BART

Zero tolerance for BART cop killings

Zelda Bronstein
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27
Zero tolerance for BART cop killings

I understand how frustrated some commuters were when protesters shut down the Civic Center BART station. And you can make the argument that the protest might have alienated fewer people if it had been outside the station, or whatever. But the fact is, a man is dead because a BART cop shot him — and quite a few other people are dead because BART cops shot them, and in at least three of those cases, the shooting was unjustifiable. And the BART Board sat on its hands for almost 20 years and did nothing (until the Oscar Grant shooting was captured on video).


So I’m with the protesters on this one. It was important to make a statement, to disrupt business as usual, and to tell BART that, frankly, we’re all sick of this shit.


And now BART says it’s going to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy for protests. BART’s Linton Johnson says:


“That delay goes to the protesters. That mess, those fringe groups own it.”


I have a couple of questions: That “mess” of a police shooting — who owns that? Why are people angry (for good reason) about the BART Police suddenly “fringe groups?”


And when do we get a “zero tolerance” policy for dubious police shootings?

End the BART cover-up

Andrew Lam
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3

Ten days have passed since a BART police officer shot and killed a man at the Civic Center station — and the public still knows almost nothing about what happened. BART will only say that an officer (unnamed) shot a man who was “aggressive” and “holding a bottle and a knife.” One witness told the Bay Citizen that the man “looked like a drunk hippie” and wasn’t running or lunging toward the two officers on duty. The coroner has identified the victim as Charles Blair Hill, 45; he had no known address.

And that’s about it. BART is investigating and so is the San Francisco Police Department, but neither agency has released a single police report or any further information. BART is still withholding a security video from the station that shows part of the incident. All that either police department will say at this point is that the investigation is under way — but nobody will offer any time frame for its completion.

For an agency still reeling from the last police shooting and still trying to win some kind of public confidence in its ability to run a law-enforcement operation, this kind of stonewalling is a big mistake.

We understand that the surveillance video might influence potential witnesses and perhaps should be kept under wraps until everyone on the scene has made a statement. But how long can that take? Two weeks? Three? At a certain point, the cops will have found all the witnesses they’re going to find — and the public needs to know that there will be a reasonable time limit after which the video will be made public.

The same goes for police reports on the incident, including the statements of other witnesses — and the names of the officers involved.

BART’s spokesperson, Linton Johnson, told us he can’t release the names of the officers because state law forbids it. He says he will release the video footage as soon as the investigation is complete. When will that be? Nobody’s giving so much as a hint. Johnson says he doesn’t know because the San Francisco Police Department is the lead agency; SFPD public affairs says the only person authorized to talk about the case is Johnson at BART.

SFPD has no business giving BART the final says on this — San Francisco ought to release the information from its incident reports immediately.

We’d be more patient about this if BART didn’t have such a long, disgraceful history of cover-ups, obfuscation, and lies about police shootings. Since 1992, when the agency completely fabricated a story to justify the shooting of an 19-year-old Jerrold Hall (BART said Hall was struggling for control of the cop’s gun; evidence showed he was actually shot in the back, from a considerable distance) it’s been hard to trust anything the transit system says.

A BART cop shot and killed a naked, mentally ill man in 2001 (and tried to cover up the scandal). And of course, the 2009 Oscar Grant shooting was marked by misinformation and cover-ups.

So BART has a particular responsibility to handle this case with the greatest amount of sunshine possible. For starters, the basic police reports — the officers’ own accounts and the reports of the initial response team — ought to be public (even if the names of the officers and witnesses are redacted). And if there’s a legal issue, the BART board ought to take the initiative to ask a judge to authorize the release of at least some relevant information.

If the officer who fired on Charles Blair Hill acted properly, then there’s nothing to hide. If the officer shot too quickly, then the public needs to know that BART is aware of the problem and is going to act on it — before anyone else gets killed.

 

BART service disruptions as protesters call for transit police to be disbanded (video)

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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63

Rush hour on the BART system in downtown San Francisco was royally screwed up for several hours July 11, and for protesters who paced along station platforms chanting “No justice, no peace!” and engaging in verbal clashes with transit cops, that was the point. The group, after all, is called No Justice, No BART, and they were there to pressure the agency in the wake of a BART police shooting.

The protesters were there to call attention to the fatal July 3 shooting of Charles Hill, a man who had no permanent address. The BART passenger was gunned down roughly a minute after two transit officers responded to a call from a station agent.

Things started heating up at around 5 p.m., when protesters who had gathered at Civic Center Station, the place where the shooting occurred, moved in a procession up and down the platform, chanting. According to fliers handed out to all the participants, the plan was for groups to board and exit the train cars together.

“None of this is really a question of public opinion — nobody here is in favor of people being shot down,” an organizer said into a megaphone at the beginning of the protest. “The question is, what is it going to take to make it stop?” To cheers and applause, he said, “We’re here today to take action to stop the BART police from killing. We don’t think the BART police should exist. There’s a mobilized angry public that isn’t going to take this shit anymore.”

Here’s what happened when the group tried boarding the first train:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6axP9OO3sCc

The video was captured by Josh Wolf.

BART Deputy Police Chief Daniel Hartwig was in the thick of it all. The chaos prompted police to shut down Civic Center Station and order everyone to leave. Once a dispersal order was issued, protesters and media exited the station, and passed by a line of officers from the San Francisco Police Department that had formed on the street.

The march then proceeded down Market Street to Powell station, and many activists boarded a train there, then exited at the 16th and Mission Street Station. With police and media still trailing behind, they proceeded back downtown on foot.

A second standoff occurred around 7 p.m. at the cable car turnaround, just outside Powell Street Station, much to the bewilderment of shoppers who gathered outside The Gap and Forever 21, clutching their shopping bags. Wearing helmets and holding nightsticks ready, police stood in a line to block off Powell street, facing protesters who were congregating in the plaza.

Tensions ran high as chanting continued and people shouted at police. At one point, a young mother who held her three-year old son started shrieking at police, enraged. She said that an officer had taunted her by saying, “Bang, bang, we’ll come.”

No one was arrested while the crowd remained in the plaza, but after mostly everyone else had left, a man who had joined in the protest was taken into custody and charged with being intoxicated in public.

Earlier in the afternoon, at Civic Center Station, Laura Wolterstorff held a photograph of Hill that she had found online. “This happens often in our city, not only with BART police, but with the SFPD as well,” she said, adding that she works with people who are struggling with homelessness and mental health issues. In the case of transit cops, “Is it necessary to have a police force that carries guns?” she asked.

Another woman who joined the protest at Civic Center, who gave her name as Miriam, said flatly, “I think if he was wearing a suit, he wouldn’t have been killed.”

Details about why transit police fired at Hill three times about a minute after arriving on the scene are sketchy. While the police have justified the shooting by saying he was brandishing a knife, the agency has yet to release a surveillance video of the incident.

Editorial: End the BART coverup

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4

Ten days have passed since a BART police officer shot and killed a man at the Civic Center station — and the public still knows almost nothing about what happened. BART will only say that an officer (unnamed) shot a man who was “aggressive” and “holding a bottle and a knife.” One witness told the Bay Citizen that the man “looked like a drunk hippie” and wasn’t running or lunging toward the two officers on duty. The coroner has identified the victim as Charles Blair Hill, 45; he had no known address.

And that’s about it. BART is investigating and so is the San Francisco Police Department, but neither agency has released a single police report or any further information. BART is still withholding a security video from the station that shows part of the incident. All that either police department will say at this point is that the investigation is under way — but nobody will offer any time frame for its completion.For an agency still reeling from the last police shooting and still trying to win some kind of public confidence in its ability to run a law-enforcement operation, this kind of stonewalling is a big mistake.

We understand that the surveillance video might influence potential witnesses and perhaps should be kept under wraps until everyone on the scene has made a statement. But how long can that take? Two weeks? Three? At a certain point, the cops will have found all the witnesses they’re going to find — and the public needs to know that there will be a reasonable time limit after which the video will be made public.

The same goes for police reports on the incident, including the statements of other witnesses — and the names of the officers involved.

BART’s spokesperson, Linton Johnson, told us he can’t release the names of the officers because state law forbids it. He says he will release the video footage as soon as the investigation is complete. When will that be? Nobody’s giving so much as a hint. Johnson says he doesn’t know because the San Francisco Police Department is the lead agency; SFPD public affairs says the only person authorized to talk about the case is Johnson at BART.

SFPD has no business giving BART the final says on this — San Francisco ought to release the information from its incident reports immediately.

We’d be more patient about this if BART didn’t have such a long, disgraceful history of cover-ups, obfuscation, and lies about police shootings. Since 1992, when the agency completely fabricated a story to justify the shooting of an 19-year-old Jerrold Hall (BART said Hall was struggling for control of the cop’s gun; evidence showed he was actually shot in the back, from a considerable distance) it’s been hard to trust anything the transit system says.

A BART cop shot and killed a naked, mentally ill man in 2001 (and tried to cover up the scandal). And of course, the 2009 Oscar Grant shooting was marked by misinformation and cover-ups.

So BART has a particular responsibility to handle this case with the greatest amount of sunshine possible. For starters, the basic police reports — the officers’ own accounts and the reports of the initial response team — ought to be public (even if the names of the officers and witnesses are redacted). And if there’s a legal issue, the BART board ought to take the initiative to ask a judge to authorize the release of at least some relevant information.

If the officer who fired on Charles Blair Hill acted properly, then there’s nothing to hide. If the officer shot too quickly, then the public needs to know that BART is aware of the problem and is going to act on it — before anyone else gets killed.

The BART shooting: Fishier and fishier

Zelda Bronstein
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2
The BART shooting: Fishier and fishier

BART’s official account of the latest shooting — and the assertion that the officers acted properly — is starting to look more and more dubious.


Props to the Bay Citizen’s Zusha Elinson for getting the first real break on the case — an interview with a witness who says the man who got shot wasn’t running or lunging toward the cops, that he didn’t seem to pose an immediate threat, and that the shooting may not have been justified:


Hollero said that from her view of the incident, police officers should “absolutely not” have shot the man, who she said “just looked like a drunk hippie.”


That’s the kind of information that will be key to the investigation — was this guy just a drunk with a knife who could have been restrained without lethal force? Or was he an immediate threat to the lives of the cops?


One of the nice things about having some journalistic competition in town is that it drives reporters to go beyond the official statements. When I covered the Jerrold Hall shooting in 1992, nobody from the Chronicle or its (then) sister paper, the Examiner, lifted a finger to challenge what BART was saying.


This time around, after all the bad publicity BART has been getting from police shootings — and with more reporters covering the story — BART’s not going to be able to keep a cover-up going. (In fact, I’m surprised nobody’s come forward yet with a cell-phone video of the shooting; if you’ve got one, call me). At some point all of this will come out — and the more BART tries to pretend everything is just fine, the worse the agency is going to look.


Obviously, there has to be a full investigation here, by the SFPD,  the BART Police and BART’s new civilian review operation. And the officers involved shouldn’t be disciplined until all the facts are in and the various agencies come to their various conclusions.


But opening some of this up to the public now won’t hinder the inquiry; if anything, more discussion will bring more witnesses forward. That’s why BART absolutely needs to release the security video feed from the station, make the initial police reports public and stop stonewalling reporters.


There may be — may be – a valid legal reason for BART to refuse to release information on the case; the California Public Records Act gives some latitude to police agencies involved in ongoing investigations. But there’s nothing in any law that says the material MUST be confidential; BART has full discretion to release that video.


It’s going to come out at some point anyway. Why wait? 

Is LEED really green?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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17
Is LEED really green?

news@sfbg.com


The archangel of sustainable development has arrived, promising much needed city housing that will add to the “social fabric of the waterfront community” with its glamorous green rooftops and unheard-of bay views. This is going to be the greenest building of them all, or so we’ve been told, but the truth is a bit more complicated.


A condominium development 25-plus years in the making, 8 Washington would transform the site of the Golden Gateway Tennis and Swim Club near Pier 39. The developer plans to renovate the recreation center with a larger fitness facility, provide two new waterfront parks with public access, and supply 30,000 feet of ground-floor retail stores and restaurants beneath its 165 new luxury apartments.


Sounds nice, doesn’t it? The problem with this $345 million project is that it’s being touted, with its “green building” LEED certification, as the most sustainable structure it can possibly be.


But there’s nothing sustainable about building high-end condos in San Francisco, a city with too many high-end condos and not enough affordable housing. And LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the most popular sustainable development certification system in the country, is a lie — at least as your friendly neighborhood building developer is marketing it.


LEED, the baby of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is a great marketing tool for developers in San Francisco, the city with the single most LEED certified buildings in the United States. San Francisco was just named the “greenest” city in North America at the 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival, largely due to its extensive representation of green buildings — which normally means structures built with recycled materials, near a transportation hub, featuring some solar panels or other renewable energy sources.


“LEED is certainly a positive thing,” Planning Commission President Christina Olague told us. “There’s this whole push toward green sustainability.”


The project’s “platinum” LEED status is all a San Francisco developer could hope for to attract the green — and more important, the city’s approval.


“LEED certification is part and parcel to the vision for the project,” said PJ Johnston of PJ Johnston Communications, speaking for the developer. “The city, neighborhood, and waterfront deserve healthy, sustainable structures, living spaces, public spaces, and amenities. That’s exactly what 8 Washington will bring.”


LEED has become the final word in green building — if your building is LEED certified, you’re golden. But all this green they’ve been feeding us is really a misleading, incomplete rating system.


The first thing to consider is that sustainable development, even if it uses recycled materials and 10 percent sun-powered electricity, is still development. Any time a structure is torn down, “the energy and materials in that [original structure] are going to get sent to landfills somewhere. You gotta calculate all that,” said sustainable development activist Brad Paul, a former SF deputy mayor, who believes in considering the entire “life cycle of a building” in determining its sustainability.


Even the Environmental Protection Agency sometimes discounts essential considerations of sustainable building. When it sought a new SF office space in 2009, its intention was to find a home that was “a model of sustainable development,” the SF Biz Times reported. But its first choice was to build new development, at the site at 350 Bush Street — with its environmental costs of demolition, throwing out old materials, and starting from scratch.


Last month, the EPA decided to remain at 75-95 Hawthorne Street instead of moving to a new building, but not because it was the sustainable choice. No deal was reached for 350 Bush, and as Regional Public Affairs Officer Traci Madison said, “There was no other option to choose from.”


Although it’s a measure of a structure’s material sustainability, LEED does not consider a building’s life cycle, or even its use. Consider 8 Washington. The developer has boasted that it’s the most expensive housing project in San Francisco history, with a hefty price tag of $3 million to $10 million per apartment.


“Who can afford these luxury condos, and what do they use them for?” Paul asks. “These guys who work for hedge funds on Wall Street,” who use the condo as a second or third home and commute on their private jets to get there.


Johnston said 8 Washington will be marketed to a “mix of buyers, including young professionals, empty-nesters looking to move back to San Francisco, and families … The project has many two- and three-bedroom units, encouraging family living,” he said. But it’s unlikely that those who can afford a condo of this luxury will make it their only home.


“[Board President] David Chiu says he’s worried about SF becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley,” said Paul. “I’m more worried about this being a bedroom community for New York, Boston, L.A.”


Instead of providing the affordable housing that San Francisco so needs, projects like 8 Washington attract the wealthy, who aren’t using public transportation. Instead, Paul said, they burn tons of fossil fuels using their new condos as weekend getaways.


 


LEED FOR THE RICH


LEED certifies buildings as “sustainable developments” based on the following categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, materials and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation in design and regional priority.


Earning points in each category brings a building closer to LEED certification, which requires at least 40 points. Above “silver” and “gold” status, a “platinum” LEED certification requires 80 points. But how builders get the points is what matters. For example, a developer might skimp on the insulation to install extra solar panels and get more points for a less efficient building.


Does LEED consider a building’s actual use? “The short answer is no,” said Jennifer Easton, a communications associate at the USGBC who added, “We want [LEED] to be used by every type of project.” But despite its billing, LEED tells an incomplete story.


“It’s just green drapery,” said SF attorney Sue Hestor, a slow growth advocate. “They’ve really had a PR machine. They keep touting all this greenness.”


LEED certification has value, Paul said, but it doesn’t turn multimillion dollar condos green. “There is absolutely no need for high-end luxury housing in the city right now,” he said.


Building luxury condos in place of affordable housing encourages the “Manhattanization” phenomenon, attracting wealthy out-of-towners to expend fuel on their private jets to get to their new crash pads.


“They aren’t gonna be living there all year,” Olague said of residents of luxury housing. “We hear a lot of, ‘We need more housing.’ If you keep building housing for the top 2 percent, how does it lessen the demand on your average workforce?”


But not everyone sees luxury condo-building as counterproductive. “Building that project actually allows for more affordable housing,” said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR (San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association). “It’ll provide housing for some people, and that can only be helpful to the housing market. If you don’t build new condos, then people just compete for the crumbs, and that means people who are rich push the rest of us out.”


In other words, if you give the rich housing, then they won’t take over your flat in the Mission — if they ever really wanted it in the first place. “I don’t think we can impose some kind of hipster elitism that they’re not our kind of people so they’re not allowed in,” Metcalf said of the wealthy out-of-towners.


LEED agrees. “We don’t want [LEED] to be for one specific group of people,” Easton said. “We have LEED-certified homeless shelters, but having a LEED certified luxury condo building is an advantage. We can’t control if someone is flying across the country in a jumbo jet every day — but we can control their energy efficiency in a building.”


 


WHO RIDES BUSES?


For the typical working class San Franciscan, living modestly is a must and public transportation is essential. So there’s an inherent environmental advantage to attracting residents who don’t rely on polluting planes and cars.


“There’s a definite need for workforce housing, middle class housing in San Francisco,” Paul says. “I guarantee you none of those people get there by private jet. The less income people have, the more likely they’re going to be to use public transit.”


But 8 Washington and luxury developments like it don’t foster public transit. The more wealthy people who move in, the more low-income residents get displaced — to the East Bay or other areas with more affordable housing. It’s another strike against sustainability when these workers opt to drive back into the city for work instead paying for BART, says Paul, particularly when they drive older, less-efficient cars.


“LEED was a way to spell an environmentally friendly product, but you have to figure in the extra driving,” said Paul.


But 8 Washington gets LEED points for building on a site close to public transit in an attempt to discourage individual car pollution. But will wealthy condo owner actually take the infrequent F-line with all the tourists instead of parking their $150,000 car in the underground parking garage right below their feet?


“When you’re talking about sustainable practices and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and how it relates to land use planning, it makes you wonder if that’s supposed to [solely] relate to housing people near transit corridors,” said Olague. “It seems to me you have to look at equity.”


The garage at 8 Washington, to be built below sea level under the condos, will house 415-plus parking spaces. The developer says that 250 of the spaces will be offered as public parking for the busy Ferry Building down the street, but the 165 additional spaces guarantee one parking space for each residential unit.


“Given the larger size of the residential units and the fact that the majority of the units are two to three bedrooms, we believe that one parking space per dwelling is appropriate,” said Johnston. Appropriate, maybe, but not environmentally friendly.


 


PROMISES AND REALITY


Wealthy people and affordable housing aside, LEED doesn’t actually measure the energy used in a building, says New York City-based architectural associate Henry Gifford. He filed a $100 million class action lawsuit against LEED last October for gaining a monopoly on the sustainable development market by making false claims about buildings’ energy savings.


“They say that the building is required to be energy efficient. But the building doesn’t have to be energy efficient — it just has to earn points, to promise it’s going to be energy efficient,” Gifford said.


It’s up to the developer what computer software is used to predict a building’s energy efficiency, and Gifford says that computer diagrams can easily be manipulated and do not consider inconsistent factors, like weather.


“California is the promise land,” said Gifford. “All you’re required to do is provide a promise. The sad thing is that it removes all the integrity from the process — it encourages lying.”


Furthermore, once the building is built and has achieved LEED certification, the building’s actual energy use in its life cycle isn’t considered. The only way you can truly know if a building is energy efficient is by looking at the utility bills, says Gifford. But once it’s LEED-certified, who cares?


There is a voluntary program called Building Performance Partnership (BPP) that tracks a building’s energy and water use over time. “The idea is we want LEED to be a system where it enacts change in the actual building,” said Easton. But the problem is the building has already gained LEED certification before the first utility bill is even mailed.


“We publish baseball scores. With everything in life, people get scored,” said Gifford, who operates with transparency in developing energy efficient buildings in New York, hosting open houses after buildings are built with printouts of their recent utility bill history.


LEED was never intended to have the final say on sustainable building, to be a seal of green approval, according to a New York Times op-ed by Alec Appelbaum last year (“Don’t LEED us astray,” 5/19/10). “Rather it was to be a set of guidelines for architects, engineers, and others who want to make buildings less wasteful. However, developers quickly realized that its ratings — certified, silver, gold, or platinum — were great marketing tools, allowing them to charge a premium on rents.”


Therein lies the issue. Yes, 8 Washington will “allow for more ‘eyes on the street’ at all hours of the day” and provide two or three-bedroom units for families who can afford them, as it promises. But a sustainable structure is far different than the promise of a sustainable life cycle of a building. And a promise is just that. *


UPDATE: Jennifer Easton at LEED wrote to inform us that, although the 8 Washington website clearly states that the project will include LEED certified buidlings, “We would like to clarify that 8 Washington is not a LEED-certified project, nor a LEED-registered project.”


 


PLANNING COMMISSION HEARINGS


July 7: Community Vision for San Francisco’s Northeast Waterfront


July 14: City demographics and sustainability; the need for low-income housing; presentation of “jet fuel burn rate” argument.


July 21: 8 Washington’s EIR approval hearing


All hearings to be held at 12 p.m. in the Commission Chambers, Room 400, City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.




JET FUEL BURN RATE FOR LUXURY CONDOS


 


Let’s assume that just five of the 165 condo buyers at 8 Washington (3 percent) are Wall Street hedge fund traders or venture capitalists using them as second or third homes. Let’s also assume they’ll use them 1.5 times a month and commute to SF aboard their business jet, a reasonable assumption for Wall Street execs making tens of millions in salary and bonuses. Why would they fly by private jet rather than take Southwest or Amtrak? Because they can. This must be factored into any environmental analysis of a project that explicitly markets to this demographic and include the following:


Mid to large size business jets used to fly cross country (Hawker 800XP, Gulfstream G2/ G3, Bombardier Global Express) on average burn 400 gallons of jet fuel/hour, take 6 hours to fly New York to SFO and 5 hours for return trip. Therefore, a single round trip burns:


• 11 hours X 400 gallons per hour = 4,400 gallons of jet fuel per trip. A typical family car uses 1,200 gallons of gas per year, so one flight from NYC to 8 Washington equals almost four years of driving a family car.


• 1.5 trips/mo. = 6,600 gallons X 12 months = 79,200 gallons of jet fuel/year or the equivalent of driving a family car for 66 YEARS each month.


Using our example of five residents, the numbers over one year and 20 years are:


• 5 X 79,200 gallons/per year = 396,000 GALLONS OF JET FUEL A YEAR or equal to driving a family car 330 years, A THIRD OF A MILLENNIUM, each year.


• 396,000 gal. X 20 yrs. = 7,920,000 gallons of jet fuel, equivalent of driving family car 6,600 years, OVER 6 MILLENNIUM, in 20 years.


Given this reality, the 8 Washington environmental impact report must analyze such questions as:


How many solar panels are needed compensate for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel/year? How many low flow toilets would make up for burning 396,000 gallons of jet fuel/year? Etc.

Fetish and armor

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Fetish and armor

culture@sfbg.com

LUST FOR LIFE The year I was 16, I wore nothing but thrift shop vintage lingerie. As outerwear. I’d layer two slips or two half-slips on top of each other so they wouldn’t be quite as see-through and clomp around in impossibly high heels. I bought my actual underwear from the Victoria’s Secret at the mall when they had their blowout sales. There and at places like Forever 21 — flashy, clubby, and cheap.

I tell you these details because it’s important, naming the places I picked up armor and fetish. Because it felt like armor and it felt like fetish — in all senses of the word. Sexual but mythic and protective in proportion, too. That lacy magenta push-up demi-bra, the one that was just a little too tight, the one that was always uncomfortable. But I’d wear it anyway because I understood the importance of armor. Of having something that would protect me if bad shit went down.

The refrain from my mother — and from the more prudish crowd at my school, the tough homophobic boys in my neighborhood, the cat-calling older men at the Mission BART Station who didn’t realize how young I was — was that if you wear clothes like that, you are asking for it. You’re putting yourself in danger.

But didn’t any of them realize that this was my way of staying out of danger? I felt so much more powerful in those impossible heels, tits pushed up and out, cleavage for days, fishnets encasing my thighs, tight leather boots hugging my calves. I felt so much more powerful and able to fight if any shit went down.

I get that kids are sexualized young in this culture, especially girls. That’s creepy, and I’m not saying it’s okay. When Abercrombie & Fitch sold thongs to preteens, it disgusted me. Toddler beauty pageants scare the hell out of me.

But whenever people get moralistic and concerned about teenage girls’ slutty outfits, about how sexual teens are these days — I cringe. Because I was that girl who got into screaming fights with her mother about fishnets and cleavage and dresses that were too tight. And I want us to actually talk to that girl without screaming at her. To see how she feels about what she’s wearing. To see if she’s doing it solely to impress people, or if she’s doing it to go along with the crowd, but she really hates it. Or if she’s doing it because it’s a way to claim power in a world that hates sexuality and hates femininity.

I was a queer chubby girl wearing sexy clothes trying to learn how to love herself in a viciously fatphobic, sexist, homophobic world. Honestly? Cobbling together a wardrobe of vintage lingerie was one of the ways I coped. I spent a lot of time figuring out what clothes worked for my body. Like most fat people, I had to figure it out on my own.

There is no cultural road map for being fat and sexual. We’re taught that the two are at odds with each other. I have lost count of how many times I have heard people say — in person, on the Internet, in print media — that fat people should not go out in clothes that are tight or revealing or provocative. That the very sight of our flesh — and in particular, the sight of our sexual bodies — is cause for disgust, even for violence. I wonder sometimes if people would have reacted as strongly to my outfits as a teenager if I’d been a size 2 or 4 instead of a size 12 or 14. How much of it was fear of young people being sexual? How much of it was fear of fat people being sexual?

I was speaking at a reproductive justice conference a while back, on a panel called something vague and cutting-edge like “The Politics of Sexuality.” I was supposed to be talking about my work in the porn industry as a fat queer woman — what I like and don’t like about doing porn. But the panel moderator opened the session by referring to Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon (who are famously anti-porn) as “sex-radical feminists.” My eyes about bugged outta my head.

It all went downhill from there. Women in the audience started disclosing their rape fantasies during the Q&A: “Why do we like this? Are we fucked up?” It was like group therapy and second-wave feminist sex guilt were getting together to have a really terrible party. By the end of it, I was bowled over and exhausted.

And then a pretty young fat girl — white, maybe 19 or 20, kinda punky, with wire-rimmed glasses and fine blonde hair with an orange streak — walked up to me as I gathered my things. She had tears in her eyes.

“I’ve …” She had to gulp, she was that choked up. “I’ve never… Gina, you’re the first fat person I’ve ever heard talk about being comfortable with your body and comfortable with sex. I really want to be there, and I’m not yet. What do I do?”

I was floored. I almost started crying too. I hugged her. I told her she was beautiful. I scribbled down some websites and some book titles. And then I hugged her — again — and told her she was beautiful — again. I felt like I could not say that enough times.

I wish I’d had time to tell her my story — how wearing clothes as armor and fetish helped and healed, and got me to where I am now. If that girl wants to wear nothing but vintage lingerie for a year? For the rest of her life? More power to her. 

Gina de Vries is a San Francisco-based writer, sex worker, activist, and writing instructor. Hear all about her at www.ginadevries.com. Hot for Lust for Life? It’s our new sex column, stay tuned.

Another BART Police shooting

Zelda Bronstein
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2
Another BART Police shooting

It’s still too soon to determine whether the latest BART Police shooting was legit. There were witnesses. There’s station security video. Maybe the victim really was attacking the officers with a knife and a broken bottle. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe something else was going on.


But given BART’s horrible record on police shootings (even before the Mehserle case), this one ought to be investigated and debated in as open a manner as possible.


And already, the cone of silence has descended. BART public affairs says the station video won’t be released. The San Francisco Police Department, which is also investigating, won’t release any documents or information, the Public Affairs Office tells me.


I’m already dubious. Technically, it might be legal for a cop to shoot a man who has a knife — but is shooting a drunk guy really necessary? How much of a threat was he, really? Were there other ways to subdue him?


The BART Board ought to be asking these questions, too — in public. Because right now, I suspect I’m not the only one who doesn’t trust anything that BART administration or the BART Police say.


This is going to be a major test of how the new BART police oversight policy works. And since Step One is rebuilding the public’s trust, the typical secrecy has to end.  

Private cops at SF General?

Zelda Bronstein
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26
Private cops at SF General?


Truly astonishing moment at the June 23 Budget Committee hearing. The director of Public Health, Barbara Garcia, actually testified that San Francisco General Hospital would be better off with private security guards instead of sheriff’s deputies — because the deputies were only able to follow the law.


You can watch the video here. The discussion starts at 4:49. It begins with Sup. Scott Wiener, is his quiet Scott Wiener way, asking Garcia to talk about the plan to contract out hospital security.


Garcia first insisted that this was a way to save $2 million that would prevent further cuts to health programs. That’s always the primary argument for contracting out.


But then she went a step further.  An outside company, she said, could provide better security — because the (low paid, poorly trained) guards will be able to operate without the restrictions of being peace officers. “There are some restrictions on [the deputy sheriffs’] ability to restrain patients,” she said.


That wasn’t a slip of the tongue — Gregg Sass, the chief financial officer, repeated it again. “If a patient isn’t breaking the law,” he said, “a deputy sheriff won’t intervene.” More: “Private security can intervene. They’re not bound by the same limits that a deputy sheriff is bound by.”


Both Garcia and Sass noted that they wanted security officers who reported directly to them, not to an elected sheriff.


Am I the only one who thinks this is a little weird?


The money thing I understand. I don’t agree — often these supposed savings don’t show up in the end, and besides, do we really want people who get paid $13 an hour without benefits handling security at SF General? But I understand the argument.


On the other hand, the notion that peace officers have to follow rules, and so we should have people who don’t have to follow rules instead strikes me as pretty disturbing. And I’m not sure how true it is: Can a security guard hold and restrain a patient who hasn’t broken the law and isn’t covered by a legal order like a 5150?


I don’t think so. The folks at SEIU Local 1021 don’t think so, either: A flier the group put out notes that:


The issue of Sheriff’s Dept. having legal restraints applies equally to all employees. If there is no 5150 or 5250, no-one has a right to restrain the patient against their will; but a well trained Institutional Policeman can gently persuade a patient with Alzheimer’s to return to their unit.


And I have to say, the notion of having the Department of Public Health oversee a security force (instead of the Sheriff or the Police Department) is disturbing, too. The worst problems in police abuse tend to come from little fiefdoms that aren’t propertly managed — the BART Police, for example, and housing and transit cops in other jurisdictions. Nobody at DPH is trained to manage a security force.


What, exactly, are these (low paid, poorly trained) security guards going to do — grab patients who complain about waiting six hours to see a doctor and “restrain” them? What happens when somebody actually does commit a crime (or brings a gun or a knife into the hospital)? The guards can’t make an arrest. So they call the cops — who come, in due time, but maybe not quickly enough to prevent a disaster. And, of course, we then pay the cops to come and make the arrest.


I haven’t been able to reach Eileen Shields, the public information officer at the Health Department, but I can tell you: The language that her boss used at the Budget and Finance Committee was pretty frightening.


UPDATE: Shields sent me over Garcia’s memo on this, which lays out the case. It pretty much says it all: 


There are times when  patients are unable to control their behavior due to acute medical       
 illness, such as delirium or brain injury. These patients may present a   
 serious risk to their own safety as well as to the safety of other       
 patients and hospital staff.                                             
                                                                           
 These situations are not the result of – nor do they result in – illegal 
 activity. This puts the Sheriff’s deputies, whose responsibility is to   
 uphold the law, in a difficult situation when they are confronted with   
 potentially harmful (but not illegal) situations caused by acute,         
 non-psychiatric medical conditions. Outside security firms do not operate 
 under the same constraints. Instead, they function as members of the     
 health care team whose responsibility is to enforce hospital policy. They 
 are charged with ensuring a safe environment and can act with greater     
 freedom to ensure safety within the limits of the law but without the     
 additional requirements and expectations placed upon a law enforcement   
 officer.
 

Busted!

Andrew Lam
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0
Busted!

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I have already written a restaurant review, a poem, and a cheerful pop song about my anal abscess. I don’t know how else to celebrate the cursed motherfucker. I could curse … But I guess I’ve done that too.

I’ve already had it lanced twice. Those were the good times. Except that on the first occasion I missed a day of work, and on the second I missed a baby shower. I felt so badfully about the missed baby shower that I invited the moms-to-be, Pod and the Attack, to breakfast the following Saturday. Technically I guess maybe I invited myself to breakfast. At their house.

Bless them, they made my favorite: waffles! With fresh strawberries! They made bacon! They made eggs! They made roasted tomatoes! It was the perfect meal! It was a masterpiece! It was culinary genius! It was the time of our lives!

Problem: I forgot to go. I don’t know, I was looking forward to it all week and then I woke up on Saturday morning, went, “Dum-de-doe,” and decided — oh, I don’t know — maybe do a little recording, or something.

I record in my kitchen because it’s the quietest room in my apartment, if I turn off the refrigerator. My cell phone was in the closet. At the designated hour, Pod went to West Oakland BART and waited for me.

When she called to say what-the-where-the-fuck-are-you? I was in the kitchen. I had my headphones on, refrigerator off, and was laying some blistering electric ukulele tracks onto Garage Band, singing: “It’s a new day/ It’s a driving rain/ I’m gonna have anal surgery/ It’s gonna be OK/ Gonna feel no pain / Or if I do it will be good for me.” La la la la la la.

And so forth.

Then.

I saw my cell phone while I was getting ready for work. It was lit up like a Christmas tree: texts, voicemails, e-mails. What-the-where-the-fuck-was-I? Oh my sweet baby Jesus, you can imagine my horror, and self-hatred — nay, loathing — as it all sunk in. How did I do that? How could I? Was my head so far up my ass that … ?

Well, technically it was, damn me. Clobber me in the kidneys with a golf club. I felt as low as a horse’s hoof cheese. And that was before the Attack sent me a picture of their spread, Pod in all her pregnancy sitting down to eat those wonderful things I said, plus cantaloupe.

Minus me.

I’ve done some dumb-ass things in my day, but don’t know if I’ve ever hated myself more. I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to forgive myself. I still kinda can’t. I mean, the bacon alone looked so good in that picture.

They were of course very gracious and forgiving, and I was of course determined to make it up somehow. I invited them over to Berkeley that evening for some of the chicken pot pie that me and the kids were making. They declined.

I invited them to breakfast the following morning. Out somewhere, on me, and they accepted. We went to the Sunny Side Café in Albany, which was alleged to be kind of fancy-pants, and great.

Never in my life, before this, have I wanted a meal to cost more than it did. But, alas, it didn’t. It was like normal weekend brunch prices, roughly $10 apiece. Less tragically, but more to the point, I didn’t think the food was that good. Let alone great. I may have malordered. Maybe I was still traumatized by my brain fart from the morning before, but my spinach-and-sausage scramble was bland city, even with salt-pepper-Tapatío. The roasted tomatoes … meh.

Pod’s pigs in blankets … that was better. And the Attack, she got it right. She hit the jackpot with the Alameda, a stack-up of good stuff — ham, cheese, french toast, eggs — and some other things I personally don’t go for, which is to say mushrooms and Hollandaise. Oh, and a balsamic reduction.

It’s her new favorite restaurant.

SUNNY SIDE CAFÉ

Mon.–Fri. 8 a.m.–3 p.m.;

Sat.–Sun. 8:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

1499 Solano, Albany

(510) 527-5383

Full bar

AE/D/MC/V

 

Some families don’t flee San Francisco

Zelda Bronstein
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19
Some families don’t flee San Francisco

I hate to admit, I take this a little bit personally, all this stuff about how families are fleeing San Francisco and how it might be better to live in Omaha or Louisville. Cuz I have a family and we aren’t leaving. And neither are my friends and neighbors. There are plenty of us who think that San Francisco is a great place to raise kids.


Some of the stories in the recent Chron article are laughably unrepresentative:


For Kearsley Higgins, raising a baby in San Francisco was idyllic. She and her husband owned a small two-bedroom house in the Castro, she found plenty of activities for her daughter, Maya, and made friends through an 11-member mothers’ group.


Now as the mother of an almost 4-year-old, with a baby boy due in September, Higgins has left. A year ago, she and her husband, a digital artist, bought a four-bedroom home with a large backyard in San Rafael. Maya easily got into a popular preschool and will be enrolled in a good public elementary school when the time comes.


Nice: One-income family buys a four-bedroom home in Marin. I’m afraid that’s not the market most of us are in.


The statistics are real:


New census figures show that despite an intense focus by city and public school officials to curb family flight, San Francisco last year had 5,278 fewer kids than it did in 2000.


The city actually has 3,000 more children under 5 than it did 10 years ago, but has lost more than 8,000 kids older than 5.


But the reasons have a lot more to do with the cost of housing than with anything else. The lack of affordable housing for families — and frankly, none of the new market-rate condos the city is allowing offer much of anything to people with kids — drives people to the cheaper suburbs. And in this economy, it’s not as if they just quit their jobs. No: They commute, long distances — and when you have kids, it’s hard to rely on marginal public transportation. What happens if you’re at work in SF and your kid gets really sick at school in Brentwood? Are you going to spend all afternoon trying to get there on BART and buses? No — you’re hopping in the car, by yourself, and driving 80 miles an hour to the school site.


Which means that building dense, expensive, small condos in San Francisco is the opposite of sustainable planning or green building. Sustainable planning means preserving existing affordable family housing and building housing for the San Francisco workforce. San Francisco is doing none of that. Density isn’t smart growth if the housing doesn’t work for people who work in the city. It’s dumb growth.


End of rant.


What I started off to say was that some of us are very happy living in the city. I’m more than happy with our public schools (McKinley and Aptos so far). I really like the idea that my son can get home from school by himself, on Muni — and can go to his martial arts class on Muni, and can walk to music lessons and bike to the park, and when he’s 16 we won’t even have to talk about a car. I love the fact that my kids are growing up with people who are very different from them — and that ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation and all the other things that were such a big deal when we were growing up are utterly irrelevant in their circles. They have friends who come from two-dad families, two-mom families, single-parent families, single grandparent families, rich families, poor families, black familes, Asian families, Latino families, families where the parents speak no English … it’s all a big Whatever. It’s San Francisco.


The city is full of cool, fun stuff to do. It’s full of fascinating people and neighborhoods. My kids experience stuff every day that the suburban folks with their big back yards won’t see in a lifetime. It’s not all positive — we see homeless people on the streets, and we give them money and talk about why people are homeless. But it’s real and it’s life and I’m not taking my family and running away.


So there.      




 

Reminder: Guardian forum tonight

Zelda Bronstein
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0

Come by the Local 2 hall, 209 Golden Gate, tonight for the second Guardian Forum on issues in the mayor’s race. We’ll be talking about budget, healthcare and social services, with a great lineup of speakers. And it’s all about audience participation — so bring your ideas. There will be plenty of time for discussion.


Panelists:


Gabriel Haaland, SEIU 1021


Brenda Barros, health care worker, SF General


Debbi Lerman, Human Services Network


Jenny Friedenbach, Budget Justice Coalition


the Unite Here Local 2 hall is at 209 Golden Gate, at Leavenworth. Couple of blocks from Civic Center BART. We start at 6 p.m. and run until 8 p.m. See you there.

Mehserle’s free, but some protesters could still face jail time

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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12
Mehserle’s free, but some protesters could still face jail time

 Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant while he was lying face down on the Fruitvale station train platform on New Year’s Day 2009, was released from a Los Angeles jail June 13 after serving a total of 365 days for his involuntary manslaughter conviction. He was sentenced to two years behind bars, but Judge Robert Perry granted him an early release due to credit for time served and good behavior.

The same date of his release, the National Lawyers Guild filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 150 protesters who were mass-arrested during the Nov. 5, 2010 demonstration in Oakland in the wake of Mehersle’s sentencing. Meanwhile, a handful of individuals who engaged in the Jan. 14, 2009 and July 8, 2010 protests launched by Grant supporters — which morphed into riots after community rallies came to an end — are still battling court cases.

Two of the protesters arrested last July initially faced serious felony arson charges for igniting a trash can, which could have led to incarceration for a longer duration than Mehserle served for fatally shooting Grant.

“There were several felony arrests last July, and people were facing charges that could lead to more than a year, no question about that,” noted attorney Dan Siegel of the Oakland-based firm Siegel & Yee. Siegel is currently representing Todd Lister and Adrian Wilson, the two defendants who were accused of arson. The codefendants now face attempted arson charges, carrying a minimum penalty of eight months, with a midterm of one year. “Theoretically, that’s what they’re still facing,” Siegel said, but added that he was confident the as-yet unresolved case would result in a more lenient outcome.

Meanwhile, some of the burglary charges stemming from the looting that occurred in Oakland last July could potentially lead to multi-year sentences, Siegel added, leading to more time in jail than Mehserle served.

Some of the hundreds arrested over the course of the three protests who had prior criminal convictions had their probation or parole immediately revoked as a consequence, said Rachel Jackson, a member of the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant and one of the organizers of the Nov. 5 community rally in downtown Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Of the hundreds of arrests made in Oakland during waves of protests launched by Grant supporters, just a small number were on serious charges such as burglary or arson. The mass arrest of 150 individuals last November was initially made on charges of unlawful assembly, yet nearly all of the arrestees were cited and released after spending up to 24 hours in jail, and all had their charges dropped.

In that instance, Oakland police corralled 150 demonstrators who had been participating in a lawful march through the streets into a residential block in East Oakland. Once they were surrounded, Oakland police — who were aided in the streets by 32 other law-enforcement agencies that night, according to National Lawyers Guild attorney Rachel Lederman — placed them all under arrest. No dispersal order was issued prior to making the arrests, and it would have been impossible to comply if one had been issued.

In a class-action lawsuit, the National Lawyers Guild argues that the Nov. 5 protester roundup and mass arrest was a violation of the Oakland Police Department’s crowd control policy, and that it constituted a violation of protesters’ rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. “Even legal observers and a few people who happened to live in the neighborhood were swept up,” Lederman said.

“The policy is clear, and the constitution is clear,” she went on. “You must have probable cause to believe an individual is committing a crime. But in this case, the whole crowd was herded onto a residential street, blocked in, and held on the street for hours. There was never a dispersal order, and all exits were sealed off.”

The Oakland Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Arrestees were held handcuffed in vans, in some cases for hours, without access to a bathroom, Lederman noted. All of the women were subjected to pregnancy tests upon being booked into jail, “which made no sense and was abusive in this particular case,” Lederman maintains, because the short time they spent there didn’t justify the excuse that the test would have been necessary to determine whether anyone needed prenatal care. Several men, meanwhile, were subjected to DNA swabs, which is “only supposed to happen if you’re arrested for a violent felony,” according to Lederman. 

Jackson, who was also arrested that night, said she believed police conduct was “incredibly intimidating, and it has a chilling effect on free speech.”

Crying in public

Andrew Lam
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0
Crying in public

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL Weaving my way through the groups of slower moving shoppers and tourists ambling out of the Powell Street BART Station, I realized I was already too late.

I had wanted to be present for the June 11 noon kickoff of Market Day — the large-scale public art event tied to Allison Smith’s current Southern Exposure exhibit “The Cries of San Francisco” — but when I reached Mint Plaza and had been handed a schedule I saw that my timing had been off by an hour.

Oh well. The point of Market Day wasn’t to necessarily be at a certain place at a certain hour to see a certain something. The “something” was supposedly happening all around me. The nearly 70 Bay Area artists, performers, and craftspeople Smith had gathered for this ambitious public art project had dispersed throughout Mint Plaza, and up and down Market Street between Fifth and Third streets, to peddle their wares (many homemade), offer more ineffable “services” (such as owning the expletive of your choice or telling you a story), or to simply “perform” in “character.”

The criers were to be like tiny pebbles subtly altering the fast-moving watercourse of weekend foot traffic. Granted, participation is hard to measure for something like “The Cries of San Francisco,” but wherever I turned, people seemed engaged even if the number of folks documenting a given artist seemed to greatly outnumber the members of the public they were interacting with.

I decided I needed a little more intimacy if I was to get my feet wet. I started back toward Market and ran into a woman dressed in steampunk-ish attire. Her name was Jamie Venci, a.k.a. the Questing Choreographer (each participating artist conveniently had a large nametag). She offered me an informative pamphlet about one of three historic buildings in the vicinity that had survived the 1906 earthquake if I promised to carry out the site-specific choreography contained within.

I agreed, and for convenience’s sake, I went with the Mint Building. Not five minutes later, I was on the steps of “the Granite Lady” attempting to convey the shape of its crenellated outline with my arms — per a step in Venci’s cutely drawn instructions — in what must have looked like a particularly inept approximation of tai chi.

Conceptual art requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of its audience. I was not merely being ridiculous in public, but was publicly enacting a new relationship to a space I had not really considered too closely before. I, as much as Venci, was the Questing Choreographer, and together we had collaborated on a piece.

The satisfaction I took in my demonstration of good faith was fleeting, as questions took over. What had passersby thought about what I was doing? And how could they really have anything to think about without some context for my undertaking? If a person dresses up in a colorful manner in San Francisco and carries on in public does anyone raise an eyebrow, let alone pause to consider the host of artistic and economic concerns that “The Cries of San Francisco” aimed to bring to the streets?

Materials for the event cited Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire to protest police harassment, as well as Carol Reed’s 1968 film version of the musical Oliver! as representational precedents. But despite the presence of Art for a Democratic Society’s Class War Store cart full o’ Marxism, the tenor of many of the criers was more playful than revolutionary. Whimsy was the order of the day.

Ha Ha La (Nathaniel Parsons) pushed around an “amusement park,” a steep ladder that participants would gingerly climb up and down while Parsons bellowed a New Age-y chant affirming their bravery and blessedness through a conch shell. After I took my turn on the rickety structure, I chose a souvenir badge that read, “You don’t have to behave you just gotta be brave.”

Also hard to miss was Maria de los Angeles Burr, who, as the Unsellable, had transformed herself into a walking pile of paper bags. “I have become burdened by too many possessions,” she muttered to me, as confused shoppers exiting from the Westfield Centre stopped to take pictures or gawked while hurrying on their way.

I wondered if they got the visual pun, or would simply move on and tune out the other criers much in the same way many of us avoid other solicitors like petitioners or canvassers.

I also wondered what the Market Street regulars — the men who sell cheap earrings, bootleg Giants merchandise, and faux-cashmere scarves from tables or the young hip-hop dancers who busk near the Powell Street cable car turnaround — thought about the criers. Did they view them as competition? As a friendly change-of-scene? Or did they see them at all?

By 4:30 p.m., all the criers had reconvened at Mint Plaza. They seemed tired from their day of art-making and being “on.” Continuing at a full clip, however, were tweens Colin Cooper and Cole Simon, by far the loudest and youngest hawkers, who had set up shop as the Masters of Disguise (one of their parents informed me that their after-school art teacher, a California College of the Arts student, had encouraged them to get involved with the project).

I walked away from our genial encounter $1 poorer but with a pair of plastic pink sunglasses and an orange mustache to my name. I felt braver with them on.

The carnival continues: the gallery installation component of “The Cries of San Francisco” is up until early next month and will host a series of performance events. Future Saturday marketplaces are scheduled for two Saturdays, June 18 and July 2 (noon to 6 p.m.). And on Wednesday, June 15 at 7 p.m., various criers will present a showcase of musical storytelling, speeches, and other forms of public address.

THE CRIES OF SAN FRANCISCO

Through July 2

Southern Exposure

3030 20th St., SF

(415) 893-1841

www.soex.org

 

Alameda all at once

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Alameda all at once

caitlin@sfbg.com

BAR CRAWLER Rumored to have given birth to the snow cone, the Popsicle, and the Kewpie doll back in its amusement park days, Alameda still gives off a summery island vibe. (With Playland at the Beach, Oakland’s Idora Park, and Alameda’s Neptune Beach, the primary mode of transportation in the Bay used to be a Big Dipper. Picture rush hour.) The golden sun, rad flea market, and laid-back neighborhoods — well, the place screams “stay a while.” So you may as well get drunk. FYI, the flatlands crawl works best on a bike, but if you soldier up and walk it, you don’t risk getting tipsy and bloody — to each her own. (Caitlin Donohue)

 

ALAMEDA FERRY

No, you’re not driving out there. Hop the ferry, ’cause guess what? It’s the first stop on the crawl. Take advantage of the bracing winds to order a beer, or better yet, a bay-ready cocktail. Affable bartenders will recommend a bloody or one of the Campari concoctions that sometimes make the specials board. Take your sweet-ass time and ascend to the top deck with your glass — you have 30 to 45 minutes to kill coming from San Francisco. Once you disembark, you’ll be flush with the possibility of a new island lifestyle. Steady on captain, much boozing lies ahead.

Departs from SF Ferry Building, Pier 41, and Jack London Square. www.eastbayferry.com

 

ST. GEORGE SPIRITS

Surprise! Not only is Alameda a great bar town, it’s also home to a burgeoning alcohol-making district. The island’s northwestern blocks — once the Naval Air Station and still fetchingly speckled at the edges with behemoth military boats — went through an era of tumbleweed rule but are now being reinvigorated by pioneer businesses that enjoy the commercial, wide-open spaces that only airplane hangers can provide. St. George Spirits moved here in 2004 and now produces pleasant, not-too-cloying Hangar One-flavored vodkas (mandarin blossom and chipotle versions are amazing), absinthe, superlative Firelit coffee liqueur, and more. Check out the $15 tasting menu in the jovial tasting room and toast to Alameda with every tiny, long-stemmed glass the good saint presents you with.

2601 Monarch, Alameda. (510) 769-1601, www.stgeorgespirits.com

(Click here for larger Google map.)

ROCK WALL WINES

Don’t worry if your St. George tasting ended with a disorienting absinthe-root beer closer — you don’t have far to bike to the next stop on the crawl. A few hangars over, step into the sleek tasting room of Rock Wall Wines, where you can order flights of swishes from Rock Wall’s father-daughter team plus nine other small wineries that share production space next door in the massive urban vintner hangar-hangout. Feel good about supporting the little guys along with another chance to sample an array of finely-crafted local booze.

2301 Monarch, Suite No. 300, Alameda. (510) 522-5700, www.rockwallwineco.com

 

BLADIUM BAR AND GRILL

So you’re a few drinks deep — time to check out the actual Alameda haunts. Bar! Well, a gym bar. Once you arrive at the Bladium (you’ll pedal past an impressive lineup of battleships on the way), smile sousedly at the front desk of the Bladium athletic center and weave your way through in-line hockey and indoor lacrosse arenas to the comfortable second-floor sports bar, where you can knock a pint back and take in some of the heated amateur action going on among the athletic types below. Don’t let all the secondhand endorphins make you feel lazy — the kind of drinking you’re doing takes endurance.

800 West Tower, Building 40, Alameda. (510) 814-4999, www.bladium.com

 

FORBIDDEN ISLAND TIKI LOUNGE

Enough crawling with the generalists — let’s get dark ‘n’ sugary the way only a quality tiki bar can encourage. Find the flavor at the low-lit Forbidden Island, where there will be a luau in progress, if you play your cards right, and sufficient vats of rum and juice even if you didn’t schedule your crawl around roast pig. Hoist a Neptune’s Garden (it’s blue and has fruit garnishes!) to discovering more about the Forbidden Island’s watering holes and continue on your way.

1304 Lincoln, Alameda. (510) 749-0332, www.forbiddenislandalameda.com

 

LOST WEEKEND LOUNGE

See how we planned this out? We started with sober sea legs on the ferry, pinky-up tastings while you can still bullshit about noses and mouthfeels, then the limber tiki limbo — enter now the dives. Lost Weekend is a good one, and it’s smack in the center of Alameda’s fun downtown, which is worth a saunter about if you’re feeling a little shaky after Forbidden Island. Otherwise, belly up the bar, gaze at the TVs and myriad ephemera on the walls from hazy sports meccas — Philly? Texas? — and discover that here in the Island City, the jock and black-clad hipster crowds can oftentimes merge into one.

2320 Santa Clara, Alameda. (510) 523-4700, www.lostweekendlounge.com

 

LUCKY 13

Turn the corner onto Park Street and you, my friend, have come to the end of your bar crawl — lucky for SF residents, it’s on familiar turf. The Lucky 13’s East Bay branch is just as good a rockabilly dive into a heavy, microbrew-tinged blackout as its Castro counterpart. Same wooden tables to back-slap and talk trash over without blazing TVs to distract your train of thought, same walled patio for fresh air and lighting of the cancer stick (yeah, alright, you’re wasted). Two big points for the Alameda Lucky: you can bring in take-out stromboli and french fries from Scolari’s next door — and the Fruitvale BART Station is only a happy downhill ride away when you’re ready for the mainland. Lean your bike against the wall and find a comfy seat for yourself, brave crawler — you’ve earned it.

1301 Park, Alameda. (510) 523-2118, www.lucky13alameda.com 

Cold comfort

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Cold comfort

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I write to you from Dot’s Diner in Jefferson Parish, La. Hedgehog is getting her knee looked at down the road, and I thought I would find me a place to sit that wasn’t the waiting room. Or a pool hall. Or bar. Or fast food joint or automotive shop. Or warehouse, thrift store, or — but only because it’s 9:30 a.m. and I ain’t the slightest bit hungry — a fried seafood shack or po-boy shop.

Jefferson’s got good eats in its own right. Crabby Jack’s is here, and at the French Canadian Quarter Festival this spring they fed me the best boudin I ever had, but at 9:30 a.m. the only way you can get a table, apparently, is if you’re an upside-down chair.

If it were 10 a.m. or even three hours later, I would have been in heaven. All’s I really required was a good strong cup a coffee and a seat, but this ain’t California or Seattle or even New Orleans. It’s the parish, as the locals call it, where you can’t exactly sit down without having a meal.

But how pretentious of them to refer to their parish as “the parish.” Don’t you think that’s pretty arrogant? Louisiana has a lot of parishes. They’re like counties everywhere else.

Whatever, I’m sure you’re more interested in what I’ve been eating San Franciscowise than Dot’s Diner’s biscuit with a fried egg on top, smothered in crawfish julie.

I will tell you: duck soup.

As always I have been on the prowl, trying to find the city’s best bowl of cold medicine and antidepressant.

It ain’t at Big Lantern here in the ‘hood, I can promise you that. Me and Hedgehog went there the last time we were in the city together, and I was fighting a cold. A fight, by the way, that I lost.

I’m human. I get sick. In fact, I get sick more than most people, being not only human but a hypochondriac. (Not that I’ve been diagnosed with hypochondria. I can just tell I have it.)

Anyway, I had wanted to show Hedgehog something special like Zuni, Delfina, or Slanted Door, but I felt too much like crap to eat anything but duck noodle soup, pea sprouts in garlic, and string beans with smoked pork.

There were dumplings, too. I forget what they were called on the dim sum menu. Some kind of “little buns,” I think. The ones that were soupy inside, they were great, but some weren’t so soupy. They had lost their juice. Not so great.

I can’t really complain about the duck soup because it wasn’t technically on the menu. Nor was it all that half bad. But the pea sprouts needed a lot of doctoring to taste like anything, and the beans with smoked pork were some of the worst things ever. About half of the beans were lifelessly old tough shriveled ones, overcooked. And the pork was like pork jerky. Very dry. Very tough. Which — granted — maybe that’s what smoked pork means in Chinese restaurants. I don’t often order it, and won’t often order it again, to be safe.

To their credit, the garlic pea sprouts and the beans and pork got better the next day for lunch, and better still the day after that, because I doctored and doctored them back to life.

The soup hit the spot, but as long as I’m healthy enough to get on BART and buses, I will be having my future duck soups in Chinatown, at Great Eastern Restaurant, thank you.

The legendary Jackson Street standby, it turns out, has a rich, flavorful dark broth with perfectly succulent roast duck and great homemade noodles. Or wontons. Or both. For $9, it’s the reigning duck noodle champion, in my book.

I would like to thank John’s Snack and Deli for being out of kimchi burritos again, or else I might never have found this out.

Oh, and Great Eastern also has crocodile soup and soft-shell turtle soup, by the way. In case you’re not sick when you go there. *

New favorite restaurant! *

GREAT EASTERN RESTAURANT

Daily: 10 a.m.–1 a.m.

649 Jackson, SF

(415) 986-5603

Beer and wine

MC/V

Great news! More BART Police tasers!

Zelda Bronstein
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7
Great news! More BART Police tasers!

I cannot contain my joy and excitement: BART is buying 130 new Tasers so every cop can have one! Imagine — more ways for the not-ready-for-prime-time police force to hurt people!


I’m dubious about BART police carrying guns — the seem to shoot the wrong people pretty often. And this new policy won’t replace lethal weapons with “less lethal” ones — the idea is to give the BART cops TWO ways to shoot people.


As we all know, “less lethal” is like “a little bit pregnant.” Either a weapon kills you or it doesn’t. Tasers are known to kill people.


But the larger point is that cops with Tasers are going to use them — and use them in circumstances where other alternatives tha don’t involve shooting anyone with anything were also possible. Tasers are a shortcut, an easy way to subdue a suspect. And I don’t care how much training the BART cops get; there are going to be mistakes, possibly deadly mistakes.


Why is the BART Board allowing this to happen?

Guardian takes seven awards

Maria Poblet
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0
Guardian takes seven awards

news@sfbg.com

The Bay Guardian won seven awards, including the top prize for overall excellence, at the Peninsula Press Club awards dinner May 21.

The overall excellence award cites the Guardian as the best non-daily paper in the region. The San Francisco Business Times was second and Central City Extra placed third.

Steven T. Jones won a first place award in the Specialty Story category for his report “Marijuana goes mainstream.” Jones and Rebecca Bowe shared top honors in the News Story category for “Buying power,” a report on corporate corruption. Tim Redmond won first place in the Political Column category and third place for editorial writing.

Bowe and Alex Emslie took third place honors in Breaking News for their report on the BART Police killing verdict. Redmond and Rula Al-Nasrawi shared second place in that category for “Mysteries of the death-drug scramble.”

 

Perception of lost integrity costs police

Mary Magee
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1
Perception of lost integrity costs police

Reporting by Sarah Phelan. Photograhy by Luke Thomas.

At the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office’s May 18 Justice Summit, the ethics of law enforcement were a central topic. And not surprisingly, the latest incidents of alleged police conduct in which SFPD officers are caught on surveillance video, which the Public Defender’s Office released, as they apparently steal personal property from suspects whose homes in the Julian Hotel they searched for drugs under possibly illegal circumstances, were on everyone’s minds, along with the crime lab and Henry Hotel scandals.

Asked if District Attorney George Gascón, who was Chief of Police until January, is considering a special prosecutor to look into these latest incidents, Sharon Woo, the D.A.’s Chief Assistant of Operations, said the D.A. looks into each case as it comes in. “We are trying to enhance the videos that came in from the Public Defender’s Office,” Woo said in a pre-summit interview. “Some are not as clear as we’d like.”

Earlier this year, when Gascón first became aware of the allegations against officers at the Henry Hotel, he directed the D.A.’s office to open an investigation into the officers and their alleged conduct. The move got David Onek, who is running against Gascón in the D.A.’s race, urging Gascón to turn the investigation over to an independent prosecutor.

But for a week, Gascón maintained that there was no conflict, and when he did finally announce that he was turning the investigation over to the to the U.S. Attorney’s Office – he claimed it was about “resources”. “New information has come to light that indicates it is better to turn over this investigation to the FBI,” Gascón said. “I have spoken to the U.S. Attorney, Melinda Haag, and she has agreed to take over the full investigation. We will of course cooperate fully with the FBI, and provide whatever assistance they need from us.”

At the time, Onek noted that Gascón’s decision was correct step. But he criticized Gascón for not making it his policy to recuse himself from any investigations that relate to his own tenure as chief. And Alameda Assistant D.A. Sharmin Bock, who recently sprung into the D.A.’ race, described Gascón’s situation on this matter as being “between a rock and a hard place.”

But yesterday, Woo noted that while it’s true that Gascón was SFPD Chief when many of the recent misconduct scandals occurred, Mayor Gavin Newsom had already appointed him D.A. when the Julian Hotel incidents occurred in February.

And Peter Herley, former chief of the Tiburon Police Department, told the Guardian that there “is always the Attorney General” to refer cases if D.A.’s feel conflicted. “George Gascón is a very upstanding individual who has also worked for the Los Angeles Police Department and was Chief of Meza, Arizona, and has done a good job in every place he’s been,” Herley said during a pre-summit interview. “So, if he sees a conflict arise, he’d probably recuse himself. It’s the public perception that’s key, that’s paramount.”

During the summit’s panel on ethics, retired San Francisco Superior Court judge Lee Baxter grilled panelists with incisive questions—as befits any self-respecting judge, retired or otherwise–on whether police misconduct is the product of a departmental culture. Noting that there had been a seemingly non-stop string of alleged police misconduct scandals in the Bay Area from drug thefts, dirty D.U.I cases, stolen drugs and setting up a brothel, Baxter observed, “If I saw a movie that included all those things, I’d think that this is not realistic.”

And there was a perhaps surprising amount of stated consensus about what needs to happen next from panelists Woo, Herley, defense attorney Stuart Hanlon, newly sworn-in SFPD Chief Greg Suhr, Anne Irwin, an attorney at the Public Defender’s Office, and John Burris, an Oakland-based civil rights attorney who is renowned for representing plaintiffs in police brutality cases.

Baxter asked the panelists why abuse of power happens, and whether, when we see media accounts of alleged police misconduct, we see the most extreme cases.

Hanlon kicked off by referring to the case of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a former high ranking member of the Black Panther Party, who was tried and convicted of the kidnap and murder of Caroline Olsen in 1972, and spent 27 years in prison, eight in solitary confinement, until 1997 when his conviction was vacated on the grounds that the prosecution concealed evidence that might have exonerated him. In particular, the government had not disclosed that a key witness against Pratt, Julius Butler, was an informant for both the FBI and the LAPD. Pratt eventually received $4.5 million as settlement for false imprisonment—the city of L.A. paid $2.75 million, the U.S. Department of Justice paid $1.75 million.

“We learned that law enforcement officers had hidden evidence, let people commit perjury, and destroyed evidence to convict someone who was innocent, “ Hanlon recalled, noting how when he first worked on the case, folks wondered if Pratt’s claim of innocence was simply part of a big conspiracy theory. “But it was not, it was men and women who thought the ends justified the means” Hanlon said, noting that the “bad apples” theory is typically trotted out during investigations into alleged police misconduct. “But officers see people who they think are bad people, and they feel they must whatever it takes,” Hanlon continued. “Primarily, most law enforcement people are good, but sometimes you get good cops lying to protect bad cops. It’s a dilemma, this concept of ‘what we do we need to do, this ‘us versus them’ concept.”

Hanlon claimed that officers don’t think citizens who live in SROs (single room occupancy hotels) have the same rights as folks in Pacific Heights.
“They think it’s OK to break down doors because these are drug dealers,” he said. And he noted that the recent string of back-to-back scandals are unusual in their proximity but are not unusual, generally speaking. “I’m not an apologist for (Chief) Suhr or the D.A., but I’ve seen these problems forever, and without trust law enforcement doesn’t work,” Hanlon concluded.

Next, Baxter put Suhr in the hot seat by asking him what to do about the “ends justify the means concept”. At which point Suhr, who has been Chief for less than two weeks, observed that the summit, which was packed to the gills with defense and civil rights attorneys, was “a bit of an away game for me, but it’s O.K., I can handle it.” He noted that only 1 in 11 applicants make it through the SFPD Police Academy, where folks undergo 1,100 hours of training, including sessions on abuse of power and responsibilities. “But if something is proven, it’s my intention not to have those officers in the SFPD any more,” Suhr said.

Retired Tiburon Chief Pete Herley revealed that during his decades-long police career, he blew the whistle when three officers nearly beat a gay man to death. “I suffered the consequences for many years,” he said. “It’s very lonely getting death threats, it’s very lonely when you don’t get the backing of fellow officers.”

Herley claimed times have changed a lot. “Change starts in the Academy and the selection of officers, and you have no other law enforcement officers that get more scrutiny, background checks m psychological checks and an 18-month probation period,” he said.

He noted that police chiefs inherit a departmental culture, whether they come into the post from the inside or the outside of the department. And that while the number of officers involved in misconduct is small, “it makes good press.” 

“I really feel one needs to be more loyal to integrity than to people,” Herley continued, noting that his parents were Holocaust survivors, and that his father was aghast when he decided to become a police officer. “But I had certain values and I don’t expect anything less from other people. I expect that every department has something in their rules and regulations that directs their officers that if they see misconduct, it’ll be stopped and the action will be reported immediately to the Chief.

Baxter asked Woo what the D.A. should do, if there is a problem.“All we are is our integrity, our ability to communicate and put forth evidence to juries “ Woo observed, noting that she has been on the frontlines as allegations about the crime lab, the Henri Hotel, and now potential theft, surfaced. “We find ourselves very reactive,” Woo observed, noting that if officers are not being truthful, the D.A.’s office has to look at all the cases they were involved in. “So it really impacts public safety and how all of us view the criminal justice system,” Woo said, noting that officers involved in the Henri Hotel allegations taken off the street.“But we have no interest in prosecuting individuals if it’s not based on solid evidence,” Woo said.

She recommended proactive steps like getting involved in Police Academy training on the law, and what officers can and cannot do, and giving officers tools to make good decisions and arrests, so there is integrity in the system. “If there isn’t, we all lose, not just the criminal justice system, but the entire community,” Woo observed, noting that as SFPD Chief, “Gascón instituted lots of policies to make sure people are doing an appropriate level of review.”

Baxter asked Anne Irwin, an attorney in the Public Defender’s Office, about their office’s role in bringing abuse of power to the attention of the public. “The Public Defender has a unique and natural role as a messenger,” Irwin replied. “We have more meaningful interaction with the victims of police misconduct than anyone else in the criminal justice system. We get into the intimate details of their lives, we develop a relationship of trust, so they confide their stories about police misconduct. And those stories are commonplace.”

Irwin noted that these stories include a disrespect for the Fourth Amendment, perjury and theft. “When you hear those stories over and over, there’s a ring of truth, a consistency,” Irwin said, noting that this is not the first time officers have been captured on camera. “We didn’t say, let’s amass a bunch of evidence. We just basically did our job. Residents told us what someone said in a report is not what happened, so we got videos from Dec. 23 and Jan. 5, and lo and behold, every word was true, two for two.”

Irwin noted that there are many good officers in the SFPD, but questioned whether a culture develops in certain departments, including the plain-clothes units, that allows misconduct to happen. “Without the videos officers would not have had to answer for their conduct,” she observed.

Baxter asked Suhr what it is about the culture that makes some cops go rogue. “Did they work there too long, were the temptations too much?” she asked.

Suhr replied that he worked in narcotics for a long time, and recovered $1.4 million in cash from an apartment in the Western Addition. “I never took a dime, and I am confident that the officers I worked with were of the highest caliber,” he said. “To paint a 2,000-person organization with a broad brush is unfair,” he added. “In the legal profession, every once in a while, you see ugly stories there too.”

Burris, who filed a $25 million wrongful death claim against BART on behalf of Oscar Grant’s family, noted that he has been involved in about 1,000 police misconduct cases in the Bay Area. “A culture exists about how you treat minority communities, “ he said, noting that he had represented black and brown clients for over 20 years. “A culture where you beat people and nothing is done, and you get away with it.”

Burris believes the problem lies in how policies are imposed, as he claimed that when officers join departments they are told to forget what they were taught in the Academy.“This is what you do on the streets,” he said.

Baxter observed that she has seen movies about the code of silence and wondered if it actually exists in police departments. “I don’t think so generally,” Suhr said. “There’s peer pressure to be sure. A regular citizen has a right not to self incriminate, and in the Police Department you can say that, but you are immediately sent to Internal Affairs, where you are told, tell me what happened or you are fired. So, today, the light is shining on us 100 percent of the time.”

Herley noted that his concern lay with situations in which officers see something, but don’t say anything. “I never thought I’d sit here and agree with every word John Burris says, but it starts at the top, and has to be enforced throughout the organization.”

Herley said the two best tools to prevent indiscretions and ensure responsibility are tape recorders and video cameras. “There’s certification of exactly what happened.” As for questions of how much it would cost to outfit officers with this recording equipment, Herley said, “ What is the cost of a lawsuit, the cost the perception of a loss of integrity to a department?”

Rolling recreation

Maria Poblet
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4
Rolling recreation

caitlin@sfbg.com

SUMMER GUIDE “We definitely try to de-emphasize Iron Man trips,” says Justin Eichenlaub, author of Post-Car Adventuring, the eminently usable guide to low carbon camping, hiking, and cruising trips around the Bay Area, Although Eichenlaub and coauthor Kelly Gregory want to include all fitness levels in the fun, make no mistake — they’re hardcore.

The two met through a Craigslist posting for a multi-day group bike trip to Monterey and now publish guidebooks and a blog under the name Post-Car Press. They’re virtual encyclopedias of info: locations of wide highway berms, how to avoid Devil’s Slide on Highway 101 (incidentally, by a route bikers have dubbed Planet of the Apes Road), and the absolute best for-bikers-by-bikers maps money can buy (Krebs cycle maps, available at www.krebscycleproducts.com).

But they’re adamant that it doesn’t take quads of steel to master the roads — even ones to far-flung campsites — sans car with the help of trains, county buses, and the occasional ferry. Indeed, even if you’re not the biking type, auto-less camping is still within your grasp. Shoulder your backpack and head out to Marin’s Samuel P. Taylor State Park via the Golden Gate Transit express bus to San Rafael, then the Marin Stagecoach No. 68. The stagecoach drops you a quarter-mile from campsites tucked into a redwood grove — where walk and bike-in camping doesn’t require reservation and costs only $3 per person per night.

A few tips for the road, courtesy of Eichenlaub. “Have a bike that you’re comfy on — it doesn’t have to be a road bike, or even have a rack, because you can stow your gear in a backpack. Realize you’re allowed to go really slow and the bike will always feel lighter than you expect.” Always familiarize yourself with your route before you leave, and — duh — bring a flat tire kit, pump, and bike lights. “Even if you’re planning a day ride, it can sometimes turn into a dusk ride.”

Here’s a partial guide to three of the pair’s fave summer adventures. Make sure to look up detailed directions before you roll out to recreate. Transit time and bike mileage numbers are for round trips.

 

MERCEY HOT SPRINGS

Public transit time: eight hours

Total bike mileage: 68 miles

“This is really a slice of California that Bay Area people don’t go to,” says Eichenlaub of Fresno County’s desert lands, which house a natural spa center that’s been around since 1912. Take BART to the MacArthur Station and bike about 1.2 miles to the Emeryville Amtrak Station. Load your steed onto a train bound for Merced — trains in California never charge fees for stowing bikes — then hop the Route 10 Merced County Transit bus (schedules at www.mercedthebus.com) to Dos Palos. Get off near the Reynolds and Christian streets intersection and begin the 33-mile ride through dry, wildflower-studded lands.

“There are few, if any, trees — only sweeping sandy plains dotted with desert brush,” according to Gregory. After an especially beautiful 12 miles on Little Panoche Road, two lanes of thoroughfare where cars rarely pass — you’ll reach Mercey Hot Springs, where you’ll find cabins (starting at $120/night) and campsites ($30 per person/night) for your well-deserved slumber.

“It feels as though you are far, far away from the city,” Gregory says. The center hosts regular yoga seminars and has a disc golf course that guests can use for free. But if you’re trying to make this a quick jaunt, day use of the pool, sauna, and baths costs only $20.

Side trip: Eichenlaub swears on the Panoche Inn, a “cowboy saloon” 10 miles down the road from Mercey. Hey, what’s better on a detox trip than getting wasted with the cowpokes? Of course, the place does have a website (www.panocheinn.com), so it can’t be too back roads.

 

PALAMERES ROAD VINEYARD DAYTRIP

Public transit time: 77 minutes

Total bike mileage: 27 miles

Take BART to the West Dublin-Pleasanton Station and then break out your bike for the ride down beautiful, shaded back roads to Sunol, a tiny town whose most famous inhabitant is probably Bosco, a golden retriever who was elected honorary mayor from 1981 until his death in 1994 (and was featured in a Chinese newspaper as an example of Western democracy’s failings).

From there, it’s a gentle hill climb up to a pair of vineyards: Westover and Chouinard. Just, ahem, don’t be expecting a Napa scene. “The first time we went out there, one of the vintners was blowing his own leaves, wearing a muscle shirt,” says Eichenlaub. Vino, sans pretension? Well worth the trip.

Drink your fill from the pleasant tasting rooms and — here’s the beauty of this ride — roll tipsily down the sloping route to the Castro Valley Station, and home.

Side trip: If you’re in the mood to make this an overnight adventure, Eichenlaub recommends taking on the extra 30 miles to the enormous Lake Del Valle, where there’s kickass family campsites tucked into a bend in the shoreline, kayak rentals, and lots of sun.

 

LOMA-PRIETA SIERRA CLUB HIKER’S HUT

Transit time: two hours Total bike journey: 50 miles

Snuggled into the Santa Cruz Mountains is an A-frame cabin with a kitchen, wood stove, and a tranquil view of the ocean you just can’t find within city limits. It’s operated by the Sierra Club, but non-club members (up to 14 at a time) can crash within its logs at prices starting at $20 per night. Be sure you make a reservation before you go at www.lomaprieta.sierraclub.org.

To become a woodland creature, take Caltrain to the Menlo Park Station and begin riding out Sand Hill Road, toward the mountains. After about seven miles, turn onto beautiful Old La Honda Road (“car-lite and redwood-lined,” says Eichenlaub) a three-mile climb to the ridge line. After summiting the hill, he recommends a pit stop at Apple Jack’s in La Honda, where Ken Kesey used to kick it — “a very quirky, very local, and surprisingly friendly bar.”

From there, continue west on Highway 84 until you get to Pescadero Road and then the entrance of Sam MacDonald County Park. After a few loops and a little climbing, make a left onto the Old Towne fire road (across from a park station parking lot) and navigate 1.2 miles of beautiful trail out to the hiker’s hut and outdoor playtime galore. Return the same way after your stay or use your Krebs map to explore West Alpine Road for fresh scenery on the loop back. 

For more info on Post-Car Adventuring and carfree trips to Big Sur, Tassajara Hot Springs, flat routes in Marin County, and even Yosemite, go to postcarpress.tumblr.com.

 

The underground

Maria Poblet
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0
The underground

arts@sfbg.com

Compilations often serve two purposes, sometimes at the same time: they can be brief introductions or exhaustive overviews. The San Francisco label Dark Entries just released BART: Bay Area Retrograde, a collection of local, underground music from the early ’80s, which feels like a bit of both. Representing local bands — from Danville to Palo Alto, Berkeley, and SF — that gravitated toward an alienated, synth-driven sound, it’s a meticulously curated snapshot that feels complete in itself, but is also a primer for the minimal synth revival. With many songs verging on 30 years old, label owner and DJ Josh Cheon and co-curator Phil Maier have compiled tracks that were un- or little- known in their own time but now sound very much of the moment.

There are many names for the variety of styles represented across BART‘s 11 songs — synthpop, post-punk, and cold, minimal, or new wave are only the most common. But nearly half of the songs are complete obscurities — four are previously unreleased and two appeared only in small, self-released editions — and the compilation as a whole is difficult to pin down. These are artifacts from a lost era, our local contribution to an international group of artists who created music that was bound to be marginal, faced with intense rock chauvinism and Reagan-era optimism.

BART kicks off with three songs (Nominal State’s “Middle Class,” Batang Frisco’s “Power,” and Necropolis of Love’s “Talk”) that sound like a blueprint for the current renaissance of icy analog futurism by groups like Xeno and Oaklander, Staccato du Mal, and The Soft Moon. But curveballs like Wasp Women’s No-Wave-y “Kill Me” and The Units’ peppy ode “Mission” alleviate the future-shock claustrophobia and put the compilation in a category of its own — it’s as much a love letter to the Bay Area’s taste for the goofy and willfully weird as an archival release.

There’s a sense of playfulness that’s immediately apparent in the presentation. Eloise Leigh’s eye-popping jacket design is satisfyingly heavy on pink, blue, and yellow, and comes as a six-panel fold-out poster rather than a standard cardboard pocket, suggesting it would prefer wall space rather than a slot on the shelf. Comprising liner notes from the Guardian’s Johnny Ray Huston and band data on one side and Dr. Art Nuko’s painting Getting Bombed in San Francisco on the other, BART the consumer object feels like something that belongs nowhere so much as Valencia Street’s overflowing vintage zine store, Goteblüd. And while the music contained on the vinyl within can be dark and brooding like “Talk,” or abrasive and fractured like Standard of Living’s “N.F.A.,” the most memorable songs, to me, are the frothy ones: Danny Boy and the Serious Party Gods’ parody-of-a-parody “Castro Boy,” and the above-mentioned “Mission.” The former riffs on Zappa’s “Valley Girl,” but ups the raunch with ad-libs about fisting, while “Mission” builds up to its irrepressible chorus with verses celebrating the unassailable pleasures of being high and eating burritos. Even if you aren’t already a minimal synth nerd, BART is a fun album.

With its variety of styles and lyrical themes, BART holds together not only because there’s a high baseline of quality, but also because of the built-in context. In addition to the design, a lot of work clearly went into finding and collaborating with these long-defunct bands, from securing unheard demos to listing the synth models used for each track. It’s a meticulously assembled record, a guided experience that points out what is so unsatisfying about downloading some lost classic from a sharity blog and deleting it, unlistened to, months later. Its local focus also sets it apart from the compilations that helped define minimal wave, although it contributes to that canon as well.

As the underbelly of an underground dominated in the retelling by figures like Chrome, Flipper, and The Residents, BART‘s new audience lives in a skewed world, where technology provides us with nearly endless opportunities to connect, where analog synths are revered for their warmth and character, and where the Mission is gentrified. Yet faced with an excess of information every time we make a decision, the rough edges of this serious, cynical music offer opportunities to disconnect from the endless demands of the present. The past will always have the advantage of seeming coherent, but BART‘s biggest success is in the way it captures the innovative, corrosive energy of its time. * *

 

Return of the skronk

Andrew Lam
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0
Return of the skronk

arts@sfbg.com

MUSIC There’s a point at the start of Bill Orcutt’s recently reissued, acclaimed 2009 album, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Editions Mego), during the violent, staccato blues of “Lip Rich,” when a telephone rings. Slight pause. And then the San Francisco musician picks up where he left off, with shattered, crashing runs of proudly broken-ass guitar notes, the occasional shout and cry. Pummeling his old Kay acoustic until it reverberates like a piano, Orcutt sounds as if he’s busy ripping apart blues guitar lines at the end of a long metal-clad tunnel — and exorcising a few demons while he’s at it. There, at Orcutt’s end, semis, motorcycles, and homegirls rumble past and Mississippi blues players still wander, stumbling into pale-faced strangers deconstructing Delta drone with their bare hands, nails, and bones.

The reality is that the police sirens, roaring buses, and streetside groans on New Way — all of which lend the music the beautifully devolved faux-authenticity of an old field recording — are the same sounds you can hear any day at 24th and York streets in the Mission. Orcutt and family moved to that spot when they relocated to San Francisco after the 1997 breakup of his old band Harry Pussy, the noise-experimental band he founded in Miami along with fearsome vocalist-drummer Adris Hoyos. New Way — a document of a new solo approach in an old room perched above an even older Mission thoroughfare—was recorded during the spring of ’09 in a window-lined spot within their corner apartment.

“It was just insanely loud,” Orcutt recalls now from his current home in Sunnyside. It’s late, but it’s one of the few times Orcutt, who holds down a job as a software engineer, can talk. “There were constantly trucks and people going by outside, so there was no way to record and keep the background out. I realized I should just go with whatever happened — and the phone rang in the middle of the take.”

As chance would have it, one of Orcutt’s favorite guitarists, English experimentalist Derek Bailey, also had a recording released, posthumously, that was punctuated by a disruptive phone call (“Wrong Number” on More 74 [Incus]).

At least it wasn’t simply a noisy trendoid bellowing in the brunch queue outside St. Francis Fountain.

“When we moved there, St. Francis was closed — it was weird when it first reopened,” says a dryly amused Orcutt. “Suddenly there were people waiting for tofu scramble, and we were like, ‘Why?'”

“Why?” also comes to mind as one listens to New Way: why hasn’t Orcutt played and recorded since the dissolution of Harry Pussy? Perhaps it was the move or work demands — more important, Orcutt got reinterested in playing music when he began to assemble a retrospective of Harry Pussy’s music for Load Records, You’ll Never Play This Town Again: Live, Etc 1997 (2008), and began to listen the furious skronk his band generated and the remarkably damaged, thick, and grotty guitar sound he developed.

“I hadn’t heard that music in 10 years. It was pretty extreme, and I forgot what it sounded like,” he says. “I was like, ‘Whoa, that is weird.’ I was listening to a lot of it because I had to, and it naturally made me want to pick up a guitar and start playing again.”

It was a slight case of being inspired by yourself — though the modest Orcutt immediately disavows this (“That sounds weird — don’t say that!”) — and remembering your roots, be they buried in the same hot soil as Mississippi Fred McDowell, or the same swampy morass as kindred noisy Floridian Rat Bastard. “Honestly, there were like two or three people that were doing strange stuff in Miami at that time,” Orcutt remembers. “It wasn’t much of a scene. It was just isolated weirdos going off on their own tangents — that pretty much described us.”

Orcutt’s incredible, atonal guitar playing is the uncommon element connecting Hoyos’ formidable shrieks and 24th Street grind. These days Orcutt prefers to play acoustic rather than electric, though it’s rigged as a four-string, with the A and D strings removed, much the same way his electric once was. The modification predates Harry Pussy: “It just stuck,” he notes. “At this point, there’s no rational reason for doing it. It’s just what I sound like in my own head.”

The acoustic was also an intuitive choice, and as Orcutt started listening to guitarists such as McDowell, Bailey, and Carlos Montoya, “just to see what had been done before and to get the lay of the land and an understanding of what the perimeters were,” its sound and mobility started to appeal. “It’s a nice way to be self-contained and self-reliant. As long as you can get it on the plane, you’re good. And in a really small venue, you can even get away without having a PA,” he explains. “If I have to, I could wind up at the BART Station and I’m good to go.”

And it exposed Orcutt as a musician, apart from the protective mob of a band. “Honestly, once I got into it, I really wanted to play solo,” he observes. “When I started playing in front of people, it was scary, but I have this weird compulsion to play solo.” That urge is still a puzzle — in Harry Pussy, he adds, “Adris [Hoyos] definitely led the way and it was easy to hang back. I don’t know …” Slight pause. “There’s some kind of process I’m working through by playing solo, and I’m definitely still working on whatever it is.”

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