Energy Archives — Page 93 of 103 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Their neighborhood

August 14, 2007

› amanda@sfbg.com

Some interesting mail landed in the boxes of Potrero Hill residents last week: flyers with a photograph of industrial stacks spewing plumes of pollution. They read, "Potrero Hill doesn’t need three more power plants in our neighborhood."

There’s a handy clip-out membership card to join the Close It! Coalition, from which you can "find out more about the city’s rush to judgment and their plan to put more power plants in our neighborhood." The return address on the card is 77 Beale, which isn’t in "our" neighborhood at all.

It’s the address of the downtown headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

The utility, in the guise of a grassroots community organization, is opposing the contract that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is currently hammering out with a private company, J-Power USA, to build a new 145-megawatt, natural gas–<\d>fired power plant on a four-acre plot at 25th and Maryland streets. The plant would be owned and operated by J-Power for a period of 10 to 12 years, after which the title would turn over to the city.

This so-called peaker plant, one of three that would run when San Francisco’s power needs exceed the normal load, would be cleaner burning than Mirant’s dirty old Potrero Hill power plant, which city officials and environmentalists want closed. Mirant’s "Reliability Must Run" contract with the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) could be terminated once the three peakers (whose generators the city received years ago through a lawsuit settlement) are built, according to the SFPUC.

Though PG&E, which has a questionable environmental record, claims to be against the peaker plants for pollution reasons, public power advocates say this is really opposition to the city owning its power sources. "PG&E has finally gone over the line. This is a good thing because this is so egregious and so transparent," said Joe Boss, a Dogpatch resident who received the mailer. "They’ll do all they can do to kill public power in San Francisco."

Boss and a group of neighborhood activists who support the construction of the peakers have put together their own mailer countering the claims of the Close It! Coalition, which has been dormant lately but was active prior to 2006, when community activists were fighting for the shuttering of PG&E’s Hunters Point power plant.

Other anti–<\d>public power literature also circulated recently in supervisorial district 11, where the California Urban Issues Project sent a flyer urging residents to oppose Community Choice Aggregation, the city’s gradual public power plan that is focused mostly on renewable energy sources. The mailer was apparently sent before the Board of Supervisors voted to approve the plan, which it did in June.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who coauthored the CCA legislation with Sup. Tom Ammiano, called the CUIP flyer "shameful" and told the Guardian, "This is signature PG&E, but it’s not just PG&E. It now very well implicates the [Gavin] Newsom administration either with complicity or silence." The CUIP board includes Committee on Jobs director Nathan Nayman, small-business advocate and Newsom appointee Jordanna Thigpen, Democratic Party political consultant Rich Schlackman, Golden Gate Restaurant Association executive director Kevin Westlye, and other Newsom supporters.

Newsom signed the CCA legislation but tacked on a letter vaguely expressing concerns about the plan. He recently authored a letter to Cal-ISO expressing his support for the peaker project. While PG&E is opposing peakers here, it has plans under way to build at least two farther south, near communities it is also battling.

The San Joaquin Valley Power Authority has filed a formal complaint against PG&E with the California Public Utilities Commission regarding how the utility is conducting itself as the community moves forward with a plan for public power.

The SJVPA is a group of 11 cities and two counties, representing about 300,000 citizens, that has filed a plan with the CPUC to purchase its power through a CCA plan. Assembly Bill 117, written by Sen. Carole Migden when she was in the State Assembly and made law in 2004, allows communities to act as their own wholesale power customers and purchase electricity for residents.

San Francisco, Marin, Berkeley, Oakland, and Emeryville are working on CCA plans, but the SJVPA is the furthest along. With CCA, power is still transmitted by utility companies, but residents pay their electricity bills to the city. The SJVPA plans to build its own 500 MW power plant — which PG&E also opposes, claiming studies show it isn’t necessary — and has issued a request for proposals from interested companies for 400 MW of renewable energy. It estimates citizens would save about 5 percent with CCA.

But representatives of PG&E have been attending city council meetings in the area and even holding their own informational workshops at which they refute elements of the CCA plan.

In a lengthy memo sent to a Hanford City Council member and very similar in tone and content to one distributed to San Francisco nonprofit organizations a couple of months ago, PG&E offers misleading claims such as "Over 30 percent of PG&E’s supply comes from a diverse portfolio of renewable energy … about 20 percent comes from PG&E’s large hydro system, and approximately 12 percent comes from smaller renewable generation sources."

But according to state law, a large hydro system does not qualify as a renewable energy source — a rule the utility doesn’t apply to itself but is quick to point out a paragraph later when it attacks the CCA plan for renewable energy.

The SJVPA complaint details several examples of PG&E spokespeople cautioning against the plan in local media and at public meetings. CEO Peter Darbee even penned an editorial for the Fresno Bee in which he wrote, "The fundamental problem with the program is that the numbers don’t add up," a statement he attempted to clarify with unsourced data showing that rates will go up even if the CCA plan says they won’t. Darbee went on to say that PG&E is just looking out for the best interests of the people.

The Fresno City Council recently voted 4–<\d>3 not to join the SJVPA, a close vote that "was based in large part on PG&E raising questions," said David Orth, the general manager of the Kings River Conservation District, which is overseeing the implementation of the CCA plan. "That is their intent, frankly — to clutter the discussion and decision-making field with a lot of uncertainties and threats of complexity."

Fresno would have been the largest consumer of power in the coalition, using 45 percent of its electricity.

Orth said obfuscation has been the utility’s tool, coupled with reassurances that power "is too difficult for you to understand, so accept the status quo."

He said PG&E hasn’t been entirely factual with its advice and cited a specific example in which PG&E claimed that if a community opted out of CCA after joining, it could be liable for as much as $11 million. "It was a fabricated number, and it was a fabricated scenario, but it lead certain council members to believe there was a risk we weren’t explaining," Orth said.

Lawyers representing the SJVPA say the utility is using ratepayer funds for its anti-CCA marketing, and that’s a violation of the CPUC’s rules. AB 117 states clearly that utilities should cooperate fully with municipalities enacting CCA plans. In a December 2005 decision seeking to clarify how CCAs will be implemented, the CPUC wrote, "There is little if any benefit from permitting a battle for market share between CCAs and utilities. Of course, we expect utilities to answer questions about their own rates and services and the process by which utilities will cut-over customers to the CCA. However, if they provide [sic] affirmatively contact customers in efforts to retain them or otherwise engage in actively marketing services, they should conduct those activities at shareholder expense. We do not believe utility ratepayers should be forced to support such marketing."

"SJVPA is informed and believes and thereon alleges that these marketing and related activities were undertaken at PG&E’s ratepayer expense to compete against SJVPA," the authority’s lawyers wrote in the complaint to the CPUC.

Even if PG&E is drawing from the proper budget for the marketing, the appearance that it isn’t needs to be addressed, and the SJVPA complaint further calls on the CPUC to clarify its rules on what utilities can and can’t do. Local customer representatives, usually salaried by ratepayer funds, are telling folks to stick with PG&E, and that’s a betrayal of trust. "You have someone who’s worked with a customer for years and years and years saying, ‘Don’t support CCA,’<\!q>" Orth said.

PG&E, which has disputed the allegations in the SJVPA complaint, did not return our calls seeking comment. The two parties are currently in mediation, and SJVPA attorney Scott Blaising said the utility has yet to provide solid evidence that ratepayer money isn’t footing the bill for the anti-CCA marketing. Southern California Edison Co., which provides about a quarter of the SJVPA’s current power, has not been as contentious as PG&E, Orth said.

"Theoretically, [anti-CCA marketing] should be covered by shareholders," said Bill Marcus, an energy consultant who works with the Utility Reform Network. "Realistically, a bunch of it leaks into ratepayer accounts."

He pointed out that PG&E’s budget allocation for local public affairs has stood at 22 percent over the course of several general rate cases, despite clear peaks in marketing for certain campaigns.

Some San Franciscans will be closely watching what happens next as a sign of things to come as this city moves forward with its CCA plan. As Mirkarimi told us, "What San Joaquin is experiencing is likely a prelude to what San Francisco will be confronting as it pertains to PG&E’s desire to deny CCA and San Francisco’s pursuit of energy independence."

Migden, who wrote the CCA law, said, "PG&E’s alleged actions controvert the letter and the spirit of the bill. The utility and the SFPUC should take heed, because green public power is the people’s passion."<\!s>*

PS PG&E can’t even get its own Web site right.

Your neighborhood streets on wry (hold the Sesame)

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August 14, 2007
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Who are the people in your neighborhood?" Wasn’t that the consciousness-raising question we were coaxed into asking as tots by the irresistibly catchy song stylings of public television? Well, if they’re the mix of humans and Muppet-esque monsters of Avenue Q, they’re strikingly but only superficially reminiscent of the denizens of that sidewalk utopia propagated by PBS children’s programming. After all, Sesame Street began way before anyone could stay shut up all day surfing the Internet for porn, like Trekkie Monster (Christian Anderson), let alone sing about it.

The inhabitants of Avenue Q are also the friends, allies, love interests, and fellow losers whom a recent college grad with few prospects and an elusive purpose — puppet protagonist Princeton (voiced and operated by Robert McClure) — can sort of maybe count on to get him through a disillusioning world that already seems downhill the moment one’s rolled off the university assembly line.

Such is the premise and highly qualified promise of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s much-hailed musical comedy, which makes a vibrant San Francisco debut at the Orpheum Theatre in a Broadway touring production happily packed with energy and a talented, impressively versatile cast. Many jaded years after Big Bird was first through with watching you, Lopez and Marx’s reappropriation of such small-screen indoctrination serves up a deflated age writ Broadway large, an arch nostalgia tailor-made for an overeducated, underemployed population of thirtysomething slacker-searchers.

Avenue Q mines TV and Broadway in equal measure, with knowing references to each in a kind of pop cultural marriage overtly joined in one show tune–<\d>loving puppet named Rod, a closeted stockbroker who plays a kind of veiled Bert to sloppy but good-natured roommate Nicky’s Ernie. And if disappointment, humiliation, and an understated resilience are things everyone shares to varying degrees on Avenue Q (a run-down row of New York City brownstones with off-the-beaten-track rents — a decidedly grubby version of Sesame Street nicely realized by set designer Anna Louizos), they also come together in one neat, compact package that isn’t even Styrofoam based: Gary Coleman (voiced and operated by Carla Renata), the has-been TV child actor and ignominious tabloid fixture here turned, in one of many inspired touches, into the building super.

Smart, lively, and consistently funny, Avenue Q pretty well lives up to the heap of praise that brought the 2004 musical a small mound of Tony Awards. The show lags a bit in the second act (where, in medium-funny numbers like "Schadenfreude," the formula can begin to wear thin), but it’s never a bore. And if there’s inevitably a sentimental aspect to the "it sucks to be you and me" universality of its theme, it winds up on what is probably the best possible note — contained in the double-edged line "Everything in life is only for now" — which at the last moment smuggles in a defiant optimism clothed as ambivalence and compromise, much as throughout the play a certain felt reality (admittedly of a decidedly middle-class variety) comes agreeably filtered by felt puppets.

OTHERS MATTERS

Insignificant Others is a new musical comedy featuring its own assortment of lovable college grads unleashed in another big (or anyway biggish) city, by San Francisco playwright-composer-lyricist L.<\!s>Jay Kuo. It may not have anything like the budget of Avenue Q — and in truth doesn’t manage the tightrope walk between its sentimental theme and a cutting comic irony as smoothly either — but while uneven in both conception and execution, Insignificant Others nevertheless has some significant talent and inspiration behind it.

The story concerns a circle of five twentysomethings from Cleveland who relocate to San Francisco with hopes of embarking on lives of romance and adventure beyond the workaday world’s cubicle walls. At the center of these tales of the city is a buxom young firecracker named Margaret (the strong and winning Sarah Kathleen Farrell) on the lookout for Mr. Right — a designation given considerable latitude in a city with a scarce supply of heterosexual men, which becomes the excuse for three of the show’s most crowd-pleasing and clever numbers.

Friendships drift, but a crisis draws the characters together again, though this central thread comes over as both weak and overblown, and its resolution too pat and syrupy. Insignificant Others‘ best parts remain the more comedic ones, wherein Kuo’s generally polished lyrics and able if less consistently original music tend to reach their highest points.<\!s>*

AVENUE Q

Through Sept. 2, $30–<\d>$90

Tues.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m.

Orpheum Theatre

1192 Market, SF

www.shnsf.com

INSIGNIFICANT OTHERS

Through Sept. 23, $35–<\d>$39

Thurs.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.

Zeum Theatre

221 Fourth St., SF

www.isomusical.com

Lollapalooza day 3: Pearl Jam censored by AT&T, Stooges, Yo La Tengo, and more

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August 13, 2007
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By K. Tighe

The Lollapalooza Chicago skyline: don’t stare at it too hardit might bite. Photo by Cambria Harkey.

Dear readers, I have failed you.

I’ve been attempting to experience the whole of Lollapalooza, which of course includes after-parties, and their obligatory next-morning results. However, while Lupe Fiasco and Amy Winehouse were playing on day 3, Aug. 5, I was stretched out on a yoga mat, trying not to hurl.

Lucky for you, I have spies everywhere. The little birds told me that Fiasco – Chicago’s resident geek-rapper – delivered a stellar, irreverent performance that left his crowd wanting more. In contrast, the petite Ms. Winehouse fell short. During most of her set, she appeared to be consumed by boredom, and even the infectious strains of “Rehab” couldn’t shake her out of it. A crowd hoping for a train wreck of some sort continued to watch, but Winehouse never turned it up. Hey, at least she showed up, right?

The punk rockers are old. The alt-rockers are old, too. Hell, even the electro-clash kids are showing some wear these days – though it’s nothing a cowbell couldn’t fix. Age be damned – the highest energy performance of the weekend belonged without question to Stooges frontperson Iggy Pop. With raggedy long hair sticking to his bare back, Iggy charged the stage like a sinewy beast and didn’t pull back once during the set, prompting hoards of fans, young and old, to get Iggy with it.

Lollapalooza day one: Ted Leo, Polyphonic Spree, MIA, LCD Soundsystem, Daft Punk, and more riveted our woman in Chicago

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August 8, 2007
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By K. Tighe

No logo? Photo by Cambria Harkey.

Ted Leo himself seemed a bit apprehensive about playing under a corporate logo at his afternoon performance on Aug. 3. The political punker lost his footing at the start of his set, falling onto the deck of the Myspace stage. I’ll try to suppress the symbolism in all of this. Once he got back to his feet, he and his Pharmacists plowed through 45 minutes of pure rock, pounding out poly-agit hits like “Bomb Repeat Bomb” and “A Bottle of Buckie” to an enthusiastic crowd. Closing the set with “C.I.A.,” Leo managed to use his guitar to rain a pound the hell out of the stage for a few minutes.

Tim Delaughter’s cultish Polyphonic Spree offered indisputable proof that many bodies in motion do not make a movement. Having abandoned their trademark white robes for black military MASH jackets, the gimmicky horn section was joined by an off-key choir and a band of tap dancers. The spree had the crowd for the first part of their set, which was loaded with old favorites and tracks from their recent album, The Fragile Army. By the end of the set, after several promised that “this will be our final song,” the crowd’s energy had fallen away from the band and the audience made its way to other stages.

Peaker plants and SF’s energy future

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August 8, 2007
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EDITORIAL Over the next few weeks, the Board of Supervisors will be looking at two major electric-power programs that could add a lot of new generation capacity (and possibly new pollution) to southeast San Francisco and a new source of backup power from out of town. Both projects seem to have broad support at City Hall.

The main questions that city officials ought to be asking about plans for a new power plant in Potrero Hill and a new power cable to bring electricity across the bay are:

•Do we really need either?

•What is motivating the powerful but little-known state agency to demand that San Francisco — the only US city with a federal public power mandate — prepare for a future in which energy use continues to grow, conservation lags, the private sector controls the city’s power supply, and the city’s plans for cutting power use are a failure?

The California Independent System Operator, known as Cal-ISO, was created in the wake of the wretched energy deregulation plan that the State Legislature concocted in 1996. The outfit, run by a five-member board appointed by the governor, is supposed to ensure that every part of California has enough electricity — now and in the future.

But the board members are almost all former utility executives, including a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. official, and like most utility executives, they seem to believe that the only track for electricity use is upward.

So Cal-ISO has informed San Francisco that it doesn’t have enough power on hand to make it through 2010. That means the city needs to either find a new way to import more power (the only significant current pathway is a cable that runs up the Peninsula and is owned by PG&E) or build more power plants inside its limits.

The problem with building more plants, particularly the kind of plants Cal-ISO likes — fossil fuel burners that can run day and night without interruption — is that San Francisco residents are trying to get rid of the last big polluting plant, Mirant Corp.’s facility at the foot of Potrero Hill, not build more.

So the latest solution involves the installation of three natural gas–<\d>fired generators known as peakers, which would run only when demand is high and other sources (including the solar facility the city plans to build) aren’t operating. The mayor and the supervisors are referring to these plants as "city-owned generation," making this sound like a big step on the way to public power.

And on one level, it is: San Francisco won the turbines (which are essentially big jet engines) as part of a settlement with Williams Energy after the energy crisis, and they could be part of a municipal utility. But the current plans call for the Chicago subsidiary of a Tokyo company, J Power, to build the structures that would house the turbines and hook them up to the power lines, then operate the plants for 10 years. Only then would they revert to city ownership.

So already San Francisco is waffling on the public power issue. (Why, for example, can’t the city build the facilities itself and hire its own engineers to hook up the turbines and run them? Why do we even need a private, outside partner?)

Then there’s the environmental impact. In theory, if the peakers only ran a few hours a day, they would spew less junk into the air than the Mirant plant currently does. And Cal-ISO is only willing to allow the Mirant plant to shut down if San Francisco develops some other form of firm local generation. But there’s nothing in writing anywhere to guarantee that the foul exhaust from Mirant would cease when the peakers fired up; in fact, it’s possible that the southeast part of the city could wind up living with both.

The other project, called the Trans Bay Cable, would be a privately owned venture carrying power from Pittsburg across the bay and into San Francisco. The power plants that would feed the cable are largely nonrenewables, and although they’re outside town, this is hardly an environmental advance.

The big question, though, is why San Francisco has to go through this exercise.

Cal-ISO predicts that the city will run short of power in a few years — but that forecast is awfully suspect. For starters, the entire projected shortfall is five megawatts in 2010, growing by 10 MW per year after that. And the city’s projections for Community Choice Aggregation suggest that conservation measures can cheaply reduce demand, by 107 MW, over the same period. Conservation, also known as demand-side management, is by far the least expensive and most environmentally sound alternative.

In fact, with an aggressive conservation plan and an aggressive solar program, it’s possible that the city could handle the local load just fine without the Mirant plant or the peakers.

That, of course, would leave much of the power in the hands of PG&E — and make the city too heavily reliant on the one Peninsula cable. That’s what makes the giant extension cord from Pittsburg seem so appealing. But the city has also been talking about extending its power line from Hetch Hetchy, which now ends in Newark, across the bay — and that city-owned, city-run alternative would make far more sense. (The company that would own the Trans Bay Cable, Babcock and Brown, has offered San Francisco a handful of cash, a total of $75 million over 25 years, to make the deal sound sweeter. But that’s birdseed compared with the revenue the city would get by building its own line and moving to create a full public power system.)

Infrastructure decisions like these tie the city down for many years to come, and the supervisors need to be careful. They should, at a minimum:

•Conduct an independent study, outside the purview of Cal-ISO, to see what the city’s energy needs really will be in the future and how they can be met with renewables and conservation.

•Direct the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to prepare a plan to build the peaker facilities as a city project, with no private-sector partner getting control of the power for 10 years.

•Guarantee the people of Bayview and the other southeast neighborhoods that if the peakers are installed, they won’t be fired up until the Mirant plant is shut down.

But there’s a larger point here. San Francisco has never had a detailed energy-options study that looks at how the city overall should address its energy needs for the next 25 years. A study like that would consider everything from tidal and wind power to public power, infrastructure needs, and extending the Hetch Hetchy line across the bay to CCA.

Instead, at the bidding of an unaccountable state agency filled with people who think like private-utility executives, the city is making a bunch of piecemeal moves that will create a patchwork of programs that may not be the right ones, may not be properly connected, and may not even be needed.

The only outfit that’s demanding we move quickly here is Cal-ISO — and before city officials decide to let the governor’s people determine our energy future, City Attorney Dennis Herrera should prepare a memo on what legal authority, if any, Cal-ISO has over the city and how San Francisco can defy that agency and determine its own future.*

Chin music, pin hits

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August 7, 2007
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Drifting into a coma at last week’s lethargic Oakland A’s–<\d>Los Angeles Angels game, I suddenly woke with a snort, dropped my bag of peanuts, and realized what was missing. No, not some bargain-price rookie flamethrower, though that wouldn’t hurt. It was too quiet. I needed some screeching Queen songs to drown out the deranged A’s fans screaming behind me.

But it wasn’t just me — the A’s and their fans were suffering from a dearth of head-bobbing, fist-punching at-bat music, in addition to a real game. One lousy Nirvana snippet does not inspire high confidence or achievement, making it hard for the team to compete with the sleek multimedia machine of, say, the Giants, the Seattle Mariners, or heck, any other ball team out there blasting tunes at top volume to work up the crowd into a bubbling froth whenever a hometown hitter saunters to the plate or whenever the action lags. Of course, the selections have fallen into predictable patterns: Barry Bonds has tended to favor Dr. Dre minimalist power hooks to usher in his home-run hits. There are the inevitable Linkin Park, Metallica, and T.I. tunes as well as "Crazy Train," "Yeah!" and, naturally, DJ Unk’s "Walk It Out," beloved of so many athletes and audio staffers — although sometimes musicians have their say, as when Twisted Sister asked John Rocker and the Atlanta Braves to stop playing "I Wanna Rock" after the player’s racist, homophobic, and sexist mouth-offs back in 2000.

Maybe we’re just damaged, in need of a perpetual soundtrack to go with our every activity and our shrinking attention spans — though some might argue that baseball, like so many sports, needs an infusion of new but not necessarily performance-enhanced energy. We can all use some style to go with our substance, which might explain why presidential candidate John Edwards was said to be pressing flesh at the still-unfolding, long-awaited Temple Nightclub in SoMa last week. And why it wasn’t too surprising to get an invite on a bisected bowling pin to Strike Cupertino, a new bowling alley–<\d>cum–<\d>nightclub down south in Cupertino Square, a withering mall off 280 where the venue has planted itself on the basement level. Its neighbors: a JC Penney, a Macy’s, a Frederick’s of Hollywood, an ice-skating rink, an AMC 16-plex, and lots of darkened store spaces. I stopped to admire the wizard-embellished pewter goblets and marked-down Kill Bill Elle Driver action figures at the sword-, knife-, and gun-filled Armour Geddon — still open for all your raging goth armament needs.

Strike, however, was raging all on its own, without the skull-handled dagger it never knew it needed. In a wink toward the Silicon Valley work-hard-play-hard crowd Strike’s owners hope to attract, Angela Kinsey from The Office threw out the first ball in the black-lit, modish alley. A luxe bar dreamed up by Chris Smith, one of the team that designed Nobu, was swarming with guests clamoring for free Striketinis.

Apparently Strike Cupertino isn’t original: the first one sprung, after a full makeover, from Bowlmor Lanes in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1997, and went on, according to the press literature, to become the highest-grossing bowling alley in the world. Others are located in Bethesda, Md., Long Island, and Miami. But what, no Vegas? Strike seems perfectly suited for Sin City, with its bright, flash, well-upholstered decor — equal parts retro ’50s and ’60s, both American Graffiti and Goldfinger — and multiple massive plasma screens distractingly flickering the Giants game, ESPN, any game, above the lanes, the lounge, and every surface. Peppy, poppy ’80s rock and R&B — "Hey Mickey" and "Little Red Corvette" — coursed from the DJ booth next to the raft of pool and air hockey tables and the game arcade as upscale clubbish figurines, blue-collar bowling diehards, and Asian and Latino kids tried out the lanes and tables and some fair American and Asian finger food.

I stuck a kiwi into a chocolate fountain and spurted sticky brown stuff all over my white shoes and shirt and wondered, could this be the future of clubbing — or sports? Amusement parks for adults, lubricated with fruity but muscley cocktails? Or maybe this is as hellacious as it gets in drowsy Cupertino.

Still, I thought Strike was worth swinging by, if only to play on a sparkling, well-waxed, seemingly nick-free lane for the first time, in fresh, BO-free shoes, with immaculate, grimeless balls. Also, knowing how many miles per hour your ball is traveling is a trip, if somewhat discouraging for featherweights like yours truly. Yes, I know the $5 cover after 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays seems excessive for, well, a bowling alley, but Monday evening seems a deal with all-night unlimited play for a flat $14. Word has it that the nightspot also enforces a dress code — and that even Bonds would have to leave his cap at home — but I say perhaps just cut back on the supershort bowling-shirt dresses and fishnet stockings on the teenagey waitresses. We’re not in Vegas yet, Toto.

STRIKE CUPERTINO

Cupertino Square

10123 Wolf Road, Cupertino

(408) 252-BOWL

www.bowlatstrike.com

YOU SCORED

OLIVER FUTURE

The Los Angeles buzz band generates scratchy, acidic melodic rock with plenty of post-punk seasoning. With Boy in the Bubble and 8 Bit Idiot. Wed/8, 9 p.m., $7. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

ROBBERS ON HIGH STREET

Veering from tree cities to familial familiars, the NYC combo come with Grand Animals (New Line). With the Wildbirds and the Old-Fashioned Way. Thurs/9, 9:30 p.m., $8. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

GREAT NORTHERN

Melodic pop for modern-rock romantics. With Comas and Twilight Sleep. Sat/11, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

MIKAELA’S FIEND AND SEXY PRISON

Driving punk tumult meets salacious death disco. With Mika Miko and Twin. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., call for price. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org

PELICAN

The Windy City instrumentalists skew shorter — seven minutes at most — and focus on songs on their new City of Echoes (Hydra Head). With Clouds and Garagantula. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com

Nerd resurge

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August 7, 2007
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ZEITGEIST This year just may go down as the one when nerds finally ruled the school, scattering HP calculators, parentally purchased button-downs, and World of Warcraft guild master credentials as they tripped on their own shoelaces on their way into WonderCon or the Lick Observatory. The infestation of all screens big and small hasn’t been quite so intense since the Ronald Reagan–era ’80s, when nerds were regularly toasted on TV’s Happy Days, then found fame in the cineplex’s Revenge of the Nerds (1984). Freaks, geeks, grinds, dorks, and losers have come a long way from Andy Kaufman cohort Fred Blassie’s 1976 novelty tune, "Pencil Neck Geek," and even further along from George Jones’s 1993 track "High-Tech Redneck" and the emergence of Pharrell Williams’s NERD production squad. Freaks and Geeks, Ugly Betty, and Steve Urkel of Family Matters have laid the foundation for fall’s TV invasion, including Aliens in America, in which an Asian exchange student meets geek with his nerd host; The IT Crowd, otherwise known as "Dances with Dudes Who Keep Late Hours Serving Your Server"; and Chuck, whose title character oversees a so-called Nerd Herd at the local Best Buy–esque big-box retailer and dabbles in international espionage. Shoring up the projected sales for Benjamin Nugent’s book, American Nerd: The Story of My People, due out in 2008, are silver-screen nerd workouts like Rocket Science, which painfully, wittily details the trials of a stuttering, would-be school debater trying to beat the odds with lots of baggage. The hot nerd sport of table tennis will be sent up in the forthcoming Balls of Fury, and the awkward raunch of nerd-focused teen sex comedy returns with next week’s gut-busting Superbad, buttressed by costar Michael "Baby Beck" Cera, who pushes the nerdiness of his übergeek character George Michael in Arrested Development to new heights in this and on his online TV series, Clark and Michael. Despite the fact that Underdog may be truly speaking for downtrodden puppies everywhere, Superbad probably represents the apogee of nerdocity, being coproduced by current comedy master of the universe Judd Apatow, who has played not a small part in the hip-to-be-uncool movement with the aforementioned Freaks and The 40 Year-Old Virgin.

So nerds rock, but why? Chalk it up to a once firmly bitch-slapped and now somewhat resuscitated tech sector — or an infusion of energy and capital in Silicon Valley? Is nerd valorization part of a backlash against the hippie hotties of the early ’00s — and a back-to-the-future glance at Reagan social conservatism? Or is this simply where all our heads are these days, as a logical extension of a perpetually wired culture? Nerdiness has seeped so deeply into everyday life that everyone, even the brawny bullies who spindled pocket protectors in the past, must to pay due respect when faced with a blank monitor. (Kimberly Chun)

Careers and Ed: Brew business

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August 7, 2007
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› culture@sfbg.com

There’s a curious but significant distinction between a job and a career. A job is something that we (usually) spend a third of our life doing, (usually) in exchange for financial compensation. While a job is inherently meritorious, it also connotes trading time for wages: an eternally losing proposition. Unless it’s paired with "hand" or "blow," there’s a modicum of doom in our breath when we utter the word.

A career, however, seems to hold aloft our daydreams and aspirations. Careers are crafted, built, and achieved. And yet, if we work for too long without keeping focus on our passions, our career sometimes becomes that trap we fall into before we know it, the thing people associate with us but we don’t associate with ourselves. At that point, our career can become the dark mirror that reflects our failure to take a risk. It is our soul death.

So there’s nothing more inspiring than meeting someone who loves what he or she does and gets paid for it. Ultimately, it’s not about getting a high-paying job; it’s about having a career that makes you happy. Lars Larson, master brewer of Trumer Brauerei in Berkeley, is one of those lucky schmucks who are making it on their own terms.

Larson’s path to Berkeley and brewing Trumer Pils has been a long and rewarding one, and it seems to be the result of his paying attention to his instincts. It’s doubtful that any child sets out to oversee an artisan beer operation, but Larson admits he can’t recall a single beer he’s disliked, "even sips of beer I snuck from my dad’s glass as a kid."

Larson spent part of his high school years studying in Germany, where the legal drinking age is 16. Around the time he graduated from college with a history degree in the late 1980s, he became interested in what was then a burgeoning craft-beer movement. Inspired by the energy of artisan beer making and the chance to return to Germany, he relocated to Berlin to get a degree in fermentation sciences. It was 1990, right after the Berlin Wall came down. After participating in the historic events that followed, Larson accepted a job at a brewery in Argentina, where the light lager style of German pilsner was popular.

"The principles of brewing are the same worldwide, but culturally [Argentina] was a phenomenal experience," Larson says. "I wouldn’t trade those years for anything."

When he returned to America four years later, he landed in Longview, Texas, working for Stroh’s, which produces such beers as Schlitz and Lone Star. The company had a four-million-barrel capacity and more than 400 employees working in three shifts for an around-the-clock industrial operation. That was by far the most commercial beer-making environment he’d ever been in.

"There’s really a limited set of actions that occurs in the brewing process itself," he says. "But learning different aspects of the business was a great experience."

When the Stroh’s factory closed, Larson took a few interim jobs before accepting his master brewer post at Trumer. Now he’s part of the international team that’s helping to develop the Trumer Pils brand regionally and beyond.

Trumer’s roots are far from the Bay Area. Founded in Salzburg, Austria, in 1601, the artisan brewery established a second location in Berkeley in 2003 because of one thing the two cities share: soft water, an important component in brewing pilsners.

There’s also a historic connection between Berkeley and beer. "The mayor of Berkeley [Tom Bates] just came for a tour," Larson mentions. "He was the guy in the 1970s who helped push legislation to enable brewpubs in California, so in part he’s the reason why we’re here today."

And Larson is glad Trumer is here. Calling this part of the country a great place to live, he says, "People love good food and drink here, and we enjoy being part of that local movement."

But what does Larson actually do? Does a master brewer job entail what we think it does? "I work with great people, and it is great fun, but it isn’t just a frat party," Larson cautions. "It’s not slugging beer all day long."

Actually, it’s the variety in his job that makes it interesting for him. "I work on plants, foodstuffs, chemicals, and machines," he says. "There are different tasks to do each day, and because our original brewery is in Austria, I get to travel to Europe and speak German."

And though beer making is an ancient art, Larson says his work is more rooted in technology and the modern age than one might expect — though it also involves plenty of hard labor.

"It’s really an industrial operation, and there are a lot of safety considerations," Larson says. "There are chemicals, gases, steam, and fast-moving machinery. It’s hot, sweaty, dirty work, and a lot of times you’re beat at the end of the day. It’s quite physical work and not for everybody."

Larson says brewing’s future seems bright. It’s a rapidly growing profession, which means there will be more jobs like his in the years ahead. But since "it’s a job that’s pretty high up on the list," newcomers will need to get in on the ground level, where they can learn more aspects of the business. It also wouldn’t hurt to have a strong background in chemistry, biology, and microbiology; to combine a food sciences degree with a fermentation sciences degree from a school such as UC Davis; and to learn to make beer at home.

As far as Larson is concerned, such work is worth the result: in his case, a great job doing something he loves.

"You meet a lot of great people in this business," he says. "And we love that we get to do something that we enjoy and that we can also share with others."*

Trumer Brauerei offers tours Mondays, 4 p.m. Private group tours can be arranged.

www.trumerpils.com

Should Daly run for mayor?

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August 7, 2007
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By Tim Redmond

Sup. Chris Daly, who unequivocally was not running for mayor a few weeks ago, is now actually talking about it again. The journalist in me says that’s a wonderful idea – raise some issues, stir up a fuss, force Newsom to face a real challenger in a real debate …. Makes for great stories.

The San Francisco progressive in me is a bit more nervous.

Daly’s not going to win, not without some sort of stunning event. (Which is possible; I mean, Newsom could utterly melt down in October, start babbling incoherently, punch out Dan Noyes on camera, admit he was secretly funding the weapons procurement program at Your Black Muslim Bakery or something …. And Daly could suddenly find himself the front runner.)

But for all practical purposes, the point of a mayoral race would be twofold: To raise issues while holding Newsom accountable – and, equally important, to build momentum for the fall 2008 supervisorial races.

I can’t emphasize enough how important the 08 races are – control of the board, and the political agenda in the city, will be at stake. Tom Ammiano, Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval will be gone, victims of term limits. Ross Mirkarimi will be up for re-election, as will Sean Elsbernd. In four key open seats, the entire balance of power in the city could shift.

So the question is: Does Daly as a mayoral candidate help progressives win those seats by generating energy and organizing talent the way Ammiano’s 1999 race and Matt Gonzalez’s 2003 race did? There are, as I’ve pointed out before, some good things about a Daly for Mayor campaign. Or does Daly, who is not terribly popular outside his district, actually drag down progressive candidates by losing badly to Newsom and allowing the mayor’s forces to brand all the progressives as Daly-ites?

Can this race bring us all together as progressives, or just create more rifts?

If Daly wants to run, he’s got some work to do, because this, of course, is much bigger than him. And I think he knows that.

When Gonzalez decided to run four years ago, it seemed like a bit of a last-minute unilateral decision, and a lot of the activists in town felt left out. Daly’s got to do better: He needs to be sure that at least some of his progressive board colleagues (many of whom he’s been fighting with) will endorse him and help; running without any support from other progressive leaders would be tough. He needs to mend fences with some of his slightly bruised pals (which would be a good thing to do anyway).

He needs to line up some community backers and seasoned campaign workers who will sign on for the battle. He needs to think about how he’s going to raise money.

Of course, there are always surprises; state Sen. Carole Migden is in a big fight of her own, against Assembly member Mark Leno, and Leno is backing Newsom. Maybe Migden would support and raise money for Daly, who she’s been close to in the past (and who is supporting her over Leno). Which would make for an interesting political season.

But again, the question at hand is how will this benefit the progressive cause, not just now but over the long haul. Three days of hard thinking to go.

Carbon-neutral madness

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July 31, 2007
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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Are you carbon neutral yet? Al Gore says he is. The concert tours for the Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews, and other big acts say they are too. Indeed, going neutral is hot these days as, almost overnight, the fledgling market in carbon offsets has burgeoned into a multimillion-dollar industry.

The method is simple, at least in theory. For a fee, companies will balance, or offset, the greenhouse gases emitted by your car or home by spending money on climate-healing initiatives such as renewable energy, forestation projects, and capturing deleterious gases like methane from farms and landfills.

But the sheer number of offset firms out there is staggering, with hundreds of companies vying for your dollars. And as the industry has exploded in popularity, questions have arisen about its reliability and whether the millions of dollars being spent are really making it to worthwhile projects.

"It’s the Wild, Wild West out there with carbon offsetting," the Sierra Club’s Aaron Israel told the Guardian. "Until it becomes a truly functional market, it’s going to continue to be confusing to the consumer who really wants to do the right thing."

A San Francisco firm is looking to bring some accountability to the freewheeling new sector. Since California’s energy deregulation disaster, the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions has run the Green-e program, which oversees and authenticates energy companies that claim to produce renewable power. Starting this fall, the CRS’s Sarah Krasley told us, Green-e will police the carbon offset market as well and put its seal on worthy companies.

Green-e has already been certifying one method for slowing climate change for years: the sale of renewable energy certificates, or RECs. A local firm called 3 Degrees (formerly 3 Phases Energy) specializes in RECs, mainly for small and large businesses. With each one-megawatt-hour certificate its customers buy, the company helps wind, solar, and other renewable-energy producers compete with cheaper, fossil fuel–based sources of energy. As 3 Degrees’ Steve MacDougal explained, "Utilities purchase energy at a commodity price, the same price for coal as for renewables. RECs allow [green-power companies] to have a premium, which makes them more profitable."

While 3 Degrees deals primarily in RECs for business clients, two other local firms, TerraPass and LiveNeutral, peddle offsets for individuals. Since it opened shop just two years ago, the for-profit TerraPass has sold tens of thousands of "passes" on its Web site for car emissions, air travel, home electricity use, and even weddings. The average buyer spends "about $50," company founder Tom Arnold told us, with the money going to initiatives like wind farms in the Midwest and the capturing of greenhouse gas emissions from farms and landfills. About one-third of 3 Degrees’ outlays go to RECs.

LiveNeutral takes a different approach from TerraPass or any other company. Rather than spending money on individual projects or methods, the Presidio nonprofit buys and then permanently retires carbon offset credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange. "By purchasing these credits and then never reselling them," LiveNeutral executive director Jason Smith explained, "we drive up the price of the credits and encourage [big greenhouse gas emitters] to reduce." LiveNeutral sells a one-ton emissions reduction credit for $7.50, Smith said. Most customers use the company’s DriveNeutral program and purchase five credits to offset one year of driving. The firm also offers a FlyNeutral option for air travel.

But many critics have likened the offset business to medieval papal indulgences, with environmental sins like owning an inefficient vehicle or cranking up the thermostat absolved for the right price. Israel said the Sierra Club does not openly oppose the practice, but he is worried that offsets could become "a distraction for people…. It’s really the last thing you should do, not the first. First you should conserve and become more efficient, then you can see about offsetting what’s left."

For Arnold, TerraPass’s phenomenal success is not about exploiting guilt or bad behavior. Instead, he reasoned, it simply shows that people want to do all they can to make a difference. "Most of our users are already green," he said. "But we want to reach the people who are just now waking up to enormity of the problem too…. What our customers are saying is very American: ‘Let’s not wait for someone else to do it, let’s get something done ourselves.’ " *

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

Black and white and color

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July 31, 2007
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One of the most exciting aspects of being a newspaper editor is recognizing a wave of activity that isn’t connected to government mind control or onslaughts of corporate-sponsored and mass-marketed art. This kind of spontaneous mass energy is happening via photography in San Francisco right now. August is known as a slow month, but the city’s galleries are alive with contemporary photos. Bill Daniel’s latest look at the US landscape is opening at RayKo Photo Center, the Daniel-influenced vagabond spirit Polaroid Kidd has his first Bay Area show at Needles and Pens, Greg Halpern’s moody views of Buffalo and Kelli Connell’s double-minted prints are up at SF Camerawork, and at City Hall — through the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery — the work of 32 local photographers is on view.

Baptized in arguments regarding its viability as an art form, photography remains as contentious as it is expansive. Witness a veteran such as Duane Michals sharpening his claws on the megapopular likes of Cindy Sherman in last year’s rant-monograph Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank (Thames and Hudson). We live in an era when the ready availability of portraiture seems to have made its definition even more reductive; via MySpace and more explicit sites, people use cameras to readily package themselves as products. Yet when black-and-white and color and digital and film collide with unpredictable results, photo portraiture can be as varied and lively as the work you’ll find on these pages.

Thanks to fellow Guardian arts editor Kimberly Chun for suggesting, late in the selection process, a focus on portraiture. This decision necessarily narrowed the Bay Area photographers to choose from; there’s a wave of garden- and eco-driven work being done by Bill Basquin and others, while Dusty Lombardo, R.A. McBride, and Jackson Patterson are discovering tremendous depth in interiors. Thanks also to Basquin, Daniel, Glen Helfand, Chuck Mobley, Katie Kurtz, and Dave and Ray Potes for their suggestions.

Twelve years ago I interviewed therapist and author Walt Odets because he was bringing much-needed humanity to discussions of the AIDS crisis; to find out that he’s also a superb photographer whose subjects have included Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido, is a revelation. In distinctive ways, Vic Blue, Robert Gumpert, and Amanda Herman reveal what journalism usually ignores or renders shallow. The intimacy of Vala Cliffton’s photos makes one ponder her presence within the scenes she depicts. Matthias Geiger shows a city you might not have noticed even when it’s been in front of your face. Stan Banos has an eye for the many shades of gray within the multihued and the cuckoo. Job Piston is that rare Bay Area photographer whose work brandishes a sexual edge that isn’t obvious or predictable. Jim Goldberg’s urban work has been canonically influential since the publication of Rich and Poor (Random House, 1985) and Raised by Wolves (Scalo, 1995). Photography is just one aspect of Désirée Arlette Holman’s hand-fashioned fantasy world, a place that looks like a wicked satire of our own.

If you’d like to see more about some of these artists, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Stan Banos

NAME Stan Banos

TITLE The Marine

THE STORY "This photo was taken in San Francisco during Fleet Week in ’04."

INSPIRATION "I’ve always had a vague obsession with time and place, and the camera is the best-suited instrument to record such transient moments (particularly when you can’t draw). I generally try to incorporate whatever signs of irony life can offer within a rectangle."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS "I have more favorite photographers as an adult than I had favorite ballplayers as a kid: Bruce Davidson, Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Carl de Keyzer, James Nachtwey, Cheryl Richards, Henry Wessel, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Lee Friedlander … the list is endless."

SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commission Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21.

WEB SITE www.reciprocity-failure.com

Victor J. Blue

NAME Victor J. Blue

TITLE Honduran immigrants, Detention Center Tapachula Mexico

THE STORY "I went to the Guatemala-Mexico border to photograph immigration there. These guys had been caught trying to ride the freight train to the United States. We only had a few minutes to take pictures inside. They were on a bus back to Tegucigalpa within a day, probably just to try again."

FAVORITE MONOGRAPHS The Mennonites by Larry Towell (Phaidon, 2000), Exploding into Life by Eugene Richards and Dorothy Lynch (Aperture, 1986), Kosovo 1999–2000: Flight of Reason by Paolo Pellegrin and Tim Judah (Trolley, 2002), Under a Grudging Sun: Photographs from Haiti Libere 1986–1988 by Alex Webb (Thames and Hudson, 1989).

WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? "The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the people of San Joaquin County."

WEB SITES www.victorjblue.com, online.recordnet.com/projects/iraq/Jose/index.html

Vala Cliffton

NAME Vala Cliffton

TITLE Unicorn

THE STORY "Unicorn is a portrait of my niece and my brother after their trip to Hawaii. My niece is in love with Hawaii and could not seem to detach herself from her scuba gear that afternoon. My brother was trying to catch a nap before dinner. The combination of elements in this unposed portrait captures an essential and intriguing aspect of their father-daughter relationship."

INSPIRATIONS "The Family of Man [Harry N. Abrams] was the first photography book I can remember picking up and being interested in. Photography was always a part of our family life. One of my projects while at the San Francisco Art Institute was to print the black-and-white snapshots taken of the family over the years."

WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? "I have spent the past couple or years working as a filmmaker and producing music videos, some of which I have put up on YouTube at youtube.com/alavala11."

SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commision Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21.

WEB SITE alavala.com

Matthias Geiger

NAME Matthias Geiger

TITLE Train

THE STORY Train is taken from Geiger’s "Tide" series, which he describes as "an examination of human presence" in "places of transit and momentary rest…. The technique of layering still images allows past, present, and future moments to appear simultaneously, reflecting the notion that each moment in time is a construct of our memories, our presence, and our projections."

INSPIRATIONS "Direct physical experience such as being outdoors, dance, and meditation, as well as readings on metaphysics."

WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? A series on utopian subcultures.

SHOW "Matthias Geiger: Tide." Sept. 6–Oct. 20. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

WEB SITE www.matthiasgeiger.com

Robert Gumpert

NAME Robert Gumpert

TITLE Untitled

THE STORY "For the past 13 years I’ve been doing an off-and-on documentary project called ‘Lost Promise: The Criminal Justice System.’ This image was done in August 2006 while I was documenting the closing of San Francisco County Jail No. 3. Built in 1934 and beset by a number of serious issues and several lawsuits ordering its closure, the jail was finally closed in August 2006, when inmates were moved to County Jail No. 5, built on land adjacent to the old jail."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Don McCullin, Lewis Hine, August Sander, Leonard Freed, Gilles Peres, and Philip Jones Griffith.

WEB SITE www.robertgumpert.com

Amanda Herman

NAME Amanda Herman

TITLE Untitled

THE STORY The image is taken from Herman’s most recent work, the short film Lost Island, which looks at the impact of Hurricane Katrina on one large family two years after the storm forced them from their home in Chalmette, La. Herman met the Morris family in Oakland while doing free family portraits for survivors at a relief day in October 2005, one month after Katrina drove them from their homes, and, she writes, "over time, I became interested in exploring the intricacies of one family’s experience with the disaster." Donations and income from the sale of the Lost Island DVD will go into a family fund to assist the Morrises as they rebuild their lives in Oakland.

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Seydou Keita, Allen Sekula, Susan Meiselas, Jeff Wall, Wing Young Huie, Wendy Ewald, Jessica Ingram, Eric Gottesman, and others.

SHOW "Inchoate," through Aug. 11. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

WEB SITE www.amandaherman.com

Désirée Arlette Holman

NAME Désirée Arlette Holman

TITLE Something Ain’t Right

THE STORY "This image is from a larger series of video and photo work depicting actors wearing crude, handmade (by me) chimp costumes. Something Ain’t Right was inspired by smoking chimps in zoos in South Africa and China. One zookeeper claimed that the chimps were smoking because they are frustrated. Could captivity make a chimp neurotic and lead it to smoke? Others claimed that the chimps were imitating tourists, recalling the cliché ‘Monkey see, monkey do.’ "

INSPIRATION "I am inspired by psychology, popular culture, figurative sculptures (including toys), art, and various types of fantasy and fiction making. I capitalize on the potential to create fantasy from realistic imagery through the use of the camera."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Currently include Tracey Moffatt, Liza May Post, and Suzy Poling.

SHOWS "CCA: 100 Years in the Making," at the Oakland Museum of Art, and a solo show at San Francisco’s Silverman Gallery. Both open in October.

WEB SITE www.desireeholman.com

Job Piston

NAME Job Piston

TITLE A Year Later

THE STORY "I was making portraits of young Hollywood and became interested in deconstructing glamour. This is a good friend of mine who was sent away to a facility for a long while. I took this picture the first time I visited him. Today popular figures openly go to rehab; it too has become glamorous."

INSPIRATION "Complicated personalities, intimacy in public spaces, secrets, the figure, and the fountain of youth."

SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commission Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21; "Evidence of Things Unseen," Peninsula Museum of Art in Belmont, through Oct. 21; solo show at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco in October.

WEB SITES www.jobpiston.com, book-of-job.blogspot.com

Walt Odets

NAME Walt Odets

TITLE Greg Hoffspiegel, Palo Alto, California, 2007

THE STORY "Because it is so instantaneous, there is much chance in photography. This photograph seems to me about the gaze and emotion of the three figures, some combination of attention, reflection, loss, and pathos, as well as the visual organization."

INSPIRATION "I have taken pictures since I was 16. If I can use the camera in a way that forces deconstruction of what we normally see but do not observe, then I feel I have accomplished something."

FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS "Henri Cartier-Bresson, of course, and Ed Ruscha and Lee Friedlander, for their elegance and form, intellect, and relentless literal rendering, respectively."

SHOW An October 2007 three-person show at SF Camerawork, devoted to winners of the James D. Phelan Award for photography.

WEB SITE www.waltodets.com/photo

Jim Goldberg

NAME Jim Goldberg

TITLE Untitled

PHOTO COURTESY OF STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY

THE STORY The image is drawn from "The New Europeans," a project Goldberg started around the time of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. The series focuses on the journeys of refugees and immigrants from war-torn or economically devastated homelands in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere to settle in Europe, specifically Greece and Ukraine. In June, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris presented Goldberg with the HCB Award so he could travel to his subjects’ countries of origin and tell the complete stories of their migration.

SHOW "Jim Goldberg: New Work." Oct. 3–Nov. 10. Reception Oct. 4, 5:30–7:30 p.m. Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 49 Geary, third floor, SF. (415) 433-6879, wirtzgallery.com

Our unnecessary nuclear future

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July 31, 2007
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by Amanda Witherell

photo of Diablo Canyon nuke plants courtesy of PG&E’s Jim Zimmerlin

Sigh. Just when you’re starting to think something productive might occur in the legislature, enter the monkey wrench. A recently released study outlines exactly how we could be planning for an energy future free of nuclear and coal. If only our leaders would quit pandering to industry and adopt such a plan, but instead it looks like the nuclear industry has quietly tucked a provision into the new energy bill that would provide billions of dollars of loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants.

Senate energy bill helps nukes

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July 31, 2007
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By Tim Redmond

The New York Times reports today that the Senate energy bill contains huge government subsidies for new nuclear power plants. This is no joke, folks: As we’ve been reporting in the Guardian, these folks are back. And they still lie.

Extra! Extra! Chronicle runs front page story critical of PG&E!

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July 26, 2007
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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Coming back from a special meeting of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) in Santa Domingo,
I was pleasantly surprised to find a solid story on the front page of the Chronicle (Thursday, July 26th) laying out PG&E’s sorry record on blackouts.

The head was good: “The Blackout Blues.” The subhead was apt: “PG&E leaves customers in the dark more often than the other big utilities in California.” The lead was a real lead: “”Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers encore more frequent and longer-lasting blackouts than other Californians, state data show.”
The second graph provided telling detail: “Tuesday’s power outage in San Francisco and the Peninsula was no isolated incident. In 2006, the average PG&E customer lost power for more than 4 1/2 hours, according to statistics compiled by the utility and submitted to state energy regulators.”

It was prominently displayed with a nice graphic and lots of dramatic white type on a black background.

The reporter, David Baker, with help from Marisa Lagos and Cecilia Vega, did a lot of work to get the story in shape so quickly after yet another PG&E service fiasco.

Dirty truth bombs

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July 24, 2007
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Been around da block as Jenny and I have? Then you’re all way too familiar with that cad Hoochie Coochie Man, that bogus Boogie (Chillen) Man, and — natch, Nick — that Loverman. But hey, who’s this new game, Grinderman? This grind has little to do with a full-bodied Arabica, the daily whatever, or the choppers that go "Clink!" in the night. It’s all about that which is toppermost of the poppermost on young men’s minds, always skirting young men’s fancies. Namely, sex, sex, and more sex. Oh yeah, and sex.

No pretense, prenups, or prenatal care here. "An overriding theme of mine is, I guess, a man and a woman against the world," Grinderman’s primo romantic, Nick Cave, murmurs. "But for this record, the woman seems to be down in the street, engaged in life, and the man is kind of left on his own, with, um, y’know, a tube of complimentary shampoo and a sock."

It’s the rough, sordid, inelegant, dirty-old-man truth, youth — and judging from Grinderman’s self-titled debut (Mute/Anti-), it sounds awfully good to me. Consider the configuration of Cave on vocals and guitar along with three Bad Seeds (violinist and electric bouzoukist Warren Ellis, bassist Martyn Casey, and drummer Jim Sclavunos), his solo band set free to create music collaboratively, loosely tethered to Cave’s mad songwriting skills. There’s sex, yes, but Grinderman is also about finding fresh, new positions and approaches to the old rump roast of rock ‘n’ roll, copping new moves to old blues, and finding new grooves for honest old dogs. After all, Cave will have been on this blighted speck for half a century this year. "Look, I’ve been turning 50 for years, so it’s kind of academic at this stage," says the polymath who won over critics with his screenplay for the 2005 Aussie western The Proposition. "I think there’s an old man’s anger behind this record and a sense of humor about it as well, I guess, that you only get with age, really. Where all you can do is kinda laugh. But I do think there’s a sort of rage that’s 50 years old."

It’s there in "Go Tell the Women": "All we want is a little consensual rape in the afternoon<\!s>/ And maybe a bit more in the evening," Cave coos. Scenes abound of balding devils treating themselves to lonely hand jobs in the shower or restlessly flipping channels, fondling the changer, on universal remote; on "Love Bomb," Cave grumbles, "I be watching the MTV<\!s>/ I be watching the BBC<\!s>/ I be searching the Internet." He’s aware of the "mad mullahs and dirty bombs" out there ("Honey Bee [Let’s Fly to Mars]"), but instead of succumbing to death and devastation, Grinderman gets lost in the life force, a many-monikered lady, the old in-and-out, monkey magik — real Caveman stuff.

The band wisely avoided choosing the latter label. But amid testosterone, no one lit on the charm. Congenialman doesn’t have quite the same ring, though the Cave I speak to from his home in Brighton, England, is definitely a lighter, brighter, wittier, and much more charming creature than I ever imagined. Searching for a lighter midinterview, Cave is in fine spirits — Grinderman had only done three shows and an in-store, but he and Sclavunos were pleased with the reception to their collective nocturnal emission.

At the larger Bad Seeds shows, Cave explains, "the audience is a long way away. It’s just been really good to kind of … see what an audience looks like again."

The four first came upon the idea of starting a new group when, while performing as the Bad Seeds, Sclavunos says, "we’d catch glimmers of it in rehearsals or sound checks. Someone would make some awful noise, and we’d all get excited and start playing along with it."

The sole American member of Grinderman and the Bad Seeds — and a onetime member of the Cramps and Sonic Youth — laughs abruptly when I ask him to describe his dynamic with Cave: "Hah! Complicated!" They talk a lot, about matters beyond music. "There’s such a tendency, such an anti-intellectual streak in rock ‘n’ roll music," Sclavunos continues. "Such a fear of seeming to know things and such a tendency to dumb things down for the sake of trying to make it seem more real or give it more integrity. Don’t let it get too complicated or it starts smacking of prog rock or something! But Nick’s not afraid of ideas, and he’s not afraid to try out ideas, and in that sense we’re all of the same mind."

Grinderman is likewise as collective minded as possible. "We do it in very much the traditional democratic manner of bands," Sclavunos offers. "Whoever can be bossier in expressing an opinion about something has the opportunity to speak up, and if there’s anything really objectionable going on, you can certainly count on people raising a fuss!"

The idea was to try something different, Cave confirms. "I asked Warren Ellis what I should sing about lyrically because we had a pretty clear understanding what the music was going to be like, and he said he didn’t know but just don’t sing about God and don’t sing about love," Cave details. "A piece of information like that initially throws me for a six, but it’s actually enormously helpful for me as a writer because it kind of cuts down your options and pushes you into another place." Contrary to belief, the idea was not to re-create Cave’s cacophonous early combo, the Birthday Party. "The Birthday Party were actually way too complicated," Cave says mirthfully. "We don’t have enough brain cells left to be able to cope with that kind of thing."

Sooo … what with all the "No Pussy Blues" and the odes to "Depth Charge Ethel" shoved down Grinderman’s trou, one wonders what Cave’s wife, Susie Bick, must think of the lyrics? She likes the band and the shows, he says, then sighs, "Um, yeah. You know, I think there may have been a certain confusion to begin with, but I cleared that up." As in, who exactly you were writing about? "Yeah. Exactly. Yeah."<\!s>*

GRINDERMAN

Thurs/26, 9 p.m., $26 (sold out)

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.gamh.com

Also Fri/27, 9 p.m., $26 (sold out)

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

www.slims-sf.com

ROAMING, CHARGED

CRIBS

UK punk pop with enough energy — and provocation, thanks to the Femlin-perpetuated sex and violence in the video for "Men’s Needs," off their new Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever (Warner Bros.) — to shiver your baby bunker’s timbers. With Sean Na-Na and the Hugs. Wed/25, 8 p.m., $11–<\d>$13. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

BAT FOR LASHES

Another kick inside for Kate Bush lovers? Vocalist Natasha Khan is an ethereal ringer for the lady. I dug the all-girl folk-and-art-song combo when they played South by Southwest — and the affection is catching: Bat for Lashes’ Fur and Gold (Caroline) was recently short-listed for UK’s Mercury Prize. Mon/30, 8:30 p.m., $10–<\d>$12. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

Give a hoot (or else)

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July 17, 2007
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WILD WILDLIFE Had director Davis Guggenheim attempted to explore all the creative possibilities that lie behind such a name as Al Gore (get it?), An Inconvenient Truth would have been a much more interesting and way scarier film. Not that turning a pressingly threatening environmental issue into unforgettably blatant propaganda isn’t frightening. It’s just that if the former vice president had played some kind of freakish, global-warming-afflicted mutant — roaming the world, secretly planning to take his revenge by literally boring people to death with his clip show — the movie would have been closer to the truth and a lot more alarming.

Fortunately, the curators at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive have created a film series that gives environmental concerns the exact twist that Truth lacks and the depth that it persistently avoided. The major theme shared by all the earth-friendly flicks in "Eco-Amok! An Inconvenient Film Fest": the antagonistic relationship between science and nature, with the latter always the triumphant victor. Science is responsible for the destruction of the environment and the birth of many mutations, but it’s also the means by which people try to save the ecosystem.

"Eco-Amok!" ‘s selections also display admirably artistic inventiveness. Frogs (1972), Prophecy (1979), and Meet the Applegates (1991) all present the unstoppable power of nature, but they also reveal the reasons why we stay so apathetic to the danger we are facing. In Frogs the members of a wealthy family whose greed overcomes their environmental sensitivities are picked off, one by one, by the croaking (and hissing, and creepy-crawling) inhabitants of the abused swamp on their estate. In Prophecy the cheapskate owner of a lumber company uses mercury to process wood; as a result, the tainted water supply spawns a nasty-looking mutant bear that devours kids while they dream in their sleeping bags. And in Meet the Applegates, Brazilian cockroaches disguise themselves as a middle-class American family to carry out a nuclear explosion but are corrupted by capitalism’s lure.

Phase IV (1974), a film with extraordinary insect photography and many avant-garde qualities, presents nature’s revenge on a whole different level. Instead of getting rid of humans, hardworking and devoted-to-their-cause ants create a new Adam and Eve — a comment on the mutations that might take place in us if the ecosystem keeps changing at a rapid pace.

But even more troublesome is the obsession with creation that’s present in The Mutations (1974), Silent Running (1972), and Habitat (1997). In these three films, mad scientists are credited with the ability to create life. In The Mutations crazed Dr. Nolter (Donald Pleasence) forges humans from plants. In Silent Running delusional botanist Lowell (Bruce Dern) produces forests while floating in space. The wackiest of them all, Habitat‘s microbiologist Hank (Tchéky Karyo), turns into a higher form of energy after he transforms his house into a living "accelerated evolution" rain forest with the ability to kill.

What those three movies make crystal clear is the same thing that all the other films in the series more or less imply: science, even when used with the best of intentions, can only bring into existence abominable forms of life. Luckily, some of the time, no matter how horrid and gruesome these creations are, nature has better plans, including them in its survival scheme. But in a less fortunate and more frequent variation, these grim new species’ sole objective is to spread mayhem and introduce humans to their messy and abhorrent deaths — which some may argue isn’t so bad either.

ECO-AMOK! AN INCONVENIENT FILM FEST

Through Aug. 29

Wed., 7:30 p.m., $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Green City: Slow climate change U-turn

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July 17, 2007
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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY It seems like most of the recent talk about global warming has been in terms of its apocalyptic potential in the distant future. Yet Bay Area heat waves and soaring temperatures in the Central Valley of late could certainly cause me to wonder whether it’s already begun. What has happened to our legendary cold summers and heavy rainy seasons? Sure, we’ve gotten patches of fog and wind, but for the most part this summer has felt, well, summery.

And apparently I’m not the only one thinking about climate change and what we need to be doing today to minimize it. Let me tell you, it’s going to take a lot more than driving a Prius and using energy-efficient lightbulbs to get the job done. That’s why the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Department of the Environment published the city’s Climate Action Plan in 2004. The plan evolved from the Board of Supervisors’ 2002 resolution to reduce the city’s annual greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to 20 percent below their 1990 levels and included a series of recommendations on how to achieve this goal.

In 1990, San Francisco emitted 9.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but by 2004 it was pumping out an extra 600,000 tons per year and counting. In order to get down to the ideal of 7.3 million tons by 2012, things need to make a major U-turn. Last month the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury released a report on how successful the Climate Action Plan has been so far, and while the city has made some progress in reducing its annual greenhouse gas emissions, the report noted that if the board’s goals are to be met, the entire city needs to step it up.

According to the grand jury report, the reduction of emissions in 2005 (the most recently available local emissions inventory) was "500,000 metric tons, only half the amount hoped," and "to achieve the reductions to 7.3 million tons by 2012 will require a tripling of the reduction rate."

The Department of the Environment remains optimistic. "We haven’t fallen behind," Mark Westlund, the department’s public outreach program manager, told the Guardian. "But we need to do more. We are currently at 1990 levels. At this point we’ve made the U-turn and are lined up to reach 7 percent [below] our 1990 levels, which would put us up to pace with the Kyoto Protocol’s goals, but we just need to ramp it up to reach our 20 percent."

City government can do a lot to control emissions. There are already regulations in place regarding the city’s vehicle fleets and setting green standards for municipal buildings. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Green Building Task Force on July 11 announced a proposal to create incentives for private-sector buildings to adopt green building standards over the next five years.

Other city efforts include 2001’s Proposition B, which expanded solar power possibilities, and Community Choice Aggregation, which recently received preliminary approval from the Board of Supervisors; the latter program will allow the city to develop renewable energy projects on behalf of its citizens. But when it comes to making San Francisco a truly green city, much of the dirty work will fall to private citizens.

Nonmunicipal sources are responsible for 90 percent of San Francisco’s emissions, with a whopping 50 percent coming from private transportation, mostly cars. While the Climate Action Plan and the Civil Grand Jury report both give suggestions on how government agencies can motivate the public to reduce emissions, these suggestions can also be read as a map for how we can help ourselves. Simple changes in transportation habits — more walking, bicycling, and public transit — could cut 963,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year. And those who must use cars could carpool more often and switch to more-efficient vehicles.

The Climate Action Plan also indicates we can reduce emissions by an estimated 328,000 tons by changing how we live at home, including better energy efficiency and waste management.

Westlund told us, "Twenty percent is not just a municipal target, it’s citywide. Residences can help. Businesses can help. We’re all in this together. Getting the message out is half of it."*

The grand jury report is available at www.sfgov.org/site/courts_page.asp?id=3680#reports.

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

Green City: Winds of change

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July 10, 2007
0

› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Atop Bernal Heights, winds speed at 25 mph, enough to prematurely slam doors, disperse heat, and power Todd Pelman’s Roscoe Street house with 100 watts of electricity at any given moment.

The 34-year-old engineer has pioneered the city’s first permitted micro–wind project, a six-foot-tall cylindrical turbine that currently sits on his roof and sends juice into the energy grid, offsetting some of his dependence on Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Now his company, Blue Green Pacific, is working to put the turbines on the market in the next year.

"It’s aesthetically not going to be disruptive in an urban environment," Pelman told the Guardian, referring to the generator, which resembles the double helix of a DNA strand when it spins.

It is microprojects like this that could help support the Community Choice Aggregation program passed by the Board of Supervisors last month, which aims to have the city partner with its residents to generate a greener power portfolio over the next 10 years.

Bernal Heights Sup. Tom Ammiano, who codrafted a plan for CCA with Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, considers Pelman’s project a grassroots step away from PG&E, which he regards as a "wolf in sheep’s clothing."

"When people see how fruitful and utilitarian this is, we’ll wind up calling the shots," Ammiano told us. He amended the planning code for Bernal Heights to permit structures to reach more than 30 feet high, thus allowing the current and future use of wind turbines in his district.

Pelman’s turbine will generate between 300 and 600 kilowatt hours of energy per year, or about 10 percent of a typical home’s energy needs, he told us. His vertical-axis turbine is a natural propeller system that spins on its axis — a contrast from the windmill-style horizontal-axis turbines characteristic of rural areas. It’s made of steel, aluminum, and plastic and contains no sharp blades that might endanger birds.

Urban wind, though plentiful, has not been widely used, mostly due to aesthetics and the space constraints of turbines, according to Johanna Partin, the Renewable Energy Program manager of the San Francisco Department of the Environment.

"The micro– and small urban wind market is still in the early stages of development," Partin said, pointing out that Chicago, the notorious Windy City, only recently started a residential permitting process.

Pelman’s turbine became the first in the city to receive a residential permit for use last Oct. 5 after numerous bureaucratic back-and-forths with the Planning Department.

His rooftop turbine captures wind energy coming from the coast and going east and sends it to an inverter in his garage that converts it to usable energy, which then travels into an electrical panel.

"Think of the turbine as the heart of the system and the inverter as the brain of the system," Pelman said.

While Pelman’s turbine may catch people’s eyes, he claims it does not do the same to birds. "It coexists very peacefully with the pigeons and the hawks," he said, mentioning a couple of Bernal Heights’ bird species.

He is working with the Audubon Society to make sure he can live up to his assertion. Due to the turbine’s opaque appearance, no birds have attempted to fly through and meet their doom — a problem frequently noted with the large, horizontal-axis turbines at the Altamont Pass Wind Farm.

A one-turbine system will cost around $5,000, though Pelman estimates that rebates will reduce the price by $1,500. It’s an "emotional purchase," he said, that will at least partially satisfy a green conscience.

Chris Beaudoin, one of Pelman’s first customers, decided to make wind energy his green cause. His Castro home of 20 years — located on what he calls "consistently windy" Kite Hill — is one of the 10 sites where Blue Green Pacific will initiate beta testing in the next six to 12 months.

As a flight attendant whose job has opened his eyes to locations where governments are stepping up to the plate in renewable-resource use, Beaudoin realized that "we can either bitch about [the lack of renewable resources] or politically agitate for it."

Beaudoin takes the ominous signs of global warming as a reason to act fast in every plausible way that he can. As he told us, "I think the main motivation is that we have to be ready for what’s going on down the road." *

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

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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July 10, 2007
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EDITORIAL Of all the cities in the United States, San Francisco ought to be most aware of the perils of privatization. Much of the city burned down in 1906 in part because the private Spring Valley Water Co. hadn’t kept up its lines and thus was unable to provide enough water for firefighting. A few years later, in one of the greatest privatization scandals in American history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. stole what was supposed to be the city’s publicly owned electricity, costing the local coffers untold hundreds of millions over the past 80 years.

This is a city that votes 80 percent Democratic and has always opposed the Ronald Reagan–George H.W. Bush–George W. Bush agenda. A large part of the local economy depends on public employment (the city, the state, the federal government, and the University of California are by far the largest employers in town, dwarfing any of the biggest private-sector companies).

And yet Mayor Gavin Newsom, who likes to say he’s a progressive, is pushing an astonishing package of privatization measures that would shift public property, resources, and infrastructure into the hands of for-profit businesses. He’s talking about privatizing the golf courses, some city parks, and even Camp Mather. He’s promoting a tidal-energy deal that would give PG&E control of the power generated in a public waterway. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the ongoing PG&E–Raker Act scandal. And he’s determined to hand over a key part of the city’s future infrastructure to Google and EarthLink (see Editor’s Notes, p. 1).

This nonsense has to stop.

It’s hard to fight privatization battle by battle. Every single effort is a tough campaign in itself; the companies that want to make money off San Francisco’s public assets typically have plenty of cash to throw around. They’re slick and sophisticated, hire good lobbyists, and generally get excellent press from the local dailies. And it works: even board president Aaron Peskin, who generally knows better, is now talking about accepting the private wi-fi deal.

So what this city needs is a unified, organized campaign against privatization.

When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981, the single biggest item on the agenda of his political backers was an attack on the public sector. The way the right-wingers saw it, government took money from the rich and gave it to the less well-off. Government regulated business activity, costing major corporations a lot of money. Government — "the beast," they called it — had to be beaten back, demonized, and starved.

So the Reaganites used their top-rate public relations machine to make the public sector appear riddled with waste and fraud. They cut taxes, ran up record (for the time) deficits, and forced Congress to eliminate a lot of social programs. More and more of what the government once did was turned over to the private sector — the way the radical right liked it.

That political agenda still rules Washington, D.C., where even a fair amount of the war in Iraq has been privatized, turned over to contractors who are making huge profits while Iraqi and American kids die.

The attack on government has worked so well that even a very modest plan by Bill Clinton to create a national health care system was killed by the insurance industry.

But privatization doesn’t work. Private-sector companies and even nonprofits don’t have to comply with open-records laws and can spend money (including taxpayers’) with only limited accountability. Most private companies are about making money first and serving the public second; that means when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down (and unions are often booted out), and the quality of the delivery tanks. Look at the real estate development nightmare that has become the privatized Presidio. Look at the disgrace and disaster that the privatized Edison School brought to the San Francisco Unified School District. Look at the glitzy café and the pricey parking lot that have replaced good animal care at the privatized San Francisco Zoo. Look at what has happened around the world when Bechtel Corp. has taken over public water systems — rates have gone up so high that some people can’t afford this basic life necessity.

Look what’s happened to the American health system. Look what’s happened in Iraq.

Government isn’t perfect, and the public sector has lot of management, efficiency, and accountability issues. But at least the public has some hope of correcting those problems. San Francisco ought to be a place where a major movement to take back the public sector is born and thrives.

Almost everyone in town ought to have an interest. Labor, obviously, opposes privatization. So should neighborhood advocates (who care about public parks and open space), environmentalists (because the entire notion of environmentalism depends on a healthy public sector), progressive community groups, and politicians. Even more conservative groups like the cops and firefighters ought to see the need to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to a private vendor.

A campaign against privatization could link wi-fi, PG&E, tidal power, and the golf courses. The campaign could force anyone running for office to address a no-privatization pledge. It could appear any time one of these rotten schemes pops up in town — and send a message that San Francisco doesn’t accept the economic agenda of the radical right.

Who’s going to call the first meeting? 2

If the “Shrew” fits

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July 10, 2007
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

By early last week the pace of rehearsals for The Taming of the Shrew had picked up at the Magic Theatre. It was time for the Cutting Ball Theater to try a run-through of the whole play, and performers and crew bustled in preparation. Sound designer Cliff Caruthers, seated at a computer console halfway up the raked house, was busy cuing invigorating blasts of Italian hip-hop and other atmospheric sounds. Actors, with obvious gusto, practiced leaping on one another, tumbling onto the floor, shouting, screaming, and miming outrageous slapstick violence. Three hip-hop dancers, meanwhile, legs and arms jabbing and swinging in ecstatic synchronization, swept on and off the stage.

In a rather striking contrast to this commotion, director Rob Melrose sat quite still, with only the occasional consultation here or brief suggestion there, as if calmly situated in the eye of a storm. But then, it would be better to say that as the Cutting Ball’s artistic director, he is the eye of the storm: ever placid, ever watchful, and very much at the center of all activity.

The Cutting Ball’s mission, as its Web site will tell you, is geared to experimental new plays and "re-visioned classics" through thoughtful, stylish productions that reach for "poetic" truths over "naturalistic or realistic" ones. And its shows — including, notably, last season’s exquisite staging of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World — invariably have a distinct sense of expertise, passion, and intelligence.

With its latest venture, a high-energy, cleverly updated, localized take on Shakespeare’s Shrew, the small but serious San Francisco company that Melrose founded in 1999 with partner and actor Paige Rogers (this production’s Kate) moves out of the 60-seat venues of the past and into the medium-big time of the Magic’s 160-seat Northside Theatre. It’s a significant step for a company still going places. Moreover, when the Cutting Ball premieres its very particular take on Shrew at the Magic this week, it will represent the culmination and confluence of several passions and pursuits for Melrose, Rogers, and their company, including the techniques and themes of commedia dell’arte, hip-hop, and, not least of all, a theater that reflects the diversity and particularity of its Bay Area environment.

Momentum for the current show began last season during a successful run of Macbeth at the Exit on Taylor.

"We were thinking of what our next Shakespeare was going to be," Melrose remembers. "David Sinaiko joined the cast when we extended, and I thought how Paige and David would make a great Kate and Petruchio. I [had also been] studying commedia dell’arte for a while, and in the summer I got a grant to go study with Antonio Fava in Italy, to kind of get it from the master. I love the influence of commedia dell’arte on Shakespeare’s work, [and] the most commedia dell’arte Shakespeare play is The Taming of the Shrew. The other thing is that my day job for the past eight years has been at the Marin Academy, [where] I’ve done lots of these big comedies — [A] Midsummer [Night’s Dream], Comedy of Errors, As You Like It. Because it’s at a school and I don’t have a lot of the limitations you have in the professional world, I’ve let my imagination run free. I’ve been a lot more bold there than I have in my professional world. Just free and easy."

That’s where he asked students versed in hip-hop dance (some of whom have since graduated) to perform during the transitions between scenes. "That worked so well that we kept doing shows with them, and it’s been really fun," Melrose said. "I also taught my students commedia. All those influences kind of fused and made for really live, fun, and no-holds-barred productions."

Rogers adds, "Those comedies had a feeling of real joy about them. I said, ‘Robby, what is going on here that you can be so free, take all these risks, and feel fine about it?’ He said, ‘Because they’re my students and they will love me no matter what I do and their parents are going to love the show no matter what.’ I said, ‘For God’s sake, let’s get some of that going at Cutting Ball!’"

If the roots of this production were in the inspiration of chemistry and coincidence, the Cutting Ball soon had to grapple with a play that comes especially freighted with political and theatrical conventions. Faced with the decidedly un-p.c. "taming" plot in which the smart and willful Kate finally submits to Petruchio’s abrasive wooing stratagem, modern productions have tended to try to subvert (often by making simply ironic) the play’s patriarchal thrust. This works against the text, as Melrose points out. His solution is to emphasize the prologue or induction scene at the outset (often cut from other productions) in which the drunkard Christopher Sly (played by Sinaiko) is made to believe he is a wealthy aristo by a mischievous lord (played by Rogers). By emphasizing this framework, which serves to make the taming plot a play within the play, and by doubling up Sinaiko and Rogers in parts that place them in alternating positions of dominance and deception, the production cleverly opens up the comedy’s themes of role playing and the social construction of self.

Finally, by rooting it all in a contemporary San Francisco milieu that includes a porn-industry wrap party, a transvestite bar in the Mission, and the Folsom Street Fair, this Shrew celebrates the fluid nature of identity in Bay Area drag, where everybody knows all the world’s a stage.*

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW

Through July 29, $15–$30

Previews Thurs/12–Sat/14, 8 p.m.

Opens Sun/15, 5 p.m.

Runs Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.

Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, bldg. D, Marina at Laguna, SF

1-800-838-3006

www.brownpapertickets.com

www.cuttingball.com”>www.cuttingball.com

Bear Grylls, you da Man

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July 10, 2007
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By Gazelle Emami

A man alone in the wilderness bends fearlessly over a precipice, planning his first move. “First,” he says, squinting into the sun, “I must find my bearings.” With a no river in sight, he bounds down the edge of the sheer drop and begins his search for nourishment.

Night falls and a storm rumbles overhead. The man is discouraged—he’s already drank some muddy water and eaten a sheep’s eyeballs, so he’s doing alright. But with no shelter and temperatures dropping rapidly, survival seems unlikely. That is, until, he comes across a rotting deer carcass. Energy renewed, the man guts the carcass, huddles inside of it for shelter, and survives the thunderous night.

Sound like fiction? It’s not. It’s all just another day in the life of Man vs. Wild star Bear Grylls. In fact, everything above is true, except for one detail—the part about our story’s hero being a mere man. Because British adventurer Bear Grylls is crazier than your average man. I’m not talking Gnarls Barkley crazy or R. Kelly bat-shit crazy. I’m talking I-will-squeeze-the-juice-from-elephant-dung-into-my-mouth crazy. I’m talking oh-look-here’s-some-quicksand-why-don’t-I-just-jump-into-it crazy.

Let me explain. On the Discovery Channel reality series, Grylls is dropped in remote locations around the world until he finds civilization, left to survive with little more than a knife. Fresh into its second season, the show’s purpose is to show you the skills you would need to survive if you were to ever find yourself lost in the wild. While I could never do most of the things Grylls does, I’ve picked up on a few skills. Among them, I’ve learned how to tell when the sun will go down, the best way to catch a fish, how to get out of quicksand, and that elephant dung is sterile.

The show’s real draw is not its educational value, but rather witnessing just how far Grylls will go. He survives by essentially being a ballsier version of MacGyver. Don’t get me wrong, MacGyver ranks high on the badass meter. But when it comes down to it, will he drink his own urine? I don’t think so.

Catch an episode of Man vs. Wild tonight at 11 p.m. on The Discover Channel. New episodes air every Friday at 9 p.m.

SOS: The Unethical Commission goes into session Monday night on the Case of the Grassroots Treasurer who went up against PG&E in a tight public power campaign. Come and support Carolyn Knee at the Ethics meeting at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall room 408

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July 8, 2007
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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Carolyn Knee, the poster girl for how the Ethics Commission is unethically treating treasurers of grassroots campaigns, goes once more before the Ethics Commission at a hearing starting at 5:30 p.m. Monday (July 9) in Room 408 in City Hall.

Carolyn and her attorney have reached a settlement of $267 with the commission’s enforcement division, which is one per cent of the amount the staff originally recommended.
But public power supporters fear that the reason her case is on the agenda once again is because at least two commissioners intend to raise questions about the recommended amount.

Carolyn, a retiree on a fixed income, found herself threatened with $26,700 in fines by the Ethics Commission for several alleged violations of campaign finance laws during a random audit of San Franciscans for Affordable Clean Energy, the grassroots group that forced PG&E to the ballot in the 2002 public power campaign.
The point: SFACE raised peanuts during the campaign (a little more than $l00,000) while PG&E spent more than $2 million to defeat the initiative, $800,000 in the final days of the campaign (and PG&E didn’t report this critical amount until nearly a month after the election.) Knee was fined l4 times what James Sutton, treasurer of PG&E’s front group, was fined. And the commission hassled and hounded her for the past five years or so. (See Amanda Witherell’s excellent story, “The ethics of Ethics,” in the Guardian and on our website and an earlier Bruce blog headed “Free Carolyn Knee! Free Carolyn Knee from the Clutches of the Unethical Commission.”)

The ethics of Ethics

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July 3, 2007
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Part one in a Guardian series

› amanda@sfbg.com

Back in 2002, Carolyn Knee did what many other citizens of San Francisco were doing — she volunteered her time and energy campaigning for a ballot measure she hoped would pass.

Five years later the retiree living on a fixed income has found herself threatened with $26,700 in fines levied by the Ethics Commission enforcement staff, who turned up several alleged violations of campaign finance laws during a random audit of San Franciscans for Affordable Clean Energy, the committee for which Knee was a volunteer treasurer.

At a June 11 probable cause hearing before the Ethics Commission, investigator Richard Mo itemized several infractions, including failure to report $19,761 in contributions on time, in addition to another $9,500 that came in right before the election but wasn’t reported until afterward; failing to notify two organizations that they were major donors who needed to file as such (one of which was the Guardian); not providing all the required information about two donors; and disparities between bank account statements and campaign finance reports.

Mo alleged Knee had "cooked the books," saying she "takes no responsibility" and "claims she was ignorant of the law, passes the blame on to her personal accountant. She cites her inexperience as a treasurer when in fact she served as treasurer for one prior committee."

It sounds like a litany of campaign crime, with Knee as the linchpin, but she maintains that none of it was intentional and that many of the reporting mistakes were made by her accountant, Renita Lloyd-Smith of the Simon Group, a company she’d hired to handle the complicated ledger of campaign finance reports. "Perhaps I was wrong in placing confidence in someone I had to hire because I didn’t know the rules," Knee told the Ethics Commission. "It was all in good faith. It was all done in love of my city. But I’ll never do it again."

Those words have a dual meaning: Knee hopes never to make another financial mistake, and she’ll never again take on the risk of steering the financial helm of a grassroots campaign.

Ethics Commission hearings such as this are usually held in closed session, but this one was opened at Knee’s insistence because she suspected she’s not the only one who’s had difficulties handling campaign finance laws or negotiating fair settlements. It was the first publicly aired probable cause hearing in the commission’s 13-year history, and both commissioners and attendees walked away with questions after issues of perceived bias and a lack of timeliness in the investigation were raised, as well as the possibility that the fines being threatened are inflated and arbitrary.

"There’s only one department in the city and county of San Francisco with no oversight — Ethics," Joe Lynn told the Guardian. Lynn is a former Ethics commissioner and staffer who still watchdogs the agency and has been openly critical of the laxness he perceives there.

His question is one of many about the commission: How does the staff conduct its investigations? Should smaller campaigns staffed with volunteers be handled differently than larger, more professionally managed operations? If resources are tight, should Ethics be more focused on going after the big guys? If the commission had more resources, would the public benefit from both a greater understanding of campaign laws and a more open, honest, and just government?

SFACE raised a little more than $100,000 during the 2002 election season (including about $29,000 from the Guardian and editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann), but the measure it supported — Proposition D, which would have allowed the city to set up its own public power system and break ties with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — failed.

PG&E spent more than $2 million defeating Prop. D, $800,000 of it in the final days of the race, which campaign attorney James Sutton, the treasurer of the utility’s front group, San Franciscans Against the Blank Check, didn’t report until nearly a month after election day, a violation of campaign finance laws. That act likely scored SFACE’s opponents the win.

The Ethics Commission staff launched an investigation, and in 2004, Sutton’s old law firm was fined $100,000 — the largest amount ever levied by the city for breaking election laws. The state Fair Political Practices Commission also slapped Sutton with $140,000 in fines for vioutf8g the Political Reform Act (see "Repeat Offender," 10/27/04).

At Knee’s recent hearing, Lynn, who was once a finance officer for the Ethics Commission, pointed out she was being fined 14 times what Sutton was fined, and if the same formula had been applied, his fine would have been nearly $1.5 million. "You can’t change the standards arbitrarily," Lynn cautioned the five commissioners. "You need to establish standards for these fines, and you need to keep them across the board."

According to the governing law, which mirrors state mandates at the FPPC, commissioners may levy a fine of up to $5,000 or three times the amount of the violation, whichever is greater. Knee’s fine could be as much as $230,000, and Sutton’s could have been $2.4 million — about the same amount that it costs to run the Ethics office for a year.

The Ethics Commission has never imposed the maximum fine, and executive director John St. Croix doesn’t like to draw comparisons between campaigns. "They’re like snowflakes, very different," he said.

A review of the past three years of enforcement history, posted on the commission’s Web site, bears out this truth and shows fines ranging from a sliver to as much as half of the contested amount. In many cases, fines are dismissed completely for financial hardship reasons. The commission does not abide by a formula, fearing that would handicap it during negotiations, but a number of considerations are weighed, including the experience of the campaign treasurer, the appearance of intent, the overall outcome of the election, and a willingness to make right.

Eric Friedman, spokesperson for New York City’s Campaign Finance Board, considered by many good-government activists to be the national gold standard for ethics groups, said its members use similar tactics for settlements, but "the structure that they follow is precedent. They’ve seen pretty much everything at this point." New York’s board is about five years older than San Francisco’s and audits all campaigns.

According to investigator Mo, the $26,700 in fines pointed at Knee was an "opening salvo" designed to inspire negotiations, which have not been smooth. Knee and her pro bono lawyer, David Waggoner, initially offered $500 to settle. Ethics continued to press for more, but Knee didn’t flinch. "I don’t think I should have to pay anything," she said, pointing out that Oliver Luby, the commission’s current fines officer, recommended a complete waiver of all fines. St. Croix said Luby doesn’t work in the enforcement division and doesn’t know all the facts of the case. The current settlement offer from Ethics is $267, which Knee is willing to accept if the commissioners agree.

It’s unclear how often such hardball is played. "Frankly, we took that settlement because that’s what they were willing to pay," St. Croix said of the Sutton case. So too with a $17,000 fine imposed on Andrew Lee for a variety of campaign finance violations (see "Enforcing Equity," 5/2/07). St. Croix said that was what Lee was willing to pay on the spot.

"I’m not sure we could set a standard," said Commissioner Eileen Hansen, who thought both the Lee and the PG&E fines were too low and said if that’s the bar, it should be raised. She pointed out that the law does provide guidance, but read literally, it could mean exorbitant fines for the same slipup echoed through a whole season of paperwork. "I think it’s a good thing to have the law," she said, but "some should pay the maximum amount and some should pay less."

"I’m happy to pay $250 to get it out of the way," Knee said. "This has taken so much of my time and energy." When asked about her audit experience, she replied, "I would never do this again. It totally discourages grassroots" campaigns.

A legal assistant for 25 years, Knee was not a professional accountant but did have experience doing some bookkeeping. "The IRS is like kindergarten compared to the Ethics Commission," she said.

David Looman, a professional treasurer who’s currently managing about 10 campaign accounts and undergoing three audits by the Ethics Commission, agrees that the potential liability is a huge risk. "Twenty years ago when I started in politics in this town, nobody paid for a treasurer. Nobody had a lawyer. Nowadays you’d be crazy not to do both," he said.

The audits in Looman’s cases involve small grassroots campaigns similar to the one Knee oversaw. "There’s no good business principle for why these people should be audited," Looman said. "The fewer resources you have to employ, the more intelligent your decisions should be for how to employ them. Here they are auditing my $12,000 committee when there are clear miscreants running around."

Part of the Ethics Commission’s charter calls for mandatory audits of all publicly financed campaigns, and St. Croix said the agency does as many random audits as resources allow. Last year, he recalled, more than a dozen were completed. With full financial backing, St. Croix said, he would audit all campaigns. He said, "It’s funny. People know they’re going to get audited and they still try to get away with stuff."<\!s>*

Next: what does the Ethics Commission need to rein in the most frequent and flagrant violators?

Editor’s Notes

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July 3, 2007
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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Fourth of July week is supposed to be slow; when I worked for a daily newspaper, we used to do long stories on the fireworks displays just to fill space on the pages. Not here. There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep track of it all, but here’s a quick rundown on what San Francisco is facing this week:

A bill that would lift a veil of secrecy hanging over police misconduct cases is stuck in the Assembly Committee on Public Safety — and Fiona Ma is one of those holding it up. Ma is a protégé of John Burton, who wasn’t easily intimidated, but she’s acting as if she’s terrified of the police lobby, which has mounted a major effort to kill the bill. It’s crazy — Ma has a fairly safe seat, and unlike some Democrats in marginal districts, she doesn’t have to fear that the cops will back a Republican against her. This is one of the worst moments in her career in Sacramento thus far, and she needs to get off the fence and back the bill when it comes up for reconsideration.

The long-awaited draft environmental impact report for the Eastern Neighborhoods zoning project just came out, and it says just about what I and many others had expected: following the proposals that the City Planning Department is putting forward would wipe out a fair number of blue-collar jobs and would not provide anywhere near enough affordable housing to meet the city’s stated needs. This ought to be a central issue in the mayor’s race (if there ever really is one); I’m not willing to accept as inevitable the loss of working-class San Francisco, and neither should the mayor.

Mayor Gavin Newsom finally signed the Community Choice Aggregation bill (see page 10) — but not with the sort of fanfare you’d expect for a program that could profoundly change the city’s energy future. Sen. Carole Migden has come forward with a bill to ensure that the power from city-owned renewable-energy projects is available to the city and doesn’t have to go into Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s maw.

Speaking of Migden: who exactly is paying for all those billboards with her face on them, touting her leadership? As we discuss on the www.sfbg.com politics blog, it’s a fascinating question. Michael Colbruno, a spokesperson for Clear Channel, which owns the billboards, refuses to say. He insists that the ads are simply "issue advocacy," which means nobody has to disclose who paid the tab. I’m not going argue campaign law with Clear Channel, but I suspect that Migden knows who gave her this nice present, worth tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps she’ll share that information with the rest of us.

In the meantime, the folks at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — those great champions of open government who love privatization and refused to support the Sunshine Initiative — have a sunshine measure of their own. They want the supervisors to hold hearings before placing anything on the ballot. That’s a direct attack on some recent ballot measures the chamber didn’t like.

I’m all for hearings. Hearings are good. But the law would require that the hearings be held 45 days in advance of the ballot, and that would be a serious drawback for progressives who want to get measures that couldn’t pass the board on the ballot. Frankly, I’m dubious about the chamber’s motives.*

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Energy

OTHERS MATTERS

OLIVER FUTURE

ROBBERS ON HIGH STREET

GREAT NORTHERN

MIKAELA’S FIEND AND SEXY PRISON

PELICAN

CRIBS

BAT FOR LASHES