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Shifting gears

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

Bicyclists throughout the city cheered as the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board unanimously approved 45 new bike-network improvement projects June 26, a move that was hailed as a major step forward for cyclist safety on city streets and a win for the environment.

In a historic decision, SFMTA accepted the findings of an environmental impact review associated with the long-stalled San Francisco Bike Plan and green-lighted almost all of its near-term project proposals, a decision that could trigger the construction of 34 new miles of bike lanes throughout the city starting as early as August.

Plans also call for innovative improvements such as colored bike lanes, converting on-street parking spaces from cars to bikes, thousands of new bike racks, and an effort to ramp up education about safety for bicyclists and motorists. Three years after a court injunction came down on bike-network improvements in the wake of a lawsuit for failing to conduct a full EIR, the board’s vote was widely applauded as a pivotal moment for bicycling in San Francisco. Now that the EIR has been adopted, the process of lifting the injunction has been set in motion.

The vote followed more than three hours of testimony from avid San Francisco cyclists, who asked for more bike lanes and greater accessibility for would-be bicyclists such as children and seniors. Fewer than 20 people turned out in opposition and most people on the thumbs-down side voiced their general support for enhanced bike lanes, but took issue with some flawed aspects of one of the projects.

For a comprehensive design that could ultimately remove more than 2,000 parking spaces from city streets to accommodate bicycle infrastructure, there was remarkably little discussion about the loss of parking.

An old familiar debate about bikes vs. cars continues to grind away — but even Mayor Gavin Newsom called this squabble a thing of the past, touting the Bike Plan as progress for San Francisco and focusing his comments at a press conference on sustainability and livability instead the competition for space on city streets.

IF YOU BUILD IT …


Moments after the MTA Board announced its decision, a crowd of die-hard bike enthusiasts from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition exchanged hugs and congratulations outside the City Hall hearing room. The vote was hailed as a major, hard-won victory.

"This is a momentous day for better bicycling and a better San Francisco," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the 10,000-member organization. The city "has taken a significant step forward in proving its commitment to smart, sustainable transportation choices, and we expect to see the numbers of people choosing to bicycle to increase dramatically."

Still, there are undoubtedly some who only expect to experience a dramatic increase in frustration when looking for a parking space. There are 880 lane-miles of streets in San Francisco’s roadway network, and according to SFMTA spokesman Judson True, a total of 880 parking spaces throughout the city would’ve been removed if the MTA Board had approved all 46 Bike Plan projects. (The board okayed 45 out of 46 projects; the hotly debated Second Street project, which would have stripped out a handful of parking spaces to accommodate bike lanes, was continued for further study.)

Amid the hundreds of pages of comments submitted during the EIR process was a complaint that the Bike Plan — often touted as a win for sustainability — could adversely impact San Francisco’s air quality by causing more drivers to circle in search of parking.

"More time will be spent by persons in cars as a result of a lack of on-street parking (already at a critical lack of capacity) searching for an available parking spot or stuck in traffic jams due to removal of car traffic lanes," one member of the public complained.

In response, the EIR points to San Francisco’s Transit First policy, which essentially says that the city will provide more of an incentive to take public transit than drive. "The social inconvenience of parking deficits, such as having to hunt for scarce parking spaces, is not an environmental impact," the EIR notes. "There may be secondary physical environmental impacts such as increased traffic congestion at intersections, air quality impacts, safety impacts, or noise impacts caused by congestion. In the experience of San Francisco transportation planners, however, the absence of a ready supply of parking spaces, combined with available alternatives to auto travel … induces many drivers to seek and find alternative parking facilities, shift to other modes of travel, or change their overall travel habits. Any such resulting shifts to transit service in particular, would be in keeping with the city’s Transit First Policy."

The underlying idea is that the Bike Plan can help to clear the air, fight climate change, and boost public health by making it more convenient to go without a vehicle — and more of a headache to drive.

As one commenter pointed out, the Bike Plan could also make life easier for people with disabilities who have to drive by replacing cars with bikes and thus freeing space in traffic lanes.

BRAKING THE HABIT


There are, of course, many sound arguments for nudging people away from driving. At a June 26 press conference, Newsom noted that 54 percent of the city’s greenhouse-gas emissions are related to vehicle traffic on the city’s roadways — and reducing those carbon emissions would go a long way toward making the city more climate-friendly, not to mention healthier for cyclists and non-cyclists alike.

Meanwhile, Bert Hill, chair of the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, noted that 40 percent of car trips in the city cover two miles or less, a distance easily traversed by bicycle. If more people opt to go by bike, the result could be calmer traffic, cleaner air, and possibly a boost for business. "No one goes shopping on the highway," one commenter pointed out during the SFMTA Board hearing. For all of these overarching benefits to be realized, of course, many motorists will have to change their behavior by electing to leave the car at home.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition points to evidence suggesting that many frequent drivers are in fact ready to transform into frequent bicyclists. "New bike lanes will … attract tens of thousands of new bicyclists," an SFBC press release noted. "More than one-third of San Franciscans say they would ride if streets had more bike lanes and were more inviting for bicycling."

Newsom sounded a similar note, calling the Bike Plan "inevitable" and asserting that the debate that "used to be framed in terms of two wheels vs. four … that is behind us." Instead, he added, it’s time for "a new narrative of collaboration and partnership" between people who share the road.

Still, a battle continues to be waged against the implementation of the Bike Plan. Mary Miles, the attorney responsible for securing the three-year Bike Plan injunction (see "Stationary biking," 5/16/07), momentarily ruined the party at the SFMTA hearing by showing up, casting an icy glare, and warning the SFMTA board to "just stop now. We are appealing these actions." In the overflow room on City Hall’s first floor, Miles’ comments elicited hoots of laughter from a crowd of cyclists.

Miles’ client, Rob Anderson, is known for his cynical view that most people will never be encouraged to ride a bike, and that the Bike Plan unfairly rewards cyclists, a "special interest" group, at the expense of the majority of people, who drive.

Anderson and Miles are expected to appeal the SFMTA’s decision, possibly throwing one last monkey wrench into the process of moving the Bike Plan forward. Construction of new bike lanes can’t begin until the legal issues are resolved and the injunction is lifted.

PARK(ING) IT


A frantic driver who has just found a parking space might be thrilled to seize it, but Matthew Passmore has sparked a different sort of appreciation for parking spaces. One of the founders of Park(ing) Day, Passmore helped draw international interest in 2005 by temporarily transforming a parking space in the Mission District into a public park.

Since then the trend has caught on all over the world: all it takes is some Astroturf, a couch, and a few coins to pay the meter fare — and suddenly the public space usually reserved for cars is transformed into an attractive mini-park for pedestrians and passers-by.

The Park(ing) Day exercise, an event that takes place in September, has since prompted the creation of some 600 parks, free clinics, and other temporary "spaces" as part of the wider commentary about the allocation of public space. In Passmore’s view, "far too much of our city is dedicated to the automobile," and Park(ing) Day is just one way of illustrating this point.

For the soon-to-be 79 miles of bike lanes in the city, after all, there are still 880 lane miles built for cars, and San Francisco streets still accommodate a whopping 320,000 parking spaces. For his part, Passmore characterizes the removal of a few parking spaces as mere "growing pains," but emphasizes that in the long run, the Bike Plan will benefit everyone — not just cyclists.

The nativists are restless

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news@sfbg.com

The comments sections of the Guardian‘s Politics blog and the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate Web site have been lit up over the past week with angry (and sometimes overtly racist) denunciations of Latino immigrants, triggered by the latest Chronicle stories challenging San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies and by Guardian revelations that Chronicle writer Jaxon Van Derkeken accepted an award and substantial cash payment from a controversial nativist group.

While Van Derbeken, two Chronicle editors interviewed by the Guardian, and other critics of San Francisco’s longstanding policy of not notifying federal authorities about the arrests of undocumented immigrants have denied trying to stir up nativist furor, the tone and content of many of these comments seems to indicate they’ve done exactly that.

The saga began June 19 when we published “Chronicle accepts award and cash from anti-immigrant group” on our Politics blog. The story began: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken recently accepted an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies — which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda — for his controversial articles on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies.

“CIS paid for Van Derbeken to accept the award at the National Press Club and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to introduce him earlier this month, an appearance they used to make derogatory comments about San Francisco, its values, and local immigrant rights activists, while saying little to rebuke the group for stirring up hateful nativist furor around what has become perhaps the country’s most divisive issue.”

Van Derbeken would only address the issue by e-mail, sending us two terse replies to our inquiry and refusing to answer most of our questions, including much how cash he received for a prize that we discovered paid $1,000 in 2001 (the complete e-mail exchange is include in our post).

“No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs,” was Van Derbeken’s most substantive comment, although he refused to offer an opinion on CIS or the SPLC report, which he didn’t read until after accepting the award. “I haven’t drawn any conclusions about it.”

CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal (2008, Sentinel), responded to our inquires with an e-mail blaming the “jihad against dissent from the elite consensus for open borders” and referring to a column he wrote for National Review Online criticizing SPLC’s fundraising.

But in the past, Krikorian has called for the federal government to cut off funding to San Francisco and even prosecute local elected officials, writing in his CIS blog, “Local neutrality on immigration is no longer possible. Every jurisdiction in the country has a choice to make: Either buttress federal efforts at immigration control or subvert them. San Francisco has chosen the second option. It should now learn the consequences.”

We did phone interviews with Van Derbeken’s editors, Managing Editor Steve Proctor and Assistant Managing Editor Ken Conner, who both defended the stories and the decision to accept the award. Neither would reveal how much cash was involved, and neither would admit that it represented validating a group that recently has been vying for mainstream legitimacy.

“All issues have proponents and opponents,” Proctor told us, equating the award to those given for education and legal affairs reporting and denying that the immigration issue is more divisive and controversial. “At the end of the day, it isn’t about this group but about Jaxon’s stories,” Conner told us.

Those stories continued in high-profile fashion a few days later as Van Derbeken essentially rewrote a June 21 Los Angeles Times scoop about how San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris allowed a half-dozen undocumented immigrants to enroll in a rehabilitation program rather than turning them over to the feds. The details became front-page lead news stories in the Chronicle on June 22 and 23.

Local immigrant rights activists criticized the Chronicle stories and the paper’s decision to accept the CIS award and money.

“When I read these kind of stories that lead us down a dark path and play on people’s fears and paint immigrants with a broad brush — as a threat, as criminals, as dangerous to the community — I do think that there are anti-immigrant nativist centers egging on reporters like Jaxon down this dark path by giving him cash awards,” Phil Hwang, a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told us. “It’s part of the strategy these anti-immigrant groups are employing. It’s why they created this award. And if you look at who founded CIS and their vision, it’s clear that they believe America is under threat from non-white immigrants,”

Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus, whom Van Derbeken mentioned by name in his CIS award speech, said she is worried this latest round would weaken Harris’ support for Sanctuary City policies. That’s what happened to Mayor Gavin Newsom last fall, when Van Derbeken wrote the stories CIS honored.

“I’d hate to see another series of anti-immigrant scapegoating being used to make hasty policy decisions that violate the rights of immigrants, tear apart families, and increase the state of terror in immigrant communities,” Chan told us.

Harris, who is running for state attorney general, defended her decision to let undocumented immigrants complete the Back on Track program after their presence was brought to her attention, but has since changed the policy to bar them from enrolling. “No innovative initiative will ever be created without some unanticipated flaws to be fixed along the way, but this must not stop us from tackling tough problems with smart solutions,” she said in a prepared statement.

“These are tough economic times,” Hwang added. “People are very nervous about their jobs. And that is often when the [anti-immigrant] rhetoric ramps up.”

The Chronicle writer and editors and Krikorian stopped responding to Guardian inquiries. But the blogs were lit up with comments — hundreds of them from around the country at the bottom of Van Derbeken’s latest stories — that had some disturbing themes, accusations, and suggestions. They indicate that the radical nativists are using this issue — and the Chron‘s spin on it — to promote a dangerous agenda.

Here’s a small sampling:

•<\!s> “Illegal aliens are like a plague.”

•<\!s> “Kick out all Illegals, return the city to its rightful owners”

•<\!s> “For God’s sake, STOP pandering to the ILLEGAL ALIENS and get rid of them!”

•<\!s> “Anyone caught crossing the border illegally should be shot as a spy.”

•<\!s> “The border ought to be land mined.”

•<\!s> “What is this sham that diversity is great? It is tearing this country apart.”

Such sentiments — which we usually counter on the Guardian Politics blog — were met with silence by Van Derbeken.

Kinda Kink.com

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johnny@sfbg.com

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood — won’t you be my neighbor? That classic American question is all trussed up and ready to go thanks to "Safe Word," a new exhibition at Chris Perez’s gallery Ratio 3 that peeks inside a nearby Mission District space: San Francisco’s lively new gargantuan factory of BDSM imagery, Kink.com.

An all-too-rare site-specific appraisal of urban landscape and activity is intrinsic to this show. Even before Kink.com took over the 200,000-square-foot San Francisco Armory, the landmark’s fortress-like appearance and mammoth scale cried out for this kind of creative response. Back in 2003, reviewing a show of mixed media cubic works by Will Yackulic at the now-defunct gallery Pond, I used the block formations in Yackulic’s art and Pond’s across-the-street proximity to the Armory as an opportunity to take stock of the structure formerly known as San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal, a neo-medieval brick goliath that was fully erected in 1914 and registered as a historical landmark in 1978.

At that time, the Armory was long dormant, but three years later, Kink.com purchased the site to use it as a production studio. While Kink.com’s location and activities have, unsurprisingly, generated a vast variety of local reportage, the five contributors to "Safe Word" don’t attack or celebrate the company — and its curious macrocosmic 21st-century update of old Hollywood’s studio system — so much as use its complex notions and representations of literal site and virtual space as trampolines for their own artistic imaginations.

In comparison to the clutter and overload characteristic of many group shows, "Safe Word" spreads nine works by a handful of artists across Ratio 3’s roomy confines in a manner that prevents any one piece from going neglected. To some degree, the standout works are those one first encounters upon entering the gallery. On the immediate right are four oil-on-panel paintings by Danny Keith that depict screen captures of grappling men from NakedKombat.com and UltimateSurrender.com. In Keith’s paintings, two torsos become one — not through the penetration shots one associates with hardcore porn, but through beast-with-two-backs-and-one-head physical images that momentarily occur during wrestling bouts. The compelling puzzle of these human pretzels is that Keith’s carefully selected and at times broodingly emotive visions bypass or subvert or transform the power games present in the titles of the source material. (In contrast, an orange-hued painting by Francine Spiegel remains elliptical as a visual response to Kink.com.)

Amanda Kirkhuff’s two graphite drawings (one on a large sheet of paper, another on a wall) are confrontational. On the far side of the room from Ratio 3’s front door, they greet viewers with (in one case) human-scale and (in another) larger-than-life full-frontal female nudity. Kirkhuff’s The Oldest Profession is like a 21st-century female answer to de Kooning. Thanks to a tit mountain and triangular patch of pubic forest, the piece’s faceless female torso flirts without sentiment with monumental abstraction — less obviously, and more wittily, Kirkhuff uses the magnified pixel or fractal block patterns of video in a manner that evokes Kink.com’s brick façade. Kirkhuff’s The Burden is the closest thing to a self-portrait in the show. Its subject meets the viewer’s gaze with a casual strength and defiance. Viewed within the context of Kirkhuff’s past hilarious renderings of pop culture icons and monsters such as Monique and Dr. Laura, these works prove she’ll likely excel in a solo show context.

Two pieces within "Safe Word" reconfigure material from Kink.com. Takeshi Murakata’s installation Because I Know How to Relax, I Can Work and Play Better matches woman-on-woman BDSM video with new age relaxation audio. There’s a comic frisson between the imagery and the verbal instructions: when the voice-over asks one to imagine a hand reaching inside one’s body, a semi-literal corollary takes place on screen. And connections between BDSM and meditative practice becomes quite clear. The idea is a bit glib and easy, though. More evocative is Anthony Viti’s looping five-minute video Mission & 14th, a card-shuffle barrage of fast-forward on-the-set screen captures of men and women at work and at play before and around the camera. At the same time that Viti’s piece demystifies or ignores the rigid barricades that characterize Kink.com activity, it also — like Keith’s paintings — defies the rules and perhaps rigidity associated with BDSM. Here, desire isn’t bound or laying down the law. Instead, it manifests as a polymorphously perverse blur.

SAFE WORD

Wed–Sat, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; through Aug. 8

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3771

www.ratio3.org

Turning point

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MORE ON SFBG.COM

>>Deconstructing the politics of parking in San Francisco

>>Safer streets for cyclists cause growing pains for motorists

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco has been a "transit-first" city since 1973, when the Board of Supervisors first adopted the policy of officially promoting public transit, pedestrians, and bicycles over the automobile. But the label has really been in name only — until this year.

Through an unusual confluence of policy initiatives that have been moving forward for several years, San Francisco is finally about to have a serious discussion about the automobile and its impacts. And parking policies are being used as the main tool to reduce traffic congestion, better set development impact fees, increase city revenue, and promote alternatives to the automobile.

"Our parking requirements need to be revised to support this [transit-first] policy by limiting parking supply — the single greatest incentive to drive — where transit and other modes are viable alternatives," reads the city’s Better Neighborhoods Plan.

While the very notion of deliberately limiting parking will likely be met with howls of protest by many drivers — indeed, urban planners already acknowledge that it’s probably not politically feasible to make drivers pay for their full impacts — they also say it’s the only way to decrease the over-dependence on the automobile.

"Without limiting parking, people will choose an auto-oriented lifestyle and continue to drive. Traffic will continue to worsen, and we will never shift the balance in favor of ways of getting around that are more effective in moving people," the plan continues.

Yet the push isn’t as dire for drivers as its stark language suggests, thanks to some innovative initiatives that could ironically make it even easier to park in some areas than it is now, in the process easing traffic congestion by eliminating the number of cars circling the block looking for parking spaces, which studies show can often account for up to one-third of the cars on the road.

DEMAND-BASED PARKING PRICES


The SF Park program is scheduled to begin later this summer in eight pilot areas, providing real-time parking data to give drivers better information on where to find spots and controlling demand with a market-based pricing system that raises rates when spots are scarce, encouraging turnover and freeing up spaces.

It is just one of many current initiatives. The city is looking at extending meter hours to nights and Sundays and adding parking meters in Golden Gate Park (those are simply revenue measures aimed at city budget deficits). Another study is examining the nexus between parking and developer impacts that could be used to charge new fees for construction. There’s also a comprehensive study of on-street parking policies that will be going before the Board of Supervisors (sitting as the San Francisco County Transportation Authority) next month after nearly five years in the works.

Yet creating more progressive parking policies requires political will, which will surely be tested in the coming months. Indeed, this year’s battle over the Municipal Transportation Authority budget — whose $128 million deficit was closed by Muni fare increases and services cuts rather than parking increases by a ratio of about 4-1, thanks to pressure from drivers and Mayor Gavin Newsom — was an early indicator of the pitfalls that exist within the politics of parking.

Using a $20 million federal traffic congestion management grant, SFMTA has spent years developing the SF Park program, approving most of the details last fall and planning to roll it out by summer’s end.

"Under-regulated on-street parking results in limited parking availability, inefficient utilization of spaces, and excess vehicular circulation," begins the San Francisco On-Street Parking Management and Pricing Study Final Report, which is headed to the Board of Supervisors next month. "This program will assess the effectiveness of using pricing and complementary strategies as a way to manage demand for parking."

The program will be rolled out in eight areas, coordinating parking information in more than 6,000 street spaces and 20 city-owned parking garages, and using that information to adjust parking rates — charging more when spots are scarce and for additional hours — to try to achieve a parking occupancy rate of about 85 percent.

"An on-street parking occupancy of 85 percent has been demonstrated by parking experts … as the benchmark for the practical capacity of on-street parking. At 85 percent occupancy, approximately one available space is expected per block, thus limiting the cruising phenomenon and generally assuring the availability of a space," the study reads.

SFMTA spokesperson Judson True called SF Park "the future of parking management, adding that "we are taking a big bite of the parking management pie with SF Park, which is the most advanced parking management system of any U.S. city."

THE TRUE COST OF CARS


It’s just the latest work product from transportation planners that have spent years behind-the-scenes developing programs to deal with the city’s over-reliance on the automobiles. "It’s all part of a strategy of using parking as a demand management strategy," said Zabe Bent, a planner with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority.

She is working on the parking policies, as well as a proposal to charge motorists a congestion fee for driving into the downtown, which comes before the Board of Supervisors this fall (although implementation is probably at least three years away).

Bent said city officials are working on a number of fronts to shore up San Francisco’s "transit-first" status and prepare for growth in what is already one of the country’s most congested cities. So some of the decisions coming up are bound to be tough.

"It’s a tradeoff we need to make to achieve our goals," she said, noting that the central question transportation planners are wrestling with is, "How do we achieve a more sustainable growth pattern?"

Such noble intentions can always get hung up on politics, and the ever-present question of how to pay for it during an era of fiscal crisis. So it appears the city may have to get creative with funding its new approach to parking.

Alica John-Baptiste, the assistant planning director overseeing the parking impact fee study, said that while it does appear to be a big year for new parking policies, "this conversation has been underway for a number of years. A lot of the discussions we’ve had are now being studied."

Most recently it was the citizens committee that developed the Market-Octavia Plan — one of the first to cap how much parking developers may build along with the projects — that sought guidance about what the city could legally do to recover the full costs associated with automobiles.

"There were a bunch of questions that came up about parking as an issue," she said of the Market-Octavia process. So the Planning Department and other city agencies began to explore the cost of parking as part of the city’s update of the Transit Impact Fee that is charged to new development, with the idea of expanding that to include impacts to all modes of transportation.

"We are looking at parking as a land use and its impact to the [transportation] system," she continued. "This is a city that really wants to support other modes than just transit."

The contract for that parking nexus study was awarded to Cambridge Systematics earlier this month with initial recommendations expected by the end of the year. That study is expected to show that developers and drivers don’t come anywhere near paying for the full cost of the automobile to San Francisco. "These nexus studies usually suggest a much higher fee rate than is feasible to provide," she said.

In other words, drivers and developers would freak out if asked to pay for their full impacts, arguing that that doing so would stifle development, hurt the economy, punish those who need cars, etc. So the fees will likely be set lower than needed to cover the city’s costs.

Even in the short-term, simply extending meter hours into the evenings — as SFMTA is now studying to help the city deal with its budget deficit — is likely to trigger a pitched battle between progressive supervisors and politicians who side with some merchant groups that consider parking sacrosanct.
David Heller, president of the Greater Geary Merchants Association, will be one of those leading the charge. By way of argument, he criticized San Francisco as "a very business-unfriendly city" compared to competitors like Colma and Burlingame and laid out this scenario: "After 6 p.m., there are no power lunches going on. People want to relax. Imagine you sit down to a nice dinner. You’ve got your wine and are enjoying your appetizer and in the middle of your meal, you have to get up and feed the meter. When you return, the ambiance has been lost. What are the chances you’ll return to that restaurant?"
And so it goes with the politics of parking, where pressing realities clash with visceral reactions, driver prerogatives (such as the "right" to feed the meter, which actually isn’t legal), and other distracting entitlement issues.
Gabriella Poccia and Rachel Buhner contributed to this report.

———–

PARKING BY NUMBERS


Number of on-street parking spaces in SF: 320,000

Number these spaces that have meters: 24,000

Total parking spaces in San Francisco: 603,000

Number of cars and trucks registered in SF: 441,653

Annual revenue from meters and city-owned garages: $64.5 million

Annual revenue from parking citations: $90 million

Number of street spaces in 8 SF Park pilot zones: 6,000

Hourly meter rates in the zones, depending on demand: 25 cents to $6

Hourly garage rates in the zones, depending on demand: $1 to $10

Number of residential parking permits issued: 89,271

Cost of purchasing an on-street residential parking permit: $74 per year

Number of temporary permits: 2,867

Annual revenue from residential parking permits: $5.7 million
Cost of purchasing SF parking on Craiglist: $100 to $500 per month
Annual city revenue if residential permits were market-based: $320 million

The mobility of space

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sarah@sfbg.com

Jason Henderson is standing on Patricia’s Green in Hayes Valley, shielding his eyes from the midsummer sun, as he explains how this area, which once lay in the shadowy underbelly of the Central Freeway, was reclaimed as a pedestrian-friendly park.

"In 1989 the freeway went all the way to Turk Street," said Henderson, an assistant professor of geography at San Francisco State University, describing how the raised concrete roadbed, built in the 1950s, cut across this neighborhood and blocked the sky — until the Loma Prieta earthquake hit and damaged the final section so badly it had to be torn down.

That natural disaster triggered a public discussion about the use of the surrounding space, and a 15-year fight that culminated in 2005 in the dedication of the Green, which is part of the Octavia Boulevard Project. Neighbors and business owners pushed the city to convert a damaged freeway into a landscaped park.

That sort of change fascinates Henderson. "I am interested in how people move around cities, and how urban space is configured for movement," he said.

The young professor was raised in New Orleans and wrote his dissertation on transportation and land use debates in Atlanta — which, as Henderson notes, is "the poster child for sprawl but became a hotbed in the ’90s of a national discourse about how we should grow, which became this very interesting debate about reurbanizing."

Henderson’s research focuses on the politics of mobility. He decided to move to San Francisco in 2003 because he saw it as an opportunity to live in a city where a car is not necessary and to study the history of the city’s freeway revolt, which began in the 1960s.

And while he is proud of this park, which was dedicated as Hayes Green then renamed for the late Patricia Walkup, a Hayes Valley resident who tirelessly advocated for the park until her death in 2006, Henderson thinks the local politics of parking have reached "a spatial stalemate."

"During the freeway revolt of the 1960s, San Francisco rejected the freeway but not the automobile," Henderson explained. "But even as San Francisco residents decided that they did not want big gashes of freeway through their waterfront, the Marina, and Golden Gate Park, the city continued to have laws that said every housing unit was to have one parking space.

"So the city adopted a transit-first policy on paper, but didn’t take space away from cars. And if you don’t do anything, you’re not solving the problem."

The problem in San Francisco is what he called the "essentializing of cars."

"A core idea within the parking debate is that there is a universal love affair with the automobile," Henderson explained. "But Obama is downsizing GM and Chrysler, and for the first time since 1960, vehicle miles traveled have started to go down. Until last year, the mantra was that Americans are going to drive. But then we found out that at $4 a gallon, this country freaks out and changes."

Earlier this year, Henderson published a paper that analyzes the city’s politics of parking through the lens of two ballot initiatives from the November 2007 San Francisco election.

"San Francisco’s parking debate is not just about parking. It is a contest over how the city should be configured and organized, and for whom," Henderson wrote in his paper, titled "The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco."

His research led him to conclude that progressives, who want to make the city more bike- and public-transportion friendly, are pitted against the more conservative elements (he calls them neoconservatives), who want to increase space for parking and cars at all costs, with the moderate (or in his words, "neoliberal") factions tangled in between.

Part of Henderson’s critique involves estimating the hidden costs of parking — and as it turns out, that can be done using Google and Craiglist. According to a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency 2008 fact sheet, there are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, including metered spaces, each consuming, on average, about 160 square feet.

According to a 2002 presentation by Jeffery Tumlin, a national transportation consultant, if the city rented these spaces for the lowball rate of $1,000 a year, San Francisco would rake in $320 million annually.

There would be no shortage of demand — market prices are way higher. Henderson’s review of Craiglist unearthed folks who looking to rent parking spaces in San Francisco and willing to pay from $100 to $500 a month.

But SFMTA — which issues more than 89,000 residential parking permits annually and recently opted to cut Muni service and routes and increase fares on public transit rather than extend parking meter hours to balance its budget shortfall — decided to increase the cost of these parking permits, starting July 1, by only $2, from $72 to $74 — per year. That’s less than 10 percent of market value.

The resulting revenue will be dedicated to the cost of administrating the program — not to offset the hidden costs of parking, which include carbon dioxide emissions, air pollution, congestion, and occupying valuable space.

Henderson is intrigued by the relationship between parking policy and a complex set of factors that include public health, obesity, and the cost of affordable housing. He notes that if a city’s housing policy requires developers to provide a parking space for each housing unit, too often developers don’t build that housing, or build it smaller, or build it as part of a luxury complex.

"The progressive response to this dilemma is to try to get government to eliminate the one parking-space-per-unit goal and cap the total amount of parking built. Meanwhile, the neocons, who believe government should be active in creating more parking, rail against more bus lanes," Henderson said.

As he notes, common to both groups is the desire for government to help them achieve their vision.

"Much as we see San Francisco as a progressive place, it’s also peopled by neoliberals and very conservative folks — and progressive and neoliberals coalesce on the issue of ‘smart growth.’ And there are lot of progressives who have a car and say, ‘I don’t want to be car dependent; I’d like to do city share, but I’d feel stranded.’ And those who say ‘I always want to have my own car, but I only drive it once a month.’"

Conceding that "tweaking the system" will cost money, Henderson cites congestion pricing as an area where the various factions can find agreement.

"The important question is, what will the revenue be used for?" Henderson said, noting that some will argue that if you charge motorists to use roads, then the money should be used to improve the roads, which is what has happened with toll roads in Texas.

But in San Francisco, activist are pushing the opposite approach. "Whereas the sustainable transportation movement in San Francisco wants to use the revenue from congestion pricing to fix Muni and discourage driving," he continued.

In his paper on parking policy, Henderson details exactly how parking allocations push up the price of housing — and change the face of ongoing developments.

A typical off-road parking space takes up 350 square feet when room to move in and out is factored in — and that’s comparable to many offices and living spaces in San Francisco. The parking alone costs $50,000 to $100,000 to develop — a cost that’s passed on to the homebuyer.

But in most neighborhoods, developers can’t avoid parking, because of planning laws. "This means that neighborhoods like the iconic North Beach simply could not be built today," Henderson wrote, noting how mandatory parking provisions mean that the lower floors of new buildings are likely to contain parking garages, not storefronts and cafes, and garage entrances take away street parking and limit where street trees can be planted.

"But at least contesting car space is on the table in San Francisco" Henderson said. "That makes it an intriguing bellwether for other places."

Wading in

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yeah, it’s a big one — "going boating" — for the working-class castaways in New Yorker Bob Glaudini’s 2007 Jack Goes Boating, a surprisingly poignant comedy now making a strong Bay Area debut at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre. Who would propose such a thing lightly? The word even sounds funny, at least in the mouths of the three friends assembled in the scene — longstanding couple Clyde (Gabriel Marin) and Lucy (Amanda Duarte), and Clyde’s best friend and perennial bachelor Jack (Danny Wolohan). Their tongues trip unfamiliarly on the "t" like it was a pinky finger extending suddenly from their coffee hand.

The two relationships at the center of Jack Goes Boating — one very tentatively setting forth, the other possibly foundering after several years — make for less than smooth sailing, plot-wise, but a class act all around, especially as delivered by director Joy Carlin’s excellent ensemble. And yes, the aquatic metaphors are heavy in the mix, as Jack, with his friends’ encouragement, makes it his mission to finally woo and win a love of his own. That would be Connie (Beth Wilmurt), a mortician’s assistant and, presumably, boating enthusiast whom senior colleague Lucy and Clyde have helpfully pointed in Jack’s direction.

An aging, bashful, lifelong single guy turned dedicated stoner of the reggae-saturated "positive vibes" school, Jack’s vaguely embarrassing enthusiasm for Rastafarianism smacks of the quiet desperation of the well-meaning dork, especially as visually crowned by a budding nimbus of white-guy dreads. But it also points to a crucial motive in Jack’s fledgling love life, namely some sort of anchor of decency and solace in a sea of urban chaos and confusion, a context made palpable in the comically supple Wolohan’s charmingly perplexed, almost painful determination as Jack.

It’s clear early on that some sacrifice is in order. To make everything turn out right for Jack and Connie’s little borough romance, it behooves Jack to first learn how to swim (Clyde to the rescue: when he’s not driving a limo like coworker Jack, he’s a swimming instructor). Moreover, owing to a little misunderstanding on Connie’s part, Jack needs to learn how to cook (Clyde to the rescue again, this time by suggesting Jack study with an assistant pastry chef Clyde knows to have been lately and uncomfortably acquainted with his own dear Lucy). Clyde’s attempts to do good are themselves problematic, however, having at points a competing agenda of their own (conflicting motives Marin plays to superb effect), centered on the baggage he and Lucy (a feisty and sharp-witted match in Duarte’s terrific characterization) have accumulated over many years. In fact, as Jack slowly wades into the deep end of the pool, literally and figuratively, Clyde and Lucy’s increasingly obvious dirty laundry begins to look like unintentional warning flags.

But Jack perseveres. Not yet at the oars, he’s nonetheless set a firm course already. He’s on board for this love thing. And, according to Glaudini, it’s as much a matter of self-survival as self-sacrifice. His swimming lessons with Clyde inch him ever so gently toward the deep end of the pool. But in a sense he’s already there, surrounded by the vortex of urban stress and mayhem as well as his own whirling emotions, all of it manifest in the predatory competition of other men — more often than not reduced to synecdoche in the dialogue: an aggressive erection on the subway, a stray hand on an unsuspecting breast, a philandering cannoli — and his own explosive temper. It’s the dicey but also ennobling power of love that makes Jack and Connie (whose own neurotic complexity gets its full due in Wilmurt’s shrewdly unnerving yet sympathetic characterization) able to navigate these waters finally, rather than merely treading them in a self-induced fog of pot smoke or "positive vibes."

Veteran Bay Area actor-director Carlin guides this beautifully designed production with sure comic instincts, making for an enjoyable ride all the way. But she and her cast also know the play gathers much of its momentum from deeper, darker waters just below its romantic comedy surface.

JACK GOES BOATING

Through July 19

Wed-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 and 7 p.m., $28-$50

Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822, www.auroratheatre.org

Farallon

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paulr@sfbg.com

Since restaurants tend to age in dog years, a restaurant that reaches its 12th birthday — like Farallon — might be called venerable. It has survived its perilous youth to achieve, perhaps, the stability of middle age, and the good news is that while not all that many restaurants see their 12th birthday, the ones that do stand a reasonable chance of seeing quite a few more.

Mark Franz, who cooked at Stars while that glittering spot was still in the hands of founder Jeremiah Tower, has been the man at Farallon from the beginning — the man, at least, in the kitchen. The designer was Pat Kuleto, and the restaurant’s interior décor shows a definite kinship with other Kuleto projects from the mid-1990s; like Boulevard (1993), it is rich in fanciful lamps and light fixtures, and like Jardiniere (1997), it includes a conspicuous sweeping staircase.

But mostly there is the Captain Nemo effect, the sense of being in some magical grotto at the bottom of the sea. Many of the visual effects are not subtle: the huge faux scallop shell that forms part of the ceiling and the row of lamps like line-caught fish hanging in front of the exhibition kitchen are two that spring to mind. But Kuleto did not neglect the finer touches, even if it takes a bit longer to notice them. The tiled mosaics on the wall arches, for instance, are quietly spectacular in their byzantine colors and details. The mosaics have worn well. They lend an air of permanence and impressiveness, and they’re what you find yourself staring at long after you’ve stopped noticing the more outlandish stuff.

The menu describes the cooking as "coastal cuisine," an au courant designation for imaginative or contemporary seafood. The restaurant’s obvious peers are Aqua and Waterbar; it’s less monumental than the former and cozier than the latter, and because it’s just a few steps from Union Square, I wondered if we would find some pandering to tourists — some version of cioppino, say. I didn’t notice any such over-obviousness. The theme instead is one of discreet sophistication, cleverness that does not call attention to itself.

Sashimi of ahi tuna ($18), for example, is the kind of thing you could get at dozens of restaurants around town. But Farallon’s kitchen gave the glistening ruby tabs of flesh a sly Spanish twist, with an overlay of a boquerón (a white anchovy), a scattering of slivered almonds, and a nearby berm of ñora-chili purée, like an honor guard.

A buckwheat blini (part of a four-course, $65 prix fixe) was soaked — and I do mean soaked — in melted butter, then topped with alternating lengths of gravlax and sturgeon, themselves capped with crème fraîche and a brief hailstorm of salmon roe, like little pebbles of orange glass. The lesson here was butter, its delicate, singular richness. Accept no substitute, because there is none.

The combination of cantaloupe and prosciutto is friendly to the point of cliché, so a little inventiveness is welcome. Farallon’s summer melon salad (also part of the prix fixe) featured a core of cantaloupe dice wrapped in swaths of prosciutto and topped with what looked like simple shaved ice but turned out to be verbena granita. Since we intuitively associate color with flavor, it was startling to find so much punch packed into something that looked as if it had been reclaimed from a hotel ice bucket.

The menu does not beat you over the head with screeds about sustainability, and perhaps this restraint is wise, since seafood choices are so often fraught ones. I love arctic char — a milder, eco-friendly relation of salmon — and I very much liked the way it was handled here ($35): gently roasted, then finished in a cast-iron pot with some white wine and a succotash-like medley of corn kernels, summer squash dice, and cubes of Spanish chorizo. But: the fish had been taken in Icelandic waters, which are quite a few carbon footprints away.

Also carbon-footprinty, though delicious, was soft-shell crab, available as a starter ($18) on a bed of corn kernels, and as the third of the prix-fixe’s four courses, with Puy lentils (a bit overcooked, I thought) and basil-roasted tomatoes. In both cases the crab was fried "naked," which meant without being dipped in batter. Fried batter has its golden, crunchy charms, but it can be overbearing. When you are trying to enjoy crab — especially soft-shell crab, the essence of crab — the best crust is no crust.

Also, crustlessness shaves a few points from the calorie count, which leaves wiggle room for dessert: a warm (prix-fixe) brownie, say, with a pat of malted-milk-ball ice cream bisected by a chewy chocolate tuile, or, for the more restrained, an array of chocolate bites ($6), including a liqueur-filled truffle and two bites of a sublime milk chocolate-peanut butter pavé. Just the sort of thing the 12-year-old in each of us loves.

FARALLON

Dinner: Mon.-Thurs., 5:30-9:30 p.m.;

Fri.-Sat., 5:30-10 p.m.; Sun., 5-9:30 p.m.

450 Post, SF

(415) 956-6969

www.farallonrestaurant.com

Full bar

AE/CB/DC/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Appetite: Honeycomb coladas, Italian wines, French prix fixe, and more

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Every week, Virginia Miller of personalized itinerary service and monthly food, drink, and travel newsletter, www.theperfectspotsf.com, shares foodie news, events, and deals. View the last installment here.

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NEW OPENINGS
The Plant Cafe Organic’s second location with Bay views
The Embarcadero goes organic with The Plant Café Organic‘s second (and much larger) locale on Pier 3. Stunning Bay views, Blue Bottle and smoothies in the morning (in the cafe side of the space), lunch and dinner (restaurant side) with Spicy Fava Bean & Cherry Tomato Bruschetta or Chicken (organic, of course), Caramelized Onion, Point Reyes Blue Cheese & Fennel Pizza. If breezes kick in, there’s heat lamps outside, while inside the air is fresh with a wall plant installation. Watch the sky turn shades of pink and blue at sunset with a Honeycomb Colada (coconut milk, pineapple juice, rum, honeycomb and toasted coconut garnish) in hand.
Pier 3, The Embarcadero
(415) 984-1973
www.theplantcafe.com

Donato Enoteca debuts in Redwood City
Take a Michelin-starred chef from Italy, place him in the Peninsula and you have Donato Enoteca, Redwood City’s newest destination restaurant. Chef Donato Scotti highlights his Northern Italian roots in a menu using farm-fresh produce and Italian ingredients, like imported burrata, prosciutto and olive oils (the latter available in sampler tastings). While choosing from more than 100 bottles of (mostly) Italian wines, dine on handmade pasta, hand-pulled braised wild boar, octopus carpaccio, or spicy sausage/broccoli rabe pizza from the wood-burning oven. The place soothes in white and brown tones, with wine cellar, and a wrap-around patio replete with couches and chairs – an ideal Summer evening setting from which to sip an apertif.
1041 Middlefield Road, Redwood City
(650) 701-1000
www.donatoenoteca.com
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EVENTS
7/14 – Bastille Day at Grand Cafe
Let them eat cake.… and eat it for free at Grand Cafe‘s Bastille Day celebration. Exec chef, Mauro Pando, prepares special French dishes for the occasion, which you can order a la carte or as an optional three-course prix fixe menu ($58 with wine pairings), featuring beloved French classics like Coquilles San Jacques (scallops) or Duck Coq Au Vin. As you sip on flutes of champagne, French wines (some half-priced) or seasonal cocktails, a vibrant Marie Antoinette graces the ballroom to rousing tunes played by an accordionist. Then there’s cake, glorious cake. Celebrate France’s independence and storm the bastille!
July 14, 5pm
501 Geary, SF
(415) 292-0101
www.grandcafe-sf.com

CONTESTS
Calling all Mixologists to compete at SF Chefs.Food.Wine
"SKYY’s the Limit": a cocktail competition open to all bartenders who want to compete for "Best Cocktail 2009" at August’s upcoming SF Chefs.Food.Wine bash in Union Square (and thereabouts). The spirit to be used? Campari, Italy’s delightfully bitter, rose-tinged apertif. Submit your own Campari creation to David Nepove himself (at davidnepove@southernwine.com) by July 6 and the top 15 recipes will be selected on July 21st, with the overall contest including judges the likes of H. Joseph Ehrmann, Martin Cate, Victoria D’Amato Moran, Scott Beattie and Marco Dionysos. Semi-finalists make their own creations during the festival on August 7 and 8 using Skyy Spirits and one secret ingredient revealed each day. With semi-finalists narrowed down from these competitions, two finalists compete August 9th for a grand prize of two round trip air tickets in the US with Virgin Airlines.
Deadline for recipe entry: July 6
www.sfchefsfoodwine.com

The Tallest Man on Earth

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PREVIEW In strictly literal terms, the Tallest Man on Earth’s Kristian Mattson is not the tallest man on the globe. He is probably the Best Bob Dylanesque Tall Dude on Earth, and also perhaps the Tallest New Swedish Musical Talent on Earth, but I suppose those monikers wouldn’t have quite the same ring. Along with no-nonsense yet playful songwriting chops, one of the things I find most fetching about his debut album Shallow Grave (Gravitation, 2008) is its direct zest. Mattson fingerpicks melodies with sprinter’s speed but never loses a nimble grace. The Tallest Man on Earth toured the U.S. with the equally austere Bon Iver recently, but I have to say I prefer Mattsson’s energetic acoustic spirit to the comparative mope of Bon Iver leader Justin Vernon. Shallow Grave‘s gloomy title is a bit misleading — on one of its signature tunes, "I Won’t Be Found," the underground dwelling is a quite lively mole hole.

The keening nasality of Mattson’s vocals are his most overt link to the Dylan tradition. His songs traverse comparatively narrow territory though, bypassing societal commentary for explorations of emotion and more intimate human relationships. In lesser hands, such intent yields forgettable schmaltz — or worse yet, the kind of music you want to forget and can’t. But Mattson avoids sentimentality and vagary through earthy imagery and a vital energy that avoids easy softness. The sonic equivalent of a splash of ice-cold water on one’s face in the morning, his songs are a bracing alternative to the melancholy brooding of his countryman José Gonzalez. The Tallest Man on Earth is also a contender for the Handsomest Tall Man with a Ceiling-Scraping Pompadour on Earth, a factor that can’t possibly hurt him as a live draw.

THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH With Nathaniel Rateliff and the Wheel. Thurs/2, 8 p.m., $12–$24. The Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. (415) 771-1421. www.independentsf.com

“Sex Positive”

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REVIEW Richard Berkowitz ought to be lionized as an early crusader in the fight against AIDS. Instead he is not only largely forgotten now, his efforts earned him hostility and a kind of blacklisting within the gay community during the U.S. epidemic’s destructive apex in the 1980s. Blessed with a still-living, charismatic subject, Daryl Wein’s documentary puzzles out that injustice. A campus radical turned S&M daddy-for-hire, he found a new outlet for highly vocal activism when the disease first began taking a significant toll in the hitherto carefree, wide-open New York City gay scene. He and the late Michael Callen cowrote a first-ever "safer sex" guide. But with HIV transmission routes/risks still a matter of conjecture, Berkowitz’s own community excoriated that concept — not to mention his pleas to rein in multiple-partner promiscuity until more medical facts were known — as reactionary. He was decried as a lowly hustler perversely bent on shaming gays back into the chastity closet, a bizarre charge reflecting the besieged community’s off-chart levels of terror and denial at the time. Most of his ideas later proved wise, but by then Berkowitz had retreated into obscurity and substance abuse, his budding journalism career nipped by still-skittish gay media outlets. Still young-ish, devoid of self-pity, he’s an interviewee with considerable flinty charm, while the movie efficiently assembles archival materials to illustrate his rocky backstory. Hopefully his pioneering crusade will be better appreciated as a result of Sex Positive — though don’t expect any such belated kudos from fellow first-wave AIDS activist survivor Larry Kramer, who in predictable fashion here sour-grapes the contributions of anyone who is not dead or Larry Kramer.

SEX POSITIVE opens Fri/3 at the Roxie.

Summer Slaughter Tour

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PREVIEW Summer metal tours, notably Ozzfest, operate like feudal hierarchies. As night descends and the stages get bigger, lesser known vassals doing fealty in the parking lot give way to the landed headbanger aristocracy, who in turn cede the stage to some anointed monarch of metal.

In recent years, package deals like Summer Slaughter have taken a more republican approach, recruiting bands of middling stature to represent a vast array of black-hoodied constituents. Though the ticket buyer is not snared by the ermine-furred eminence of a Maiden or a Priest, a large number of quality upstarts can cast a wide net. Throw in three or four majority whips with reliable fanbases and good reputations, and you’ve got yourself a Congress of carnage.

Suffocation is the biggest name on the bill, and the veteran New York City death metal band will cater to the "never-too-brutal" crowd with its bludgeoning low-end assaults, including cuts off a new full-length, Blood Oath (Nuclear Blast). Death-heads will also be there for cult German tech outfit Necrophagist, whose impossible chops and mind-bending arrangements justifies its headlining spot.

D.C. thrashers Darkest Hour is embarking on its first U.S. run without departed lead guitarist Kris Norris, and will be eager to show its many detractors the fighting fitness of a new lineup and a new, Norris-less album, The Eternal Return (Victory Records). Folk-inflected Finnish battlers Ensiferum round out the tour’s Big Four, promising the best in war-kilts and anthemic, epic barrages. Whatever your particular poison, slaughter is imminent.

SUMMER SLAUGHTER TOUR With Winds of Plague, Dying Fetus, Born of Osiris, Origin, Beneath the Massacre, After the Burial, Decrepit Birth, Blackguard. Wed/1, 2:30 p.m. $30. Regency Grand Ballroom, 1290 Sutter, SF. (415) 673-5716. www.regencycentersf.com/grand

July 4 Dining Deals

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PREVIEW Fourth of July tends to be a casual, low-brow, pre-packaged-potato-salad-and-cheap-beer kind of holiday. But it doesn’t have to be. This year, Bay Area foodies can celebrate our country without compromising their culinary standards. CAV Wine Bar and Kitchen will host a BBQ with ribs and fixins, as well as vegetarian options. ($35/person. 1666 Market, SF. 415-437-1770, www.cavwinebar.com). That Hayes Valley beacon of class and culture, Jardiniere, will sport red, white, and blue tablecloths and family-style dining while serving haute twists on classic dishes like
pickled watermelon, Berkshire pork ribs, and lobster rolls. ($55/person. 300 Grove, SF. 415-861-5555, www.jardiniere.com). For a bit of French flair (we are a melting pot, after all), La Folie will be open for the first time this July 4 (2316 Polk, SF. 415-776-5577, www.lafolie.com). Or check out Paul K, whose Dine About Town deal has been extended through July 5, for summer classics like heirloom tomato salad, pan-seared white seabass, or flatiron steak ($34.95/person. 199 Gough, SF. 415-552-7132, www.paulkrestaurant.com).

JULY 4TH DINING DEALS. Various times and locations. Check individual

Websites for information.

“Bernd & Hilla Becher: A Survey – 1972-2006”

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REVIEW The problem, or perhaps the benefit, of a survey of photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher in an environment like the Fraenkel Gallery is the institutional quality the space projects onto the work. Although a sense of sterility is key to the Bechers’ photography, and while it can be contended that the 49 Geary Street site only accentuates the Bechers’ attempt at objectivity, such a setting also brings the success of the work in the marketplace to the fore, rather than providing a hermetic environment in which to operate.

This conundrum is interesting in light of the deadpan documentation of the water towers, grain elevators and blast furnaces that are the subject of the Bechers’ black-and-white photographs and, seemingly, the Fraenkel show. Arranged in grids for side-by-side comparison, each industrial structure is consistently the same size within its frame. As a result, there is a sense of impartiality, which prompts a discourse between the documented structures and, more broadly, between each photograph. The Bechers’ appear to be simultaneously operating within a system and outside a system. They implement something akin to a turn-of-the-century scientific classificatory technique in which the camera is used to document a subject’s unique features, but they also aestheticize the subject.

Bit the neutral stance of the Bechers’ photographs eschews Blossfeldt-like modeling. Instead, it appears to take cues from the Bauhausian model — one in which the built environment was celebrated, along with the camera, as archetypically modern. Yet while both styles of photography might be influences (perhaps especially so because of the couple’s respective academic training), the Bechers’ photography consistently removes clear reference points. Because of this, the stance of the gallery in which the work is exhibited becomes more apparent. Despite its prime examples from — and comprehensive look at — the German couple’s work, this survey situates their photography within a historical context rather than accentuating its conceptual relevance.

BERND & HILLA BECHER: A SURVEY — 1972-2006 Through Fri/3. Tues–Fri, 10:30–5:30 a.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary, SF. (415) 981-2661. www.fraenkelgallery.com

Harris, Newsom duck on immigration

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EDITORIAL So let’s get this straight.

Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, has set up a laudable program called Back on Track that offers counseling and job training for first-time drug offenders who otherwise would be clogging up the local jail.

A handful of the people who went into the program were undocumented immigrants. Some completed the program successfully and were allowed to graduate.

This is a problem?

Apparently so — because between them the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner have devoted at least five major stories, one horrible column and at least one editorial to exposing the fact that some people who otherwise would have been jailed and deported for minor nonviolent crimes have been allowed to stay in the country, with new skills that might help them find jobs that don’t involve selling drugs on the street.

And Harris, who is running for state attorney general, is scrambling to cover herself, announcing that undocumented immigrants will no longer be allowed to go through the program. In other words, to get rehabilitation instead of jail time in San Francisco, you now have to submit proof of citizenship.

There’s a whole lot wrong with this picture. The critics attacking Harris claim that undocumented immigrants don’t deserve job training since they can’t work in this country legally anyway. That’s just silly — tens of thousands of immigrants who lack legal documentation are working in San Francisco right now, and tens of thousands will continue to work in San Francisco. And they’re generally a productive part of the economy and community. These immigrants already face barriers to attending college. The only thing that denying first-offenders job training does is increase the chance they will return to crime.

Yes, the L.A. Times was able to find one person enrolled in the program who went out and committed robbery and assault. He was the only one of seven undocumented people in the program who had legal problems while attending. The others were allowed to graduate, had their criminal records erased, and, given the overall results of the program, were far less likely than people who had served jail time to re-offend.

Unfortunately, the daily newspaper stories are just the latest attack on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policy, which is supposed to bar local law enforcement from turning people over to federal immigration authorities. Mayor Gavin Newsom has backed away from the sanctuary policy — and now Harris is backing away, too.

The district attorney says that allowing undocumented immigrants into her program was a mistake, and that it’s been "fixed." That’s the wrong approach. Prisons and county jails in California are jammed beyond capacity. The cost of incarcerating all those people is staggering and helping to bankrupt the state. And the threat of deportation has created a climate of terror and desperation in immigrant communities, where families are being ripped apart and lives shattered by overzealous federal agents.

And the weak responses by San Francisco city officials are just empowering the radical nativists, who want to blame all of society’s problems on immigrants.

Harris did nothing wrong and has no need to apologize or change her program. Job training as an alternative to jail is good public policy — for citizens and noncitizens. She and Mayor Newsom ought to be defending the Sanctuary City laws instead of running away from them. If this is what it takes to seek statewide office, the mayor and district attorney would better serve their constituents by staying at home. *

Editor’s Notes

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tredmond@sfbg.com

Lucy Dalglish, the director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, is about as much of a national leader on open-government and free-speech issues as we have in this country. She’s been watching (and fighting) the battle against government secrecy for more than a quarter century as a reporter in St. Paul, a media lawyer, and since 2000 the head of RCFP. So when she sounds an alarm, it’s worth listening.

And at the annual conference of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, she warned that the decline of daily newspapers — something those of us in the alt-media often treat as a spectator sport, jeering at the losers who for years couldn’t figure out how to print news people wanted to read — is going to have a serious impact on open government.

The thing is, conservative, weak, and lame as so many dailies were, they have been the ones funding almost all of the major freedom-of-information lawsuits and organizations. The case law that protects the news media (including bloggers) from nuisance libel suits? That came from The New York Times. The law preventing the government from using prior restraint to block the publication of material it thinks might damage national security? The New York Times. The most important open-government cases in the nation? Mostly filed by medium-sized dailies like The Press Enterprise in Riverside.

I’m not here — lord knows, I’m not here — defending the likes of Knight-Ridder and Copley and Scripps-Howard, which are mostly very conservative newspaper chains that have decimated news coverage, kowtowed to the powerful, and screwed up a lot of communities. But Dalglish has a point: as the old guard in the media spirals into decline, who’s going to take up the free-speech and open-government banner — and by that I mean, who’s going to put up the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to file and defend these key lawsuits and keep these organizations alive?

"It isn’t," Dalglish said, "going to be Google."

The Chronicle ran a story June 29th talking about the growing discussion of the need to reform Proposition 13. It was mostly a political piece, looking at the popularity of the measure and the complications of trying to change a law that has pretty much defined public finance in California for 30 years.

Robert Cruickshank at Calitics.com brought up something in response to the Chron story that hadn’t really occurred to me:

"Since 1978," he wrote, "California has experienced two massive housing bubbles. The 1980s bubble, which seemed large at the time, was primarily focused on California and caused widespread unaffordability before the 1989 crash. The 2000s bubble was a nationwide phenomenon, but Prop. 13 played a role by removing a brake on housing inflation. If homeowners saw tax assessments rise in relation to their values, instead of being largely fixed at the rate at the time of purchase, it seems unlikely we would have had the enormous and destructive boom and bust in the housing market we witnessed."

So Prop. 13 causes high housing prices. Probably high rents, too. Worth thinking about. *

The massage parlor mistake

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OPINION Taking advantage of the recent turmoil over the huge city budget cuts, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Carmen Chu, have pushed though malicious legislation imposing criminal charges and restrictions on massage parlors. Many are outraged that this costly legislation was prioritized — we want to know why it was, and how much it will cost to implement. Lawyers are questioning its legality.

Under the guise of concern for women’s safety, Chu and Newsom falsely claimed that the law would stop sex trafficking. We’ve heard these lies before. Politicians who want to increase the criminalization of sex workers confuse prostitution, which is consensual sex for money, with trafficking, which is forced and coerced labor, sexual or otherwise. The reality is that most parlor employees work consensually and often collectively, without force or coercion. In Rhode Island, where indoor prostitution is legal, similar legislative maneuvers are in the works, also using the pretext of trafficking to make criminals of women working indoors.

Chu and Newsom claim they are targeting parlor owners, but by pushing the industry further underground, their legislation makes workers, many of whom are immigrant women, more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Workers will suffer most from the increased raids, arrests, and criminalization. Fearing arrest and/or deportation will mean fewer women will report rape or other violence and exploitation when they occur.

What is the real political agenda here? Chu and Newsom have said that the proposals "could make it easier to close the 50 or so city-licensed parlors suspected of selling sex." If and where sex is being sold, parlor closures would force women onto the streets — where it is 10 times more dangerous to work. Those who are arrested are likely to end up in prison — to the devastation of their children — or deported. What good reason is there to endanger women’s safety and break up families this way, especially during hard economic times?

San Franciscans question why, when most trafficking cases occur in the agricultural, construction, clothing, and domestic industries, anti-trafficking measures target immigrant sex workers working of their own free will. We suspect racist gentrification policies are behind this legislation. Developers will be allowed to seize land in the Tenderloin and downtown areas if massage parlors are forced to close. This deceitful, profiteering law imposes huge fines, criminal charges, and has a punitive clause making the parlors pay for unspecified enforcement charges against them.

Considering that not long ago, police were exposed for taking thousands of dollars from massage parlor workers, involving them in the licensing process creates fertile ground for increased corruption.

What is wrong with selling or buying sex if both parties consent? After all, 42 percent of San Franciscans voted last November for Proposition K, which would have decriminalized sex work, despite a campaign of fear mongering and misinformation by the mayor and district attorney. New Zealand successfully decriminalized prostitution six years ago to "promote occupational health and safety" and "protect from exploitation." There has been no increase in prostitution, pimps, or traffickers, and women are more able to report violence and insist on their rights. It’s time for San Francisco to do the right thing and stop criminalizing sex workers.

Rachel West works with the U.S. PROStitutes Collective.

Art listings

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Art listings are compiled by Johnny Ray Huston.

MUSEUMS

Asian Art Museum 200 Larkin; 581-3500, www.asianart.org. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, 10am-5pm; Thurs, 10am-9pm. $10 ($5 Thurs after 5pm), $7 seniors, $6 for ages 12 to 17, free for 11 and under. "In a New Light: The Asian Art Museum Collection." Ongoing.

California Palace of the Legion of Honor Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave and Clement); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5pm. $8, $6 seniors, $5 for ages 12 to 17, free for 10 and under (free Tues). "Surrealism: Selections from the Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books." Work by surrealist poets and artists. Ongoing.

Cartoon Art Museum 655 Mission; CAR-TOON. Tues-Sun, 11am-5pm. $6, $4 students and seniors, $2 for ages 6 to 12, free for five and under and members. "The Art of Stan Sakai: Celebrating 25 Years of Usagi Yojimbo." Through Sun/5. "Watchmen." Illustrations, sketches, and comic book pages by Dave Gibbons. Through July 19. "The Brinkley Girls." Retrospective devoted to early 20th century illustrator Nell Brinkley. Through August 23.

Contemporary Jewish Museum 736 Mission; www.thecjm.org. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:30pm; Thurs, 1-8pm. $10, $8 seniors and students, free for 12 and under and members. "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater." An exhibition of 200 works of art and ephemera. Through Sept 7. "Being Jewish: A Bay Area Portrait." Ongoing.

De Young Museum Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive (near Fulton and 10th Ave); 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm (Fri, 9:30am-8:45pm). $10, $7 seniors, $6 for ages 13 to 17 and college students with ID (free first Tues). "The Fauna and Flora of the Pacific." Mural by Miguel Covarrubias. Ongoing.

Legion of Honor Lincoln Park, 34th Ave and Clement; 750-3600. Tues-Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm. $20 adults, $7 seniors, $6 youths and students, free 12 and under. "Waking Dreams: Max Klinger and the Symbolist Print." Retrospective of the German Symbolist artist. Through Sat/4.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 151 Third St; 357-4000. Mon-Tues, Fri-Sun, 11am-5:45pm; Thurs, 10am-8:45pm. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues; half price Thurs, 6-8:45pm). "Austere: Selections From the SFMOMA Collection." Photography and architecture and design. Through Tues/7. "Otl Aicher: Munchen 1972." Graphic design. Through Tues/7. "Patterns of Speculation: J. Mayer H." German architectural studio. Through Tues/7. "Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’." Exhibition devoted to the photographic classic. Through August 23. "Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities." Show dedicated to the two popular American artists. Through Sept 7. "Art in the Atrium: Kerry James Marshall." Monumental murals. Ongoing.

San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design War Memorial Veterans Bldg, 401 Van Ness, fourth floor; 255-4800, www.sfpalm.org. Tues-Fri, 11am-5pm; Sat, 1-5pm. Free. "Star Quality: The World of Noel Coward." Exhibition dedicated to the icon. Through August 29. "Maestro: Photographic Portraits of Tom Zimberoff." Portraits of national and international conductors. Ongoing. "150 Years of Dance in California." Ongoing. "San Francisco in Song." Ongoing. "San Francisco 1900: On Stage." Ongoing.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 701 Mission; 978-ARTS. Tues-Wed, Fri-Sun, noon-5pm; Thurs, noon-8pm. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free first Tues). "Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth." Mixed media sculptural "soundsuits" by the Chicago dancer-turned-artist. Through Sun/5. "Through Future Eyes: The Endurance of Humanity." Contemporary work by ten artists, incuding six Young Artists at Work curators. Through Sun/5.

BAY AREA

Cantor Arts Center Lomita and Museum, Stanford University, Stanford; (650) 723-4177. Wed, Fri-Sun, 11am-5pm; Thurs, 11am-8pm. "Appellations to Antiquity." 19th and 20th century works from the museum collection. Through July 26. "Pop to Present." Survey from the 1960s to the present. Through August 16. "Contemporary Glass." Modern glass works. Ongoing. "Rodin! The Complete Stanford Collection." Ongoing.

Judah L. Magnes Museum 2911 Russell, Berk; (510) 549-6950. Mon-Wed, Sun, 11am-4pm. $4, $3 students and seniors. "Memory Lab." Interactive installation allowing visitors to make family albums from their documents, photographs, and memories. Ongoing. "Projections." Multimedia works from the museums archival, documentary, and experimental films. Ongoing.

Oakland Museum of California 1000 Oak, Oakl; (510) 238-2200. Wed-Sat, 10am-5pm (first Fri, 10am-9pm); Sun, noon-5pm. $8, $5 seniors and students (free second Sun). "Future of Sequoias: Sustaining Parklands in the 21st Century." Panoramic photos with commentary. Through August 23. "Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object." A solo exhibition dedicated to the Oakland artist. Through August 23. "The Art and History of Early California." The story of California from the first inhabitants through the Gold Rush. Ongoing.

Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology UC Berkeley, 103 Kroeber Hall, room 3712, Bancroft and Bowditch, Berk; (510) 643-1193. Wed-Sat, 10am-4:30pm; Sun, noon-4pm. $4, $3 seniors, $1 students, free for 12 and under. "From the Maker’s Hand: Selections from the Permanent Collection." An exploration of human ingenuity found in living and historic cultures around the world. Ongoing.

UC Berkeley Art Museum 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk; (510) 642-0808. Wed-Sun, 11am-5pm. $8 adults, $5 seniors and young adults, free for members and 12 and under. "Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye." Museum survey curated by Lawrence Rinder. Through August 30. "Human Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet." Collaborative exhibition. Through Sept. 27. *

Bending toward oblivion

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culture@sfbg.com

Gay liberation changed Martin Duberman’s life. In the 1960s, Duberman taught history at Princeton, hardly a bastion of radical thought. Yet he found himself invigorated by nascent counterculture movements and became a champion of the left, penning essays in The New York Times and serving as faculty advisor to the Princeton chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. At the same time, Duberman spent years in intensive psychotherapy in desperate attempts to "cure" his homosexuality. Soon after the emergence of the gay liberation movement, however, he rejected this homophobic vision and embraced a gay identity. His work also became queerer.

Over the years, he has written more than 20 books — biographies, plays, memoirs, history texts, and a novel — on a wide range of topics ranging from antislavery activism to the civil rights movement and Stonewall. His new book, Waiting to Land: A (Mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008 (The New Press 352 pages, $26.95), is a combination of diary entries and recollections from the Reagan years to the present. This latest work serves as a window into Duberman’s activist and scholarly careers, as well as his critiques of the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian movement.

SFBG We’re approaching the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the symbolic event of early gay liberation, and I’m wondering if you think there’s any of this liberationist spirit left in the gay movement.

Martin Duberman Well, I guess it depends on how you define liberationist. In the early days, gay liberationists were aware of a great many other ills in the society besides their own. Their own were real, and they were well aware of that. But there was a lot wrong, they felt, with the system, and their central goal was to challenge many of the established institutions and values. Today most LGBT people seem to think of themselves — certainly they tell the mainstream — as "just folks," except for this little matter of a separate sexual orientation. That they’re patriotic Americans and they want the same things that everybody else wants, etc.

SFBG In Waiting to Land, you cover this assimilationist turn in the gay movement. You talk about the March on Washington in 1993 where gays in the military became the dominant issue. You also talk about Stonewall 25, which happened one year later in New York City, where one of the biggest fundraising events was held onboard a U.S. aircraft carrier, and where corporate sponsorship arguably overwhelmed any celebration of resistance, history, or culture. Has anything changed in the last 15 years?

MD The early ’70s were still fueled by the countercultural movement of the ’60s, and the early gay movement built on the insights and the demands of, say, the feminist movement or the antiwar movement. I mean there was so much going on in the ’60s, and together it all amounted to a challenge to the so-called experts. There was an across-the-board challenging of many traditional views, so finally that began to seep down, or up — whatever it is — to us. That’s the whole trouble, I think, with the assimilationist turn. It denies our own gay past and our culture and our politics. I mean, they’re willing to throw all that away in order to make stronger the claim that we’re just folks.

SFBG And do you feel like mainstream gay people have become more heterosexualized? I mean in that particular way of embracing long-term committed partnership, monogamy, or now even marriage, as the only type of love or intimacy that’s valid?

MD Yeah. Once again, the banner of lifetime monogamous pair-bonding has been raised. Now some of that is the result of AIDS, in which people were scared to death, so they settled down into so-called permanent relationships. Not everybody. But many more than had done so in the ’70s.

SFBG When you talk about AIDS in Waiting to Land, it punctures the style of your writing. You’ll be writing something that’s more ruminative, and then you’ll have three or four sentences about a friend who died or a series of friends who died, and then you go back into your thoughts about something outside of that.

MD I think that’s right. It’s why I put that subtitle in. I say "mostly political," because when it came to the death of friends, I did talk about my personal feelings, and my sadness, whereas most of the time in Waiting to Land I’m talking about external events or public policies.

SFBG You yourself have played a role as both an insider and outsider in a variety of realms. In Waiting to Land, you deliver scathing critiques of the rigid hierarchies and competitive structures of academia. You talk about the homophobia of the straight left, and you talk about the limited agenda of the gay mainstream. You talk about the exclusiveness of establishment theatre and mainstream media. Yet you’ve also worked inside all these structures. So I’m wondering how these institutions have formed your politics and how you’ve helped to form or transform these institutions.

MD [W.E.B.] Du Bois, the great African American leader, once said something — I think he called it double vision. He said that although he had had a superb education and was accepted by mainstream whites, nonetheless he felt he was a spy in the culture, a spy who was bringing the news about the mainstream back to his own people. And on one level, I have had a very easy time passing — I went to very good schools, I was on the tennis team in high school, etc. Nobody, I think, or very few people, guessed that I was in fact homosexual, and I did my best to play along with that. I was very career-oriented, I was very competitive — I always wanted to be first in my class, win the best prize for an essay, and that’s where most of my energy went throughout my 20s. But then once the counterculture began, I sort of leapt on it. I was immediately sympathetic, and I wrote lots of essays during the ’60s in which I was very strongly on the side of the New Left. And then it took a while longer after that before I realized that of course the same applies to being gay.

SFBG In terms of your role as both insider and outsider, do you feel that that’s helped you to develop stronger critiques of all those institutions, whether on the straight left, in the gay mainstream, or in establishment theater and media?

MD I think so, because I knew the inner workings of many of these mainstream institutions, and so I was able to see the falsity of many of the attitudes, especially toward people who are not middle-class whites. White men, I should say.

SFBG I think one thing you’ve tried very deliberately throughout your career, whether as a writer, an academic, or an activist, is to build movement ties across lines of class, race, gender, and age. In the new book, you talk about trying to bring an awareness of queer and feminist issues into the straight left, and an awareness of race and class into the gay mainstream — and feeling mostly like you’ve failed.

MD I think it’s because the mainstream left is no more receptive — they all claim that, "well of course we believe you people should have your rights, and of course we’re tolerant of your lifestyle." But when it comes right down to it, you cannot get them to hang around long enough to listen to the ways in which queer values and perspectives might inform their own lives. They don’t believe that for a second. And that hasn’t changed at all. At least, if it has changed, I haven’t seen it.

SFBG And what about in terms of the other side of the equation? With the dominant agendas of the big gay institutions centering on marriage, military service, ordination into the priesthood, adoption, and unquestioning gentrification and consumerism, do you think that those particular emphases prevent a deeper analysis of structural issues of racism and classism?

MD Well, of course they do. Mainstream America is still further behind the gay movement in dealing with any of those issues. So when you’re bending your energy to turning into the mainstream, you’re simultaneously burying your awareness of the class and racial and economic divisions that continue to characterize our country.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (mattildabernsteinsycamore.com) is the author, most recently, of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights) and the editor of an expanded second edition of That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull).

Selling the park

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sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Considering that it exists just a short hop from the industrial grind of Third Street, Candlestick Point State Recreation Area is a surprisingly wild and peaceful 150-acre bayshore park.

On a recent afternoon, a man practiced his golf swings, a group fished off a pier, and a lizard darted across a trail and into a clump of wildflowers, all apparently unaware of the storm gathering around the future of this waterfront habitat.

State Sen. Mark Leno’s Senate Bill 792 would give the State Lands Commission and State Parks Department the authority to negotiate an exchange of 42 acres in the park for patches of land on the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, allowing Lennar Corp. to build condos in the state park and reducing Bayview’s only major open space by 25 percent.

Leno claims that SB 792 "will help realize one of the few remaining opportunities for large-scale affordable housing, parks, open space, and economic development in San Francisco by authorizing a key public-private land exchange necessary for the development of Hunters Point/Candlestick Park."

"A lot of this property is dirt, and much of it is used by the 49ers for parking. It’s not high quality park land," Leno told the Guardian.

In addition to adding some amendments suggested by the Sierra Club, Leno said state and federal agencies must approve the deal, which would also require a full environmental impact report. "There will be no environmental shortcutting," Leno said.

But environmental advocates are outraged that Mayor Gavin Newsom and his chief economic advisor, Michael Cohen, are trying to get state legislators to facilitate an unpopular land swap that allows an out-of-state developer to build thousands of condos on state tidelands in exchange for strips and pockets of the toxic shipyard (see "Eliminating dissent," 6/17).

"When Michael Cohen asked us to endorse what they were calling a conceptual framework, he called it a rush to the starting line and promised us a full and robust discussion of the actual proposal," Kristine Enea, who works for the India Basin Neighborhood Association, said of last year’s Proposition G. "We’re not trying to stop the development, but we want a discussion. And we’re raising questions that otherwise won’t be raised until after the environmental impact report is completed."

In April, Newsom wrote to Sen. Fran Pavley, who chairs the state’s Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, claiming that plans for the shipyard and Candlestick Point had already been endorsed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and overwhelmingly approved by voters in June 2008.

"By utilizing a true public-private partnership, this [SB 792] will cause tens of millions of dollars of public open space investment to state park lands and public trust lands, at no cost to the state or the city’s general fund, providing a significant benefit to the state as well as to the citizens of San Francisco," Newsom wrote.

As part of the land swap, Lennar would pay fair market value for much of the parkland, with estimates of about $40 million that would go to the state for managing the remaining acreage. Lennar proposes to build 7,850 housing units on Candlestick Point, and it’s unclear how many of those will go into what is now a state park.

Critics say Newsom is trying to use Prop. G like a hammer to force through legislation that wouldn’t pass locally and would destroy the park’s current functions and wildlife habitat, forever changing life in Bayview Hunters Point, due to the scale and socioeconomic and environmental impacts of Lennar’s proposed redevelopment.

Created by the legislature in 1977, CPSRA is the state’s first urban park. It offers panoramic views of the wind-whipped bay, San Bruno Mountain, and Yosemite Slough, the only unbridged waterway in the city’s southeast sector. And while it’s not typically crowded, the park is well-used by residents, who like to hike and jog, walk their dogs, and windsurf adjacent to Monster Park stadium.

Saul Bloom — whose nonprofit group, Arc Ecology, angered Cohen and Newsom in February when it published "Alternatives for Study," a draft report that identified deficiencies in Lennar’s current proposal — admits that a section of the park is a weed-filled lot that 49ers fans use for parking on game days.

"But the leasing for parking contributes $800,000 toward park maintenance annually," Bloom told the Guardian, noting that this is a vital source of funding in tough times.

He also noted that the California State Parks Foundation recently raised $12 million to restore Yosemite Slough and the California Solid Waste Management Board (whose members include former Sen. Carole Migden, whom Leno defeated last year) recently completed a $1 million rehabilitation of a former construction debris field on the state park property.

But neither this nor the state Budget Conference Committee’s recent decision to institute a $15 surcharge on vehicle license fees of noncommercial vehicles as a dedicated funding source to keep California’s state parks open will save CPSRA from being hobbled if SB 792 is approved in its current state.

"Surely other land can be used for building condos. Affordable housing and condo residents need open space too," said Peter Barstow, founding director of Nature in the City, noting that the 42-acre parcel of contested land represents 25 percent of the park, but only 5 percent of the 770 acres the developer has at its disposal to build 10,500 units of proposed housing.

"Any loss in acreage would seriously diminish the ability of the park to serve the city’s needs, especially with 10,500 new units proposed for the Lennar development," Barstow said.

He said some "logical swapping" is possible. "But they are doing some numbers game, in which they are counting a huge amount of parkland that is already there."

"We should be thinking how to connect these ecologically isolated islands," Barstow said, who sees this debate as an opportunity to link CPSRA to wildlife corridors in McClaren Park and Bayview Hill. "The development should be in the interest of the people, critters, wildlife and plants in the Bayview, not in those of someone in an office thousands of miles away."

He also scoffed at proponents’ arguments that the density of the development means that it is smart urban growth. "Just because a development is dense is not an argument to build it on a park."

Cohen recently told the Guardian that the 77 acres of the 49ers stadium and all the paid parking inside its facility will be filled with "mainly retail and entertainment," while the 42 acres of state park would be used to build condos.

Meredith Thomas of the Neighborhood Parks Council noted that her group "fully supports the revitalization and redevelopment of the Candlestick Point/Shipyard area … But when folks voted for Prop. G in June 2008, nowhere did the measure say that by voting for it, you are agreeing to sell parkland."

"We are always concerned when municipal land that is being used as a park is put up for sale," Thomas said. "While it’s a state park, it really functions as a neighborhood park for those who use it. I think what happens when we plan for large developments is that we don’t do enough to plan for parks with the density increase that’s coming."

The Sierra Club has been leading the charge against the bill. "We lose 40 acres but gain a bathroom," Arthur Feinstein, the Sierra Club’s local representative jokingly told the Guardian. "Now that’s a good deal!"

Observing that the organization’s position is "no net loss of acreage, no loss of biodiversity, no loss of wildlife corridors," Feinstein said, "There are a ton of alternatives to this plan and no reason to destroy 25 percent of the park or build a bridge and a road over Yosemite Slough."

With Arc’s studies showing that the bridge, which will cost $100 million to construct, only shaves two minutes off travel time, Feinstein added: "This is a road to nowhere. It’ll cost $50 million a minute."

He also said that allowing a company to buy state parkland "sets a terrible precedent… Then every state park is at risk from developers as the state’s budget woes grow. I hope Sen. Mark Leno sees this."

"No one would ever think put housing on Crissy Field," Feinstein continued. "But in the Bayview, the attitude is, why not? That whole mentality has made the area into an environmental justice community. Even when it’s given something, it comes in a costly way to the community, but a cheap way for the developers."

March madness

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le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I can tell you where to get pork tacos if your car breaks down in Petaluma and you have to wait for Kragen to test your battery, which for some reason takes an hour. I speak from experience; it’s just not mine. My only experience with experiences like this are vicarious. Now. As you know, I drive a new car and have gotten in the bad habit of getting where I’m going.

Which is nice, in a way, but my chances of marrying a tow truck driver are greatly reduced. Not to mention a Good Samaritan with a wrench. Not to mention early lunch at an unexpected hole-in-the-wall next to Kragen’s. How am I supposed to discover such discoveries?

That’s where friends with unreliable cars come in. And where would I be without them? Not at Taqueria Los Potrillos No. 1 in Petaluma, contemputf8g soccer posters, soccer trophies, and pictures of a guy named Hector Murillo with his arm around various and sundry soccer stars and, for all I know, stars who are stars of other things that aren’t soccer, such as …

Well, I can’t think of any examples right now.

"Today I got up at 6, left at 7, and broke down in Petaluma," my friend the Jungle had written in his e-mail. He described his consolation tacos as "out of this world" and "amazing" — "the best al pastor taco I’ve ever had in my life, I swear."

And to think he was having it at a time of frustration and despair. And for breakfast!

I had mine later that same day, for dinner, and I would agree with my buddy’s alacritous taco take whole-stomachfully, except that in my life, "the best al pastor taco I’ve ever had" doesn’t amount to very many beans. I’m more of a carnitas chica.

Or was. Now I don’t know.

I love it when life or pork shakes you up like this. Don’t you? You think you’re straight, and then you’re gay, or vice versa, or you think you’re bi and then it turns out that in fact, you are bi, but your favorite kind of taco is al pastor, not carnitas.

Happy pride!

As you may know, I am hyperbolically fickle when it comes to food, incoherently queer when it comes to sex, insane in love, and queerly incoherent as a writer. What else is there? For me, pride is not possible. But I wish you all the very best. While you’re reading this I will be dancing with animals, I’m pretty sure, at the Berlin Zoo. Not being proud so much as slightly drunk, I predict, and very very happy.

I’ll be being the B and the T. You bring the lettuce.

I write to you from an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean, at twilight. Tomorrow morning I will wake up, if I sleep, 5,658 miles away from the nearest Guardian news box. In other words, now would be the perfect time to say something really really offensive. I wish I could think of a way to piss off almost everyone, but I’m in this sort of uncaffeinated slow and soupy Ativan cloud right now, and, realistically, the best I can hope to do from here would be to mildly annoy a handful of lesbians.

I’ll pass.

Well, let me just pose it as a question, and then finish talking about tacos. What’s the difference between a march and a parade? That’s the question. My thinking is a parade is for showing off, being proud, putting on a show … and a march is all that too, only less organized and more to the point: the point being to rally the troops, gather momentum, numbers, spontaneous support. No? Now go look at the Web page for the dyke march that happens here every Pride weekend on Saturday night, and wonder with me: they talk a lot of talk about inclusion, then ask roughly half the population of San Francisco to politely stand on the sidelines and clap.

Sounds like a parade to me. Sounds like, if you don’t need men out there in the street with you, congratulations, your work is done.

The tacos were awesome. The green salsa was delicious. The chips were fresh. Oh, and check out the bleeding Jesuses in the window of the grocery store/carniceria two doors down, all crucified and shit, sad eyes turned toward heaven, wondering: "Is there a bi march?"


TAQUERIA LOS POTRILLOS

Mon.–Fri., 9 a.m.–10 p.m.;

Sat.-Sun., 8 a.m.–10 p.m.

355 E. Washington, Petaluma

(707) 763-4220

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Intelligent design

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first world is so jammed with manufactured stuff we can’t perceive most of it — even the stuff we buy rapidly and take for granted, to be replaced by each next-model thingy. This process is now our economy’s bedrock, as was underlined when the government’s first order of business after 9/11 was to encourage partying like it’s $19.99 via those "America: Open for Business" signs with Old Glory as shopping bag. Yet the economy and consumerism’s ever-more-tangible impact on our planet seem to scream, "Shop less!"

Durability vs. disposability and perennial style vs. trendiness are conflicting impulses on both sides of the buyer/seller equation. In theory we might all agree everything we buy should be functional, sturdy, and attractive enough to keep until it gives out. But this flies in the face of nearly all marketplace logic, and purchaser desire. The whole idea is to generate decisions made on what you want, not what you need. Better still if that line blurs.

The New York Times’ "Consumed" columnist Rob Walker describes this drive as one for "the ‘New Now,’ a ‘New Next’" in Objectified, the latest documentary by Gary Hustwit. Like his Helvetica (2007), which looked at the stealthily enormous role of typeface in our lives, Objectified is more an appreciation than a critique of something utterly ubiquitous in this case product design — and a few stellar personalities behind it.

Hustwit isn’t interested in history or the full range of design as much as celebrating those idiosyncratic individuals whose design imprint falls within the ongoing tradition of 20th-century modernism, with its clean lines, minimal detailing, and whiff of yesteryear’s sci-fi future. "Good design is as little design as possible" insists retired innovator Dieter Rams of German home appliance giant Braun. Many of the film’s interviewees — mostly designers well-known within the industry by name or firm (IDEO, Smart) — muse on products rooted in the post-analog "connected world." With an item’s inner workings now reduced to the microchip’s all-powerful DNA, there’s little need for form to resemble function anymore; practically everything can be some sort of smooth, small, amorphous blob or plane.

Still, as Objectified emphasizes in Helvetica‘s same alert, amused, admiring way, the best designers don’t aim for depersonalizing aesthetic perfection (let alone garish flamboyance). Instead, their goal is honing every manufactured object we require or enjoy so it makes the world a mite more user-friendly. There’s an ingratiating segment here observing just how much thought goes into Smart’s creating garden-shear handles even an arthritic could love. Elsewhere, one colorful industry type rails that there’s simply no excuse for bad design anymore. Yet another GPS no one can figure out should occasion "riots in the streets," he says.

Objectified‘s primary images of rhyming-row merch in consumerist temples (IKEA, Target, etc.) are "globalization" personified. Yet as one person mercifully mentions here, that neverending parade of stuff only reaches a lucky 10 percent or so. Since the other 90 percent aspire toward disposable income and luxury goods, our insatiable minority now ponders how to tell them it’s all been a horrible mistake.

The designers here are aware of, yet somewhat flummoxed by, that crisis: It’s the very nature of their jobs that "most of what you design ends up in a landfill." It will fall to a different documentary to chronicle how product design adopts new agendas of quasi-permanence, successive useage, and biodegradability. When and if that truly happens, Objectified might turn into beautiful detritus, an artifact from a vanished age of elegant waste.

OBJECTIFIED

Wed/24-Sun/28, 1, 3, 5 p.m.

(also Wed/24-Sat/27, 7 and 9 p.m. ), $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

‘Manhattan’ 2.0?

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Every once in a while Woody Allen breaks new ground, uncovering a different side of the incomparably prolific filmmaker. Just as often, he doesn’t. Whatever Works isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but it’s funny — in fact, it’s one of the funniest and warmest of his recent films. It just goes to show that even when he’s not the "new and improved" Woody Allen, he’s still Woody Allen. And that’s nothing to sniff at.

Allen doesn’t star in Whatever Works, but he might as well. Larry David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a crueler, more cynical version of Allen’s nebbishy persona. At first his condescension and misanthropy are a bit disconcerting: is this how Woody’s felt about us all along — that we’re idiots and he’s the only one who really gets it? But, like most Allen protagonists, Boris is a lot more relatable and less unpleasant once we get to know him. It helps that he’s forced to take in simple Southern belle Melody St. Ann Celestine, a runaway who somehow falls in love with her host. No matter how bad a hypochondriac curmudgeon you are, marrying a much younger woman is bound to lift your spirits.

As with his other films, the strength of Whatever Works is in the variety of talented actors Allen has assemble. Aside from Larry doing Woody — about as close to the real thing as you can get — Evan Rachel Wood is charming as Melody. Her performance, equal parts sexual and naïve, recalls Mira Sorvino’s Linda in Mighty Aphrodite (1995). And Patricia Clarkson, who stole her scenes in Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008), continues to wow as Melody’s mother.

In the end, Allen fans will embrace the film. Allen haters — well, they’re probably not about to start liking him now. There may be a formula at play here, but in the all-too-appropriate words of the movie’s title, "whatever works." Frankly, it’s comforting to know Allen can still put out a lighthearted comedy after recent serious detours. Hey, funny is funny. Woody is Woody.

WHATEVER WORKS opens Fri/26 in Bay Area theaters.

Paging all freaks

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johnny@sfbg.com

QUEER ISSUE As May gave way to June, news arrived that a veteran gang of gay magazines — Honcho, Inches, Mandate, Playguy, and Torso — were printing their last glossy naked pages, no thanks to the unending onslaught of Internet porn and hookup sites. For print fetishists of the queer variety, this would seem like a sign of the gloomy end times. But signs can be wrong. In fact, a teeming variety of small publishers are bringing a mix of sex and sensibility to those underground seekers who revel and rebel outside the eye of the computer monitor. Here’s a brief, far from complete, guide to the action.

BAITLINE

In a recent interview on the Guardian‘s Pixel Vision blog, the artist Matt Keegan talks about the subversive social potential of gay calendars and magazines during past eras. You could say Baitline revives this potential. It’s the anti-Craigslist. Hallelujah! Hand-drawn and stapled, this local community resource can help you find your next pervy playmate or like-minded roommate, or assist you in stoking an artistic project and finding a job.

70 Richland Ave, San Francisco, CA, 94110. sywagon@gmail.com

BUTT

Not-so-straight from the Netherlands comes the gay version of Playboy for the 21st century to tease your nether lands even though you buy it to read the interviews. BUTT’s been around long enough to be anthologized as a book. The latest issue is SF-centric, with appearances by Hunx from Hunx and his Punx, and Hunx’s sometime partner in crime, Brontez.

Klein-Gartmanplantsoen 21-I, 1017 RP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. www.buttmagazine.com

CHECK OUT THESE GUNS

Artist Nathaniel Fink is interested in documenting male body types. This simple and cute little zine finds a shirtless and slim subject flexing against a big blue sky.

nathanieljfink@gmail.com; www.morephotosaboutbuildingsandfood.blogspot.com

FAG SCHOOL

Your teacher at Fag School is the one and only Brontez of Younger Lovers and Gravy Train!!! fame. Brontez knows how to turn funny anecdotes and sexy pics into an old-school queer zine for our ADD moment. Not as simple as it sounds. He’s also good at making straight guys takes off their clothes and model.

www.myspace.com/1256201

FOR LONELY ADULTS ONLY

The most recent example of Regis Trigano’s photo zine presents a man alone in bed having some fun. Well shot.

www.proun.us

GOTEBLUD

This isn’t a zine, but instead a zine store run by Matt Wobensmith, the queer punk stalwart behind Outpunk Records and the zine of the same name in the 1990s. Opening night last month revealed a small emporium of countercultural wonders — queer stuff is just one facet. Just try to resist the Wuvable Oaf memorabilia.

Sat–Sun, noon–5 p.m. 766 Valencia, SF. www.goteblud.livejournal.com

HANDBOOK

Men, oft-scruffy, sometimes tattooed, taking care of themselves — based in San Francisco, this publication reaches all over the country to create images that owe a debt to old amateur raunch hands such as Old Reliable.

handbooksf@yahoo.com; www.hanbookmen.com

PINUPS

Christopher Schulz’s three-times-a-year publication featuring one or two models is bearish and cuddly, whether depicting a light wrestling bout or a sandy frolic with a beach ball.

contact@pinupsmag.com; www.pinupsmag.com; www.myspace.com/pinupsmag

QUEER ZINES

This book lists and shares samples from the ever-expansive realm of queer zines. As a zinester from the early days who attended the Chicago SPEW conference decades ago, I can say it isn’t definitive — but it is wonderfully, revealingly comprehensive.

Printed Matter, 195 10th Ave., New York, NY, 10011. aabronson@printedmatter.org. www.printedmatter.org

SPANK

I’d call this the My Comrade of today, replacing that primarily 20th century zine’s drag comedy with boyishness. In other words, here’s a rag for partying NYC art fags.

www.spankzine.wordpress.com

STRAIGHT TO HELL

Still raunchy at 66 issues old, this is a classic, the daddy of them all, the one that exposes Penthouse Forum as boredom. Images by the late, great photographer Al Baltrop appear in the latest edition along with stories bearing titles like "Jockey Rides Teen’s Face — Wins Race" and "Appaloosa Stud with ‘Epic Torso’ Overwhelms Startled Shutterbug."

S.T.H., Box 20424, NYC, 10023. sth@straight-to-hell.net; www-straight-to-hell.net

Kingston nights

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a&eletters@sfbg.com

Everybody loves bounce. It persists as a state of mind, an epiphany of sexual exhibitionism and physical delirium: Baltimore club and San Francisco’s hyphy movement; Rio de Janeiro’s baile funk to Puerto Rican reggaeton; and London grime and dubstep to Berliners’ dub.

Philadelphia label owner, producer, filmmaker, and occasional journalist Wesley "Diplo" Pentz has probably done more than any other American DJ to popularize the notion of club music as an international phenomenon with common roots and regionally distinct varieties. Last year, Paste magazine claimed he "has updated the template set by 20th century song hunter Alan Lomax." Much like Lomax, Diplo has brought "undiscovered talent" to Western ears, from his early championing of Atlanta crunk as one-half of the pioneering DJ duo Hollertronix to his support of Brazilian rappers Bonde Do Role. However, just because he brings those artists to hipsters’ attention doesn’t mean they aren’t successful within their Third World communities.

Yet even if some myths of cross-cultural exchange persist, they aren’t fraught with as much racial tension as in Lomax’s day. This leads us to Diplo’s latest project, Major Lazer, with U.K. producer Dave "Switch" Loveys. The two traveled to Kingston, Jamaica, last year, recording with dancehall and reggae stars such as Turbulence, Mr. Vegas, Vybz Kartel, and Prince Zimboo at the Marley family’s legendary Tuff Gong Studios. The resulting Guns Don’t Kill People … Lazers Do (Downtown) is a wildly libidinous dance party, a hymn to club nights where pussies pop and guns blaze.

"We both concluded that there’s a lot of talent in Jamaica that isn’t really being exposed at the moment," Switch says from New York City. Many of Major Lazer’s Jamaican collaborators — including T.O.K., author of the infamous gay-bashing anthem "Chi Chi Man" — have had U.S. deals in the past. However, with the music industry’s continuing decline, U.K. label Greensleeves’ meltdown and purchase by equally troubled imprint VP Records, and the cyclical nature of Jamaican music’s popularity, they haven’t received as much attention as in the recent past. "All we’ve tried to do is expose the talent … on a more global scale than just in Jamaica," Switch says.

Switch is the lesser-known of the Major Lazer squad. He first drew recognition in West London for producing garage house tracks. He called his work "fidget house," and the term stuck: the English love their nomenclature. A U.S. trip to work with Spank Rock and Amanda Blank inadvertently led to credits on Santogold’s "Creator," a major hit that, coupled with his widely-acclaimed contributions to M.I.A.’s Arular (Interscope, 2005), helped fuel the Major Lazer project. "Now when we approach things, people are more willing to trust us when we want to make it a little bit more quirky," Switch says.

Both producers have traveled to Jamaica before. Diplo has released material by JA artists like Ms. Thing on his Mad Decent label, while Switch announces his love for the hot Kingston street party Passa Passa. After the two returned to the U.S. to assemble Major Lazer’s debut "in little bits" between other DJ and production gigs, word of the project leaked out to their American friends. "As soon as they heard we were putting it together seriously, they were, like, if you need any help, let us know," Switch says.

Perhaps the best parts of Guns Don’t Kill People … Lazers Do come when their American friends nestle against their Jamaican counterparts: Amanda Blank answers slack rapper Einstein with an equally filthy rhyme on "What U Like"; Brooklyn singer Jah Dan kicks a conscious flow on "Cash Flow"; and criminally underrated harmony sisters Nina Sky sing coquettishly on "Keep It Goin’." Sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate our bouncement artists until you hear them hold their own with their Jamaican counterparts, like when Santogold chants a hook for Mr. Lexx’s gruff war chant on "Hold the Line." It’s then that you realize that club music’s lingua franca — swagger, sex, and having fun — has no borders.

Meanwhile, the cover art for Guns Don’t Kill People … Lazers Do pays homage to the comic art found on the back covers of old Jamaican albums like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders (Greensleeves, 1981) and the Upsetters’ Super Ape (Mob Entertainment, 2006). "Major Lazer is basically a fictional character we dreamt up to give this whole project we did down in Jamaica an identity, rather than it just being me and Wes — two white guys going down to Jamaica and trying to make a record," Switch says. "We tried to make it a little more fun."

MAJOR LAZER

Fri/26, 9 p.m., $26

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

(415) 673-5716

www.spectrumfest.com

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