Print sections as they appeared in the early 2010s

To find articles by keyword or author, you may want to use our Search function.

Print Sections

The burger hopper

-
0

› paulr@sfbg.com

The hamburger has a certain Zelig quality in America: It turns up all over the place, in guises high and low, at fancy metropolitan restaurants and greasy truck stops on the outskirts of every Podunk and Palookaville from coast to coast. Some, like the famous Zuni burger, are made from carefully ground high-end beef; many others — many, many others — are made from meat whose provenance we probably don’t care to think about.

The hamburger, then, is democratic in the best American sense. It looks as good in coat and tails as it does in a pair of sweatpants. It uncomplainingly accepts the companionship of cheese, yes, all kinds of cheese, but also of bacon, avocado, mushrooms, and grilled onions — not to mention lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles. It can be made in a flash — cooked in a pan, under a broiler, on a griddle, over hot coals — and eaten with ease, being a variant of that incomparable finger food, the sandwich. It is suitable for practically any occasion; it is our national food. Presidents and paupers alike eat hamburgers.

Yet as democracy in America wanes, one cannot help wondering about the fate of the burger. Of course, San Francisco is not the ideal location for these kinds of ruminations, for this has never been much of a hamburger town. The city’s culinary roots are, instead, Franco-Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and maritime — none of them huge on ground-beef patties — and in later years we have witnessed a bloom of vegetarian regimes in which the trusty burger is anathema or worse. Add to all this a raft of concerns about mad cow disease and E. coli contamination, LDL and the ethical treatment of animals, and you have a recipe for … linguine with broccoli, or something.

Yet the burger is a hardy little fellow, and places that honor its tenacity persist and even, modestly, proliferate. One new such spot is Toad’s, which opened toward the end of January in the old Café Arguello space at Valencia and 26th Streets. You would not think, walking into Toad’s, that here is a restaurant dealing mainly in hamburgers and hot dogs, nor for that matter that you were entering a restaurant named Toad’s; the cream-and-dark-wood look is one of understated elegance and makes the tall, straight, boxy space look like a small Town Hall. The flat-panel television mounted above the bar toward the rear and tuned to ESPN does give a slight sports-bar air and does, perhaps, whet the appetite for such all-Americana as buffalo wings, potatoes, nachos, and curly fries, all of which the menu offers.

Not too many years ago, curly fries were a Jack in the Box exclusive, but now you can get them at one-off places like Toad’s, and they’re every bit as good — crisp and slightly spicy coils — as the fast-food version. You can get a full order of them, complete with buttermilk ranch dressing, for $3.95, but a better option might be to upgrade the fries included in the cost of your burger. This slight surcharge bumps the price of the well-seasoned and juicy avocado cheeseburger, say (with a half avocado’s worth of buttery, ripe slices and choice of cheese), from $8.95 to $9.95 and provides more than enough curly fries, unless you are really fixated.

In keeping with the restaurant’s handsome look, the Joe Six-Pack menu is full of sly upscaleness. The beef burgers are made from Black Angus, and there are several meatless choices available (including the amazingly lifelike Boca burger), along with homemade chili and soup of the day ($4.95 a bowl), which, even when it sounds drab — zucchini and mushrooms, maybe, classic bottom-of-the-bin, end-of-the-week stuff — is likely to be spiffed up with some cumin and chili pepper. You can get Stella Artois and Big Daddy IPA on tap. The one thing Toad’s doesn’t have is the alfresco option. For that you’ll have to traipse over to Barney’s Gourmet Burgers in Noe Valley.

Like Toad’s, Barney’s is a burger joint with a fair amount of discreet spit and polish. The space used to belong to a bistro, and the beer garden–worthy garden out front, set with umbrella-shaded tables and potted plants, was an important draw for diners who might otherwise be tempted to step into Little Italy (now Lupa) across the street. When Barney’s took over, there was quiet mourning in some quarters at fate’s lack of imagination, but the place has had a long run and — to judge from the crowds in the garden day and night — a successful one.

As it happens, Barney’s, too, offers curly fries, and they are as good as Toad’s (and Jack’s), right down to the ranch dressing. Although I made the mistake of ordering the curlies separately, I thought I was exercising moderation by getting only a half basket of them ($3.50) and was dismayed to find, when I weighed myself the morning after, that I’d gained five pounds. Moral of story: no morning-after weigh-ins, and curly fries should probably be eaten with tweezers, or handled with some of the same ceremony and officiousness that Seinfeld‘s übertoff Mr. Pitt brought to the enjoyment of his Snickers bars. (Knife! Fork! White linen napkin!)

The burgers, they are fine and conform nicely to the local standard. (Assuming you know what I mean, I shall say no more.) Lighter eaters and beefphobes will be relieved to learn that Barney’s offers turkey burgers outfitted in various ways — dusted with Cajun spices ($6.95), maybe, then blackened like Gulf red snapper. Such a burger might not play in Palookaville, but here in the big city, it’s the people’s choice, or one of them. SFBG

Toad’s

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–9:30 p.m.

Lunch: Sun., noon–3 p.m.

1499 Valencia, SF

(415) 648-TOAD

Beer and wine

MC/V

Potentially noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Barney’s Gourmet Hamburgers

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

4138 24th St., SF

(415) 282-7770

Beer and wine

MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Sleep-deprived video game maniacs

-
0

› testme@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A bunch of Belgian neuroscientists finally figured out a way to turn spring break into an article for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the current issue, they report on what happens to the human brain after playing a lot of Duke Nukem and experiencing total sleep deprivation. Although the study is actually about how the brain stores spatial memories (in which "spatial memories" refers to retained information about virtual towns from the game), it is in fact a very tidy way to make a science experiment out of everyday life.

If the scientists conducting the study aren’t themselves in the habit of staying up all night playing video games, they almost certainly have friends, colleagues, or children who are. Being neuroscience geeks, their first response when confronted with video game obsession isn’t "Dude, what level are you on?" but rather, "Dude, what’s it doing to your brain to stay up all night shooting invaders from another world?"

Now they have their answer. The researchers told 24 test subjects to play Duke Nukem, after which one group was given a regular night’s sleep, another no sleep at all. Both groups subsequently got two nights of sleep and were then tested for spatial recall. The sleep-deprived gamers remembered the layout of the game far less clearly than the sleepers. It turns out that sleeping allows the brain to reorganize our spatial memories, moving them from the short-term memory zone of the hippocampus to the long-term memory zone of the striatum (an area of the brain also associated with body movement). So, if you stay up all night killing aliens and go to work or school the next day, you won’t remember very well the layout of the game you played.

Sure, that’s interesting, and it confirms what you might guess: Playing video games instead of sleeping is messing up your brain a little bit. But what I like about this study is the way its elements are cobbled together out of ordinary experience. This isn’t the kind of test that can only be dreamed up in the labs of a synchrotron or a giant room full of superfast DNA sequencers. It’s right out of our living rooms and laptops.

In the world of social science, there’s a long tradition of people studying themselves or their own cultures. Anthropologists who dig live-action role-playing games turn themselves into "participant observers" and write books about friendship rituals in live-action role-playing games. Psychologists in nonmonogamous relationships conduct research on the emotional states of people in nonmonogamous relationships. And ethnographers visit the inner cities where they grew up to create intricate analyses of ghetto graffiti and neighborhood basketball teams.

Is there something wrong with studying ourselves? Some would say it’s not good science because self-analysis is never objective. In fact, classic mad scientists, from the fictional Dr. Frankenstein to real doctors throughout the 20th century who jammed electrodes into the brains of asylum inmates, are dubbed crazy for turning the people around them into lab rats. The madness of these scientists is linked to their propensity for converting their communities into elaborate research projects.

Those Belgian neurologists, although they could hardly be accused of harming anybody, were therefore close to "mad" on a scale of mad to scientist. They took some people engaged in ordinary activities — let’s face it: Sleep-deprived video game playing isn’t that unusual — and made them into a bunch of test subjects. There’s something deeply weird about that. It’s also exactly the sort of experimentation that scientific inquiry should inspire. Sometimes the results may be silly, and they were downright scary in an era before review boards regulated tests on human subjects. But today such experiments encourage us to question what we take for granted in our daily lives. After all, it’s the urge to understand the everyday that drives other MRI nerds to study how the brain processes vision, and geneticists to investigate which genes regulate aging.

I’m glad I live in a world where everything can be turned into an impromptu scientific paper. I’d rather be a research subject than an undiscovered condition. SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has, in fact, been studied by several scientists, but not for the reasons you think.

www.pnas.org

 

One percent solution

-
0

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

The column about the young woman who ceased having sex with her boyfriend after being terrified (not to say terrorized) by the antiabortion displays on their college campus got a lot of responses, not entirely unexpectedly. This letter bore the subject line: "Stop degrading women for protecting themselves," which, well, wow. Don’t spend much time on the Internet, do ya? If this woman thinks my mild dismissal counts as "degrading" women, then I do not think that word means what she thinks it means. Go Google "bukkake," honey, and then maybe we can talk.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

As a nurse, I was disgusted to have you dismiss using both the contraceptive pill and a condom as "borderline nutso overkill" for contraception purposes. When used absolutely perfectly, with no other drug, digestive, or weight considerations, the pill is at best only 99 percent effective. A 1 percent chance of getting pregnant should not be dismissed as "off-plumb." Patients on the pill can get pregnant even though they have not missed any pills, because every single factor that could decrease the pill’s effectiveness has not been studied.

As for your comments about antiabortion displays as "assaultive theatrics": Why would these displays be offensive and disturbing to you if there was absolutely nothing wrong with terminating the life of a fetus?

In the future, you should refrain from describing women as "nutty" for trying to eliminate the 1 percent risk. I would describe them as empowered and intelligent for taking every measure to avoid conceiving a child they do not want.

Love,

Stop Degrading …

Dear Stop:

Did you miss the fact that she wasn’t "protecting herself" by using a condom plus the pill; she was refusing to have sex, period? To be fair, I didn’t treat her previous insistence on doubling up birth control methods with the softest and supplest of kid gloves, but I did have my reasons. Would you like to hear them?

See, I talk to these kids constantly at San Francisco Sex Information, where I think the staff spends more time on these questions than they do at any other educational pursuit. "Can I get pregnant if I’m on the pill and he wore a condom and he didn’t come in me?" "… if I’m on my period and we don’t have intercourse but he rubs himself on my knee a little bit but doesn’t come?" "… if we’re in the hot tub and I’m on the pill and he’s wearing a condom …?"

After a while, one loses patience. Not with the teenagers, mind. It takes a lot to get me feeling grouchy toward kids who are just looking for a little trustworthy information. No, I have lost patience with their teachers, who ought to be teaching them some critical thinking skills so they can learn to do reasonable risk-assessment, but who are so afraid of getting into trouble that even in nonabstinence-only districts all they will say is, "There’s no such thing as safe sex." The kids who call and write are terrified. They have no idea how the menstrual cycle works (and not for lack of "learning" it over and over in sex ed). They have no concept of what it actually takes to get pregnant ("Can I get pregnant from oral sex?"). They know nothing, nothing at all, except "sex = pregnant." And they are not dumb kids, or even underprivileged kids. They are suburban, middle-class kids, and they can’t think their way out of a wet cardboard condom box, because nobody has bothered to teach them how. I get grouchy! Sue me.

I also get grouchy when people who ought to know better demonstrate a similar lack of critical-thinking skills. Where, for instance, does your 1 percent failure rate come from, and why are you so comfortable bandying it about? Most sources I can get my hands on put the reported "perfect use" failure rate of oral contraceptives at between 0.1 and 0.3 percent (charts usually just say "less than 1 percent"). The "typical use" figures, granted, put the failure rate as high as 5 percent, but keep in mind that by far the most common "typical" cause of failure is not taking the pill, followed by taking it wrong. One paper I read actually blamed oral contraceptive failure on going off the pill entirely during the year in question and failing to report that. So yes, while assorted physiological weirdness can cause pill failure, it’s a lot more effective than you give it credit for, provided one actually, you know, swallows the thing.

I have no problem, really, with people at no particular risk for STDs deciding that the 0.3 percent is not quite safe enough for them and choosing to add a barrier method, particularly during the midcycle danger zone. That is a matter of personal, albeit slightly nutty, choice. I do have a problem with scaremongering and willful ignorance. That goes for the fetus-poster panderers as well as for the teachers who can’t be bothered to check their facts before telling vulnerable young people to "be afraid, be very afraid."

Love,

Andrea

Sunshine smoke screens

-
0

EDITORIAL There are danger signals coming out of City Hall these days, some not-so-subtle indications that the city’s open-government laws might be quietly coming under attack. Consider:

•The City Attorney’s Office has filed an action in Superior Court to have library activist James Chaffee declared a "vexatious litigant." That would stop Chaffee from filing any more legal actions to try to force the Library Commission — which has a terrible record on open government issues — to comply with state and local laws.

Chaffee is a former chair of the Sunshine Task Force. In 1999 and 2002, he filed a string of suits against the library (all of them lost, the city says) and he’s filed a few actions since then. He’s acted as his own attorney in almost every case. Some of them, frankly, were a little obscure: Changing the public-comment time at a meeting from three minutes to two minutes isn’t the sort of thing that typically requires a lawsuit to resolve. But his work, in and out of court for 31 years, has unquestionably had a positive impact on library openness — and has infuriated the Library Commission, which is pushing this action. Chaffee’s last lawsuit was filed more than a year ago. Why go after him now?

•The Chaffee litigation comes at the same time as a Sunshine Task Force committee has been quietly discussing ways to handle activists who file repeated, numerous, and extensive records requests. The target in that case is Kimo Crossman, who has filed dozens of requests seeking information related to the city’s dealings with WiFi contractors. We realize he’s flooded the City Attorney’s Office with requests, and it’s costing the city a whole lot of money to deal with them. But his basic point — that the entire WiFi contract talks have been far too secretive — is absolutely true.

And the question never came before the entire task force, which should have had an open, well-publicized discussion on the issue and sought ways to address it. Instead, David Pilpel, chair of the task force’s Education, Outreach, and Training Committee, called a special hearing on the matter March 22. The meeting, on "abusive, burdensome, excessive, and/or harassing" records requests, was poorly noticed and poorly attended, and Pilpel gave the City Attorney’s Office and the library plenty of time to make their cases, while limiting Crossman and Chaffee to three minutes each.

The full task force essentially rebuked Pilpel at the next meeting, March 28, and task force attorney Ernest Llorente has drafted new rules for special meetings.

•Meanwhile, Sunshine Task Force chair Doug Comstock may lose his seat. The supervisors have reappointed all of the sitting task force members except Comstock; Sup. Sean Elsbernd is making an issue of Comstock’s role as a campaign consultant. This one ought to be simple: Comstock was a key part of the campaign to pass the Sunshine Initiative in the first place, led the effort on the latest round of reforms, has been an excellent chair — and has been on the public-interest side of every significant issue that’s come before him.

All of this backroom dealing and overreaction has us worried. The issue of "excessive" public records requests is tricky and has the potential to lead to some terrible legislation or rules. It needs a lot more public discussion; the task force ought to schedule a full hearing on it, with plenty of time to thrash out all sides, before anyone proposes any possible solutions. There’s no need to go to court against Chaffee right now, and it sets a bad precedent. City Attorney Dennis Herrera ought to drop the case and tell the Library Commission that it ought to act like open government matters — and if it wants to silence critics, it can find the money to hire its own lawyers.

And the supervisors need to reappoint Comstock, who is exactly the kind of person the task force needs as a leader at a critical time like this for open government. SFBG

For more background, including an open letter from Chaffee and the City Attorney’s motion, go to www.sfbg.com.

Read City Attorney’s reaction

-
0

VexatiousNoticeFiled.pdf

VexatiousComplaintFiled.pdf

VexatiousMemoFiled.pdf

Read James Chaffee’s response

-
0

Contact: James Chaffee 584-8999 

SaveOurLibraries.com / savebooks@pacbell.net

Being Vexatious Down At the Public Library Is a Virtue

Open Letter to the SF Bay Guardian

The one thing that history has taught us is that if there is going to be responsible democratic government, there better be process, openness, access and respect beforehand, because there will never be accountability afterward. 

I use to think that there would be accountability, yet the forces of privatization have sucked our public library dry like any parasite, and everyone knows it.  Yet corporate philanthropy acts as if we are supposed to be grateful, and our city officials comply.

The San Francisco City Attorney has filed a motion to have me declared a vexatious litigant.  I confess that I am a bit shocked.  I never thought they would try it.  It is obvious that it is politically motivated and it needs to be addressed politically. 

There is no mistaking the source of this move.  There was a recent meeting of a committee of the Sunshine Task Force that had been called in the service of City departments reacting against document requests that were "annoying."  That was not the word, but something like that.  A representative of the City Attorney’s office, Matt Dorsey, stated that one of the City Attorney’s options was to seek redress in the court of public opinion.  Of course, it seems all too obvious to make an example of someone like myself who does not shrink from the term "Gadfly" but in fact embraces it.

According to the papers that were served with the motion for vexatious litigant, I have filed 20 lawsuits in my 31 year career as a Gadfly at the San Francisco Public Library.  When I started at the San Francisco Library Commission, there was no public attendance, no public comment, and I am sure the Library Commission never imagined there ever would be.  At that time the Library staff complained because the Library Commission had de facto meetings at the home of the director of the library’s private partner, at that time called the "Friends" now called the Friends and Foundation.  A prominent member of the Library staff solicited me to complain about violations of the Brown Act.  I had never heard of it at that time.  That was a long time ago.

At about the time that I started there was a Robert Redford movie called, "Three Days of the Condor."  It was about an historical society that was a front for the CIA.  I was a fly on the wall in those early Library Commission meetings, and that is what it was like.  No one cared about the library as a public institution.  They were going to suck it dry in the interests of private fund raising.  I was the first person to break through the barrier to attendance at Library Commission meeting and that first meeting was more challenging than any open meeting issue I have faced since.  Having done this, I felt it was my duty as a citizen to expose what I saw.

It is openly acknowledged at the Library that there would be no compliance with sunshine or open meetings laws without my lawsuits.  As a matter of fact, at the recent meetings of the Technology and Privacy Committee that was convened to pave the way for implementation of RFID, there was a proposal to use on-line conferencing software in an illegal way.  Commissioner Coulter made a joke that they had better not or they would get sued by me.  Some joke.  There is no respect for what is right, or what is legal, not to mention actual respect for the public.  The only thing that deters them from brazen violations of the law is getting sued.  The only thing that deters them from naked rip-off of the library is what little openness there is.

Yet after all of this time of being successful in creating some semblance of compliance with Sunshine and open meetings laws, if however grudging, their only response is to sue me as a vexatious litigant.  It is the opposite of the three  strikes law.  The concept is that after twenty strikes they want a get-out-of-jail free card.  One would think they would be ashamed that after this long string of illegalities, but they want to blame me for fixing it. 

This vexatious litigant motion is nothing but slander and intimidation in its purest form.  Labeling me as a vexatious litigant has no chance of success.  Such a motion is neither legal, lawful or even valid.  If any responsible authority in City Hall sees this missive, please be informed that the San Francisco City Attorney’s office is in desperate need of adult supervision.

One never knows what a judge is going to do, but even if I were to lose and end up being slandered as a vexatious litigant, it is a small price to pay.  There is a sense in which I lost the battle, but won the war.  There is public attendance at commission meetings, agenda items, public comment (no matter how much they laugh and rattle their M&M’s), and copies of documents under discussion (most of the time).  None of those things were implemented willingly.  The library Commission fought against them just as hard as I fought for them.  Most of the time it doesn’t matter much, but when the staff wants a City Librarian who has an MLS or the pre-school gets kicked out of Bernal Heights, there is a forum for people to speak and the Library Commission’s arbitrariness does not go down quite so easily. 

For those who believe that Coke is the Real Thing, Progress is Our Most Important Product, and Military Intelligence knows where the Weapons of Mass Destruction Are, they may also believe that corporate money in the library is "positive."  Everyone else has long ago acknowledged that I was right about the stream of lies that ruined our library and benefited private interests, and continues to do so.

The motion does not make sense without some discussion of the substance of the suits along the way.  The City Attorney in its memo uses the terms "meritless lawsuits over and over again," and "repetitive meritless lawsuits."  What the City Attorney does not mention is that three of those appeals resulted in published opinions.  When the Court of Appeal publishes an opinion, the court is saying that it is a significant point on which lower courts need guidance.  The published opinions went against me, but that is a result of the political climate not the significance of the issue.  

The law on vexatious litigants uses the term "adverse judgment."  Let’s take just one example.  The library refused to hold the required Library Preservation Fund neighborhood hearings on open hours in the branches.  I filed suit.  After the suit was filed, the Library Commission scheduled new hearings, and then claimed to the judge that the case was moot.  Is that an adverse judgment?  The city seems to think it is.  In fact, in the law there is something called a "prevailing party" standard.  Under that standard, if you get what you were originally asking for you are the prevailing party.  Under the "prevailing party" standard I have won the vast majority of the suits.

Let’s take another example.  One of the lawsuits was on a closed session.  The judge demanded to see the tape recording of the meeting "in camera."  The Library Commission claimed that they had "lost" the tape, unquestionably as a coverup.  The judge had no choice but to dismiss for lack of evidence.  Is that an adverse judgment?  The city seems to think it is.

Of course, there was the case that I won hands down.  At least two of the cases were about the Fuhrman Fund (See Bay Guardian of Dec. 22, 1993) where they had to get the law and the will changed to retroactively indemnify themselves.  Quentin Kopp got involved and there was a major public discussion public trusts.  (Don’t forget the Director of the Friends and Foundation was the same person who had attempted to divert the Buck Trust in Marin County.  Marin County was successful in protecting itself, but San Francisco failed.)  How meritless was that?

I could go on like this at some length, but the point is, these were all crucial issues and now I am defending myself against this superficial and malicious SLAPP.

I am grateful for the Bay Guardian’s support, but I think it makes one small faux pas.  The editorial refers to some of my lawsuits as "a little obscure."  All of the suits were about distinct and important points.  I never sued over anything that I didn’t consider both significant and a deliberate violation on the part of the Library Commission.  The Library Commission does not negotiate or compromise.  When I began the door was completely slammed in my face.  I started by establishing a beachhead and advancing openness point by point.  Myself, Kimo Crossman, Christian Holmer, Timothy Gillespie, Doug Comstock and so many others — including Bruce Brugmann — have been fighting for sunshine and open government against a door that has been slammed in our face by those who think that because of their money they are aristocrats or "good people."  There was nothing obscure about it.

The reason that this is so prejudicial is that I am in fact in "pro per" and people make certain assumptions about that.  What no one wants to admit is that the City Attorney is what is called "Rambo litigators from Hell."  Until one have been through at least a dozen lawsuits against them, one is helpless against the dirty tricks that one is up against.  Just as an indication, there are court rules that every case must have a settlement conference and a mediation.  In my entire history, I have never had either.  They never negotiate.  They never discuss.  They don’t have to.  If there were any truth in the matter, the City Attorney would be declared "vexatious."

The fact is that democracy exists because public-spirited citizens fight for it.  The better question is, Why did the Library Commission fight against it at every turn?   It is important to look at the broad perspective of who is, and has been, fighting for the democratic principles of openness and public process.  The fact is, Kimo Crossman and I, as well as others, have been fighting for democratic principles that are important to everyone and it is a good thing that we do, no matter how often we lose.

For those who saw my public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting of April 11, you saw 35 newspaper headlines exposing problems in SFPL while I mentioned everything from the book dumping scandal to the retribution against staff whistleblower scandal, and many in between.  Would the City and the society as a whole be better off if none of that were exposed?  Of course, the library administration did not willingly allow the sunshine that brought those issues to light.  One of the weapons that they use most relentlessly against openness is personal calumny against those who would uncover the truth.  I have been called a lot worse things than vexatious litigant.  Every gain for democracy comes at the expense of the aristocracy’s prerogatives.  They don’t like it, but that is the way it works.

In the end it wasn’t about the Brown Act.  Figuratively speaking, I was smuggling wheelbarrows. It was about establishing a beachhead for democracy so that there would be public discussion about the issues of the privatization and destruction of the public library.  It is true that some of the Brown Act lawsuits were about relatively small points, but it began with brazen and open contempt for sunshine and ended up with more of the truth coming out than anyone thought possible.

The next step is putting Library Commission meetings on SFGTV.  How many departments with a $70 Million annual budget are not broadcast on cable access or available on Video on Demand?  The one thing that will make it difficult for the Library Commission to privatize the Public Library is to allow the people to see what is going on.  That is where "sunshine" comes from.  "Sunshine is the best disinfectant."

The right housing fees

-
0

EDITORIAL The San Francisco Chronicle has finally noticed what we reported a month ago: The Board of Supervisors has effectively put in place a moratorium on new market-rate housing on the east side of the city. We hear that city planners are looking for loopholes to undermine the temporary ban, but the intent of what the supervisors did is clear: Until there’s a detailed and valid review of how new high-end condos and lofts impact blue-collar jobs and low-income housing, the developers will have to let their demolition and excavation equipment idle.

Meanwhile, Sup. Chris Daly is moving to increase significantly the amount of low-cost housing that private developers have to build to win permission for future projects. Daly’s legislation is a good start and sets the right tone for the debate, but the board should go even further.

The Daly plan would apply to almost all new market-rate housing built anywhere in the city and would take effect whenever the moratorium ends. It would require most developers to offer 15 percent of the units of any project for less than market rates, and that number would jump to 25 percent if the affordable housing was built on another site. In other words, a builder who wants to put up 500 luxury condos in SoMa would have to build 125 affordable units somewhere else in the city.

That’s nice, but it’s not enough.

The city’s own general plan makes it clear that 72 percent of all new housing needs to be affordable to moderate- and low-income people. And the planning process for the eastern neighborhoods has still offered no proposals for how to make that happen.

At the same time, of course, the plans to intensely develop an area poorly served by transit and generally bereft of public infrastructure and open space utterly ignore the fact that it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create real neighborhoods (instead of clusters of heavily fortified, gated buildings).

Daly’s got the right idea: Developers are making a fortune building million-dollar condos in San Francisco, and they can well afford to give the city a whole lot back. But it’s worth taking a longer approach here and considering the price of bringing as many as 100,000 more people to SoMa, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, the central waterfront, and Bayview–Hunters Point — and figure out who is going to pay for it.

Daly could start by asking for a detailed independent study of what it really costs a developer to build new condo units in the city and what the current profit margins are. Then take the city’s affordable-housing needs, the need for public-sector development, and the estimated new tax revenue and compare: Can fair taxes and requirements on the developers raise enough money to meet the city’s needs?

And, if not, we get back to the question this paper has been asking for over a year: Why are we building any new market-rate housing, anyway? SFBG

 

{Empty title}

-
0

› tredmond@sfbg.com

Editor’s notes

I used to say San Francisco politics was a contact sport, but these days I think it’s more of a steel-cage match, which is generally fine with me. I have no beef with blood sport, and most of us are consenting adults who chose of our own free will to participate in this high-stakes game. But even ugly fights have unwritten rules, and one of them is that you don’t make disparaging comments about people’s gender, race, or sexual orientation. It’s just not OK.

I mention this because there’s a pretty serious furor in the queer community over an attack by developer Joe O’Donoghue on transgender activist Robert Haaland.

Ol’ Joe, who also likes to think of himself as a poet, is fighting with Haaland over Proposition D, which would bar the city from sending some mentally ill people to Laguna Honda hospital (and would, as an aside, rezone lots of city-owned land for private nursing homes). Haaland works for the big city-employee union, Local 790, which is campaigning against Prop. D; O’Donoghue, who is a major backer of the measure, has decided to personalize the campaign. In a lyrical missive that’s been widely distributed, O’Donoghue refers to "our transfigured Robert" and (in the not-so-subtle cloak of biblical language) suggests that Haaland is a bitter and angry human being because he was born a woman. Another letter refers to Haaland as "Robbi" and threatens to donate to the Prop. D campaign the same amount of money as the city had to pay to Haaland to settle a transgender police-harassment case. It’s actually pretty vicious stuff.

Some queer leaders are arguing that there ought to be a city law banning political "hate speech," which is entirely the wrong approach: You can’t outlaw any kind of speech without bad First Amendment problems. But we all can, and should, tell O’Donoghue (whose political statements are getting increasingly mean-spirited and personal) that he’s crossed a very big line and that if he’s going to pull shit like this, he’s no longer welcome in local politics. The guy has a lot of campaign money to throw around, and it’s tempting even for folks on the left to take it. But every decent San Franciscan ought to tell him to take a hike.

Now this: I’ve enjoyed all the historical stuff in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner about the 1906 earthquake, but everyone’s leaving out one of the best parts. It was the failure of the private Spring Valley Water Company to maintain its pipes that helped doom firefighting efforts — and that was a big factor in the passage of the Raker Act, which gave the city a public water system. Of course, the Raker Act also required us to run a public power system, which (as I’ve probably mentioned a time or two) has been blocked by Pacific Gas and Electric Co. all these years.

And this: The axes are falling with fury over at the Village Voice, where longtime Washington bureau chief Jim Ridgeway — one of the top alternative press reporters in the country — was canned the first week in April, and writer Jennifer Gonnerman resigned. Sydney Schanberg, the Pulitzer Prize–winning media columnist, had already left, and the Bush Blog had been canceled. All of this drew the attention of Democracy Now, which did a lengthy report April 13. They even got me out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to join the East Coast discussion. Somehow, though, nobody from the Phoenix-based New Times crew that just bought the Voice was available for comment. Chickens. >SFBG

For a full transcript, go to www.sfbg.com.

In SF, health care for all

-
0

OPINION The question before us as San Francisco voters, health care providers, activists, legislators, and consumers is: "Can our community provide access to health care for people who work?"

In a surprising, welcome, and wise political partnership, Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom have joined their hearts and minds in a two-pronged approach to improve health access. The scope of the problem is simple.

In San Francisco, 84 percent of workers are privately insured. Employees contribute through premiums and co-payments. But there are now 82,000 uninsured adults in San Francisco. They rarely use preventative or primary care health services and (because of cost) only pursue health services when acutely ill. The overwhelming majority find their way to the overburdened emergency department at San Francisco General Hospital, where the taxpayers pick up the cost, estimated at more than $29 million a year.

It’s difficult and prohibitively expensive for individuals to get private health coverage. So group insurance is the obvious solution — and right now, that means insurance from employers.

The first of two complementary endeavors, initiated in November 2005 by Supervisor Ammiano, is the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance. It would direct employers with 20 employees or more to provide health insurance or contribute financially toward paying the cost of health care services for uninsured employees who work at least 80 hours a month.

The second part of the initiative comes from Mayor Newsom, who appointed a 37-member Universal Health Care Council, which will submit recommendations by May 2006 for a "defined benefits plan" establishing a "medical home" for the uninsured. It will also clarify the scope and cost of defined services, such as prevention and primary care, including behavioral or mental health services, dental health services, and prescription drugs, all in a plan delivered by the Department of Public Health clinics and the nonprofit coalition of community clinics.

San Franciscans overwhelmingly support universal health care.

By May the Universal Health Care Council, led by Sandra Hernandez, who runs the San Francisco Foundation, and Lloyd Dean, CEO of Catholic Health Care West, will recommend the scope of a plan, and health care benefits and costs, for both uninsured employees and the unemployed. For uninsured employees, this defined benefit plan could be heard at the same time as the final hearings on the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance currently in the budget and finance committee.

The opportunity to legislate a defined health care benefit for 30,000 uninsured working people in San Francisco is a historic step forward in improving the health status of all San Franciscans. Let us join both Sup. Tom Ammiano and Mayor Gavin Newsom to make history by the summer of 2006 and expand health coverage to working San Franciscans. SFBG

Roma Guy is a member of the clinical faculty of the Health Education Department at San Francisco State University and a city health commissioner.

Arnold and Emily

-
0

This is a story about a muscle-bound governor, a nine-year-old girl, and some polar bears. The governor is Arnold Schwarzenegger, the girl is Emily Magavern, and the polar bears or at least photos of them served as backdrops for a pair of speeches the two gave on global warming.

Emily, the daughter of a Sierra Club lobbyist, gave her speech in Sacramento on April 3 at a press conference outlining legislation that Democratic lawmakers have introduced to create a mandatory limit on greenhouse gases.

“I don’t want the polar bears to lose their homes,” Emily told the gathering.

That bill was triggered by a report from the Climate Action Team, which was commissioned by Schwarzenegger in June 2005 to recommend how California should address global warming. The report’s suggestions include a tax on gasoline, the monitoring of factory emissions, a cap-and-trade system (which caps the amount of greenhouse gases that factories may produce and sets up a trading market in which businesspeople can buy or sell emissions credits), as well as other less contentious initiatives.

But when Schwarzenegger came to San Francisco April 11 to outline his recommendations, he embraced almost none of the controversial schemes, with the exception of mandatory reporting of emissions (something most factories don’t now report), even as he claimed climate change to be a “most pressing issue.”

“The debate is over, the science is in, and it’s time for action,” boomed Schwarzenegger, who then contradicted his own call to action by telling the crowd that he was concerned about scaring businesses out of the state. “Must take cautious steps and the right steps.”

There are telling contrasts between the approaches of our tough-talking governor and this soft-spoken little girl. In some ways it seems their roles are reversed, with Schwarzenegger unwilling to connect cause and effect and Emily taking a more mature view of the problem.

Emily diagnosed what is essentially a simple problem. Humans are causing cataclysmic, global climate changes through excessive consumption of fossil fuels. The changes are having a negative impact on many species, including polar bears in the Arctic and animals closer to home, like California’s state bird, the California quail.

Some of the top contributors to the problem are the humans living right here in California, which is the world’s 12th largest producer of greenhouse gases, of which 58 percent come from cars. The solution: Burn less fossil fuel, even if that’s a difficult thing to do.

“We can’t rely on oil forever,” Emily said.

In contrast, Schwarzenegger spun a compelling vision of what California’s future would be like if it cleaned up its greenhouse gas emissions. Yet he remains politically intimidated by business interests, such as the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, which says that addressing global warming would hurt the state’s economy.

In the beginning of his speech at San Francisco City Hall, Schwarzenegger touted the need for immediate action by developing a mandatory reporting and cap-and-trade system, emphasizing the economic benefits of recently implemented initiatives. Yet he later said he opposed caps, leaving it unclear how such a system would work or exactly what he’s calling for.

“We should start off without the caps until 2010,” Schwarzenegger said. “Caps could scare off the business community.”

Schwarzenegger’s response has many global warming advocates feeling deflated, while a number of businesses are breathing sighs of relief. The governor also appears to be letting the driving public off the hook by refusing to support the gas tax that his committee recommended, a problem addressed by Emily.

“If people try to not drive cars as much and try to drive cleaner cars, that would help the problem,” Emily said.

There are also many grown-ups out there who agree with Emily and say that dealing with global warming may be difficult, but doing so proactively and taking a lead role in the effort might actually help the state’s economy by encouraging development of new technologies and industries rather than hurt it.

“The chamber’s very good at having 20/20 vision in the rearview mirror,” said Bob Epstein, cofounder of Environmental Entrepreneurs. “All businesses need are the creation of simple rules, and then the legislators can step back and let business innovate.”

That seems to be what the legislature is trying to do, with Assembly Bill 32 seeking to cap factory emissions and reduce them by 30 percent by the year 2020. But whether the governor will sign this bill (and others to come) and start saving the polar bears and Emily’s generation is a question he seems unwilling to address. SFBG

 

Invisible minority

-
0

A new community-based research report on Pacific Islanders — Tongans, Samoans, Hawaiians, Fijians, and other Polynesians — reveals disproportionately high dropout, arrest, and depression rates among the population in Oakland.

In the 2000 to 2001 school year, for example, 47 Pacific Islander ninth graders were enrolled in the Oakland Unified School District. By the 2003 to 2004 school year, when those students would have been seniors, only 14 Pacific Islanders were enrolled in the 12th grade.

Pacific Islander youths also have the second-highest arrest rate in Alameda County and the highest arrest rate — about 9 in 100 Pacific Islanders each year — in San Francisco County, according to the Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center.

Often grouped under the larger Asian and Pacific Islander category, Pacific Islanders’ experiences are overshadowed by larger groups like Chinese and Japanese Americans.

"We’re invisible," Penina Ava Taesali, a researcher of the report, told the Guardian. "All we have is anecdotal data on issues. In every segment of the government — city, county, state, and federal — there’s no data."

Taesali, who is the artistic director of Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership, said that when she first began working for AYPAL eight years ago, she expected to see a program for Pacific Islander youths — and was surprised to see none. She helped create the youth program Pacific Islander Kie Association (PIKA) in 2001.

She is among those now trying to figure out why this relatively small cultural group is having such disproportionate problems — and how they might be solved.

Culture Clash

The first wave of immigration from the Pacific Islands came after World War II. During the war many Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, Tonga, and Samoa, were occupied by US troops. Previous to that, many Pacific Islands were colonized by Europeans.

After the United States loosened its immigration policies in 1965, more and more Pacific Islanders moved to the US, as well as to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. First men, then women, moved abroad for better jobs to send remittance back to the islands. Between 1980 and 1990, the US population of Tongans rose 58 percent.

When the 2000 US census was released, many were also surprised to learn that there are more Pacific Islanders living in California than in Hawaii: 116,961 compared with 113,539. The Bay Area — including Oakland, San Francisco, and San Mateo — is home to 36,317 Pacific Islanders.

Now a new generation of Pacific Islander Americans is growing up and learning to navigate family, school, and church — but many are feeling alienated from all three social structures.

"A lot of times, within Pacific Islander families, the children are very much seen but not heard," Venus Mesui, a community liaison at Life Academy and Media Academy high schools in Oakland, said. "They’re not really able to express themselves at school or at home. Depression comes along with that, because they don’t have the know-how to express themselves in a positive manner. They don’t have a space, or they don’t feel safe, to voice their opinions."

The report also revealed that several youths who were interviewed said domestic violence and corporal punishment occurred within their families.

Pelenatita "Tita" Olosoni, 18, told us she wished more parents would visit the schools to see what’s really going on.

"Parents think school out here is easier than back on the islands," Olosoni said. "It would be helpful if they took time off from work to see what kids are going through every day."

According to Mesui, parents need to be trained in how to support their children, particularly if they attend underperforming schools.

"I know all of the parents want their kids to succeed, but unfortunately, older siblings are asked to take care of the younger ones, and this doesn’t prepare them with good habits that will make them successful in school," Mesui, who is Hawaiian, said.

Olosoni said she and other Pacific Islander students have had to stay home and miss weeks of school to take care of their younger siblings and cousins.

Christopher Pulu, a 15-year-old freshman at Oakland High whose father is a landscaper, said, "That’s what the majority of our fathers do." Most Pacific Islanders in the US are laborers, and 32 percent live below the national poverty level, according to 2000 US census data.

"They always need an extra hand," Olosoni told us. "So the boys will drop school and see it as an easy way to make money and work with their dads."

"Big-boned and heavy-handed"

Like many minority groups, Pacific Islanders suffer from stereotypes. The prevalent minority myth that all Asians (though most Pacific Islanders do not consider themselves Asian) do well in school actually hurts groups like Pacific Islanders, Cambodians, and Hmong, according to Andrew Barlow, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and Diablo Valley College.

"Most people say we’re big-boned and heavy-handed," Olosoni said. "When Tongans get in trouble, the whole Tongan crew gets in trouble."

Olosoni remembers the day she, her sister, and three friends were called into the principal’s office after a lunchtime fight at Castlemont High School in East Oakland. The security guard called another guard on his walkie-talkie and said, "Gather all the Tongans in the office," Olosoni recalls.

"I was like, ‘No, they didn’t go there,’" she told us. "It was just the five of us involved in the fight, but they called in all the Tongans." After the fight, the five Polynesian girls were given a one-week suspension.

Because Pacific Islander youths only make up 1.2 percent of a district’s population, they are usually a small but visible group within each school. While security guards may not be able to call "all Latinos" to the office, for example, they can do so with a smaller population like Tongans, Barlow said. He said that being so easily targeted increases solidarity within the community but may also lead to insularity and even more stereotyping.

"When people are denied opportunities and when they’re treated unequally, the way they’re going to deal with that is increasing reliance on their community and increasing ethnic solidarity," he said.

Barlow, who teaches courses on race and ethnicity, told us stereotypes are just a part of the problem. Larger systemic issues such as the economy, access to jobs, and educational role models are just as crucial.

"Tongans are already coming into American society with a lot of problems caused by colonialism," Barlow says. "If you don’t have access to a very wealthy school district, if you don’t know people who have access to good jobs, if you don’t have a high degree of education, then you’re in trouble."

A New Generation

Pulu said he hopes to be the first in his family to attend and graduate from college. He has received at least a 3.5 grade point average every semester and attends church regularly.

At the beginning of the school year, his multicultural education teacher asked him to go to the front of the class and point out Tonga on a world map.

"It doesn’t stand out," Pulu said. He is energetic and enthusiastic and doesn’t mind educating others about his culture. "Most people think it’s a part of Hawaii."

Mesui said Pacific Islanders have come a long way. Though the report focuses on a lot of struggles, Mesui said that she has personally seen increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders graduate from high school and go on to college, including her three children.

She believes schools should address the issue of youths who don’t have support at home.

"When they’re not in school, they’re doing something else," Mesui said. "The majority of the arrests are due to them not going to school and getting in trouble on the streets. And I think it falls on the school — we’re not doing something to keep them here."

Olosoni said she knows of 3 Tongan youths in the last school year who were kicked out of Castlemont — out of about 15 Pacific Islander students in the school — for cutting class.

"It comes from the lack of them getting help from people of their own kind to help them understand things better," Olosoni said. She is now attending adult school and working on her GED.

Over the years Taesali has pushed for more programming in the community. PIKA now has about 40 youths who meet every Tuesday afternoon at an Oakland high school.

"If we got more Pacific Islander staff and teachers, there would be immediate results," Taesali said. "I have no doubt about it."

Taesali sees Pacific Islander students engaged when they learn about their own culture.

"Every time we’ve done workshops on Pacific Islander history and culture, [the students] just don’t want to leave," she said. "They are so happy to be learning about their culture." SFBG

Dede Wilsey’s whoppers

-
0

An aggressive and misleading campaign against Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park by the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums — spearheaded by its board president, Dede Wilsey — appears to be backfiring as the proposal heads for almost certain approval by the Board of Supervisors.

Yet the Healthy Saturdays proposal by Sup. Jake McGoldrick — which would close from May 25 to Nov. 25 the same portion of JFK Drive now closed on Sundays, a six-month trial period to study its impacts — still needs the signature of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has not yet taken a position.

And there are rumblings that even if the measure is approved — either with Newsom’s signature or an override of his veto — Wilsey and her supporters intend to attempt a referendum that would effectively kill the project if they can gather 20,000-plus valid signatures within 30 days. City law requires the targets of referendums to be placed on hold until the vote, which would occur this November.

The proposal got its first hearing April 14, when the Land Use Committee unanimously recommended it be approved by the full board (which will consider the matter April 25). The long and emotional hearing showed sharp divisions between the environmentalists and recreational park users who support closure and the de Young Museum benefactors and park neighbors who oppose it.

It also unmasked the deceptive tactics being employed by Wilsey and museum director John D. Buchanan, who coauthored an April 7 letter to de Young Museum members and April 4 memos to museum trustees and staff urging opposition to Healthy Saturdays and implying the museum’s survival was at stake.

"Closure of JFK Drive on Saturday has twice been voted down by the electorate and has been shown to be unpopular in polls for the last decade. While Sunday closure is a reality, road closures severely compromise access to the museum, particularly for seniors, families, persons with disabilities, and anyone who cannot afford the cost of the parking garage," they wrote. This information was parroted by many who argued against the closure.

Yet the letters were grossly misleading — and at least 16 museum members wrote angry letters to the museum protesting the Wilsey-Buchanan position. The Guardian obtained the letters through a Sunshine Ordinance request. One writer called the museum campaign "self-serving and deceptive," while another wrote: "I take issue with undertaking a letter campaign using my donations."

Contrary to what the April 7 letter implies, people with disabilities are allowed to drive on the closed roads, and McGoldrick has now incorporated into the measure all recommendations of the Mayor’s Office of Disability. The letter also never indicates that the closure is temporary, that free parking is available a short walk from the museum, or that the public voted on the proposal just once, albeit on two competing measures that were each narrowly defeated, in November 2000.

At that time, with polls showing public support for the Saturday closure proposed in Measure F, museum patrons tried to scuttle the closure by qualifying a competing Measure G, which would have delayed the Saturday closure until after completion of the parking garage. In the ballot pamphlet, Wilsey, the California Academy of Sciences, and other opponents of Measure F wrote arguments for the ballot handbook promising to support Saturday closure once the garage was completed, as it was last summer.

"The Academy supports the closure of JFK Drive on Saturdays once the efforts of Saturday closure have been studied, alternative transportation measures are in place, and the voter-approved, privately funded parking facility is built under the Music Concourse," one statement read.

At the hearing, McGoldrick asked Wilsey why she is reneging on her promise. Wilsey said that she wrote her statement in 1998 while her husband and dog were still alive, before she had raised $202 million for the museum renovation, and back when "we were not in a war against terrorism. Almost nothing that was true in 1998 is true today."

Wilsey did not respond to our request to clarify her response or explain other aspects of what appears to be a calculated campaign of misinformation. For example, she and other museum spokespeople have been saying publicly that museum attendance on Saturdays is far higher than on Sundays because of the road closure.

When we spoke with museum spokesperson Barbara Traisman, she said the de Young receives 15 to 20 percent more visitors on Saturdays than on Sundays. Yet she refused our request to provide the attendance data to support her statement — just as museum officials have ignored requests by McGoldrick for that data for the last three weeks — telling us: "That’s too onerous to ask someone to do that."

So on April 13, the Guardian made an immediate disclosure request for those records under the Sunshine Ordinance. The next day, just as the hearing was getting under way, Wilsey turned those records over to McGoldrick.

The documents showed that on 10 of the 23 weekends that the de Young has been open, attendance on Sundays was actually higher than on Saturdays. By the end of the hearing, even committee chair Sup. Sophie Maxwell — who had voiced concerns about Saturday closure and was not considered a supporter — voted for Healthy Saturdays, joining the board’s progressive majority of six that has already signed on as cosponsors. SFBG

 

PG&E vs. Greenaction

-
0

         

Pacific Gas and Electric Company has been promising for years to shut down its filty, dangerous Hunters Point power plant. Now state regulators have signed off on the plan, and it should be happening any day. But PG&E and Greenaction — which has been the group leading the charge to close the plant — have very different ideas about the timeframe.

 

Here’s PG&E’s claim:

 

 

   PG&E Completes Potrero-Hunters Point Transmission Line
                               in San Francisco

      Utility on Target to Closing Hunters Point Power Plant This Spring

    SAN FRANCISCO, April 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Pacific Gas and Electric
Company has released into service a new underground transmission line in San
Francisco, bringing the utility closer to its goal of closing its last San
Francisco power plant.
    The Potrero-Hunters Point Cable is a 115,000-volt transmission line that
improves electric reliability and increases electric capacity in San
Francisco. Built at a cost of about $40 million, the Potrero-Hunters Point
Cable spans 2.5-miles and is entirely underground, connecting two large
substations in southeast San Francisco. Construction on the line began in June
2005.
    The Potrero-Hunters Point Cable is the second-to-last of nine transmission
projects PG&E has completed in its effort to obtain California Independent
System Operator approval to terminate the must-run contract for the Hunters
Point Power Plant. The California ISO has required PG&E to run the plant to
assure continued reliable electric service in the region, but completion of
the transmission projects will allow PG&E to maintain reliable service without
the plant.
    The final transmission project, the Jefferson-Martin 230-kv Transmission
Line, is scheduled to be completed this spring, even though excessive rain
during March and April has posed challenges. PG&E is investing approximately
$320 million in the nine projects that will increase electric capacity,
improve reliability and also allow for the Hunters Point Power Plant to close.
    Ten business days after PG&E notifies the California ISO that the
Jefferson-Martin line is in commercial service, the "reliability must-run"
contract under which PG&E is obligated to operate the plant will terminate, at
which point PG&E will immediately close the plant.
    "PG&E worked closely with the community, the City and the Port of San
Francisco to get the Potrero-Hunters Point Cable project approved and built in
a timely manner," said Jeff Butler, senior vice president of energy delivery
at PG&E. "Everyone understood the project’s role in closing the Hunters Point
Power Plant."
    "The Close It Coalition and the A. Philip Randolph Institute have been
instrumental in seeing that Hunters Point Power Plant close," said Lynette
Sweet, a community resident and advocate, and board member of the Bay Area
Rapid Transit District. "I’m grateful that PG&E listened to the community and
worked hard to keep their promise."

    For more information about Pacific Gas and Electric Company, please visit
the company’s Web site at www.pge.com.

SOURCE  Pacific Gas and Electric Company
    -0-                             04/07/2006
    /CONTACT:  PG&E News Department, +1-415-973-5930/
    /Web site:  http://www.pge.com/
    (PCG)

 

Here’s what Greenaction has to say about that:

For immediate release: April 7, 2006

 

For More Information Contact: 

Marie Harrison, Bradley Angel, Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, (415) 248-5010

Tessie Ester, Bayview Hunters Point Mothers Committee for Environmental Justice, (415) 643-3170

 

                  Showdown at PG&E Hunters Point Power Plant

 

           Greenaction and Community Groups Set Tuesday, April 11, noon

                as Deadline to Shut Down PG&E’s Polluting Power Plant

 

PG&E claims plant will close, but fails to set date & makes conflicting statements about closure

Tired of broken promises over the last 8 years, residents issue ultimatum

 

San Francisco, CA – Fed up with PG&E’s refusal to set a specific date to close the dirty and outdated PG&E Hunters Point power plant and tired of years of broken promises to shut it down, Bayview Hunters Point community residents and Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice will take nonviolent action at the power plant on April 11th at noon to ensure it closes once and for all. 

 

The power plant is located at Evans and Middlepoint, San Francisco, in the heart of the low-income Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. As one of California’s dirtiest and oldest power plants, it has polluted the community for over 77 years.  Residents suffer very high rates of asthma and cancer.

 

PG&E officials have recently made numerous conflicting statements about the supposed upcoming closure of the power plant. First, in September PG&E told the California Independent System Operator (ISO) that the plant should be able to close by early April. Next, in November they wrote a letter to the ISO stating it should close by the end of the second quarter (by end of June). Then, two weeks ago a PG&E official told Greenaction that construction of transmission lines required for ISO approval for the shut down had been completed, and were undergoing testing. Early this week PG&E told a City Department of the Environment official that construction had not been completed. On April 6th PG&E Vice President Bob Harris told an environmental group representative that the plant would be closed "8 days after the rains stop." It is very unclear which rains the PG&E official was referring to.

 

PG&E has had so-called community groups that it directly supports praise the company, ignoring the ongoing criticism from residents who actually live next to the plant and suffer every day from dirty air.

 

Tessie Ester, resident of the Huntersview public housing project located across the street from the PG&E plant and chair of the Bayview Hunters Point Mothers Committee for Environmental Justice, said "After years of watching our children suffer with all these illnesses, we won’t be singing or dancing until it closes, and we will be there on April 11th to ensure that, in fact, it finally shuts down."

 

On April 11th, residents and their supporters will gather in front of the PG&E Power Plant to ensure that the plant closes, by community action if necessary. "Residents and Greenaction will be at the front gates of PG&E on April 11th to make sure this dirty polluter is shut down once and for all," said Marie Harrison, community organizer for Greenaction. "We are tired of delay after delay and broken promises from PG&E and government officials, and we will be at the front gate on April 11th."

                                                                                # # #

 

 

 

 

Wild Pepper

-
0

Travelers on Interstate 280, northbound across the south face of the city, may well have had occasion to use the San Jose Avenue exit, a two-lane ramp that curves through a tunnel and onto another multilane road scarcely different from the freeway itself, except for the Muni trains running along the median and the lower speed limit, which is generally ignored, as is the case on the freeway proper. But, like a wadi fading in some desert, San Jose Avenue soon becomes a ghost. Traffic curves onto Guerrero and speeds north, and San Jose itself seems to end even before reaching Cesar Chavez.

It doesn’t end, though. It’s just interrupted, and a block north of Cesar Chavez it resumes its languid progress as a kind of village lane all but inaccessible to the automotive furies on nearby thoroughfares and lined with quaint old houses and a small slice of park, beatifically calm. At the foot of this segment of street, in a building that could easily be mistaken for a Laundromat, we find Wild Pepper, a recently relocated Chinese restaurant (ne Long Island, on Church) notable not only for its isolation — for restaurants, like wolves (and humans!), tend to operate on a pack model, clustering together — but also for its offer of evidence that two people can indeed eat quite royally in this town and still get out the door for less than $40, maybe nearer $30. Those numbers include tax and tip, yes — the latter covering table service at tables covered with proper white linens and set with handsomely lacquered rosewood chairs.

None of this is to suggest that Wild Pepper is the lap of luxury. The setting, intimate to the city yet remote from it, has its charms, of course; I would not have been surprised to find a hitching post for horses outside the front door. The interior design too, while not without its flourishes, including an aquarium full of bubbles and decorative tropical fish, is Spartan in the manner of one of those semilegal in-law apartments in which the dehumidifier is always running. But all this means is that there is less sensory clutter to distract one’s attention from the excellent food.

As Wild Pepper’s menu reminds us, excellent Chinese food need not be imperial nor be prepared with a banquet table and 14 courses in mind. Earthiness helps, pepperiness too, along with an attention to freshness of ingredients and continence in the use of cooking oil. As an introduction to these admirable qualities, Wild Pepper offers a deceptively boring-sounding cucumber salad ($3.95); the crisp, cooling cuke is cut into coins and dressed with a simple but lively oil flecked by chili flakes and minced garlic. If you thought the cucumber was a dark green torpedo fit only to be made into effete little white-bread sandwiches for the high teas beloved of the garlic-fearing English, you will be pleased to think again.

Many of the menu’s more attractive offerings are to be found under the heading "chef’s specials." Here we find such treats as minced-chicken lettuce cup ($6.95), basically a variant of mu shu pork (including a small dish of hoisin sauce), with chicken substituted for the pork and immaculate leaves of iceberg lettuce for the pancakes. Also good, if on the richer side, is Szechuan crispy beef ($8.95), cords of shredded meat hot-wokked to a certain snappiness in the company of slivers of onion and an unassumingly brown but potent sweet-sour sauce laced with Szechuan peppercorns. For a Thai spin, try basil eggplant with prawns and scallops ($10.95) — the classic Siamese combination of sweet and spicy, with the eggplant neither tough nor mushy, those disastrous termini of many a home cook’s ministrations.

If there is a weakness on the menu, it lies in the hot appetizers and can be recognized by the alluring but somehow repulsive scent of the deep-fryer. The pork pot stickers ($4.50 for six) are an exception, being just pan-seared instead of dunked in a vat of hot oil. But they are an exception; also a bit floury. The combination plate ($6.25) gives the full oily effect; here we have egg roll and fried chicken wings (which consist of little more than deep-fried batter and some slender bones — but are tasty!), along with a pair of pot stickers and a couple of disks of crab Rangoon: crab meat mixed with cream cheese and, yes, deep-fried. Good, but positively Homer Simpson–esque.

A better hot first course might be one of the soups. Hot and sour ($2.75 for a cup) is fine in a mainstream way, but a more enriching choice might be the ocean party ($6.95 for a large, and that means at least six cups’ worth), an egg drop soup fortified almost beyond recognition. Emendations include seafood, of course (mainly scallops and chunks of white fish), along with shreds of bok choy, rounds of baby corn, panels of carrot, and slivers of shiitake mushroom. There is no obviously dominant ingredient in this soup, and its flavor is delicate — easily obscured, say, by the bite and fire of the preceding cuke salad, if you had eaten that first, as we made the mistake of doing. But we found that once the cuke fireworks had ended, the soup quietly asserted itself until its mild flavor filled our mouths and we could not get enough of it. Pepper, you see, is nice, whether red, black, white, or Szechuan, but it is not the only way to go.

Wild Pepper

11 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.

3601 26th St., SF

(415) 695-7678

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

222 Club

-
0

REVIEW This jazzy, Euro-cozy joint in the ’Loin just got licensed for hard alcohol, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying its Spanish-inflected wine list and sparkling sojuladas (a lovingly crafted combo of soju and limonada). Victrola-era tunes pour out of the upstairs bar’s speakers, while in the downstairs lounge, art students, hip-hop aficionados, and old-school bebop fans mingle over upscale housemade pizzas ($10–$15) or the delicious antipasto plate ($11), featuring marinated sausage, berry jam, wine-braised beef, warm pâté, and imported cheeses. Owners Bianca, Joseph, and Manuel provide enough hands-on bar service (and peppy personality) to sate any classy barhopper’s appetite. (Marke B.)

222 Club 222 Hyde, SF

(415) 440-0222. D, $, credit cards not accepted

Horoscope

-
0

April 5–11

Aries

March 21-April 19

Aries, everyone’s got a little bit of the people-pleaser in them, even you. You might annoy the shit out of yourself this week as you notice all the ways you refine your personality to suit what other people want or need from you. Pay attention to which of your closest relationships provoke such chameleonesque activity.

Taurus

April 20-May 20

Your dramas actually have a higher purpose, Taurus. They’re not just happening because the earth deities are pissed at you for your lackluster recycling habits. Nope. Frustration offers you the opportunity to ground your ass in such a way that you coast through your stress with unbelievable balance and authenticity.

Gemini

May 21-June 21

Gemini, you’re going to have to take a risk. May we suggest that such a risk be taken from your happy place, as opposed to your crazy place, where you’re currently renting a room. We shouldn’t have to tell a weird-ass sign like yourself not to be scared of doing things unconventionally, but fear can make even the zaniest of the zodiac turn overly prudent.

Cancer

June 22-July 22

Every time you encounter crap, Cancer, (and you will encounter crap — in fact, you might want to check the bottoms of your shoes right now), we want you to seize the opportunity to use the stanky muck as compost and hustle yourself some flowers out of the situation.

Leo

July 23-Aug. 22

Awwww, finally, someone has a nice horoscope. You deserve it, Leo. You people have truly been putting the horror in horoscopes lately. But not this week! You should be beaming with pride at how open you are to cultivating a new level of understanding what love and passion actually mean to you.

Virgo

Aug. 23-Sept. 22

Welcome to our crash course in how much you can and cannot control things, Virgo. We think you’ve been enrolled in this particular program before, but hey, sometimes it takes a few tries for information to really sink in. Your homework: cultivating humility in a way that doesn’t diminish your vitality.

Libra

Sept. 23-Oct. 22

Libra, it’s going to be tricky to not compulsively submerge yourself in the society swirl. While it may be enticing to throw your cares to the wind and take up a regimen of partying, frankly, your self-esteem can’t handle such immersion in humanity. Have a bath, a cry, or a primal scream instead.

Scorpio

Oct. 23-Nov. 21

Sometimes, Scorpio, all you’ve got is your little personal truth. Your point of view. Your slice of life. And it looks like you’re on a Slice of Life Sandwich diet. The meat in your sandwich this week is (a) you can and should totally trust your needs, and (b) you seriously need to assert some frigging boundaries.

Sagittarius

Nov. 22-Dec. 21

Sagittarius, there is such a thing as too much push and not enough yield. And you are all about that thing right now. Yes, we’re saying you’re being pushy and uncompromising. While we are fans of asserting your individuality, and of assertiveness in general, you have officially gone overboard in pursuing what you want.

Capricorn

Dec. 22-Jan. 19

Education isn’t always about acquiring information, Capricorn. Sometimes the most crucial lessons are those that teach us to unlearn what we thought we knew — and undo the damage such mistaken smarts have created. Such knowledge brings loss. Nothing catastrophic, you’re just learning to let go.

Aquarius

Jan. 20-Feb. 18

Ah, it’s another pupil in this week’s School of Hard Knocks! Your specially tailored curriculum concerns ambiguity. How do you achieve some level of comfort when murky situations make you want to scratch your eyes out? How do you ground your intentions and pursue what you want while trapped in enigmatic circumstances?

Pisces

Feb. 19-March 20

Pisces, you’re coming from such an emotionally funky place it’s getting to be wicked hard to ride good vibes. Just try to stay checked in with yourself and take special pains to make sure you’re not behaving in a way that’s reactionary. Let your behavior reflect what you truly want, not just your tantrums.

Cocky bull story

-
0

Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles were early, defining examples of the film director living like a work of art — larger than life, a wee bit self-destructive, and as entertaining as their movies. Yet looking, acting, and smelling like a great filmmaker doesn’t necessarily mean you are one.

Nicholas Jarecki’s The Outsider manages to just about completely avoid that troublesome issue. It leaves no doubt, however, that subject James Toback is a maverick, an auteur, and an original. The leap implied is that these inherently neutral designations imply quality, even greatness — not just, as Roger Ebert is noted as saying (in perhaps the closest the film comes to a critical evaluation), that anything of an off-the-beaten-track, personal nature is bound to be more “interesting” than whatever the studio assembly line spat out last weekend.

No argument there. But it would be ignoring what really does grab one’s lapels about Toback’s work to suggest (as The Outsider does) that he must make great films because they’re unlike anyone else’s. In fact, the reason he’s been worth following for three decades or so is precisely because his work is often obnoxious, crackpot, and uneven at best and ouch-bad at worst. Toback’s moments of garishly questionable judgment are sometimes world-class ones you can’t forget.

After major druggy high jinks at Harvard and penning an infatuated book about Dionysian football legend Jim Brown, Toback wrote 1974’s The Gambler, in which all his influences (the first being Dostoyevsky) and themes (“race, sex and risk”) are laid out. It was about an intellectual (James Caan) driven by compulsion into gambling debts and other excesses that invite criminal violence — pretty much the quintessential Toback plot, someone notes in The Outsider, and one he’s happy to confirm as quasi-autobiographical.

A similar scenario went into hyperdrive in 1971’s Fingers, his first and still best directorial effort. Recently remade as the French film The Beat That My Heart Skipped, this electric genre-mauling had frequent collaborator Harvey Keitel bouncing off the walls of his inner Dr. Jekyll (concert pianist) and Mr. Hyde (psychotic mob enforcer). It remains crazy in a good way. Which could not be said of the international intrigues Love and Money (alas, there’s no footage of him wrangling on-set with Klaus Kinski) and Exposed. The latter featured unlikely corn-fed Midwesterner Nastassja Kinski’s encounters with terrorism, fashion modeling, and a Rudolf Nureyev struggling to convey blaze-hot heterosexuality in a uniquely constipated way. Like his friend Norman Mailer, Toback often regards women with a combination of Penthouse slobbering and Freudian horror; it’s too bad the documentary doesn’t ask any of his more recklessly messed-around actresses for their two cents.

It’s a mighty spotty oeuvre. His more commercial stabs (The Pick-Up Artist, Harvard Man) are just poor entertainment; a smart screenplay for Bugsy was undermined by the wrong star (Warren Beatty) and director (Barry Levinson). The Big Bang was a look-who-I-know cocktail party masquerading as philosophical inquiry. Highly “personal projects” Black and White and Two Girls and a Guy gave Robert Downey Jr. way too much rope while giving me cause to repeatedly bang my head against the wall. Many of these films are playing at the Roxie in conjunction with Jarecki’s portrait. Knock yourself out.

At times The Outsider is more revealing than flattering toward its subject — as when Downey calls the subject a “genius and retard.” If one might argue he doesn’t merit either extreme, it’s Toback’s oft-simultaneous hitting-and-missing that makes him so hard to dismiss. Or maybe it’s just the 100,000 micrograms of pure LSD-25 he says he never quite recovered from. That does explain a lot.

THE OUTSIDER

Fri/7 through April 13

Fri., 7 and 9 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 3, 7 and 9 p.m.; and Mon.–Thurs., 6:30, 8, and 9:30 p.m.

For information about the “James Toback Retrospective,” see Rep Clock.

Roxie Cinema

3117 16th St., SF

$4–$8

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

www.outsidermovie.com

28 years later

-
0

If you live in or truly love San Francisco, you’ve seen The Times of Harvey Milk. Rob Epstein’s 1984 movie is one of the best nonfiction features ever made. It’s also one of the greatest movies about this city. Only time will tell whether Stanley Nelson’s new documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, is a work of similar importance, but the fact that I’m even mentioning it in the same context as Epstein’s movie says something about the reserved precision of its journalistic reasoning and the overwhelming emotional force of its finale.

Of course, there is another reason to connect Jonestown and The Times of Harvey Milk. The murder of Supervisor Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White took place 10 days after the deaths of Jim Jones, Congressman Leo Ryan, and more than 900 members of Jones’s Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. One tragedy claimed the life of a man who was already a civil rights hero, while the other led mainstream media and true crime sources to portray a human being as a monster. Just as Epstein’s movie profoundly humanizes Milk, Nelson’s movie digs beneath stereotypes of pure evil to reveal a different Jones than the one used to sell quickie television and paperback biographies.

Twenty-eight years later, the tragedy in Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders still have an effect on San Francisco politics: In very different ways, they represent the death of progressive, district-based local activism and its afterlife. (Garrett Scott, codirector of the superb documentaries Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story and Occupation: Dreamland, was in the early stages of making a movie about the two events and their relationship to SF politics when he died earlier this year.) It seemed appropriate to have New York native Nelson discuss his movie with a contemporary political figure whose knowledge of local history runs deep. On the eve of Jonestown’s screenings at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, former San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez agreed to interview Nelson about the roads leading to the cataclysmic events of 1978 and the roads leading away from it.

MATT GONZALEZ I want to start by saying I had a typical impression of Jim Jones as a cult leader whose message was a hustle to get people into his church so he could take advantage of them when they were vulnerable. The thing that jumped out immediately to me in this film was that the fundamental part of his message throughout his ministry was this idea of racial integration and equality. The main component was there at the beginning, and in a place like Indiana, when Indianapolis was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. It made me rethink and see him as someone who exhibited a certain genuineness and courage at that time.

Did that surprise you about him?

STANLEY NELSON The depth of his commitment surprised me. During one of the anniversaries of the deaths in Guyana, I heard some Peoples Temple members talking about it on [the radio]. I started thinking, “This involved over 900 people — all these people weren’t crazy. So what was it that drove them to the church?”

Research made me realize that there was something much deeper going on and that this was a real political movement for a lot of the time the church was in existence.

MG Jones had been a member of a human rights commission out in Indiana. That also underscores a very self-conscious relationship between his church and what was happening in society.

SN Yes. [In the film] there’s that incredible audiotape when he’s giving his own history, where he talks about how his father didn’t want to let a black kid in his house. Jim Jones says, “I won’t come in either,” and he doesn’t see his father for years after that.

I don’t think it was a hustle at all, I think it was something he truly did believe in. Jim Jones was a very complicated individual. Everybody’s complicated — there are no simple people — but Jim Jones was much more complicated than most of us.

MG How hard was it to find folks in Indiana who knew Jones?

SN It was hard. But Lynn [Jones’s hometown] was very small, and we were able to find one person who could lead us to others. One thing that’s amazing when you do research is that you can go to high schools and grade schools, and they still have yearbooks. You find people’s names, use the phone book, and just start calling.

MG Over time, Peoples Temple gets a financial foundation because its members give their property to Jones. He’s then able to set up communal living arrangements. But when he’s in Indiana, if I’m to understand correctly, he’s selling monkeys door to door or something like that.

Was his message about communal living a part of the hustle, or do you think that was also a belief that he genuinely held?

SN I think he genuinely believed it. That component really came out of Ukiah, in Redwood Valley, where they [Peoples Temple] had this farm. People actually did travel with him from Indiana [in 1965], so how were they going to live when they’d sold their houses? They could live communally.

One thing that I found fascinating is that the older people who lived in these communal houses got better treatment than they ever could have gotten from the state or welfare or Social Security, because not only were they housed and fed, they were also loved. All of a sudden they had this family — the old people were revered in Peoples Temple.

MG Would you say those two components — racial integration and property held in common — were the cornerstone of his preaching?

SN I think they were a big part, but it was also more than just racial integration. There was a sense that “we have this power that none of us has as individuals.” This was a time when a lot of people were smoking dope and dropping out, but Peoples Temple members were active. They saw themselves as activists; they saw themselves changing the world with the church as a tool.

MG In 1971 Richard Hongisto was elected sheriff of San Francisco, and it was a very liberal campaign. [George] Moscone was elected mayor in ’75, and we know Peoples Temple played a part in that. Hongisto’s election was an early sign of growing liberal strength in San Francisco, enough so that you can look at the Moscone victory and not simply say, “Peoples Temple caused this to happen.” But there’s no question given how close the election was that they played a major role. How do you see their political impact then?

SN Peoples Temple was part of the mainstream politics of the Bay Area. I’m from New York. I had no idea that Jim Jones was head of the Housing Commission in San Francisco or that politicians came to Peoples Temple events and gave incredible speeches praising Jim Jones. That was something I discovered while making the film.

It’s part of the history of Peoples Temple, but it was also like a birthday cake–times-12 to the politicians. The politicians didn’t look too far behind this gift horse, because [Peoples Temple] was highly organized. People did what Jim Jones said. At one point they had 13 buses. They’d fill up the buses and —

MG — a politician could have an instant press conference.

SN Just one phone call and Jim Jones could come with buses. You’d have 500 people at your march.

MG Do you get a sense that what happened in Jonestown reverberates politically today? The players then aren’t necessarily in politics. Jackie Speier still is, but Moscone, Willie Brown, and others are not holding political office. Still, do you see any aftereffects?

SN I’m not sure on a local level, but one thing I think it did was help kill the idea of communes in this country [at a time] when there was a strong movement saying, “Let’s live together; let’s live on the land; let’s pool our resources.” All of a sudden that was associated with “look at what happened in Guyana.”

MG As I understand it, there are about five survivors who were there when the massacre took place.

SN There were about five people actually there [who survived], and of those, there are, to my knowledge, three left alive. Two of them are in the film.

MG People closely associated with Peoples Temple spoke to you and revealed some, I would think, very difficult, personal stories about sexual assault or the use of authority to express dominance. Was it difficult to get people to talk honestly?

SN It was surprisingly easy for us to get people to talk honestly. Time has passed. Partly because of a play [Berkeley Rep’s The People’s Temple] that was produced here in the Bay Area, I think people understood that maybe we were ready to hear a different version of the story that was much deeper.

MG In the film you see that Jones is abusing prescription drugs and probably has a mounting paranoia that’s associated with some mental condition. Is there a sense that he changed while he was in San Francisco, or was Peoples Temple headed toward this sort of cultlike finality from its inception?

SN We interviewed people who knew Jim Jones when he was a kid, and they talk about the fact that he was not normal even as a six- or seven-year-old boy. But I think that his behavior did get more extreme as time went on. He had this incredible power within the church, and he was this warped individual, and the combination affected his behavior. In the end, when they [Peoples Temple members] are isolated in the jungle, that’s [a reflection of] who he is.

MG Tell me about the wealth of material you have. There is film footage of a healing that is rather dramatic and recordings of his various sermons.

SN Going in, I had no idea that there was so much film footage. But we found a guy in LA who had shot in Peoples Temple over two days using three cameras and 16-millimeter film and had lit the whole church. His footage is just incredibly beautiful. The healing service, Jim Jones preaching, and the congregation singing and dancing are all part of that. He’d sold off bits and pieces to places like NBC, but we came along at a time when he felt that the film he wanted to make would never get made, so he agreed to sell us some footage.

We found members of Peoples Temple who had footage that had never been seen before. There are actually shots from the plane of them going down [to Guyana] — you can hear Jim Jones describing what he’s going to do — and shots of Jones cutting through the jungle with machetes.

Also, we were working very closely with the California Historical Society library, which has a Peoples Temple collection.

MG There was a recent book [Dear People: Remembering Jonestown] that compiled some of that material.

SN Also, Jim Jones recorded himself and his sermons at Peoples Temple. They actually audio-recorded the night of the suicides. As the people are dying, Jim Jones is encouraging them to drink the poison. There are audiotapes of the children and the women and men screaming and dying.

MG As a filmmaker going into a project like this, are you trying to present the truth? Are you trying to present an alternative reading of what happened? Are you trying to warn people?

SN I’m not trying to warn people or tell an alternative history, although obviously what we did turns out to be an alternative history. I was just trying to tell this incredible story and tell it with as much honesty as I can. Everybody in the film had a part to play in Peoples Temple. We really wanted it to be a film told in the voices of the people who lived through it.

MG In my notes I have a reference to the various CIA-related theories [about what happened in Guyana]. You don’t pick that up in the film, and I wonder if you might say something about that.

SN There are different theories that Jim Jones was a CIA agent and this was all a scary mind-control experiment. You know, we found nothing to back that up, and it just didn’t make sense for us to go down that road.

MG As I understand it, a lot of these theories stem from [the fact] that the government withheld documents related to Jonestown. I guess Congressman [Leo] Ryan had a bill pending, the Hughes-Ryan amendment, that would have required that CIA covert operations be disclosed to Congress before those operations could be engaged in. You didn’t find anything related to that?

SN No, we didn’t find any hard evidence. I’m trying to operate as a filmmaker and also as a journalist.

MG So you had access to material —

SN — and we just didn’t find it [evidence].

MG I’d be interested in seeing what the original accounts were like in the local press in San Francisco during the time of Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders. There was probably a sense of how Moscone’s opponents might use his ties to the Peoples Temple for political purposes.

SN One reason for the article in [the magazine] New West that first exposed Jim Jones and called for an investigation of Peoples Temple was to discredit Moscone. Part of the media follow-up was that “here is someone that Moscone supported.” So that was already happening around a year before the deaths in Guyana.

MG There are folks who find objectionable the idea of referring to the deaths as mass suicides. Did you reach a conclusion about that?

SN The film has no narration, so we didn’t refer to that other than in a title card at the end that I think calls it the largest mass murder-suicide in history. It’s impossible to say exactly what went on that day, but it is very clear that the kids — something like 250 people who were under 18 — were all murdered.

It was something we struggled with: “What do we call it: suicide or murder?” I think by the end of the film you feel that it’s kind of both at the same time.

MG If Jim Jones had died in Guyana prior to Ryan’s visit, is your sense in talking to the survivors or those associated with the church that this is a project that would have sustained itself?

SN I just don’t know.

MG You don’t want to engage in a bit of speculative history?

SN I think they had a real problem in sustaining themselves. They were growing food, but they were bringing in food too. Financially there was a burden.

One fascinating thing about that day is that there weren’t a lot of people who left with Congressman Ryan — less than 20 people. It was more Jim Jones’s insanity, him thinking that 20 people leaving is devastating [that led to the massacre].

MG Other than the sermons, are there other records of his thoughts? Are there tracts and manifestos?

SN There are some things that he wrote. He didn’t write a definitive book of his philosophies, but there is a piece in which he picks apart fallacies in the Bible.

MG On the one hand, Jones could be critical of the contradictions in the Bible, and on the other, he could pick out the parts that were useful to him.

SN One thing that everybody said was that Jim Jones knew the Bible — he wasn’t just talking off of the top of his head. He was incredibly smart, prepared, and cunning.

MG What did you learn from making the film?

SN It’s a film I’m glad to be finished with. All films are hard to make, but it really took a lot out of me. We’ve only had two screenings, and both times afterward there was a kind of shocked silence. One was for the members of Peoples Temple and their friends to let them be the first to see it.

MG How it was received?

SN The Peoples Temple members loved the film. We screened the film in a small theater, and we had a reception outside. The Peoples Temple members who were there with their families just stayed in the theater for about 15 minutes talking among themselves. It made me a little nervous [laughs]. But when they came out they all said they loved the film and felt it was a powerful way of telling their story — a story that hadn’t been told that way at all.

JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE

April 29, 6:15 p.m.; April 30, 7 p.m.; May 1, 7 p.m.; May 2, 4:30 p.m.

Part of the San Francisco International Film Festival

Various venues

Call (925) 866-9559 for tickets and (415) 561-5000 for more information.

www.sffs.org

Un certain regard

-
0

Like Bresson and Renoir did before them, the Dardenne brothers tend to inspire reviews using vaguely Christian words like transcendence from critics trying to describe the way a transparent film style can result in such fully formed, singular movies. At least one such reviewer has already referred to their newest masterpiece, L’Enfant, as a miracle, but, alas, it is not so. Like the Dardennes’ previous pinnacles — La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son — L’Enfant handles weighty themes like guilt and redemption with awesome grace. But to liken the film to an act of God surely takes something from the technical precision and artistic concentration that so informs cinema Dardenne.

While their breakthrough may have come on the stage at Cannes, Luc and his brother Jean-Pierre cut their teeth on a decade of vérité-style documentary work before making their first fiction film, 1987’s Falsch. Much has been made of the way the fly-on-the-wall documentary technique has informed the Dardennes’ fiction work, and, indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone exploring the tension between realism and reality as fruitfully. L’Enfant‘s camera isn’t as doggedly shaky as in the earlier films, but the general long-take style is still present: Conversations and characterizations are mediated by constant reframing instead of by cuts. The Dardennes’ ability to narrate with single takes, conveying information and drama via performance, framing, and an impeccable, Bressonian use of sound, means the brothers belong in any discussion of cinema’s long-take masters (a table that many, including Gus Van Sant and Richard Linklater, wish to eat at). Had he been alive to see L’Enfant, celebrated French critic and letting-the-camera-run aficionado André Bazin would surely have turned in a sparkling review.

Described as a sketch, L’Enfant‘s story is the stuff of melodrama. A penniless teenage mother (Déborah Francois) wanders with her baby in search of the father. Played by a ravaged Jérémie Renier (La Promesse), père Bruno is a decidedly small-time crook. Always looking for a score, he sells the newborn to back-alley adoption agents when mother Sonia isn’t around. As with all Dardenne stories, though, there is redemption: The baby is recovered, and Bruno ends up assuming responsibility for an unrelated theft to spare an underage accomplice.

If this sounds like a nail-biting character study, though, the story plays more mutedly than one might expect. Like much art cinema, the Dardennes use an oblique film style to distance us from characters and de-emphasize narrative spectacle. For the brothers, this strategy isn’t used for the sake of vague artiness but rather to convey their filmed stories as moral parables. One of the key sequences of L’Enfant is the one in which Bruno sells his baby. There is a sort of tension that builds as he rides the bus toward a rendezvous point in a single long take, but it’s of an infinitely quieter and more reflective sort than the kind produced by a comparable scene in Oscar-winner Tsotsi. A couple of cuts and a few rings of Bruno’s cell phone later, our protagonist is waiting in a barren apartment while the baby’s “adopter” operates next door — a climax narrated entirely by offscreen sound. The scene conveys an outrageous misdeed, but any judgment or repulsion has been sucked out by the Dardennes’ removed perspective; as such, Bruno’s betrayal seems less a crime against humanity than an action, an inevitable result of his role as the thief.

In the end, the Dardennes aren’t concerned with why their characters do what they do (the thing that occupies the vast majority of narrative filmmakers) but rather are taken with charting the moral implications and consequences of their characters’ actions. Someday a wise DVD distributor is going to package the Dardennes’ fiction films as a set, and the result will rival Kafka’s collected short stories in its parabolic riches. L’Enfant‘s protagonist thief may spend much of the film running to stand still, but the Dardenne brothers are nothing if not directed — toward greatness, that is.

L’ENFANT

Opens Fri/7 in Bay Area theaters.

For showtimes go to www.sfbg.com.

www.sonyclassics.com/thechild

Doomsday dream believer

-
0

“We didn’t commit suicide,” Jim Jones gravely intones in an audiotape capturing the final moments of Jonestown. “We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

Nearly 30 years after the deaths of more than 900 people in the Guyanese jungle, Stanley Nelson’s deeply affecting Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple replays Jones’s final, twisted address, setting in motion what the doc tabs “the largest mass ‘suicide’ in modern history.” Using a remarkable cache of vintage footage, as well as candid interviews with Peoples Temple survivors, relatives, and other eyewitnesses, Nelson examines the massacre with a journalist’s eye. Why the tragedy happened may never be explained, but seldom before has the how of Jonestown been so clearly delineated.

Long before “drinking the Kool-Aid” filtered into the popular lexicon, young Jim Jones was an ambitious preacher whose ideas about racial equality proved too radical for small-town Indiana. Jones and his wife, Marceline, adopted several children from different ethnic backgrounds; one the few still alive — Jim Jones Jr., who says he was the first African American child to be adopted by white parents in Indiana — appears in Jonestown, as do early church members who followed Jones to Northern California (so chosen because he believed the region would be safe in the event of a nuclear attack). The racially diverse commune was “like a paradise,” a former resident recalls; recordings of Jones’s uplifting sermons and the jubilant Peoples Temple choir, as well as images of happy farmers, seem to bear this out.

Of course, illusion played a big part in Jones’s metier. One of Nelson’s coups is footage of a faith healing paired with an interview that exposes the “patient” as one of Jones’s (perfectly healthy) secretaries. Various ex-followers corroborate each other’s horror stories; one memorable sequence features overlapping testimony about how devotion was measured by sleep deprivation. Jones’s sexual proclivities, which contradicted what he preached and involved sleeping with both male and female disciples (whether or not they were willing), are discussed, as is the general feeling of fear and paranoia that increased as Jones gained more control. A “loyalty test” involving a vat of untainted punch is also detailed; a woman who was there surmises that Jones wondered if he was “potent enough to get people to do it.”

Jones’s ability to manipulate his followers demonstrates the kind of power later echoed by other self-destructive cults. But while Heaven’s Gate seemed a little loony from the start, what with the space aliens and all, the Peoples Temple represented itself beautifully to outsiders. The San Francisco political community was especially taken with the energetic, racially diverse congregation; as Jonestown points out, the church could instantly supply masses of well-behaved protestors, as well as influence key elections by voting as a single bloc. On a television talk show, then–California assemblyman Willie Brown deems the Peoples Temple “the kind of religious thing I get excited about.”

Even the Guardian was taken in by the Peoples Temple, reporting on its progressive humanitarian efforts in a March 31, 1977, article titled “Peoples Temple: Where Activist Politics Meets Old-Fashioned Charity.” Read with the benefit of hindsight, the piece is often chilling, as when Jones arrives late to a church service because he had to stop and console a woman “who was talking suicide.” Jones’s distrust of government is already in full force (“I have a lot of guilt to know my taxes go to the shah of Iran and Chile”); his hatred of the press (as the film explains, inflammatory coverage hastened his expatriation) less so.

A good chunk of Jonestown is devoted to November 18, 1978, aided with startling footage of doomed congressman Leo Ryan’s Guyana visit and the chaos that erupted in its wake. Two of the men who lived through “White Night” but saw family members (including young children) die before their eyes share their stories, and the emotional impact is undeniable. And then there’s that audiotape, which is even more frightening when replayed. As Jonestown reveals, the line between suicide and murder could not be more distorted: Deceived by promises of paradise, hundreds of people joined a church that championed equal rights — then found themselves living in an isolated world where even the most basic rights were denied.

 

Intelligence

-
0

CHEAP EATS “Did you hear about the barn swallows in Minnesota?” Earl Butter said, while we were waiting for our waffles.

“This reminds me,” I replied. “This idea that there are more alive people now than dead ones — where did you get it?”

“Late Night,” he said.

“David Letterman?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah.”

“Actually,” he said, “I heard it somewhere else too. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “Fact-checking.” I checked myself. “After-the-fact fact-checking.”

“Well, about the barn swallows — ”

“What are your sources?” I said, before-the-fact fact-checking, for a change.

“Public television.”

“What show?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some nature show.”

Our waffles came. On paper plates with plastic forks and knives. They came with two eggs apiece, over-easied into neat little triangles, and meat. Sausage for me of course, and Spam for Earl. You can also get bacon, or some kind of veggie patty ($4.75).

There was butter already melting into the waffles, and, to my amazement and delight, and surprise, given the paper and plastic and overall fluorescent lighting of the little joint, the butter looked like butter. “Can I get more butter?” I asked the guy. Partly this was a fact-checking maneuver, and partly I wanted more butter. I knew I did, without tasting, because I always want more butter.

He smiled and went to get it for me. Sweet guy. Great place. New favorite restaurant. I already knew that, but maybe you want hard evidence.

“About the barn swallows,” Earl Butter said, halfway done eating, and I hadn’t even started.

On the radio: Forum, with Michael Krasny and a panel of tweedy-sounding indie rock “experts” boring the world to death with Noise Pop blah, blah, blah, making it, blah, blah, sincerity, blah, passion. Get off the radio and dance, dudes.

Guy comes back with a little paper bowl full of real butter, and I could of kissed him, speaking of rock ’n’ roll. This was all I needed to know, and knowing it, little plastic knife in hand, I buttered and buttered my golden, crispy waffle, which was starting to get cold. Which is perfect because then the butter really sets there. Speaking of cold, hard facts. It doesn’t disappear into the waffle. It globulates. Waits, looks back at you, existingly. Then, finally, melts into your tongue. Hot damn!

“Can I try a piece of your Spam?” I said.

He gave me a whole slice. It was pretty good, a lot better than I expected. Would you believe I’d never eaten Spam before? Well, I have now eaten Spam. It’s pretty good.

The sausage was chicken apple sausage and this is my only bone to pick with the place. What’s up with the fancy-pants sausage? The name of the joint is the Little Piglet Café, you got pork this and pig that all over the menu, little piggy visual touches all over the walls and all around the paper-hearts-in-the-shape-of-a-heart in the window in the door . . .

The big sign outside over the window, which drew me to the place in the first place, Ninth Street between Bryant and Harrison: Waffles, Soups, Boxed Lunches, Daily Specials, Hot & Cold, Little Piglet Café, real cute picture of a pig. I don’t get it. What’s up with the chicken sausage?

“Barn swallows,” said Earl Butter.

It’s still my new favorite restaurant. I mean, waffles, eggs, and meat for under five bucks, and with real butter, are you kidding me? Plus the coffee is coffeehouse quality, and there are enough other good-looking things on the menu to keep me coming back for weeks and weeks without even repeating myself: Cajun meatloaf sandwich, barbecued pork with “pig sambal” (whatever that might mean), roasted peppers and avocado salad with pineapple vinaigrette.

Is this a Hawaiian theme I’m picking up on?

“Home Depot,” said Earl Butter.

“Huh?”

There’s a Spam can dispensing candy canes, and a picture of Jessica Simpson setting on a can of tuna fish.

“They figured out how to open the automatic doors and get inside,” he said.

“Who did?”

Little Piglet Café

Mon.–Fri., 8 a.m.–4 p.m.

451 Ninth St., SF

(415) 626-5618

No alcohol

Takeout available

MasterCard, Visa

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Cuvee organica

-
0

Organic wine is on the rise, and the French, no dopes as regards marketing, are on the case. A recent tasting of organic and biodynamic wines by the importer Louis/Dressner (at K and L Wine Merchants) included offerings from some small producers from the south and northeast of France and the Loire Valley and served as a reminder that (1) French winemakers do right by chenin blanc in a way that American winemakers, to my knowledge, cannot yet even crudely approximate, and (2) if you are going to buy French organic wine, you might be better off with a white than a red.

We did not taste all the reds, but the two we sampled, a 2004 Coteaux-du-Loir rouge-gorge from Domaine de Bellivière and a 2004 Côtes du Rhône from ?

Hotel California

-
0

The father of all masked superheroes, Zorro first appeared in California in 1919, in serial form, brought to life by pulp writer Johnston McCulley. Soon afterward, the suave, playful Zorro (the secret identity of the decidedly unglamorous Don Diego Vega) became an enduring international phenomenon, thanks to screen legend Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and continues to evolve in a slew of films, TV shows, and comic books — up to and including a new Isabel Allende novel and a forthcoming musical scored by the Gipsy Kings.

A new wave of anti-immigrant demonizing and criminalization under way nationwide makes all the more obvious the urgency behind the breezy but pointed comedy Zorro in Hell, Culture Clash’s beautifully staged romp in black leather, mask, and cape, in a coproduction with La Jolla Playhouse and Berkeley Rep and deftly helmed by the Rep’s artistic director, Tony Taccone. If it took the LA-based, Mission District–bred Latino political-comedy troupe (composed of Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Sigüenza) 22 years of writing and performing to finally tackle the mythical Hispanic crime fighter, their timing couldn’t have been better.

But is Zorro to be considered an authentic pop-cultural or folk hero despite his conflicted origins in mass entertainment, ethnic stereotype, and pseudohistory? The trio’s own initial ambivalence serves as an engine for Zorro in Hell‘s critical but redemptive excavation of the myth at a time when resurrected rebel heroes, as spurs to mass action, seem to be the order of the day (very Z for Vendetta, in other words, and little wonder the Wachowski Brothers’ film is one of myriad cultural reference points bandied around to nice effect here).

The story centers on a frustrated LA writer and nominal Latino (Montoya) who’d prefer to be penning sitcoms but, meanwhile, has an “other voices” grant to write a play about the Zorro legend. He arrives at the El Camino Real Inn less than enthusiastic about a subject he considers culturally specious and politically irrelevant and meets a couple of larger-than-life characters who take it upon themselves to set him straight: the 200-year-old proprietress (a feisty, very funny Sharon Lockwood) and her ancient bellhop, Don Ringo (Sigüenza), proudly self-described as “the first Chicano.” Together, their careers seem to touch (literally in the case of Doña’s countless love affairs) upon most of California’s cultural history.

Cracking open the Zorro legend (given stage form by a versatile and amusing Joseph Kamal) sets in play a whole history and rebel tradition peopled by names like Ambrose Bierce, William Saroyan, Jack London, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Sacco and Vanzetti, Marx, Nietzsche, and, of course, the Scarlet Pimpernel (likely inspiration for McCulley’s masked avenger). Other references are more off the wall, or off the flag, as in the case of a talking grizzly named Kyle (Salinas), an erudite bear offering the slightly spooked, drug-addled writer some talking-cure in a charmingly professional bedside manner. Then there’s legendary outlaw Joaquin Murieta (Salinas again), the incarnation of crafty but principled revenge: “I taught myself to walk, talk, drink like them. But I never murdered like them.” The writer’s own transformation includes entering an old Zorro movie in the part of the archetypal “sleepy Mexican,” who, in this radical reappropriation of cultural capital, we’re told, is more like a sleeping giant beneath the wide brim of his tilted sombrero.

Doña has an ulterior motive behind all this consciousness-raising: She needs help fending off the imminent threat brought by land-snatching developers in league with the evil Gobernador, who naturally arrives by Humvee. (As the Latinos who voted against their own interests by helping to elect an action movie icon demonstrate, the superhero sword can cut both ways.)

Charming, sharp, and frequently wacky, the cutting jokes, quips, and allusions in Zorro come at a remarkable clip (a breathless 20 rpms, or references per minute, at least). All of it unfurls amid Christopher Acebo’s colorful, kinetic, and multifaceted scenic design; some zesty swordplay choreographed by fight director Dave Maier; and appropriately dramatic on- and offstage musical accompaniment by guitarist Vincent Christopher Montoya as the swashbuckling movies of yesterday spill onto the stage, and the stage antics of Culture Clash and company, in turn, transform into cleverly refashioned celluloid dreams projected onto a massive movie screen.

And so, with rapier wit, Culture Clash leaves its own mark on the Zorro legend, proving the pun to be mightier than the sword and the myth capable of new, subversive energies in a reactionary age. It might be that its sprawling, garrulous nature fails, in the end, to lay the best ground for the play’s final call to arms (at least the culminating “rise up!” segment feels a bit forced and tends to drag on), but no matter: Hundreds of thousands of Latinos and others are already in the streets of LA and other cities across the country. Zorro may or may not be a myth with real political traction, but either way, justice, as Zorro would be the first to tell you, is a do-it-yourself job.

CULTURE CLASH’S ZORRO IN HELL

Through April 16

Tues., Thurs.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Wed., 7 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m.

Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theater

2015 Addison, Berk.

$10–$59

(510) 647-2949 or (888) 427-8849

www.cultureclash.com

www.berkeleyrep.org

Danger! Danger!

-
0

Dear Andrea:

Being in my second trimester, I’ve read volumes about the so-called danger of air embolisms caused by blowing air into the vagina during oral sex. Now, I can’t imagine I’m part of an elite few who have had the somewhat embarrassing, occasional “vaginal farts” during or after sex. What do you suppose is the risk of the infamous air embolism occurring from simply getting air forced into the vagina from your basic act of intercourse?

Love,
Airy Mary

Dear Mary:

I’ve actually looked into this subject some while in the process of putting together a talk on all the horrible things that can happen to you while having what you thought would be nice, normal, even salubrious sex. You can break your penis — or someone else’s penis! You can burst a previously unsuspected ovarian cyst! You can — well, never mind. You can do all sorts of horrible things to yourself or someone you are quite fond of, but chances are, you won’t.

A few years after essentially pooh-poohing the embolism issue (“Don’t sit on an air compressor,” I believe I wrote), I had the opportunity to interview and then work with Dr. Charles Moser, the unchallenged expert on how to avoid killing yourself or others in the pursuit of sexual gratification, and he succeeded in convincing me that air embolisms really are a potential danger, even (occasionally) in nonpregnant women. But not even the good doctor suggested that intercourse was likely to cause one, except in certain very specific circumstances that we will get to shortly. A quick review of the literature turns up many articles on air embolisms due to (poorly executed, one assumes) oral sex, although the cases themselves are pretty scarce and often not fatal. You get to go to the hyperbaric chamber, like Michael Jackson!

Since “vaginal farts” are caused by air pumped into the vagina during intercourse, not, heaven forfend, into the uterus, there is likely no correlation whatsoever between your propensity for producing them and any possible danger to you or your fetus. The air has to get into your bloodstream, and the most likely route for that would be through the (open) cervix into a (possibly damaged) uterus. You will, of course, have had a thorough exam, including an ultrasound, to clear you for any cervical or placental abnormalities, before taking my word on anything like this. If you haven’t, we are not having this conversation.

Now, those few fatalities. They were mostly due to intercourse too soon after delivery, a thought that makes me cringe anyway, although I have spoken to women who felt ready to go as soon as the doctor cleared them for takeoff. Doctor and cleared would be the operant words there.

Love,
Andrea

Dear Andrea:

My girlfriend and I always have sex with a condom, and only when she is on birth control, to play it extra-safe. Recently, however, she’s been noticing the antiabortion displays that show up on our college campus sometimes. She now refuses to have sex, because she is so freaked out about becoming pregnant and needing to have an abortion, and she talks about seriously never having sex again because of it. I obviously want to talk to her about this and reassure her, but everything I say, no matter how understanding, makes her think I’m just trying to persuade her into giving me sex. How should I help her calm down about this situation?

Love,
Out in the cold

Dear Cold:

You realize your girlfriend’s reaction is way out of the norm, right? That is to say (not that I recommend putting it this way when you do have that conversation), she’s gone a little off-plumb, at least where her risk assessment abilities or lack thereof come into play. Or was she always a little nutty on this topic, as evidenced by the doubling-up of pill plus condoms, which is borderline nutso overkill for birth control purposes (although perfectly rational for disease prophylaxis)?

Look, I have walked through those antiabortion displays. Quite recently I arrived at the restaurant where I was meeting my husband a little pale and shaky from having to walk through two rows of giant, dismembered-fetus posters. They were stationed outside of what I believe was an obstetrician’s convention, and I confess I could neither eat nor engage in small talk until the ghastly images, mixed with my anger at the fact that these assaultive theatrics were aimed at doctors who provide essential health care to women, had faded. But, dude, I got my groove back. There is something going on with your girlfriend that cannot easily be laid at the feet of the antichoice brigade, not that it wouldn’t give me great pleasure to heap blame upon them.

Suggest that your girlfriend go see a nurse practitioner or someone who can calmly walk her through the actual risks (essentially nonexistent) of condom-wrapped, hormonally blocked intercourse. If that plus taking a different route across campus when the crazies are afoot don’t work, well, I hope you like blow jobs. I hear they’re quite popular.

Love,
Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her former life, she was a prop designer. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

1...488489490...493Page 489 of 493

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