ACTION HERO Soft-spoken and dare I say, petite, Tony Jaa hardly looks like the kind of guy who could annihilate a room full of underground pit fighters. Of course, anyone who’s seen Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior knows this appearance is deceiving. The 30-year-old Thai superstar’s latest film, The Protector, features elephants and a one-take sequence of, as Jaa describes it, “me fighting the bad guys from the ground floor to the fourth floor” — but, as in Ong-Bak, there are no CG, wires, or Jaa stunt doubles during the fight scenes. On a recent visit to San Francisco, Jaa paused to discuss his skyrocketing career.
SFBG Your films are famous for their fight scenes. Which comes first, the stunts or the story?
TONY JAA (through interpreter Gilbert Lim, also his manager) It has to be the story first. After the script is done, all the stunt people — my [martial arts] master Panna Rittikrai, the director [Prachya Pinkaew], and me — will sit down and decide what sort of action would fit into each particular scene. Then we try them all out before we actually film them.
SFBG Before Ong-Bak, Muay Thai hadn’t been featured in many films. What makes your way of fighting different?
TJ Muay Thai is something I would really like to show to the rest of the world. With my style of shooting a film — not having a stunt man for myself — it creates a more realistic film for the audience.
SFBG CG effects have come a long way in recent years, so it’s kind of ironic that the future of martial arts, which is what you’ve been called, keeps it so old-school.
TJ I feel that CG is not something to be taken lightly. I’m OK with it, but I feel a sense of pride in doing the stunts. I want my audience to feel amazed by something I did myself.
SFBG Do you plan to do the Jackie Chan thing and make an American movie? In Ong Bak there was that graffiti shout-out to Steven Spielberg …
TJ Yes! [Laughs] It was something the director put in. For the time being, I’m extremely busy with my next film, Ong-Bak 2, which I’ll be directing myself. As to whether I would go to the US [to make a film], when Spielberg calls … [Laughs] I’m just joking! But the time might come when I will make the move.
SFBG Will Ong-Bak 2 be a direct sequel to the first film?
TJ No, it’s actually a period piece. You’ll see me using weapons and showing Thai martial arts styles that will be very new for the cinema.
SFBG OK, I have to ask. If you only had one punch to bring a guy down, where’s the best spot to aim to do the most damage?
TJ [Laughs] A lot of the basis of martial arts, it’s not about hitting the other person, it’s about self-discipline. Although in many parts of our bodies there are weak spots which you could actually hit to knock the person out. But I’m not gonna name them! (Cheryl Eddy)
THE PROTECTOR
Opens Fri/8 in Bay Area theaters
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.theprotectormovie.com
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The man with the golden guns
Air Americana
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Madonna and her scantily-clad kabbalah practice may have been ousted by the Russian Orthodox Church, but rest assured, oh ye faithful, the Silver Jews are finally coming to San Francisco. The band, often mislabeled as a Pavement side project, actually coalesced before Pavement, though the two backstories share a history of caustic revelation.
David Berman, guitarist-vocalist Stephen Malkmus, and drummer Bob Nastanovich formed the Silver Jews in 1989 while students at the University of Virginia. After graduation, they took the budding project with them to New York. Their music thrived in that city’s frenetic air. The band’s roster has changed continuously, but Berman, a heartbreaking writer and constant innovator, has always been at the helm. It’s his project, his voice.
Berman will be turning 40 in January. Four awe-inspiring full-lengths, a host of smaller projects, and a well-received poetry book (1999’s Actual Air) have placed him firmly in the cultural spotlight, often against his will. Berman is a recluse in some ways, a natural wordsmith — and instantly demanding performer — in others. He’s given the Bay Area numerous poetry readings but never a rock show.
Until now. Berman has been through some tough, emotionally trying shit lately, but he’s back, with the eloquent deadpan that has made him the envy of songwriters, indie philosophes, and music junkies everywhere. Longtime fans may call this unprecedented tour a resurrection, but Berman laughs it off. “I’d always planned to be a middle-aged performer,” he jokes via an e-mail interview. “This year has just been the run-up to the start of my contract with the Missouri River Blues Barge’s Menthol Topaz Casino.”
Waiting for a new Silver Jews album is like waiting for John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats to take the stage: everyone is ready to be shattered and jubilant, lyric by lyric, tune by tune. On 2005’s Tanglewood Numbers, the first Silver Jews effort since 2001’s Tennessee (both Drag City), Berman’s voice sounds deeper than ever, as if it might break at any moment and never come back.
The Tanglewood crew is rather big — 13 folks including Malkmus and Will Oldham — but that’s just how they do it in Nashville, where the record was recorded and mixed. Other Nashville-ized albums by the likes of Cat Power and Oldham these past years have taken some getting used to. Tanglewood hits the heart instantly.
Berman’s vocal duos and duals with his wife, Cassie, who plays a variety of old-timey instruments on Tanglewood, are organic and intensely personal. “Humans have been failing Human Relationships 101 for half a million semesters straight now,” writes Berman. The ability to perform back-and-forth vocal lines is “one of the many things you can do more easily under a band name than as a solo artist,” he notes. “Different souls are in the music.”
On “I’m Getting Back into Getting Back into You,” the Jews sound trapped in a psychedelic small-town roller-skating rink, needing to raise their voices to be saved. But maybe we’re all trapped. “I’ve been working in an airport bar/ It’s like Christmas in a submarine,” Berman croons. An ominous “om” sneaks in at the end of the tune.
Since their first recordings, made on answering machines and Walkmans, Berman and the Jews have been proving that our main roads are really back roads and vice versa. He writes of those early days: “Getting the tape back after a good performance was hell — first the breaking and entering …” Americana, broadly defined, is sustained by such neighborhood trickery. When Lucinda Williams revisits childhood gravel roads or Darnielle sings about hearing the screams of football season, particularly American landscapes reveal what we had always thought were private obsessions. Such artists gain a universal appeal by taking local scenes and spraying themselves all over them. It’s sound graffiti and it feels so good.
Berman’s current plan is deceptively simple: “To keep making these different versions of the master Silver Jews album in the sky.” On Tanglewood, “How Can I Love You If You Won’t Lie Down?” rocks hard but also highlights Berman’s tragicomedy: “Time is a game only children play well/ How can I love you if you won’t lie down?”
The Mezzanine performance will feature Peyton Pinkerton and William Tyler on guitars — Pinkerton played on 1996’s The Natural Bridge, Tyler on 2001’s Bright Flight (both Drag City) — Brian Kotzur on drums, Tony Crow on keyboards, and Cassie Berman on bass. Even the lineup gets Berman going. “Peyton is a descendent of William Henry Harrison…. I’m convinced that many of our country’s best electric guitarists are the far-flung descendents of mediocre 19th-century American presidents.” SFBG
SILVER JEWS
With Monotonix and Continuous Peasant
Sun/10, 8 p.m.
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
$19.99
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com
Songs in the key of quirk
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
“Let’s bleed orange and brown all over this town.” Is it possible for such words of wisdom to induce skull fractures? Try inhaling this foul stench of a battle cry from doomed Cleveland Browns fans for 22 seasons as an Ohio resident, and you tell me if your gray matter doesn’t feel starved for another kind of enlightenment. Hailing from “the Mistake on the Lake,” a.k.a. northeastern Ohio, does have its share of rewards and quirks. The rent is supercheap and Black Label Beer is a staple in every twentysomething’s diet. We have LeBron James — ’nuff said. If Drew Carey says it’s cool, then our shit don’t stink, right? Maniacal football fiends, burning rivers, insatiable femmes, sweltering summer humidity versus punishing winter blizzards, and Dave Grohl — nothing resonates louder than these two Buckeye Belt principles: we like to put things into perspective and we have our dignity.
Musically speaking, Ohio’s rock ’n’ roll scene is engrossing and tends to personify a hearty DIY blend of blue-collar garage rock and trash punk. Given the nature of its factory-fraught makeup and economic turmoil, it only seems natural that listening to bands such as Deep Purple and David Lee Roth–era Van Halen never really goes out of style. Just 30 minutes south of Cleveland, in the tar-smothered tire kingdom of Akron, the shoddy atmosphere hasn’t changed much either. On any given night, it’s common to walk into a pub and see drunk boys and girls washing down greasy cheeseburgers and salted vinegar potato chips with pint glasses of Pabst Blue Ribbon to the soundtrack of gnarled fuzz and pealing feedback blowing out of a guitar amp. Sure, northeastern Ohio might lack the utopian hipster hangouts of Brooklyn and post-rock wet dreams of neighboring Chicago, but it makes up for it with character and remains home to a neglected crew of groundbreaking art rockers, new wavers, and experimental weirdos: the Dead Boys, the Pagans, Devo, the James Gang, Pere Ubu, and the Rubber City’s favorite twosome of blues breakers, the Black Keys.
The band’s drummer, Patrick Carney, reassured me in a recent phone interview that the “bright lights, big city” aspect of places like New York is nothing to write home about. “I find it all to be very boring,” he says. “I’d much rather hang out with someone who delivers pizzas and watches Roseanne all day than with someone who has a cool electronic record collection.”
Since the duo’s inception five years ago, Carney and vocalist-guitarist Dan Auerbach have gone from packing small clubs to selling out big concert halls with their raw, bluesy hooks and vintage rock harmonies — and they show no signs of letting up any time soon. Already three albums deep, the Keys unleash their most emphatic and primal offering to date on their Nonesuch Records debut, Magic Potion. Sporting a grittier AOR edge than some of the band’s past records and proving their loudest effort since 2003’s Thickfreakness (Fat Possum), Magic Potion is dynamic in rhythm and scope and effectively captures the Midwestern sound the group was aiming for.
“Basically, we wanted to make a loud fucking rock ’n’ roll album,” Carney says with a laugh. “One you can drink a beer to and everything’s turned up to 11.”
The beauty of the Black Keys is their unpretentious approach to songwriting. Rather then tearing a song apart measure by measure, Auerbach and Carney zero in on the medley and let their instruments do the rest of the talking. The pair write songs that are straight from the heart — integrating the southern blues swagger of Junior Kimbrough and Jimmy Reed with the stripped-down, FM-friendly magnificence of Led Zeppelin and Cream, with heavy emphasis on the latter. Auerbach’s vocals stretch from raspy howls to soothing strains while he coats infectious riffage and fiery chops with muddy layers of distortion.
Carney is no slouch either — pummeling his kit like Bill Ward on yellow jackets. The two structure the songs on Magic Potion in a fashion that sounds genuine and antiquarian without contrived overdubs, those that Carney describe as “very hi-fi.”
“Just Got to Be” opens the album with husky, Southern-rooted guitar and crashing cymbals, then hushes up for a second as Auerbach pleads, “I’ve got to go because/ Something’s on my mind/ And it won’t get better/ No matter how hard I try.” Tenderly felt ballads (“You’re the One”), psychedelic Brit-blues (“The Flame”), and monolithic rockers (“Give Your Heart Away”) follow.
It’s obvious that success hasn’t gotten to the heads of Auerbach and Carney, even after notable tours opening for the likes of Beck, Sleater-Kinney, and just earlier this summer, Radiohead. They have definitely grown as musicians since their days of banging up basement walls with muck-covered din yet still manage to firmly hold on to their signature sound and bust out solid pieces of reputable work. Ultimately, the band contradicts the age-old myth of rock ’n’ roll: it never really vanished — it just needed a good kick in the ass to get it out of bed. SFBG
BLACK KEYS
With Beaten Awake
9 p.m.
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
$22
(415) 346-6000
www.livenation.com
Back from the country
› johnny@sfbg.com
At the end of our transatlantic phone conversation, I tell Vashti Bunyan to have a good night, and she tells me to have a good day. She’s relaxed at home in Edinburgh, Scotland, where her friend Jenny Wright — whom the first track on the new album Lookaftering (Dicristina Stair) is dedicated to — is staying for a visit. “We really haven’t seen each other at all over the last 30 years,” Bunyan says when I first ask about Wright, not knowing that she’s in fact sitting nearby. “She just happens to be staying with me right now! That’s really, really lovely.”
Reunions that span over 30 years — and ones that are really, really lovely — are something Bunyan’s devoted admirers fully understand. Defined by the forest flute-and-vocal duet of its singular title track, her first and for a long time only full-length recording, the Joe Boyd–produced 1970 Just Another Diamond Day (Dicristina Stair), is the rare kind of cult recording that deserves its cherished status. In essence, it’s an aural document of a horse-drawn journey to the Isle of Skye — a trip that she recently made once again for a film project by Kieran Evans, who first directed her in the real-life role of a native Londoner in Saint Etienne’s 2003 film Finisterre. “We went up to the Hebrides to film the end,” she says in a warm, soft-spoken tone of voice not unrelated to her singing. “It’s been quite a revelation to see all those places and have to think about that time again.”
Even Bunyan’s fans can’t be blamed for mistakenly thinking that she’s still living the magic-tinged pastoral life conjured by Just Another Diamond Day, her famed collaboration with members of Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band. The cover of Bunyan’s Lookaftering features a profile of a regal-looking hare (“You call it a jackrabbit, don’t you?” she says) painted by her daughter, the artist Whyn Lewis. It begins with the Wright-inspired composition “Lately,” which down to its very title suggests little has changed in Bunyan’s world of sound except some subtle alterations for the better: the new album’s pace is a bit more relaxed, the already unique dedication to exploring thought and feeling even deeper.
Lookaftering’s most gorgeous melody might be the one within “Hidden.” “I wrote it for my boyfriend,” Bunyan says when asked about the song’s roots. “When I showed it to him, he was quite upset by it, and I couldn’t understand why. I thought it was a very loving and tender song, but he thought it meant he didn’t understand me or I didn’t understand him. But now, whenever I sing that song — and I usually start the show with it — I think he’s really pleased.”
Some of that pleasure is partly thanks to Devendra Banhart, who is only the most dedicated and high profile of Bunyan’s current-day admirers, who also include Animal Collective and Piano Magic. “I was so frightened of performing live,” she admits when asked about her return to the public eye (if it is indeed that, considering her reclusive nature the first time around). “I couldn’t even record an answering machine message. I asked Devendra how he could do it, and he said, ‘You just have to do it — there’s no other way. You have to do it until it becomes normal.’ After 10 shows or so I realized that my knees weren’t shaking anymore and I was actually enjoying it. I’m so grateful to Devendra for just saying the truth — you do what frightens you until you aren’t frightened anymore.”
For Bunyan, both the advice and support from Banhart and his associates have been a revelation. As a young artist she felt an unspoken bond with French singer-songwriter Françoise Hardy (“She was the only person with whom I felt any kinship at all”) and oft silently bristled against the patriarchal aspects of Svengali Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones, and the overall competitiveness of her then-peers from swinging London. “Fancy ball gowns were the things they wanted to put me in — no way!” she remembers with a laugh. “When I started out at 18 or 19, the recording process was fascinating to me. But because of the way things were then, a shy girl could never get access to the actual production method.”
Today, Bunyan’s using her home computer to perform mirror-perfect duets across the ocean with Banhart and to make her own music without interference. The descendant of John Bunyan (“I was never made to read Pilgrim’s Progress when I was young — thank goodness, because I would have rebelled”) has even discovered a certain rhythmic and lyrical connection within the writing of her famed family member. She’s also made peace with her traveling past: “Back in the time [Loog Oldham and I] were working together, I think we hardly exchanged two words. But now there’s so much to talk about, and he’s so helpful and wise and just brilliant to remember things with.”
The shy country girl of musical myth is a city woman with grown kids now — and all the wiser for it. “I was talking with Jenny Wright about that just today,” Bunyan says. “In a small community you can go a certain kind of mad, really — I think human beings need lots and lots of different kinds of people to relate to and communicate with, and they finally find their own way.”
“I did desperately turn my back on the world and go off with a horse and wagon,” she says. “But I didn’t stay there!” SFBG
VASHTI BUNYAN
Thurs/7, 9 p.m.
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
$20–$24 ($39.95 with dinner)
(415) 885-0750
www.gamh.com
For the complete interview with Vashti Bunyan, visit Noise at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.
To live and cry in Albany
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Remember the first time you strolled into the Ivy Room? The rec room wood-panel walls, a bar with a clear shot of a view into a homey live space, a jukebox that spun 45s, a pinball machine, the regulars in cutoff T- and Hawaiian shirts (always accessorize with a bulbous gut, please) who warmly welcomed hoodies and strangers alike. The gun emporium down San Pablo Avenue was the first indication that you were in an interzone between then and now, us and them, where a free-speech, increasingly affluent Berkeley began to cave to a live-free-or-eat-hot-lead working-class East Bay. The down-low Albany spot has been one of the last bastions outside Oakland, nay, the entire Bay, where you could imagine yourself in the thrall of the red state blues once again. Where you could imagine peeling yourself off the floor and walking out into some Southwestern furnace to roast like a relleno.
When the late Dot and later her son Bill MacBeath first took on the ’40s-built Ivy Room in ’92 (moving up the street from the It Club, which Dot had watched over since 1978), a point was made in cultivating a roots, country, rockabilly, and blues scene that was slowly vanishing from the area — with the exception of Downhome Music, the Arhoolie label HQ down the street. At the time, MacBeath says, “it was a really scary old-man bar that I would never have thought of walking into.” But the Ivy proved a bigger tent than that — taking on indie rockers and hip-hop crews and providing a sweet little platform for performers like Jonathan Richman, Sugar Pie De Santo, Chuck Prophet, Kelley Stoltz, Neil Michael Hagerty, Jon Auer, Wayne “the Train” Hancock, the Lovemakers, the Loved Ones, Pinetop Perkins, Deke Dickerson, Gravy Train!!!!, and oodles of others.
“I tried to create a place where musicians could play and express themselves,” explains MacBeath, who booked the music until 1999, when Sarah Baumann took over. “People can appreciate that, and it was also a regular neighborhood bar at the same time.” Why hang in Albany if you don’t live close enough to stumble home in a drunk? These acts gave you a reason — along with the Ivy-clad crew and their genuine, rapidly vanishing, and all-too-often-remodeled-out-of-existence vibe, a relic of a time when the Embers in the Sunset served up sad clown paintings along with sloe gin fizzes and Mayes in the Tenderloin offered crab, cocktails, and comfort in ’20s-era wood booths.
But that was then — MacBeath is ready to move on and has sold the venue, which plans a final blowout weekend Sept. 15–17 showcasing Ivy fans and friends before the ownership changes Sept. 18.
MacBeath can’t say this chapter will entirely close on the club, yet one can naturally expect change to come to a beloved relic like the Room. “I’m trying not to be sad about that,” he says. “The bar is not going away.” However, he adds, “I don’t think it’s really current anymore.” We the flesh and blood relics appreciate it, but we’re “not really here as much as I think they should be — for how cool it is.”
DONDERO’S NOT DONE According to the online list of auspicious locals who have played the Ivy Room, stellar songwriter Dave Dondero has never graced the joint. But I’m sure he would if he could — and maybe even start a semistaged brawl with his drummer, Craig D, as he did at the Hemlock Tavern so long ago. True to the title of his 2003 Future Farmer album, The Transient, the man continues to wander: I caught up with him in Austin, where he had just completed the recording of his latest album for Conor Oberst’s Team Love imprint, tentatively titled When the Heart Breaks Deep.
The songs, Dondero says, revolve around his life in the last year when he was living and bartending in Alaska and San Francisco. “I actually tried to write a real love song,” he explains, prepping for a tour with Centro-matic. “It’s always been a smarmy, poking-fun-at-love song. I felt like trying out that side of my brain, love expression in music, though I’m not sure what side of the brain love comes out of, mixed in with heart and guts, all working together.” “Simple Love,” for instance, concerns an SF relationship that didn’t pan out due to Dondero’s rambling ways.
In all, he’s happy with the new countryish, more piano-oriented album, which reputedly continues to show off Dondero’s considerable writing choppage. “It’s got a folk song called ‘One-Legged Man and a Three-Legged Dog,’ inspired by a one-legged man walking a three-legged dog in Golden Gate Park,” says the songwriter. “A match made in heaven.”
Recorded in a studio called the Sweat Box, sans Pro Tools (the faux funk-metal-country record is next, he jokes), the disc was designed to tug the heartstrings, Dondero explains. “It sounds kind of beachy. Easy listening. Soft rock. Adult contemporary,” he observes. “I’m 37. I’m making music for myself and hoping to try and make my mother cry on this one.” SFBG
DAVID DONDERO
With Centro-matic and the Decoration
Wed/6, 9 p.m.
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
$10
(415) 621-4455
www.bottomofthehill.com
IVY ROOM FAREWELL SHOWS
With Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days, the Moore Brothers, the Loved Ones, Carlos Guitarlos, Rusty Zinn, Mover, Ride the Blinds, Eric McFadden Trio, “Soundboutique,” and Nino Moschello
Sept. 15–17, call or see Web site for times and prices
Ivy Room
858 San Pablo, Albany
(510) 524-9220
ivyroom.com
Late-night luau
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS I mean, they were already practically married, but my friends Little Him and Little Her officially said they did in the Presidio last weekend, and there was a decidedly islandish theme to the event.
Hawaii, I mean — so technically I should have been playing the uke instead of steel pan. But I’m not a very technical person.
And this isn’t the society pages.
It’s the food section. You want to know about my week in Idaho, right, being a semiprofessional cook for the first and probably last time ever? Among other whimsical dishes, I invented angeled eggs. Instead of mayonnaise, you use, predictably, barbecued chicken. And instead of paprika, fresh salsa.
There was a barbecued squash stuffed with refried beans, sausage, and olives, and another sausage poked suggestively through cored zucchini slices. A pork feast marinated in unripe green grape juice (thanks, Chrissy), rubbed with fresh herbs and basted in pear barbecue sauce — everything but the pig courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. “Jack” Poetry’s garden.
I love using what nature and hecklers throw at you. Barbecued green tomatoes (because deer kept knocking them off the vines). Barbecued overripe cucumbers …
What else rolled off the grill was, of course, my signature dish, barbecued eggs. Which, so you know, have come a long way since I last wrote about them, last winter, I think. I think I was cooking them then in meat grease and barbecue sauce in a bread pan in the wood stove. Now I pour the beat-up eggs into cored bell peppers with chunks of sausage and/or whatever … toothpick a strip of bacon around the rim of the pepper, skewer the toothpick with a cherry tomato, olive, onion, and/or also whatever. And stand them up on the grill. It’s not quite perfected yet, because they fall and spill and take forever to set; but it’s getting there, and it not only tastes better but looks 10 times prettier than huevos Dancheros did.
I have a term for what I do, cooking-wise: nouveau trash.
There are other words as well. But the important thing is that, like Little League baseball, I had a lot of fun doing it. And I had, in Johnny “Jack,” Eberle “Jack,” and Georgie “Jack” Bundle, an appreciative and enthusiastic audience. They were working hard recording music all day, every day, and if not for the chicken farmer would have eaten nothing but toast and Cheerios for a week.
At the end of which week, I dropped Mr. Bundle off at the Boise airport so he could make it to his grandpa’s 90th birthday party and delivered his car full of gear to Oakland. The “Hawaiian Wedding Song” was already stuck in my head, and this was a week before the wedding.
In case you don’t know it, you can easily imagine: it’s a wedding song! The lyrics are unadulterated cheese, but the melody is spectacularly all-over-the-place. I was going to have to learn it, and I didn’t have anything better to do with my ears between Boise and Oakland, so I looped the recording and sang and whistled and hummed and yodeled and just generally drove myself crazy.
Next day needing something to eat in the Sunset, I thought of Island Café, that new Hawaiian joint where JT’s all-night diner used to be. Taraval and 19th Ave. Thematically, geographically, it just seemed like the thing to do. And I was all alonesome still, and they have a counter. A great one. An even greater one than it used to be, because there’s a big TV now, and women’s golf was on.
Women’s golf goes good with Hawaiian food. Who knew?
Instead of Spam and eggs or barbecued chicken soup, which I didn’t see until too late, I got Loco Moco ($8.65). That’s three hamburger patties, three scoops of rice because I didn’t want the macaroni (because of mayonnaise), some cabbage, and of course gravy. But not enough gravy. I distinctly remember reading the word “smothered” on the menu in reference to gravy, and neither the burgers nor the rice scoops were what I would call smothered. They were dolloped.
But besides that I have nothing bad to say about my new favorite Hawaiian restaurant. The service was good and friendly. Women’s golf. Uke. Surfboard. Good music. Good vibe. Nothing’s more than 10 bucks. A lot of things are a lot less.
And — and this is a big and — they’re open till 2 a.m., and all night Thursday through Saturday. SFBG
ISLAND CAFÉ
Sun.–Wed., 8–2 a.m.; Thurs.–Sat., 24 hours
901 Taraval, SF
(415) 661-3303
Takeout available
Beer and wine
MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible
The viognier quandary
› paulr@sfbg.com
The evening’s menu was to include shrimp, marinated in paprika and lemon and grilled on skewers, and the issue was wine, as in: which one?
“I will bring a viognier,” said the imminent guest decisively, as if settling on the prescription to be given for some mysterious ailment.
“Great,” I said, “that should be fine.” Viognier! It would have my vote as the world’s most disappointing white varietal. A few years earlier, at Gary Danko, I’d had a glass of Condrieu — a reputable viognier wine produced in the south of France — and found myself thinking of some high-society type with a slightly shrill voice. The wine seemed thin and glassy, and if that was the best the French could do with viognier, I thought, then it was time to move along.
But I had overlooked the fact that Old World white grapes’ tendency to get big and fat in California might actually be an advantage for some of the emaciated cases. The great French wines made from sauvignon blanc and chardonnay grapes are robust enough despite the cooler weather and chalkier soils over there, and they suffer here, really, from too-plush conditions. But California viognier is a distinct improvement on its Gallic antecedent, if the 2005 Cline bottling brought by the imminent (then actual) guest is to be the basis of our judgment. The wine was rich and weighty, with some floral perfume reminiscent of an Alsatian Riesling’s, along with a slight residual sugariness that brought out the crustacean’s natural sweetness against the smoke of the grill and the bite of the paprika.
“This is really good!” pronounced the sweet tooth, one of whose favorite jokes is to suggest that dinner should begin with dessert. I too thought the wine was lovely, and I was also relieved that the bottle of Chablis I had chilled as a precaution (a première cru from Domaine le Renardière, 2000) would not have to be rushed in on a rescue mission but could appear with leisurely dignity as a kind of Chapter Two, telling its own distinctly different story.
The Chablis was steely, crisp, and dignified, in the high French tradition — a different story indeed — and purely as an enological matter I preferred it. But the viognier matched better with the food on the table, of that there was no doubt, though it was gone by the time dessert finally appeared.
A lover’s lane
› paulr@sfbg.com
Of the top 10 questions I am most often asked about restaurants in the city, the top two by far are “Which is the best?” and “Which is your favorite?” Since “best” is a snake pit of competing considerations and unacknowledged biases, I am happier with the second, which is all about acknowledging one’s biases — about being in touch with the inner bias. For me, it is also far easier to answer, since my favorite restaurant in the city, the one I have recommended to inquiring minds for more than a decade, is Hawthorne Lane. (And a brief digression here for the honorable mentions: Firefly, Delfina, Gary Danko, and Boulevard, each reliably sensational in its way.)
How do I love Hawthorne Lane? Let me count the ways. The food, of course, has always been exquisite, though the many Asian touches favored by the original chef, Annie Gingrass, are much less in evidence under the current regime of Bridget Batson; the only more-or-less intact survivor I recognized from the old days is the Chinese-style roasted duck.
Speaking of survivors: the restaurant itself qualifies as one, having surfed the treacherous dot-com wave and its rough aftermath with grace and without frantic reinvention. The restaurant still looks much as it did when it opened in 1995: there is handsome ironwork on a glorious old brick building, a casual front room whose ovoid bar stands amid a ring of booths, and a regal passageway to the main dining room, with its exhibition kitchen, banquettes upholstered in rich fabrics (some floral, others striped), and plenty of paintings (most of the colorful-squiggly school) on the walls. The look, with its meant-to-last fusion of traditional and modern elements, is timeless and has worn well.
Best of all, you can offer this observation and many others across your table without having to shout to be heard. You might even be able to whisper, or at least murmur. For Hawthorne Lane has artfully managed noise from the beginning, and on that basis alone it long ago won my heart. The place is busy and it is lively, but while the cauldron of sound simmers and bubbles, it never boils over. The result is a restaurant in which it is possible to converse while enjoying the food, and for some of us this basic and ancient mix of satisfactions remains one of the heights of civilization.
The food would be enjoyable in any event. While I mourn the passing of the $28 three-course prix fixe option — offered in the dark autumn of 2001, when air travel was stunted and tourism anemic — I am glad to find that most of the main courses on the ever-changing menu are now available in half sizes (at reduced if not quite halved prices), an innovation that encourages the trying of more dishes and the ingestion of fewer calories while helping with money management. (Hawthorne Lane is expensive, and you could easily drop $100 a head there, but you can also spend quite a bit less and not cheat yourself.)
One of the few big dishes not offered in smaller guise on the main menu is the Chinese duck — but it did turn up as a downsized item (for $15) on the bar menu, inclusive of split scallion buns with which to make little duck sandwiches. We agreed that the finger-food angle was fun, but the dish on the whole seemed to be a little out of tune, with too much vinegar in the sauce, like a light on an overcranked dimmer. Could this imbalance perhaps be because the duck is a signature dish from a regime that’s no longer there?
Otherwise, Batson’s cooking is both passionate and elegant. From the fire-breathing brick oven emerges a small but memorable procession of clever pizzas, among them a pie ($12) topped with prosciutto, Mission figs, and arugula leaves: an artful combination of salty, sweet, and nutty, with plenty of white cheese to serve as emulsifier. Squash blossoms ($14), icons of summer, are stuffed with goat cheese and basil, tempura-battered into flute shapes, deep-fried, and presented on mixed greens with a pool of soffrito and cherry tomatoes.
Even more deeply imbued with the essence of summer, if that’s possible, is an heirloom tomato risotto ($13 for a half portion), intense with tomatoey-ness despite its golden color and enriched with plenty of parmesan cheese. The dish is like a distant, aristocratic relation of mac and cheese, with the differences as apparent as the familial similarities. We caught no plebeian echo, on the other hand, in the crisped striped sea bass ($17 for a half portion). The small chunk of filet was indeed well crisped, the better to stand up to a cap of peperonata and a few coins of fennel root (nature’s little breath mint) braised with leek and pancetta.
The half-sizing joyride ends abruptly at the dessert border. But this poses no hardship, because people seem routinely to share desserts in a way they do not always share savory courses. It helps that Hawthorne Lane’s desserts are big and complex; we saw a trio of the seasonal sorbets — spooned cornucopia-style into crisp fruit cups — arriving at the next table and silently wished that couple luck for the long march. For us, the matter at hand was the fetchingly named peach buckle ($9.50), a kind of stone fruit coffee cake with slices of Frog Hollow peach atop an almond streusel and cinnamon meal baked over everything, like stucco. We buckled down and demolished it. SFBG
HAWTHORNE LANE
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m.
Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–9 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.
22 Hawthorne, SF
(415) 777-9779
www.hawthornelane.com
Full bar
AE/DC/DISC/MC/V
Pleasant noise level
Wheelchair accessible
Weaponizing data
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I was in front of a computer when the Twin Towers went down. The morning light flooded Charlie’s tiny studio apartment kitchen, where she’d parked her computer desk in a spot that another person would have used for a breakfast nook.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Look at the Washington Post!” I stared blearily at the monitor, coffee mug in my hand, and saw pictures of smoke. Charlie continued clicking and clicking on news. It was everywhere: live streams and up-to-the-second photographs of the towers as they burned.
One had fallen. Then the other one did. That morning we consumed hundreds of images and lines of electronic text, at the edge of a future I couldn’t fathom. Shit was going to happen, that’s all I knew.
My phone rang an hour later: it was Ed, whose plane from Japan to San Francisco had been diverted to Vancouver. No planes were entering or leaving US airspace.
What happened in geographical space was just the thin end of the wedge.
Shifts more dramatic than anything I could have imagined occurred on our electronic communication networks. The phone system and the Internet formed a new ground zero, a place where “fighting terrorism” became a force more socially disruptive than terrorism itself.
In the weeks that followed, flags and half-baked, vengeful ideas
spattered the mediascape online. ISPs allowed the government to install “carnivore” devices on network backbones, thus allowing the government to eavesdrop on everybody’s Internet traffic. Passage of the USA-PATRIOT Act allowed law enforcement to send secret subpoenas to online service providers for information about their customers.
Those of us critical of the US policies that led to the attack literally whispered to each other about it. We were afraid to say what we thought of the government crackdowns.
Something changed the Internet forever during the surreal years after the attack on the World Trade Center, when we went to war with a country whose citizens and leaders had nothing to do with what happened on September 11, 2001. Data mining was weaponized.
The ability to track hidden information patterns in vast piles of
unsifted data, once the purview of obscure academic articles and some start-ups with weird names like Inktomi and Google, became the touchstone of government efforts to track down terrorists. If a lack of intel is what allowed the terrorists to get us, then by gum, the spooks were going to get as much intel as they possibly could.
As a result, we got John Poindexter pushing misguided programs like Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA), which would allegedly be a giant computer operation in which all the data in the universe would be crunched and “patterns” would emerge to lead government agents to dens of bomb-making bad guys. It also led to the NSA’s now infamous (and probably illegal) surveillance of all the telephone and Internet data passing through AT&T’s wires — as well as the wires of several other major network providers.
Both of these programs rely on the idea that you can find a terrorist
needle in a haystack of data. And both were made far more dangerous by the rise of consumer products like Gmail, Flickr, and MySpace — giant databases of personal information, often tagged with keywords for easy searching. As many pundits (including myself) have said, we’re creating our own surveillance treasure trove.
But what that analysis leaves out is something near and dear to the
American spirit: the people have weapons too. It isn’t just the
government that can turn data mining into a weapon. The citizens can do it too, often better. And so the years since the Sept. 11 attacks have witnessed a blooming of what Dan Gillmor calls “citizen journalism.”
When the mainstream media wouldn’t report what was going on, people turned to alternative sources of news, including online sources. Bloggers became the new investigative reporters.
The groundwork laid by these subversive data miners continues today. The community of online journalists and researchers revealed that an AP photo of the fires in Beirut had been doctored. Bloggers sounded the alarm when upstart photographer Josh Wolf was arrested for refusing to hand over to police video he’d taken of a G-8 protest in San Francisco.
It’s no accident that the rise of blogging coincides with the rise of
government surveillance online. The people are watching too. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is watching the watchers.
Ghost story
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I was on antidepressants for a year and just came off them recently. It was situational; I have no other psych history. I’ve always fantasized about being submissive but never seriously acted on it. But since I’ve been off the medication, I’ve experienced an intense surge of sexual interest. I’ve developed an online relationship with someone in which I am his sex slave–toy. I’ve just sent him some pictures of me. I’m a professional and my friends and family have no idea.
I feel I’m about to go out of control with this desire. Out of control is bad, but is being a sex slave bad? I need to either find a safe place to act out my cravings or go to counseling. How do women who want to be submissive slaves become so safely? What the hell is wrong with me?
Love,
Slavey
Dear Slave:
In my little subcultural corner over here, not a thing, but I wouldn’t be so sanguine about it if I had evidence that you wished yourself harm or were not, as they say, tall enough to ride this ride. You seem a cautious, even somewhat timid sort of girl though, and while that might hold you back a bit, it’s better to be held back than to hurtle blindly over a cliff.
I know a couple who established a relationship like yours, never intending to meet, let alone fall in love, and last time I heard, they were living on a boat and raising kittens. That’s rare though. More typically, what happens online ought to stay online, if you ask me. I don’t mean online dating; that’s fine, but if you’ve established a master-slave deal with this guy based on nothing but, well, mastery and slavishness, what are the chances you are otherwise compatible?
Keep Mr. Web Master–your Web master as a toy (he’s your toy as much as you’re his) and start from scratch. If you’re not out trolling for scary strangers who could actually hurt you and you’re not being driven so crazy by twisted desire (can’t you see the pulp-style illustration?) that you can’t maintain your respectable, professional standing, you don’t need counseling. You need to read some books (not the pulp kind, the kind they sell at nice sex stores), join an S-M educational group or attend some “munches” (coffee klatches for would-be perverts), and start experimenting with being the sort of sex slave who sheds her collar after a couple hours and goes home and feeds the cat. This sort of program, entered into knowledgeably and pursued in moderation, ought to get you where you want to end up: as a “slave” who commands respect and controls her own destiny. There’s no such thing in real life, but this is hardly real life, and that’s the point.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I’m not-so-recently divorced and starting to think about having sex again. My problem is, whenever I start thinking about sex, it’s memories of what my husband and I did (mostly BDSM) that come to mind, and I just shut right back down because I don’t want to think about him. Do I just need to buy a bunch of random porn and hope I’ll light on something else that arouses me?
Love,
Long Dry Spell
Dear Dry:
Not a bad idea, but you don’t have to buy anything. (You really have been gone awhile, haven’t you?) Porn is free for the finding all over the Internet, and you should be able to find representations of not just BDSM scenarios but the exact BDSM scenarios you used to act out with your husband — minus the husband. Looking at or reading some of this stuff may not fully exorcise your husband’s unwelcome ghost — it probably won’t — but it is sure to help. BDSM also, unlike other sexual proclivities, has the advantage of being a spectator sport. If you live in or near or can visit a major metro area — the kind that can support a leather shop or two and has a gay pride parade featuring humans, not golden retrievers, being proudly leash-walked through the center of town — there will be some sort of club or private party circuit where you can see S-M in action. The disadvantage of live display is that the people are unlikely to look as good in leather panties as do the models on the Internet. Plus, you have to be polite to them and ask if you can watch — in short, you have to talk to them. The advantage, of course, is that you do have to talk to them and thus might make a friend or find someone who is neither your husband nor the ghostly afterimage of your husband with whom to do S-M. This is all very hard work, and for the confirmed introvert it (speaking) will never come naturally. But compared to being alone, lonely, haunted, and unable to masturbate, it’s got to be a breeze.
Love,
Andrea
Veto the cable giveaway
Editor’s note: This editorial has been corrected. An earlier version mischaracterized the effect of the cable bill on municipal finances.
EDITORIAL A terrible bill masquerading as a proconsumer law cleared both houses of the state legislature last week and is now on the governor’s desk. It could cost cities and counties millions of dollars, potentially wipe out local control over cable TV franchises, and give a big boost to AT&T, which is best known these days for cooperating with the Bush administration on illegal wiretaps.
The bill, AB 2987, was introduced by Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D–Los Angeles), but its real sponsor is AT&T. The bill would allow big telecommunications companies to apply to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for a statewide franchise to deliver cable and video services to California residents. The idea is to make it easier for these companies to offer telephone, Internet, and cable TV service all in one bundle. AT&T and the bill’s other backers say it will increase competition and lower rates. Lenny Goldberg, who runs the California Tax Reform Association and is one of the smartest analysts of economic policy in the state, says the bill will actually lead to increased rates.
But beyond that, there’s a huge problem with the measure. It would effectively take away from cities and counties the ability to regulate local cable TV providers. It would give AT&T or Verizon (or whoever might come along in the future) the ability to ignore local government, get a permit from the state, and deliver service to cities and counties — without having to negotiate a local franchise fee or accept local terms and conditions. Comcast, for example, pays San Francisco millions of dollars a year for the right to sell cable service under the city streets — and under the franchise agreement is required to provide public-access and government channels. A cable provider with a state franchise would never have to go beyond what an existing franchise pays.
Sen. Carole Migden (D–San Francisco), one of only four senators to oppose the bill, argued passionately against giving any favors to AT&T, which has a proven record of turning information on its customers over to the federal government. That’s another excellent reason to oppose the bill, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger should veto it.
Meanwhile, Assemblymember Mark Leno’s industrial hemp bill, AB 1147, is on the governor’s desk and should be signed into law. So should AB 2573, which Leno had to fight the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for and will help San Francisco expand its solar power production. There’s also Leno’s public records reform bill — and perhaps most important, his bill that would allow San Francisco to impose its own motor-vehicle fee, bringing the city $70 million a year. SFBG
The cost of harassing the homeless
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has always talked about treating homeless people with compassion, is allowing the cops to do just the opposite — and it’s costing the city millions. As Amanda Witherell reports on page 11, the San Francisco Police Department under the Newsom administration has issued 31,230 citations for so-called quality of life offenses like sleeping on the streets, sleeping in the parks, and panhandling. In a pioneering study, Religious Witness with Homeless People reports that issuing and prosecuting those citations cost taxpayers $5.7 million over the past two years.
This is a reminder of the failure of the Newsom administration’s housing policy — and a terrible waste of law enforcement resources. The mayor needs to put a stop to it now.
Think about it: most homeless people are living on the streets because they don’t have the money for housing in this famously expensive city. In the vast majority of the cases, giving someone who’s broke a ticket for $100 is a colossal waste: the offender isn’t going to be able to pay anyway, so the unpaid ticket turns into an arrest warrant. The next time around, the police can nab this person and put him or her in jail (costing the city $92.18 a day, according to the Sheriff’s Department). In the end, 80 percent of the citations are dismissed anyway — but not before the police, the courts, the district attorney, and the sheriff run up a huge tab.
In some cases, it’s just another hassle for homeless people. In other cases though, these seemingly minor tickets can rob someone of the last vestiges of a semitolerable life. The list of quotes from homeless people included with the study is, to say the least, depressing:
“They wake me up in the morning and threaten to arrest me if I don’t stand up and start walking. The drop-in centers are full, so I either walk or get ticketed. I can’t walk all day long.”
“They took my vehicle away because I slept in it in the mornings while waiting to get another construction job. Losing my truck was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I can’t get a job without my truck, so now I’m on the street.”
“Just one ticket for sleeping can violate my parole, and then I’ll be in [prison] with murderers.”
“I went to Project Homeless Connect, and they really helped me. Two days later, they arrested me for not paying my tickets.”
The city is facing a homicide epidemic. The police brass constantly complain that there aren’t enough uniformed officers to keep the streets safe. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is having to fight to get approval for a modest pilot program that would put exactly four officers on foot patrols in high-crime neighborhoods; that program could be funded for less than one-tenth what the city is spending harassing the homeless.
It makes absolutely no sense for the police to be wasting time issuing these sorts of citations. Sure, violent people who are a threat to the public need to be kept off the streets — but that’s only a very small number of the homeless in San Francisco. Letting people sleep in the parks or in their cars isn’t a solution to the homeless problem — but it’s hardly a massive threat to the city’s populace (and certainly not when compared to the growing murder rate).
Newsom, of course, could and should make a public commitment to spending that $5 million in a more useful and productive way. And the Police Commission should look into the Religious Witness study and direct the chief to order officers away from giving quality-of-life citations.
If none of that happens, the supervisors ought to look into this too. If the cops have the money to be chasing panhandlers and car sleepers, the budget committee should look at the department’s allocation and see if some of those resources can’t be better spent fighting actual crime. SFBG
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
There are people at the daily newspapers around here who bristle when I accuse them of ignoring important local stories, particularly ones involving powerful political, business, or social figures (and most particularly, involving the newspapers themselves). No representative of the Hearst Corp. stands in the newsroom door announcing that stories about management will be sent to New York for prior censorship. Nobody tells the Chronicle’s reporters that they can’t cover a pressing story.
And I believe all that. I really do. I know it doesn’t work that way.
Carl Jensen knows that too. When he started Project Censored back in 1976, he knew he’d get a lot of criticism. “Censored” is a pretty strong word; it evokes a mirthless military guy with a pair of scissors and a big black pen, preventing real news from emerging out of a pressroom bunker somewhere.
But what Jensen has been trying to say for years is that the stories cited by Project Censored represent choices made by editors and publishers about what’s important in today’s world. That’s what the front page of a newspaper is — a set of choices. Is the confession of the purported killer of JonBenet Ramsey more important than the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of millions of Americans? Is the latest news about Brad and Angelina more important than the latest news from Iraq? Is one man’s quest to take control of every daily newspaper in the Bay Area worth more than a first-day story and a few tiny news briefs?
Editors are paid to make those decisions — and the ones who want to keep their jobs know what the rules are. That’s why some stories get more coverage, more play, and more attention and some get deeply buried or published in one place and never picked up by anyone else.
Anyone who reads political blogs knows about stories like the ones on this year’s Project Censored list (see page 15). Nobody blacked out the news with a big rubber stamp; it just never got reported in the first place.
For a Sunday afternoon on a Labor Day weekend, it was truly impressive: I counted at least 300 people at the Delancey Street events room for the Sue Bierman memorial. Just about everyone on the local left seemed to be there, along with a few luminaries like John Burton, Gavin Newsom, and Willie Brown, who were Bierman’s friends even when they were wrong and she was right.
Newsom, who was often at odds with Bierman, looked out over the crowd and made the point succinctly: “This is what happens,” he said, “when you’re nice to people.”
There were many funny and moving stories. Burton, who showed up in his usual sartorial splendor (striped sweatpants and an untucked shirt, which makes me respect the guy as much as anything he’s ever done in politics) talked about how Bierman always, always enjoyed herself, even in the most boring political drudgery. It was wonderful to see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren there (and wonderful for them to see how many people were part of Bierman’s San Francisco community).
Calvin Welch, her Haight Asbury neighbor, friend, and longtime comrade in arms, reminded us all that Bierman “created the neighborhood movement in San Francisco” — and that she did it in her own style, always believing that “fun is important.”
A lot of people go to political funerals because they have to; most of us went to this one because we wanted to. Thanks, Sue. SFBG
Saving women from themselves
OPINION In the name of protecting sex workers, a few San Francisco activists have adopted the rhetoric of antiprostitution advocates and taken their case to the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women (COSW). The commission, following this lead, has adopted a controversial strategy — opposed by the vast majority of dancers, activists, and sex educators — to close down VIP rooms, private booths, and private areas in adult clubs and repeal “encounter studio” permits, claiming that privacy in commercial sexual contexts must be stopped because it causes prostitution, sexual assault, and AIDS.
For starters, the AIDS claim is wrongheaded: starting 30 years ago, activists around the world have explained that the way to address sexual health is not to drive people further underground through this exact sort of repression.
Beyond that, the legislation put forward by the COSW echoes contemporary moral panic. This law uses terms that have historically been used to curtail our freedom under the guise of protecting women. For example, the proposed bill claims that prostitution is “coerced” — but that depends on how you define coercion.
Forced labor and coercion are serious crimes in the legal framework. But economic coercion is the motivation for many types of work, and the fact that women are coerced or forced into this work is being used to justify prohibitions that affect all sex workers. The term “sexual exploitation,” which also comes up in the legislation, has been used to describe (and curtail) the voluntary commercial activity of sex workers.
The commission claims it based the proposal on testimony from dancers but omits the fact that the vast majority of dancers rejected the approach, showing up in droves at hearings. Of course, dancer and sex worker rights activists support some strategy to address complaints about unfair labor practices, exorbitant commissions, safety concerns, and harassment — but no effort was made by the COSW to find a consensus.
The campaign developed by the COSW places dancers in closer alliance with management as both dancer options and management options are being threatened. This phenomenon is part of Sex Worker History 101. The current dancers are further alienated and discouraged by this dynamic from organizing to improve working conditions. Unraveling this dynamic is necessary to further labor advocacy in this industry. The issue of private booths distracts from the problems of illegal stage fees, contractor versus employee labor issues, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations.
Other parts of the plan include allowing COSW representatives to inspect the workplace and to “notify the Commission on the Status of Women when they make any change to the compensation schedule.” Now there’s a great idea: put the classy female elders of San Francisco in charge of working-class women in the sex industry.
This legislation sets some very troubling precedents. Solutions to problematic working conditions in clubs should be developed by the workers, with assistance from labor experts. Given the level of polarization this proposal has created, that could take some time. SFBG
Carol Leigh
Carol Leigh, author of Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot (Last Gasp), is dean of academic studies at Whore College.
To read the legislation, go to www.whorecollege.org/badlegislation.
Enchanté
› paulr@sfbg.com
“You’re not getting older, you’re getting better” is one of those things you say to someone who’s getting older and not better and is sensitive to the decline because of yet another birthday. (Birthdays beyond the 30th are at best memento mori, at worst a cumulative curse. After 30, one should count them by 10s.) Yet y-n-g-o-y-g-b is not just a mollifying phrase to be found on a Hallmark card; sometimes it is actually true. Many of the grander wines improve with age, up to a point, and so does the occasional well-conceived restaurant, particularly if the restaurant is a bistro.
“Bistro” is a much-abused term in our gastronomic idiom. Its meaning has been pulled and stretched to cover all manner of restaurants, bound together perhaps by just the faint suggestion of casual hipness. But even in America, where language is treated as cavalierly as food additives and war, words do retain core meanings, and the core meaning of bistro remains French. A proper bistro is quintessentially a neighborhood restaurant, well established and appealingly scuffed, with a brief menu of mostly traditional (French) dishes at moderate prices.
Le Charm is a proper bistro, though it is in San Francisco, not Paris, and when it was opened in 1994 by Alain Delangle and Lina Yew, its neighborhood was a little iffy. The SoMa of that time was already beginning to don its new Loftland identity, but the donning was uneven, and large swaths of the area were still grubby and gritty enough to make opening a nice restaurant a bold proposition. These days … well, SoMa is far more residential than a decade ago, and in that sense le Charm, the neighborhood restaurant, now has a neighborhood to belong to and neighbors to serve.
The wait has been kind to the restaurant. Although the space was recently remodeled, it has a look of woody permanence, with golden oak trim, cinnamon-colored walls, and a trellised garden set with tables. My basic impression, from years ago, was clatter, but while the restaurant now is hardly quiet, steps seem to have been taken to curb the noise. The floor is carpeted, and this alone makes a big difference.
Le Charm has been, from the beginning, a prix fixe haven, and while today’s bill of fare is fitted out with a full complement of à la carte choices, the prix fixe — $28 at dinner for three courses — continues to fascinate. Usually I succumb to this fascination, since the latter menu is full of the sort of earthy standards that make French food approachable and even lovable, from onion soup to blanquette de veau, and the fixed price means you need not worry about the bill, unless you go nuts with the wine. (Le Charm’s wine list is brisk, moderately priced, and surprisingly tilted toward California bottlings.)
But I do not always succumb, particularly when in dessert-forswearing mode, as we all must be from time to time. I was, moreover, interested in the mosaique ($8), an à la carte offering that turned out to be a kind of chilled vegetable terrine, wrapped in a skin of leek and cut into large, roughly triangular flaps. The terrine consisted of snow peas, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, and shiitake mushrooms, while the leek skin was tender enough to be cut with an ordinary knife.
I also wanted lentils, and that meant the boudin blanc au foie gras ($19), stubby lengths of mild white sausage cut on the bias and given a Stonehenge arrangement around a moody hillock of Puy lentils, with interpolations of peeled, seeded tomato quarters.
Across the table, another story was unfolding, a $28 tale in three chapters that opened with a salad of cubed red beets set in tatsoi greens (decent, but more about looks than taste) and ended with an orange crème brûlée topped with slices of mandarin orange. In between there was a plot twist: the restaurant’s justly famous chicken-liver salad substituted for a selection from the standard, and weightier, main courses, with a corresponding discount of a few bucks. (I was surprised to see the possibility of duck confit passed over by someone I had long understood to be an insatiable duck-confitista.)
The chicken-liver salad — buttery chunks of meat with the mildest breath of liver flavor, scattered like boulders across a meadow of mixed greens — might work a bit better at lunch, when less heft is desirable, at least for those who need to remain conscious for the remainder of the workday. (A friendly warning here: the garden, in good weather, provides an al fresco experience you might have some trouble pulling yourself away from.) I was disappointed to find no croque monsieur on the midday menu, but quiche lorraine ($9.50), an egg tart stuffed with ham and cheese, wasn’t a bad substitute and was also served whole: a disk the size of one of those personal pizzas you can get at Roundtable.
Tart lovers of the sweet tooth variety will appreciate the tarte tatin, which at $4 is something of a steal and is also excellent — not the usual state of affairs for restaurant tartes tatins, too many of which have runny caramel and mushy apples. Le Charm’s version features shapely hemispheres of firm fruit, bronzed and slightly translucent, as if formed from amber, along with viscous caramel and flaky pastry. The formula is simple, really (tarte tatin is much easier to make than ordinary, American-style apple pie), yet a well-made one never fails to charm. SFBG
LE CHARM
Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.
315 Fifth St., SF
(415) 546-6128
www.lecharm.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Breema karma
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS This Cheap Eats restaurant review is a thank-you note to a guy named John. He bought all the tokens for a Thai temple brunch for me, Bernie, and Laura last Sunday. And technically it should have been the other way around, me tokening him, because he’d just breema’d me.
If you don’t know what breema is, I don’t know what to tell you. They bend, push, and dance on you, kind of like a massage, only you’re lying on the floor and it’s all very musical. Then you’re hungry and all relaxed and shit. I love it and am lucky to have two friends, Bernie and Laura, who are practitioners. And now John. Three friends.
If you don’t know who John is, he lives in Oakland, used to have chickens, still has a Ping-Pong table, two cool kids, couple watermelons on the counter, a big empty room with pillows along the walls, and lots of rugs. I think he might be the Big Cheese of Breema, because 1) he’s crazy good at it, and 2) he taught Laura, who I think taught Bernie, who used to practice on lucky me.
I have no interest in learning anything per se (like Latin), but I do like to receive. Massage, breema, packages, sensory information, tokens … At a Buddhist temple in Berkeley on Sunday mornings, you turn these tokens into Thai food. It’s a madhouse. Lines out the yinyang, no more meatballs, no more fish balls, nowhere to sit, general confusion … and still you gotta love it.
Know why? Because it’s different. It’s something else. It’s outside. The food’s pretty good, and at a dollar a token, five tokens for a big bowl of noodle soup, the price is pretty reasonable.
The soup line was way shorter than the meat line and the vegetarian line, and anyway soup seemed really really good to me. So that was where I stood. They had three different choices of noodles: wide, skinny, and skinnier. But they were out of everything else.
“No meat,” the serverguyperson said when I came to the counter.
“Fish balls,” I said.
“No fish balls,” he said.
I was just about to think I was in a Monty Python sketch when he gestured toward the adjacent vegetarian buffet and said, “Vegetable only. Fifteen minutes for meat.”
“I’ll wait,” I said and stepped to the side. But I’d already been waiting in lines and wandering between them like a lost little chicken farmer, and the next couple people behind me conceded to vegetable soup, and I had to admit that the noodles, the dark broth with the little load of color on top, looked dang delicious.
After this I was going to play at a block party barbecue in Albany for food and tips, and then after that I was invited to another barbecue back in the city. I did the math. Meat plus meat equaling meat meat meat, I broke down and went with veggies for brunch.
So now I had this nice bowl of steaming vegetable soup and no idea where all my friends were. In the process of looking for them, wandering around like a lost little chicken farmer, I discovered on a remote fringe of the mayhem a no-line-at-all fried chicken station, and the chickens looked great, but I was all out of tokens.
Also found: a stage with colorfully dressed musicians playing traditional Thai stuff to tables and tables of happy eaters. No friends and no room for me and my soup, not there, not in the main part of the pavilion, not in the alley …
My soup was starting to get cold. I was dying of hunger. Buzzards were circling. I looked at the sky, looked at my feet, kicked the bleached bones and tumbleweeds out of my path, and pushed on.
Here they were! Sitting cross-legged on the grass and sidewalk out front, eating stuff. Although I tasted some of everything, and everything was good, I think my favorite thing (because I’d never had it before) was this little fluffy doughy doodad cooked with coconut milk and stuffed with green onions.
But Bernie, bless him, had scored one of the last fish ball soups, and I managed to mostly eat that. Thank you, Bernie. The fish balls were wonderful. SFBG
WAT MONGKOLRATANARAM
Sun., 9 a.m.–2 p.m.
1911 Russell, Berk.
(510) 849-3419
No alcohol
Credit cards not accepted
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
WITHOUT RESERVATIONS
› paulr@sfbg.com
We tend to trust what we see, and when what we see is a computer printout, specifying in meticulous detail what we just had for dinner, we tend to trust it all the more. How can such a miracle machine as the computer ever be wrong? Being wrong is a human thing; it is an errant scribble on one of those pale green tablets on which servers write down orders at less technologically advanced establishments (unless they are show-offs working from memory). Or it is bad arithmetic. Most people, I am sure, have had the experience of being delivered a hand-written check they could not decode — and when you can’t decode it, you just shrug your shoulders and pay it, hoping the errors, if any, aren’t too egregious.
Tidy computer accountings of restaurant activity would seem to be altogether an improvement over ballpoint primitivism: a brave new world. And yet, and yet … it behooves us not to fall asleep. Computers might be infallible, and to the extent that computers replace human beings as trackers and toters-up of bills, the likelihood of error is diminished. But it is not eliminated, as I discovered recently when sifting through the bill at one of the city’s more tech-savvy restaurants: a dollar too much for this item, a dollar too much for that one — and, to be fair, a dollar too little for a third.
A dollar here and there would not seem to make all that much difference — just a couple percentage points of the total bill. But any effective strategy of overcharging must be subtle, in amounts small enough not to be noticed or worth disputing, and it should be balanced by the occasional undercharge, to give the impression of randomness or lack of guile. Customers must be granted the occasional victory, so that they do not become disillusioned or even angrily suspicious.
I asked for menus to recheck the numbers, then summoned our server to point out the discrepancies. The matter was quickly straightened out, with apologies. Possibly these were innocent mistakes, bad numbers entered into the machine by some harried human in a hurry. But as we left, I glanced around at a big dining room full of people accumuutf8g charges on an unseen computer somewhere, and I wondered.
Pwned
› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION Last night, for about the 30,000th time, I pondered whether I should be shredding the stubs of my phone and cable bills before throwing them away. I always keep my credit card statements for a year or two. That shit just seems too scary personal to toss. But what about the other stuff? If someone were to root through my building’s trash bin and find my (unshredded) cell phone bill, they’d know the numbers of everyone I’d called during the past month. Other bill stubs are less revelatory, but someone could still use them to cancel my gas and electricity or order me the most expensive cable package.
But I just can’t muster up the amount of paranoia that would be required to properly eliminate all those pieces of paper with my personally identifiable information on them. And good shredders (not the lame one-sheet-at-a-time ones) are expensive. So every month I leave massive amounts of personal data in the bins outside my back door.
And that’s not all. I also save chat sessions on my computer and SMS messages on my phone. Sure, I fear clutter in the real world, but I also have a highly developed sense of sentimental value. So I keep the little electronic blips my friends write, thinking that one day I’ll be glad to read them again. Some of those blips are e-mails that I keep stored in the vast server fields of a major Web mail provider, which means that system administrators can look at them — and worse, this Web mail provider can hand them over to the government without telling me.
Don’t even get me started on the kinds of personal information I leak about myself in my writing. A dedicated asswipe could, just by combing over my old columns, figure out the general location of my house in San Francisco, my sexual orientation, the kind of relationship I’m in, what kind of computer I have, which ISP I use, where I’ve worked, where I shop, and who my friends are.
All my digital data is, of course, far more vulnerable than those hard copy phone records I dump every month. At least my trash bin is localized: to steal or tamper with my information, somebody would have to break into my building and jump inside the trash bin. But to steal my e-mail? Or read my columns obsessively for personal details? A naughty person could do that from anywhere. Prying members of an HR department could run a background check on me from the comfort of their Aeron chairs.
So what the hell is wrong with me? Why would I compromise my own privacy, knowing full well what the consequences could be? I’ve already confessed to a few reasons: laziness, inability to hoard tiny pieces of paper, sentimentality, chronic column writing. The less frivolous answer is that I’ve weighed the alternatives — shredders, constant data wiping — and chosen to take the risk. I don’t want to be forced to hide everything about myself. If some potential employer doesn’t like my blog, that’s an employer I don’t need. If the government wants to persecute me for what’s contained in my stored messages, then I will fight back as best I can or leave the country.
It’s not as if I don’t protect myself. I never store any data in my Web mail account that I’m not prepared to share with sysadmins and the government. I overwrite data that I want to delete on my computer, which means it can’t be retrieved using typical law enforcement forensics. I rarely enter anything but fake information into online forms. I download and send my e-mail via SSL, which prevents people from reading it while it’s moving over the network. Am I safe from the National Security Agency or a very determined hacker? No. But neither am I leaving myself wide open to identity theft and surveillance.
When somebody breaks into your computer and looks at your private data, geeks say that your computer has been “owned.” And if your computer is utterly taken over, all its information plundered egregiously, you’ve been “pwned” — a bit of geek slang that comes from some dork who made a typo on IRC back in the day. I know that I’m pwned by the government, pwned by Google, pwned by my reliance on Windows OS. But they haven’t pwned my brain, OK? I’m still going to write the truth about myself and the world; I’m still going to throw away bill stubs like a normal person.
Say it loud and clear: we will not be pwned! If that isn’t a 21st-century protest cry, I don’t know what is. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who was thrilled to discover that the Wikipedia entry for “pwn” includes a section on pronunciation.
Too bad, Dad
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’ve prided myself on having a good relationship with my daughter, and we have always been able to talk about anything, but I was shocked when she asked me about anal sex. I was at a complete loss. She’s only 14 and it never crossed my mind that she would even know what that is, but I guess it’s not like it used to be. She said it’s the “cool” thing to do at her school and that most of her girlfriends have had it. I don’t want her to think that she can’t come to me about things. I could give her the “if your friends jumped off a bridge” speech, but then again, well … at least I wouldn’t have to worry about her getting pregnant. LOL. How should I handle this? Should I be supportive or honest or just refer it to another female like my sister or one of my coworkers?
Love,
Puzzled Pop
Dear Pop:
Sorry. Unless you’re raising her alone in a supermodern ranch house on a lonely and distant planet, she could have asked someone else, but she didn’t. You’re up, and I’m afraid you’ll have to be both honest and supportive. It should help to hear that “supportive” does not mean “Butt sex? It’s no biggie. Get with the program, kid.” Plus, if she came to you for advice, chances are good that she’s not already doing it and liking it or else what would she need your advice for?
We do hear (where have you been?) that these kids today spend more time having anal sex and attending blow job parties than they do on soccer, MySpace, and homework combined. There was a moment there when it seemed every possible media outlet featured a scarifying exposé of rampant oral gonorrhea among kids at elite suburban middle schools or rings of barely pubescent girls selling their anal favors for Bubble Yum. Much of this stuff is clearly exaggerated for effect, extrapolated from precious little data to garner ratings, sell magazines, or whip up a panic among parishioners or PTA members.
There is, however, some measure of truth along with the disinformation, if fairly nonpartisan bodies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins are to be believed. Every study conducted in the last decade or so has shown at least some increase in the number of young (in some cases, very young) people having oral and anal sex. In some cases, these are the very kids who sign abstinence pledges, promising not to “have sex” until marriage, another downside to using “sex” to mean penis-vagina intercourse. It allows for all sorts of weaselly usage, from the presidential “I did not have sex with that woman” to the willful misinterpretation of decent scientific data by groups like the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family.
I did have a point here: do not assume that she’s wrong or exaggerating when she tells you that anal is the “in” intercourse at her school. It may not be as prevalent as she thinks or reports (at least some of her girlfriends are lying), but it is happening.
It would be useful to know what your daughter actually asked you — I’m having a hard time believing she requested your blessing to start taking it up the butt, so what did she need from you? I’m going to go with the most likely possibility, that she mostly just wanted you to listen while she processed her own thoughts and feelings, and surely you, Mr. Sensitive Dad, could handle that much without having to palm the poor child off on your secretary or the mailroom girl?
Chances are your daughter also needed some information about what people actually do with their butts and stuff, since adolescents, even adolescents who affect a world-weary air and claim intimate knowledge of whatever arcane subject is under discussion, are notoriously vague about the nitty-gritty details. I think it’s perfectly legit to outsource this part, but only this part, probably by recommending one of the sex education Web sites specifically targeted to teenagers. I like Scarleteen.com, but it really doesn’t matter as long as you don’t just point her at the Web and tell her to go look up “anal + teen,” OK?
Let the professionals handle the “does it hurt?” and “will I like it?”-type questions, but as her dad you don’t get to shirk the harder parts, where you ask her what she’s heard, how she feels about it, whether her friends are pressuring her, and what she will do if they do pressure her. I would hope you’ve already talked to her about respecting herself and her body and not doing anything until or unless she really wants to, and then only once she’s educated herself about risks and how to avoid them. If you haven’t, well, for God’s sake, man, she’s 14. She has all kinds of excuses for stupid and irresponsible behavior. What’s yours?
Love,
Andrea
Cutting taxes the right way
EDITORIAL Finally the Democratic Party in California is starting to talk seriously about tax policy. It’s an important change in the political winds, and if state treasurer Phil Angelides can get beyond the tepid-to-hostile press and use his promise of a middle-class tax cut to gain ground on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it may signal the end of decades of regressive and deeply harmful economic policy.
Schwarzenegger, who knows he’s in a tough race, has been trying to smear Angelides by saying that the Democratic candidate is pushing for tax hikes. Yes, he is — tax hikes on the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger (and Phil Angelides), people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. For the record, these are people who have seen their taxes drop dramatically under the Bush administration and are the direct beneficiaries of an alarming national trend of wealth concentration among the richest Americans.
Angelides isn’t talking about radical tax hikes; all he wants to do is restore the top state income tax rate to the level it was under Republican governors like Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson. Still, raising taxes never plays well in the polls, so Angelides is now doing what he needed to do from the start of his campaign: he’s proposing to cut taxes on middle-class working families.
It’s a risky strategy: pundits on the right will accuse him of “class warfare,” and the details of his plans will get obscured by negative political ads and lousy media coverage. But it’s the right approach: he’s actually talking about shifting the tax burden upward, about changing the national trend in tax policy, about giving the majority of the voters tax breaks and paying for it by making a few wealthy people pay more.
But if it’s going to work, he needs to be a lot clearer on exactly how the dollars pencil out — and he needs to offer more than what seems like a relatively modest tax cut. Right now, his plan calls for $788 million in tax reductions for families earning less than $100,000 a year and $5 billion in tax hikes for the wealthy. He’s also offering to find $1 billion in state waste.
For a family living on $46,000 a year, the program would amount to $660 a year in tax relief.
We understand that the tax cuts have to be lower than the tax hikes — the state is deeply in debt, and there are all sorts of badly needed social programs that ought to be funded. But in the end, his plan sounds pretty mild: there’s a lot more than $1 billion in waste, corporate tax loopholes, and uncollected revenue out there, and a California family earning $46,000 a year, facing the insane housing market and rapidly rising energy costs, could use a lot more than $50 a month in extra cash.
Let’s remember: the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich (and especially the very rich) that’s taken place in the past two decades is unprecedented in the postwar era and quite possibly unprecedented in American history. A few bucks here and there aren’t really going to make that much difference. If Angelides is serious, he should revise his plan to at least double the tax cuts for the middle class, hike the tax credits for low-income families — and pay for it by creating another tax bracket altogether, for Californians who earn more than $1 million a year.
But this is an excellent start — and Angelides deserves tremendous credit for opening a discussion that should have taken place years ago. SFBG
Cops out of their cars
EDITORIAL The politics of crime can be tricky for the left: progressives are against far-reaching and punitive crackdowns, against police abuse, against the pervasive financial waste in law enforcement … and sometimes can’t come up with answers when neighborhoods like Hunters Point and the Western Addition ask what local government is going to do to stop waves of violence like the homicide epidemic plaguing San Francisco today.
So it’s encouraging to see Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a Green Party member representing District 5, taking the lead on demanding more beat cops for the highest-crime areas in town. Mirkarimi’s not pushing a traditional reactionary approach of suggesting that the city hire more police officers and lock more people in jail; he’s advocating a simple — and decidedly progressive — approach to the issue. He wants the cops out of their cars and on the streets. On foot.
The idea of beat cops and community policing isn’t new at all; in fact, it’s the modern approach of highly mobile officers in cars, dispatched by a central computer and radio system in response to emergency calls, that’s a relatively recent trend. Police brass love it — they can cover more ground with fewer troops — and a lot of patrol officers like it too. They have that big metal car to protect them from potentially hostile criminals, and they don’t have to interact every minute of every day with the people on the streets.
But cops walking the beat are a proven deterrent to crime — and that’s not merely because of their visible presence. Properly trained and motivated community police officers can forge ties with merchants, residents, and neighborhood leaders. They can figure out where problems are likely to happen. They can become an asset to the community — not an outside occupying force that residents neither trust nor respect.
It’s a crucial change: right now, one of the biggest problems the San Francisco Police Department faces in solving homicides is the unwillingness of witnesses to come forward, in part because of a general mistrust of police. When there’s a killing, homicide detectives appear as if out of nowhere, demanding answers; it’s little wonder nobody wants to talk to them.
We recognize that beat patrols won’t solve the homicide crisis by themselves. That’s a complex socioeconomic issue with roots in poverty and desperation, and a couple of folks in blue on the street corner can’t alleviate decades of political and economic neglect.
And we also realize that it can be expensive to put officers on foot — they can’t respond as fast, and it takes time to develop community ties. But Mirkarimi isn’t asking for a total overhaul of the SFPD’s operations. He’s asking for a modest pilot program, a one-year experiment that would put two foot patrols a day in the Western Addition, focusing on areas with the most violent crime. The ultimate goal, Mirkarimi says, is to create a citywide beat-patrol program.
It won’t be easy: the department seems to be pulling out all the stops to defeat Mirkarimi’s proposal, which will come before the Board of Supervisors on Sept. 19. The Police Commission needs to come out in support of Mirkarimi’s proposal and direct Chief Heather Fong and her senior staff to work to make it effective.
The supervisors, some of whom worry that beat patrols in high-crime districts will mean less police presence in other areas, should give this very limited program a chance. Nothing else is working. SFBG
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I was out of town when Sue Bierman died Aug. 6, her car crashing into a Dumpster near her Haight Ashbury home, in the neighborhood she loved. I was out of cell phone range and had no real Internet access, and the papers in Upstate New York didn’t carry the story. So I didn’t learn until I got home that San Francisco had lost one of its most vibrant, funny, warm, and passionate political voices.
Bierman, a native of Fremont, Neb., arrived in San Francisco in 1950. She was part of the first generation of urban environmentalists and was there at the birth of a movement that would change American cities forever.
The city that Sue Bierman adopted as her home was still largely a human-scale metropolis, a town coming out of World War II with a mix of blue-collar industry, a thriving waterfront, and a diverse population.
Her tenure as an activist tracked almost perfectly with the postwar assault on San Francisco by greedy real estate developers, speculators, and politicians who carried their water. She was part of the infamous freeway revolt, the successful effort by Haight residents to block a new elevated freeway that would have soared over part of Golden Gate Park. She was an early member of the anti–high rise crew that realized how intensive downtown development was going to turn San Francisco into another Manhattan. And when the late mayor George Moscone appointed her to the Planning Commission, she was a lonely voice for sanity through 16 years of development madness.
I first met her in 1983 when I was a young reporter covering planning and she was the only member of the commission who would ever come out against any major high-rise project. Over and over, she lost 6–1 votes.
When she was elected supervisor in 1990, she was not only a staunch environmentalist and neighborhood advocate but one of the few on the board at the time who really understood public power: as she would constantly remind her colleagues, she came from a state where electricity could never be sold by private entities for private profit.
And through year after year of brutal defeats, she kept not only her spirit but her sense of humor — and her personal warmth. She had none of the bitter anger that a lot of us took from that era. In fact, even when I criticized her both in private and in print for her loyalty to Willie Brown, she remained a friend. She never once had a harsh word to say to me.
A part of San Francisco passed when she died.
In other news: Supervisor Bevan Dufty insists he hates negative politics and won’t attack other candidates. And yet, the following appeared in Matier and Ross on Aug. 20:
“The campaign is barely under way, and already the mud balls are being lobbed. In this case, it’s a 1995 news clip from the Chicago Tribune describing how [Dufty opponent Alix] Rosenthal, then a 22-year-old senior at Northwestern University, abruptly resigned as student body president rather than face an impeachment hearing over a campaign finance scandal.
“Her sin: Exceeding the campaign spending limit by $26.06.”
Well, somebody dredged that up and leaked it to the press. Anyone you know, Bevan? SFBG
A memorial service for Bierman is set for Sept. 3 from 2 to 4 p.m. at Delancey Street Foundation, 600 Embarcadero, San Francisco.