests for comment, and it’s unclear how the outfit treats its own workers. Discrimination based on sexual orientation, for example, is not a part of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity laws, but it is a part of California’s, and even the Presidio Trust’s own personnel manual mandates it.

To require anything definitive and absolute would take an act of Congress to mandate the Presidio adhere to state or local ordinances. We tried to reach Pelosi’s office to ask about it, but she didn’t return our calls.

In the meantime, Sommers said, "The Presidio Trust could insist that all vendors abide by California state labor laws. Then large employers in the Presidio would have to treat their workers like citizens of California." *

Law enforcement’s real battles

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OPINION In order to be smart on crime, law enforcement needs to make important choices about where to focus our resources. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has been making poor choices, and those choices are hitting home in San Francisco.

Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted raids in San Francisco and around the Bay Area, rounding up immigrants at their jobs and schools, in some instances with ICE agents announcing themselves as police. These actions sow fear in the immigrant community among undocumented and documented residents alike.

The raids conducted in San Francisco present many of us in local law enforcement with a great concern. One of law enforcement’s biggest challenges to protecting crime victims in immigrant communities is encouraging them to come forward. Because immigrants are often afraid to report crimes, they can be regarded as easy targets for violent criminals and con artists.

We all suffer when crime victims are isolated from law enforcement. If victims and witnesses do not report crimes or cooperate with law enforcement, criminals remain on the streets, and all of us are put at risk. That is why my office is holding immigrant resource fairs in the Mission District and Chinatown to support immigrant rights and to make clear to community members that they are protected by San Francisco’s Sanctuary Ordinance and that my office will not report them to ICE when they come forward as witnesses or victims of crime. Rather than driving immigrants deeper into the shadows, we need to encourage those who have been victimized by crime to work with us to hold criminals accountable.

At the same time, the US Justice Department is walking down an ominous path by threatening journalists with prison time when they protect their confidential sources. In San Francisco the US attorney has held journalist Josh Wolf in prison since September 2006. Wolf should be released. For very good reasons, 31 states, including California, have shield laws upholding the rights of journalists to protect the secrecy of their sources and unpublished information. We need a federal shield law as well.

Of course, I believe crimes against police officers should be aggressively prosecuted. But I also believe that federal authorities have an obligation to respect the First Amendment. Free speech rights are critical to the work of journalists, university researchers, organized labor, and all of us in a democracy. The Justice Department should recognize the importance of protecting free speech, not only as constitutional and civil liberties issues but as smart public safety policy. Journalists play a key role in connecting us to individuals with information about crimes, and threatening the confidentiality of their sources has a chilling effect. If sources fear their confidentiality will not be protected, they will be less likely to come forward to journalists with information that could expose corruption or assist us in solving violent crimes.

Cities across the country are grappling with serious gang violence. Precious resources should be focused on addressing violence, gun crime, and major white-collar crime, not wasted on prosecuting journalists and conducting immigration raids that sweep up innocent residents, actions that hinder our efforts to build trusting relationships with vulnerable, victimized communities and keep the public safe. *

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is the San Francisco district attorney.

Fix early warning for cops

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Police Commission has finally approved a long-overdue plan to monitor problem cops — but the Police Officers Association managed to get it watered down to the point where it won’t be terribly effective. The whole sorry episode was an example of how the POA has been running roughshod over the Police Department and undermining even basic disciplinary procedures.

The commission has been talking about this for four years now, ever since the American Civil Liberties Union and the Controller’s Office released scathing reports outlining the city’s failure to monitor problem officers and identify cops who were prone to violent behavior.

The idea is simple (and it’s worked successfully in plenty of other cities): there are well-established patterns of behavior and performance signals that tend to be associated with police officers likely to get into trouble. The San Francisco system will track uses of force, citizen complaints, police-abuse lawsuits, officer-involved shootings, on-duty accidents, and vehicle pursuits and allow the department to do early intervention with any officer who seems to be developing violent or reckless behavior.

But that ignores two other key indicators — cases in which criminal charges are dismissed because of officer misconduct and cases in which the cops charge citizens with resisting arrest. If an officer is involved in an unusually large number of these sorts of cases, it’s a clear sign of potential trouble, Samuel Walker, a criminologist who’s a national expert on early-intervention systems, told the commission.

The POA, however, helped write the plan — and refused to allow those criteria to be included. The union also made sure that the tracking system can’t be used in considering whether an officer is promoted, disciplined, or allowed to train other cops. In other words, the Police Department can’t use its own data for what would seem to be standard management practices. In fact, POA officials threatened to sue the city if the commission made any effort to tighten the tracking program.

The system is hardly punitive to the cops. The first two times it triggers a red flag, the officer’s supervisor can use the information for closer monitoring — or can simply review the findings and determine there isn’t a real problem. Only after a third warning sign does the officer have to undergo counseling.

A good early-warning system can prevent police violence and abuse, and by weeding out problem officers before they do something that leads to a major lawsuit, it can save the city a lot of money. But the real point here is that the commission and the chief — not the police union — should be making decisions about management policy.

This program won’t go into effect until the end of the year; there’s still plenty of time for the commission to send it back for amendments without buckling to the demands of a rogue police union that has already done tremendous damage to the department’s reputation. Commissioner David Campos, to his credit, was the lone vote against it; the other members of the panel should follow his lead.*

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s funny: the transcontinental railroad was born in San Francisco, and it transformed California. But the West Coast has pretty much lost the train thing. You want to go from here to Los Angeles, there are pretty much two choices: you can fly or you can drive. In theory, you can ride Amtrak, and I’ve done it, but it doesn’t run very often and takes about 12 hours. Fun, if you like that sort of thing, but not at all practical.

But on an early Sunday morning last week, I was traveling from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia, and between 8 a.m. and noon there were about half a dozen trains running on that route. The high-speed Acela got me to Philly in 90 minutes, downtown to downtown, way faster than I could drive. Another hour or so, and I could have been in Manhattan.

There are flights from Washington, DC, to New York, but these days it seems kind of silly to fly: by the time you arrive at the airport, get through security, go up, go down, deplane, and get from the airport to the city, you’re well beyond three hours. The train’s way cheaper too.

Yeah, I love trains (actual legroom, no seat belt signs, scenery, bar cars), so I’m biased, but it seems silly that California is spending billions of dollars on highway projects (including a new bore for the Caldecott Tunnel, a colossal waste if there ever were one), and we still aren’t talking seriously about high-speed rail to Los Angeles, which would probably bring more environmental and economic benefits than all of the other transportation projects in the state put together.

There are plenty of reasons to wring your hands over Assemblymember Mark Leno’s decision to challenge incumbent state senator Carole Migden in 2008. The race will almost certainly be bitter and ugly; both sides have an incentive to go negative. It could split the queer community, leave progressives wondering whom to support, and turn political allies into enemies.

Or maybe it won’t: I wonder if San Francisco’s progressive community is mature enough today to handle this without any bad long-term impacts. Some of the city’s left leaders will back Leno, and some will back Migden, but in the end, neither one of these candidates is the enemy, and if everyone keeps a sense of perspective (the way we were able to do in the District 5 race in 2004), it doesn’t have to be a bloodbath.

I realize that Leno is running in part because of term limits, which might not be the most noble of motivations. And I’m against term limits. But there’s actually a reason to be happy about this race: it’s a demonstration that old-style machine politics is dead in San Francisco.

Ten years ago this race would never have happened. Willie Brown was in charge — really in charge — and no local Democrat would have dared to defy his will. Brown didn’t like contested races between Democrats, and he would have told one of the two candidates to back off, and that would have been that.

We live in a different political world now. Mayor Gavin Newsom will probably support Leno, but he has way too much on his mind right now to be involved in any kind of backroom deal. Neither Migden nor Leno has the kind of clout to scare the other away, and nobody else in this town does either.

Democracy isn’t always pretty, but after living under the machine for a couple of decades, I find this almost refreshing. *

Newsom needs to come clean

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EDITORIAL It’s no surprise that Mayor Gavin Newsom doesn’t want to answer any more questions about his affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk. The polls suggest that most of the voters have either forgiven him or never really cared in the first place, so it’s in his interest to move on and try to keep this from becoming a campaign issue.

And if it were just about sex, that would be fine with us too.

But from the start this sordid episode had some bad elements that are every bit a matter of public interest. Rippey-Tourk wasn’t just the wife of one of Newsom’s friends; she was an employee of the city, and in a not so indirect way, Newsom was her boss. And with the evidence that has surfaced that Rippey-Tourk was paid $21,755 for work she didn’t do, including paid leave for the time she was in rehab (something other city employees don’t get), there are real questions that the mayor needs to answer.

Let’s run down the situation, as far as we can establish it:

• Rippey-Tourk and Newsom had an affair in 2005. That year she had 7 1/2 weeks of unpaid leave — a benefit that is not part of the standard package offered to city employees and not in any union contract.

• In May 2006, Rippey-Tourk went into substance abuse rehab and was out of work until July. She was still listed on the city payroll until Sept. 1, when she was cut a check for $10,155. Ultimately, she was paid for 13 1/2 weeks (or 67 1/2 days) of unpaid leave. She was entitled to 10 vacation days and 13 sick days. That leaves 44 1/2 days that she didn’t work and technically shouldn’t have been paid for.

• The Mayor’s Office says other city employees donated their unused vacation and sick time to her. It’s perfectly legal under city policy for employees to donate their paid time to a colleague who has to take a leave for a catastrophic, life-threatening illness. But alcohol and drug rehab don’t typically fall into that category.

• The law says the Department of Public Health must certify that a city employee faces an actual life-threatening illness before the catastrophic leave policy comes into play. And the employee’s supervisor has to sign off on the decision.

So somebody at the DPH must have approved a leave for a worker who almost certainly didn’t qualify, and Rippey-Tourk’s immediate supervisor at the time, then–chief of staff Steve Kava, had to have gone along.

It doesn’t take much speculation to figure out what likely went on here: Newsom had his chief of staff give an employee who had slept with the mayor a benefit that other city employees don’t get, and the director of public health, who (more or less) reports to the mayor, went along with it. And a bunch of city money was involved.

So far nobody at City Hall will answer questions about how this happened, saying that it’s a matter of employee privacy. We agree that Rippey-Tourk (the real victim in all this) has been through plenty, and the public has no business examining her medical records. But the mayor has made a nasty mess of the situation, and he can’t be allowed to just skate away without explaining whether his office in effect paid hush money out of the public till to someone he had treated shabbily — and who had strong legal grounds to sue the city and deeply embarrass the mayor in an election year.

If Newsom would show up at a Board of Supervisors meeting, the way he’s supposed to, and answer questions, the public might glean a bit more information. But he’s refusing — and while the City Attorney’s Office is conducting a confidential investigation, that’s not good enough.

The supervisors should launch their own investigation — and they need to demand to see the key documents, talk to the key players (starting with Newsom, Kava, and Public Health Director Mitch Katz), and determine if the mayor violated city law and then tried to cover it up. The budget analyst, Harvey Rose, should be directed to investigate the use of city money here — and whether this practice is going on anywhere else in the city. It won’t be easy — but the supervisors have the legal authority to issue subpoenas, and while that power is rarely used, this might be an occasion that justifies it.

The cover-up is almost always worse than the crime — and if Newsom and his senior aides won’t tell the truth about what happened, there is going to be serious fallout. *

Bad day for board conservatives

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By Steven T. Jones
Sup. Sean Elsbernd is the smartest conservative on the Board of Supervisors, but he may now be regretting his latest effort to challenge city spending. This afternoon, he took issue with a $642,000 budget appropriation intended to offset federal cuts in funding for AIDS programs. Given the city’s commitment to provide universal health care this year, Elsbernd said, “We need to be very cognizant of how we spend Department of Public Health money.” He wasn’t convinced that the programs actually needed the money, a stand that drew impassioned replies from several supervisors in defense of the city’s barely adequate response to this deadly epidemic. Ultimately, only newbie Sup. Ed Jew joined Elsbernd in voting against giving more money to help fight AIDS in San Francisco, a stand that probably took more balls than brains.
It wasn’t a banner day for the board conservatives. Jew also lost on his effort to send back to committee a proposal by Sup. Jake McGoldrick to ask the Municipal Transportation Agency to reduce the price of MUNI Fast Passes for 18-24 year olds. On Feb. 21, Jew and McGoldrick were the only members present on the City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee because Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier was absent once again. The two men deadlocked on whether to pass the measure on the full board, so McGoldrick later exercised his right to get the signatures of three other supervisors and call the measure to the full board. This prompted Jew to write a petulant commentary in today’s Examiner. McGoldrick was willing to continue the matter for a week (which the board ultimately did) so there wouldn’t be an appearance of trying to avoid a full public debate, but Jew and Alioto-Pier insisted on sending it back to committee. It was a fairly audacious stand for Alioto-Pier, who has by far the worst attendance record on the board, but hardly surprising. Jew, for his part, once again proved himself a quixotic and ineffective rookie. But hopefully he’s learning his lessons.

Fighters in City Hall

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By Steven T. Jones
San Francisco City Hall hosted a different breed of fighters today as boxers Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather held a high-profile press conference for their May 5 bout in Las Vegas. The event was open to the public and hundreds of boxing fans seized the opportunity to take part in the spectacle, including Sal Anguiano, who traveled from Los Banos to start the line at 7 a.m. for the noon event. Like a majority of the crowd, Anguiano was rooting for De La Hoya and predicted his boy would knock the mouthy Mayweather out in the third round. While Mayweather spoke, the crowd broke into a chant of “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar.” A highly animated Mayweather, wearing a long sleeved brown shirt and huge crucifix made of diamonds, clowned his way through event, taunting the crowd and De La Hoya, promising to “beat his ass” and even shoving his opponent at one point. But De La Hoya, dressed in sweater and sharp gray suit, was all class, absorbing the taunts and saving his attacks for the ring. “Come May 5, I will be in the best shape of my life,” said De La Hoya, a 10-time world champion from East LA who is a cult hero, especially among Latinos. “He is considered the best fighter pound for pound, and come May 5, I’ll be ready for it.”

Making Lemonade of the Chron’s Lemon

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By Sarah Phelan

It’s hard to stay in the public eye when you’re stuck in jail and denied in-person and on-camera interviews, as freelance journalist Josh Wolf has been for the over six months. So, I have to give it to Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders for reminding everyone of Josh Wolf’s plight, even if what I really have to give Saunders is a Lemon Award.

Saunders tries to spin Wolf’s case with the old smear that Wolf isn’t really a journalist. It’s a spin that began in the SFPD and the US Attorney General’s Office, as the Bay Guardian discovered months ago, but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The minute Wolf sold his footage to KRON-TV, his work qualified as news. And journalism is about gathering and spreading the news, not sitting in a corporate headquarters and drawing a pay check to write spin.

Saunders also tries to smear Wolf by belittling his efforts to tell stories compared to those of “real journalists, such as the Chronicle’s Lance Williams and Mark Fairanu-Wada.” If Saunders is going to refer to the whole “confidentiality source agreement” business, then maybe she should remind readers of the whole sordid story behind that affair.

Next, she tries to smears Wolf case by accusing the Board of Supervisors of not having done everything they could to find out who attacked Officer Peter Shields, who was out of work for a year after his skull was fractured during the protest that Wolf filmed. Too bad, she didn’t figure out that
investigators have federalized the case on bogus grounds: there was no arson of a police car, just a broken taillight. But, hey, how else were they gonna get around California’s reporter shield laws. (Other than by claiming that Wolf wasn’t a journalist.)

Finally, Saunders tries to smear Wolf with a bait and switch: apparently, this isn’t about an attack on a cop. It’s about an attack on a gay man. Last time, we checked, Wolf did not attack any cops, straight or gay. Nor did he film the attack in question. What he did film was the other officer beating up an anarchist. But who cares about the truth when you’re busy spinning?

The only thing that seems to concern Saunders about Wolf being caged is that it’s costing tax payers dollars. Yeah. Along with trying to turn Wolf into an investigative tool of the government and chill dissent in the process. But who cares about free speech?

So, thanks, Saunders, for reminding us about Wolf. Enjoy the lemonade.

NOISE: An A for the A Team

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Guardian intern Sam Devine shares his latest obsession:

ateam.jpg

So I’ve been listening to the newly reissued A-Team soundtrack while at work. Which, yes, is probably dangerous. I feel more afraid of flying and I could go for a cheap cigar if pair of leather driving gloves were provided.

But mostly, as I hear the A-Team‘s theme repeated over and over, set against various cliché ’70s arrangements, I can’t help but think: This is the best possible combined rip-off of the Temptations and Aaron Copland that could ever be imagined!

The A-Team‘s main theme is a driving snare drum and bombastic, uplifting, horns followed by ornamental swells from the strings. Likewise, in “Rodeo” by Aaron Copland, the main theme is driving percussion and bombastic, uplifting, horns followed by ornamental swells from the strings.

In a similar sense, the A-Team‘s countertheme is such a direct lift from “Get Ready (‘Cause Here I Come),” by the Temptations, that you can almost hear Paul Williams singing, “I never met a girl who makes me feel / The way that you do (you’re alright!)”

Just think – A-Team composers Mike Post & Pete Carpenter were able to squeeze out five seasons worth of soundtrack material just by pairing a piece of 20th century composition with a bit of classic Motown. Makes me want to try writing a symphony based around selections of Bela Bartok and Diana Ross.

I hope it works out. I love when a plan comes together.

PG&E is radioactive

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By Tim Redmond

A couple weeks ago, we gave Mark Leno a little slap for showing up to celebrate Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s solar project at the LGBT Center. Today, Beyond Chron is whacking Carole Migden for being too frinedly with PG&E.

The nice side of all of this: It clear that both candidates consider PG&E to be politically radioactive, and simply proximity can breed political fallout. It’s about time.

A little help from their friends

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The San Francisco Chronicle’s intrepid reporters have insisted repeatedly in recent weeks that the Delancey Street Foundation accepts absolutely no government funds. “Instead, it relies on donations and the profits from its commercial enterprises,” San Francisco’s paper of record wrote on Feb. 6.

A simple search of the city’s vendor database, however, confirms that several local agencies in San Francisco paid Delancey Street amounts totaling well over $1 million for the last two fiscal years alone. The Department of Children, Youth & Their Families gave Delancey Street $98,000 in program grants for each of the last two fiscal years and by the end of 2007 will have given the nonprofit more than $300,000.

And the mayor’s office gave Delancey Street $435,000 in fiscal year 2006 and $483,000 in 2005, the records show.

The city has paid the foundation more than $200,000 so far this year, and there’s another $64,000 in outstanding payments. The Guardian obtained copies of the grant agreements through sunshine requests made last week.

Mayor Newsom is receiving “counseling” for a self-diagnosed excessive love of white wine from Delancey Street’s politically well-connected executive director, Mimi Silbert, who has known Newsom and his family for years.

The foundation’s easily accessible federal tax forms reflect the hundreds of thousands in annual government dollars paid to Delancey Street.

After local blogger Michael Petrelis began contesting the claims, a Chronicle reporter clarified for Petrelis following a call to Silbert that grant money from the city supports a charter school on Treasure Island called the Life Learning Academy. The academy is managed by Delancey Street and targets troublesome teens – half of them on probation – who have had problems elsewhere in the school district. Silbert told us that the school was designed in part to emulate Delancey Street by operating businesses like its organic produce subscription service and bike maintenance shop.

She said, as Delancey Street has for years, that program residents living at the nonprofit’s Embarcadero Street headquarters depend on one another to keep the place operating through its variety of undertakings.

“We structured it without a staff and without day-to-day funding so that people could help each other,” Silbert said. “And it’s in the helping of each other that you begin to find your strength. And since they run the organization and go from department to department to department, they eventually find what they are good at.”

But there’s more. According to Delancey Street’s tax forms and deed records maintained by the county recorder, the Mayor’s Office of Housing facilitated a $4 million loan for Delancey Street in 1989 using city money to help with the construction of its sprawling residential and commercial center on the Embarcadero, which cost $20 million to build, not including donated labor. As long as Delancey Street complied with a series of terms, the loan, plus interest, would be forgiven after 20 years. Free government money, in other words.

The city’s mayor at that time was Art Agnos. Delancey Street leveraged $18 million more through the private sector to cover the rest of its construction costs for the Embarcadero Triangle Project, according to its tax forms.

They did so using a cash-generating scheme known as a “leaseback” agreement. A third party purchased the property for $18.7 million paid to Delancey Street and also covered the expense of the $4 million loan made by the city. The whole transaction took place only on paper, and in exchange, the third party got to take advantage of the property’s low-income housing tax credits by technically owning 600 Embarcadero St. while the nonprofit continued to operate Delancey Street at the location.

Silbert wields far-reaching connections inside the Democratic Party and among moneyed philanthropists including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen Dianne Feinstein and even Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair. When Silbert announced plans to expand nationally, Delancey Street’s longtime supporter, Feinstein, vowed to secure a $1 million grant from the U.S. Justice Department to help in the effort, according to a 2002 LA Times profile of the organization.

The foundation is headquartered in a burnt umber stucco building on Embarcadero Street fringed with decorative iron gates and planters beneath French-style windows. Overlaying the property is a grid of sun-baked courtyards. Its design complies neatly with the principles of New Urbanism encouraged in the northeastern neighborhood with a walkable row of ground-floor businesses and densely packed dwellings. According to lore, it was built entirely by residents of Delancey Street.

If you didn’t know it was a treatment center, frankly, you’d mistake it for another of the innumerable yuppie enclaves that have sprouted in the neighborhood over the last two decades.

Five hundred residents live on site and conduct all of the program’s day-to-day operations as part of their commitment to an intensive two-year program. They provide labor for several Delancey Street businesses that buoy the nonprofit, from its famous Delancey Street Restaurant to a national moving and trucking service.

Leaseback agreements, such as the one entered into by Delancey Street to build its hub on the Embarcadero, are a common financing mechanism for low-income housing construction. But the forgivable loan from the city shows that a little sleuthing on the part of reporters would have gone a long way in confirming the extent of the nonprofit’s professed independence

Who will be with Leno at the kickoff?

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By Tim Redmond

That’s the question all over San Francisco politics now that Leno has announced he’s running against state Sen. Carole Migden. His campaign kickoff is at noon this Friday, at YBC, and it will be the first sign of what sort of support he’s been able to line up.

The people who show up will risk infuriating Migden, which is nothing to trifle at (and will make it tougher for city officials, who have to work with her on legislation). Leno is much calmer and milder, but he’ll also remember who his friends are (and aren’t).

Sup. Tom Ammiano, who is running for Leno’s seat (with the endorsement of both Leno and Migden) tells me he’s staying neutral. It would be hard for him to do anything else at this point. But soon, lots of local politicos are going to have to take sides, then live with it for a year as the race gets hotter and hotter.

Friday is Opening Day. Let’s see who comes out to play.

SF Democrats and the war

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By Tim Redmond

The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee is going to vote Feb. 28th on a resolution against the war. That shouldn’t be a big deal; everyone in San Francisco is against the war, right?

But the resolution, by Rafael Mandelman, Robert Haaland, and Michael Goldstein, does more than oppose the war; it calls on the Democratic leadership in Congress — that’s our own Nancy Pelosi — to overturn the resolution authorizing the president to use force and to cut off all funding for further hostilities, “except as necessary to provide for the safe and orderly withdrawal of all troops in Iraq.”

It ought to be a slam dunk in this city, but I bet there will be some strong opposition to the resolution — from people who fear embarassing or confronting Pelosi.

Crazy: This doesn’t hurt Pelosi a bit. In fact, it gives her leverage with the moderates in her party to say that back home, her constituents are demanding action.

This ought to go to a roll-call vote; I’ll keep you posted on how it comes out.

Will they have to cancel Easter?

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By Tim Redmond

About 20 years ago, a group of crazed anarchists put out a parody of a major national newspaper with a banner headline that read:

EASTER CANCELLED! CHRIST’S BODY FOUND!

I can’t quote the exact language of the story, since that was way back when, but it read just like a standard New York Times report, except that it focused on how several major world religions had been thrown into chaos by the news that Jesus’s bady had been found — something that undermined one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity, the ressurection of Christ.

To a Catholic-school kid like me, it was funny largely because the Roman Catholic Church was, and is, so utterly paranoid about any historical evidence that might cast doubt on any of the scared rules of the church. (Most biblical historians, for example, agree that Jesus never said anything about priests being celebate or women being unable to serve as priests; that comes from medieval popes, who were not always a savory bunch.)

So I loved the Da Vinci Code, and I loved Cross Bones, just as I’ve always loved discussions about the historic arcania of Jesus, the Holy Family and the Popes. And now I love this.

I’ve already read a few books and articles that get into the Jesus Cave — the idea that archeologists have found bodies in a cave that may be Jesus, Mary Magdelene and their son (think about it: If Jesus had a son, presumably — immaculate-conception powers aside — he had sex, which would means this whole celebate priest thing would be utterly bogus).

But this documentary is getting a fair amount of blog press; my fave is the argument that James Cameron wasn’t satisfied with sinking the Titanic; he now wants to sink Christianity

Go team.

PS: My colleague Cheryl Eddy worries that if Easter is cancelled, she’ll have to stock up quicly on Peeps.

A party pooper’s thoughts on ‘Inland Empire’

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by Jason Shamai

Sitting in the theater the other night, it was with both great relief and great sadness that I realized I felt zero obligation to work out what was going on in David Lynch’s Inland Empire. The movie practically dares you to be stupid enough to try, so I didn’t. At first all I felt was the relief — what a pleasure to let the movie’s New Orleans funeral procession of words, sounds, images, and performances roll along without having to ask the left side of my brain to do anything. By the halfway point, though, I was starting to feel cheated, either by my lack of a certain kind of attention, or whatever was missing from the film that justified that lack, or both.

David Lynch.jpg
Hey Lynch — Shamai has you on notice.

NOISE: Biggest little city, Taiwanese pop, Who are you…

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Who knew Reno was the bowling capital of the US of A? This after catching the new feature film Reno 911: Miami (below), which proved to be something of a laugh riot earlier this week.

reno911.jpg

Right now I’m hanging in Reno, catching the Who at the Reno Event Center (more long-tressed gray-hairs in one spot, perusing Who souvenir booklets, than I’ve seen since, well, ever, ’cause I’ve never seen the Who live before) and Taiwanese pop star Tsai Chin tonight, Feb. 24, at Grand Sierra Resort and Casino (more Chinese families in one spot than I’ve seen since, well, the last SF Lunar New Year parade), and checking the resort’s 24-hour 40-something bowling alley. But lo, today I happened to stumble over the city’s National Bowling Stadium.

bowling stadium.bmp

A giant silver ball dome, a hundred lanes, a crazy Remington-style bronze statue featuring, not wild horses or cowboys, but Pippi Longstocking-esque bowlers zanily swinging bowling bags. Guys with guts swinging balls. Visions of The Big Lebowski rumble through the skull.

San Francisco’s erupting skyline

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San Francisco has always been a city defined by its hills and the bay. Our city has an image and character in its urban pattern that depend especially on views, topography, streets, building form, and major landscaping.

The bay is a focus of major views. Hills allow the city to be seen and, more than any other feature, produce a variety that is characteristic of San Francisco. This pattern — a visual relationship to hills and the bay — gives the city “an image, a sense of purpose,” according to the 1971 Urban Design Plan.

Since then it has been official city policy to recognize and protect this relationship.

In the last four years, Rincon Hill developers negotiated with two planning directors — Gerald Green and Dean Macris — to allow towers up to 550 feet tall between Folsom Street and the Bay Bridge. Nine have already been approved. Two under construction are already visible on the skyline. More are on their way. The Rincon Hill towers will be higher than the top of the bridge towers. Views of the bridge towers from Dolores Park, upper Market Street, and Twin Peaks are literally being eliminated.

The remnants of the Urban Design Plan are in tatters because developers and planning staff want to eviscerate height limits south of Market to create an artificial hill of residential towers up to 100 stories tall from Market to the bridge approach. Their avowed rationale is to develop a transit terminal at First and Mission streets — a terminal with a multibillion-dollar funding shortfall.

And all of this is happening under the political radar.

When staffers made their one and only presentation to the Planning Commission about this new mega-high-rise district, the meeting was not broadcast or even filmed. And this was for a presentation that depended on visuals.

Who will live in these towers? Empty nesters who can afford multimillion condos and people with multiple homes around the country and world.

The Planning Department claims these will be vital new neighborhoods. But they won’t be for families with children or government employees or hospitality industry workers or artists. They won’t be for people working in San Francisco who are trapped in a daily two-hour commute because housing costs are out of sight. They won’t be for the people working in San Francisco who are most in need of moderately priced housing.

There won’t be a single new housing unit for low- or moderate-income people in the new Rincon Hill. Every single developer opted to not build on-site affordable units.

What happens when people crossing the Bay Bridge can no longer see the hills in the center of the city? When people in the city face a wall of buildings so high even the Bay Bridge towers can’t be seen?

Entrances — such as the Bay Bridge — are important for a sense of orientation to the city. Blocking street views of the bay, distant hills, or other parts of the city can destroy an important characteristic of the unique setting and quality of the city.

Since the Gold Rush, people have come to San Francisco to make their fortunes. There is constant tension between those who want to make money off our city and those who want to live in the city.

San Francisco tore down the Embarcadero because it cut the city off from the bay. Now we are erecting another, much higher barrier. To the barricades!

Sue Hestor

Sue Hestor is a lawyer and activist specializing in land use and environmental issues.

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