Bars Archives — Page 31 of 37 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Endorsements

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January 16, 2008

President, Democrat

BARACK OBAMA

This is now essentially a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, and no matter how it comes down, it’s a historic moment: neither of the front-runners for the White House (and by any standard, the Democratic nominee starts off as the front-runner) is a white man. And frankly, the nation could do a lot worse than either President Hillary Clinton or President Barack Obama.

But on the issues, and because he’s a force for a new generation of political activism, our choice is Obama.

Obama’s life story is inspirational, and his speeches are the stuff of political legend. He can rouse a crowd and generate excitement like no presidential candidate has in many, many years. He has, almost single-handedly, caused thousands of young people to get involved for the first time in a major political campaign.

The cost of his soaring rhetoric is a disappointing lack of specific plans. It can be hard at times to tell exactly what Obama stands for, exactly how he plans to carry out his ambitious goals. His stump speeches are riddled with words like change and exhortations to a new approach to politics, but he doesn’t talk much, for example, about how to address the gap between the rich and the poor, or how to tackle urban crime and poverty, or whether Israel should stop building settlements in the occupied territories.

In fact, our biggest problem with Obama is that he talks as if all the nation needs to do is come together in some sort of grand coalition of Democrats and Republicans, of "blue states and red states." But some of us have no interest in making common cause with the religious right or Dick Cheney or Halliburton or Don Fisher. There are forces and interests in the United States that need to be opposed, defeated, consigned to the dustbin of history, and for all of Obama’s talk of unity, we worry that he lacks the interest in or ability to take on a tough, bloody fight against an entrenched political foe.

Still, when you look at his positions, he’s on the right track. He wants to raise the cap on earnings subject to Social Security payments (right now high earners don’t pay Social Security taxes on income over $97,000 a year). He wants to cut taxes for working-class families and pay for it by letting the George W. Bush tax cuts on the rich expire (that’s not enough, but it’s a start). He wants to double fuel-economy standards. His health care plan isn’t perfect, but it’s about the same as all the Democrats offer.

And he’s always been against the war.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of that. Obama spoke out against the invasion when even most Democrats were afraid to, so he has some credibility when he says he’s going to withdraw all troops within 16 months and establish no permanent US bases in Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has far more extensive experience than Obama (and people who say her years in the White House don’t count have no concept of the role she played in Bill Clinton’s administration). We are convinced that deep down she has liberal instincts. But that’s what’s so infuriating: since the day she won election to the US Senate, Clinton has been trianguutf8g, shaping her positions, especially on foreign policy, in an effort to put her close to the political center. At a time when she could have shown real courage — during the early votes on funding and authorizing the invasion of Iraq — she took the easy way out, siding with President Bush and refusing to be counted with the antiwar movement. She has refused to distance herself from such terrible Bill Clinton–era policies as welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and don’t ask, don’t tell. We just can’t see her as the progressive choice.

We like John Edwards. We like his populist approach, his recognition that there are powerful interests running this country that won’t give up power without a fight, and his talk about poverty. In some ways (certainly in terms of campaign rhetoric) he’s the most progressive of the major candidates. It is, of course, a bit of a political act — he was, at best, a moderate Southern Democrat when he served in the Senate. But at least he’s raising issues nobody else is talking about, and we give him immense credit for that. And we’ve always liked Dennis Kucinich, who is the only person taking the right positions on almost all of the key issues.

But Edwards has slid pretty far out of the running at this point, and Kucinich is an afterthought. The choice Californians face is between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Obama, for all of his flaws, has fired up a real grassroots movement, has energized the electorate, and is offering the hope of a politics that looks forward, not back. On Feb. 5, vote for Barack Obama.

President, Republican

RON PAUL

We have a lot of disagreements with Ron Paul and his libertarian worldview. He opposes the taxes that we need to make civil society function and the government regulations that are essential to protecting the most powerless members of society. From its roots in the Magna Carta and Adam Smith’s economic theories to the Bill of Rights, it’s clear the United States was founded on a social compact that libertarians too often seem to deny. And Paul compounds these ills in the one area in which he departs from the libertarians: he doesn’t support federal abortion rights. He’s been associated with some statements that are racially insensitive (to say the least). He clearly shouldn’t be president.

But he won’t — Paul isn’t going to win the nomination. So it’s worthwhile endorsing him as a protest vote for two reasons. His presence on the ballot serves to show up some of the hypocrisies of the rest of the GOP field — and he is absolutely correct and insightful on one of the most important issues of the day: the war.

Paul is alone among the Republican candidates for president in sounding the alarm that our country is pursuing a dangerous, shortsighted, hypocritical, expensive, and ultimately doomed strategy of trying to dominate the world militarily. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and thinks the US should pull out immediately. It’s immensely valuable to have someone like that in the GOP debates, speaking to the conservative half of our country about why this policy violates the principles they claim to hold dear.

Paul is absolutely correct that if we stopped trying to police the world, ended the war on drugs, and quit negotiating trade deals that favor multinational corporations over American families and workers, we would be a far more free and prosperous nation.

President, Green

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY

We endorsed Ralph Nader for president in 2000, in large part as a protest vote against the neoconservative politics of the Bill Clinton administration (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, welfare "reform," etc.). And Nader’s Green Party campaign had a place (particularly in a state the Democrats were going to win anyway). We’ve never been among those who blame Nader for Al Gore’s loss — Gore earned plenty of blame himself. But four years later we, like a lot of Nader’s allies and supporters, urged him not to run — and he ignored those pleas. Now he may be seeking the Green Party nomination again. Nader hasn’t formally announced yet, but he’s talking about it — which means he still shows no interest in being accountable to anyone. It’s too bad he has to end his political life this way.

Fortunately, there are several other credible Green Party candidates. The best is Cynthia McKinney, the former Georgia congressional representative, who has switched from the Democratic to the Green Party and is seeking a spot on the top of the ticket. McKinney has her drawbacks, but we’ll endorse her.

The real question here is not who would make a better president (that’s not in the cards, of course) but who would do more to build the Green Party and promote the best course for a promising third party that still hasn’t developed much traction as a national force. We’ve been clear for years that the Greens should be working from the grass roots up: the party’s first priority should be electing school board members, community college board members, members of boards of supervisors and city councils. Over time, leaders like Mark Sanchez, Jane Kim, Matt Gonzalez, and Ross Mirkarimi can start competing for mayor’s offices and posts in the State Legislature and Congress. Running a presidential candidate only makes sense as part of a party-building operation. (That’s what Nader did in 2000, and for all the obvious reasons he’s incapable of doing it today.)

But the Greens insist on running candidates for president, so we might as well pick the best one.

McKinney has a lot to offer the Greens. She’s an experienced legislator who has won several tough elections and taken on a lot of tough issues. As an African American woman from the South, she can also broaden the party’s base. She was a solid progressive in Congress, where she was willing to speak out on issues that many of her colleagues ducked (she was, for example, one of the few members to push for an impeachment resolution).

McKinney has her downside — in recent years she’s been flirting with the loony side of the left, getting a bit close to some Sept. 11 conspiracy theories that hurt her credibility (although she’s also made some very good points about the attacks and the lack of a serious investigation into what happened). And some of her supporters have made alarmingly anti-Semitic statements (from which, to her credit, she has attempted to distance herself). But she has to come out now, strongly, to denounce those sorts of comments and show that she can build a real coalition.

With those (serious) reservations, we’ll give her the nod.

Proposition 91 (use of gas tax)

NO

Prop. 91 is essentially an effort to ensure that revenue from the state’s gas tax goes only to roads and highways. It’s a moot point anyway: Proposition 1A, which passed last year, did the same thing, and now even proponents of 91 are urging a No vote.

But we’re going to take this opportunity to reiterate our opposition to Prop. 1A, Prop. 91, and any other ridiculous effort to restrict the use of gasoline tax revenues.

It should be clear to everyone at this point that the widespread overuse of automobiles is having far bigger impacts on California than just wear and tear on the roads. Cars are the biggest single cause of global warming, and they kill and injure more Californians than guns do, causing enormous costs that are borne by all of us. Driving a car is expensive for society, and drivers ought to be paying some of those costs. That should mean extra gas taxes and a reinstatement of the vehicle license fee to previous levels (and extra surcharges for those who drive Hummers and other especially wasteful, dangerous vehicles). That money ought to go to the state General Fund so California doesn’t have to close state parks and slash spending on schools and social services, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing.

Proposition 92 (community college funding)

YES

Prop. 92 is another example of how desperate California educators are and how utterly dysfunctional the state’s budget process has become.

The measure is complicated, but it amounts to a plan to guarantee community colleges more money — a total of about $300 million a year — and includes provisions to cut the cost of attending the two-year schools. Those are good things: community colleges serve a huge number of students — about 10 times as many as the University of California system — many of whom come from lower-income families who can’t afford even a small fee increase. And, of course, as the state budget has gotten tighter, community college fees have gone up in the past few years — and as a result, attendance has dropped.

Part of the way Prop. 92 cuts fees is by divorcing community college funding from K–12 funding — and that’s created some controversy among teachers. Current state law requires a set percentage of California spending (about 40 percent) to go to K–12 and community college education, but there’s no provision to give more money to the community colleges when enrollment at those institutions grows faster than K–12 enrollment.

Some teachers fear that Prop. 92 could lead to decreased funds for K–12, and that’s a real concern. In essence, this measure would add $300 million to the state budget, and it includes no specific funding source. This worries us. In theory, the legislature and the governor ought to agree that education funding matters and find the money by raising taxes; in practice, this could set up more competition for money between different (and entirely worthy) branches of the state’s public education system — not to mention other critical social services.

But many of the same concerns were voiced when Prop. 98 was on the ballot, and that measure probably saved public education in California. The progressives on the San Francisco Board of Education all support Prop. 92, and so do we. Vote yes.

Proposition 93 (term limits)

YES

This is pathetic, really. The term-limits law that voters passed in 1990 has been bad news, shifting more power to the governor and ensuring that the State Assembly and the State Senate will be filled with people who lack the experience and institutional history to fight the Sacramento lobbyists (who, of course, have no term limits). But the legislature isn’t a terribly popular institution, and the polls all show that it would be almost impossible to simply repeal term limits. So the legislature — led by State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez, who really, really wants to keep his job — has proposed a modification instead.

Under the current law, a politician can serve six years — three terms — in the assembly and eight years — two terms — in the senate. Since most senators are former assembly members, that’s a total of 14 years any one person can serve in the legislature.

Prop. 93 would cut that to 12 years — but allow members to serve them in either house. So Núñez, who will be termed out this year, could serve six more years in the assembly (but would then be barred from running for the senate). Senators who never served in the assembly could stick around for three terms.

That’s fine. It’s a bit better than what we have now — it might bring more long-term focus to the legislature and eliminate some of the musical-chairs mess that’s brought us the Mark Leno versus Carole Migden bloodbath.

But it’s sad that the California State Legislature, once a model for the nation, has been so stymied by corruption that the voters don’t trust it and the best we can hope for is a modest improvement in a bad law. Vote yes.

Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 (Indian gambling compacts)

NO

We supported the original law that allowed Indian tribes to set up casinos, and we have no regrets: that was an issue of tribal sovereignty, and after all the United States has done to the tribes, it seemed unconscionable to deny one of the most impoverished populations in the state the right to make some money. Besides, we’re not opposed in principle to gambling.

But this is a shady deal, and voters should reject it.

Props. 94–97 would allow four tribes — all of which have become very, very wealthy through gambling — to dramatically expand the size of their casinos. The Pechanga, Morongo, Sycuan, and Agua Caliente tribes operate lucrative casinos in Southern California, spend a small fortune on lobbying, and convinced Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to give them permission to create some of the largest casinos in the nation. Opponents of this agreement have forced the issue onto the ballot.

The tribes say the deals will bring big money into the state coffers, and it’s true that more gambling equals more state revenue. But the effective tax rate on the slot machines (and this is all about slot machines, the cash engines of casinos) would be as little as 15 percent — chump change for a gambling operation. And none of the other tribes in the state, some of which are still desperate for money, would share in the bounty.

The big four tribes refuse to allow their workers to unionize. While we respect tribal sovereignty, the state still has the right to limit the size of casinos, and if the tribes want the right to make a lot more money, they ought to be willing to let their workers, not all of them Indians, share in some of the rewards. We’re talking billions of dollars a year in revenue here; paying a decent salary is hardly beyond the financial ability of these massive operations.

The governor cut this deal too fast and gave away too much. If the tribes want to expand their casinos, we’re open to allowing it — but the state, the workers, and the other tribes deserve a bigger share of the revenue. Vote no on 94-97.

Proposition A (neighborhood parks bond)

YES

This $185 million bond has the support of a broad coalition of local politicians and activists, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and every member of the Board of Supervisors. It would put a dent in the city’s serious backlog of deferred maintenance in the park system.

The measure would allocate $117.4 million for repairs and renovations of 12 neighborhood parks, selected according to their seismic and safety needs as well as their usage levels. It would also earmark $11.4 million to replace and repair freestanding restrooms, which, the Recreation and Park Department assures us, will be kept open seven days a week.

The bond also contains $33.5 million for projects on Port of San Francisco land, including a continuous walkway from Herons Head Park to Pier 43 and new open spaces at regular intervals along the eastern waterfront. While some argue that the Port should take care of its own property, it’s pretty broke — and there’s a growing recognition that the city’s waterfront is a treasure, that open space should be a key component of its future, and that it doesn’t really matter which city agency pays for it. In fact, this bond act would provide money to reclaim closed sections of the waterfront and create a Blue Greenway trail along seven miles of bay front.

One of the more questionable elements in this bond is the $8 million earmarked for construction and reconstruction of city playfields — which includes a partnership with a private foundation that wants to install artificial turf. There’s no question that the current fields are in bad repair and that users of artificial turf appreciate its all-weather durability. But some people worry about the environmental impact of the stuff, which is made from recycled tires, while others wonder if this bond will end up giving control of 7 percent of our parkland to the sons of Gap founder Don Fisher (their City Fields Foundation is the entity contributing matching funds for city-led turf conversions). Although the Rec and Park Department has identified 24 sites for such conversions, none can take place without the Board of Supervisors’ approval — and the supervisors and the Rec and Park Commission needs to make it clear that if neighbors don’t want the artificial turf, it won’t be forced on them.

Prop. A also earmarks $5 million for trail restoration and $5 million for an Opportunity Fund, from which all neighborhoods can leverage money for benches and toilets through in-kind contributions, sweat equity, and noncity funds.

And it includes $4 million for park forestry and $185,000 for audits.

With a 2007 independent analysis identifying $1.7 billion in maintenance requirements, this is little more than a start, and park advocates need to be looking for other, ongoing revenue sources. But we’ll happily endorse Prop. A.

Proposition B (deferred retirement for police officers)

YES

We’ve always taken the position that relying exclusively on police officers to improve public safety is as useless as simply throwing criminals behind bars — it’s only part of the solution and will never work as an answer all on its own.

But we’re also aware that the city is suffering a dramatic shortage of police officers; hundreds are expected to retire within a few short years, and those figures aren’t being met by an equal number of enrollees at the academy.

So we’re supporting Prop. B, even if it’s yet another mere stopgap measure the police union has dragged before voters, and even though the San Francisco Police Officers Association is often hostile to attempted law enforcement reforms and is never around when progressives need support for new revenue measures.

Prop. B would allow police officers who are at least 50 years of age and who have served for at least 25 years to continue working for three additional years with their regular pay and benefits while the pension checks they’d have otherwise received collect in a special account with an assured annual 4 percent interest rate.

The POA promises Prop. B will be cost neutral to taxpayers, and the city controller will review the program in three years to ensure that remains the case. Also at the end of three years, the Board of Supervisors, with a simple majority vote, could choose to end or extend it.

POA president Gary Delagnes added during an endorsement interview that department staffers in San Francisco who reach retirement age simply continue working in other police jurisdictions. If that’s the case, we might as well keep them here.

No other city employees are eligible for such a scheme, which strikes us as unfair. And frankly, one of the main reasons the city can’t hire police officers is the high cost of living in San Francisco — so if the POA is worried about recruitment, the group needs to support Sup. Chris Daly’s affordable-housing measure in November.

But we’ll endorse Prop. B.

Proposition C (Alcatraz Conversion Project)

NO

We understand why some people question why a decaying old prison continues to be a centerpiece of Bay Area tourism. A monument to a system that imprisoned people in cold, inhumane conditions doesn’t exactly mesh with San Francisco values.

But the Alcatraz Conversion Project, which proposes placing a half–golf ball–like Global Peace Center atop the Rock, is a wacky idea that looks and sounds like a yuppie tourist retreat and does little to address the island’s tortured past. People don’t have to support everything with peace in the title.

The proposal includes a white domed conference center for nonviolent conflict resolution, a statue of St. Francis, a labyrinth, a medicine wheel, and an array of what proponents call "architecturally advanced domed Artainment multimedia centers."

We agree with the ideal of dedicating the island to the Native Americans who fished and collected birds’ eggs from this once guano-covered rock for thousands of years and whose descendants carried out a bold occupation at the end of the 1960s. But this proposal seems based on wishful thinking, not fiscal or environmental realities.

The plan is backed by the Global Peace Foundation, which is a branch of the San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, a Mill Valley nonprofit founded by Marin resident and Light Party founder Da Vid. It’s just goofy. Vote no.

Next week: Alameda County endorsements.

Where is home?

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January 9, 2008

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"I’ve never been inside here before. I don’t like to come in here, because I feel alienated in my own neighborhood by this place, and that is kind of what this play is about," Danny Hoch said recently. His new solo stage production, Taking Over, opens Jan. 16 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Speaking the day before he flew out West from New York to begin rehearsals with rep director Tony Taccone and looking around in half disgust, the New York–born actor-playwright was seated inside the Roebling Tea Room, a recently opened, funkily decorated but high-end restaurant directly across the street from his home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he has lived for the past 20 years.

The yuppie meeting place was Hoch’s choice, as much for convenience, it seemed, as to further emphasize the point of what his new work is all about. "Williamsburg is ground zero for gentrification not just in New York but in the country, because it has provided a blueprint for how fast and how violent displacement and economic development can happen in a short amount of time," Hoch said. "And Taking Over is about how gentrification is really masking the idea of colonialism and how everybody is kind of searching for a sense of home and disconnected from where their home is. And in the kind of neofeudalism that is the new economy of North America, people looking for home wind up displacing people who are home."

As in his previous solo plays, such as the Obie Award–winning Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop — which 10 years ago also premiered at the Berkeley Rep — Hoch channels a myriad of characters of various ages, races, and genders. Embodied with his ever-sharp dry observant wit, these include a major real estate developer, a Dominican taxi dispatcher, a French real estate agent, a revolutionary gangsta rapper, and a New York University student — a "clueless hipster" from Michigan who protests that she feels "like a homeless person" after her parents cut her monthly allowance from $5,000 to $3,000.

Another engaging character is the guy who was just released from incarceration after serving time under New York’s controversial, draconian Rockefeller drug laws. But he’s been gone so long he doesn’t recognize his old hood. "When he arrives they’re shooting a movie on his old block, and he talks to a PA on the movie set and says, ‘When I was growing up here people never came to shoot a movie. People shot things all right — like [other] people or heroin — but not a movie,’<0x2009>" Hoch explained. "And then he points to [a] woman in the window and says, ‘That’s my mother.’ And the PA asks him, ‘Oh, she doesn’t want to come down and check out the movie set?’ And he says, ‘No, she’s still afraid to go outside from the ’80s.’<0x2009>"

According to Hoch, the Bay Area has consistently been the most receptive to his work. "The Berkeley Rep is one of the only theaters, if not the only theater, that would support this kind of show from its inception. A theater in New York that needs to economically sustain itself [is] not going to commission or fund a show at this level about gentrification in New York, because it’s going to alienate their very audience." In fact, for the past 10 years Hoch has been unable to make a living as a writer or an actor in his hometown. "New York stories are no longer viable in New York City because the market is being informed by Americans. This is why you have Subway and Domino’s and Applebee’s and TCBY all over New York City — so that Americans can feel at home," he said.

"Do you know how many vintage clothing stores there are around here and stores that I can’t even identify with what the fuck it is that they are selling?" Hoch asked rhetorically. "How do you economically sustain that? You sustain that with disposable income, not income income. That is how you sustain this many bars and a tearoom like this. I tell you, this neighborhood didn’t need another tearoom. We needed more teachers. We needed a hospital. We needed better schools."

TAKING OVER

Through Feb. 10, $27–$69

See Web site for showtimes

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2025 Addison, Thrust Stage, Berk.

1-888-4-BRT-TIX

www.berkeleyrep.org

The Zoo Blues

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January 9, 2008

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This story was first published May 19, 1999

IN EARLY 1997, the San Francisco Zoo had a serious public-relations problem. The zoo wanted San Francisco voters to approve a $48 million bond measure to overhaul the facilities. But the Asian elephant exhibit was making the zoo look bad.

Tinkerbelle the elephant had been living alone since April 1995, when her longtime companion, Pennie, was put to sleep. Animal activists had been complaining that, for an animal that herds and has complex social interactions in the wild, life alone was cruel and unacceptable. According to the minutes from a board meeting of the San Francisco Zoological Society, the private group that manages the zoo, executive director David Anderson decided it was time to find a friend for Tinkerbelle. He thought he found her in Calle.

Calle was about 30 years old and on exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo. She had put in her time entertaining humans, working shows in Las Vegas and giving rides to kids at the San Diego Zoo. Animal advocates in Los Angeles were trying to get her to a sanctuary in Tennessee. But Anderson decided he wanted her in San Francisco.
Animal rights advocates hated the idea. Gretchen Wyler, executive director of Endocino-<\h>based Arc Trust came to San Francisco to check out the zoo’s facilities. “I was devastated when I saw how small and barren it was,” Wyler told the Bay Guardian.

S.F. Zoo curator David Robinett denies that the decision to move Calle to San Francisco had anything to do with the timing of the bond campaign. “We were anxious to move ahead and get a companion for Tinkerbelle,” he told us.
Either way, the zoo was in a hurry — and it wound up with a huge problem on its hands. Before leaving Los Angeles, Calle was tested for tuberculosis. According to Susanne Barthell, who ran the Council for Excellence in Zoo Animal Management until her death last fall, the elephant population at the L.A. Zoo was known to have problems with T.B., a claim Robinett denies. But S.F. Zoo officials did not wait for the test results to come back before they brought Calle north on March 19, 1997.

The tests came back positive. The zoo had just bought a tuberculous elephant.

As soon as she arrived, Calle had to be quarantined from her new companion. And the financially troubled zoo got hit with elephantine medical bills. Calle’s treatment would run from $60,000 to $65,000 a year, curator Robinett told the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare in July.

It got worse. In separating the elephants, zoo workers put Calle in the cushier exhibit quarters, which at least had some vegetation and a watering hole. Tinkerbelle was moved to neighboring quarters, without vegetation or water. She had to poke her trunk through a hole in the wall to refresh herself. (Only this month was the electrified barrier between the two areas removed permanently. Calle is cured, and the two elephants can now interact.)

The elephant debacle is all too typical. San Francisco’s zoo has never been one of the country’s best — but six years after it was placed in private hands, it’s in worse shape than ever. Privatization was supposed to save the zoo; instead it has failed it. A Bay Guardian investigation based on interviews and documents shows:

* Dozens of animals live in squalid, substandard conditions: primates have died because of disease-<\h>ridden cages, orangutans are cooped up in tiny cement boxes, rare rainforest mammals are losing hair.

* The number of zoo employees charged with taking care of the animals has plummeted — while the number of other employees has doubled.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so frustrated with the S.F. Zoo’s animal mistreatment, it is threatening to fine the zoo thousands of dollars — and one foundation that had given hundreds of thousands to the zoo has withdrawn its funding.

* Thanks to a string of expensive bond issues, the public is still paying for the zoo, but zoo executive director David Anderson has seen his own salary substantially boosted.

* Marketing expenses have skyrocketed, and the zoo is heavily dependent on amusement park–<\d>type rides and other non-educational attractions to break even.

* City officials have become so skeptical of the zoo society’s ability to manage itself that Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano called for an audit last spring. Stanton W. Jones, an auditor who works for budget analyst Harvey Rose, is expected to release the audit late this summer.

In fact, the zoo is a case study of everything that is wrong with privatization.

A bad place to live

The push to privatize the zoo got rolling in 1990, when David Anderson was brought in from New Orleans’s Audubon Park and Zoological Garden. The zoo’s infrastructure was crumbling, and its finances were in bad shape. Sources in the Recreation and Park Department say Anderson enthusiastically advocated privatization as a solution.
Without accepting bids from other organizations, Rec and Park handed over control of the zoo to the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had been raising money for the zoo since 1954. In the summer of 1993 the society agreed to lease the premises and take over management of the zoo, promising to balance its budget by June 30, 1998 (see “Sold!,” 10/19/94).

Anderson has made out handsomely from the deal. In 1994 the society paid him $81,443; by 1997 his total compensation had gone up to $148,500, including a $25,000 bonus — in a year when the zoo was still losing money.

The animals have fared much worse.

Within the past two months the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which governs animal care in zoos, has issued the society a warning. According to the USDA, inspectors have repeatedly notified zoo administrators about problems. If those problems aren’t corrected, the agency is now threatening to fine the zoo.

“We made it clear that they are not doing a good job on maintenance,” Wensley Koch, supervisory animal care specialist with the USDA’s western sector office, told the Bay Guardian. “Basically there’s a management problem.”
Records of inspection reports dating back to 1990 reveal problems throughout the zoo facilities — from the big cats’ lairs to the monkeys’ quarters. Wood is rotting; fences are rusting. Rats get into food areas and leave droppings.
Many of the problems are associated with the primate center, which has been a trouble spot since it was built in 1985. The colobus monkeys’ metal climbing bars were grooved. Since keepers couldn’t clean them of feces, the monkeys got sick from contact with their own excrement. The colobus population was decimated. According to Sandra Keller of Citizens for a Better Zoo, which was watch<\h>dogging the zoo at the time, 53 of the 85 primates in the center died.

“Once they opened it, the animals started dying,” Keller told the Bay Guardian. “They didn’t quarantine the new animals sufficiently when they were brought in. They basically wiped out the whole primate collection. It was heartbreaking.”

But turning the zoo over to the private society didn’t help. If anything, conditions are worse. A September 1996 USDA inspection found feces all over outdoor structures in the primate center. And in April 1997 an inspector noted that rat feces were found in the gorillas’ indoor housing area and that weeds and bushes grew out of control in the outside exhibit.

Inspectors frequently found that problems they had repeatedly brought to the society’s attention had not been addressed. For example, rotting wooden structures in the primate center went unrepaired for years between inspections; wire mesh fences keeping the colobus monkeys from escaping the exhibit continued to rust for a year after the USDA-imposed deadline to fix them.

Indeed, records from the past three years show that the zoo was regularly blowing its USDA-imposed deadlines on fixing facilities.

“When you’ve been writing ‘rust up’ for 10 years, most people get the message,” Koch told the Bay Guardian. “We’re at the point where, if the zoo doesn’t shape up, we might be forced to take an action against them. We can fine them up to $2,500 per violation.”

“If we’re looking at a monkey enclosure and we explain that a rusty enclosure is a problem and we note they also have rust at the zebra site, then the next time we come out, we don’t want to see a rusty elephant enclosure,” she said. “What becomes obvious is that either they don’t care about complying or they have decided not to. When they’re doing that, they’re using us as a quality control agency. The impression is that they have no quality control themselves.”

A 1993 incident involving an orangutan named Chewbacca sheds light on how zoo officials have tended to respond to agency involvement. Responding to an anonymous complaint, the USDA found that zoo officials had been planning to keep the 150-pound Chewbacca confined to a four-by-six-foot converted entryway for more than a year while they used his quarters to breed chimpanzees.

“From my perspective it appears that the project with the chimpanzees has been ill conceived,” William DeHaven, a sector supervisor with the USDA, noted on Oct. 12 of that year. “If you do not have sufficient space to conduct a breeding program properly, we feel it should not be conducted at all.”

USDA veterinary medical officer Richard Spira found Robinett to be uncooperative in dealing with the situation. “Incredibly, David Robinett took exception to my observation that the temporary night quarters were cramped at best,” Spira wrote to Koch. “This … is to give you a little taste of the double<\h>speak I’m getting at the zoo.”

The zoo has been no quicker to respond to problems brought to its attention by private citizens. On January 23, 1997, Barthell complained to both the zoo and the USDA. Barthell, an outspoken critic of the zoo, reported that she had seen a herd of six blackbuck standing in a driving rainstorm with no shelter, not even a tree. She also noted that 12 kangaroo were soaked and huddling against a wall for protection, their shelters too small to protect them.
Robinett responded to her concerns in writing. “This is not atypical of antelope,” he wrote. “In fact, many species react to inclement weather by seeking open space rather than cover.” He also said the kangaroo shelters were fine.

The USDA didn’t see it that way. The agency informed the zoo in February 1997 that shelter provided for both the blackbuck and the kangaroos was inadequate.

Robinett denied that the zoo has a cavalier attitude toward facilities problems.

“A lot of it is the age of the enclosures,” Robinett told us. “It is also a problem of limited resources. When you’re patching the patch of a patch — that’s when there are problems.”

He said that the zoo had to choose carefully how to spend its funds and that it gave the highest priority to the ones that officials there felt posed the greatest hazard to animals. And Wayne Reading, the society’s chief financial officer, says the infrastructure improvements are well underway, funded by donations and bond revenues.

Private zoo, public funds

When the society assumed control of the zoo in 1993, it was on the verge of collapse. City officials had neglected at least $10 million in facility maintenance; the number of paying visitors was in decline.

According to the zoo society’s lease, the city agreed to keep paying the zoo $4 million a year (to help cover the cost of civil service employees). In exchange, the society was supposed to take over the zoo and make it financially viable.

The society was not able to pull the zoo out of the red. In the spring of 1997, after four years of losing money, zoo officials admitted to acting parks director Joel Robinson that they were paying operating expenses with a loan of roughly $2.5 million from Wells Fargo as well as with money raised before the zoo went private. And in November of that year, Reading told the Rec and Park Commission that the marketing expenses for that fiscal quarter were over budget by $47,000. The society raised admissions prices in spring 1998 to cover an immediate $250,000 shortfall.

The society had already started going after an infusion of public funds. The minutes of society meetings show that for more than a year, the group devoted almost all its energy to getting a $48 million bond issue passed. According to the lease, the city agreed to sell at least $25 million in bonds to improve crumbling facilities. The society was supposed to raise $25 million from private funders by the time the bonds were sold. (To date, the society has raised $17 million.)

In June 1997, voters passed the $48 million bond issue. The zoo expected the bonds to start selling in late fall 1998, but they were delayed by a lawsuit seeking to overturn voter approval of the 49ers stadium bonds, which passed in the same election. That litigation was thrown out of court; the zoo bonds are expected to be sold this summer. The society has also taken $26 million from bonds issued for rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The city’s Recreation and Park Department responded to the zoo’s financial troubles by looking the other way. Rather than conduct an audit of the zoo or monitor the operation more closely, the department announced that it would no longer scrutinize the zoo’s budgets at all (see “The Secret Zoo,” 11/26/97, and “Don’t Feed the Zoo Society,” 12/10/97).

Rec and Park’s former finance director Ernie Prindle, who had been checking the zoo’s budgets until 1997, told the Bay Guardian that Anderson seemed to want the zoo to have the advantages of being run by a private organization while still being covered by a public one. When the zoo admitted in the fall of 1997 it was further in debt than it should have been, Anderson asked why the department could not just take care of the deficit and make the numbers work as it had done in the days when it was part of the city system, Prindle said.

“We had to tell him it does not work that way anymore, now that the zoo is a private contractor,” Prindle said.

Carnival or classroom?

By the end of October 1998 the zoo was in the black for the first time since the society took it over. But with that success has come controversy. Instead of investing in the animals, the society has capitalized on theme rides, such as the merry-go-round, the Puffer Train, and the Tiger Express ride.

Amusement-park attractions and a pricey marketing campaign — costing the zoo almost $3 million from 1995 to 1998 — have brought more visitors to the zoo. That plus higher ticket prices means more money. And Anderson is certain that with this increased revenue, the zoo will ultimately be able to shed its carnival atmosphere and focus on its true mission: education to foster environmental activism among visitors.

But if environmental activism is Anderson’s goal, he has a strange way of showing it. For example, when the zoo brought in a lorikeet exhibit in April 1998, it allowed its sponsors to place a display — a shiny Ford sports utility vehicle — near the site.

“If you’re setting yourself out as an educator, then you’ve got to have a source of funds,” Anderson told the Bay Guardian.

Some of Anderson’s more straightforward forays into environmental education have had trouble. One of his pet conservation projects is the Madagascar Fauna Group, head<\h>quartered at the San Francisco Zoo. Among other things, the group supports the protection of Madasgascar’s Betampona National Reserve and hopes to re-introduce zoo-bred lemurs and other endangered primates, such as aye-ayes, to the island nation’s wilds.

Since 1994, when the society assumed control of the zoo, it has spent $785,222 on its Madagascar projects.
In August 1997 Anderson brought two aye-ayes from Duke University’s primate center to San Francisco. Merlin and Calaban are the only male-female aye-aye pair in any zoo in the United States. Zoo officials hope to breed them.
Anderson speaks proudly of the work the zoo has done to educate people in Madagascar about protecting aye-ayes. But he hasn’t done such a great job protecting the ones in his care.

In Madagascar, aye-ayes spend time more than 60 feet high in the rainforest canopy, where they pull bugs from trees with their long fingers. In San Francisco, they live in an eight-foot-tall glass case.

Male aye-aye Merlin has had an ongoing problem with hair loss on his hind legs. As a result the zoo’s vet put him on steroids periodically from 1997 to 1998. Zoo officials blame the hair loss on two factors: premature separation from his mother, which took place while Merlin was at Duke, and the stress of being introduced to a new female.
Anderson told the Bay Guardian the hair loss wasn’t a big deal; some activists feel differently.

“That’s a shame,” Shirley McGreal, director of the International Primate Protection League, located in South Carolina, told the Bay Guardian. “Those guys cover a good distance of territory in the wild.”

But the aye-ayes haven’t been a huge success with zoogoers either. Aye-ayes are nocturnal creatures and extremely timid; Merlin and his mate, Calaban, rarely leave the shelter of leafy branches. The best chance you’ll get to see an aye-aye at the zoo is in the gift shop, on a sweatshirt or a postcard.

Paying the price

Luckily for the society, hardly any of its donors know about how the zoo animals live; it’s hard to woo grants with rusty fences, feces-filled cages, and cramped cement cells. But one funder did find out.

In September 1994, the zoo announced the opening of its $2 million Feline Conservation Center. Keepers had already raised questions about the new facility; some thought it was unsafe for the keepers because the animals could reach through the fence to the service area with their paws and claws.

When zoo administrators brought in Denver Zoo curator John Wortman, he had the same concerns. In his final evaluation to the Zoo Society, written in October 1994, Wortman stated, “I hate to sound like a broken record, but the old safety issue rises again. The repairs should have been made prior to the felines moving unto the enclosures. Fortunately, enough of the lock system functioned and no person or creature was hurt during the shake-down period.”

The keeper at the time, Terry Moyles, was fired by the zoo March 1995. Barthell and other animal advocates suspected he was dismissed because he was outspoken about the inadequacy of the facility; Robinett denied the charge.

In a Jan. 30, 1995, letter to the charitable foundation that was funding the center, Wortman described the Feline Conservation Center as “a poor design and dangerous exhibit for both the animals and the zoo keepers.”
The center’s problems got its funders’ attention. In a Feb. 19, 1999, letter to city auditor Jones, executives from the Redmond, Wash.–based Leonard X. Bosack and Betty M. Kruger Charitable Foundation blasted the zoo.

After the foundation made initial grants of more than $200,000 for the center, the letter states, “the Foundation Board also pledged two payments of $162,000 to be made in 1994 and 1995 contingent on continued progress reports. The Foundation rescinded the pledge of $325,000 in 1995 after years of unsatisfactory response from the Zoo Executive Director and the Board of Directors.”

The letter goes on to lay out how the zoo hired a contracting firm with no experience in building wildlife care facilities, how it wasted funds, and how it ignored the recommendations of its consultant.

“As John Wortman noted, the `major problem was the inability of the S.F. staff to design a modern animal facility,’” the letter stated.

Robinett denies that the zoo staff is to blame. “To say this was a screwup in design — I think that is incorrect,” Robinett told the Bay Guardian. “We have had success [with the center], especially with breeding. It’s been a very good exhibit.”

It is that attitude that makes some people worry about making animals pay the costs of privatization.
Privatization “has not helped animal care,” Ron Lippert, a longtime animal health technician and former member of the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare, told the Bay Guardian. “What privatization has done is allowed the society to do more things on their agenda — without the public scrutiny they had before. It seems like this is [Anderson and the society’s] kingdom and palace, and they want to see how much they can show it off.

“But the bottom line is that with the cold, windy, and wet climate at the zoo, it’s the wrong city. It’s the wrong location. Animals who aren’t used to handling ocean climate have to handle it day in and day out. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a zoo here. The zoo society was supposed to do all this great stuff. But as far as zoos go, this one still sucks.”

Bob Porterfield contributed to this story.

Bye bye, mai tai: Trader Vic’s no more

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January 8, 2008

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Alas, along with the dispiriting news that people keep getting shot and jumped outside nightclubs, that the police are pushing to “more directly” regulate bars and clubs, and that perennial underground jam palace the Gingerbread Warehouse finally got busted on New Year’s Eve, comes this awful fact of 2008: The San Francisco branch (the original) of Trader Vic’s is no more.

Trader Vic: Rolling in his rum-soaked grave?

The bar-cum-restaurant — a 2006 Best of the Bay winner — had opened in fancier digs (where legendary resto Stars once was) after relocating from the spot where Le Colonial is now, after residing there for 12-odd years. Trader Vic’s is now an international chain, so you can still hit up one of those giant cocktails in a bowl to share with friends in Shanghai, but it was built on the reputation of amazing local Victor J. “Trader Vic” Bergeron, who invented the mai tai. No reason has been forthcoming about the closure.

I really liked their space! What will they do with all those antique dugouts hanging from the ceiling?

Oh well, bottoms up. (Also closed in recent weeks: the Washington Square Bar & Grill and the delicious Patisserie on 18th Street. )

Sonic Reducer Overage: Saigon, Hiss Golden Messenger, Chris Brown

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December 28, 2007

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All the shows that didn’t make print – but should have!

SAIGON
The Brooklyn rapper makes his SF debut, after doing seven hard years behind bars. Apparently he had a lot of hours to hone his rhyming skills, and after founding a nonprofit to help inner-city kids whose parents are incarcerated, he hooked up by chance with Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse), who gave him a hand with production. After garnering some notoriety with his mix tapes, collaborations with Jay-Z, and appearances on Entourage, Saigon hopes to hit it big with his debut, The Greatest Story Every Told (Fort Knocks), which he unveils tonight. With DJ Big Von. Fri/28, 9 p.m., $15. Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. (415) 820-9669.

hissgoldenmessenger sml.bmp

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER
How to describe Hiss Golden Messenger? They’re a little classic rock, a wee bit free-form jazz, a tad dissonant, a teensy droning, with a dab of flute-folk, a dash of freak jazz. Oh, heck, just see ’em for yourself! MC Taylor, late of Court and Spark, is back in town from his studies in the south, and any number of bandmates – including Scott Hirsch, John Hofer, Patrick Main, Ryan Bishop, Greg Wiz, Pink Nasty, Chris Sipe, Matt Cunitz, Megumi Stohs, Tom Griesser, and Tim Bluhm will materialize. Then all will be golden, for sure. Also check opener Banana, once of the Youngbloods. With Parson Red Heads and Michael Talbott. Sat/29, 9:30 p.m., $8. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923.

CHRIS BROWN
The Grammy crowd was impressed with the heartthrob’s spry moves. Dude be limber – and there’s no denying the smorgasbord of chart sensations assembled for this tour. With Bow Wow, Soulja Boy, Sean Kingston, Shop Boyz, and Lil Mama. Sat/29, 7:30 p.m., $40-$80. Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl. (510) 569-2121.

Miette Confiserie

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December 27, 2007

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REVIEW To the casual consumer the difference between a genuine candy store and the checkout aisle at Walgreens is a small one. For others, however, the sweets palate is discriminatory indeed and will only be satisfied by the very best. Both can find a home at Miette Confiserie.

Walking into the store is like walking into a childhood fantasy. There are trees made of gumdrops, huge jars full of brightly colored treats of all types, and even a cotton candy machine. The staff are as sweet as the wares, and the prices for bulk candy are more than reasonable if you don’t insist on stuffing yourself diabetic. Some of the chocolate bars are as expensive as $30, but they’ve come halfway around the world and are pretty big. On the other end of the financial spectrum, there are individual bite-size treats like caramels and torrone for as little as 25¢ a morsel.

Most important, there’s a wall dedicated entirely to black licorice, which is kind of like the zany, crystal-gazing aunt of the candy family — she smells good, but nobody can quite gather the courage to talk to her, because she looks a little intimidating. Miette, however, manages to demystify black licorice, making it accessible — desirable, even, after you’ve scarfed down a few free samples.

No doubt about it, Miette accomplishes its goal of making candy even more fun than it inherently is. Willy Wonka, watch out.

MIETTE CONFISERIE Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. 449 Octavia, SF. (415) 626-6221, www.miette.com

Nickie’s

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December 26, 2007

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Cooking styles have their seasons, just as nature does, and lately there has been a delicate springtime for restaurants serving Louisiana-style food. By this I mean Cajun and creole, a pair of slippery terms that are almost always mentioned together but, despite an implication of fungibility, don’t mean quite the same thing. Cajuns were French speakers who in the 18th century left northeastern Canada and drifted down the Mississippi Valley to the bayou country south and west of New Orleans, where they established a rural and isolated culture that persists to this day. Creoles, by contrast, were citified types who traced their origins directly to Europe; New Orleans was their capital and remains their symbol.

These distinctions, fiercely policed by the interested parties, carry a diminished and blurred charge here in our polyglot land of blurred distinctions. If you see crawfish étouffée (a classic Cajun dish) on a menu, you’re likely to see jambalaya and gumbo too, with beignets (the sophisticated little holeless doughnuts) for dessert. And where would you be looking at such menus? Possibly at such old-timers as Cajun Pacific or the Elite Café, or at such newcomers as Farmerbrown and Brenda’s, whose openings have helped fill the void left by the departures some years ago of Jessie’s (on Folsom Street) and Alcatraces (on 24th Street).

Amid all of these comings and goings and endurings, the question of convincingness has never quite dissipated. A friend with Cajun roots scoffs at the Bay Area’s Louisiana-style restaurants, but it’s likely he hasn’t yet been to Nickie’s, which serves a jambalaya (among other Cajun-tilting treats) that can fairly be described as incendiary, in not the likeliest setting: a remade pub with sports-bar overtones on one of the sketchier blocks of lower Haight Street.

Haight east of Divisadero these days bears some resemblance to the Valencia Street of 15 years ago. The sense of stratification is vertiginous; at the corner of Steiner stands RNM, a clubby restaurant of voluptuous urbanity, but take a few steps east and you are passing badly lit Laundromats, a "low cost" butcher shop, and the occasional pedestrian mumbling soliloquies to a shopping cart in the middle of the street. Then you see a large N glowing green in the night, and you step inside and order a Stella Artois on tap — Nickie’s offers 13 varieties of draft beer, plus pear cider, beer in bottles, and mixed drinks and wine — while scanning several flat-panel windows into the wide world of sports. And you are hungry.

There is no connection I know of between sports bars and Cajun-creole food, but a pub is a pub and should have at least some pub food, sports screens or no, and Nickie’s does. If fish-and-chips is the staple dish of English pubs, then the burger has to be the staple of ours. Nickie’s version ($11) is a triple threat: a troika of little burgers on little egg-washed buns, each with a different topping. The avocado and cheddar edition didn’t quite work for me (clash of creamy yet assertive personalities), but Swiss cheese went well enough with mushroom, and the blue cheese–and–bacon combination was intense.

As for the accompanying fries: they were good with ketchup but even better dipped into the spicy aioli left over from our rapid devouring of the shrimp cakes ($8), lightly crisped like any good fritter and insinuatingly lumpy with crustacean meat. You can get coleslaw instead of fries, but really, who has a burger — let alone three burgers — with slaw instead of fries? And what would you do then with your leftover aioli? Stick your finger in it? Who, me?

We’d ordered mac and cheese ($6.50) as a sort of shareable starter, and it might have held its own if it had appeared as the opening act, ahead of the jambalaya. Instead it turned up in the same armful of plates as that formidable dish and ended up being overwhelmed by it. (Service is attentive enough, if not exactly polished.) But there was no dishonor here, since the jambalaya ($10) left us gasping with pleasure. The dish was studded with peeled shrimp and knuckles of seriously spicy andouille sausage, and the low volcano of rice, cooked with tomatoes and green bell peppers, had been infused with enough cayenne to be spicy-hot in its own right.

In keeping with the complex, squabbling-siblings narrative of Cajun and creole, there are Cajun and creole interpretations of jambalaya. The latter (and perhaps the original) kind includes tomatoes and is accordingly reddish, while the former is tomatoless and acquires its brown color from the initial searing of meat in the pan. Either way, jambalaya is a New World descendant of paella and, like its close relation gumbo (a child of bouillabaisse), reflects the complex play of influences — French, Spanish, Caribbean, African — that produced the well-seasoned cultural stew of New Orleans and South Louisiana.

I would add Irish to that list if there were (but there isn’t) any historical warrant for doing so, since Nickie’s feels somehow Irish, and to be served excellent Cajun and creole food, along with a foamy glass of draft Guinness, by a server with an Irish accent in a pub on Haight Street in San Francisco is one of life’s delightful little paradoxes. Paradox is the spice of life — let’s get that into our book of quotations, truisms, aphorisms for all occasions, and words to live by. *

NICKIE’S

Mon.–Fri., 4 p.m.–2 a.m.; Sat.–Sun., noon–2 a.m.

466 Haight, SF

(415) 255-0300

www.nickies.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Enjoy your corn bread

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December 18, 2007

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO "You know, I like to sit around in my hotel room after the show in my bra and panties and say to somebody, ‘Get me a Rémy Martin with a water back, goddamn it! Thank you.’ I know they like it, and I do too."

OK, I wish my life were like that — I’m allergic to cheap cognac — but holy crap. Has it really been two decades since intricately striking comedienneuse Sandra Bernhard, who snarkily uttered the words above, tickled homos pink and sent confounded heteros down the Stoney End with her "Without You I’m Nothing" tour? Lorf, my mints are dusty. Somebody hand me a tambourine! Come back, come back to the Five and Dime, Barbra Streisand, Barbra Streisand!

Wow. That was really gay, even for moi. Somebody hang me in Saudi Arabia.

Slutting it up with a crooked-toothed Madonna, slapping down Roseanne’s sloppy joes, grouching through Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird — this is all but winceworthy water under the bridge of the fierce-at-52 Ms. Sandra’s exquisite, seemingly unrestructured nose. And who could ever forget her immortal early ’90s safe-sex rap "Wanna touch my pussy, wanna taste my jam? / Gotta be usin’ a dental dam." Not me, that’s who.

Lucky for us all, Sandra’s planning a 20th anniversary tour of "Without You I’m Nothing" next year, but until then she’s wetting our whistles with a New Year’s Eve extravaganza at the Castro Theatre. She rang me up for a quick chat about the glory of her upcoming appearance.

SANDRA BERNHARD Darling! How are you?

SFBG Gurl, I’m hungover as usual — and George W. Bush is totally fucking up the global climate summit in Bali right now. I’m frantically fast-forwarding myself into 2009.

SB Don’t I know it, child. I watched the Democratic debate the other day, and I was weeping. I cannot wait for any one of them to win. Meanwhile I’m just keeping myself busy, spending time with my family [partner Sara and nine-year-old daughter Cicely], and basking in quiet limelight.

SFBG At the end of this month you’re doing two nights in Atlanta and then immediately flying to San Francisco on New Year’s Eve. I noticed on your holiday gift wish list you’ve asked for a lot of protein bars, cinnamon gum, and organic cosmetics. Is that how you stay so fresh?

SB I’ve also got a world music album and new film, See You in September, coming out next year. You know, it looks like I’m doing a lot, but really I do a show or two, take a day off to center myself, and get back out there, ready for more. I can’t wait to be in San Francisco — such a fun city, full of amazing people.

SFBG You were here in November to judge the Miss Trannyshack Pageant. I bet you got a lot of wig in your teeth that night.

SB It was a wild ride that seemed like it would never end.

SFBG So what can we expect at your New Year’s show? "Everything Bad Is Beautiful" with a balloon drop?

SB Are you kidding? People these days can barely sit still for 20 minutes, let alone watch a whole show on New Year’s Eve. I’m planning a kind of variety spectacular. Video clips, some stand-up, a bunch of songs.

SFBG Your art has always been about tearing down the whole idea of celebrity. It’s like you were foretelling our current moment when you said, "To be superfamous you need to act like a total freak."

SB It’s so true! I think in this country we’ve just given up. We’re burying our heads in whatever fucked-up, methed-up, Britney–Paris–Paula Abdul disasters are spoon-fed to us. I mean, I tear those girls apart in my shows, but even doing that is giving them more dimensions than they actually deserve.

SFBG Most of my readers are total fashion whores. You always look so together. Who are you wearing lately?

SB Zac Posen, Marc Jacobs, Juicy Couture, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, and I love this Israeli designer named Nili Lotan. It’s a mix. But you’ve gotta watch out — there’s too much cheap knockoff shit out there.

SFBG You’ve been such an inspiration to most of the dykes I know.

SB I love young gay women — they’ve caused a revolution. They’re more free with their money. They’re jaunty. I have this story I tell where I went to lunch with this older friend. The waiter asked if she wanted more corn bread, and she was, like, "Sure!" Then she turned to me and whispered triumphantly, "It’s free." And I was, like, why don’t you just pay for the damn corn bread if you like it so much? Just pay for it and enjoy it. That’s my message to the world: enjoy your corn bread. *

SANDRA BERNHARD

Dec. 31, 11 p.m., $35–<\d>$100

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

The art of the Eagle men’s room: “Walls of Glory”‘s one-night stand

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December 14, 2007

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A portrait of Queen Elizabeth by Christina Empedocles was stolen from its perch over a toilet just before the bar opened for the show.

By Stacy Martin

For one night only, the three bathrooms at one of San Francisco’s all-time favorite leather bars were multipurposed into mini-fine-art galleries. “Walls of Glory,” a temporary, site-specific installation at the Eagle Tavern debuted at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 12, and closed that same night at 10. Curated by California College of the Arts graduate student Luke Butler, the show included works by 18 artists.

Butler’s idea for the event came from his desire to stage an exhibition in an undesirable location, a place that’s the complete opposite of a gallery and its white, pristine walls. He also wanted to bring artworks to a place everyone eventually has to go to, and one of the great equalizers of humanity is, indeed, the toilet.

After much convincing, skeptical Eagle bartender Doug agreed to let Butler stage the event, though the show was kept to its brief viewing hours due to potential environmental hazards. But some work was designed to handle the rough environment.

Muddy waters: Danny Keith showed paintings of dudes getting down and dirty.

Take Erik Scollon’s series of tiny porcelain figurines of nude men lewdly posing in the urinals, all begging to be pissed on – and pissed on they were. Jason Kalogiros’s sneaky and rusty tin tea box sat on a shelf above another urinal, with its image of King Edward sporting a black bar of tape over the monarch’s eyes. The object is actually a pinhole camera, and removing the tape lets Edward get a peek and take an image of the visitors to the loo.

Danny Keith’s paintings of guys wrestling in the mud shared stall-wall space with Travis Meinolf’s homey embroidered motto piece, while a photograph by Larry Sultan adorned one wall across from a sink sporting Elisheva Biernoff’s specially molded hand soap in the shape of a nude male reclining on a bed.

One unfortunate consequence of this fun, but risky installation came just an hour or so before the official opening time when a painting of Queen Elizabeth hung over one of the toilets was stolen. The artist Christina Empedocles, realizing that the show must go on, quickly fashioned a response piece for the thief. She embroidered “Hello Teeny” in pink thread onto black fabric and hung it in place of the missing work. Works by Butler, James Gobel, Erin Allen, Jordan Kantor, Keith Boadewee, Jason Hanasik, John Jenkins, Brian Murphy, Jessica Rosen, Patrick Hillman, and Guardian critic Glen Helfand rounded out the show.

For his next curatorial adventure, Butler is hoping to flip the environment from the masculine to the feminine – perhaps creating a new installation in one of the city’s public women’s restrooms.

Glen Helfand introduced a book installation to the Eagle Tavern men’s room; Jason Kalogiros, a King Edward tobacco/tea can-cum-pin-hole camera. Curator Luke Butler presented collages of nude men with presidential heads – the Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon noggins were notable – lounging in natural settings.

Merry Fucking Xmas!

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December 14, 2007

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Photo of last year’s SantaCon by Lane Hartwell

By Iris Tablas-Mejia
It’s that time of year again! Dust off your red and white apparel ‘cause a fleet of debauched Santas will be running amok through San Francisco again on Saturday, Dec. 15, spreading their unconventional holiday cheer to bars, city landmarks, jaded locals, and unsuspecting tourists starting at 10 a.m. at the Pier 39 carousel.

Since Santacon’s creation by the Cachophony Society in 1994, cities across the nation have adopted San Francisco’s merry tradition, including Miami, Nashville, Portland, and Madison, WI, to name a few. Countries such as Germany, Thailand, Sweden, and Cambodia have also organized their own Santarchy invasions. According to Michael Michael of the San Francisco Cacophony Society—a group that has been involved with other mass events such as the Brides of March, the Urban Iditarod, and the Salmon Run during Bay to Breakers—Santacon is especially popular in Japan.

“The popularity of Santacon in foreign countries has a lot to do with the extent that American culture and its icons have spread beyond our borders,” explained Michael in an email.

Santacon appears to be as synonymous with the holiday season in San Francisco as Christmas itself, but don’t call it a movement. “That’s what you do in the bathroom,” reads the website dedicated to the non-movement, Santarchy.com.

The itinerary for this year’s Santacon is a closely guarded secret, but late arrivers can sign up for updates on the progress via text message. However, the Santarchy website does hint at its plan to “deflower virgin territory.” Last year, the jolly ol’ St. Nicks and Nickettes made an impromptu appearance at a wedding in North Beach, so there’s no telling what the Santas will get into this time around.

Year in Music: Bling

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December 12, 2007

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

There’s no getting around it: for me, 2007 was the year of the vibes, case closed. But before anyone gets the wrong idea and paints me as a hacky sack–thwacking trustafarian slathered in sandalwood oil and picking chunks of crusted hummus from my beard, let me qualify: those ain’t the kind of vibes I’m a-grooving on. Nah, we’re talking vibraphones here. You know, aluminum bars, mallets, the whole bit, just like Lionel Hampton, Milt Jackson, and Cal Tjader used to rock. And while we’re at it, let’s throw in xylophones, glockenspiels, and marimbas too. Basically, if you hit it with a couple of sticks and it chimes out a sunny-day "ping," "bling," "blong," or "pong" in response, you’ve got my undivided attention. I’m a hopeless sucker for percussion with pitch, and this year has heaped a veritable bounty of warm, mellow tones into my headphones.

Oh, the twinkles and sparkles of the ceaselessly charming, thrillingly cheeky Gruff Rhys. The title track of the Super Furry Animals vocalist’s sophomore release, Candylion (Team Love), rolls along like an ice cream van from a subversive children’s television show, thanks to its misleadingly bright, singsong xylophone patterns, trilling away while Rhys plays the part of the medicated host, informing the kiddies, "Dreams can come true. Nightmares can also." Delicious! Then there’s the Brunettes. The Kiwi duo lay down a mighty double assault of lush glock action on their Structure and Cosmetics (Sub Pop) with "Her Hairagami Set" and "Credit Card Mail Order." The former picks up the mallets to plunk down an OMD-inspired round of ’80s romanticism, while the latter evokes images of poodle skirts and beehives with a glock melody beamed down from Buddy Holly.

How about Midnight Movies, whose glorious, Mazzy Star–like "Ribbons" billows and whirls heavenward with its elegiac xylophone line? The Barbarella-isms of Dean and Britta’s Back Numbers (Zoë) just wouldn’t be the same without the orbit-seeking wooziness of those space-jazz vibraphones. And where would I be without Welsh xylophone abusers Los Campesinos!, whose breathless pummeling of the metal bars on "You! Me! Dancing!" approaches levels of rapture? Finally, I bow to my icon as I revel once more in the mesmerizing marimba rumbles of Siouxsie’s captivating solo debut, Mantaray (Universal). Honestly, what could possibly beat a rhythm that’s also hummable? Good vibes are flowing, indeed.

TOP 10 ALBUMS

•<0x0007>The National, Boxer (Beggars Banquet)

•<0x0007>Beirut, The Flying Club Cup (Ba Da Bing)

•<0x0007>Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (Merge)

•<0x0007>Blonde Redhead, 23 (4AD)

•<0x0007>Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-)

•<0x0007>Bat for Lashes, Fur and Gold (Echo/Caroline)

•<0x0007>Grinderman, Grinderman (Anti-)

•<0x0007>Celebration, The Modern Tribe (4AD)

•<\!s><0x0007>Jens Lekman, Night Falls on Kortedala (Secretly Canadian)

•<\!s><0x0007>Gruff Rhys, Candylion (Team Love)

Year in Music: Grievous angel

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December 12, 2007

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An archival recording can assume many forms, contexts, meanings. This year saw the reissue of an album unappreciated in its time (Jim Ford’s The Sounds of Our Time [Bear Family]), the compilation of genre-bound obscurities (Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series), the live performance (Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. 1 [Amoeba]), the stripped acoustic set (Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 [Reprise]), the radio sessions (Judee Sill’s Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 [Water]), the reconstructed unfinished work (John Phillips’s Jack of Diamonds [Varese Sarabande]), the singles collection (Vashti Bunyan’s Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964–1967 [FatCat/Dicristina]), and, perhaps closest to the bone, the fabled home recording.

Of course, some vocalists bend these categories by the nature of their performance style. This is certainly the case with Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), a double CD documenting a lovely set by Karen Dalton at a Colorado coffeehouse in 1962. It might as well be a home recording for the intimacy of the performance space — owner Joe Loop explains in the liner notes that his club held only 50 — and the entrancing, private nature of Dalton’s folk arrangements. Such a record is notable for a performer as studio-phobic as Dalton: she only recorded two albums in her lifetime (1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best [Koch] and 1971’s In My Own Time [Light in the Attic]), and rumor has it the takes for her debut were captured on the sly, when she didn’t know the tape was rolling.

All of this would be mere intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that Dalton was one of the major talents of the first folk revival, though mostly unappreciated in her own time. She died in 1993 after a bitter struggle with drugs and alcohol. Cotton Eyed Joe is educational in contextualizing this mystery voice in terms of the coffeehouse circuit, but any such historiography quickly fades when faced with her strange, time-stopping interpretations of traditionals and tunes by the likes of Ray Charles, Woody Guthrie, and Fred Neil. The voice shakes with unresolve, surrounding you and then disappearing before you can pin it down, buckling with some unknowable duress, slipping into untold dimensions.

It only takes a few bars of Dalton’s possession of Charles’s "It’s Alright" to cast the spell. Her minimal 12-string guitar work drags on the tune, her voice searching the depths of the verse for a smoldering, emotional core. Elsewhere Dalton runs through the songs she would record for her studio albums, and it’s bracing to think how long she lived with these ballads. Forty-five years later, we hear a unique act of disembodiment, a self-eulogizing worthy of critic Greil Marcus’s illustrious "Invisible Republic."

Each glimpse deepens the appeal of so many other performers from that era, and it’s tempting to see these collections as filling a specific niche in today’s music market: a hunger for mystery, substance, and story in the face of a downloader’s paradise. As more music is rendered instantly accessible, many of us wish to burrow further into the secret histories of rock, folk, and soul. We sift for treasure, perhaps wondering if the Internet isn’t inherently anathematic to the idea of discovering forgotten greatness. Such recoveries can and will proliferate online, but ground must first be broken elsewhere — in a magazine or a basement, among audio tapes or old notebooks. Performers and promoters are becoming increasingly canny in using the Web to deliver icons and bylines, but it takes a set like Cotton Eyed Joe to make the singer a saint. *

TOP 10

•Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks), and Animal Collective at the Fillmore on Sept. 17

•Jim Ford, The Sounds of Our Time (Bear Family)

•Jana Hunter, There’s No Home (Gnomonsong)

•Karen Dalton, Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), and Judee Sill, Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 (Water)

•Entrance at the Ben Lomand Indian Summer Music Festival on Sept. 1 and at the Cafe du Nord on Nov. 18

•The Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans)

•Lightning Bolt at LoBot Gallery on April 9

•Michael Hurley at the Cafe du Nord on April 18

•Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise)

•Little Wings, Soft Pow’r (Rad)

Year in Music: Sub obsession

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December 12, 2007

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When listeners go mad for a track they hear on London’s dubstep pirate radio station Rinse FM, the DJ quickly backspins the vinyl or CD turntable and says, "All right, from the edge!" It’s an apt metaphor for music that has San Franciscans like myself clinging to bass bins and feverishly tracking the music’s forward march from South London across the globe.

Dubstep was 2007’s most fun and relevant electronic music form. The sound encompasses our war-weary planet’s apocalyptic throb, with the promise of technology’s tones twinkling in the distance. It welds dub reggae’s weighty bass with UK garage’s insistent rhythmic pulse and, like a massive black hole, draws in techno, grime, industrial, drum ‘n’ bass, and other electronic subgenres.

This year, seven years after its gritty South London birth, dubstep music was everywhere in the Bay Area, from small bars like Underground SF to multiple Burning Man camps. Parties like Grime City, Narco Hz, Brap Dem, and Full Melt drove the music, while promoters like SureFire booked big out-of-town acts. Brit expat Emcee Child ruled the mic with Axiom and Audio Angel contributing vocal vibes, and DJs like SamSupa!, Djunya, Ripple, Cyan, Subtek, Kozee, Jus Wan, and Kid Kameleon sorted the platters.

So why dubstep, and why now? Well, house, techno, hip-hop, and mashups have mined familiar, even worn, territory for years, addled by heaps of cocaine and mediocre productions. Meanwhile, innovation is dubstep’s main component: London’s Benga dropped electro-influenced steppers, local artist Juju gave us dub-fueled tunes, Skream issued acidy tracks, and new names like Elemental offered glitchy breaks as dubsteppers broke all the rules. This inspired a clutch of devoted SF enthusiasts to launch a full-scale takeover, with club nights, legal and pirate radio shows, and labels and local producers getting international acclaim. SF is now respected internationally as America’s dubstep ground zero.

The good news: this scene is more down-to-earth than the city’s notoriously cliquey drum ‘n’ bass crews were in their mid-’90s prime. The first time you go to a dubstep party you’re more apt to be handed a shot than shot down as a newbie. And remember: when you hear a sick dubplate rinsed out there, don’t forget to put five fingers in the air and shout, "From the edge!"

TOP 10 FROM DJ TOMAS, A.K.A. DUB I.D. DUBSTEP

1. Various artists, Hotflush Presents: Space and Time (Hotflush)

2. The Bug featuring Killa P and Flow Dan, "Skeng" (Hyperdub)

3. N-Type’s Sunday radio show, Rinse FM

4. Benga, "The Invasion" (Big Apple)

5. SamSupa!, Fallinginto DJ mix

6. Cotti and Clue Kid, "The Legacy" (–30)

7. Burial, Untrue (Hyperdub)

8. Babylon System, "Loaded" (Argon)

9. Coki, "Spongebob" (DMZ)

10. Skream, "Skreamizm Vol. 4" (Tempa)

Santarchy’s on its way, jingle jingle

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December 11, 2007

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Don’t freak out if you missed Folsom this summer, or if you forgot to pop into the Mission for Cinco De Mayo, or couldn’t make it Pride or whatever. This is San Francisco, remember? The sun may be gone, but the gratuitous rallies ain’t stopping anytime soon. If anything, winter means it’s time to get extra fucked-up and crazy, which is what all the freaks and burner kids will be doing at the 13th annual SantaCon Convention.

Here’s the deal. As night begins to fall on December 15th, thousands of filthy and depraved Santa Clauses will be finishing up their alcohol-fueled photo sessions, closing their tabs at dive-bars, calling up their hoes, and collectively stumbling toward Pier 39. By 5:45 chaos will be in full effect as the Santas begin marching down the Embarcadero toward Union Square. Expect a lot of slutty Mrs Clauses, drunk elves, pissed off holiday shoppers, and the usual bunch of kooky naked dudes. It’s gonna be dangerous. It’s gonna be dirty. It’s gonna be absolute Santarchy!

Legends of the follicle

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December 5, 2007

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TRIPLE FEATURE It may be hard to fathom now, but Burt Reynolds was probably the biggest movie star of the 1970s. Other actors of his generation have gained more prestige, made fewer flops, or carried above-the-title status to the grave or today (like Robert Redford, who arguably has zero marquee value left). Reynolds put up a feeble fight as his career ebbed into TV shows, supporting roles, and self-parody. But he had many hits, both high- and lowbrow. He was the first since Bing Crosby to be the top box office star five years in a row. More, he exuded the defining territorial scent of Me Decade masculinity: wearing open wide-lapel shirts with an exposed medallion, smelling of Jovan Sex Appeal ("a provocative blend of exotic spices and smoldering woods interwoven with animal musk tones"), and equally at ease ogling the new secretary, prowling singles bars, and being the complete angler … in a hot tub, preferably.

This supremely confident archetype sported the au naturel mossy mounds of an athletically fit chest. (Later Reynolds became a notorious patron of the topside kind of rug.) He wasn’t "hairy" — he was hirsute, virile. His swagger might’ve evaporated like Samson’s had that pelt — or the manly ‘stache typically hovering above it — been shorn.

Billed as "Three Moustache Rides with Burt Reynolds," Midnites for Maniacs’ Castro Theatre salute presents the star in the very prime of his beef. Two artifacts on the triple bill must be counted among Burt’s greatest misses — one is practically a lost film — while the last was indeed his single greatest hit. But they’re all Burtalicious.

A college football star whose pro prospects ended with a knee injury, Reynolds was discovered onstage in New York, reached Hollywood in 1959, and spent subsequent years doing episodic TV and B movies. He seemed stuck in the second tier until cast as the most defensively capable of four suburban guys facing extreme redneck peril in 1972’s Deliverance. That did it. Even in a harrowingly unpleasant movie, Reynolds oozed charisma. Such cock-of-the-walk confidence led him to pose nude (hand covering genitals) that year in Cosmopolitan. He later complained this particular career move had typed him as a sex symbol who couldn’t be taken seriously. But Burt Reynolds was always first among people not taking Burt Reynolds seriously.

The public liked best the amused wise guy of talk show appearances, particularly when he was running from–slash–smirking at the law in action comedies ideal for the drive-in circuit. His biggest (if not best) was 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, Midnites for Maniacs’ midnight show. Not far removed is the program’s middle feature, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, a felicitous pairing with Dolly Parton that stalled in the transfer from the Broadway stage.

But Reynolds didn’t want to be forever moonshinin’ and doggin’ the sheriff. He wanted to be suave and elegant, like his idol Cary Grant. Thus he dove into At Long Last Love, a film so excoriated in 1975 that it’s never been released on VHS or DVD. This Castro showing might well be its first United States projection since the original run. Love is a throwback to giddy, art deco 1930s musicals. Unwisely, it had Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, and others not known for their song and dance skills performing vintage Cole Porter tunes live on set.

A gorgeous-looking soufflé that failed to rise, the film met with complete commercial and critical rejection. Hollywood gloated, director Peter Bogdanovich having impressed too many as an arrogant arriviste foisting a "talentless" model-actress girlfriend on the public. (Though Shepherd’s career would ultimately recover better than his.) Still, it has charms — including Reynolds, who makes musical amateurism seem a wry in-joke.

Always haphazard in picking projects (he reportedly turned down James Bond, Die Hard, Terms of Endearment, and Star Wars), Reynolds gradually eroded his stardom. Despite a prestige boost from Boogie Nights (which he thought dreadful until it started getting raves), he’s continued to take work whenever, wherever. He’s now 71 years old, a trooper who can’t or won’t quit, though his odds of ending on a grace note grow remote. He certainly deserves better than Cloud 9, one of eight acting jobs he took last year alone that no one noticed. He has the starring role: coach to an all-stripper volleyball team. Sigh. If he understood that he remains well loved, would he be choosier? Unlikely. The Reynolds archetype is an all-American winner who knowingly pratfalls into loserdom, winking en route. That fallen-jock-angel persona remains sexy. He minted it.

THREE MOUSTACHE RIDES WITH BURT REYNOLDS

Fri/7 (At Long Last Love, 7:30 p.m.; The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, 9:45 p.m.; Smokey and the Bandit, midnight), $10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

My dinner with B-Legit

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December 5, 2007

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I meet B-Legit in Concord for lunch at the Elephant Bar, an appropriately massive venue for a rapper of his stature and talents. With three albums by the Click — a group including his cousins E-40, D-Shot, and Suga T — and five solos under his belt, B-La hardly needs an introduction. Along with Too $hort, the Click started the Bay’s independent hip-hop scene, beginning with their 1989 12-inch under the name MVP. They soon formed a label, Sick Wid It Records, and B-La regales me with tales of their early hustles, like sneaking their records into music stores, which soon ordered copies after fans kept bringing the uninventoried items to the counter.

When Sick Wid It snagged a distribution deal with Jive in 1994, the latter rereleased B-La’s debut, Trying to Make a Buck, which had moved some 100,000 copies independently. With Jive behind him, the rapper released his best-known album, The Hemp Museum (1996), including the nonsingle hit "City to City," which still receives airplay on KMEL, 106.1 FM. When Jive started prioritizing pop groups like N’Sync, however, the man born Brandt Jones found himself on the back burner until Koch Records affiliate In the Paint bought his contract and released the already recorded Hempin’ Ain’t Easy (2000). After a second disc, the underpromoted Hard to B-Legit (2002), he and Koch parted ways.

Forming his own branch of Sic Wid It, Block Movement, B-Legit released a 2005 album with that title through local powerhouse SMC. Continuing the more experimental brand of mob music begun with Hard, Block Movement may be his greatest disc to date, particularly the tracks coproduced by Bedrock and Clyde Carson.

"I sat back and let Clyde Carson direct me," the Vallejo rapper says. "He directed four songs. I was trying to switch it up.

"Unfortunately, it came out about a month before hyphy really took off," he continues. "If you weren’t hyphy, you were kinda overlooked. It wasn’t unsuccessful, but it was bad timing." Even so, as hyphy’s trendiness began petering out, artists like B-Legit retained their core audience, thus weathering the storm.

While hard at work on a follow-up, B-La has paused to release an interim disc, Throwblock Muzic (Block Movement/SMC). Like the Who’s Odds and Sods (MCA, 1974), Throwblock collects dope tracks from throughout B-La’s career that, for one reason or another, didn’t make previous full-lengths.

"This is the teaser to prep everybody for the next album," he says. "But it’s a solid album too. It’s not just old-school. We worked on it." With its remixed tunes, swapped-in new beats, and new material, Throwback has the feel of a solid LP: beats by newer producers like Young L of the Pack and Dallas artist Goldfingers make the recording contemporary, even as cuts by Mike Mosley, E-A-Ski, and CMT recall the classic mob music days. The lead single, "GAME," stems from a 2001 session with Mac Dre, albeit with new music by Troy Sanders. As Dre and B-La trade bars on the second and third verses, it’s hard not to wish Dre had lived to collaborate more with his former Sick Wid It rival for Vallejo supremacy.

With B-La’s success and the explosion of E-40 on the national scene, opportunities to re-create the Click’s old family vibe are increasingly rare, due to scheduling pressures. Under these conditions, I ask, is there any possibility of a new Click album?

"Used to be you had to be in the studio together," B-La replies. "Now you do your session, send it to someone, and they send it back to you. But the music comes out better when you vibe on the spot together.

"We want to create that magic one more time," he says, coolly peeling off a $100 bill for the lunch. "But I would want this group album to have a sincere vibe, like we used to do it."

www.myspace.com/blegitthesavage

Hotlines

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December 5, 2007

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› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Gurl, my phones have been ringing themselves right out of my brand-new Safeway paper bag purse. The pink one, the silver one, the little lavender one I usually keep tucked in my Dita Von Teese fringed mesh teddy — they’re all off the hook, jingling like sequins in daylight. Bitches are chatty — scandal for the holidays, how novel — and you know I’d rather gag on Josh Groban or jack off to the L.L. Bean winter catalogue than keep the gossip from you.

Besides the dish that a certain local magazine is paying clubs to have its "personalities" staff the door at parties (drag queens as product placement — I love it) and the rumors flying around that many long-running weekly parties are shutting down (congratulations, Miss Trannyshack 2007 Pollo Del Mar!), there’s some serious nightlife shit going down. The "not in my backyard" whiners of our gloriously gentrifying city are squawking up a storm, and the San Francisco Police Department and the Board of Supes might actually be listening.

After-hours clubs and restaurants are feeling the heat (North Beach barhoppers may have to do without their postparty slices of pizza soon, and possibly any new bars as well), some up-and-coming neighborhoods may be zoned to exclude any nightlife or "adult" establishments, and I’m even hearing that new bars with liquor license transfers are being pressured to shout "Last call!" at midnight. Say quoi???

On top of all that, violence. Several bars have been brazenly robbed of late, and most clubs are rightly reminding their patrons to stay aware of their turbulent surroundings. Yet nothing can stop the dance floor love. Be careful out there, don’t mix up your mace and your mascara, and check out some great parties — before we’re all forced to boogie softly in our bedrooms.

TURN IT ON

Folks I know and trust have been living for Love It! Wednesdays at Icon Ultra Lounge lately. And given the DJ lineups that often include some of my new faves like No Battles, the dirtybird boys, and way-too-cute Tee Cardaci, I can hardly deny them their bliss. I’ll even be partaking gladly of it Dec. 5, when San Francisco’s very own tidal wave of techno, DJ Alland Byallo, washes over the dance floor to showcase his new label, Nightlight Music. Joining him will be Berlin-via-Detroit techno nomad (technomad?) Lee Curtis, whose live set of tweaky synths, sticky bass, and lo-fi disarray will surely rock the fuzzy Kangols off the crowd. Also glowing lively: a tag team live–versus-DJ set by Nightlight stablemates Jason Short and Clint Stewart. Brutal with the millimeter, kids.

CUMBIN’ AT YA

Cumbia electro-hop? Ah si, it’s happening. And global-eared local DJs Disco Shawn and oro11, of the new label Bersa Discos, are bringing it straight up. "We both went down to Buenos Aires and discovered this crazy experimental cumbia scene," Disco Shawn recently MySpaced me. "Bedroom producers were mixing the classic Latin American sound with electro, hip-hop, dancehall…. We’re bringing this music to the other side of the equator, to unleash it on gringo nightlife." Feel the tap-tap-typhoon of the Bersa Discos boys’ awesome cumbiaton discoveries at their new monthly, Tormenta Tropical, Dec. 7 at Club Six, as well as other synced-up styles of electro Sudamericano, baile funk, and live spazzy hip-hop from the mind-blowing Official Tourist.

TIEFIN’ OUT

Surely one of the best video mashups in the cyberverse is "Tiefschwarz Is Burning" on YouTube, wherein some enterprising goofball laid UK electropop sweetness Chikinki’s "Assassinator 13 (Ruede Hegelstein Remix)" over scenes from Paris Is Burning. The hypnotic minimal techno tune, which turns out, oddly, to be the perfect soundtrack for voguing ’80s downtown queens — RIP Willie, Anji, Pepper, Venus — was taken from Teutonic duo Tiefschwarz’s Essential Mix for BBC’s Radio 1, and before this explanation gets any more complicated, just look it up and fall into a Yubehole about it, already. Better yet, check out Tiefschwarz live (they’re hot, they’re brothers — why not?), courtesy of Blasthaus at Mighty on Dec. 15. German techno soul isn’t, amazingly, oxymoronic.

NIGHTLIGHT MUSIC SHOWCASE AT LOVE IT! WEDNESDAYS

Wed/5, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Icon Ultra Lounge

1192 Folsom, SF

(415) 626-4800

www.myspace.com/loveitwednesdays

www.nightlight-music.com

TORMENTA TROPICAL

Fri/7, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $5

Dark Room, Club Six

60 Sixth St., SF

(415) 861-1221

www.clubsix1.com

www.myspace.com/bersadiscos

TIEFSCHWARZ

Dec. 15, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 762-0151

www.blasthaus.com

www.tiefschwartz.net

Sleep tight

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December 5, 2007

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am newly married and have a great, fulfilling sex life with my husband. A while ago, I told him that I’m really turned on by the thought of him rousing me out of sleep with sex. Months have passed since I told him my fantasy, and, thinking he just wasn’t interested, I recently asked him why he hadn’t tried it yet. His response was "I have, but every time I do, you mumble incoherent stuff and roll over." I’m really bummed that I don’t remember his advances, and even more bummed that my deep slumber is depriving me of potentially awesome sex! Is there anything I can do about this issue, or is this a fantasy that must remain only in the mind?

Love,

Sleepy

Dear Sleep:

I’m not sure if it’s my job to rate people’s fantasies, but hey, what the heck? Good fantasy. It just ever so gingerly starts to poke a toe into kinkier water: unconsciousness, inability to give consent, a little bit of the more wholesome sort of necrophilia — good stuff! — and yet it’s very sweet, very harmless, and very married. I give it a 9, and I’m sorry it’s been such a bust for you so far. Happily, though, you’ve hardly exhausted the possibilities. Give it here, and let’s see what we can do.

Your poor sweet husband is doing the equivalent of the would-be dom who, when the disappointed bottom complains, "You had me all tied up! You had a flogger! Why didn’t you whip me?" says, "Um, you said, ‘Please don’t!’<0x2009>" That’s why we have safe words: not so much so the top will stop as so he or she will start. The main problem, obviously, is that you have not worked out with your husband what you mean by rousing, nor have you determined just how awake you have to be in order to for him to continue his ministrations. If you’re going to push it toward my (admittedly, liberally editorialized) version above, then you hardly need be conscious at all. You’ve also apparently failed to give him explicit permission to wake you up. Which was sort of the point, wasn’t it? Your husband is simply being too considerate, and if he’s to take the role of the sort of brute who would rouse a lady from her slumbers just to satisfy his base lusts, he’d better get with the program: either he wakes you or he has his way with your somnolent self. Either way, he has to press the issue. He can’t just let you snore on! Talk about unclear on the concept. Apparently he needs express permission to pester you, so grant it and go to bed.

As I was answering this, something about it began to seem familiar, and after a while I realized I was remembering that long, deeply strange period in Alt.Sex.Column’s history (starting, I think, in 2004) when sleep sex and sleep rape simply would not go away and leave us alone. There was the guy who’d mounted his male partner in the latter’s sleep; there was the story of the woman who’d get in her car, drive to bars, and pick up strangers for sex, all in her sleep; and there was this guy who claimed he’d had accidental anal sex with his wife in her sleep and is still kind of freaking me out at several years later:

Since then I have done this again, with a growing sense of excitement. She will stir and wake up … so I always get out before she wakes. I want to do it when she’s awake but I don’t know how to tell her…. [February 2004]

He didn’t wait for my answer ("She will kill you!") before he confessed to her and then seemed a little surprised when she nearly killed him. And there was the molesting priest who had the boy sleep over repeatedly, got him drunk, took him out to bars and parties, and did who knows what to him under cover of night, then blamed it all on some sort of parasomnia. What I don’t think I ever followed up on, though, was whether those stories about sleep-driving, sleep-slutting around, and so on, were ever tied retroactively to use of Ambien and similar sleep drugs, which, it was revealed last year, can certainly have that sort of effect on the poor, hapless, really tired people who take them. If Ambien can (and it can, it can) cause people to wander down to the kitchen in the wee hours to stuff their faces, why couldn’t it make people stuff other things as well, all unawares?

None of which has anything to do with you, Nice Married Lady. You simply want to be roused by something, well, arousing. And you have every right to be, if you ask me.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Gluhwein by any other name

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December 4, 2007

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› molly@sfbg.com

It all started with my mother. Every year we’d throw a Christmas party for friends and relatives, and every year she’d put out three Crock-Pots: one for hearty stew, one for hot apple cider, and one for mulled wine. Add the puffy-painted sweatshirts Grandma made for us and a house full of people (some reluctantly) singing carols, and it was inevitable I’d forever associate these three items with the holidays. Fast-forward to my college years, when I waitressed at a German fine dining restaurant and the highlight of the cold, rainy Portland, Ore., winter was glühwein (the name of this German mulled wine means "glow wine"), and you’ve got the early seeds of what is now my full-blown fetish.

So what, exactly, is mulled wine? Depends on where you’re drinking it, but the general idea is heated red wine with sugar, spices like cinnamon and nutmeg, and often some kind of citrus fruit all cooked together. It can be sweet or spicy, incredibly strong or boiled to a near nonalcoholic state, and any shade of gorgeous crimson. And although the original version was probably invented to mask cheap or bad wine, most modern recipes use quality wines that could stand on their own.

Point being? Yum, yum, yum. Whether you call it glühwein or Swedish glogg, French vin chaud or Chilean navegado, here are some places to look for that special warm-drink alternative when you’re sick of pumpkin lattes and you just can’t handle one more hot buttered rum.

LEHR’S GERMAN SPECIALTIES

You can’t get glühwein here, but you can buy the spice mix so you can make it yourself — plus all of the traditional Christmas (or, as they say in Germany, Weihnachten) chocolates and candies you never knew you needed.

1581 Church, SF. (415) 282-6803

GOURMET HAUS STAUDT GIFTS AND CAFE

From schnitzels to spaetzle, this is the place for all of your German favorites — including glühwein. Buy a bottle or two year-round, or visit during the holidays for a warm glass with your lunch.

2615 Broadway, Redwood City. (650) 364-9232, www.gourmethausstaudt.com

SCHROEDER’S

Go for the glühwein, stay for the polka. But get there this month — like most places in the home country, San Francisco’s oldest German restaurant only serves this specialty during the holidays.

240 Front, SF. (415) 421-4778, www.schroederssf.com

KAN ZAMAN CAFÉ

It’s as un-German as you can get, but this charming Middle Eastern restaurant has all the comfort and warmth you’d expect to find in a schnitzel house — even if it comes from low lighting and cushions, not wood paneling and leather lederhosen. Plus, Kan Zaman serves carafes of warm mulled wine all year long.

1793 Haight, SF. (415) 751-9656

BISTRO 9

Kan Zaman’s cousin in the Sunset also features a heated version of vino, along with a more distinctly Mediterranean menu. But the snuggleworthy interior is just as inviting.

1224 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 753-3919, www.bistro9sf.com

CAFÉ FLORE

We all know it’s perfect for an outdoor brunch, but Café Flore also has mulled wine to warm our bellies when the weather outside is frightful.

2298 Market, SF. (415) 621-8579, cafeflore.com

Is this a comprehensive list? Oh, no. We haven’t even mentioned all of the city’s German and German-leaning restaurants, many of which are sure to serve the good, sweet, warm, red stuff this winter. Nor the myriad wine bars that may pour Polish grzane wino as a novelty item or the specialty grocery stores that stock their shelves with Hungarian forralt bor. But this list should get you started on a fetish of your own. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. *

Feed our students well

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November 27, 2007

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Not long ago a green vegetable was a rare and startling sight on a lunch tray at a San Francisco school. Carnival-style food was the standard, with corn dogs as a regular entrée, packaged apple turnovers as the "fruit" course, and fried potatoes as the staple vegetable.

School lunches have come a long way since 2003, when San Francisco Unified School District parent volunteers, staff, students, public health professionals, and other community supporters joined together to begin creating the school district’s Wellness Policy. Lunches are fresher, tastier, healthier, and leaner, and the SFUSD’s "no empty calories" policy has been a role model in the nationwide effort to improve school food.

But even after all of those changes, a high school group recently surveyed more than 2,000 of their peers and learned that students still complain that school food doesn’t taste fresh and costs too much, and some question how nutritious it is.

So a growing movement argues it’s time to take the next step: the greening of school meals. Surely a food-savvy, health-conscious, environmentally aware city like San Francisco, which is located in one of the world’s most fertile agricultural regions, should be feeding its kids fresh, local organic produce at every meal.

But there’s an obstacle, and it’s green too. Government reimbursement for a free school lunch is just $2.71, nearly half of which goes to pay for labor. Other fixed overhead eats up another large chunk, leaving just about $1 to pay for the meal itself, including 34¢ for the required milk.

No wonder it’s hard to respond to requests for fresher, healthier food and more of it. New salad bars placed in three schools as part of a pilot program address these concerns, offering students mixed greens and raw vegetables, several kinds of fresh fruit, and whole grain breads and muffins, in addition to the hot entrée. When the first salad bar was created last year at Balboa High School, the average number of students eating its cafeteria lunch every day increased 26 percent, with virtually all of the new diners low-income students.

But that $1 per meal won’t cover a salad bar at every school, which is the SFUSD’s goal. The cost of just the equipment for a salad bar — the bar itself, added refrigeration and sinks, a couple more tables — can run more than $10,000 per school, depending on how much work needs to be done to reconfigure the lunch line. Organic produce drives the meal cost higher too.

Unfortunately, the SFUSD doesn’t have that money. Because it’s currently left to the school district to provide meals, the SFUSD must require that the Student Nutrition Department budget break even or else cut into classroom funds to cover the deficit.

The good news is that thanks to grants from the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families and Mayor Gavin Newsom, salad bars are being started in 25 SFUSD schools this year, stocked with seasonal, local produce. Still, despite this additional funding, only about 25 percent of district students will have access to the salad bars. Social justice demands that every student have equal access to a healthier school meal.

Most city officials and the greater community probably aren’t even aware of the situation. It’s time to put the need to feed our children adequately on the radar of the whole community and ask officials to step in with funding to ensure that our children can eat well without sacrificing classroom resources to cover the cost of their food. The Public Education Enrichment Fund, better known as Proposition H, provides a growing pot of city money aimed at improving the schools, and part of it could be used to fund the opening of more salad bars, so more school kids can enjoy the benefits of fresh produce and whole grains.

Providing the money to put salad bars in every school would pay off in healthier kids and related positive effects. Better nutrition is linked with higher academic achievement, improved behavior, and other benefits.

Let’s become a city that commits to teaching our children well, feeding them well, and promoting a greener food system. *

Paula Jones and Caroline Grannan are members of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Sex crimes grandstanding

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November 27, 2007

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EDITORIAL Sex offenders are an easy political target. Nobody wants to be portrayed as soft on child molesters; nobody wants to defend ex-cons who are required to register their whereabouts with the police. Jessica’s Law, the state bill that bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any school or park, passed overwhelmingly in 2006, and only a few brave politicians, including San Francisco sheriff Mike Hennessey and Assemblymember Mark Leno, were willing to oppose the measure on the grounds that it’s counterproductive and unworkable.

Now Joe Alioto Veronese, a San Francisco police commissioner and candidate for State Senate, has launched an effort to force the local police to roust sex offender parolees who live in San Francisco. It’s good politics for someone who wants a high-profile campaign issue, but it’s bad law enforcement policy.

Proposition 83, which Veronese supported, imposes harsh penalties for anyone convicted of a sex crime. It also prevents all convicted offenders from living in San Francisco, since there’s not a single residential unit in the city that isn’t within 2,000 feet of a school or a park. That, of course, simply forces the problem onto other communities — and tends to send offenders to rural areas, where they lack access to services and ties to the community. By most accounts, isoutf8g ex-cons is a bad way to prevent future criminal conduct.

But there’s a loophole, and the state Bureau of Prisons has made no effort to hide it. If an ex-offender registers as transient — that is, homeless — the state can’t bust him or her for living too close to a school or a park. So some number of parolees — perhaps as many as 166 — released after committing sex crimes have returned to San Francisco and registered as transients. Some of them probably are, indeed, homeless. Some are no doubt trying to find a way to live in this city without vioutf8g Prop. 83 (and thus vioutf8g their parole, which means returning to prison).

Veronese wants the San Francisco Police Department to go out and find every one of these transients and, if they aren’t in fact homeless, arrest them for parole violation. That’s going to take a lot of police time — and is unlikely to be terribly effective.

For starters, it’s not the job of the SFPD to monitor parolees. The state’s Department of Corrections does that — and every transient parolee has to check in with his or her parole officer every single day anyway. Veronese told us he doesn’t expect the SFPD to send ex-offenders back to prison — but if they’re arrested, that’s exactly what will happen.

And for the record, as Sheriff Hennessey points out, only a very small percentage of paroled sex offenders are rearrested for sex crimes. The vast majority of child molesters — the category of criminals Prop. 83 was aimed at — are relatives of the child in question, not strangers on the street. And every one of these parolees already has to wear a GPS bracelet.

The whole effect of Veronese’s policy will be to drive further underground a population that shouldn’t be hiding in the shadows. It would encourage parolees to hide, to remove their locator bracelets, and to avoid service providers. It would divert police resources at a time when the murder rate is soaring.

It’s a bad idea that the rest of the commissioners should shoot down. And if Veronese wants to be a serious candidate for State Senate, he should start talking about real issues and leave the phony "tough-on-crime" stuff for the Republicans.

Punk Rock Karaoke

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November 21, 2007

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By Justin Juul

If the horrible song-selections and corny atmospheres found at most karaoke bars have always stopped you from jumping on stage, you might want to check out Punk Rock Karaoke. It sounds like a simple twist on a tired activity, but Punk Rock Karaoke isn’t an event; it’s the name of a band. PRK’s all-star line-up includes members of NOFX, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and Agent Orange, which would be a decent lineup if any of these particular dudes could sing. This is where you come in.

Rather than post a singer-wanted ad on Craigslist, the members of PRK have decided to say fuck it and ask their fans for help instead. It works like this: you drink until you feel comfortable in front of the crowd and then pick a song from their list of fifty classics. Drink a little more as you wait around for your name to come up, and then when it does, you can either run out the back door or bust a move on the M-I-C. Actually, that does sound a lot like regular karaoke doesn’t it? Whatever…it’s still punk, right? Right?!

Punk Rock Karaoke
December 5th @ The Uptown
1928 Telegraph, Oakland
(510) 451-8100
$13 / Doors at 9pm

Fetus frenzy

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November 20, 2007

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› culture@sfbg.com

If you live in San Francisco and are in possession of a conventional vagina, you are most likely pregnant. And if you’re not pregnant, you’re either anxious to become so or have just pinched out a baby and are looking toward closing the deal on numbers two and three before you hit 40. If none of the above applies, I, a new mother myself, give you permission to ignore that self-righteous pregnant bitch eyeing your Muni seat and openly admit the following: SF was edgier when it was just a bunch of wayward freaks in crotchless ass pants.

Now, thanks to a surge in results-oriented fucking among the white, heterosexual ruling class, this city has become overrun with decaf-latte-sipping, thousand-dollar-stroller-pushing, CFO–Noe Valley–ish, overly together supermoms who will tear you multiple assholes if you even think about stepping near their two-legged petri dish specimens. One might be tempted to label this phenomenon a baby boom. That assumption, however, is incorrect. What we are witnessing in San Francisco — and everywhere else inhabited by Gen Xers with money — is a parent boom.

In the past, parents were simply identified as people who raised children. That era, which lasted roughly 200,000 years, has ended. Parents now practice the rarified art of parenting. Parents who parent must adopt a specific parenting style — one that’s far more complex than a hairstyle and infinitely more expensive. Parenting requires ongoing investment in sleep and breast-feeding consultants, childproofing contractors, European-designed gear, six-week courses, endless manuals and magazines, and, depending on one’s sacred style, couture bedding and nursery decor that can run well over five grand. This is quite a change of direction for Generation X, to which I belong, whose members were blacking out in Cow Hollow bars and smoking out of two-foot Mission District bongs throughout the ’90s. But my generation’s escapist persona — equal parts political indifference, obsessive consumerism, hedonistic self-absorption, and Diff’rent Strokes references — did not abate or even truly evolve when we threw the birth control in the trash. It only found new life, literally.

We, the latchkey slackers who postponed being parents until our ovaries wept, are acutely aware that whatever decisions we make regarding our children are direct reflections of ourselves. It is therefore imperative to properly accessorize one’s child; only by doing so can one ensure the child is a better accessory. The right stroller, carrier, preschool waiting list, parenting philosophy, and even diaper — all denote much more than any sensible person would care to know.

THE BABY GAP

Oh, wait. I forgot to mention the babies: it appears there are many of them. Commercial sidewalks in Noe Valley, Cole Valley, Hayes Valley, and beyond buzz with kitten-eyed freshies sucking the rubberized life out of pacifiers, frazzled mommies in yoga pants and camel toes pushing behemoth, double-wide prams, nannies chatting on cell phones while small barbarians stick organic Cheerios up their noses. Top preschools are waitlisted for several years. Babysitters are harder to find than a pimple on a newborn’s butt. Is it good for San Francisco’s soul that kiddie boutiques outnumber bondage shops and Polk Street glory holes? It’s an epidemic, cry my nonparent friends, some of whom have been accosted by pompous moms and dads for accidentally bumping into strollers or smoking on the street. Ever think of denying an All-Important Holy Mother with Child your seat on the 1 California? Want to be knifed by a stay-at-home mom from precious Laurel Heights?

Funny thing is, the evidence of a baby boom is largely anecdotal. Statistics paint a very different picture. A disturbing March 2006 report by Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, "Families Struggle to Stay: Why Families Are Leaving San Francisco and What Can Be Done," reveals that we have the lowest child population of any American city. And of San Francisco’s 100,000 children, most reside in the city’s poorest districts — including traditionally working-class neighborhoods that are becoming increasingly chic. Coleman Advocates also estimates that 39,000 families with children are in need of affordable housing.

"The issue is not if there is a baby boom trend in San Francisco," Coleman Advocates’ Ingrid Gonzales e-mailed me. "The real issue is whether these [lower-income] families stay or are eventually pushed out of San Francisco because of a lack of affordable family housing or access to a quality public school education. Stats show that families leave when their children reach kindergarten age. Coleman Advocates and our families say that this is not OK — families should have a right to stay in the city they call home."

Somehow I doubt the parents buying the $1,890 Cabine infant dresser at Giggle on Chestnut Street are too worried about making rent. In fact, a May article in the New York Times reports that San Francisco is second only to Manhattan in toddlers born to wealthy white families, defined as those that pull in an average of $150,763 per year. And consider this Coleman Advocates finding: there was a 45 percent drop in the number of black families with children in San Francisco from 1990 to 2000, while around the same time 90 percent of the people moving into the city did not have children and — surprise, surprise — were mostly rich and white. This development pretty much paralleled the period of the dot-com boom. At the risk of making light of an alarming situation, is it safe to posit that the dot-com bust inspired semiemployed white professionals to buy a lot of lube?

CLASH OF THE CODDLERS

So what creates this illusion of a baby boom? Probably an uptick in showy, hyperactive parenting. Weekends at Children’s Playground in Golden Gate Park provide insight into the phenomenon. There parents can be found earnestly — one might even say aggressively — parenting. They really put their all into it ("it" being what our parents haphazardly did with us) as they push their bewildered offspring in swings, making sure to "Wheee!" with more enthusiasm than a redneck at a NASCAR rally — an apt metaphor, because this brand of parenting is a competitive sport. "How old is she? Is she standing on her own? Can she walk yet? Does she speak French, and can she crap in the can?" someone always wants to know, hungrily eyeing your baby as if she were a delicious wild Alaskan king salmon fillet.

But blessed be, developmental superiority is not the only way to make other parents feel like shit. Fleets of luxury Dutch strollers are parked around the playground’s grassy knolls, each exceeding my share of rent by $300. I’ve seen nannies pull toys from Coach and Louis Vuitton diaper bags, kids scale the jungle gym dressed in Little Marc coats, white babies in $40 organic cotton T-shirts emblazoned with a grossly ironic image of a black woman’s face.

This excess of money breeds paranoia. Even on the warmest days, Caitlin-Courtney-Penelope-Emily-Aurelia-Shiloh-Mackenzie can be observed crawling in the playground’s cool sand, fully dressed in the very best of Zutano’s and Petit Bateau’s wide-brim hats, thick socks and booties, long-sleeve shirts, and pants in order to prevent the wretched elements, formerly known as blue sky and sunshine, from attacking the child’s not-so-invisible bubble. And rest assured, many of the playground’s nannies — almost entirely middle-aged mothers and grandmothers of color — have been fingerprinted and subjected to invasive criminal background checks. Long gone are the days when parents hired any ol’ teenage stoner to watch their kids.

LAVISH AND LACK

I feel embarrassed to be here, I often think. Because I know I’m part of the problem. I didn’t come to San Francisco for the money — I was born here and spent most of my childhood in that new epicenter of ultraparenting, Noe Valley — and I don’t have a nursery, a full-size kitchen, or even a hallway in my shared one-bedroom Sunset apartment. (This is not a "poor me" moment; my lifestyle is a choice.) But I did spend $300 on a labor and newborn preparation course, during which I suffered video after video of goopy babies cannonballing forth from untamed bush. I paid a woman $200 to teach me how to breast-feed and another $50 to join a local e-mail list through which upper-crust women seek help in finding dinner party entertainment for hire and live-in au pairs. I can cite Halle Berry’s prenatal test results but no statistics from the war in Iraq. I have secretly chuckled at ugly babies. I have wanted to know if your baby can stand alone yet and why she’s so much smaller than mine. I’ve purchased nearly 20 books on pregnancy, breast-feeding, natural birth, cosleeping, infant health, starting solids, potty training, how to stay hot, and how to fix my gut.

Pediatric records indicate I was not reared by wild dogs, yet I can’t figure out how to assume the most primal of all roles — motherhood — without hitting the ATM.

In her 2007 manifesto against the $20 billion baby-to-toddler industry and the disastrous effects it has on our children, Buy, Buy Baby (Houghton Mifflin) author Susan Gregory Thomas credits Gen X’s overspending and unhealthy micromanaging to the way in which we, the products of broken homes and TVs as babysitters, were raised: "The commercialization and neglect of young people results not only in fears of abandonment and bank-breaking shopping habits in adulthood to fill the void but also in a deep, neurotic sense of attachment to, and protection of, one’s own children and home."

Gregory Thomas’s assessment strikes me as painfully true and spurs the question: what kind of people will our babies become? Will they, as older children and adults, invariably expect and demand the best, no matter the appropriateness of the circumstance? Will they be terrified of public schools and public transportation and — worse — people with a different color skin? How will they ever travel abroad, and will they condescend to people who have less? Surely the parents who buy their baby the $1,700 Moderne crib intend only to give their child the finest they can offer. Every child is worthy of that grand intention. Yet, as my friend and mother-mentor Billee Sharp pointed out, the more extravagant the gifts, the harder the parents must work to provide them, resulting in less time spent with their kids. Lavishness, in this sense, becomes empty compensation for a shortage of available love.

IT TAKES AN INTERNET?

Being a new parent is much harder than it seems. If we’re overcompensating, it’s largely because we don’t know what else to do. If it takes a village to raise a child, what happens when all you have is DSL? During my pregnancy and the first three months of my daughter’s life, my husband and I lived in relative isolation in Brooklyn, away from family and a network of close friends that could offer knowledge and day-to-day help. The books, the classes, and the breast-feeding consultant filled the gaps that real support would have provided. (I certainly had two boobs but no idea where to put them: In the baby’s mouth? Are you serious?) In the absence of genuine community, we follow the only guidelines available to us and do the best we can manage. While nothing is less appealing to me than having to be someone’s friend simply because we both piss our pants when we sneeze, artificially constructed social networks like mommy groups, daddy groups, play groups, and Yahoo e-mail groups fulfill a real need for disconnected urbanites whose families typically reside thousands of miles away.

Learning to be a parent without geographic and strong emotional links to our families, then, becomes a complicated process of untangling the skein of too much information. From the moment a woman discovers she is pregnant, she and her partner are encouraged to believe they are totally, utterly retarded when it comes to being parents. The reality-TV experts, the how-to books, the product-driven Web sites and magazines cater to a deep, unrelenting distrust of ourselves, and they have the tragic effect of obliterating whatever parenting intuition and knowledge that we, as living creatures, already have in our DNA.

My path to reclaiming motherhood began with an injured wrist. Everything I had read warned that I would roll over my child and kill her if we slept together in one bed. To prevent this tragedy, my husband and I bought a sleigh bed attachment for our bed that kept me at least a foot away from my child. Each night that I listened to her breathe without being able hold her brought an agony so intense that I became profoundly depressed. I was desperate to pull her close to my body, like every mammal mother does, like our ancestors did long before they stopped growing pubic hair on their backs. In my longing to be nearer to my child, I contorted my left wrist under my head as I slept, perhaps to stop my murderous hands from accidentally touching the person I love most. With my wrist in a splint and steroid shots in my hand, I sobbed to my mother over the phone, "I can sleep with my cats, but why not with my own child?"

The night I brought my daughter into bed marked the beginning of my departure from the fear-and-product-based mommy mainstream. Within weeks a friend turned me on to the instinctive-parenting ideas put forth in Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept (Addison Wesley, 1986), a fascinating book that details the author’s travels to Venezuela, where she studied the parenting methods of the indigenous Yequana Indians, who, remarkably, have never considered shopping for child-rearing clues on Babycenter.com. Admittedly, my and my husband’s current touchy-feely, indigenous-inspired style is a little fringe lunatic, and, as Gregory Thomas might suggest, it’s probably no coincidence that we both come from broken homes. But life-changing insights that require no investment in stylish baby gear are available to us. We only have to be willing to look.

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

One of the most affecting messages I have received about the depth of real parental love came to me in the form of a damp newspaper abandoned on the subway in New York City. Elizabeth Fitzsimons’s essay "My First Lesson in Motherhood," published in the New York Times Modern Love section this Mother’s Day, chronicles the journalist’s trip to China, where she and her husband picked up their adopted infant daughter, who, it turned out, had debilitating health defects. Fitzsimons was warned that her daughter might have Down’s syndrome, might never walk, and will likely be tethered to a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. "I knew this was my test," Fitzsimons writes, "my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head ‘No’ before [the doctors] finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. ‘She’s our daughter,’ I said. ‘We love her.’ "

Fitzsimons’s fierce, truly unconditional love for a child she did not create becomes even more striking when contextualized in these fertility and pregnancy-obsessed times. We all want our children to be healthy, to outlive us, to be content, and to exist in a safe, peaceful world. These desires are pretty basic. Clearly, though, there’s a worrisome glitch in the parent boom trend: it has nothing to do with the well-being of children who are biologically not ours. This newfound love for babies is entirely insular, concerned only with one’s genetic family, one’s own perfect, beautiful, well-fed, well-dressed child. Look inside a pregnancy or parenting magazine and you will find that most lack any semblance of social perspective as they offer tired takes on recycled, useless information: "How to lose the baby weight in three days!" "Ten tips for getting back the magic in the bed!"

But the truth is that while middle-class women squabble about whether to breast-feed or bottle-feed, 39,000 families with children in this city are in dire need of affordable homes. For every day we bicker over stay-at-home moms versus mothers who work full-time, four children in this country will die from abuse or neglect, and eight more will be killed at the hand of someone operating a gun, according to Children’s Defense Fund statistics.

The self-centeredness of Gen X parents manifests as blindness to these sad realities, and here I indict myself again. Why do I only act on behalf of my child when I have the means to do something that could help other, less fortunate children? Maybe the answer is too painful to consider. Maybe I’d rather shop for a new sling instead. *

Goldie winner — Film: Samara Halperin

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November 7, 2007

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It’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re watching the films of Samara Halperin. Take, for example, the minute-long Plastic Fantastic #1 (2006). Jaunty bleeps keep the beat as a pair of ketchup-and-mustard-bedecked hot dogs are shredded into meaty octopuses. Freed from their buns, they frolic across a checkered tablecloth and embrace atop layers of sauerkraut and relish.

All of Halperin’s works — especially the ones that use her trademark technique, stop-motion with plastic toys — convey the filmmaker’s ability to find gleeful joy in unexpected places, be it a construction site (as in 2006’s Hard Hat Required), the Wild West (1999’s Tumbleweed Town), or the homoerotic subtext of Beverly Hills, 90210 (2001’s Sorry, Brenda). Her films also reflect her love of bright colors and, especially, pop culture.

"I grew up a few blocks from where they would shoot Sesame Street," the New York City–born, now Oakland-based Halperin explains. "I’ve always had this disconnect where I didn’t really understand that television wasn’t real. I saw Snuffleupagus on the street! So from a very early age, I was deep into [pop culture]."

As a child, Halperin dreamed of becoming a cartoonist and later worked in ceramics. After she entered the Rhode Island School of Design, she realized filmmaking was her calling.

"I’ve always made shorts, and [in 1989] I started making films that I wanted to see that I didn’t see, like queer youth represented or really queer people represented at all," she says. "I got a lot of shit for [my queer subject matter] in the beginning. It just wasn’t fashionable yet."

Now, of course, there’s an entire TV network devoted to queer programming. Logo screened Tumbleweed Town — Halperin’s eight-minute graduate thesis project for California College of the Arts — when programming in response to the Brokeback Mountain renaissance. A marvel of mise-en-scène in miniature, with expressive plastic characters and a score by Corner Tour that perfectly complements the action (another characteristic of Halperin’s films: pitch-perfect musical choices), Tumbleweed Town had a genesis that was equal parts imagination and inspiration.

"I had never done animation before," Halperin recalls. "I’m not really an animation person, but I am a toy person. [The cowboy toy looked] so gay, I thought I’d find a boyfriend for him and build a world where they could be gay together. I’d just moved from Texas, where there were real, handlebar-mustachioed gay cowboys shining boots in the bars. I’m a New York Jew, and I’d never seen anything like this."

Tumbleweed Town is Halperin’s best-known work besides Sorry, Brenda, a black-and-white marvel of suggestive reediting that’s a must-see for anyone who was ever addicted to "BH Niner."

"I really loved the show," she says, inching up her pant leg to reveal a 90210 tattoo on her calf. "I always thought, ‘[Brandon and Dylan] are so gay’ — I just wanted to bring out their relationship and show people what I saw." The piece made its way into the hands of Conan O’Brien, who discussed it on the air with the Brandon Walsh.

"Jason Priestly loved it," Halperin says. "He stole the tape to show to Luke Perry, so that was the crowning glory for a fanatic such as myself."

When she’s not tuning in to new pop-culture craziness — like MTV’s "revolutionary" celebration of bisexuality, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila — Halperin teaches at Mills College and works on an array of new films: a sequel to Tumbleweed Town set in early 1980s New York City; a live-action, nonnarrative homage to her beloved Coney Island, Astroland; and a video project that pays tribute to Richard Simmons and "loving yourself, no matter what you are."

On that note, Halperin’s final thought is especially fitting: "I encourage people to make movies. It’s my personal view that the world can be changed through art."

www.steakhaus.com/samara