The California Supreme Court has legalized same sex marriage in California, ruling this morning on the case that stemmed from San Francisco’s move in 2004 to unilaterally allow gay and lesbian couples to get hitched. This is a big day for Mayor Gavin Newsom (who decided the city should go ahead and issue marriage licenses to everyone, which was by far the boldest and best thing he’s done from Room 200), City Attorney Dennis Herrera (who won the legal fight, making California just the second state to extend marriage rights to all Californians), and all residents of San Francisco and California.
The press conferences at City Hall kick off at noon and it’s likely to be quite a celebration down there (mixed in with some apoplectic opponents of gay rights, I’m sure), so ride your bicycle on down and help mark a historic day for San Francisco.
SFBG Blogs
Same sex marriage legalized in California
Big gay thanks, California Supreme Court
As a ginormous, idealistic faggotta, I of course can’t help tearing up at the news that the California Supreme Court overturned the ban on same-sex marriage. As someone who’s been with the love of their life for more than three years now, though, I’m suddenly terrified. How the hell am I gonna pull off a fuschia wedding dress in this heat? Thank goddess for Secret antiperspirant, ladies.
Of course, there’s still a big fight ahead — in California, with a heinous, probable November ballot initiative that wants to amend the constitution against love, and the inevitable “why can’t I marry this tree?” panicky bullshit from the right. (Well, why can’t you, treehugger?). And this is, alas, just a mere blip in changing this weird country’s attitude as a whole. But, despite my queer anarchist misgivings about legalized emotional contracts and human property, I’m ecstatic for all the brave lovers who went full in to win this one. Hey, I’m a sucker for romance.
SFBG will have more coverage coming this afternoon.
PS — yes, Florida: Rainbows ARE sexually suggestive.
Joey Ramone Day birth bash deets
Good to know Joey Ramone Day marches on – just as it was fun to hear, at last night’s Eric Lyle reading/event at CounterPULSE for his new book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, the Guardian contributor talk about his own personal observance of Joey Ramone Day – playing Ramones songs on a boombox through the streets, meditating on the frontman.
Well, it happens on every coast. This just in – the details for this year’s Joey Ramone Birthday Bash on May 19 in NYC:
“Celebrating what would have been the 57th birthday of punk-icon Joey Ramone, the annual Joey Ramone Birthday Bash will take place Monday, May 19, at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza. Mickey Leigh, event organizer and brother of Joey Ramone, has announced that, as part of the eighth annual Bash, fans will be treated to a special reunion appearance from Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom featuring Handsome Dick Manitoba, Andy Shernoff, Ross the Boss, and JP Thunderbolt.
Big fat gay wedding announcement
The California Supreme Court has announced that it will issue its long-awaited same sex marriage ruling tomorrow morning at 10 a.m., deciding whether the current ban is unconstitutional. City Attorney Dennis Herrera, whose office has been fighting for the right of LGBT couples to get hitched and whose website has extensive links to documents on the case, will host a press conference at noon to react to the ruling.
So far, nobody knows what to expect except the fact that whatever the ruling, it will be big, big, big news for San Francisco and the rest of the state. Stay tuned.
Ammiano: Parking meters for the homeless
Today’s Ammianoliner:
Mayor Newsom announces new homeless program. Parking meters for the homeless. Tow not cash.
(From the home telephone answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Wednesday, May 14, 2008.) B3
San Francisco tops list of best cities for the outdoors
During this wonderful heat wave, on the day before the increasingly popular Bike to Work Day, it hardly seems surprising that Forbes Magazine has named San Francisco as the best city in the country for the outdoors.
The top three cities (us, San Diego, San Jose) are all in California, so apparently our state’s picture perfect weather was a big plus in their rating system. But San Francisco was also singled out for our good air quality, abundant recreational opportunities, and the facts that almost 20 percent of city land is devoted to parks, which we spend $252 per citizen to promote and maintain.
Yay us!
Sub Pop pops the cork on two decades with NW fest
‘Member when you first heard Nirvana’s Bleach (1989)? ‘Member when you first spun 1986’s Sub Pop 100? Yeah, it was the ’80s, and college-alternative-indie-whatever-rock was a piping hot, tumescent, rich vein, ready to bedazzle. Still, the lil’ label from the Northwest, Sub Pop, stood out from the slew of worthies with its prescient picks from a roused, riled, and increasingly loud underground, a wise-acre attitude, and a forward-facing outlook on the state of the rock.
So gather round as the Seattle imprint celebrates its 20th anniversary – yeesh, it’s been that long – with a fine comp, Happy Birthday to Me: Terminal Sales Vol. 3 (including tunes by Mudhoney, Foals, Wolf Parade, No Age, Kelley Stoltz, Flight of the Conchords, and the Helio Sequence); a series of reissues begining with Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff: Deluxe Edition (coming May 20); a limited relaunch of the lauded Sub Pop Singles Club; a July 11 comedy show with Eugene Mirman and Patton Oswalt; and a benefit fest, which runs July 12-13 at Marymoor Park outside Seattle in Redmond, Wash.
The Bay will be represented by Comets on Fire on a bill that includes Flight of the Conchords, Foals, Iron and Wine, Low, Pissed Jeans, Wolf Parade, and Ruby Suns. And those who remember the ’80s (and early ’90s) will be psyched to hear that such reunited grunge-meisters and rock hurlers as the Fluid, Green River, Beachwood Sparks, and Red Red Meat will also put in a few appearances. Yes, there will be a half-pipe.
For a $35 single-day or $60 two-day pass to the fest or a $20 ticket to the comedy calvacade, call (206) 628-0888 or go to the Ticketmaster site.
Yo, bangerz: Rave it tecktonik
In this week’s Super Ego clubs column, I finally take on the banger scene’s hardcore electro glitz riot on the city’s dance floors. The sound and style originated in France, mostly, and is helping to resuscitate the much-maligned term “euro” — commonly associated with over-caffeinated, hyper-sugary tunes that fitted really awful embroidered jeans and Gucci knockoff sunglasses on a couple generations of appletini swillers. I’m much more into the new euro, needless to say, and in Paris at least, bangers are associated with a dance craze, tecktonik (also spelled tektonik). Here’s what it looks like, to the wonderfully banged-up tune of fabulous French rapstress-chanteuse Yelle‘s “A Cause de Garcons.” (Her show here at the Independent last month was off the hook, btw, and she featured a sequined pink Stephen Sprouse-like dress reading “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Fierceness!)
Goofy, but sweetly energetic. The dance in fact originally started in the early-mid 2000s, in Parisian megaclub Metropolis, where it was performed to a much harder sound, a direct descendant of rave music: much more trancey and happy hardcore. (It’s said the term “tecktonik” actually refers to the clash of hardcore dance styles coming in from Belgium and the Netherlands then, crashing into each other like techtonic plates.) The two somewhat over-it-looking white dancers in the Yelle video above are famous lookalike tektoniquistes VaVan and TreAxy — household names in France. Here’s a video of them performing an early version of the dance, called “jumpstyle” (some still prefer to call it that, others use the name to refer to the music) and done to a “more traditional” musical style — you can really see the liquid rave-dance origins here, and yeah, it looks more than a tad ridiculous, but why not? There’s a reason for the term “jumpstyle.” Also happening at the time — around 2005ish, as with all underground phenomena the timing is fuzzy — and in the same clubs, but to more amped-up happy hardcore, was a revival of the Melbourne Shuffle, an old rave dance from the early ’90s that really only looks good when you do it in extraordinarily baggy pants. The “shufflers” often squared off with, or at least disassociated themselves from, the tight-pantsed “jumpers.” (In my head, they’re like the Jets and the Sharks.) Also, despite its name, “jumping” is much more about the upper body and random skips, whereas “shuffling” is all about lower glide. Here’s the Melbourne Shuffle: So, OK, what does any of this have to do with Justice, and the Ed Banger Records scene and sound?
Heavenly oboro: SFBG goes to Eiji
Really yummy …
Here comes the public power initiative!
By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down to see the historic Mirkarimi/Peskin/City Attorney resolution)
Today, at the Board of Supervisors meeting, Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin introduced
a Charter Amendment mandating that the city’s Public Utilities Commission create a plan to establish a retail power agency in San Francisco and start the process of kicking PG&E out of City Hall and the rest of the city.
The amendment, as our editorial in Wednesday’s Guardian outlines, would “provide the badly needed kick start to get city officials to act on San Francisco’s historic mandate for a municipal electricity system.”
The move is prompted by the battle over whether the city should replace the ruinous Mirant private power plant with city-owned power plants called peakers at the foot of Potrero Hill. PG&E has quietly orchestrated a major political and public relations onslaught to kill the peakers because they would be what PG&E fears most: city-owned public power.
In fact, as Tim Redmond’s blog discloses, PG&E even marched seven lobbyists (yes, seven) into the office of would-be-green Mayor Gavin Newsom, who once personally backed the plan and whose Public Utilities Commission backs the plan. PG&E jacked Newsom around and muscled him into asking for a delay in today’s scheduled power plant vote to give PG&E more time to kill the peakers.
The rationale: some sort of vague and ridiculous idea of retrofitting the Mirant plant and keeping the PG&E uber alles status quo.
IF PG&E ultimately loses the peaker vote (and it will be close), PG&E will most likely run a referendum on the November ballot against this dread move to peaker public power. So the Mirkarimi and Peskin move is aimed at putting a counter initiative on the November ballot and breathing new life into the historic battle to enforce the federal Raker Act (which mandated San Francisco have a public power system) and bringing our own cheap Hetch Hetchy public power to the people of San Francisco. (See Guardian stories and editorials since l969.) The initiative would be timed to take advantage of the expected heavy turnout of Obama forces for the presidential election and for the election of supervisors.
The legislative digest sums up the amendment in a paragraph of City Hall legalese:
The amendment is to “address the need to change electricity production, delivery, and use to ensure environmentally sustainable and affordable electric supplies for residents, businesses, and city departments and to require the Public Utiliies Commmission to comprehensively study and determine the most effective means of providing clean, sustainable, reliable, and reasonably-priced electric service to San Francisco residents, businesses, and city departments.”
The amendment was written and signed by Deputy City Attorney Theresa Mueller and approved as to form by City Attorney Dennis Herrera. It was introduced by the president of the board (Peskin) and a powerful supervisor who is obviously running for board president and mayor (Mirkarimi). These references are important: when the public power movement was reinvigorated in the late l990s, it faced a massive lineup of PG&E stalwarts inside City Hall: City Attorney Louise Rennie, Mayor Willie Brown, the PUC executive director and PUC commission, and all the supervisors with the notable exception of Sup. Tom Ammiano.
Mikarimi led the two famous initiative campaigns as campaign manager in 2000 and 2001, which PG&E defeated with muscle, mutli milliions, and staunch daily paper support. Now, Mirkarimi is inside City Hall in a starring role leading the charge for community choice aggregation (CCA) and now a public power initiative. And the whole thing scares the hell out of PG&E.as never before.
.
Hurray! The battle is on!
P.S. PG&E marches in: You can see how PG&E works by seeing who was at the critical May 5 meeting in the mayor’s office. No public power people, nobody from the Sierra Club, and no environmental justice activists who are also opposing the peakers (but for understandable environmental reasons.) But standing tall at the secret meeting were seven PG&E lobbyists, led by Travis Kiyota, and such PG&E friendly folks as PUC Commissioner Dick Sklar (remember him?), Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, and a representative from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
PG&E and NRDC arranged to have a timely letter on NRDC letterhead, dated May 12 , come to the supervisors from Robert Kennedy Jr., with ccs to Newsom, President Michael Peevey of the California Public Utilities Commission, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The letter was of course released to the press and the public on the eve of the vote. PG&E, NRDC, and Kennedy had at least one line right: “Where San Francisco ultimately decides to invest its precious energy dollars is a choice that will send a message to cities around the country.”
The tipoff: nowhere do the PG&E supporters, including the Chronicle editorialists who suddenly took a down-with-the-peakers stand yesterday, nor the Examiner, with a wimpy story today on Newsom’s sudden change of plans, mention those dread three letters that divulge the secret agent at work (PG&E) nor that dread phrase that tells what the secret agent is really up to (killing public power.) C’mon, folks, this isn’t that hard to figure out. Is there some law somewhere that says the local media can’t cover what PG&E is doing to perpetuate the PG&E/Raker Act scandal and once again kill public power? (See “The Shame of Hearst” in previous Guardian and blog items.)
On guard. The pubic power forces are once again moving up to the front lines, muskets at the ready. B3 (who sees the fumes from the Mirant plant every minute of every day from my Potrero Hill office window)
Click here to read Mirkarimi and Peskin’s recent Charter Amendment.
Click here to read Redmond’s recent blog, PG&E offers Newsom a blank check
Click here for this week’s PG&E editorial.
Blasting Lennar’s land grab
By Maria Dinzeo
While we’ve already dubbed Lennar Corporation “the corporation that ate San Francisco,” representatives from five Bay Area environmental organizations today held a press conference to blast the corporation for creating Prop. G to gobble up the rest of Bayview Hunter’s Point and Candlestick Point.
Esselene Stancil, a resident of Bayview since the 1950’s, says this is nothing new. Change is often promised, but it always falls short. “I have seen many changes in the Bayview, and this change is not for us. We have plenty of parks. What we need is to take care of the one’s we have. They promise us houses, but there are no houses being built out there that people will be able to afford.”
There will, however, be plenty of luxury condominiums, chiefly in the Candlestick Point area, complete with a bridge connecting their wealthy owners with the freeway. John Rizzo of the SF Chapter of the Sierra Club said that Prop. G’s plan to build a thoroughfare through Yosemite Slough is just another way of economically marginalizing Bayview residents. “This bridge is specifically for residents of the luxury condos in Candlestick Point so they don’t have to drive through the Bayview and look at poor people,” said Rizzo.
Rizzo also noted the dubious nature of the Prop. G campaign that promises the Bayview jobs, housing, and a new park. “It’s deceptive advertising. Lennar promises the Bayview a park, but what they deliver are 15-story luxury condos and an astro-turf parking lot,” he said. “The Bayview deserves real parks, and maintenance of those that already exist.”
Said Stancil, “It’s just another gimmick that these corporations always have. They are trying to blind us from the truth. But don’t let them fool you.”
PG&E offers Newsom a blank check
Gavin Newsom is a mayor who hates to make the tough decisions, and the proposal for three new power plants in Southeast San Francisco is his worst nightmare.
Newsom’s own Public Utilities Commission is pushing the plan, and he’s backed it in the past. Environmentalists are making a stink about it, and that’s caused the mayor-who-wuold-be-green some headaches.
But the major reason he suddenly decided to ask for a delay in the power-plant vote may have nothing to do with environmental issues at all.
Seven lobbyists for Pacific Gas and Electric, led by Travis Kiyota, visited the mayor May 5th and told him that the giant utility would spend whatever it takes to stop the peakers, a reliable City Hall source tells me. Attending the meeting were Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and PUC commissioner Dick Sklar, the source said.
According to this source’s account, PG&E offered to pay for more power cables into the city, for an expensive demand-management program … for just about anything that would prevent San Francisco from owning its own power plants.
I couldn’t reach either Sklar or Alioto-Pier this afternoon. But Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, confirmed that the meeting took place:
On Monday, May 5, PG&E participated in a meeting to provide substantive
expertise in the areas of energy efficiency, demand response and power
generation and transmission. Along with staff from the Mayor’s Office,
Board of Supervisors, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Department
of Environment, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, CA Public
Utilities Commission (CAPUC), and the National Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), we were able to engage some of the most creative and knowledgeable
experts in the room together as we work to identify alternatives to the
current action plan.
Ballard also said that retrofitting the Mirant plant — leaving the big privately owned polluter in place — was “one of the options on the table.”
As far as I can tell, there were no public-power advocates in the meeting.
So PG&E is still driving energy policy in the Mayor’s Office. How nice.
Two former mayors help Mirkarimi launch campaign
As I predicted, Friday’s campaign kickoff event for Sup. Ross Mirkarimi wasn’t simply about whether he’ll be reelected to the Board of Supervisors. It was the launch of a movement to reshape San Francisco’s political landscape in a way that could maintain progressive control of the Board of Supervisors and propel Mirkarimi into the mayor’s office a few years from now.
Yet rather than relying strictly on a reenergized progressive movement, the event seemed to signal that Mirkarimi is aiming to create a bigger tent that capitalizes on his strength on criminal justice issues, among other domains of the moderates. Notably, those in attendance included two former mayors: Art Agnos (no surprise) and Willie Brown (big surprise, and a strong indicator that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s coalition is fraying).
As Sup. Aaron Peskin told the capacity crowd at Yoshi’s on Fillmore Street, “There may come a day when Ross is the chief executive of this city.”
Rock the Casbah: ‘Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers’ revives North Africa’s chaabi
ABDEL HADI HALO AND THE EL GUSTO ORCHESTRA OF ALGIERS
Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers
(Honest Jon’s)
By Erik Morse
The style and history of chaabi may be recognizable to few if any Westerners. But the examples performed on Abdel Hadi Halo and the El Gusto Orchestra of Algiers represent a unique and fascinating exchange between French, Spanish, and Algerian musical identity as well as the miscegenation of Jewish, Berber, and Arabic street culture in the heart of North Africa.
Translated from Arabic as “popular,” chaabi – originating in the Casbah as part of a Moorish/Andalusian tradition that stretched back to the 15th century – reached its height during the 1950s. Primarily performed in bars and clubs where many French expats, American GIs, Sephardic Jews, and Algerian Muslims congregated and swapped native instruments and scales, the cosmopolitan interplay of chaabi marked a complex colonial parity comparable to American Delta blues. With Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, over 100,000 pied-noirs (mostly Jews and European colonials) fled north from their homes fearing reprisal from the Muslim sanctioned government. And with them went much of the cross-cultural popularity of chaabi.
Although it lost much of its mystique among younger musicians, the forefathers of chaabi played on. Some, like El Hajj Muhammad El Anka, referred to as the “father of chaabi,” continued to teach and spread the genre’s musical heritage throughout Algeria until his death in 1978.
Video: Meet the Makers
The third annual Maker Faire in San Mateo brought out some of the country’s most innovative inventions, ranging from lounge wheelchairs and mind machines to human-sized mousetraps and better crocheting.
Three missing letters in the Chron’s peaker editorial
The San Francisco Chronicle came out today against the plan to build three combustion turbines, known as “peaker” plans, at the foot of Potrero Hill.
But while the editorial quoted both sides in what I agree is a complicated issue, the editors ignored one of the most alient points: The campaign agains the peakers is being funded largely by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
Three missing letters, people: PG&E.
PG&E is underwriting the “Close It Coalition,” which sounds like a group aiming to close an existing power plant. The problem, peaker proponents say, is that the Mirant power plant that’s now pumping carbon and particulates into the air can’t be closed down unless the power it produces is replaced, locally. That’s what the state regulators are mandating That means significant new generation within city limits. And it means generating capacity that can run at night, when solar panels aren’t firing.
PG&E doesn’t want the peakers (which would produce about a third less pollution than the Mirant plant does) because they would be owned by the city; that’s a step toward public power. The utility isn’t worried about pollution or green power; this is a company that owns a nuclear power plant (on an earthquake fault). It’s a company that is building its own fossil-fuel plants up and down the state.
No: for the major funder of the no-peakers effort, this is about preserving a power monopoly. Beginning and end of story.
I am dubious about the peakers, too. It’s hard to support new fossil-fuel plants in San Francisco. But when you look at who’s behind the anti-peaker campaign, the story gets a lot more complicated.
You wouldn’t know that from reading the Chron’s editorial.
State Senate update: The newspaper endorsements
Carole Migden got the Bay Area Reporter, which is a significant achievement since the B.A.R. has often tended more toward the moderate side of gay politics:
A sitting incumbent who has a solid record of accomplishment – both for the LGBT community and residents as a whole – should not be driven from office because she has a strong personality or has been gruff at times in her dealings with people.
Mark Leno got the Pacific Sun, the major alt-weekly in Marin, which complains that Migden has been out of touch with the North Bay part of the district:
When she first ran for this seat in ’04 she alienated large numbers of local people, including Democrats, at a San Rafael Chamber of Commerce candidates’ event and in other actions that made it clear she had little interest in the parts of the 3rd District north of the Golden Gate. While she says she was quietly working on Marin issues, including solving a Sausalito houseboat problem, in the first part of her term, most people saw her as out of touch with Marin. From the time Mark Leno declared his intent to run for her seat, she has been a legislative dynamo on North Bay issues.
Joe Nation’s got the landlords.
Oktoberfest in May: Tourist Club returns?
By Justin Juul
The Tourist Club , an authentic German beer garden at the end of a mile-long unmarked trail in the Muir Woods, is probably one of the coolest places in the entire Bay Area. It’s one of those spots you take out-of-town friends when you want to impress them with how awesome you’ve become since up and leaving whatever shithole town they’re still rotting in. It’s exclusive, hidden, and stunningly beautiful. Plus, there’s beer!
The only thing is, the place has been closed for the past six months and it doesn’t look like it’s opening anytime soon. It’s sad, really. I mean think of all the hipsters who’ve made the mile-long hike this Spring only to discover the club’s rude sign: Closed To The Public Until Further Notice. Think of all the disappointment. Think of all the cool points suddenly turned lame. But there’s hope.
Word on the street (and on The Tourist Club’s new website — exclusively for site members) is that the German’s will be opening their doors for a one-time bash, called Maifest, on May 18th. Maifest is an annual celebration of German heritage, beer, and sausage. Just like Oktoberfest. But in May! Awesome.
$20-$25
The Tourist Club (AKA The Hidden German Beer Garden AKA The Nature Friends Club)
30 Ridge Ave, Mill Valley.
(415) 388-9987
www.touristclubsf.org
Joe Nation, the landlord’s man
The Marin Organizing Committee held a rally May 8th in San Rafael that attracted all three state Senate candidates to discuss issues of social welfare in the county. More than 600 people showed up, and by Marin standards, that’s a huge crowd.
Among the top issues: Prop. 98, the horrible ballot measure that would end rent control in California.
All three candidates say they are against 98.
Mark Leno and Carole Migden got to the rally on time. Joe Nation was a bit late. The reason: He had to stop first in San Francisco – at a fundraiser sponsored by some of the same landlord groups that are funding Yes on 98.
That’s right: Nation went and took some big checks from the pro-Prop. 98 landlords, then drove across the bridge for a No on 98 rally.
Lisa Christensen, Nation’s campaign manager, told me that Nation “has been against Prop. 98 from the start, and wears his No on 98 button everywhere he goes.” As for his alliance with the landlords? “San Francisco politics is a melee,” she said. “Some of my dearest friends are passionately against me on some issues, and we work together on others.”
I wonder if he took the No on 98 button off for the landlord party.
To life! Iceland’s Borko whoops it up with his latest
BORKO
Celebrating Life
(Morr Music)
By Erik Morse
Bjorn Kristiansson, a.k.a., Borko, is not only a chronic day-dreamer but a procrastinator as well. A music teacher and film composer living in Reykjavik, Borko has finally assembled an album, Celebrating Life, to follow his 2001 debut EP, Trees and Limbo (Resonant). The result – a collection of varying electronic and folktronic experiments that reaches back to 2002 – is a pleasing if dilettantish grab bag of bright charmers and absurd homages to the tundra. Kristiansson’s inspirations suggest an ambitious musical mind that seeks grand scope rather than minute detail.
The album’s opener, the appropriately titled “Continental Love,” is a wonderful introduction to Kristiansson’s musical topology, using synthesized horns and sampled vocal beats to simulate the expansive void of the Great North – a space more than a place – and, left largely to the romantic imagination, the perfect wintry allegory for longing. The next track, “Spoonstabber,” abandons these mammoth instrumentals for the doe-eyed vocals and electro-acoustic soundscapes of Amnesiac-era Radiohead, revealing Borko’s m.o. to be one less of tonal focus than generic catch and release. Lest we forget, this is pop and not process music.
Despite the childish titles, “Shoo Ba Ba,” “Sushi Stakeout,” and “Ding Dong Kingdom” dovetail into melodrama, using heavily processed keyboards, plangent electric guitars, and hypnotic coos and chimes – not unlike fellow Icelanders múm or Air in its lush soundtracking for The Virgin Suicides. Throughout, the playful melancholia of Borko evokes the cinematic regionalism of Guy Maddin or Dagur Kári, whose works similarly equate romance not with equatorial heat but with arctic hibernation. And Celebrating Life is filled with the kind of hit-and-miss magic that comes when an imagination overburdened with the possibilities of music seeks to create not only a new genre but a whole new continent of sound.
Bienvenidos to the jungle: munchies Italiano in Costa Rica
A little bit of Italy down south: La Puerta Negra. Photo courtesy of Zancudo Times.
By Erik Morse
A-way down south past Baja, Calif., and the Rio Grande, through Mexico and the mountain ranges of Central America, which blossom into the fiery petals of Arenal volcano, there’s a tiny fishing village near the border of Costa Rica and Panama called Playa Zancudo. Along the town’s one gravel road that travels through the swamps and palm trees to the edge of the Osa Peninsula, passing shotgun shacks and mercados, sits one of the most delicious Italian restaurants this side of the Adriatic.
Christened La Puerta Negra according to the plywood sign near the dirt path entrance, this small trattoria is a simple concrete slab and garden just off the beach. But the chef and owner Alberto Ferrini has taken great care to make it his own: a colorful assortment of fresh flowers, white tablecloths, and twinkling lights sit beneath a quilted patio covering.
Photographs of forgotten guitar heroes from the American delta are pinned above the entrance to the open-air kitchen, and the constant rotation of jug bands and blues troubadours playing from the stereo portray an ardent musical soul. A small advertisement written in marker reads: Live Blues on Saturday Night. Later on I find out that Ferrini often brings his git box from the room above the restaurant to give his customers a lesson in old-fashioned gut bucket.
SPORTS: Boo-yah! Johnnie LeMaster returns
By A.J. Hayes
In current baseball vernacular, “wearing it” refers to owning up to a hellacious slump, a shoddy performance or bone-headed play sans lame excuse.
“I threw like ass… basically,” former Giants pitcher Sidney Ponson so elegantly put it following a horrible game a few seasons ago. That’s a fine example of “wearing it.”
Blaming a shipment of “soft” bats for a home run drought — as Oakland slugger Jack Cust did this spring — is most assuredly not “wearing it.”
In the late ’70s, much-maligned former Giants shortstop/futility icon Johnnie LeMaster, AKA “Bones,” AKA “Johnnie Disaster,” took “wearing it” to a whole new level.
In one game vs. the Montreal Expos in 1979, LeMaster “wore it” – literally.
A prototypical good field/no hit shortstop during his best days at the park, the super slender LeMaster was enduring a prolonged stretch of through-the-wickets fielding/don’t-even-bother-stepping-into-the-box hitting that had everyone from little kids to blue-haired ladies at Candlestick Park calling for his scraggly ’70s-style mustache.
Razzing LeMaster had become the official second language of the frozen concrete bowl by the freeway.
So without informing the higher ups in the San Francisco front office, LeMaster had his name plate removed from the back of his No. 10 Giants jersey and replaced simply with a three letter word: “Boo.”
“It really caught everyone off guard, in fact when I walked to the plate that night I could hear manager Joe Altobelli say, ‘Why does John have “Bob” on the back of his uniform?’
“That stunt cost me a $500 fine, but it was worth every penny. It won over some of the media and the fans really got a kick out of it,” said LeMaster who was honored by the Giants last weekend as part of the club’s season long 50th San Francisco Anniversary celebration.
It was the Paintsville, Kentucky resident’s first visit to San Francisco’s downtown ballpark.
Garbage to gold: SF Dump’s new artist
By Justin Juul
When boring people think about heaven they envision angels and wings and clouds and gold and stuff like that. Other people, cooler people you might say, imagine a world where everything is free, where alcohol flows like water, where cigarettes provide nourishment, and where orgasms last for hours. And then there are people like Paul Cesewski, a well-known Bay Area artist who’s been making bicycle-powered carnival rides, kinetic sculptures, and other weird machines for something like a decade and a half. His vision of paradise is a sprawling landfill of garbage, scrap metal, and castoff PVC tubing. What a weirdo.
Material!
The cool thing about Cesewski’s version of heaven is that, unlike the angel and harp deal, it actually exists. It’s called the SF Dump and after years of trying, Cesewski has finally scored the Dump’s coveted artist-in-residence gig. He’s been wallowing in scrap metal, garbage, and PVC piping for the past three months and he’s about to let loose with a show. It’s only going on for two days so don’t miss the boat.
Paul Cesweski, clownin’
Paul Cesweski
SF Dump
503 Tunnel Ave. SF.
Free
May 23 (5:00 – 9:00)
May 24 (1:00 – 5:00)