California

“From San Francisco to Silicon Valley”

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REVIEW The camera loves San Francisco. Weather, light, hills, and landmarks all make it primary fodder for photographers, too many of whom hew to the postcard views. Known for his architectural documentation of the industrial outer rings of Europe’s cities, Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico came to the Bay Area to capture its transitional developments: Silicon Valley and the San Francisco of strange buildings and telephone wires. No Victorians or trolley cars here, which means that many viewers may recognize the city as they know it: construction, do-not-enter road signs, and a distant skyline; sunbathers in Dolores Park rather than the Golden Gate’s majesty; Verizon Wireless billboards; and the 76 gas station globe. A conventional picture of the Marin Headlands drifting in fog is interrupted by the foregrounding of high-rise apartments. A stunning landscape photo taken from Twin Peaks revels in the incongruities of our still-beautiful city, with grassy California hills overlaying the low-slung Sunset and Castro, and Market Street forming a V with a long afternoon shadow.

"From San Francisco to Silicon Valley" also includes a plethora of freeway shots, which makes sense, given the show’s title. Basilico shoots both the silent underpasses and the blurred velocity of downtown-bound cars. As we transition to the valley, the highways provide the visual link. Instead of giving way to a rising crowd of buildings, the roads beget alien corporate campuses and manicured exurbia. Basilico the architect gleefully frames the garish structures and sprawling sameness that define much of the Silicon Valley landscape, though his best portraits include counterpoint evocations of California nature. On the same floor of the museum, in "Picturing Modernity," Carleton E. Watkins’s photograph The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill (circa 1868) presents San Francisco as a hungry upstart. More than 100 years later, Basilico’s shot of roughshod development in the hills outside San Jose tells a similar story.

FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO SILICON VALLEY Through June 15. Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Breezy’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since the symphony strike of the mid-1990s, the west side of the Civic Center has seen more than its share of high-profile destination restaurants open their doors. From Jardinière (born 1997) to Essencia (2007), the tone of the restaurants in the neighborhood (whose epicenter is the corner of Gough and Hayes) has become considerably … tonier.

Much of the upscale-ishness doubtless has to do with the demolition of the Central Freeway viaduct and the reemergence of Hayes Valley as a nice place to live. A fresh bloom of boutique shops tends to confirm this. But east of Gough, the song remains largely the same: opera, symphony, ballet, with the occasional "in conversation with" at Herbst Auditorium thrown in. Yes, we are talking performances of one kind or another, and performance audiences often want something to eat in a civilized setting beforehand and aren’t always eager to cash out their 401(k)s or Google stock options to pay for it. Does the west Civic Center, with its new wealth of destination spots, have anything to offer these people? Ivy’s was the archetype of this sort of value restaurant, but it closed more than a decade ago.

On a recent weekend evening, mild and clear after weeks of stultifying rain, we slipped into Breezy’s at about 7:30 and found both large dining rooms full. A half hour later, as the clock struck eight, the restaurant was nearly empty; we were like the two forlorn members of a school of tasty fish who didn’t get the memo about the approaching great white shark. As curtains grandly rose in grand buildings on the other side of Gough, we made do with a chocolate tart.

Bawer Tekin and Dawn Wiggins opened Breezy’s last fall in a space long occupied by the Blue Muse, whose fanatical devotees will be relieved to know their restaurant has reappeared a block away, in a space that adjoins the performing-arts parking garage. The old space, meanwhile, looks little-changed and is still rather cavernous, with the front room still dominated by the big bar and the rear dining room faintly secret, like a cell in a medieval cloister. A creamy color scheme brings some warmth to this brutal roominess, and the iridescent tiles on the support pillars exert a certain hypnotic appeal, as Rubik’s Cube did a generation ago.

But forget about Breezy’s pleasantly unobtrusive décor and its friendly, efficient service, which holds up well even at the heart of the pre-performance rush. You’re there to eat, and the food is good. Quite good! Interesting without calling undue attention to itself, and reasonably priced in a fat-cat city where the word affordable often seems as if it’s been read right out of the language.

Chef Rodney Baca’s menu offers, according to the restaurant’s Web site, "the fresh tastes of the Mediterranean, with a swirl of Asian flair." Nicely put. The food, in other words, is that by-now familiar amalgam of California–New American cuisine, with touches of local and sustainable, along with a few blatant violations of these tenets. I love stuffed tomatoes, and Baca’s version ($9) is excellent — a baseball-size, reasonably ripe (for February) fruit, opened at the top like a Halloween pumpkin for a lively filling of prosciutto, cheese, and basil — but … a tomato in February? With basil? Everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire wrote in Candide, except (and I choose to believe this is implicit in the Voltairean text) winter tomatoes.

An arugula and watercress salad ($6) is a little more like it. The greens reached the table still practically glistening with rain, and instead of walnuts (those usual suspects), Baca used spicy peanuts to add crunch while making, possibly, a sly Super Bowl reference. Aged bleu cheese is a standard player in these salads and did appear in this one, but the vinaigrette acquired a refreshing sheen from pomegranate juice.

The kitchen also handles pasta beautifully, and this is an important consideration for performance-bound people, who will be more comfortable sitting there for an hour or three if they’ve eaten something a little lighter than a 20-ounce steak. You can get some steak with your pasta if you like; linguine alla carbonara ($14), with a classic sauce of pancetta cream and green peas, also includes meatballs of rib eye and Asiago cheese — just enough meat to register. And macaroni and cheese ($6, for a serving big enough to be a small main dish), is infused with truffle oil, scattered with crisped bits of chorizo, and plated with mixed micro greens, for a full-spectrum effect.

The chocolate tart ($7) we were so contentedly eating when the room cleared, as if in response to an air-raid siren, did suffer from a tough crust. Our server had mentioned this to us beforehand. But it was flavorful tough crust, we had good knives, and the ganache inside was intense and at the very precipice of not being sweet. Embedded on the surface of the ganache like bits of buckshot were blueberries, while napped around the edge was a wild berry marmalade and a dusting of pulverized pistachio.

At weekday lunchtime (the other busy period for restaurants in this area) Breezy’s is nicely accessible. Its large carrying capacity must help. Choices tend toward the conventional — Cobb salad ($9), say, or seared ahi tuna ($11) on a focaccia bun — and as at dinner, toward lightness too. Lightness, freshness, the pleasant startlement of a fresh breeze in the face: the name Breezy’s made not much sense to me before I went there and ate the food, but then I did and now it does. *

BREEZY’S

Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.

409 Gough, SF

(415) 552-3400

www.breezysf.com

Full bar

Moderately noisy

AE/DC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Rent control fix

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Cities would be empowered to require replacement of rent-controlled units lost to demolition or disasters under legislation introduced by state senator Carole Migden with the support of affordable housing advocates in San Francisco.

Migden, during a Feb. 22 rally outside City Hall announcing State Senate Bill 1299, acknowledged that many property owners might oppose the effort but said, "We are at our wit’s end in trying to keep this city affordable."

The legislation comes just as the San Francisco Tenants Union and other groups are mobilizing against this June’s Proposition 98, which would end rent control in California — affecting 170,000 apartments in San Francisco alone.

"Rent control in San Francisco remains our largest and most effective affordable housing program," Sup. Chris Daly said at the rally. But SFTU head Ted Gullickson told the crowd that it is undercut by redevelopment projects, such as a current proposal to demolish apartment complexes at Park Merced, and could be wiped out by an earthquake.

As Gullickson said, "San Francisco every day is bleeding its rent control housing stock."

Big finish

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

After more than three weeks of testimony, a series of expert witnesses, reams of documents entered into evidence, and some stunning admissions on the part of the nation’s largest alternative newspaper chain, the Guardian‘s lawsuit against the SF Weekly is headed for the jury just as this issue hits the streets.

The outcome could impact the future of the alternative press.

The Guardian is charging the Weekly and its corporate owner, Village Voice Media, with predatory pricing, arguing that the Weekly for many years sold ads below cost with the intent of harming the locally owned competitor. That would be a violation of the California Unfair Practices Act.

The Weekly‘s last few witnesses were slated to take the stand Feb. 26 and closing arguments are set for Feb. 27, when Judge Marla Miller told the jury that it will probably begin deliberating.

The daily newspapers and the mainstream media in general have ignored the case. "That’s a shame," Mark Fitzgerald, a columnist for the trade magazine Editor and Publisher, wrote in a Feb. 24 piece that called the trial "sometimes raucous."

In fact, it’s been fascinating, and the jurors have seen some remarkable evidence. Since the chain, then known as New Times, bought the Weekly in 1995, the evidence has shown that the paper has never once made a profit. In fact, the corporation has had to ship in $13 million from its Phoenix headquarters to keep the Weekly afloat.

Several top executives, including two former Weekly publishers, Troy Larkin and Chris Keating, have admitted under oath that the Weekly was selling ads below cost. The Guardian‘s financial expert, accountant Clifford Kupperberg, has presented evidence that the Weekly sold ads below cost as much as 90 percent of the time and that the predatory practices have cost the Guardian between $5 million and $11 million.

On Feb. 22, Everett Harry, an expert witness hired by the Weekly, as much as admitted the same thing, presenting a series of charts that showed consistent below-cost sales.

The Weekly‘s lawyers are arguing that the 16-paper chain and its senior management never intended to harm the Guardian. Any financial setbacks the Guardian has suffered were due entirely to the dot-com bust, the post 9/11 recession, and the rise of Internet advertising, they say.

They also say that the Weekly and the Guardian have so many competitors in the San Francisco market that it would be foolish for VVM to try to damage a single competing newspaper.

But three witnesses have come forward to testify that Mike Lacey, one of the two principal owners of Village Voice Media, specifically vowed to put the Guardian out of business when he took over the Weekly. Memos from Weekly publishers to the bosses in Phoenix refer to the Guardian as the only significant competitor and discuss how the Weekly can take ads away from the Guardian.

In some memos, Weekly executives talk of how well they are doing in San Francisco, even as the Weekly was losing more than $1 million a year. The clear implication: the Weekly publishers weren’t being judged on how much money they made, but on how effectively they’ve tried to cripple the Guardian.

The jury will have to find that the Weekly sold below cost, that it did so to harm the Guardian, and that the Weekly‘s behavior played a significant role in causing the Guardian financial harm. The panel can then award damages.

Alternative papers around the country, particularly independents, are watching the trial closely. If the Guardian wins, the jury verdict could send a signal to big publishing outfits in California and in the 20 other states with similar antitrust laws that below-cost selling and attempts at market domination could be risky business.

Tooth and consequences

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› culture@sfbg.com

It’s two days after Christmas and I’m sprawled out on a plastic-lined chaise lounge, sipping fluoride and waiting for the blood to stop gushing from my gums so the doctors can get back to work. Beyond the noise of drills and X-ray machines I hear grunts from several other patients and the sounds of merchants outside hawking sombreros, sweetbread, bootleg Fendi bags, and pottery. Kind of strange, but I’m not worried anymore. This is my second day at Dr. Rafael Lopez’s dental clinic, and I’m no longer freaked out that it’s nestled among trinket stores and cantinas in a bustling bazaar in Mexico.

I also don’t care that the dentists here speak hardly any English, nor I any Spanish. I mean, it’s not like I’m alone. All the other patients at Dr. Lopez’s office are either Canadian or American, and all the people shopping out front are too. In fact, nearly every person I’ve met on the streets here is Caucasian and an English speaker. We’re all dental tourists, and we’ve come to Los Algodones — a sunny border town near Yuma, Arizona, which allegedly has more dental clinics and pharmacies per block than any other city in the world — to save money. In my case, I’m in for three root canals with posts and crowns for the price of a secondhand scooter on eBay: $1,850, about a third of what I’d pay for the same procedures in the States.

I’d heard about Dr. Lopez’s clinic through a friend of my mother’s, but Los Algodones, like other dental tourism destinations, was easy to find on the Web. In fact, the town’s Web site, www.losalgodones.com, is actually a dental clinic referral network, with pictures of smiling clinicians and graphic before and after shots flashing across its home page. Clinics like Dr. Lopez’s, which often handle 10 to 20 patients a day, are set up exclusively for foreigners. Dr. Lopez estimates that 80 percent of his customers are American and 20 percent are Canadian; most Mexicans in the area can’t afford his rates. Many of them come to towns like this for big-ticket procedures like bridges and reconstructive surgery, some of which can cost more than $10,000 at home.

And they’re coming in increasing numbers. According to HealthCare Tourism International, a nonprofit accreditation and information organization set up to monitor the medical tourism boom, an estimated 1 million Americans will travel abroad this year for some of sort of medical service, up from the National Coalition on Health Care’s figure of about 150,000 in 2004. Of the procedures sought, 40 percent will be dental related. A recent article in the New York Times on the dental tourism phenomenon cited a boom in luxury travel packages designed around dental procedures. A root canal followed by a little fly-fishing in Costa Rica? Why not? The money you save can justify a short vacation.

ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM


Dr. Lopez’s clinic is, hopefully, the end of the road for me. I’ve been struggling with dental problems (and the potential resulting bills) for years. With all this talk of health care reform, you’d think I would have been able to find a decent low-cost US dentist, especially in civic-minded San Francisco. But it just wasn’t happening. For whatever reason, dental care and health care are viewed as two separate issues in the United States. When it comes to diseases, colds, and broken bones, you can usually catch a break, but good luck trying to get your teeth fixed on a budget. The truth is, even if you have some form of dental insurance, which is unlikely — according to the American Dental Association (ADA), only about half of all Americans do — dental care is nearly impossible for average wage earners to afford. At least, I’ve never been able to afford it. And I’ve looked everywhere.

My own dental horror story began nearly a decade ago when the Marine Corps kicked me off my retired father’s lifelong dental plan. I was fine for about a year, until the day I awoke with a terrible pain in my mouth. I was 19 at the time, taking classes at a community college and working at a café — barely able to pay rent, let alone find the time and money for a visit to the dentist. So I did the next best thing: simply ignored the pain, staving it off with copious amounts of ibuprofen when it got intense. The over-the-counter denial did the trick for almost two years, but I knew I would be forced to eventually bite the bullet, however softly.

And then it happened. My teeth started breaking. Not hurting, at least no more than usual, just breaking off — in huge, gray chunks.

This went on for years. By the time I was 25, four of my teeth had shattered and the rest seemed well on their way to doing the same. I adopted the diet of a five-month-old, unable to chew anything tougher than bananas or scrambled eggs. It was time to act, but I had no idea where to go. As a full-time student, getting by on financial aid, loans, and whatever I could rake in as a part-time waiter, I was nearly destitute. I’d recently transferred to San Francisco State University, but at that time, in order to purchase the student dental plan the school offered, I also had to purchase its medical plan, a combination that would have increased my monthly bills by nearly $200.

It was tempting, particularly in comparison with most employer-related or individual plans I qualified for, which could run into the thousands. But SFSU’s dental plan screened out existing problems, like the trainwreck I had going on, and carried an annual cap of less than $1,000. (Unlike medical insurance plans, which feature deductibles, most dental plans have annual monetary ceilings.) So even with the plan I would still be unable to afford even a fraction of the work I needed to have done. Since my student days, SFSU has implemented a dental-only plan available to undergrads, but often the limits are too low to cover anything other than cleanings and fillings.

Thus I began my search for a pro bono dentist, figuring that with all the uninsured people living in the city there must be someone around. It quickly became clear, however, that scoring free dental is harder than finding a decent vegetarian restaurant in rural Alabama.

QUEST FOR DENTAL


First, I had a glimmer of hope: a medical and dental clinic in Berkeley that had the word free in its name.

The Berkeley Free Clinic (BFC) has been offering free medical and dental care to the hard-up since 1969. It provides free HIV tests, medicine, preventative education, and more. But I needed dental work — and that was another story. As the only clinic in Northern California offering free fillings, extractions, and referrals to discount dentists, BFC is insanely popular. And since it’s run by volunteers and donors, it’s also chronically understaffed. Jessica Hsieh, a clinic coordinator, explained that the facility does as much as it can with limited resources. "We used to take patients on a first-come, first-served basis," she says. "But there were so many people lined up every night that our waiting room and hallway became fire hazards."

To deal with this problems, the clinic has devised a maddening selection system, which includes spotty business hours and a name-in-the-hat-style lottery. It sounded a little sketchy, but I gave it a go.

After making the 45-minute commute from my home, I arrived at the clinic at exactly 5:30 on a Monday evening. I scribbled my name on a small slip of paper, handed it to the receptionist, and took a seat in a waiting room crowded with students, broke workers, and homeless people. A nurse came out and told everyone to sit tight; the dentists were taking our names into a separate room and she’d return soon with their random choices. Ten minutes later, she came out again, read off three names, and then told everyone else to go home.

The room had been quiet as we all waited to see who’d won, but when a young blond girl with designer jeans and a fancy cell phone rose to claim her prize, the atmosphere became tense.

"That’s fucking bullshit," said a man with dirt on his face and ripped boots. "I’ve been coming here for weeks. This is her first fucking time!"

One of the dentists apologized and reminded us that we were welcome to keep trying as many times as we liked. I took his advice and returned three more times, missing a day of study or work for every fruitless visit until I gave up. One of my teeth in the back had started aching like hell, and I couldn’t stomach the wait any longer.

I broadened my search to include dental schools like that at the University of California San Francisco, where the wait times were rumored to be long, but once on the list, getting work done was guaranteed. After talking to students at the UCSF clinic, though, I realized treatment would require several days off from work and school because each step a student made during surgery would have to be approved by a busy professor and analyzed by other students. And the discount wasn’t exactly phenomenal.

The average cost of a single complete root canal procedure (root canal, post, and crown) at UCSF is more than $1,100, almost twice the amount I wound up paying in Mexico and way more than I could afford at the time.

So I scrapped the dental-school idea and dug deeper, figuring that if I couldn’t find free or cheap dental work, I could at least find a place that offered a payment plan. And I did find such a place.

Western Dental is like the McDonald’s of dental clinics. With multiple locations in almost every city in California, it’s effectively cornered the market on affordable dental work. Only it’s not cheap. A complete root canal procedure on one tooth can cost up to $1,590 — a lot less than a regular dentist, but much more than a dental school and about three times as much as Dr. Lopez charged me in Mexico. People flock to Western Dental because it lets you pay off your dental work like you would a car. You plunk down $99 for a yearlong membership, make a 20 to 30 percent down payment, and then pay the rest off monthly over the course of one year. And Western Dental doesn’t take your credit history into account when working out a plan.

Out of desperation, I eventually did get one of my teeth fixed at the Mission and 24th Street location, and wound up paying a $350 deposit and monthly installments of $110 for the next 12 months.

CAVITY CAVEATS


With my most painful tooth taken care of, I could now focus on finding a better deal, which is how I wound up in Mexico. So far it seems to have been a pretty smart decision. My new teeth look great and they’re holding up fine. I was treated extremely well by Dr. Lopez’s staff. But there are many reasons not go to Mexico for cheap dental work. And Brad Hatfield, a Korean War vet and retired city planner from Arizona City who asked that I not use his real name, knows them all.

Hatfield has been making the three-hour trip to Los Algodones for nearly a decade. He’s seen the town evolve from a haven for cheap trinkets and booze into what it is now: a medical resort for Americans with expensive tooth and eye issues. Hatfield started going to Los Algodones when he realized that even with his insurance he’d never be able to afford necessary dental work. But now, many years and thousands of dollars later, he’s learned his lesson.

"The problem with dentistry in Mexico," says Hatfield, "is that there’s no recourse. If something bad happens, you can’t sue anyone. All you can do is ask for your money back." And that’s just what Hatfield did when he returned from Los Algodones recently and discovered that his new teeth were worthless. Indeed, he claims that almost none of the work he’s gotten in Mexico has held up longer than a year or so.

This last time was the worst. "As soon as I got home," says Hatfield, "my gums started hurting really bad and bleeding off and on." When he called his clinic to complain, they denied his request for a refund and invited him back for some discounted work instead. Hatfield went back, got the work done, and thought his problems were over. But a few days later he realized they weren’t. "I was sitting here eating a piece of chocolate, and all of a sudden I realized I was chewing on two of my teeth and the bridge that was connecting them. All the work they had done had just fallen out."

Hatfield has tried repeatedly to get his dentist to refund his money back, but all he gets in response are invitations to return for more work. "Now they want to just rip all my teeth out and give me a full set of implants. It’s going to cost thousands of dollars on top of the $10,000 I’ve already spent there over the past year."

Hatfield is currently trying to get his problems fixed at a dental college in Mesa, Arizona, but he’s facing steeper prices and will probably have to return to Mexico soon. "My dental and medical problems have ruined me as a person," he says. "I can’t get a job because my teeth are so screwed up, and I can’t think through all this pain. I just don’t understand why dental work is so expensive. It’s much worse than medical."

THE BIG YANK


Hatfield brings up a good point. For some reason dental issues aren’t included in national or local debates about health care. Healthy San Francisco, the universal, citywide health care access program operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, doesn’t cover access to dental services, which were never even considered for inclusion. When reached by the Guardian for comment on this exclusion, SFDPH spokesperson Eileen Shields stressed the difference between the city’s program and regular insurance plans, saying "[Healthy San Francisco] is a health access plan, providing access to basic medical care. I mean, my health plan doesn’t even include dental — does yours?"

Denti-Cal, the state dental insurance program offered as part of Medi-Cal, is an option for California residents with a low income, a social security number, and at least one child. But it obviously doesn’t help the throngs who fill the waiting rooms of Western Dental. San Francisco General Hospital keeps an oral surgeon on call for extreme emergencies but if you want your janked-out teeth replaced or aren’t doubled over in chronic pain, SF General can’t help you.

It doesn’t look like any of this is changing soon. None of the candidates running for president this year has announced a platform that specifically deals with the high cost of dental care in America. Why? Why are medical and dental issues treated as two separate entities? And why is it so hard to afford dental treatment even with insurance?

Hsieh of the BFC thinks it may have to do with the fact that dental issues aren’t thought to be as life-threatening as medical issues. But if an infected tooth is left untreated, it can lead to death just as surely as unchecked pneumonia. On its Web site, the ADA acknowledges the high cost of dental insurance but privileges prevention over treatment, claiming that most dental problems are preventable. If Americans would just take care of their teeth, use their paltry insurance plans for routine checkups, and quit eating so much candy, they wouldn’t have to get root canals. But I brush after meals, floss regularly, and stay away from sweets — and I’ve been in and out of dental clinics with major problems since I was five.

Another theory has to do with the high costs of dental school and specialized equipment, which makes sense. But the truth of the matter, commonly pointed out in the ongoing health care debate, is that mixing profit with patients is a recipe for disaster. As long as insurance companies are able to make billions by fleecing their customers, and as long as dental clinics and drug companies are allowed to set their own prices, the general population is going to be cavity ridden and kind of ugly.

For now, it seems dental tourism may be the best option for people with normal-to-low incomes and chronic problems. Two months after my visit to Mexico, my teeth feel much better and I’m back on solid food. But this kind of travel isn’t for the fainthearted. The weather and food in Los Algodones are great. But getting your teeth ripped out and reconstructed in a foreign country with no legal recourse is dangerous and scary, especially during the high-traffic winter season when the tendency to rush through patients escalates.

My triple root canal, for example, took a mere two visits. The doctors hacked away for 10 hours straight, let me heal for one day, and then stuck on the crowns and pocketed my check. I stumbled out of Dr. Lopez’s office a few days before New Year’s, in a Novocain-induced daze, with blood on my shirt and pieces of rubber molding stuck to my cheeks. My jaws and head ached as I shuffled through the mile-long border-crossing corridor, sweating and dry-heaving.

As I approached the checkpoint, I wondered if I had made the right choice.

Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually made one. It was this or nothing.

Emma Lierley contributed to this report.


>>View a video interview with a Canadian dental tourist

Noise Pop: Heavy petting

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SFBG The song "Xavier Says," off the Magnetic Fields’ latest album, Distortion (Nonesuch), seems to describe a relationship between two not-terribly-happy and at least somewhat fucked-up people. I know you hate these questions, but is this based at all on personal experience?

STEPHIN MERRITT It’s certainly based on personal experience in that I spend a lot of time sitting around writing in sleazy gay bars with a lot of old men because that’s where they play the thumping, boring disco music that I find is best to write to. And so I hear this kind of conversation.

SFBG On the surface, "Nun’s Litany" seems to be about a nun thinking back on her life. Is there a deeper meaning or perhaps a social criticism to the song?

SM Someone pointed out that it could be the same protagonist as in "California Girls" — in fact, maybe the protagonist in "California Girls" is already a nun. I am not intending any social criticism in music. I think social criticism is best done in prose. If you want to do social criticism in rhyme, then you can’t be very serious — neither about the rhyme or the social criticism.

SFBG In a somewhat recent interview, you said that "serious music isn’t listened to in a casual setting." Now you seem to be playing more formal concert halls around the country instead of smaller venues or art galleries. Is this because of your growing fan base or because you prefer playing concert halls?

SM Well, we have more people who want to get in, so we can’t play in galleries. With our growing fan base, where we would be playing is not arenas but large, big, clunky venues. We’re keeping it down because of my hearing problem.

SFBG Are there any particular noises in a live music environment that bother your ear?

SM Well, that’s a leading question. Why, yes: applause. Applause is seemingly perfectly tuned to send my ear into lawn-mower mode.

SFBG Does feedback or distortion bother your ear?

SM Not as much — it seems to be pure tones. Actually, what bothers me most is high white noise. [Irving, Merritt’s Chihuahua, named after Irving Berlin, starts barking for the third time during the interview]

[Thirty seconds later] There, I killed the dog. [Laughter] n

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS

With Interstellar Radio Company

Feb. 28–29, 8 p.m., sold out

Herbst Theatre

War Memorial Veterans Bldg.

401 Van Ness, SF

www.ticketmaster.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Noise Pop: Follow those Dodos

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Meric Long spent a year in chicken heaven or hell, depending on your feelings about charred fowl flesh. For about a year the Dodos vocalist-guitarist-trombonist chopped, baked, and tended as many as 80 signature roasted chickens per night as a line cook at San Francisco foodie institution Zuni Cafe — a day job so intense that plump, juicy birds haunted his dreams. "Whenever I start talking about the chickens, I can’t shut up," he says ruefully now. "It just it ruled my life for a year!"

But honestly, despite those incursions into his REM-scape, Long feels more kinship with his band’s namesake: the Dodo, that incredible, edible, yet now extinct white meat. "They were like chickens," he muses, sprawled sideways on a bench in Mission Creek Cafe on this warm California winter afternoon. The precision roasting of fowl seems far away on this fair day. "They were lonely, though."

"They wanted friends," drummer Logan Kroeber throws in. He’s still shaken and a bit stirred thanks to a too-close-to-personal-extinction-for-comfort encounter between his skateboarding self and a car blasting down a nearby alley.

"And that’s why they got killed off," Long continues. "They weren’t used to visitors, and the English came and were hungry and ate ’em."

Still, it takes a lot of sly chutzpah to adopt the moniker of the highly uncool, not-so-beautiful loser of the animal kingdom. And though they’d never say so explicitly, Long and Kroeber are hoping, humbly, to do the clumsy waddlers proud by adapting and maybe even flourishing. Exhibit one: the Dodos’ compelling second album, Visiter, scheduled to be released March 18 on Frenchkiss. Its 14 songs unfold in three rough parts, beginning with the toy piano invocations of road-weary, lovelorn musicians ("Red and Purple"), then rolling through noise-wracked folk drone ("Joe’s Waltz"), wry, Magnetic Fields–style songcraft ("Winter"), and a ragtag country blues scented with the sun and sand of Led Zeppelin and West African drumming ("Paint the Rust"). A significant evolution from Long’s time as a solo acoustic act and from the Dodos’ self-released debut, Beware of the Maniacs (2006), Visiter is startlingly deep and likely to hold up under repeated plays, catching the listener on the tenterhooks of Long’s insinuating melodies.

So it’s funny, then, to think that Long first dubbed his solo folk act Dodobird because he felt like such a slow goer and has now firmly found his voice with Kroeber and the Dodos. "To be honest, I think back then I used to have a fear that I was kind of unintelligent, like I was really dumb but didn’t know it," Long says bashfully. "I don’t know if I should say it. But I think it had to do with partying too much when I was younger and completely fucking my brain. I also think there’s this plane of understanding that other people seem to be on and I’m still kind of out of the loop on."

As usual, Kroeber jumps into the conversation, to watch his bud’s back, because seriously, dude, in his opinion, Long is nothing like the dazed and confused kids he grew up with down south: "A lot of people can sort of deflect that with ‘You’re thinking too much, man! Keep it simple! Positive vibes!’ You know, that sort of brick-by-brick, build your weed cabin." Kroeber nods sagely. "I grew up in Santa Cruz — it’s a historical place for weed-cabin building."

The Dodos found their endearingly clumsy footing far from the happy yet isoutf8g metaphorical grassy isles of yesteryear. After moving from his hometown of Lafayette, Long had been playing solo around town — occasionally as Mix Tape with vocalist Brigid Dawson of the Ohsees — when Kroeber’s cousin introduced the guitarist to the drummer two years ago. Kroeber started accompanying Long live on a few songs, on a single tom. "Even during those early shows," Kroeber recalls, "that girl Emily from Vervein was still, like, ‘It’s cool — I like what you’re doing, the one drum thing. I’m all about it!’ Even with one drum, people were, like, ‘Keep going!’<0x2009>"

A particularly inspiring Animal Collective show roused Long to offer to pay Kroeber’s way to Portland, Ore., where the singer-songwriter was about to record Beware with engineer John Askew, who owns the Filmguerrero label. Their experience working with Askew was so fruitful that the two returned to Askew’s Type Foundry studio to make Visiter after spending 2006 on perpetual tour, getting tighter, writing songs together, and solidifying their identity as a band. For Visiter, the duo piled on an odd array of instruments — stand-up bass, toy piano, and trombone — while the producer carefully pieced the sounds together in the recording’s aural landscape. "John sits there and closes his eyes and imagines his record as a soundscape and places things geographically," Long says, standing suddenly and patting the air above him here and there. "I think it really helped with this situation, because with two people there’s a lot of sonic space to fill, so where he placed everything really made a huge difference. The drums take up so much sound space on the record."

Loneliness fills the spaces of the songs as well, as Visiter so often seems to revolve around the women who were just passing through Long’s life. "Jodi" and "Ashley" are, naturally, about two such suspects, while "Undeclared" eschews Kanye West collegiate themes to focus on an unrealized crush, and "Red and Purple" captures that "young lady" who fashioned elaborate gifts involving invisible ink that would greet Long at every club on tour. "It was pretty romantic shit," Long says a bit wistfully.

"I was definitely impressed," Kroeber agrees. "I didn’t really know this girl, but later I imagined she was one of those people who sew everything by hand, supermeticulous. It was some next-level spy shit."

As the talk turns to girls who have come and gone, the Dodos grow a mite melancholy, though not enough to throw in the towel and jump in a roasting pan. They recently underwent a minimedia storm in New York City, where they attempted to go uncensored for MTV.com while hungover and sleep deprived after partying with Long’s chef pals the previous night. Fortunately, these days the Dodos are relying on their survival instinct more often than not and seeking out swimming holes rather than new watering holes when on tour.

Not that the drink doesn’t have its uses. "It’s an artificial sort of cryostasis," Kroeber quips. "But as soon as you get done with the tour and go home, it crumbles. The second tour, when I came back, my girlfriend was, like, ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ But it does work! When you’re on the road it’s the one thing that keeps you going."

THE DODOS

With Or, the Whale, Bodies of Water, and Willow Willow

Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $10–$12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

ww.cafedunord.com

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Compañía Nacional de Danza

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PREVIEW When Nacho Duato, crowned with laurels from his years in England and Holland, returned to his native Spain in the 1980s, the country’s national ballet company offered him its directorship. He took one look at the ensemble’s anemic repertoire and decided he could breathe some life into it. Consequently, today Compañía Nacional de Danza is a repository of Duato’s choreography. Spain could have done worse: Duato has put contemporary Spanish ballet on the world map like no one else. Don’t expect even a shadow of bolero or flamenco in the two different programs that constitute his company’s San Francisco debut. You will get the fruits of an exceptionally broad musical imagination and dancing that is full-bodied and energized — still ballet based but moving into a lush contemporary sensibility. One of this tour’s pieces, Castrati (2002), also performed at the University of California at Davis a few years back, recalls the brutal ceremony that insured boy sopranos retained their voices beyond puberty. To the sounds of the most glorious Vivaldi, cassocks fly about the stage in a none-too-gentle representation of those initiation rituals. An older work, 1996’s Por Vos Muero, splendidly evokes the role of dance as a social occasion and is performed to 15th- and 16th-century Spanish music. The newest work, Gnawa (2007), named after Moroccan descendents of slaves, explores connections within Spanish and North African cultures. Also on the program are Gilded Goldbergs (2006), White Darkness (2001), and Rassemblement (1990).

COMPAÑÍA NACIONAL DE DANZA Program A, Wed/20–Thurs/21, 8 p.m.; Program B, Sat/23, 8 p.m., and Sun/24, 2 p.m.; $35–$55. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 392-2545, www.performances.org, www.ybca.org

“Low Life Slow Life: Part One”

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REVIEW "Low Life Slow Life: Part One" is a self-curated portrait of the artist Paul McCarthy as a young man told with a few of his favorite things. It’s a very personal exhibit, much of it culled from the archives of a now-grown enfant terrible, and lays out a canny narrative about artistic influence that throws the viewer more than a few MacGuffins.

Before McCarthy fully developed his taboo-vioutf8g aesthetic — which found its most abject expression in his foodstuff- and prosthesis-filled performance pieces of the 1970s and ’80s — he was a Utah painting student whose first steps in using his body as a medium were guided by the action-based events of artists such as Allan Kaprow, Kazuo Shiraga, and Yves Klein. A first edition of Kaprow’s canon-making Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (H.N. Abrams) is on display here, alongside paintings, photographs, sculptures, and printed matter by or related to several of the artists included in the 1966 volume.

Much of what McCarthy has chosen would slot neatly into the syllabus for one of the art history classes he now teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles. Which is to say that he is aware of how institutions inevitably shape an artist’s time on Earth into a career, placing it within a historical context in relation to and often as a reaction against other artists. McCarthy’s piss take on these sorts of creative genealogies starts with Dada collagist John Heartfield’s swastika-shaped Tannenbaum (1934), then jumps 30-odd years to Joseph Beuys’s 1962 sculpture made with fallen pine needles, whose brown color is shared by McCarthy’s dead Xmas tree and bric-a-brac pileup (2007). The trees’ tinder skeletons look like the survivors of a pillow fight on a paintball range. Wisely, McCarthy leaves other works out of such daisy chains of facetious art history scholarship. Mike Henderson’s giant, ghoulish oils Nonviolence and Castration (1968) stand alone as apocalyptic visions of the dark underside of American life. I wonder if they remind McCarthy of his salad days of stuffing Barbies up his ass while besmirched with ketchup. (Matt Sussman)

LOW LIFE SLOW LIFE: PART ONE Through April 12. Tues. and Thurs., 11 a.m.–7 p.m.; Wed. and Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.wattis.org

Citizens vs. spies

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› news@sfbg.com

A Bay Area man and a San Francisco nonprofit are at the center of an epic, ongoing battle over privacy rights involving all three branches of the United States government. The outcome may determine the lines between national security and personal liberties in the 21st century.

The story begins in December 2005, when the New York Times exposed the George W. Bush administration as having illegally eavesdropped on US residents without required court warrants. The next month a former AT&T technician in San Francisco came forward with information about how that company (and Verizon and MCI, it was later learned) was gathering Internet and phone data from its customers and illegally routing it to servers controlled by the National Security Agency.

Mark Klein saw that a splitter was diverting the normal information traffic of domestic customers to a secret room at the AT&T Folsom Street plant. He knew that NSA people were around the company’s buildings as early as 2002, and it didn’t take him long to figure out what was going on. "It was obviously some big government hush-hush thing," Klein told the Guardian in a phone interview.

Klein realized he was not in a position to do much at the time, so he "made a note and moved on," he said. He also came across company documents spelling out the technical details of the operation, which his "fortuitous knowledge" allowed him to understand and explain. Klein stowed them away and kept them when he retired in May 2004.

Klein contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group, in January 2006 and became a key witness in a class action lawsuit filed by the organization on behalf of AT&T customers. Hepting v. AT&T was the first of nearly 40 cases filed by citizens in Northern California against telecommunications companies and the government. In June 2006 a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of state-secrets privileges. The government and AT&T appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco.

On August 15, 2007, EFF lawyers offered their opening arguments to a three-judge panel, urging it to allow AT&T customers to continue to fight against illegal spying on their Internet and telephone communications. In transcripts from this session, Judge Michael Hawkins surmises the matter: "As I understand, in this case what the plaintiffs are saying is that AT&T has provided telecommunications information about its subscribers to the government without a warrant."

This action runs afoul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established a special court to issue warrants for government surveillance and which set standards to prevent abuse, although the court has rarely refused to issue warrants, which could even be obtained retroactively for emergency situations.

The Bush administration has sought to revise FISA for the post–Sept. 11 world, and a major component of this overhaul would be immunity for telecommunication companies that have served as dragnet information collectors for years. Government and AT&T lawyers argued before the judges that the data collection was in the interest of national security and that the industry giants were acting in good faith, so they cannot be held liable.

Reiterating this position, company spokesperson Walt Sharp wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian, "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security."

A decision in the case is still pending, and according to Rebecca Jeschke, media relations coordinator for the EFF, "We have no idea when they’ll have a ruling for us. Delays for a year are not uncommon."

Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to essentially legalize the actions of the Bush administration and the companies and is hashing out two conflicting piece of legislation. The Senate voted Feb. 12 to reject an effort to strip the immunity provisions from the FISA Amendments Act, opting to protect the companies from legal scrutiny.

The House of Representatives has its own surveillance measure, which would loosen up some FISA restrictions but not include the immunity provision. That legislation, House Resolution 3773, was passed in November 2007 by a 227–189 vote. The bills now head to a Senate-House conference committee, which will work out the discrepancies, if that’s possible. As Jeschke explained, "The two bills will become one law or no law."

Bush has repeatedly said he will veto any bill that does not include immunity, while hawks in Congress say national security will be compromised if the government has to gather information without corporate assistance. In a Feb. 15 press release, Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected this assertion: "[The president] knows our intelligence agencies will be able to do all the wiretapping they need to do to protect the nation…. [He] should now work in a cooperative way with Congress to pass a strong FISA modernization bill that protects our nation’s security and the Constitution."

Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill told the Guardian, "Her position is that we have to make sure that this is consistent with the Constitution…. She is not in favor of immunity."

HR 3773 is "far from perfect," according to the EFF Web site, but it "provides far more congressional and judicial oversight of the Executive Branch’s domestic spying than the FAA."

Klein, the former AT&T technician, whistle-blower, and key witness, also became an unpaid lobbyist for EFF when he traveled to Washington DC in November 2006. He described the experience as "very tiring, exhausting," and said that over the four days, "we were much more successful in media coverage, but in terms of Congress, it didn’t do very much."

He concluded our interview with some foreboding words based on his experience. "This is more than about another bill," he said. "This is about fundamental constitutional issues, and many people are unaware."

Money grows on trees

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY A lone fisher casts his line off the wooden dock of Candlestick Point, his favorite spot and one at risk of closure from state budget cuts.

"The tide is too low today to catch anything, but supposedly there’s halibut now after the rain," Ernesto Perez told the Guardian as he walked back to his car empty-handed, hoping to return later.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office has proposed closing 48 of the 278 state parks by July 2009 because of a projected $14.5 billion state deficit. A big chunk of that shortfall is from the car tax Schwarzenegger repealed when he took office, triggering threats to schools, parks, and social welfare programs.

The parks with the lowest revenue or highest maintenance costs were placed on the closure list. Nine Bay Area parks could be affected, ranging from the small Candlestick Point to Henry W. Coe State Park near San Jose, the largest in Northern California.

Although the state could save $13.3 million if the parks close, the governor hasn’t calculated how much would be lost in tax revenue from the businesses these parks sustain, nor does he seem interested in the intrinsic loss of valued public assets.

"Look at how important Hearst Castle is to the central coast’s economy," Roy Stearns, spokesperson for California State Parks, told the Guardian.

The agency was asked to reduce its 2008–09 budget by about 10 percent, achieved mostly through layoffs and closing parks. Rangers will provide rudimentary maintenance of the closed parks, mostly monitoring illegal campers and fires. The state does not know how much money it would need to reopen the parks or when such funds might become available.

"In essence the state is abandoning the parks," Barbara Hill, vice president of the California State Parks Foundation, told the Guardian. She fears poaching, arson, and illegal dumping will proliferate. "How will they be able to properly secure the borders?" she asked.

The CSPF, a nonprofit that helps to preserve state parks, recently secured $17 million to restore tidal marshes in Candlestick Point. If implemented, the project would create the largest contiguous wetland in the city. The plan is now on hold, forcing the area into further decay.

Nature lovers are not the only ones concerned about the state parks’ cuts. If the 48 parks do close, the expected 6.5 million person drop in visitors will certainly impact the revenues of cities, counties, and the state. According to the California Division of Tourism, 73 percent of visitors come to the state for leisure purposes, and each county earns about $1.5 billion per year from tourism.

"It’s a shame to close Candlestick. I don’t know how it will affect my business," Andy Hung, owner of 88 Fishing Tackle on San Bruno, told the Guardian. "Even now there aren’t enough public piers to fish from." If Candlestick closes, Hung believes fishers will migrate somewhere else.

Across the bay in Benicia, people are worried. The city’s main attraction, the Benicia Capitol State Historic Park, is on the parks closure list. "It’s our most significant building, and we’re lobbying so the final budget cut won’t include it," Amalia Lorentz, Benicia’s economic development manager, told the Guardian.

A 2001 study by the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo found that visitors to Morro Bay State Park contributed $15 million to the local economy over two years and were responsible for the creation of 364 jobs. Benicia has almost three times the population of Morro Bay. Although the Morro Bay park will remain open under the budget cut, eight other parks in the area will close.

Officials say they doubt higher entrance fees are the solution to saving the parks. "We’ve raised fees three times in the last seven years. They’re the highest in the nation, and we don’t want to price people out," Stearns said. Funds to the state park system have been slashed consistently since the 1980s, and parks have been relying more on entrance fees than state funding. Because of a 233 percent increase in day fees in the past six years, California park attendance has dropped by about nine million people, according to state park officials.

Several organizations, including the CSPF, are collecting signatures and donations to encourage Schwarzenegger and the legislature not to sacrifice California’s parks to political expediency.

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

The real FISA problem

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EDITORIAL It’s no secret that the nation’s telecommunications companies have been spying on Americans without any sort of legal warrants. The New York Times broke that story in December 2005 — and not long after that a San Francisco man who had worked for AT&T came forward to describe how private calls were routed to a secret building on Folsom Street where the feds could listen in.

The courts are sorting out whether that was a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which contains at least some limited provisions protecting privacy. But in the meantime, the George W. Bush administration wants to update FISA — and include retroactive immunity for the telecom companies. Even if AT&T, Verizon, and others broke the law by allowing federal agents to snoop on their customers, Bush says, they should pay no price.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other public interest groups have been pushing to block immunity; unfortunately, the Senate (with California’s Dianne Feinstein on the wrong side) has gone along with what Bush wants. The House has a better bill, and the two are headed for a conference committee. Activists are demanding Speaker Nancy Pelosi stand firm and refuse to allow passage of any bill that protects the phone companies from past misdeeds.

That’s the right approach, and we agree. But we have to ask: why are the Democrats so willing to support this law in the first place?

FISA was created in response to the Counter Intelligence Program abuses of the 1960s, and it provides some modest protection for citizens. But it created a special secret court that could authorize wiretaps with very little oversight. The government’s warrant requests have almost never been rejected. Sometimes the court has issued them after the fact, retroactively approving wiretaps that have been done with no judicial oversight at all. The current version of FISA is better than what Bush wants — but it could be vastly improved.

We’ve never been fans of secret legal proceedings and special, shadowy courts that operate as an arm of law enforcement. The entire premise of FISA seems awfully shaky: if the FBI or the National Security Agency needs to tap someone’s phone, why can’t it go before a federal judge, using the normal procedures for wiretap and search warrant authorizations, just like everyone else? Is there any evidence that the federal courts are unable to handle that job or that the judiciary is too unwilling to allow the government to use all of the tools it needs to track terrorists?

Is the United States any safer with the authority to spy on Americans almost entirely removed from the oversight process established by the Constitution?

The real threat here is the growing one to privacy and civil liberties — and the best way to address it is to simply refuse to reauthorize FISA, start from scratch, hold hearings, get public testimony, and rewrite the law in a way that protects the public, not just the FBI, the NSA, and telecom companies. That’s what Pelosi ought to be pushing for.

Sharing the Panopticon

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

When two airline workers were robbed at 14th and Mission streets last August, the victims called 911 and described their attackers to the dispatcher as a pair of African American males.

At the time, several groups of people stood two blocks away at the always manic intersection of 16th and Mission streets, a high-crime area where the city installed four public surveillance cameras as part of an ongoing pilot project that began in 2005.

Police nabbed two suspects there whom they believed fit the description, and the victims later identified the duo as their attackers. Case closed. Except for one problem: the suspects claimed they were standing at 16th and Mission streets the whole time and never ventured two blocks away, to where the robbery occurred.

So a deputy public defender, Eric Quandt, tried to obtain footage from the city’s controversial public safety cameras to confirm their story. He was denied access to it by the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management because, according to the city’s Administrative Code, only police officers with a written request can review the recordings.

Other government agencies must get a court order, and since the recordings are held by the city for no more than seven days, by the time defense attorneys realize crucial evidence might exist, it’s likely to be long gone.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s expansion of public surveillance cameras across the city has been the subject of regular criticism from privacy advocates who say no substantial evidence exists that they reduce crime or provide valuable evidence to prosecutors. But few imagined Big Brother could serve as an alibi proving someone’s whereabouts when police placed the wrong suspect at the scene of a crime.

Quandt managed to get the footage in time after appealing to a police inspector, and 23-year-old Neil Butler and 21-year-old Robert Dillon, who had served 70 days in jail, were freed. However, the city’s elected public defender, Jeff Adachi, said there have been almost a dozen or so other instances when his office believed surveillance footage from the cameras could refute a prosecutor’s claims, but city officials have barred PDs from accessing it.

"These two men would have faced decades in prison," Adachi told the Guardian, "so I find it shocking that law enforcement would object to the defense obtaining these tapes. It has to be a two-way street."

"[City officials] act as if they have a proprietary right over the footage," added Rebecca Young, the managing attorney for Adachi’s felony unit. "We are officers of the court. We should not have to deal with bureaucratic red tape to access and review the footage."

Few cities in the United States have rules in place reguutf8g the use of surveillance footage to begin with, so determining procedures for how defense attorneys might use the cameras to free innocent people once again puts San Francisco on the cutting edge of public policy.

After learning about the robbery case last August, Sup. Gerardo Sandoval decided defense lawyers need access to the recordings if they could be used as evidence to free people wrongfully charged with crimes.

Sandoval’s legislation would require the city to preserve the footage for 30 days instead of seven, giving defendants more time to access the footage. Their lawyers would only need to submit a written request to the Department of Emergency Management, which controls the tapes.

But Newsom’s newly appointed top criminal-justice aide, Kevin Ryan, and the mayor’s chief of staff, Phil Ginsburg, want to kill the legislation, claiming it would cost the city too much money and could potentially compromise ongoing criminal investigations by exposing witnesses or confidential informants who appear in the footage.

"It’s safe to say that they tried to derail the legislation," Sandoval told the Guardian.

Ryan, you may recall, is the former US attorney for the Northern District of California who attempted to define his law enforcement career by prosecuting the steroids scandal in major-legal baseball and later the stock options backdating imbroglio that consumed Silicon Valley.

His last major imprint on the public, however, came when the White House ousted him from the Justice Department along with seven other chief federal prosecutors. While his colleagues were said to be let go because they weren’t fully cooperative with the GOP’s political agenda, it was reported that Ryan was asked to resign because of mounting criticism that he’d poorly managed his office and alienated staffers, despite being an eager loyalist of President George W. Bush.

After that, Ryan worked briefly in the private sector before Newsom surprised the city at the beginning of the year by making him director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. While a prominent San Francisco Democrat making a Republican devotee his top aide on issues related to crime raised eyebrows, Ryan’s inaugural act in that capacity epitomizes the outlook of a conservative law enforcement official.

Sandoval has attached to his ordinance a string of amendments to satisfy law enforcement, such as instituting punishments for defense lawyers who publicly disclose videos and allowing the district attorney and the Police Department 180 days to review footage and block its release if it’s deemed too sensitive for any reason.

However, the supervisor says he’s still not sure that Newsom, through his new conservative crime-fighting proxy, will accept making a traditional tool of law enforcement the new weapon of public defenders who serve indigent criminal suspects.

"I got the impression from Ryan that he outright opposed it," Adachi said. "But I’m not sure where the mayor stands on it."

Ryan and mayoral chief of staff Ginsburg did not return calls for this story, nor did the mayor’s press spokesperson, Nathan Ballard, respond to a detailed e-mail.

But Ryan has already shown a willingness to flout Newsom’s caution on the cameras. After the Feb. 6 Police Commission meeting, Ryan told the San Francisco Chronicle that police should be permitted to monitor the city’s surveillance cameras in real time to identify crimes about to occur or already in progress.

When the safety cameras were first launched, however, Newsom made a major concession to privacy advocates, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California most notable among them, by prohibiting law enforcement officials from watching the cameras live, in part to protect against potential voyeurism or racial profiling.

Ryan’s desire to expand the camera program is "all the more reason to make sure there’s a process in place," Adachi said, for defense lawyers to obtain the footage.

The Police Commission, meanwhile, has made it clear that the footage should not be widely available as public records and the cameras ought to be shut off during political demonstrations to protect First Amendment rights and keep federal agents from using them to target undocumented immigrants.

"If the public defender or a defense lawyer needs it, to me that’s an appropriate use of the information," police commissioner David Campos told the Guardian. "The concern should be: is there any way to keep the feds from getting this footage? We don’t have a way of doing that right now."

San Francisco launched its surveillance program in mid-2005 with two cameras outside public housing tracts in the Western Addition. Two and a half years later, 74 cameras are spread across the city in 25 locations, even though city officials were still calling this a pilot project as recently as this month.

The city was supposed to provide the Board of Supervisors and the Police Commission with a report by last year that evaluated how well the cameras were performing, but city administrator Ed Lee has missed several deadlines, and now it’s not due until March.

Jennifer King, a research analyst for the University of California at Berkeley’s Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic, is leading the study and says it’s one of only two that she’s aware of taking place in the US at this time.

A preliminary report done by the Berkeley team will only include an analysis of crime statistics, but a second study will involve comparing camera locations with control sites that are the same size and have similar demographics and crime profiles, because "there could have been changes in the background crime rate citywide that had nothing to do with the cameras," King told the Guardian.

In the meantime, Police Chief Heather Fong told the commission Feb. 6 that inspectors had requested footage nearly 80 times but in only two instances was it "useful in a prosecution."

At another public meeting last year, an official acknowledged that of the 178 cameras controlled by the federally subsidized San Francisco Housing Authority, none has ever led to an arrest in a homicide case, despite the fact that a large percentage of the city’s violent crime occurs in public housing developments.

Even Sandoval’s not convinced of the cameras’ efficacy: "We have to do everything we can to make sure everyone has fair access to the cameras…. But I’m fairly certain that the cameras really are just an intrusion into our privacy and the risk greatly outweighs any benefit."

Moth Madness

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adultLBAMoth.jpg
Good to see the plan to spray the Bay Area with Little Brown Apple Moth-related pesticide get major ink in the Chronicle.

While the debate rages over as to whether spraying a pheromone-containing pesticide over urban areas is an efficient and public health-protective way to deal with the moth, one thing is for sure.

Having small planes fly low over your home for hours on end is extremely unpleasant.

“It was like an air raid,” is how a friend who lives in Santa Cruz described her experience of the aerial spraying that took place in Santa Cruz last fall, using crop dusters. in a questionable effort to completely eradicate this tiny moth.

“Their engines sounded like motorbikes, only overhead,” says my source, adding that though she did experience any adverse health effects, “the experience was very invasive.”

“The worst part is knowing it could happen again and again, for years,” she adds.

To find out what the California Department of Food and Agriculture is planning for your region, check their website

And to see what citizens opposed to the spraying think, check out the California Alliance to Stop the Spray‘s site.
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Weekly publisher admits below-cost sales

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The former publisher of the SF Weekly admitted today to a key part of the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its corporate parent.

Chris Keating, who was the Weekly publisher between 2004 and 2006, was on the stand for cross-examination by Guardian lawyer Ralph Alldredge. After a lengthy discussion in which he discussed numerous examples of efforts to win ads away from the Guardian by cutting rates, Alldredge asked him directly:

“You knew those [prices] were below your cost, right?”

Keating replied, “Yes.”

That’s a significant admission: The Guardian is claiming that the Weekly sold ads below cost with the intent to harm the locally owned paper. That’s a violation of California law.

Robert Moses Kin’ and Black Choreographers Festival

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PREVIEW In February, as the days start getting longer again, two things come to mind: Black History Month summons deep reflections, and all of that extra light brings the advent of fresh views. In the Bay Area no better example of clear-sighted perspectives can be found than in the work of the Robert Moses’ Kin company and from the codirectors of the fourth Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now, Kendra Kimbrough Barnes and Laura Elaine Ellis. Moses starts his two-week season at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Feb. 14, while the Barnes-Ellis team is entering its festival’s second half at Project Artaud Theater in San Francisco.

From Moses, be prepared for a smaller company of six dancers performing in a brand-new program that includes three world premieres and a revival of 2007’s Rose (set to Beethoven), which is new to San Francisco. In addition to choreographing, the prodigious Moses also created the score for one of the evening’s pieces, Reflections on an Approaching Thought. In step with the company’s tradition of addressing social issues, the program’s Consent delves into the ethics of medical experimentation on poor people.

The Black Choreographers Festival has scheduled three lineups spanning work representative of the African diaspora — jazz, African, Afro-Brazilian — as well as modern and dance theater. If you have never seen site-specific choreographer Joanna Haigood and her Zaccho Youth Group, from the Bayview neighborhood, don’t miss them on the afternoon of Feb. 17. They are exceptional young artists.

ROBERT MOSES’ KIN Thurs/14–Sat/16 and Feb. 20–23, 8 p.m.; Sun/17 and Feb. 24, 2 p.m.; $23–$26. Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California, SF. (415) 292-1233, www.jccsf.org

BLACK CHOREOGRAPHERS FESTIVAL Fri/15–Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 3 and 7 p.m.; $10–$20. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. (415) 863-9834, (510) 801-4523, www.bcfhereandnow.com

Cuckoo for Coco500

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› paulr@sfbg.com

An adage favored by the paterfamilias: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He has generally deployed this wisdom in the matter of automobiles, while for me it has tended to apply to … well, practically everything. Bizou, for instance. This was the restaurant Loretta Keller opened at the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan in 1993, a time when the corner of Fourth Street and Brannan was a pretty lonely place at night. There was as yet no baseball park or light-rail line nearby, just the dowdy Caltrain station and lots of empty-looking warehouses slouching in the gloom.

Keller had worked at Stars in its glamorous heyday, but her restaurant, which served rustic French and Italian foods in a setting of rustic elegance, most closely resembled Zuni Cafe. The place was always, in my experience, discreetly stunning, and when I learned a few springtimes ago that she was recasting it for contemporary tastes, I thought, Oy. The subtext of the change seemed to be that the city’s most recent bevy of young, rich plutocrats was uninterested in a restaurant with a hint of Provençal languor; to lure them in, you needed halogen spot lamps, unadorned surfaces, certainly more noise, and a menu promising excitement.

Coco500, Bizou’s successor, does answer to this description, but it is nonetheless just as stunning in its own way and is a worthy bearer of the torch. I went in warily, full of skepticism, and was almost instantly won over, and that is about the loudest hallelujah I can sing for any restaurant, reinvented or otherwise.

Most of Coco500’s magic has to do with the food and the service, it must be said. The redesign of the interior emphasizes blond wood and is reminiscent of a Scandinavian Designs store or a sauna, and while there’s nothing wrong with the Danish modern look, it doesn’t exactly send the most accurate subliminal signals about what sort of food to expect. If the cooking is no longer about Provence and Italy, it’s still Cal-Med in some fundamental way. You’re not likely to find lutefisk on the menu, though there is plenty of seafood, and even in California an ethos of seasonality has to account for winter’s being one of the seasons. Bizou was good at this; so is Coco500.

Let’s start with a marvelous flat bread ($10), like the thinnest of thin-crust pizzas, topped with a fine mince of mushrooms and, for some extra chthonic intensity, truffle oil. The sense is of eating slices of especially flavorful winter-dampened earth, and the crust could not be better.

Seafood is more seasonal than we’re sometimes aware, though most Bay Areans probably associate king salmon with summer, and this Bay Arean associates halibut with winter. Ono, on the other hand, I associate with Hawaii; it’s one of those marvelous fish taken from the deep, clean waters around the islands, and while it makes a doubtful entrant on a restaurant menu in San Francisco, thousands of miles distant, Coco500’s kitchen does manage to turn it into a delicious crudo. The chunks of opalescent white flesh are sprinkled with fennel shavings, drizzled with a blood orange gastrique, and wrapped in wildly unseasonal, but tasty, basil leaves. It’s like eating prescooped Chinese lettuce cups.

More winter: celery root ($6), roasted with thyme and neatly cubed, could almost have passed for some sort of potato dish. A cream of cauliflower soup ($6) did not lack for cream — an ingredient of underappreciated potency that can overwhelm through sheer richness but didn’t quite here. Bits of chervil and squirts of paprika oil over the soup’s surface helped maintain balance.

Duck is also wintry for me, maybe because it’s a close relation to goose and roast goose is a classic holiday dish, dramatic if, in the end, more trouble than it’s quite worth. Boneless duck breast, on the other hand, is a type of flesh for all seasons: red and meatlike for bad weather but also highly grillable and always easy to deal with. At Coco500 the duck breast ($23) was grilled (medium), sliced, and presented with two extraordinary companions. One was a whole braised endive, almost like a torpedo onion, the other a duck baklava, rillettes under a pastry roof — completely unexpected and natural at the same time. Also delicious.

Alaskan black cod ($23), also known as sablefish, was another faraway fish, and I should have resisted it on carbon footprint grounds if nothing else, but I was lured in by the bit players: smashed (skin-on) fingerling potatoes and creamed rapini, like creamed spinach but with a sharper edge. The gently sautéed fillet itself, delicate and immaculately white, was good though not exceptional. I did find some ex post facto consolation at Seafood Watch, which reports that black cod is a best choice; the fish are line-caught from well-managed and sustainable fisheries. Please, restaurants, trumpet this kind of information! Don’t assume we have it or always have the presence of mind to ask for it.

We might not have had the presence of mind because we were probably thinking ahead to dessert and other postprandial wonders, such as Armagnac ($10), my latest passion in the liquid fires. Less fiery but not less worthy was a warm apple-huckleberry tart ($8) — basically a single-serve apple pie stained blue by the berries, with an immensely flaky (in the good sense) crust. As for the fruit: I love apples and apple pie, but the huckleberry (a close relation of the blueberry) is an American original, so how about a starring role someday?

COCO500

Mon.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Fri., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.; Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

500 Brannan, SF

(415) 543-2222

www.coco500.com

Full bar

AE/DC/MC/V

Moderately loud

Wheelchair accessible

Cleaning up FERC’s mess

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OPINION In the late 1980s, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission member Charles Trabant warned that "the only thing that we have to fear is FERC itself." He was speaking about his agency’s aggressive policy of preempting state regulatory powers — and undermining the rights of consumers — to encourage utility competition. This spring the Supreme Court will decide whether or not Trabant was right.

FERC’s response to the California energy crisis was too little too late.

At the height of the crisis FERC urged the state and many utilities — desperate to reduce the immediate cost impact of the crisis — to purchase long-term power supply contracts. Energy traders call this type of transaction "blend and extend" because the contract is a mix of short- and long-term prices. During this period, California and many utilities followed FERC’s advice and took advantage of this form of contract with the objective of extending the contracts long enough to keep short-term prices down. One utility, for example, tried to limit prices to a 35 percent rate increase. While the immediate effect was to reduce prices, sellers ended up gaining crisis-related scarcity profits over the longer term of the contract.

After the crisis abated FERC found that short-term prices — including those that had been used in many utilities’ blended contracts — were unjust and unreasonable and ordered sellers to refund revenues that exceeded an administratively determined just price. However, FERC denied the pleas of the state of California and others for adjustments to long-term contract prices. Ironically, it did so based on a "public interest standard," a financial test that considers the welfare of sellers but not that of customers. The public interest standard evolved to enable sellers to unilaterally raise a contract price that is below cost in order to avoid financial harm. Clearly, these were not the circumstances facing those who purchased power to temper customer costs. FERC just reckoned that the price would be passed on to customers.

The federal courts overturned the FERC decision. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that FERC’s oversight was "fatally flawed" and "offers no protection to purchasers victimized by the abuses of sellers or dysfunctional market conditions that FERC itself only notices in hindsight."

Electricity sellers, supported by FERC, have persuaded the Supreme Court to review the 9th Circuit’s ruling. Amicus briefs before the Supreme Court paint a dark picture of unwilling investors not providing the capital necessary to maintain reliable electric systems.

The merchant energy sector experienced a severe credit and liquidity crisis in 2002. According to Moody’s Investors Service, the crisis was not caused by regulators’ protecting customers but was due to energy trading having a flawed business model that lacked investment-grade characteristics. The market was taught an expensive lesson with the bankruptcies of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Enron, Mirant Corp., Calpine, and NRG. During this process, however, bankrupt power generators such as Mirant, the owner of the Potrero Hill power plant in San Francisco, used bankruptcy protection to modify contracts to generate value for their creditors.

Creditors have protection in the new competitive markets. Now it is time for the Supreme Court to protect customers too, by enforcing the Federal Power Act as it was written by Congress.

Carl Pechman

Carl Pechman is an economist and the founder of the energy consulting firm Power Economics in Santa Cruz.

Ecoerotic

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› molly@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY You may be the greenest, most permacultured locavore with a heart made of hemp. You tend your community garden on dates, travel only by biodiesel bus, and make your Christmas gifts from recycled materials rather than contribute to our culture’s overconsumption of resources. But chances are you haven’t thought about how your sex habits are affecting the planet — not to mention your partner. And what better time to think about it than the week of Valentine’s Day, the date when couples feel entitled to sex and singles are saddest about not having any? (Or is that the other way around?… But I digress.)

`Thing is, your favorite dildo may be releasing deadly toxins into the environment. Your discarded butt plug, so small and cute and seemingly innocent, may spend several centuries in a landfill before it degrades — if it ever does. Your vibrator could be the reason for someone else’s unnaturally tiny penis. Really.

The issue with sex toys — one of the more recent industries to be examined through a green lens — is twofold: disposal and toxicity.

The first is the easier, less contentious, and somewhat more obvious issue. Since we’re talking about a variety of objects often made of plastic, PVC, rubber, electronics, and other nonbiodegradable materials, it makes sense that concern has been raised about where sex toys end up and what happens to them when they get there. Just like water bottles and discarded train sets, sex toys made from these materials seem destined to last longer on the earth than any of us will — causing more pain in the long term than pleasure in the short term.

The second issue is whether sex toys are safe for humans, both those who use them and those who may be exposed to them through the environment. The concern here is phthalates, a variety of chemicals most commonly used to soften hard plastics but also found in cosmetics, food wraps, and a number of other ubiquitous consumer goods — and until recently, often used in plastic-based sex toys. There has been substantial research suggesting that phthalates — chemicals not naturally occurring in the human body — are present in 90 percent of Americans’ bodies. Furthermore, scientists believe phthalates can have a detrimental effect on male reproductive development.

"Severe interference can involve incomplete development of the penis, undescended testicles, decreased testosterone levels," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Guardian. "There can be lifelong consequences."

Are there counterarguments to all of these worries? Sure. For starters, there’s always the issue of how green to go. Should you worry more about your rubber dildo — which you may keep for 10 years — than about your plastic shower curtain, which you’ll throw in the landfill in three months? Or is this just the latest ecofriendly phase our culture (and media) is going through? And as for phthalates, there are lots of different kinds — and no one is exactly sure what they do or how they do it.

But if you’re anything like Coyote Days, buyer for Good Vibrations, you’ll figure safe is better than sorry. Days said the major sex toy retailer has decided to phase out products containing phthalates, just in case it turns out the chemicals really are as bad as scientists suspect. In particular, Days suggested replacement with silicone varieties, if you can afford them.

And if you’re worried about how well a sex toy will biodegrade, you can always opt for a metal, wood, or glass variety.

In fact, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can check out the P Aqua from Love Piece, a dildo made from seaweed and water that, while solid at room temperature, can be boiled to oblivion for Earth-friendly disposal. (Though the company asks you to notify it if the dildo has a sour odor. Ew.)

As for Good Vibrations’ future inventory? Day said, "We’re not quite at the seaweed and water level yet." Me either. But I’m hoping for a sushi restaurant tie-in when this thing gets big. Buy one California roll-in-the-hay, get one seaweed sex toy free? I like it.

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

Super lessons

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› news@sfbg.com

The Super Fat Tuesday presidential primary election in San Francisco was marked by some portentous trends and factors that could have a big impact on who becomes the Democratic Party nominee — and whether that person will be accepted as the people’s legitimate choice.

Consider the scene the night before the election. A small army of young people made its way up Market Street carrying signs and pamphlets supporting their candidate, Barack Obama, taking up positions outside Muni and BART stations and on high-profile corners to spread the message of change.

Meanwhile, inside the Ferry Building, Mayor Gavin Newsom and former president Bill Clinton convened one of several "town hall meetings" held simultaneously around the country to promote the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who checked in on a satellite feed.

Among the many luminaries on hand was State Sen. Carole Migden, a superdelegate (one of 71 from California) who has not yet pledged her support to either Clinton or Obama and who could ultimately play a huge role in determining the nominee. Migden made a show of exchanging pleasantries with the former president, warmly embracing him in front of a crowd of about 250 people and more than a dozen news cameras before taking a seat nearby.

But Election Day was for the regular citizens, and once their votes were counted and analyzed, a couple of things became clear. Clinton won California with the absentee ballots that she had been banking for weeks thanks to her deeply rooted campaign organization. Her margin of victory among early voters was about 20 percentage points.

Yet a late surge of support for Obama caused him to win at the polls on Election Day, leading to his outright victory in San Francisco by a margin of about 15,000 votes, or almost 8 percentage points. It was a symbolic victory for progressives on the Board of Supervisors, who backed Obama while Newsom campaigned heavily for Clinton (see "Who Wants Change?," 1/30/08).

Obama and Clinton were close enough in California and the rest of the Super Fat Tuesday states that they almost evenly split the pledged delegates (those apportioned based on the popular vote). But if present trends continue, even after Obama’s sweep of four states that voted the weekend after California, neither he nor Clinton will have captured the 2,025 delegates they need to secure the nomination before August, when the Democratic National Convention convenes in Denver.

That means the nomination could be decided by superdelegates such as Migden, a group comprising congresspeople and longtime Democratic Party activists, from party chair Art Torres down to those with key family connections, such as Christine Pelosi and Norma Torres.

And that could be a nightmare scenario for a party that hopes to unify behind a campaign to heal the country’s divisions.

Political analyst David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics in San Francisco, said this election was marked by a higher than expected turnout and more people than usual voting on Election Day rather than earlier. In San Francisco turnout was more than 60 percent, including an astounding 88.4 percent among Democrats.

"In the last couple weeks there was a strong get-out-the-vote push by Obama’s people," Latterman said during a postelection wrap-up at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which he delivered along with campaign consultant Jim Stearns.

Latterman said that Obama surge, which drew out voters who were generally more progressive than average, may have been the margin that pushed Proposition A, the $185 million parks bond, to victory. It trailed among absentee voters but ended up less than five points above the 66.6 percent threshold it needed to pass.

"I don’t know if this would have passed or not if it had not been for the Obama push at the end," Latterman said.

Stearns agreed, saying, "In some ways, we should name every park in the city Obama Park."

At the measure’s election-night party at Boudin Bakery on Fisherman’s Wharf (where some of the bond money will renovate Pier 43), Yes on A campaign consultant Patrick Hannan told us he was worried as the initial results came in.

"That is a high threshold to hit," he said of the two-thirds approval requirement for bond measures.

But as the crowd nibbled on crab balls and sourdough bread, the results moved toward the more comfortable level of around 72 percent support, prompting great joyful whoops of victory.

Recreation and Park Department executive director Yomi Agunbiade acknowledged that the decision to place the measure on the February ballot rather than June’s was a leap of faith made in the hopes that the presidential election would cause a high turnout of Democrats.

"We’re excited," Agunbiade said at the party. "This was a hard-fought race that involved getting a lot of people out in the field and letting folks know what this was about — and we’re definitely riding the wave of high voter turnout."

The strong turnout helped Obama win half of the Bay Area counties, Sacramento, and much of the coast, including both the liberal north coast and the more conservative Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

But Clinton’s advantages of socking away early absentee votes and her popularity with certain identity groups — notably Latino, Asian, and LGBT — helped her win California.

Yet Obama’s appeal reaches beyond Democratic Party voters. He got some late support from prominent local Green Party leaders, even though their party’s candidates include former Georgia congressional representative Cynthia McKinney and maybe Ralph Nader (see "Life of the Party," 1/16/08).

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a founder of the California Green Party who also worked on Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, announced his endorsement of Obama at the candidate’s Super Fat Tuesday event at the Fairmont San Francisco. Mirkarimi also noted the support of Greens Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, and Jane Kim, the highest vote getter in the school board’s last race.

"I registered Green because I felt their values were closer to mine," Kim, who left the Democratic Party in 2004, later told the Guardian. "But I’ve always endorsed whoever I thought was the best candidate for any office…. I saw Obama as a candidate taking politics in a different direction that I hadn’t seen a national candidate take things before."

If Obama’s campaign can continue to develop as a growing movement running against the status quo, he could roll all the way into the White House. But it’s equally possible to imagine the Clintons using their deep connections with party elders to muscle the superdelegates into making Hillary the nominee.

Stearns said this scenario could hurt the party and the country: "I can’t imagine a worse outcome for the Democratic Party than to have Obama go into the convention ahead on delegates he’s won and have Hillary Clinton win on superdelegates."

Amanda Witherell and David Carini contributed to this report.

Search for shelter: Bryan Cohen’s nightly journals

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Editor’s Note: Guardian intern Bryan Cohen contributed to this week’s cover story: “Shelter Shuffle: Inside San Francisco’s confounding system of housing the homeless.” What follows is a fascinating log of his experiences:

DSCN0168.JPG
Mural on the southeastern wall of MSC South, one of the city’s largest shelters

By Bryan Cohen

I have a new saying for the San Francisco Human Services Agency: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me; fool me three times . . . Oh wait, shame on you again because public service programs shouldn’t be in the business of fooling people — or making them feel shameful about being fooled.

Here’s the story – I’d just arrived in San Francisco from Boston when my car was impounded. I got a job, but came up short for a down payment on an apartment. With no back up cash, staying at a hotel would put me back even farther and I don’t know anyone on the west coast, let alone the state of California or the Bay Area.

All of this is absolutely true, except for one fortunate detail: I was able to Craigslist my way into a short-term apartment. Otherwise, this would have been much more than just an undercover investigation for a newspaper.

I took off on a chilly Saturday evening, expecting at the very least a gym floor and a blanket. Three days later I had yet to see a bed or a good nights sleep. And to add supreme insult to that injury: official city reports I reviewed later showed lots of vacancies at the very shelters that were denying me and others a place to stay.

Mike Lacey ducks the big ones

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I missed the trial on Friday, so if the SF Weekly’s hit man, Andy Van De Voorde, wants to take a swing at me for posting information on the testimony, fine: I’m smiling, Andy. (I’m also not the only person in the courtroom from the Guardian who knows what’s going on and can take notes.)

But before we get to the day’s events, let me do my all-too-regular Van De Voorde correction file. From his most recent blog:

“What’s your official title?” asked Weekly attorney H. Sinclair Kerr Jr. in what is a traditional first question for witnesses.

“I’m the executive editor of the company and apparently the mascot,” Lacey replied.

The remark was a reference to testimony from Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond, who last week said under oath he thought of Lacey as a New Times mascot.

Um, no Andy. I didn’t say that, under oath or otherwise. That testimony was from Jennifer Lopez, who used to work for the SF Weekly.

And jeez, Andy’s in court every day.

Another correction:

[Guardian attorney Ralph] Alldredge was also skeptical about why [New Times CEO Jim] Larkin hasn’t attended the trial—an odd question given that he could have subpoenaed the New Times executive.

Actually, Andy, you might check with your lawyers: This is a California case, and as long as Larkin doesn’t live here and can’t be found within the borders of the state, we can’t subpoena him. Interesting that he hasn’t shown up once for the trial; if he had, we could have compelled him to take the stand and answer a few questions.

Now then, since we have that cleared up, let me go to the day’s events. Here’s our report:

Mike Lacey took the stand in the Guardian’s predatory pricing trial against the SF Weekly and had some trouble answering some key questions.

The editor in chief of the SF Weekly’s parent chain, the VVM/New Times/SF Weekly, said at one point that the SF Weekly was a better paper in “most all respects” to its competitor, the Guardian.

Lacey said that the Weekly was better in layout, stories, design, graphics, readers, everything. Also, he said that the Guardian was “obsessed with City Hall and City Hall minutiae” and the city was full of young people who didn’t vote and weren’t interested in politics and they came to the Weekly.

If the Weekly is such a better paper, Guardian Attorney Ralph Alldredge prodded on cross examination, why does the Weekly sell its advertising at rates so much lower than the Guardian? Why doesn’t a Weekly advertising sales person sell its advertising space at a rate higher than the Guardian? Why doesn’t the Weekly command a premium price?

Lacey ducked the questions.

Predatory pricing: A primer

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The jury in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly got a primer today on how prdatory pricing by a big chain works.

Guardian controller Sandy Lange took the stand, and outlined the results of information she’d compiled on below-cost sales by the Weekly and the East Bay Express. The Guardian is charging that Village Voice Media, formerly known as New Times, which owns the Weekly and until recently owned the Express, has been selling ads below the cost of producing them to harm a competitor.

That’s a violation of California law.

Lange explained how she and other Guardian staffers and legal assistants had entered into an Excel spreadsheet some 20,000 sales transactions from the Weekly and the Guardian, involving 128 accounts, over eight years, from 1999 to 2007. In each case, the computer tracked whether the Weekly’s ads were sold below cost — and how often those cut-rate sales were linked to the Guardian either losing a client or being forced to cut prices to salvage the deal.

The spreadsheet showed that in 91 percent of the transactions, the Weekly’s sale price was below cost. That’s consistent with data Lange presenting showing that the Weekly had consistently lost money. In 2003, she noted, the cost of producing a page of the SF Weekly was $1,936.17 — and the paper’s revenue was just $1,634.36. That meant the Weekly was losing about $300 for every page it produced. A few years later, the gap had grown: The cost of producing a page was $2,730 and the revenue was $1,900 — meaning the Weekly was losing $800 a page.

How was this possible? Simple: The chain kept pouring in money from its 15 other markets to prop up San Francisco and the East Bay.

Then Lange explained her correlation report: In 34 percent of the transactions involving below-cost sales, the Weekly’s rate-cutting was associated with the Guardian deeply discounting its own ads (threatening the financial viability of a local paper with no deep-pockets parent). And when she added in the accounts that the Guardian lost entirely after the Weekly’s predatory pricing, the total came to 66 percent.

In other words, in two-thirds of the cases where the Weekly had sold below cost, the Guardian had either had to follow suit and sell for less than the ads were worth — or lost the account and the business.

Lange also presented charts that showed how the predatory behavior had eroded the Guardian’s share of the local alternative-weekly ad market.

On cross-examination, Weekly attorney Ivo Labar tried to argue that the market itself had shrunk. In 2000, he pointed out, the two papers together sold $13 million worth of display ads. By 2007, that number had shrunk to $8.8 million. “Isn’t it true,” Labar asked, “that advertisers chose to spend only $8.8 million in 2007?”

Lange said she disagreed with the premise of the question. “Because of your predatory pricing,” she testified, “you put negative pressure on the market.” In other words, the Weekly depressed the costs of all alt-weekly ads in San Francisco.

Labar then pointed to a handful of accounts in which the Weekly either sold ads for a higher price than the Guardian or the Guardian appeared to have lost the business for reasons that had nothing to do with price, and tried to discredit the entire report on the basis of a few examples. That’s been the Weekly’s practice in this case: Take a clear trend (years of below-cost pricing) and clear results (damage to the Guardian) and try to poo-poo it by saying there are a few cases here and there that don’t fit the pattern.

Lange’s testimony will continue tomorrow morning.

On the ground

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>>How Clinton and Obama split California

>>Photos from Obama’s party

>>Obama party coverage
***“Change is coming” (if you didn’t know)
***Lack of diversity in the City?
***The scene at the Fairmont Hotel ballroom

>>Obama wins San Francisco

>>Clinton party coverage
***The scene at Hillary’s SF headquarters
***Hillary supporters snub Obama camp

>>Prop A victory party

>>Watching the California returns roll in

>>A real convention for once?

>>Dining with Ron Paul supporters

>>Drinking to democracy at the Kilowatt

>>Partying with the Democrats

>>Who can beat McCain?

>>Bill and Gavin stump for Hillary

>>A vote for Edwards

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