Energy

Little green burners

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› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Today’s environmental problems — global warming, peak oil, drastically dwindling biodiversity, an unsustainable economic system that pollutes and consumes too much — are big. And there are many big solutions proposed by big governmental bodies, big individuals, and big corporations.

A major commitment is truly needed, but perhaps it’s the million small innovators and gestures that are most likely to add up to the most fundamental shift. Could these people, linked together, with enough freedom and support to pursue their visions, save the planet?

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey threw a stone into this pond last September when he chose Green Man as the theme for this year’s event, a decision that has rippled through the thousands of creative, capable people who spend much of the year tinkering in workshops around the Bay Area and across the country. People like Jim Mason.

Mason heeded Harvey’s call in his typically exuberant fashion, developing an innovative gasification system that turns biomass waste products into a usable fuel similar to natural gas. Collaborating with fellow artists and engineers in the Shipyard space that he created in Berkeley, Mason has been doing groundbreaking work.

The group converted a 1975 pickup truck owned by impresario Chicken John to run on substances like wood chips and coffee grounds, and Mason and John have been working principally with artists Michael Christian and Dann Davis to develop a fire-spewing, waste-eating, carbon-neutral slug called Mechabolic for Burning Man this year.

"Chicken’s shitty truck is going to be sitting in front of the Silicon Valley’s big alternative-energy conference for venture capitalists," Mason told the Guardian on May 22 as he headed to the Clean Technology 2007 confab, an illustration of the place little innovators are starting to find amid the big.

The New York Times featured Mechabolic in a technology article it ran earlier in May about the Green Man theme, and the project has been a centerpiece of the green evangelizing being done by Burning Man’s new environmental director, Tom Price.

Price has been working with hundreds of innovators like Mason to turn this year’s Burning Man, at least in part, into a green-technology exposition where creative types from around the world can exchange ideas. "It’s the Internet versus the big three networks" was how Price compared the big and small approaches to environmental solutions. "The goal is to show how easy and do-it-yourself profound solutions can be."

But ragtag approaches like Mason’s don’t fit well into institutional assumptions about art and technology, as he discovered May 11 when Berkeley city officials ordered him to shut down the Shipyard or bring it into immediate compliance with various municipal codes.

"They need to temporarily leave while they seek the permits that ensure it’s safe to be there," Berkeley planning director Dan Marks told us May 18. He criticized the Shipyard for using massive steel shipping containers as building material, doing electrical work without permits, and not being responsive to city requests.

The move stopped work on gasification and other projects as the Shipyard crew scrambled to satisfy bureaucratic demands — but it also prompted a letter-writing campaign and offers of outside help and collaboration that convinced Mayor Tom Bates and city council member Darryl Moore to meet with Mason on May 21 and agree to help the Shipyard stay in business.

Berkeley fire chief David Orth and other officials fighting the Shipyard say that Bates has asked for their cooperation. "A request has been made to see what can be done to keep the facility there but bring it into compliance," Orth told us.

All involved say the Shipyard has a long way to go before it’s legal and accepted by the city. Among other things, Mason must prove that the old, recycled oceangoing shipping containers (which enclose the Shipyard and other Bay Area artists’ collectives) are safe. But he and others are hopeful, driven, and convinced that they’re onto something big.

"Places like the Shipyard, which is a cauldron of ideas, don’t fit into the traditional model of how a city should work," Price told us. "The fringes, where the rules are a little fuzzy, is where surprisingly creative things happen." *

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

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I love the whales, really I do. I even worked for Greenpeace once. I am in awe of these majestic creatures of the deep and see them as indicators of the health of the entire marine environment. Human beings should take care of their cetaceous fellow citizens of the watery planet. Folks, I am so down with the whales.

Yet as the two errant humpbacks led the news again for about the fifth night in a row and the Coast Guard cutters and the helicopters and the array of state wildlife officials and veterinarians swarmed around the Sacramento River basin, I had to stop and wonder, for about the 50th time:

Why don’t they treat wayward people like this?

Every day the streets of San Francisco are full of injured human beings, members of the species Homo sapiens who have been hit by the psychic or physical equivalent of boat propellers. There are women with children who stagger homeless from one place to another, unable to find their way to a functional family.

These living, breathing mammals do not get a special multiagency task force set up, with a designated full-time Coast Guard petty officer as a media liaison and a staff of dozens of officials from the military, the state Department of Fish and Game, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They don’t receive what amounts to an unlimited budget to get their wounds treated and their lives turned around.

And the media doesn’t pay any attention to them. Even when they die, as a couple hundred do every year. Nobody who owns a helicopter gives a shit about homeless people in San Francisco.

I’m not going to argue against the whale-rescue effort. I don’t think the Coast Guard ignored any looming terrorist threats in the nearby Pacific or let any sailors die in capsized crafts while it was helping the whales. It was probably a good training exercise for all involved, and hell, if it cost a million bucks, that’s less than the Pentagon wastes every five minutes or so in Iraq. Go team.

I’m just saying, that’s all. I’m just saying.

———————————————

Way back in 1974, a guy named Sam Lovejoy went on trial for destroying a weather tower in Montague, Mass., that a local utility had built in preparation for the construction of a nuclear power plant. One of Lovejoy’s expert witnesses was John Gofman, a nuclear chemist and the author of the book Poison Power, who made the definitive argument against nuclear energy. The material created by a reactor, he said, must be guarded "99.9999 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerrilla activities, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…. Do you believe there’s anything you’d like to guarantee will be done 99.9999 percent perfectly for 100,000 years?"

You can’t, was the point. Lovejoy walked.

And now, as Amanda Witherell reports in "Nuclear Greenwashing," page 15, the nuclear industry wants a new life. We all ought to know better. *

Gui, your music looks terrific

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› johnny@sfbg.com

The first clue that Gui Boratto’s Chromophobia is an extraordinary Kompakt disc — a song collection that places the German label back at the forefront of the best electronic music — can be found on its cover art. Since its inception, Kompakt has had a signature clean design style for its releases. Developed by one of the label’s three co-owners, Wolfgang Voigt, it’s made great use of simple circles and basic color combinations. For Chromophobia, the São Paulo, Brazil, musician called on his friend Felipe Caetano to create a cover. Caetano came up with a beautiful piece of color theory that layers a series of primary-color Kompakt circles over the edges of one another to form a variety of new-hued combinations.

"Our first idea was to do a black-and-white cover, but we decided that was cliché," Boratto says from São Paulo, referring to the title word, a term for the fear of color. "The decision to make the cover colorful was ironic. But for me, chromophobia is like simplicity — the same type of meaning as monochromatism within an architectural point of view."

Got that? The affable Boratto is no club drone whose scope of experience remains as narrow as a programmed and endlessly looped 4/4 beat. He’s a married father of one who has studied architecture in addition to music. "I think architecture and music are almost the same thing," he says, his accent bringing an alternately questioning and singsong quality to English words. "They’re different means of expression, but they treat spaces in the same way."

In Chromophobia, Boratto builds and creates a variety of attractive spaces, without pretension but with a sensibility perhaps informed by a love of modernist architectural pioneers such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. "Within the modernism movement, you can find the same ramp used in the garage and in the dining room," he observes. Such functionality could be ascribed to many tracks on Chromophobia, which entwine rhythmic and melodic complexity and simplicity in a manner that can add vivid atmosphere to private interior settings, natural panoramas, and — though not in all cases — the dance floor.

COLOR ME GLAD


A major part of Chromophobia‘s appeal — apparent from the crystalline descending melody of the opening track, "Scene 1" — is that Boratto knows how to construct a strong simple motif or riff. "My first instrument was guitar, and when I was 10 or 11, I was really into Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin," he says, breaking down his musical background into shorthand. "But in the mid- to late ’80s, my older brother lived for a while in the south of France and then in London, and when he came back he brainwashed me."

The glorious results of that brainwashing are apparent in Chromophobia‘s most-discussed track, "Beautiful Life," on which Boratto’s wife, Luciana Villanova, plays the role of a female Bernard Sumner, quietly singing some affirmative words alongside a mammoth guitar line that invokes the unmistakable bass lines of New Order’s Peter Hook. "It was really a joke," Boratto says with bashful enthusiasm when asked about the track, which Web sites such as Resident Advisor have singled out for special praise. "There’s no complex textures [to "Beautiful Life"], as there are on some of the other songs [on Chromophobia]." True, but the song is no mere retro exercise: as much as New Order, the sunny feminine grace of "Beautiful Life" also calls to mind Ricardo Villalobos’s epic 2006 update of his own "La Belle Epoque," probably the only time Boratto and the Chilean Villalobos have crafted a similar definition of techno.

Still, Chromophobia‘s truest pleasures might be subtler ones, such as the alternately shuddering and sinuous propulsive energy of "Terminal" and "Gate 7" (the latter of which takes its title from the number of the TAM Airlines boarding gate for all of Boratto’s flights to Europe). On "Acróstico," Boratto provides a reprieve from this momentum, fashioning the electronic equivalent — via an array of low-key chirps and whirring sounds — of a nature scene at dawn or dusk.

"The title of ‘Acróstico’ stems from the fact that the high bass notes complete the lower notes — if you see a drawing of the notes, it looks like an acrostic," Boratto explains. For a musician who specializes in instrumental tracks, Boratto has a flair for linguistic matters. After bringing up Franz Kafka in response to a question about Chromophobia‘s final track, "The Verdict" — which takes its name from a Kafka tale often published in volumes of The Metamorphosis — he comments on a certain similarity: "One thing I noticed is that with Metamorphosis‘s Mr. [Gregor] Samsa, if the two s‘s in his name turn into k‘s, and the m‘s turn into f‘s, you have Kafka. It’s fiction, but it’s his story."

THE AMERICAN FRIENDS


By no means is Chromophobia Kafkaesque. But a dynamic between colorful optimism and an undercurrent of gloom gradually courses through the album, growing deeper as it progresses. On the penultimate track, "Hera," Boratto crafts a coda so poignant that it easily eclipses the best recent tracks put forth by Booka Shade and other instrumental acts on Get Physical, perhaps the one German label to overshadow Kompakt in recent years. Kompakt is definitely on a roll as of late, thanks to the long-awaited — and underrated — second volume of label cohead Michael Mayer’s Immer (2006) and the ambient — in comparison to Boratto — allure of the Field’s acclaimed From Here We Go Sublime. The Field’s Axel Willner is inventive enough to tap into the so-ghostly-it’s-frightening essence of the Flamingos’ "I Only Have Eyes for You" (also a touchstone on the soundtrack of Kenneth Anger’s 1950 film Rabbit’s Moon), yet Boratto’s palette is broader, connecting techno’s chillier reaches with the warmth of Antonio Carlos "Tom" Jobim.

Jobim may be "the master," in Boratto’s words, but the man behind Chromophobia also loves US brands of soul — especially Al Green and Stevie Wonder. Likewise, while the "little Paris" known as Prague might be Boratto’s favorite city in architectural terms, he’s looking forward to his SF visit. "I really love San Francisco," he says, remembering the "mainstream" charms of a club like Spundae, where he once saw Boy George. "I actually lived near Berkeley, in Pinole, for six months in 2001. I studied in Berkeley, and I had two American friends. This one friend had a big house in a nice neighborhood in Berkeley, where we had barbecues and never-ending parties. We used to party in San Francisco too, at some clubs and friends’ apartments."

This week, as Boratto returns to the Bay Area, he’s going to find a lot more than just two American friends — or at least American fans — at his party. And deservedly so — he’s made one of the best records of this year. *

KOMPAKT TOUR

With Gui Boratto and Michael Mayer

Thurs/24, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.mezzaninesf.com

Occupational hazards

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You think your job sucks? Imagine working as an office drone for multinational corporation Palisade Defence, whose slogan is "We’re hitting a home run for freedom and a time-out for terror!" In Christopher Smith’s black comedy Severance, a team-building weekend (shades of The Office) in Eastern Europe (shades of Hostel) goes gruesomely, satirically awry (shades of Shaun of the Dead). It’s not as scary as last year’s The Descent (nor as funny as Shaun), but Severance is yet another indication that the UK horror invasion ain’t ebbing anytime soon.

Severance is clever, but it’s not really that different from a million other bloodthirsty flicks: a bickering ensemble gets lost in the wilderness, where someone or something starts picking off shrieking victims one by one. It’s refreshing to see grown-ups rather than teens pasted into this scenario, and Smith adds political jabs by making the heavily armed, woods-lurking baddies monsters of Palisade’s own weapons-corp making.

Of course, encountering a rogue militia is hardly the outcome our hapless city slickers expect from their forced journey of togetherness. The group members, who all kind of hate each other to begin with, include an uptight snob (Toby Stephens), a kiss ass (Andy Nyman), a no-nonsense blond (Laura Harris), an idiot boss (Tim McInnerny), and a horny stoner (Danny Dyer). The joke is that there’s never a better time to work as a team than when everyone’s life is in danger — yet unity still proves difficult for these yups in the woods.

But I know what you’re wondering, horror fiend: how repulsively creative are the death scenes? Early on, a comically gross encounter with a bear trap foreshadows unfortunate ends met in booby-trapped trees. Smith, who cowrote with James Moran, also gives us a final girl with enough tenacity to fight back against physical opponents and the indignity of being put on hold when calling for help. With its familiar plot points, Severance may not hit a home run for horror — but there’s an undeniably fun energy propelling all those severed limbs.

SEVERANCE

Opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

www.severancefilm.com

Czech, please!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A faltering economy is the biggest threat to most national film industries, but Czechoslovakia’s had a more distinct misfortune: it was shut down by occupation forces not once but twice. Most famously, the 1960s Czech new wave, in which talents like Jirí Menzel, Ivan Passer, Vera Chytilová, and Milos Forman first flourished, was abruptly dammed by the 1968 Soviet invasion. The type of widespread film-buff culture that brought attention to those directors scarcely existed when — before the Nazis commandeered local studios and permitted only a handful of strictly escapist films to be made for the home market — the country’s cinema had its first golden age.

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia boasted one of the most adventurous and lively — if not widely exported — movie industries in the world. Of course, this meant there was room for a lot of populist fluff. But the 12 features in the Pacific Film Archive’s new series "Czech Modernism, 1926–1949" show why Nazi invaders sensed a celluloid threat: these films are full of playful social critique as well as imaginative stylistic leaps. They assume that an audience is intelligent and that it will enjoy the subversion of authority. These films don’t provide pacification, let alone propaganda.

As playwright and Velvet Underground fan turned president Václav Havel would suggest some decades later, Czech life — at least the urban variety — has long appreciated the intersection of the avant-garde and leftist politics. The region’s geographic location, between the sophisticated capitalist West and the stylistically impoverished Communist USSR, at times seems directly reflected in these films’ colliding influences, from German expressionism to Soviet formalism to an Erich von Stroheim–esque attitude decadence.

The series’ two movies by director Vladislav Vancura apply a mad stylistic energy to subjects that might easily have been played for simple melodrama or pathos. In 1933’s On the Sunny Side, a pair of city children whose friendship bridges the class divide end up dumped in an orphanage when their parents are deemed unfit: first it’s fatherless, accordion-playing Honza, then pigtailed Babula, whose womanizing dad has just bankrupted the family. Frenetic montages contrast the adult worlds of poor and rich, cutting between breadlines and champagne-guzzling flappers. At the progressive home for foundlings, by contrast, equality is ensured by self-government — as a collective, the kids are better able to look after their own welfare than the grown-ups who’ve failed them.

Vancura’s Faithless Marijka, from the next year, is set in the Carpathian Mountains, with local nonprofessional actors as the leads. But it’s no sylvan idyll. The supposedly central tale of a lumberjack’s cheating spouse is nearly lost amid the struggles of laborers to triumph over their greedy oppressors (whose ranks include a disturbing anti-Semitic caricature).

A similar mix of poetic naturalism and Eisensteinian montage marks Karl Junghans’s 1929 silent Such Is Life. Its titular shrug downplays a vigorous look at some ordinary Prague residents, notably a put-upon laundry worker (Vera Baranovskaya, who played the title character of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s 1926 Mother), her loutish husband, and a manicurist daughter pretty enough to attract major trouble. Similar perils await two office girls lured into a lecherous nightlife in 1931’s From Saturday to Sunday, by Gustav Machatý, who would create an international sensation with Hedy Lamarr’s nude swim in Ecstasy two years later. This time romance rather than lust prevails as the more innocent secretary flees a grabby grandpa and winds up meeting her pure-hearted lower-class match.

Mistrust toward the rich and powerful was also a frequent theme in the era’s Hollywood films, in an attempt to please American audiences suffering though the Great Depression, which in turn triggered Czechoslovakia’s economic hardship. But the criticism in such films was usually glib, the solutions fanciful. Not so here. It’s eye-opening to watch a popular hit like Martin Fric’s 1934 Heave Ho!, widely regarded as the best effort from local comedy team Jirí Voskovec and Jan Werich.

Werich plays a dissolute multimillionaire informed one day that his stocks are worthless and he’s broke. Teaming with an unemployed laborer (Voskovec) who’d ranted against factory-shutting fat cats on the radio (before being dragged off), he discovers — after making a mess of various odd jobs — that he’s inherited a huge building. Unfortunately, it’s just a bunch of steel girders, so the penniless duo hit on the scheme of collectivizing construction with other indigent workers, who’ll have a home when it’s finished. Naturally, corporate types try to thwart this truly free enterprise, but they are treated to the ol’ titular gesture. A socialist semimusical with sight gags and assorted silliness, this sure ain’t Gold Diggers of 1933. *

CZECH MODERNISM, 1926–1949

Through June 24; see Rep Clock for schedule; $4–$8

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Public power, underground

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Public power advocates are looking for new ways to lay the groundwork for city-owned electricity — by just opening up the ground.

The plan could be a significant step forward for the public power movement and may open a new front in the long campaign to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. with a city-run agency.

Sup. Chris Daly has asked the city attorney to draft legislation that would require anyone who digs up a city street, for any reason, to install city-owned power and fiber-optic cables in the hole. That would mean, for example, that when PG&E replaces natural gas lines, as it’s doing all over the city right now, the company would also have to install (or allow the city to install) the infrastructure for a municipal power and communications system.

And since the city will be paying to tear up every single street to replace water and sewer pipes over the next two decades, the plan would eventually create a complete network that could be used to deliver public electricity — and Internet and cable TV — to residents and businesses.

"In 15 to 20 years’ time, we would have an electric grid that’s underground and owned by the city," Daly told the Guardian.

The advantage of the plan is that it may be far cheaper (and more practical) to build an underground city network than to condemn and buy out PG&E’s existing, aging system.

The idea isn’t new: Back in 2004, Sup. Tom Ammiano proposed a similar plan and held hearings on it. Ammiano talked about burying electrical cable as well as fiber-optic lines, which he said would be a far better solution to the digital divide than Mayor Gavin Newsom’s wi-fi plan.

Daly’s idea is to use a special tax program to purchase the equipment at bulk prices and have it on hand for whenever the jackhammers come out.

"The beauty of this proposal is you’re getting the efficiency of the streets being dug up," Daly said, which would reduce costs for the overall plan.

And of course, the final system would be all underground — much more aesthetically pleasing and safer during earthquakes than PG&E’s aboveground grid.

The cable itself isn’t cheap, but Daly suggests the city could take advantage of the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Act of 1982, passed by voters in response to the belt-tightening implications of Proposition 13. With Mello-Roos, local officials designate an area — from as small as a house lot to as large as an entire city — as a community facilities district and levy a tax to pay for improvements to the infrastructure in that area. Similar to a "community benefit district," it must be approved by the property owners, and the funds typically go toward better streets, services, and facilities — including electricity.

It costs the city as much as $380 a foot to dig trenches, then backfill them after installing conduit. But if the street is already torn up, the price of laying electric cable is only about $100 a foot, figures we’ve obtained show. The cost for wiring all 900-odd miles of San Francisco streets would run close to $500 million — less than half of what PG&E insists the city would have to pay to buy out its old lines. And individual neighborhoods could be wired for relatively modest amounts of money.

Daly said CFDs could be established by neighborhood or district and coupled with the installation of renewable energy sources, which the city is planning to do through community choice aggregation. For example, residents in Bernal Heights could decide to add a 2 percent property tax to their bills to buy the power lines, the Public Utilities Commission could put a solar array on the nearby reservoir — and a percentage of that neighborhood’s power would be locally owned and operated and cleaner than putting up a peaker plant on Potrero Hill.

"We’re undergoing a dramatic expansion of our renewables in the city," PUC spokesperson Tony Winnicker said. "If we could move our renewables through our own distribution system, there would be enormous cost savings for our ratepayers."

The Department of Public Works would coordinate the work. "We’ve been running the Street Construction Coordination Center for as long as I’ve been here," said spokesperson Christine Falvey, who’s been with the DPW for more 10 years. The center manages the permits for digging up the rights-of-way and tracks construction projects five years into the future to make sure streets aren’t continually wracked with potholes.

A fiber optics feasibility study prepared for the city by Columbia Telecommunications Corp. and released this past January also recommended that the city take advantage of open holes in the roads. "Opportunities for cost-effective installation of fiber arise each day as City crews work in the right of way. At a minimum, San Francisco should immediately adopt a future-looking policy to add to existing fiber and conduit infrastructure at every opportunity to build up critical mass," the report reads.

About half of PG&E’s lines are already underground, and the company is slowly moving to comply with state mandates that call for more buried cables. But the city’s Utility Undergrounding Task Force reported that at PG&E’s current rate, undergrounding the remaining 470 miles of wires would take 50 years.

San Francisco activists have tried repeatedly to take over PG&E’s system and enforce the federal Raker Act, which requires the city to operate a public power system. But every attempt has required a citywide vote to create a new power agency and to authorize the sale of bonds to buy out the utility’s system — and every time that’s gone on the ballot, PG&E has spent millions to defeat it.

The Daly plan would also require a ballot fight — but perhaps not an expensive citywide campaign. The Mello-Roos taxes could be approved neighborhood by neighborhood. The price would most likely be in the millions, not the hundreds of millions it would cost to buy PG&E’s entire system at once. *

Why we’re with Mark Leno

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OPINION The choice confronting voters in the State Senate District 3 primary in June 2008 is about electing the best candidate who personifies the direction, tone, and future of the progressive movement. Voters want positive changes, unequivocal vision, tangible accomplishments, and a leader who drives the movement forward.

Mark Leno represents the best progressive choice for that type of change. He is an articulate, innovative, and effective assemblymember who always makes a concerted effort to reach out to the people he serves with boundless energy; he will work equally hard as a senator.

As a legislator, Leno ensures that the voices of his constituents are well represented. His issues are driven by the communities he serves. He focuses on advancing controversial issues despite opposition in Sacramento, and he continues to achieve impressive political, cultural, and social milestones.

While serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Leno created the nation’s first medical cannabis identification program, which has become a model for similar programs across California.

On environmental issues, Leno has also won nationwide acclaim for his efforts to promote the use of renewable energy sources such as solar power in San Francisco and across the state.

When it comes to tenant rights, Leno’s legislative record speaks for itself. After many suffered the negative impact of Ellis Act evictions, he authored Assembly Bill 1217 to protect the disabled, elderly, and disadvantaged single-room-occupancy tenants from becoming homeless.

Leno has earned his reputation as a champion and visionary by introducing legislation that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity in housing and employment. Much like the transgender medical benefit legislation that he introduced as a member of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, his AB 196 is arguably one of California’s most significant nondiscrimination laws ever enacted to protect transgender people.

In 2005, Leno’s groundbreaking LGBT civil rights legislation to support marriage equality was the first in the nation to win approval by both houses of a state legislature. Although Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, Leno has reintroduced it and will not quit until it becomes law.

Leno is running for the District 3 State Senate seat because he believes that elective offices belong to the people. He will bring to the office his integrity, experience, and accomplishments in protecting marginalized and underserved communities, promoting environmental protection, and developing alternative sources of energy, and he’ll still remain independent of special interests. He introduces innovative solutions to difficult problems and represents the values of the people of Northern California.

For all these reasons, Mark Leno is our best choice for change. *

Theresa Sparks is president-elect of the San Francisco Police Commission. Cecilia Chung is deputy director of the Transgender Law Center.

A new route to public power

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EDITORIAL Public power isn’t a hard sell in principle. For starters, public electric utilities in California offer consistently lower rates than private companies, and in many cases, the rates are far lower. Municipal utilities are more likely to be environmentally responsible and seek better conservation measures and renewable energy sources. San Francisco’s under the thumb of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has soaring rates, is plagued by reliability problems, and operates a nuclear power plant.

Besides, this is the only city in the nation that has a federal mandate, the Raker Act, requiring public power.

But the politics are tough: cities that want to go into the power business traditionally buy out the private company’s existing wires, polls, and meters — but that costs a big chunk of money. And any bond act to buy out PG&E’s system requires a citywide vote — which means fighting PG&E’s tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash. Over and over again since the 1930s, the company has defeated citywide bond acts with the pure power of money.

But now Sup. Chris Daly has an approach that might change the calculus.

As Amanda Witherell reports ("Public Power, Underground," page 13), every street in San Francisco is going to be torn up in the next few years, either by PG&E, which is replacing gas lines, or by the city, which is replacing water and sewer lines. Daly wants to require everyone who digs a ditch in a San Francisco street to allow the city to run electric wire and fiber-optic cable at the same time. Since the main cost of burying power lines is the excavation, the city would be able, over the course of 15 years or so, to create a cost-effective, safe, and modern underground utility system. Then there would be no need to buy out PG&E; city officials could simply start selling power on the public lines.

It’s not that simple, of course: the wire itself isn’t cheap — and Daly is looking at a finance system that would require property owners to vote to tax themselves to pay for it. And it’s going to take a long time to complete.

But the system could be built one neighborhood at a time and could be connected to new solar generating systems that the city is planning to construct anyway. So the residents of, say, Bernal Heights or the Haight or the Mission or Bayview could agree to pay for a local city-run electric project. The solar panels would generate power (cheaply), the city-owned lines would carry them, and the savings in energy costs would more than compensate for the modest tax increase.

The city’s Public Utilities Commission has only begun to look into the idea, but staffers there say it’s entirely feasible.

This proposal needs to move forward with all possible dispatch. The supervisors should authorize money for a full-scale feasibility study to look at the costs, the schedule, and the ways neighborhood-based public power projects can be started as soon as possible. The board should approve Daly’s legislation, and the mayor should sign it.

And the public power movement ought to get behind this plan. It’s not an instant answer — but then, neither is buying out PG&E’s system; the litigation alone might take a decade. And if San Francisco can create green public power in even one district, the idea is going to spread. *

Unwilling, unable

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My boyfriend and I are in our late 20s. He’s unable to have sex more than once a day, nor does he want to, even when we’ve been separated. He can’t get it up again even hours later, though we rarely try. He isn’t interested as often as I am in general.

My other lovers were often rarin’ to go soon after, or at least interested. My impression is that this is normal, particularly for young men. He’s unconcerned, but I feel rather unsatisfied and worry that with age his desire will further decrease. He’s also very slender and often lacks energy in general. I’m worried something is amiss hormonally or otherwise, which he dismisses. He’s had maybe one medical checkup since we met and doesn’t get much exercise.

Am I right to be concerned or is this normal? Am I selfish?

Love,

Wanting More

Dear More:

Your boyfriend appears to be what they used to call "neurasthenic" — rather languid and wan, with a nervous temperament and a tendency toward fainting spells and melancholy. Back then, he would have been fed beef tea and lightly poached eggs on toast and sent back to bed (alone!) to sleep it off for a month or two. Sadly, this sort of rest cure is no longer available to us, so we must make do with modern substitutes: Jamba Juice and gym memberships. He really does sound somewhat undernourished, and I bet you’re right about the exercise. Take him out for hamburgers or something. Walk there, if possible. Perhaps if he got his blood pumping on occasion, other forms of pumping would ensue.

There is, inconveniently, no good reason to believe there’s anything wrong with him that could be fixed with, say, giant injections of manly androgens. While it’s possible that his lowish libido is a hormone thing, it isn’t particularly likely. My best guess is that he’s just different from (some) other guys and different from you. You probably needn’t be concerned about him dropping dead from whatever’s keeping his libido low, but you might spare a little concern for yourself and your future. You’re not being selfish — this is serious. It’s likely to be you doing the compromising, so make sure you can before you promise anything permanent.

Couples perfectly matched in appetite are fairly rare, actually. Most people are adjusting a wee bit up or down all the time, depending, and it’s hardly worth noticing until it gets to be like one of those science fiction plots where one person’s running superfast and the other’s in normal time and they can’t see each other. We must resist the temptation to declare our partners functional or deviant by the degree to which their sexual desires match our own. Nor does it matter if he’s "normal" by others’ standards. He’s fine for him. It’s up to you to decide how fine that is with you.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I’m currently taking a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor called citalopram (a.k.a. Celexa), and I can’t have an orgasm. My sex drive is low compared to normal but not nonexistent. With my boyfriend in my bed, I can still get turned on. And I can get so close to orgasm it feels like it must be about to happen, but somehow it never does, no matter how hard we both try. It’s immensely frustrating.

I considered stopping the medication, but I’ve tried numerous antidepressants, and this is the only one that’s allowed me to lead a normal life. I’m reluctant to sacrifice my mental health for my sex life, but I hate having to choose between the two. Can you help? Maybe your readers have similar experiences or some way to get round this?

Love,

Not Happenin’

Dear Happenin’:

Aaaaaargggh!

So frustrating. I think you’re right to rank your general mental health above your sex life, but then again, a rotten sex life when you used to have a good one is pretty depressing in itself. On top of that, there are armies of people in exactly your situation with no definite fix, so aaaarrrgh.

I’ve got three semi-half-assed suggestions; I wish I had a better one. The first is patience, since the side effects often wear off with time. The second is Wellbutrin, either alone or in addition, which is the solution for a lot of people, but I fear you may already have tried it. And the third involves getting various degrees of weird. You could apply something or take something to increase clitoral sensitivity (provided you’re a girl; you actually didn’t say). Maybe a pump or other sensitizing toy? Or Viagra (they still say it doesn’t work for women, but many women disagree), or alprostadil if you can track any down? And then there are creams containing L-arginine or some such that purport to aid arousal — and who knows? They probably don’t but occasionally appear to. None of these will hurt you (unless contraindicated for some reason; do your homework), and they won’t make you more depressed, so what’s to lose?

Anyone had any success with other remedies?

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson teaches sex and communication skills with San Francisco Sex Information. She has been a theater artist, a women’s health educator, and a composting instructor, but not at the same time. She is considering offering a workshop on how to have and rear twins without going crazy, since she’s currently doing that too.

Why I’m with Carole Migden

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OPINION With the election on the horizon, declared candidates have hired their campaign consultants, tested the field with expensive polls, and hit the city’s political club circuit hoping to lock up early endorsements. Unfortunately, the race getting the bulk of the attention is not San Francisco’s political watermark, November’s mayoral contest. It’s not even the new super-duper Tuesday presidential primary in February. As crazy as it may seem, the election getting the most attention in San Francisco right now is the June 2008 California State Senate primary.

After several months of polling and speculation, on March 2 Assemblymember Mark Leno announced that he would be challenging former ally and incumbent senator Carole Migden.

Make no mistake about it: Migden is one of the most fearsome politicians in Sacramento. She knows how to stand up to the governor, and she has a long list of progressive accomplishments, including authoring the state Clean Water Act, enabling local governments to do community choice aggregation, and protecting the vulnerable from predatory lending. Migden is already endorsed by progressive supervisors Jake McGoldrick and Gerardo Sandoval, progressive school board commissioner Eric Mar, former president of the Board of Supervisors Harry Britt, and progressive activists Debra Walker and Michael Goldstein. She’s also up double digits, so it’s time we call this one for Migden and get on with the job of putting a progressive in the Mayor’s Office.

Progressives know that to defeat Mayor Gavin Newsom this year, we will have to mount a significant and focused grassroots campaign. Any distractions will be costly. Migden-Leno is clearly a major distraction. Leno’s challenge takes both Leno and Migden off the progressive list of possible mayoral candidates. And more important, progressive energy, volunteers, and money that should be going into the effort to defeat Newsom will be gobbled up by the State Senate race.

Leno’s longtime political consulting firm, Barnes, Mosher, Whitehurst, and Lauter, is probably best known for its role in successfully challenging San Francisco’s soft-money regulations and then managing the record-shattering $3.2 million soft-money operation to reelect Mayor Willie Brown in 1999. BMW went on to help elect Newsom in 2003.

BMW not only provides the money and operations to get its candidates elected; the firm also — by its own proud account — seeks to influence these elected officials to get deals done for its corporate clients.

One of BMW’s biggest corporate clients is the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which opposed San Francisco’s minimum-wage and paid-sick-leave laws and is now suing the city to stop it from enacting our universal health care plan. Progressives shouldn’t allow Leno and BMW to advance up the political ladder. *

Chris Daly

Supervisor Chris Daly represents District 6.

Next week: "Why we’re with Mark Leno," by Theresa Sparks and Cecilia Chung.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Sup. Chris Daly has kind of a cool idea: he wants to hold a progressive convention to pick a candidate and a platform for mayor. The date is June 2, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The place is the Tenderloin Community School. The idea is for hundreds of grassroots activists to gather, nominate someone to take on Gavin Newsom, and kick off a citywide campaign that will, at the very least, force the carefully protected mayor to come out from behind his handlers and answer some tough questions.

Not everyone thinks this is a good concept — and I’m the first to agree it’s a bit of a risk. It assumes, for example, that there’s a serious candidate for mayor whom we can all agree on and who actually wants to run for the job. And it assumes that we all really want to put the effort into a full-scale campaign against an incumbent who looks pretty close to unbeatable right now.

Neither of these is a trivial issue.

In theory, a nomination convention is a chance for constituents to choose among candidates who are competing for the right to seek office. Four years ago, when we had Tom Ammiano, Angela Alioto, and Matt Gonzalez in the race, a convention would have been fun, if not terribly useful; none of those people would have dropped out in favor of another based on one convention vote. But right now there’s not a lot of competition: nobody who has the profile to launch a credible race has stepped forward and volunteered for the mission. And it would look pretty lame to have the People speak and call for a candidate who then took the stage and declined.

If this is going to work, the situation has to change in the next few weeks. The folks who really don’t want to see Newsom get a bye are talking, and one of them is going to accept the responsibility. Me, I’d be happy with Daly, Matt Gonzalez, Aaron Peskin, or Ross Mirkarimi, but Gonzalez isn’t ready to announce anything at this point, Peskin has told me he’s not going to run, Mirkarimi is being awfully coy, and Daly seems pretty reluctant (although he hasn’t ruled it out, he says he’ll do it only if nobody else will).

Not everyone thinks it’s even worth the fight. Paul Hogarth, writing in BeyondChron.org, argued May 14 that it’s better to save our energy and let Newsom be a weak lame duck for another five years. After all, he hasn’t been able to do much harm — and now and then, he does something decent.

The problem is that the city has serious problems, and it’s not OK for a mayor to be missing in action this long. Think about the murder rate. Think about Muni. Think about the future of blue-collar jobs, affordable housing, and the eastern neighborhoods. Think about the fact that in the next four years, the last big piece of land where San Francisco can preserve blue-collar jobs and build affordable housing will be up for grabs. Think about the city’s soul. Because it really is on the line here — and I’m not ready to hand it over to Newsom again without a fight. *

Out of downtown

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Out of downtown

› steve@sfbg.com

It wasn’t going well for Ted Strawser, predictably. The alternative transportation activist faced an uphill battle March 14 trying to convince a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce committee to endorse Healthy Saturdays, a plan to ban cars from part of Golden Gate Park.

Representatives of the park’s museums and Richmond District homeowners had just argued their case against the measure. “Visitors want access to our front door, and we want to give it to them,” Pat Kilduff, communications director for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indignantly told the group of two dozen business leaders gathered around a large conference table.

Strawser gave it his best shot: he talked about following the lead of other great cities to create car-free spaces; he said, “Golden Gate Park is one of the best parks in the nation, if not the world”; and he made a detailed case for closure. But around the table there were scowls, eye rolls, and other obvious signs that Strawser was being tolerated, not welcomed. Some — including chamber vice president Jim Lazarus — even started to interrupt and argue with him.

Then the man sitting next to Strawser spoke up. “I don’t think this is fair,” he said. And suddenly, everyone in the room shaped up. Strawser’s ally — his only supporter in the room — was somebody no chamber member could or would dismiss. Warren Hellman doesn’t shout or bang the table — but when he speaks, downtown pays attention.

Hellman, a prominent investment banker, told the committee members that he expected them to show the same respect for Strawser that they had for the previous two speakers. The nonsense ended, immediately.

And by the time Strawser turned the floor over to Hellman, the mood had changed. The group listened raptly, smiled, and nodded as Hellman spoke in his usual folksy, familiar, disarming style.

“It’s not a lot of fun when friends fall out,” he began, “because the previous speakers and many of you all agreed on the necessity of the garage [that was built in Golden Gate Park], and we worked together.”

He pointed out that many in the group had promised during the fall 2000 election to support Healthy Saturdays once the garage was built, although Hellman was now the only member of the coalition honoring that commitment. But he didn’t chide or shame his colleagues. That isn’t Hellman’s style.

Instead, he spoke their language. The garage has never been full and needs the money it can charge for parking to repay the bonds. This isn’t a fight that’s going away, since “part of the conflict is because this park is everybody’s park.” But there are “about 100 compromises not acceptable to either side that would move this forward.” And if a solution can’t be found, there will probably be an expensive ballot fight that nobody wants.

“My conclusion is we should attempt this test,” Hellman told the group. Ultimately, when the vote was later taken in secret, the chamber didn’t agree, although it did vote to back a trial closure after the California Academy of Sciences reopens next year.

At the meeting, Hellman openly called for Mayor Gavin Newsom to get involved in seeking a compromise, something Hellman said he had also just requested of the mayor at a one-on-one breakfast meeting. A couple of weeks later Newsom — who had already indicated his intention of vetoing the measure — did broker a compromise that was then approved by the Board of Supervisors.

As usual, Hellman didn’t take credit, content to quietly play a role in making San Francisco a better place.

Healthy Saturdays isn’t the most important issue in local history — but the significance of Hellman’s involvement can’t be underestimated. His alliance with the environmentalists and park advocates might even signal a sea change in San Francisco politics.

Warren Hellman represents San Francisco’s political and economic past. And maybe — as his intriguing actions of recent years suggest — its future.

This guy is a rich (in all senses of the word) and compelling figure who stands alone in this town. And even though his leadership role in downtown political circles has often placed him at odds with the Guardian, Hellman consented to a series of in-depth interviews over the past six months.

“Our family has been here since early in the 19th century, so we had real roots here,” Hellman told us. His great-grandfather founded Wells Fargo and survived an assassination attempt on California Street by a man who yelled, “Mr. Hellman, you’ve ruined my life,” before shooting a pistol and barely missing.

The Hellman family has been solidly ruling class ever since, rich and Republican, producing a long line of investment bankers like Warren.

Yet the 72-year-old comes off as more iconoclast than patrician, at least partly because of the influence of his irreverent parents, particularly his mother, Ruth, who died in 1971 in a scuba-diving accident in Cozumel, Mexico, at the age of 59. “She was entirely nuts,” Hellman said, going on to describe her World War II stint as a military flier in the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots and other colorful pursuits. “She just loved people, a little like I do. She collected people.”

Hellman grew up wealthy and cultured, but he also attended public schools, including Grant Grammar School and Lowell High School. In between, the young troublemaker did a stint at San Rafael Military Academy — “reform school for the rich,” as he called it — for stunts such as riding his horse to Sacramento on a whim.

After doing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Hellman got his MBA from Harvard and went on to become, at the age of 26, the youngest partner ever at the prestigious Manhattan investment firm Lehman Bros. He developed into an übercapitalist in his own right and eventually returned home from New York and founded Hellman and Friedman LLC in San Francisco in 1984, establishing himself as the go-to financier for troubled corporations.

“He is really one of the pioneers of private equity,” said Mark Mosher, a longtime downtown political consultant and the executive director of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Commission on Jobs and Economic Growth, on which Hellman sits.

Hellman became what Business Week called “the Warren Buffett of the West Coast,” a man of extraordinary wealth and power. Among other accomplishments, Hellman took Levi Strauss private, recently made billions of dollars in profits selling DoubleClick to Google, and manages the assets of the California public employee retirement funds (CalPERS and CalSTRS), which are among the largest in the world.

Like many financial titans, Hellman has always been a generous philanthropist, giving to the arts, supporting schools in myriad ways, and funding the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Free Clinic (which his children run). He vigorously competes in marathons and endurance equestrian events, often winning in his age bracket. And he has his humanizing passions, such as playing the five-string banjo and creating the popular Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.

But he’s also been a prime facilitator of downtown’s political power, which regularly flexes its muscle against progressive causes and still holds sway in the Mayor’s Office and other city hall power centers.

Hellman founded, funds, and is a board member of the Committee on Jobs, which is perhaps the city’s most influential downtown advocacy organization. Hellman and his friends Don Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein also started SFSOS, which now wages the most vicious attacks on left-of-center candidates and causes.

When the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions were threatening to leave Golden Gate Park, Hellman almost single-handedly had an underground parking garage built for them, in the process destroying 100-year-old pedestrian tunnels and drawing scorn from the left. The Guardian called it “Hellman’s Hole.”

“We at the Bike Coalition very much started out on the opposite side of Warren Hellman,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum told us. “We couldn’t have been more like oil and water on the garage issue.”

But over the past two years or so, Hellman’s profile has started to change. He went on to become an essential ally of the SFBC and other environmentalists and alternative transportation advocates who want to kick cars off JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park on weekends, crossing the downtown crowd in the process. He has shared his wealth with progressive groups such as Livable City, which often fights downtown, and has stuck up for edgy fun seekers over more conservative NIMBY types. He has also publicly repudiated the attacks of SFSOS and its spokesperson, Wade Randlett, and withdrawn his support from the group.

Hellman is still a Republican, but a thoughtful and liberal-minded one who opposed the Iraq War and wrote an article for Salon.com in February titled “If the United States Were a Company, Would George Bush Be Our CEO?” (His answer: hell no.) And to top it all off, Hellman sports a few tattoos and even attended 2006’s Burning Man Festival and plans to return this year.

Unguarded and reflective, Hellman’s comments to the Guardian foreshadow the possible future of capitalism and influence in San Francisco and point to potential political pathways that are just now beginning to emerge.

Our first conversation took place at the Guardian office two weeks before the November 2006 election, when it was starting to look like Nancy Pelosi had a good shot at becoming speaker of the House of Representatives.

“I think this election in two weeks is going to be really interesting,” Hellman told us.

This Republican was cheering for the Democrats to win. “They aren’t my kind of Republicans,” he said of the people in power. Hellman didn’t support the war or approve of how the Bush administration sold it, and he wanted Pelosi and the Democrats to hold someone accountable.

“What I’d like her to do is admit that we can’t get out [of Iraq immediately], but start to talk about what the fallout has been. Discuss the enormous cost in human life as well as money, and how it’s possible the war united the Middle East against us,” Hellman said.

The one thing he can’t abide is disingenuousness. Hellman speaks plainly and honestly, and he asked us to keep particularly caustic comments off the record only a few times during almost six hours’ worth of interviews. He was self-effacing about his political knowledge and seemed most interested in working through the problems of the day with people of goodwill.

Asked what he values most in the people he deals with, Hellman said, “It’s authenticity. Do they believe things because they believe in them, or do they believe in things because they’re cynical or they’re just trying to gain something?”

Locally, Hellman has reached out to people with varying worldviews and come to count many friends among those who regularly battle against downtown.

“I love to know people,” he said. “That’s probably the single thing that motivates me. When someone says to me, ‘How can you be friends with [then–head of SEIU Local 790] Josie Mooney?’ I say, ‘Look, I want to know Josie Mooney. And if she’s awful, then we won’t be friends.’ I’m just fascinated by getting to know people. And virtually always, they’re a little like Wagner operas: they’re better than they sound.”

Hellman was the chair of the Committee on Jobs when he got to know Mooney, who chaired the San Francisco Labor Council and was a natural political adversary for the pro-business group, particularly when Hellman was leading the fight to do away with the city’s gross receipts tax, which has proved to be costly for the city and a boon for downtown.

But after that victory, Hellman turned around and cochaired a campaign with Mooney to retool and reinstate the gross receipts tax in a way that he believed was more fair and helped restore the lost revenue to the city.

“We lost, but he put $100,000 of his own money into that campaign,” Mooney told us, noting that the proposed tax would have cost Hellman and Friedman around $70,000 a year. “I think he just thought the city needed the money. It was a substantive point of view, not a political point of view.”

Mooney considers Hellman both a friend and “an extraordinary human being…. He has made a huge contribution to San Franciscans that doesn’t relate to ideological issues. A tremendous thing about Warren is he’s not ideological, even in his political point of view…. On politics, I’d say he is becoming more progressive as he understands the issues that confront ordinary people.”

Mooney is one of the people who have helped bring him that awareness. When they first met, Mooney said, Hellman told her, “You’re the first union boss I ever met.” That might have been an epithet coming from some CEOs, but Hellman had a genuine interest in understanding her perspective and working with her.

“In a sense, I think that was a very good era in terms of cooperation between the Committee on Jobs and other elements of the city,” Hellman said. “Josie and I had already met, and we’d established this kind of logic where 80 percent of what we both want for the city we agree on, and 20 percent [of the time, we agree to disagree].”

Committee on Jobs executive director Nathan Nayman — who called Hellman “one of my favorite people in the world” — told us that Hellman feels more free than many executives to be his own person.

“He’s not with a publicly held company, and he doesn’t have to answer to shareholders,” Nayman said. “He takes a position and lives by his word. You don’t see many people like him in his income bracket.”

Hellman has become a trusted hub for San Franciscans of all political persuasions, Nayman said, “because he’s very genuine. He’s fully transparent in a city that likes to praise itself for transparency. What you see is what you get.”

Hellman expects the same from others, which is why he walked away from SFSOS (and convinced Feinstein to bolt as well) in disgust over Randlett’s scorched-earth style. Among other efforts, SFSOS was responsible for below-the-belt attacks on Sups. Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval (whom a mailer inaccurately accused of anti-Semitism).

“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman said. “SFSOS started doing the opposite of what I thought they would be doing, so it was fairly easy for me to part company with them. What I thought we were doing is trying to figure out ways to make the city better, not just being an antagonistic, nay-saying attack organization. I’m not a huge fan of Gerardo Sandoval, but I thought the attacks on him were beyond anything I could imagine ever being in favor of myself. And it was a series of things like that, and I said I don’t want anything more to do with this.”

Downtown, they’re not always quite sure what to make of Hellman.

“Every once in a while, he does things that irritate people who are ideologically conservative,” Mosher said. “He took an immense amount of heat for supporting the Reiner initiative [which would have taxed the rich to fund universal preschool].”

He’s given countless hours and untold riches to public schools, doing everything from endowing programs to knocking on doors in support of bond measures and often pushing his colleagues to do the same.

“My connection to him has been through the school district, and he’s really been a prince,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said. “He has even stopped calling me antibusiness. He put a lot of his energy into improving public education, and so he shows it can be done.”

Progressives don’t always agree with Hellman, but they feel like they can trust him and even sometimes win him over. “If you get a relationship with him and you’re always honest about the facts and your own interests, he will listen, and that’s pretty remarkable,” Mooney said. “He shows a remarkable openness to people who have good ideas.”

His appreciation for people of all stripes often causes him to reject the conventional wisdom of his downtown allies, who viciously attacked the Green Party members of the Board of Education a few years ago.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh my god, Sarah Lipson, you know, she’s a Green Party member, she’s the furthest left-wing person on the board,’ blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And I phoned her up one day and said, ‘I’d really like to meet you.’ And she’s — leave aside the fact that I think she’s a very good person as a human being, but she’s a very thoughtful, analytic person. Listening to her opinions about things that are happening in the school district, I really respect that. I mean, what do I know about what’s going on in the school district? I know more now than I did then. But just getting to know people, and maybe get them to understand my point of view, which isn’t that penetrating.”

Many of his efforts have received little publicity, as when he saved the Great American Music Hall from closure by investing with Slim’s owner Boz Scaggs and helping him buy the troubled musical venue. “There are things that you and I don’t even have a clue that he has done,” Nayman said.

“He’s an interesting guy,” Mosher said. “He’s one of a dying breed, a liberal Republican. He has a social conscience and wants to use his money to do good.”

Actually, calling Hellman liberal might be going too far. In the end, he’s still very much a fiscal conservative. He doesn’t support rent control, district elections for the Board of Supervisors, taxing businesses to address social problems such as the lack of affordable health care, or limits on condo conversions.

He also opposes the requirement that employers provide health care coverage, which downtown entities are now suing the city to overturn, telling us, “In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea, because I’m still, even in my aging years, a believer that the marketplace works better than other things…. Universal health care I do believe in, but what I worry is that it’s going to be another damned bureaucracy and that it’s not going to work.”

Yet he doesn’t believe wealth is an indicator of worth, saying of his fortune, “It is luck. Most of what you do you aren’t better at than everyone.”

He doesn’t believe in the law of the jungle, in which the poor and weak must be sacrificed in the name of progress. In fact, he feels a strong obligation to the masses.

As he told us, “My mantra for capitalism — and I didn’t invent this, but I think it’s pretty good — is that capitalism won, and now we need to save the world from capitalism.”

Hellman looms large over downtown San Francisco. His Financial District office offers a panoramic view of the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, the Ferry Building, and the rest of the city’s waterfront. He likes to be personally involved with his city and the companies in which Hellman and Friedman invests.

“Usually I’m directly involved,” he told us in an interview earlier this year. “I’ve always said that I don’t like to go to the racetrack to just look at the horses. The fun of being a principal is that you’re standing at the track and not saying, ‘Gee, that’s a beautiful gray horse.’ You’re saying, ‘Come on, he’s got to win!’ So I’m almost always invariably invested in the companies that we work with, either individually or through the firm.”

Unlike many Wall Street barons who strive to control a company and bring in new executives, flip it for a quick profit, or liquidate it, Hellman said his firm tries to identify solid companies and help facilitate what they do. “We don’t usually take over companies. I always think that we provide a service to help the businesses,” he said. “Our job is kind of the opposite of owning a factory. Our job is to be sure the people who run the business feel like it’s their business.”

Similarly, he thinks capitalists need to feel a sense of ownership over society’s problems, something he thinks is taking root in San Francisco and other economic centers, particularly among the younger generations. “It’s about understanding how much suffering there is on the other side and trying to figure out how that suffering can be alleviated,” he said. “I think it’s partly good economics that as you bring people up, they’re able to do more for society. If nothing else, they’re able to buy more and shop at a Wal-Mart or something — probably someplace you would wildly disapprove of — and buy goods and services. But I don’t think it’s that narrow.”

Rather, he believes that everyone has a little progressive in them, a little desire to cooperatively solve our collective problems rather than pass them off to future generations. He sees a marked change from his days at Lehman Bros.

“Everybody was into making it,” he said, noting that many capitalists then did charity work as a means of attaining social status but focused mostly on the accumulation of wealth. But, he said, the new generation of capitalists seems genuinely interested in improving the world.

“The feeling for giving back in the next generation, in the now 25- to 35-year-olds, it’s just an order-of-magnitude difference than it was for people who are now in their 40s and early 50s,” Hellman said. “I’m very encouraged.”

Yet the flip side is that, in Hellman’s view, downtown doesn’t wield as much power as it once did. Low political contribution limits have made politicians less dependent on downtown money, creating fewer shot callers, while democratizing tools such as the Internet have broadened the political dialogue.

“For the last 30 years we have become an increasingly tolerant city, and that’s great,” he said. “In the old days, [the Guardian] complained about downtown, and yeah, no shit, downtown really did control the city. The benefit was as that slipped away, the city became fairer and more open to argument. So now downtown hardly has any power at all anymore. In a sense, that’s a good thing. Tolerance grew tremendously when the city wasn’t dictated to.”

That tolerance caused street fairs to pop up all over town and festivals such as Hellman’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass to blossom in Golden Gate Park. Bike lanes have taken space from cars, events such as Halloween in the Castro have gotten crazier, street protests have gotten bigger and more frequent, and people have felt more free to fly their freak flags. And all that freedom eventually triggered a backlash from groups of isolated NIMBYs who complain and often find sympathetic ears at city hall.

“Sometimes you get the feeling in this city that in the land of the tolerant, the intolerant are king,” said Hellman, whose festival has endured noise complaints even though the music is shut off by 7 p.m. “There is a continuing pressure to do away with fun, because fun is objectionable to someone, [but] we need to think about not creating a new dictatorship of a tiny group of people whose views are not in line with the opinion of most of the people of San Francisco…. You should try to balance the good of a lot of people versus the temporary annoyance of a few people.”

Preserving fun and a lively urban culture is a personal issue for Hellman, who plays the five-string banjo and calls his festival “the most enjoyable two days of the year for me.” He helps draw the biggest names in bluegrass music and acts like a kid in a candy shop during the event.

“I feel very strongly that an important part of our culture is built on the type of music and type of performance that goes on at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass,” Hellman said. From parables set to music to songs of struggle and the old union standards, “that kind of music is the conscience of our country.”

He considers bluegrass a vital and historically important form of political communication, more so than many of the upscale art forms that the rich tend to sponsor. “I’m glad that we have first-rate opera, but it’s equally important that we foster the kind of music, lyrics, etc., that support all this,” he said. “Somebody once said that most of the great Western philosophy is buried in the words of country songs. And that’s closer to the truth than most people think. A big passion of mine is to try to help — and people have defined it too narrowly — the kinds of music that I think have a hell of a lot to do with the good parts of our society.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a Republican venture capitalist from the older generation, Hellman also considers the countercultural freaks of San Francisco to be some of the “good parts of our society.” That’s why he attended Burning Man for the first time last year and why, he said, he loved it, as much for the culture and community as for the art.

“I went to Burning Man because as much as possible I want to experience everything,” he said. “I want to just see directly what it’s like. I knew I’d enjoy it. I never doubted that. But what really overwhelmed me is it was 40,000 people getting along with each other. I mean, it’s pretty intense. There were dust storms and the world’s most repulsive sight: nude men over 70 just dangling along. But I never saw an argument. It was 40,000 people just enjoying each other.”

It was most striking to Hellman because of the contrast with the rest of society. As he said, “I’ve never seen this country so divided.”

While Hellman supports Schwarzenegger — calling him “a good advertisement to California” — he has nothing good to say about his fellow Republican in the Oval Office. He calls Bush’s tenure “an absolute four-star disaster.” The invasion of Iraq is the most obvious problem, he said. “Our war policy has slowly veered from being ‘Don’t tread on me’ to we’re going to jump on your neck.”

But his antipathy to certain aspects of the Republican Party began even earlier, when the religious right began to take over.

“I thought we were not that polarized during the Clinton administration. I was somewhat encouraged,” Hellman said. “Maybe there was an undercurrent of strident religious behavior or strident conservatism, but not the conservatism that I think the Republican Party used to stand for, which was fiscal conservatism instead of social conservatism. Somehow, there was this angst in this country on the part of religious people who I guess felt this country was being taken away from them, and they were the kind of stalwart or underpinnings of society. And they took it back.”

But in the wake of that disaster, Hellman thinks, there is an opportunity for reasonable people of goodwill to set the future political course. As Nayman said of Hellman, “He does believe there is a middle way pretty much all the time.”

Politically, that’s why Hellman gravitates toward the moderates of both major parties, such as Schwarzenegger and Newsom. He looks for people who will marry his economic conservatism with a regard for things such as environmentalism and social justice.

“It’s very tough to be a big-city mayor,” Hellman said. “[Newsom is] probably the best mayor we’re entitled to. He’s got this fantastic balancing act.”

Hellman said downtown hasn’t been terribly happy with Newsom for supporting striking hotel workers, getting behind Ammiano’s health insurance mandate, supporting tax measures, and generally letting the Board of Supervisors set the city’s agenda for the past two years.

“Their measure is he has 80-percent-plus popularity, and he ought to spend some of it. Well, they might not agree with what he would spend it on. And he’s been unwilling to spend very much of it. In some parts of the business community there is disappointment with him, but I don’t think that’s right. He didn’t hide what he would be like.”

What Newsom said he would be — a big reason for his popularity — is a mayor for the new San Francisco, a place where the city’s traditional economic conservatism has been tempered by a greater democratization of power and an ascendant progressive movement that expects its issues to be addressed.

“I don’t like people who are intolerant,” Hellman said. “I don’t like people that are telling you something to get some outcome that, if you understood it, you probably wouldn’t want. I like people that are passionate.”

Asked, then, about Sup. Chris Daly, the nemesis of downtown and most definitely a man of strong political passions, he said, “I admire Chris Daly. I disagree with Chris on a lot of things he believes, but there are also probably a lot of things I would agree with Chris on. And I respect him.”

Hellman is the rare downtown power broker who wants to bridge the gap between Newsom — whom he calls a “moderate to conservative establishment person” — and progressives such as Daly, Mooney, and the Bicycle Coalition. The middle ground, he said, is often a very attractive place, as it was with Healthy Saturdays.

“I’m sure you spend time in the park on Sunday, and it’s a hell of a lot nicer in there on Sundays than Saturdays,” Hellman said. But even more important to him, this is about integrity and being true to what Golden Gate Park garage supporters promised back in 2000.

“They were proposing Saturday closing at that time, which I’ve always thought was a good idea,” he said. “And we made a commitment to them, or I thought we made a commitment to them, that let’s not have Saturday closure now, but as soon as the garage was done, we’d experiment with Saturday closure.”

We brought up what Fine Arts Museums board president Dede Wilsey has said of that pledge, that it was under different circumstances and that she never actually promised to support Saturday closure after the garage was completed.

“There’s a letter. She put it in writing,” he said of Wilsey. “She signed a letter on behalf of the museums saying that when the de Young is done, we should experiment with Saturday closings.”

The Bike Coalition’s Shahum said that even when Hellman was an enemy, he was a reasonable guy. But it’s in the past couple of years that she’s really come to appreciate the unique role he plays in San Francisco.

“He showed decency and respect toward us,” she said. “We never saw him as a villain, even though we disagreed completely. Later he really stepped up and has been a leader on Healthy Saturdays. And what I was most impressed with is that he was true to his word.”

Supervisor McGoldrick, who sponsored the measure, echoed the sentiment: “Hellman was certainly a man of his word who acted in a highly principled way.”

So why does Hellman now stand apart from the downtown crowd? Has he parted ways with the economic and cultural power brokers who were once his allies?

No, he said, “I think they parted ways with me.” *

 

Berkeley shutting down art and alt-energy center

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By Steven T. Jones
Just as I was writing about wanting to get back into covering the fantastic alternative energy creations now being developed by Burning Man artists, Berkeley officials were in the process of shutting down an important hub for this work. The Shipyard is a live-work industrial arts space just off Ashby Avenue built from steel shipping containers, which city officials apparently don’t think is safe, so they’ve ordered the artists out and the place shut down immediately, with owner Jim Mason risking $2500 per day fines until he can get out. “It’s a major blow to the underground arts community,” Burning Man’s environmental director Tom Price told me this morning. Even worse, it’s a blow to Mason’s main project for the year, Mechabolic, a gasification system that turns garbage into usable energy without producing carbon or greenhouse gases, the very thing that Berkeley officials claim to support. We’re just diving into this developing story now, so check back for the complete story next week. Or if you want to help them break down many years of funky hard work, stop by the shop at 1010 Murray Street this weekend.

40th anniversary Summer of Love event

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SEPTEMBER 2

Summer of Love 40th Anniversary Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, JFK at 25th Ave, SF; www.2b1records.com/summeroflove40th. THIS SUNDAY starting at 10am, FREE! This event features world-class musical acts and entertainment that represent the spirit and energy of the 1967 Summer of Love. The lineup includes such legendary, rabble-rousing musicians, poets and speakers as: Country Joe McDonald, Canned Heat, Michael McClure, Taj Mahal, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Wavy Gravy, “Hair Reunion” original cast, Ray Manzarek, ruth weiss, Scoop Nisker, and many, many more. Tune in, turn on, and drop by to join thousands in commemorating this historic event.

A complete lineup of the artists appearing is available here.

You can find out more about the Summer of Love 40th Anniversary event, including local accomodations, transportation, and auxiliary events here.

Summer 2007 fairs and festivals guide

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ONGOING

ArtSFest Various venues; www.artsfestsf.org. For its fourth year, ArtSFest presents a showcase of theater, dance, visual art, film, music, spoken word, and more. Through May 28.

Night Market Ferry Bldg Marketplace, along the Embarcadero at the foot of Market; 693-0996, www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com. Thurs, 4-8pm, through Oct 26. Marketplace merchants and farmers offer their freshest artisan foods and produce at this weekly sunset event.

United States of Asian America Arts Festival Various venues; 864-4120, www.apiculturalcenter.org. Through June 30. This festival, presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, showcases Asian Pacific Islander dance, music, visual art, theater, and multidisciplinary performance ensembles at many San Francisco venues.

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Yerba Buena Gardens, Third St at Mission; 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. Through Oct, free. Nearly 100 artistic and cultural events for all ages takes place at the gardens this summer including Moroccan percussionists, Hawaiian ukulele players, Yiddish klezmer violinists, Balinese dancers, Shakespearean actors, Cuban musicians, and Japanese shakuhachi players.

BAY AREA

Silicon Valley Open Studios www.svos.org. Sat-Sun, 11am-5pm, through May 20. Check out Silicon Valley artists’ works and the spaces they use to create them at this community art program.

MAY 8–20

The Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Bay Area 2007 Various venues; www.youthspeaks.org. Youth Speaks, La Peña Cultural Center, the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, and San Francisco International Arts Festival present this showcase of new theater works that feature break dancing, MCing, graffiti, spoken word, and DJ sampling.

MAY 10-20

Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival Various venues; www.mcmf.org. The Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival features the best and brightest independent musicians and artists, including music by Vincent Gallo, Acid Mothers Temple, Edith Frost, and Gary Higgins. Literary and film events are also planned.

MAY 12

KFOG KaBoom! Piers 30-32; 817-KFOG, www.kfog.com. 4-10pm, free. Kick off the summer with this popular event featuring music, a spectacular fireworks show, food and drinks, and activities for kids. Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Guster, and Ozomatli perform.

BAY AREA

Arlen Ness Motorcycles Anniversary Party Arlen Ness, 6050 Dublin, Dublin; (925) 479-6300, www.arlenness.com. 10am-4:30pm, free. Celebrate the company’s fourth year in Dublin and 37th year in business with a display of the largest selection of Ness, Victory, American Iron Horse, and Big Dog Motorcycles in California, a walk through the museum, and a live music from Journey tribute band Evolution.

Beltane Pagan Festival Civic Center Park, 2151 MLK Jr. Way, Berk; www.thepaganalliance.org.10am-5:30pm, free. This year’s festival focuses on children and young adults and features a procession, performances, vendors, storytelling, an authors’ circle, and information booths.

Peralta in Bloom Spring Festival Carter Middle School, 4521 Webster, Oakl; (510) 655-1502, www.peraltaschool.org. Due to a fire, Peralta’s spring festival will be held at a temporary home this year. Expect the same great live entertainment, carnival games, old-fashioned high-steppin’ cakewalk, free arts and crafts, and delicious barbecue as always.

MAY 13

Hood Games VI "Tender Love" Turk between Mason and Taylor; 11am-4pm. This celebration of youth culture features live skating and music, art, a fashion show, contests, and a raffle. Bonus: every mom who shows up for this Mother’s Day event gets a free skateboard.

BAY AREA

Russian-American Fair Terman Middle School, 655 Arastradero, Palo Alto; (650) 852-3509, paloaltojcc.org. 10am-5pm, $3-5. The Palo Alto Jewish Community Center puts on this huge, colorful cultural extravaganza featuring ethnic food, entertainment, crafts and gift items, art exhibits, carnival games, and vodka tasting.

MAY 16–27

San Francisco International Arts Festival Various venues; (415) 439-2456, www.sfiaf.org. The theme for this year’s multidisciplinary festival is the Truth in Knowing/Now, a Conversation across the African Diaspora.

MAY 17–20

Carmel Art Festival Devendorf Park, Carmel; (831) 642-2503, www.carmelartfestival.org. Call for times, free. Enjoy viewing works by more than 60 visual artists at this four-day festival. In addition to the Plein Air and Sculpture-in-the-Park events, the CAF is host to the Carmel Youth Art Show, Quick Draw, and Kids Art Day.

MAY 18–20

Festival of Greece 4700 Lincoln, Oakl; (510) 531-3400, www.oaklandgreekfestival.com. Fri-Sat, 10am-11pm; Sun, 11am-9pm, $6. Free on Fri 10-4 and Sun 6-9. Let’s hear an "opa!" for Greek music, dance, food, and a stunning view at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension’s three-day festival.

MAY 19

A La Carte and Art Castro St, Mountain View; (650) 964-3395, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. A moveable feast of people and colorful tents offering two days of attractions, music, art, a farmers’ market, and a special appearance by TV star Delta Burke.

Asian Heritage Street Celebration Howard between Fifth and Seventh streets; 321-5865, www.asianfairsf.com. 11am-6pm, free. More than 200 organizations participate in this festival, which features Asian cooking demonstrations, beer and sake, arts and crafts, a variety of food, and live entertainment.

Family Fun Festival and Silent Auction 165 Grattan; 759-2815. 11am-5pm, free. Enjoy this second annual family event in Cole Valley, featuring a kids’ carnival with prizes, street theater, live music, refreshments, and a silent auction.

Oyster and Beer Fest Great Meadows, Fort Mason, Laguna at Bay; www.oreillysoysterfestival.com. 12-7pm, $15-19 ($50 reserved seating). O’Reilly’s Productions presents the 8th annual festival celebrating oysters and beer, featuring cooking demos, competitions, and live performance from Flogging Molly, Shantytown, The Hooks, and more.

Saints Kiril and Metody Bulgarian Cultural Festival Croatian American Cultural Center, 60 Onondaga; (510) 649-0941, www.slavonicweb.org. 3pm-midnight, $15. Enjoy live music, dance, and traditional food and wine in celebration of Bulgarian culture. A concert features Nestinari, Zaedno, Brass Punks, and many more.

Taiwanese American Cultural Festival Union Square; (408) 268-5637, www.tafnc.org. 10am-7pm, free. Explore Taiwan by tasting delicious Taiwanese delicacies, viewing a puppet show and other performances, and browsing arts and crafts exhibits.

Uncorked! Public Wine Festival Ghirardelli Square, 900 N Point; 775-5500, www.ghirardellisq.com. 1-6pm, event free, wine tasting $40-100. This second annual wine festival features wine tasting, five-star chef demonstrations, wine seminars, and a chocolate and wine pairing event.

BAY AREA

Cupertino Special Festival in the Park Cupertino Civic Center, 10300 Torre, Cupertino; (408) 996-0850, www.osfamilies.org. 10am-6pm, free. The Organization of Special Needs Families hosts its third annual festival for people of all walks or wheels of life. Featuring live music, food and beer, bouncy houses, arts and crafts, and other activities.

Pixie Park Spring Fair Marin Art and Garden Center, Sir Francis Drake Blvd at Lagunitas, Ross; www.pixiepark.org. 9am-4pm, free. This fair for preschoolers and kindergarteners features bathtub races, pony rides, a petting zoo, a puppet show, and much more.

MAY 19-20

Bay Area Storytelling Festival Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area, San Pablo Dam Road near Castro Ranch, El Sobrante; (510) 644-2593, www.bayareastorytelling.org.

Sat, 9:30am-8pm; Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm, $8-65. Gather around and listen to stories told by storytellers from around the world at this outdoor festival. Sheila Kay Adams, Charlotte Blake Alston, Bill Harley and others are featured.

Castroville Artichoke Festival 10100 Merritt, Castroville; (831) 633-2465, www.artichoke-festival.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $3-6. Have a heart — eat an artichoke. This festival cooks up the vegetable in every way imaginable and features tons of fun activities for kids, music, a parade, a farmers’ market, and much more.

Day of Decadence Women’s Expo Sedusa Studios, 1300 Dell, Campbell; (408) 826-9087, www.sedusastudios.com. 1-4pm, $5. Twenty-five women-owned businesses exhibit their products and pamper their customers at this decadent event. Includes free services, champagne, refreshments, and a chocolate fountain.

French Flea Market Chateau Sonoma, 153 West Napa, Sonoma; (707) 935-8553, www.chateausonoma.com. 10:30am-5:30pm, call for price. Attention, Francophiles: this flea market is for you! Shop for antiques, garden furniture, and accessories from French importers.

Himalayan Fair Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 869-3995, www.himalayanfair.net. Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 10am-5:30pm, call for price. This benefit for humanitarian grassroots projects in the Himalayas features award-winning dancers and musicians representing Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mongolia. Check out the art and taste the delicious food.

Maker Faire San Mateo Fairgrounds, San Mateo; (415) 318-9067, www.makerfaire.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $5-15. A two-day, family-friendly event established by the creators of Make and Create magazines that celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, science projects, and the do-it-yourself mindset.

Muscle Car, Hot Rods, and Art Fair Bollinger Canyon Rd and Camino Ramon, San Ramon; (925) 855-1950, www.hatsoffamerica.us. 10am-5pm, free. Hats Off America presents this family event featuring muscle cars, classics and hot rods, art exhibits, children’s activities, live entertainment, and beer and wine.

Passport to Sonoma Valley Various venues; (707) 935-0803, www.sonomavalleywine.com. 11am-4pm, $55 (weekend, $65). This first of its kind, valleywide event will provide visitors rare access to the many hidden gems of California’s oldest wine region. More than 40 Sonoma wineries are participating, and the cost includes unlimited tasting.

Sunset Celebration Weekend Sunset headquarters, 80 Willow Road, Menlo Park; 1-800-786-7375, www.sunset.com. 10am-5pm, $10-12, kids free. Sunset magazine presents a two-day outdoor festival featuring beer, wine, and food tasting; test-kitchen tours, celebrity chef demonstrations, live music, seminars, and more.

Spring Fling Open House Rosenblum Cellars, 2900 Main, Alameda; (510) 995-4100, www.rosenblumcellars.com. Noon-5pm, $30. Try new and current releases at Rosenblum’s Alameda winery while enjoying wine-friendly hors d’oeuvres and music from local musicians.

MAY 20

ING Bay to Breakers Begins at Howard and Spear, ends at the Great Highway along Ocean Beach, SF; www.baytobreakers.com. 8am, $33-40. See a gang of Elvis impersonators in running shorts and a gigantic balloon shaped like a tube of Crest floating above a crowd of scantily clad, and unclad, joggers at this annual race from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean.

BAY AREA

Jazz on Fourth Street Festival Fourth St, between Hearst and Virginia, Berk; (510) 526-6294, www.4thstreetshop.com. 11am-5pm, free. Local merchants present this annual outdoor music festival featuring Marcus Shelby Quartet, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Group, two Berkeley High combos, and the award-winning Berkeley High Jazz ensemble.

Niles Wildflower Art and Garden Show Niles Blvd at Main, Fremont; www.niles.org. 10am-3pm, event free, garden tour $12-15. Take a self-guided tour of beautiful home gardens and enjoy the creative works of local artists.

MAY 24–27

Sonoma Jazz Plus Festival Field of Dreams, 179 First St W, Sonoma; 1-866-527-8499, www.sonomajazz.org. $45-95. Thurs-Sat, 6:30 and 9pm; Sun, 8:30pm, $45-110. Head on up to California’s wine country for Memorial Day weekend and soak in the sounds of LeAnn Rimes, Tony Bennett, Smokey Robinson, and Harry Connick Jr.

MAY 25–28

Memorial Day Folk Music Camp Out Waterman Creek Camp, Santa Cruz County; (510) 523-6533. www.sffmc.org. $7/night. Preregistration required. Camp and sing along with the San Francisco Folk Music Club. Everybody’s goin’!

MAY 26

Soul Jazz Festival Crown Canyon Park, 8000 Crow Canyon, Castro Valley; www.souljazzfestival.com. 12-8pm, $45-49. A one-day music event celebrating the worlds of jazz, funk, and soul. This year pays tribute to Ella Fitzgerald and features Johnny Holiday, Ladybug Mecca of Digable Planets, and Ella Fitzgerald’s son, Ray Brown Jr.

MAY 26–27

Carnaval San Francisco Harrison between 16th and 24th streets; (415) 920-0122, www.carnavalsf.com. 10am-6pm, free. The vibrant Mission District plays host to the best of Latin and Caribbean cultures and traditions with an array of food, music, dance, and art. The theme for this year’s carnaval is Love Happens, and it features speed dating at the Love Nest, a performance by Los Lonely Boys, and a parade on Sunday.

North American Cycle Courier Championship Speakeasy Brewery, 1195 Evans; 748-2941. Sat, 9am-2pm; Sun, 10am-1pm, free. This weekend-long celebration of bike culture features a race on a closed course that tests all areas of bike messenger skill.

BAY AREA

Santa Cruz Blues Festival 100 Aptos Creek, Aptos; (831) 479-9814, www.santacruzbluesfestival.com. 10am-7pm, $20-100. Rhythm and blues buffs beware. This annual festival, in its 15th year, showcases some of the most renowned acts of new and vintage R&B, soul, and blues rock, including Los Lonely Boys, Etta James and the Roots Band, and Little Feat. International food booths, juice bars, and beer make this event add to the appeal.

MAY 26–28

The San Francisco Cup International Youth Soccer Tournament and Festival Golden Gate Park’s Polo Field, SF; (415) 337-6630, www.sfcup.com. 8:30am. This 20th annual premier event brings together 128 national and international teams of both genders for great soccer excitement.

MAY 26–JUNE 30

Bay Area Summer Poetry Marathon Lab, 2948 16th St, SF; (415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org. 7-10pm,. $3-15 sliding scale. Various Bay Area and national poets read their work at this event held throughout the summer.

MAY 27

Antique Street Faire Main St, Pleasanton; (760) 724-9400, www.pleasantondowntown.net. 8am-4pm, free. This semiannual event sponsored by the Pleasanton Downtown Association provides more than a mile of antiques and collectibles displayed by about 300 professional dealers.

Art in the Vineyard Wente Vineyards Estate Winery, 5565 Tesla, Livermore; (925) 456-2305, www.livermoreartassociation.com. 11am-5pm, admission free, wine tasting $15. Mark your calendars for the 35th anniversary of this popular event, featuring 40 talented multimedia artists in addition to music by Vested Interest.

Asian Pacific Heritage Festival Bay Area Discovery Museum, 557 McReynolds, Sausalito; (415) 339-3900, www.baykidsmuseum.org.10am-5pm, free. Experience taiko drumming, the Marin Chinese Cultural Association’s Lion Dance Team, and other Polynesian and Pacific Islander arts groups, as well as traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino cuisine in honor of Asian Pacific Islander Month.

Caledonia Street Fair Caledonia St, Sausalito; (415) 289-4152, www.ci.sausalito.ca.us.10:30am-6pm, free. This fest boasts multicultural food, dance, music, and more than 120 arts and crafts vendors. Don’t miss out on the Taste of Sausalito luncheon and wine-tasting event featuring food and wine prepared by select Napa and Sonoma wineries and restaurants.

MAY 28

Stone Soul Picnic Cal State East Bay’s Pioneer Amphitheatre, 25800 Carlos Bee, Hayward; 1-800-225-2277, www.kblx.com. Doors at 10am, show at noon, $56-81.50 includes parking. KBLX Radio 102.9 FM presents its 10th annual R&B and soul music event, featuring performances by Isaac Hayes, the Whispers, the Dells, and Tower of Power.

MAY 29–30

BALLE Film Fest Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, Berk; (415) 255-1108, ext 112, livingeconomies.org. 6 and 8:30pm, $10 for screening, $15 for night. Business Alliance for Local Living Economies presents a two-night film festival reutf8g to BALLE principles, including Everything’s Cool, a film about global warming, and Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about China’s industrial revolution.

MAY 31–JUNE 3

Contra Costa County Fair Contra Costa County Fairgrounds,10th and L streets, Antioch; (925) 757-4400, www.ccfair.org. Thurs-Fri, noon-11pm.; Sat-Sun, 11am-11pm, $4-7, parking $3. Now 70 years old, this county fair has a little of everything. Daily sea lion shows, a man dressed as a giant tree, and, of course, clown acts, are just some of the events presented to fairgoers this year.

JUNE 1–10

East Bay Open Studios Various venues; (510) 763-4361, www.proartsgallery.org. Open studios: June 2-3, 9-10, 11am-6pm; formal artists’ reception May 31, 6-10pm, free. For more than 25 years, the East Bay Open Studios have drawn more than 50,000 visitors to Pro Arts Gallery and various artist workspaces to support the work of local artists. The public can view exhibits, purchase artwork, attend workshops, and go on an art bus tour.

Healdsburg Jazz Festival Check Web site for ticket prices and venues in and around Healdsburg; (707) 433-4644, www.healdsburgjazzfestival.com. This ninth annual week-and-a-half-long jazz festival will feature a range of artists, from the George Cables Project and Roy Hargrove Quintet to the funky Louisiana-style Rebirth Brass Band and first-rate vocalist Rhiannon.

JUNE 2

Berkeley Farmers Market’s Strawberry Family Fun Festival Civic Center Park, Center at MLK Jr, Berk; (510) 548-3333, www.ecologycenter.org. 10am-3pm, free. Living up to its name, this festival is a guaranteed good time for the whole family. Highlights include environmental information booths, hands-on activities, delectable strawberry shortcake, and live performances by Nigerian Brothers, EarthCapades Environmental Vaudeville, Big Tadoo Puppet Crew, and Young Fiddlers.

Heartland Festival Riverdance Farms, Livingston; (831) 763-2111, www.eco-farm.org. 10am-7pm, $10 advance, $12 at gate. Celebrate a summer weekend by picking berries, taking farm and garden workshops, buying fresh produce from a farmers’ market, and enjoying live music at this family event.

Sonoma Valley Vintage Race Car Festival Sonoma Plaza, Sonoma; (707) 996-1090, www.sonomavalleyvisitors.com. 5pm, free entrance. Wine and food $30 in advance, $35 at the door. A gigantic taste explosion filled with more than 30 vintage dragsters, gourmet food, and wine samples.

Springfest 2007 Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, 200 North San Pedro, San Rafael; (415) 499-8891, www.mdt.org. 1 and 5pm, $14-22. Marin Dance Theatre presents this spring program featuring various performances directed by Margaret Swarthout.

JUNE 2–3

Art Deco and Modernism Sale Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St; (650) 599-DECO, www.artdecosale.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 11am-5pm, $7-9. An extravagant art sale featuring pottery, books, art, vintage clothing, glass, furniture, and other accessories dating from 1900 to 1980.

Art in the Avenues Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, Ninth Ave and Lincoln; www.sunsetartists.com. 10am-5pm. This annual exhibition and sale presented by the Sunset Artists Society brings together artists and art lovers from all over the Bay Area.

Great San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna; 383-7837, www.crystalfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-4pm, $5. This year’s fair is sure to please anyone interested in mystical and healing arts. Check out the more than 40 vendors catering to all of your crystal, mineral, bead, and jewelry needs.

Union Street Festival Union between Gough and Steiner; 1-800-310-6563, www.unionstreetfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. This year marks the 31st anniversary of one of San Francisco’s largest free art festivals. In addition to more than 200 artists and 20 gourmet food booths, the event features activities that represent the history of the Union Street Festival, including a special photographic exhibit that shows Union Street as it was 100 years ago.

BAY AREA

Marin Home Show and Benefit Jazz Fest Marin Center Exhibit Hall and Fairgrounds, San Rafael; (415) 499-6900, www.marinhomeshow.com. Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, $8 (Sat tix include free return on Sun). Not only will there be hundreds of experts in everything from renovation to landscaping on hand to answer all of your home and garden questions, but there will also be live jazz acts to entertain you throughout the weekend. Proceeds benefit Marin County public schools.

JUNE 3

Santa Cruz LGBT Pride March and Rally Starts at Pacific, ends at Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz; (831) 427-4009, www.santacruzpride.org. 11am-5pm, free. Join the largest gathering of queers and allies in Santa Cruz County. Stage lineup includes Frootie Flavors, Nedra Johnson, Twilight Vixen Revue, Horizontes, and Assemblymember John Laird. Valet bike parking provided.

JUNE 6

Strollin’ on Main Street Party Main between St John and Old Bernal, Pleasanton; (925) 484-2199, ext 4, www.pleasantondowntown.net. 6-9pm, free. Stroll down Main Street and visit vendor booths, a beer and wine garden, and a stage where featured band Drive will play.

JUNE 6–AUG 29

Summer Sounds Oakland City Center, adjacent to 12th St/City Center BART Station, Oakl; www.oaklandcitycenter.com. Wed, noon-1pm, free. The Oakland City Center presents a weekly spotlight on an array of diverse musical artists.

JUNE 7–17

San Francisco Black Film Festival Various venues; (415) 771-9271, www.sfbff.org. The festival celebrates African American cinema and the African cultural diaspora by showcasing films by black filmmakers and emphasizing the power of film to foster cultural understanding and initiate progressive social change.

JUNE 8–10

Harmony Festival Sonoma County Fairgrounds,1350 Bennett Valley, Santa Rosa; www.harmonyfestival.com. Fri, 12pm-9pm; Sat, 10am-10pm; Sun, 10am-9pm, $20-149. This year’s theme is "promoting global cooling" boasts an ecovillage offering tips for living and consuming, a well-being pavilion featuring natural remedies, and a culinary showcase of dishes using natural ingredients. Festival-goers can camp onsite and musical highlights include Brian Wilson, Erykah Badu, the Roots, moe., and Rickie Lee Jones.

JUNE 9

Dia de Portugal Festival Kelley Park, San Jose; www.diadeportugal.com. 10am, free. The Portuguese Heritage Society of California presents this annual festival featuring a parade, live music, food and wine, a book and art sale, and more.

Temescal Street Fair Telegraph between 48th and 51st streets, Oakl; (510) 654-6346, ext 2, www.temescalmerchants.com. Noon-5pm, free. This fair will feature live music, crafts, martial arts demonstrations and food samplings from local restaurants, including an Italian beer and wine garden, a tribute to days when the district once flourished with beer gardens and canteens.

JUNE 9–10

Italian Street Painting Festival Fifth Ave at A St, San Rafael; (415) 457-4878, ext 15, www.youthinarts.org. 9am-7pm, free. Street painters paint beautiful and awe-inspiring chalk artwork on the streets of San Rafael.

Live Oak Park Fair Live Oak Park, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 898-3282, www.liveoakparkfair.com.10am-6pm, free. Is there a better way to revel in the summertime than to enjoy original arts and crafts, delicious fresh food, and live jazz by Berkeley’s Jazzschool all weekend long in beautiful Live Oak Park? Didn’t think so.

San Jose Gay Pride Festival Discovery Meadow, Guadalupe River Park, San Jose; (408) 278-5563, www.sjgaypride.org. Sat, 10am-6pm, free; Sun, 10:30am, $15. This year’s San Jose pride celebration is two days’ worth of events, speakers, and music, including performances by the Cheeseballs, Average Dyke Band, and Smash-Up Derby. After the parade on Sunday, cruise vendor booths peddling their LGBT-friendly goods and services.

JUNE 9–24

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; (415) 392-4400, www.worldartswest.org. Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm, $22-36. Performers from around the world converge at the Palace of Fine Arts to bring San Francisco a diverse selection of the world’s most talented dancers, including North Indian Kathak, Cantonese style Chinese lion dance, flamenco, and Middle Eastern belly dance.

JUNE 14–16

Transgender and Queer Performance Festival ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; (415) 863-9834, www.freshmeatproductions.org. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 7 and 10pm, $15. Fresh Meat Productions celebrates its sixth annual festival. This year’s artists perform traditional forms and path-blazing ones: hula, taiko, traditional Colombian dance, aerial dance, spoken word, rock ‘n’ roll, theater, hip-hop, and modern dance.

JUNE 14–17

CBA 32nd Annual Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival Nevada County Fairgrounds, McCourtney, Grass Valley; www.cbaontheweb.org. Ticket prices vary. Rhonda Vincent and the Rage, Cherryholmes, the Del McCoury Band, Dan Paisley and the Southern Grass, Country Current, the US Navy Band, the Dale Ann Bradley Band, and John Reischman and the Jay Birds perform at this California Bluegrass Association bluegrass jamboree.

JUNE 14–24

Frameline31: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival Various venues; (415) 703-8650. www.frameline.org. The 31st annual film festival by and about the LGBT community continues with a whole new program of innovative queer cinema.

JUNE 15–17

International Robogames Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, SF; www.RoboGames.net. Noon-10pm, $15-20. Engineers from around the world return for the fourth annual event listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest robot competition. Featuring 83 different competitions, including 18 just for walking humanoids.

JUNE 16–17

North Beach Festival Washington Square Park, 1200-1500 blocks of Grant and adjacent streets; 989-2220, www.sfnorthbeach.org. 10am-6pm, free. Touted as the country’s original outdoor arts and crafts festival, the North Beach Festival celebrates its 53rd anniversary with juried arts and crafts exhibitions and sales, a celebrity pizza toss, live entertainment stages, a cooking stage with celebrity chefs, Assisi animal blessings (Vallejo/Columbus), Arte di Gesso (Italian street chalk art competition, 1500 block Stockton), indoor classical concerts (4 pm, at National Shrine of St Francis), a poetry stage, and more.

San Francisco Free Folk Festival San Francisco City College, North Gym, 50 Phelan, SF; www.sffreefolkfest.org. Noon-10pm, free. Folkies unite for the 31st anniversary of this festival that features local and national artists, dances, open mics, family events, and workshops.

San Francisco Juneteenth Celebration Art of the Fillmore Jazz Presentation District, Fillmore from Geary Blvd to Fulton; 931-2729, www.sfjuneteenth.org. 10am-7pm, free. This Bay Area-wide celebration celebrates African American freedom while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. Promoted through a community festival that celebrates and shares African American history and culture through music, the performing arts, living history, and other cultural activities. Seven full blocks of food, arts and crafts, and community and corporate information booths. Three stages of entertainment, educational speakers, and health and job fairs. All neighborhoods welcomed.

BAY AREA

Marin Art Festival Lagoon Park, Marin Center, Ave of the Flags at Civic Center, San Rafael; (415) 388-0151, www.marinartfestival.com. 10am-6pm, $8. More than 250 fine artists join in at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Marin Center. Look out for the stilt walkers!

Russian River Blues Festival Johnson’s Beach, Guerneville; (952) 866-9599, www.russianriverbluesfest.com. 10am-6pm, $45-180. Head on down to the river for this annual affair featuring Buddy Guy, Little Richard, Koko Taylor, Roy Rogers and the Delta Kings, Lowrider Band, Elvin Bishop, and many others. Festival organizers also invite attendees to indulge in wine tasting for a nominal fee.

JUNE 17

Native Contemporary Arts Festival Esplanade at Yerba Buena Gardens, Fourth St and Mission, SF; (415) 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. 12pm-3pm, free. This fest features amazing performances, plus kids can make their own dream catchers, baskets, and bracelets.

JUNE 17–AUG 19

Stern Grove Music Festival Stern Grove, 19th Ave and Sloat, SF; www.sterngrove.org. Sun 2pm, free. This beloved San Francisco festival celebrating community, nature, and the arts is in its 70th season.

JUNE 20–24

Sonoma-Marin Fair Petaluma Fairgrounds, Petaluma; www.sonoma-marinfair.org. $8-14. This fair promotes and showcases agriculture, while displaying the diverse talents, interests, and accomplishments of the citizens of California, especially the youth of Sonoma and Marin counties. Catch acts such as Cheap Trick, SHe DAISY, and Bowling for Soup on the main stage.

JUNE 22–24

Sierra Nevada World Music Festival Mendocino County Fairgrounds, 14480 Hwy 128, Boonville; www.snwmf.com. Three-day pass, $125; camping, $50-100. Camp for three days and listen to the international sounds of Bunny Wailer, Toots and the Maytals, Luciano, Ojos de Brujo, Les Nubian, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars, Junior Kelly, Sugar Minot, and many others.

JUNE 22–JULY 8

Alameda County Fair Alameda County Fairgrounds, 4501 Pleasanton, Pleasanton; (925) 426-7559, www.alamedacountyfair.com. $4-9. Enjoy opening night fireworks, carnival attractions, a wine competition, a karaoke contest, an interactive sports and fitness expo, concerts, and oh so much more.

JUNE 23

Dyke March Dolores Park between 18th and 20th streets, SF; (415) 241-8882, www.dykemarch.org. Rally at 3pm; march at 7pm, free. Head on out to march with the San Francisco chapter of this now internationally coordinated rally. A Dolores Park celebration and rally precedes the march.

JUNE 23–24

San Francisco Pride 2006 Civic Center, Larkin between Grove and McAllister; 864-FREE, www.sfpride.org. Celebration Sat-Sun, noon-6pm; parade Sun, 10:30am, free. A month of queer-empowering events culminates in this weekend celebration, a massive party with two days of music, food, dancing that continues to boost San Francisco’s rep as a gay mecca. Do not under any circumstances miss the parade!

BAY AREA

Danville Fine Arts Fair Hartz Ave, Danville; (831) 438-4751, www.danvillecachamber.com. 10am-6pm, free. The quintessential arts and crafts fair descends upon Danville each year, bringing with it fine food and drink, Italian-style street painting, and more.

JUNE 23–25

King of the Bay Third Ave, Foster City; www.kingofthebay.com. 1pm, free. See the world’s top kiteboarders and windsurfers compete at this event.

JUNE 23–30

Jazz Camp West 2006 (510) 287-8880, www.jazzcampwest.com. This eight-day jazz program for adults and older teens features more than 100 classes taught by more than 45 nationally and internationally known artists.

JUNE 23–AUG 4

Stanford Jazz Festival Various venues. (650) 736-0324, www.stanfordjazz.org. This acclaimed festival has been injecting Northern California with a healthy dose of both classic and modern jazz for more than three decades.

JUNE 23–SEPT 8

Concert in the Hills Series Cal State East Bay, Concord Campus, 4700 Ygnacio Valley Rd, Concord; (925) 602-8654, www.concord.csueastbay.edu/concertinthehills.htm. Free. This series celebrates its eighth season with performances by acts such as Dr. Loco and His Rockin’ Jalapeño Band, Aja Vu, Joni Morris, and Native Elements.

JUNE 29–JULY 1

Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival Black Oak Ranch, Laytonville; (707) 829-7067, www.katewolf.com/festival. Fri, 1pm-midnight; Sat, 10am-11:30pm; Sun, 11am-10pm, $55-160. This annual tribute to Northern California singer-songwriter Kate Wolf, who is credited with repopularizing folk music in the 1970s, features performances by Utah Phillips, Joe Craven and Sam Bevan, the Bills, and many others. Don’t miss the "Hobo Jungle Campfire," a nightly campfire on the creek shore with story swappin’ and song jammin’ aplenty.

JUNE 30–JULY 1

23rd Annual Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy, 1-800-310-6563, www.sresproductions.com. 10am-6pm, free. Three stages of nonstop entertainment featuring top and emerging artists. Ten blocks of art booths and gourmet food.

JUNE 30–JULY 4

Marin County Fair Marin Center, Ave of the Flags at Civic Center, San Rafael; (415) 499-6400, www.marinfair.org. 11am-11pm, $11-13. This county fair stands above the rest with its promise of nightly fireworks, There will be many fun, new competitions to enter this year, including the Dancing Stars Competition, in which contestants may perform any style of dance — from tap to ballroom, salsa to boogie. Also not to be missed is the 18th annual "Creatures and Models" exhibit and the 37th annual "National Short Film and Video Festival," plus food and rides and other fun fair stuff.

JULY 1

Vans Warped Tour 2006 Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View; (650) 967-3000. www.warpedtour.com. 11am, $29.99. As Cities Burn, Bad Religion, Boys Like Girls, Coheed and Cambria, Escape the Fate, Pennywise, the Used, Funeral for a Friend, Revolution Mother, the Matches, and others perform at this annual punk music and culture event.

JULY 3–4

WorldOne Festival Cerrito Vista Park, El Cerrito; www.worldoneradio.org. Mon 5pm, Tue 10:30am, free. Worldoneradio hosts a world music and culture stage in the park. The eighth annual event is produced as a public service and fundraiser for area nonprofits.

JULY 4

City of San Francisco Fourth of July Waterfront Celebration Pier 39, Embarcadero at Beach, SF; (415) 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1-9:30pm, free. SF’s waterfront Independence Day celebration features live music, kids’ activities, and an exciting fireworks show.

JULY 5–8

International Working Class Film and Video Festival New College Roxie Media Center, 3117 16th St; www.laborfest.net. Held annually to commemorate the San Francisco general strike of 1934 brings together filmmakers and labor artists from around the United States and internationally.

BAY AREA

High Sierra Music Festival Plumas Fairgrounds, 204 Fairground Rd, Quincy; (510) 595-1115, www.highsierramusic.org. 11am-11pm, $35-156. Enjoy your favorite jam bands on five different stages and at five different late-night venues, a kid zone, arts and crafts, food and drinks, beer, yoga, dancing, camping, and more. The lineup features performances by Xavier Rudd, the Disco Biscuits, Yonder Mountain String Band, Martin Sexton, and Les Claypool.

JULY 6–SEPT 29

Marin Shakespeare Company Festival Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, Dominican University of California, Grand Ave, San Rafael; (415) 499-4488, www.marinshakespeare.org. Fri-Sun, varying times, $7-30. The Marin Shakespeare Company presents its outdoor festival featuring performances of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2.

JULY 10–21

Mendocino Music Festival Various venues; (707) 937-2044, www.mendocinomusic.com. $15-45. David Lindley, Mollie O’Brien, the Chris Cain Quartet, and others celebrate the 21st anniversary of this classical and contemporary music festival.

JULY 12–15

World California Fest Nevada County Fairgrounds, Grass Valley; (530) 891-4098. www.worldfest.net. $30-140. The 11th annual festival features eight stages and four days of music, with performances by everyone from Ani DiFranco to the Venezuelan Music Project. Camping is encouraged.

JULY 13–15

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; (415) 777-4908, www.silentfilm.org. Call for times and prices. The Golden Age of the silver screen comes to life, complete with a swelling Wurlitzer.

JULY 14-15

San Francisco International Chocolate Salon Fort Mason Conference Center; www.SFChocolateSalon.com. Sat, 11am-6pm; Sun, 10am-4pm, $20. The first major chocolate show on the West Coast in two decades takes place this summer with the theme Chocolat, in honor of Bastille Day. Experience the finest in artisan, gourmet, and premium chocolate with tastings, demonstrations, chef and author talks, and wine pairings.

BAY AREA

Los Altos Arts and Wine Festival Main and State, Los Altos; (650) 917-9799. www.losaltos-downtown.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, free. Enjoy original art and free entertainment while indulging in gourmet food and fine wine.

San Anselmo Art and Design Festival San Anselmo between Tamalpais and Bolinas, San Anselmo; 1-800-310-6563, www.artanddesignfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. The San Anselmo Chamber of Commerce brings this buffet of cooking, home, and landscape design to the masses.

JULY 19–29

Midsummer Mozart Festival Various venues; (415) 627-9141, www.midsummermozart.org. $30-60. The Mozart-only music concert series features pianist Janina Fialkowska, the Haffner Serenades, and the Coronation Mass.

JULY 19–AUG 6

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Various venues; (415) 621-0556, www.sfjff.org. The world’s first and largest Jewish film festival has toured the Bay Area for 27 years.

JULY 21–22

Connoisseur’s Marketplace Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park; (650) 325-2818, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. This annual midsummer festival hosts live jazz, R&B, and rock ‘n’ roll as well as arts and crafts, chef demonstrations, international cuisine, and lots of fun for the kids.

JULY 27–29

Gilroy Garlic Festival Christmas Hill Park, Hwy 101, Gilroy; (408) 842-1625, www.gilroygarlicfestival.com. 10am-7pm, $6-12. If 17,000 pounds of garlic bread isn’t enough of a reason to go, then all the other manifestations of this flavorful food are. Gourmet food and cook-offs, as well as free music and children’s activities, entertain you as you munch.

JULY 29

San Francisco Marathon Begins and ends at the Ferry Bldg, Embarcadero, SF; www.runsfm.com. $110 to compete. Tighten your laces for 26.2 miles around the Bay. The less enthusiastic can run a half marathon, 5K, or "progressive marathon," instead.

Up Your Alley Dore Alley between Folsom and Howard, Folsom between Ninth and 10th streets, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm. Hundreds of naughty and nice leather lovers sport their stuff in SoMa at this precursor to the Folsom Street Fair.

AUG 3–5

Reggae on the River Dimmick Ranch, French’s Camp, Hwy 101, Piercy, Humboldt County; (707) 923-4583, www.reggaeontheriver.com. $165-225. Further details pending. This year’s riverside roots and reggae fest features the Roots, Shaggy, Angelique Kidjo, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Mad Professor, the Itals, Eek-A-Mouse, Sierre Leone’s Refugee Allstars, and many others.

Reggae Rising Dimmick Ranch, French’s Camp, Hwy 101, Piercy, Humboldt County; www.reggaerising.com. $175 for a 3 day pass. Further details pending. This new summer festival will benefit various nonprofit groups in this southern Humboldt community and features Damian Marley, Sly and Robbie, Tanya Stephens, Fantan Mojah, and more.

AUG 4–5

Aloha Festival San Francisco Presidio Parade Grounds, near Lincoln at Graham, SF; www.pica-org.org/AlohaFest/index.html. 10am-5pm, free. The Pacific Islanders’ Cultural Association presents its annual Polynesian cultural festival featuring music, dance, arts, crafts, island cuisine, exhibits, and more.

AUG 9–12

Redwood Empire Fair Redwood Empire Fairgrounds, 1055 N State, Ukiah; (707) 462-3884, www.redwoodempirefair.com. Noon-11pm, $3-6. Bring the family to this old-timey fair, complete with rides, food, and fun.

AUG 10–12

Comcast San Jose Jazz Festival Various venues; (408) 288-7557, www.sanjosejazz.org. $5. This three-day music festival hosts dozens of acclaimed musicians playing all flavors of jazz.

AUG 11

SEEN Festival 2006 People’s Park, Telegraph and Dwight, Berk; (510) 938-2463, www.maxpages.com/seen2000. 11:30am-5pm, $5 suggested donation. This year marks the 12th anniversary of this world music, reggae, and soul festival.

AUG 11–12

Nihonmachi Street Fair Japantown Center, Post and Webster, SF; (415) 771-9861, www.nihonmachistreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. Japantown’s 34th annual celebration of the Bay Area’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities continues this year with educational booths and programs, local musicians and entertainers, exhibits, and artisans.

Pistahan Yerba Buena Gardens, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybgf.org. 11am-5pm, free. The Bay Area Filipino festival of culture and cuisine features arts and crafts, live entertainment, food, and more.

Vintage Paper Fair Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, Ninth Ave at Lincoln, SF; (323) 883-1702, www.vintagepaperfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-4pm, free. Craft lovers will enjoy this fair, which presents works made from all kinds of paper — from photographs, postcards, and memorabilia to brochures and trade cards.

AUG 18–19

Solfest Solar Living Institute,13771 S Hwy 101, Hopland; (707)744-2017, www.solfest.org. "The greenest show on earth" is back for another year featuring exhibits about renewable energy, green building, ecodesign tools, organic agriculture, and much more.

SEPT 1–2

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival Broadway between Victoria and Meadow Glen, Millbrae; (650) 697-7324, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. More than 100,000 visitors will gather for this festive Mardi Gras-style celebration featuring R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and soul music, as well as arts and crafts, food and beverages, live performance, and activities for kids.


SEPT 8–9

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro between El Camino Real and Evelyn Ave, Mountain View; (650) 968-8378, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. Known as one of America’s finest art festivals, this vibrant celebration featuring art, music, and a kids’ park draws more than 200,000 arts lovers to Silicon Valley’s epicenter.

SEPT 9

Solano Stroll Solano Ave, Berk and Albany; (510) 527-5358, www.SolanoStroll.org. 10am-6pm, free. The vibes are always mellow and the air filled with rhythm at the Solano Ave Stroll. In its 33rd year, the milelong block party will feature a pancake breakfast, booths, entertainers, a parade, and more, this year with the Going Green — It’s Easy! theme.

SEPT 15

Expo for the Artist and Musician SomArts, 934 Brannan, SF; (415) 861-5302; artsandmedia.net. 11am-6pm. This eighth annual event, sponsored by Independent Arts and Media, is the Bay Area’s only grassroots connection fair for independent arts, music, and culture, featuring workshops, performances, and networking.

SEPT 22

California Poets Festival History Park San Jose, 1650 Center, San Jose; californiapoetsfestival.org. 10am-4:30pm, free. Celebrate California’s distinctive heritage of poets, poetry, and presses at this all-day outdoor festival. *

Compiled by Nathan Baker, Angela Bass, Sam Devine, Molly Freedenberg, and Chris Jasmin

The promise of high-speed rail

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EDITORIAL Imagine — there’s a project on the drawing board in Sacramento that would:

• Get two million cars off California’s roads.

• Eliminate any need for expensive and environmentally damaging new runways at the San Francisco International Airport.

• Create tens of thousands of high-paying jobs for economically depressed Central Valley communities.

• Generate untold billions of dollars in long-term economic development in the state.

• Make the ugly trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles a simple and affordable pleasure.

• Represent the single most important contribution California could make to cutting global warming.

• Pay for itself in 10 years.

Why isn’t everyone in the state demanding that it go forward immediately?

That’s the strange question about high-speed rail. It makes perfect sense on every level. It’s the sort of project that ought to satisfy every interest group in the state. The environmentalists love it; so does the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.

Yet Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is prepared to effectively defund the agency that is planning the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, and is moving to ensure that the first installment of the money the project needs won’t be in the next set of infrastructure bonds, on the 2008 ballot.

The governor’s position is baffling, and the only explanations his staffers have offered are so factually inaccurate that they’re laughable. The Democratic Party supports it — but this project needs more than just a few statements of support. It needs to become such a priority for the state that the legislature can force the governor to move forward on it.

A high-speed rail line would carry people from downtown San Francisco to downtown LA in a little more than two hours. At current estimates, the trip would cost about $40. The technology is proven; high-speed rail works all over the world. In terms of energy use, it’s about the most efficient and environmentally sound way of moving people around that exists. The demand is clearly there. The total price tag — about $40 billion for a full build-out from Sacramento to San Diego — isn’t cheap, but every estimate shows that the project will pay for itself a decade after the first trains start running. That’s a great deal, even a spectacular deal, for any public works project.

But time is of the essence. Every year of delay hikes the price of the project by $2 billion. The high-speed rail agency ought to be racing at full throttle to get a plan on the next possible ballot — but instead, the governor’s budget is giving the authority less than a tenth of what it needs to keep going.

The nonpartisan legislative analyst says in a recent report that if the governor won’t fund the high-speed rail authority this year, the legislature might as well shut it down.

This is utter insanity. High-speed rail is crucial to the state’s future and needs a lot more champions. Don Perata, the senate president, and Fabian Núñez, the assembly speaker, need to tell the governor in no uncertain terms that the high-speed rail agency must be funded, and the first installment of bonds must be on the November 2008 ballot.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

San Francisco district attorneys have never been known for fighting political corruption. You don’t see politicians or corporate CEOs doing the perp walk around here — and trust me, it’s not because there’s a lack of criminal activity. Over the past 20 years, I’ve personally written or edited at least two dozen stories that involved clear evidence of lawbreaking by prominent San Francisco citizens, and not one of them has ever been held to account in a court of law.

(OK, I’ll give Terence Hallinan credit for Fajitagate; at least he tried. But it turned out to be an embarrassment when the highest-ranking cops walked away free and clear. And even Hallinan couldn’t — or wouldn’t — lay a glove on Willie Brown.)

Kamala Harris, who will be up for reelection next year, clearly has higher political ambitions. When I saw her take the stage with Sen. Barack Obama at the state Democratic convention in San Diego and he introduced her as one of his most prominent supporters, I could almost see the wheels turning: Federal Judge Kamala Harris. White House counsel Kamala Harris. Even Attorney General Kamala Harris. If Obama doesn’t win, she’s still on a lot of short lists for higher office.

But if she wants to be another Eliot Spitzer, she’s got to, well, be Eliot Spitzer. She’s got to be willing to take a firm hand on political crimes, pursuing and investigating violations of public trust as if that were the most important part of her job.

And she can start right now with the San Francisco Community College District.

It’s been more than a month since the news broke that an associate vice chancellor at City College diverted $10,000 in public money to a private campaign fund set up to pass a college bond act. Nobody’s been charged with any crime, but it seems to me there are some real questions not just about propriety but about legality here. And it seems to me, as someone who has watched that snake pit over there for a long time now, that it’s highly — highly — unlikely that a junior-level college official acting entirely on his own would have shifted 10 grand into a campaign committee that had close ties to elected members of the community college board.

Nobody in the DA’s Office will confirm or deny any investigation, which is standard practice. But I bet an aggressive district attorney who started digging out there on Phelan Avenue might shovel up some serious dirt. Just a thought, Kamala.

I’m beginning to think that our candidate for mayor ought to be Sup. Ross Mirkarimi.

Part of that is, frankly, political reality: Matt Gonzalez shows no sign of wanting to run at this point, and it’s getting late. Sup. Aaron Peskin doesn’t want to do it. There’s talk about former mayor Art Agnos, but I don’t buy it: Agnos would have a lot of fences to mend from his administration, and he’s not the type to apologize.

I hate to say that "leaves" Mirkarimi, because he’s actually a good candidate. He’s smart and full of energy and can take on the mayor on street crime: Newsom is going after panhandlers while Mirkarimi is trying to do something about the appalling murder rate. He’s only been in elected office a couple years, but then, Obama (who is Mirkarimi’s age, to the day) has been in the US Senate a couple years, and he could be the next president. Worth thinking about.

Bringing CCA to life

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EDITORIAL Community Choice Aggregation, a new system of developing and selling electric power, has the potential to put San Francisco on the cutting edge of renewable energy nationwide. It could offer lower rates to consumers. It could be an important first step on the road to a full public power system.

When the notion first came up a few years ago, everyone — from Mayor Gavin Newsom to the supervisors to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. — claimed to be supportive. Now Supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Tom Ammiano have put forward a plan that would ensure that half the city’s electricity come from solar, wind, and increased efficiency (along with the power we currently get from the dam at Hetch Hetchy). The plan would put San Francisco in the business of developing, promoting, and using solar energy on a huge scale. And suddenly, PG&E is spending millions on ad campaigns and has launched a quiet letter-writing effort to sabotage CCA — and the mayor is nowhere to be found.

It’s no coincidence that the giant private utility’s ads began appearing all over the city, including on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, in the same month that Ammiano and Mirkarimi were preparing to introduce their CCA bill. The company is trying to lay the groundwork to counter the city’s arguments that public power, or CCA, is an environmentally sound alternative to PG&E. As Amanda Witherell reported ("Green Isn’t PG&E," 4/18/07), the whole image of PG&E as a green company is a lie: its current power profile is 44 percent fossil fuels and 24 percent nuclear — which means two-thirds of the electricity the company sells is creating either greenhouse gases or nuclear waste.

The CCA plan, on the other hand, calls for 360 megawatts of fully renewable energy in San Francisco. The way the system would work, the city would use money that voters have already approved to develop solar generators and would contract with electricity providers that offer renewable energy. The city would buy the power in bulk, at comparatively low rates, then resell it to residents and businesses. And since the city won’t be making a profit, the cost to consumers will be less than what they currently pay PG&E.

It sounds simple, but the actual implementation is going to be a bit tricky — and will require constant monitoring. That’s why Ammiano and Mirkarimi want to create a new panel, made of several supervisors and representatives from the Mayor’s Office and the SFPUC, to manage the transition. It makes perfect sense: the supervisors need to play a role in the new agency and ought to sign off on any contract. If they don’t, the whole thing could be underfunded, delayed, and packed off to a bureaucratic back room.

But Newsom doesn’t want to give up control, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera hasn’t signed off on the deal. Herrera no doubt has legal arguments against creating a joint control agency, but we can’t believe there’s no legal way to pull this off. Herrera needs to help the board come up with a creative solution.

Meanwhile, Newsom needs to stop ducking this issue. He seems to have plenty of time to attend PG&E’s faux-green media events — but even after CCA supporters rescheduled a press conference twice at the request of Newsom’s office and set it for a time the mayor was available, he didn’t show up.

CCA is a key part of the city’s energy future. The supervisors should pass the plan, including an oversight panel, and the mayor should not only sign it but actively push for rapid implementation. If not, his kowtowing to PG&E should be a central issue for a challenger in the fall campaign. *

PS State law bars PG&E from actively campaigning against aggregation, yet there are signs that the utility is doing just that. Herrera and District Attorney Kamala Harris should immediately open an investigation.

Nancy Pelosi wants energy independence

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gaspump2.jpg

By Tim Redmond

Rep. Nancy Pelosi is going to announce an energy independence plan by July 4.

Gee: I wonder if she’ll include a gas tax, which even Business Week thinks is a smart move.

Me + Kinky = 2gether 4ever

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By Molly Freedenberg

Dear Kinky,

Oh, how I love you. Unlike so many other objects of my affection, you always come through. And not just because you come when you say you will, or because you’re always dressed for the occasion, or even because you always act as though there’s nowhere in the world you’d rather be except right here, right now, with me.

No, not only do you always deliver on your promise of high-energy music and a great live show. But you also always exceed my expectations.

Wednesday night at the Independent, you were better, cuter, more energetic, and more incendiary, than I’ve ever seen you before. And that’s not easy, because you were pretty damn good when I saw you at the Knitting Factory in L.A. several years ago. and again at in Santa Barbara during that festival Modest Mouse was headlining with “sunshine” in the title. But this. Oh, God. This.

MCMAF: Renewable source

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Van Halen may have made it into the music record books for Most Ridiculous Tour Rider for their demand for M&Ms picked free of the turdlike brown numbers. But musician-director Vincent Gallo might make the rock hitmakers jump with his own Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival must-have. "I’m not going to show you his rider," festival founder Jeff Ray says wryly. "It’s a little crazy."

"Oh, c’mon," I say, perched on a couch in the red and yellow office in Ray’s Mission flat. Stringed instruments, an organ, books, artwork, and the other tools and artifacts of an active musician and artist compete with the stuff of the festival – a paper schedule that winds around one wall, MCMAF posters with artwork by Jo Jackson, Andrew Schoultz, and Cliff Hengst (Leslie Shows offered a collage for this year’s), and beer bottles and empties marking many busy, late nights – that has threatened to swallow Ray’s creative energies since it began 11 years ago. Ray’s cat Panther, which he describes as bipolar, dozes drooling on my jacket – if that feline can give it up, surely he can.

"You can say I’m trying to track down a coin-operated arcade horse," he admits.

Attempting to please and showcase the many, radically varied, wild, and woolly musicians and artists who participate in the festival is part of the MCMAF mission – along with presenting a lineup that’s made of 80 percent local emerging creators. And the creek runs uphill: this year’s event includes Nevada City artists such as Mariee Sioux and Cafe Beautierre, as well as a "folky-centric" slant focusing on solo artists such as Gary Higgins, who was initially discovered by Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance and Comets on Fire and is coming to California for the first time. Energized by volunteer and guest curators such as the Plug Research label, Ray and John Fellman, the festival’s main programmers, continue to compel ex-San Francisco music scenesters such as, say, Devendra Banhart, who will judge the music video awards, and introduce new streams: a dance mavericks program and a brass band parade through the Mission that will end with a festival celebrating sustainable energy and installation art in Dolores Park.

The faces of the volunteers may change, the groups may wander off or move on, but a few things remain. "It’s the same every year," Ray says. "Chaos, spontaneity, intuition, inspiration, mixed with pragmatic people who have stronger organizing skills than I do." And after more than a decade, he knows how he might define a successful event at this most grassroots of local music gatherings – with bands as varied as Comets on Fire and Kid 606, Lemonade and Petracovich, Acid Mothers Temple and Bran Pos, David Copperfuck and Subtle: a solid show has to have "mostly good vibes. And no one gets killed. No club catches on fire. And if we don’t go too much in debt, that’s a good thing." (Kimberly Chun)

For a complete schedule of the 11th annual Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival (May 10-20), go to www.mcmf.org. Check www.sfbg.com/blogs/music for more Mission Creek festival coverage.

MCMAF: The Dilettantes

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Meeting up for an interview anywhere in the Haight in the middle of a Sunday afternoon is a bit of a dodgy prospect. With every easily distracted tourist and bumbling acid casualty in the city making random zigzags through the neighborhood, finding a clear path on the sidewalk is enough of a challenge, never mind finding a quiet place to talk. But there I am, in a booth at Magnolia’s, with the three songwriters of the Dilettantes, chatting away over beers without so much as a glance in the direction of all the scattershot energy reigning outside. Lesson? Miracles do happen, even in the Haight.

I’m mentioning the neighborhood because the Dilettantes identify so closely with it. Not only do most of the band members work and spend time here, but they also draw deeply from the Haight’s ’60s musical legacy. Sure, their music is filtered through four decades’ worth of post-psychedelic comedown, but the songs of Joel Gion, Jefferson Parker, and Brock Galland – accompanied by drummer KC Kozak and bassist Nick Marcantonio – follow the arcs and whirls of artists from that era, particularly their constant reference point: love.

Still, this is 2007, and San Francisco has changed. When I ask how the Haight inspires the group’s songwriting, Galland immediately says, "Well, the fumes that come off the sidewalk, definitely." Listening to the advance copy of their forthcoming album, 101 Tambourines (Stranger Touch), I see what he means – those flower power daisies have been glazed with curious oozing substances, as evidenced in their gritty garage pop. There’s a welcome sheen of grease to Galland’s clamorous "Kiss and Run," while Parker’s "Don’t You Ever Fall" parades with a slightly woozy majesty worthy of these streets. Gion’s "The Whole World" might jangle in Byrds-y formations, but it’s his unruffled Go Betweens-meet-Lou Reed delivery that attests that the times indeed have changed since the Summer of Love.

Perhaps these descriptions remind you of another band with whom Gion was associated: the tumultuous Brian Jonestown Massacre, led by the notoriously headstrong Anton Newcombe. Certainly both groups share sonic similarities, but Gion enthusiastically points out a major difference: "Jonestown was the singular vision of just one guy, while the Dilettantes are a completely collaborative, cooperative effort. Really, it’s a mutual appreciation society we have here. It’s great!"

Of course, that’s already obvious to me – I can see it in the brotherly ease with which they finish each other’s sentences. Parker sums it up: "One of the best things about being in the Dilettantes is that we’ve all helped each other grow as songwriters. We keep joking about re-creating one of those famous Brian Jonestown Massacre fights at the end of our shows, but really we just like and respect each other too much to ever do that." (Todd Lavoie)

CHAMBER STRINGS

With the Dilettantes and Persephone’s Bees

May 18, 9 p.m., $15

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

MCMAF: This magic moment

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

YACHT has cancelled his May 11 appearance with Kid606, Trackademicks, Lazer Sword and Luke’s Anger.

Enthusiastic and optimistic – Jona Bechtolt would have to be both to schedule back-to-back shows in Bloomington, Ind., and Big Sur, as he did on his most recent tour.

"I’m pretty much into playing wherever there is a desire for me to do so," Bechtolt e-mails en route to Seattle. "Once I played in a bathroom in the basement/rec-room of some kid’s grandparents’ house in St. Louis because he really wanted me to."

Infectious enough to rock the wood paneling of any suburban pad, conceptual enough to win over the crowd at New York’s premier performance-art space, the Kitchen, Bechtolt’s YACHT is a one-man dance-party extravaganza. Tourmate and fellow genre-masher Dave Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors describes Bechtolt’s jams as "positive energy rainbowe dome musick from a next-generation West Coast healer," while pal Devendra Banhart terms it "megaphysical" music: the kind of thing that makes you want to slam and shimmy, which is just what Bechtolt does in his workout-pace performances.

A couple months ago I interviewed BARR’s Brendan Fowler and was wowed by his hyperproductivity as a performer, an artist, and a magazine maker. Bechtolt, against all odds, seems to up the ante. Drawing from Portland, Ore.’s collaborative creative spirit ("Everyone I know that’s making music or videos or whatever is fully supportive in a way I haven’t really seen anywhere else"), Bechtolt is the resident connector, beat maker, blogger, and shaker. In between programming the Blow’s electronica, maintaining a killer video-text blog (www.teamyacht.com), and spitting out remixes (States Rights recently released a collection of these sides called Our Friends in Hell), Bechtolt’s found time to help create the Portland-centric Urban Honking blog collective, play drums with Banhart and Little Wings, and embark on several tours in recent years (he spent this past New Year’s Eve at Oakland’s 21 Grand). Oh, and he’s produced a new full-length YACHT album, I Believe in You. Your Magic Is Real (Marriage), to send the dance party home with you.

"It’s definitely important to me for YACHT to be all mine," Bechtolt muses. "I love collaborating, and it totally keeps me on my toes." Still, he explains, "I love making stuff on my own even more because I don’t have to worry about making anyone happy other than myself." The sense of liberation shows: I Believe in You is a freewheeling record replete with cameos (Bobby Birdman, Eats Tapes), shout-outs, and hooks galore. "See a Penny (Pick It Up)" sets the tone with a simple, sunny vocal line layered over crushing synths, snuffed-out beats, and nervous guitar notes. And Bechtolt brings a remixing sensibility to his work: each song piles up tracks before a deconstructive juncture – call it a break or a bridge – reasserts the crucial elements of rhythm and melody. The album gets increasingly eclectic – and identifiably Northwestern – as it moves past its early run of hardcore dance anthems. "I Believe in You" in particular sounds like tricked-out K Records pop, and "Women of the World" is unabashed Nirvana-love (Bechtolt publishes his songs under the motto "I learned it from watching grunge").

The ultimate magic act would be for YACHT to actually score a crossover with any one of these pop romances. Bechtolt’s clearly got the production chops to do some commercial damage, but his sound is probably a little too goofy to have Timbaland worried. No matter: the stage is where YACHT comes into full bloom. (Fittingly, the actual recording seems like almost an afterthought to the gonzo release party Bechtolt has planned for Portland: YACHT on a yacht, rocking the Willamette River.)

"Performance is totally something I think about a lot," the artist confesses. "Sometimes I write songs with big speakers, call-and-responses, and specific dance moves in mind, and other times songs just happen, and I hope that the same energy that comes out at shows comes out on the document of the song." It only takes a quick spin through YouTube – one especially compelling clip pictures Bechtolt in silhouette, pulling off pop-and-lock dance moves to the beat of album opener "So Post All ‘Em" – to know that with YACHT, seeing is believing. *

YACHT

With Kid606, Trackademicks, Lazer Sword, and Luke’s Anger

May 11, 9 p.m., call for price

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

MCMAF: Collective hip noises

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Should you take this life seriously enough to listen to it, I would suggest you head to local electro-organic thinkers I Am Spoonbender’s Web site right now, before you read this story, and download the trailer for their latest self-released album, Buy Hidden Persuaders (IAS, 2006), another three-sided disc (their gorgeous Teletwin 12-inch had concurrent grooves on one side, allowing for a randomly asserted listening experience) from the wizards of esoteric musical realism. Sure, the aesthetically thorough trailer’s bricolage of images and texts deals with everything from hypnosis to Illuminati-style dollar-bill machinations and just happens to act as a manifesto, art show, music preview, and persuasive cinematic display all at once.

But don’t fret. Dutifully check the "I Agree" button when the site lets you know that "IASBHP [I Am Spoonbender’s Buy Hidden Persuaders] is a subliminal advertisement for itself … produced by control, and is an album of ‘engineered outcomes.’ " Grin and download, watch and get ready to strangely rock, because you will surely make use of the free album download in WAV format and proceed to share these pulsing soundscapes with everyone you encounter, whether you intend to or not. William S. Burroughs’s notion that language is a virus was tied to his ideas about time as a sort of viral petri dish, and that makes sense here, in reverse. Persuaders is a soundtrack to its own propagation.

"I firmly believe that after spending three and a half years working on this album, there’s no way to hear it all in less than that time," Dustin Donaldson said recently on the phone from his San Francisco home. The mastermind behind IAS’s infectious, rhythmic stylings knows sound inside and out. "It’s designed to be encountered repeatedly and to reveal itself over time," he continued. "The longer you listen to it, the more you’re going to hear recurring musical themes, say, in different registers on different sounds, lyrical themes reflecting on themselves."

The entire Persuaders project – which includes the album, their first performance in three years, the succulent Web site, the Shown Actual Size EP (Gold Standard Laboratories), the book that will soon accompany the new album, and even the band’s dreams as they go to bed at dawn in San Francisco after nights of channeling and creating – is aimed at balancing out and exposing as a fraud the harm done by advertising and the like to our very beings. If we envision corruption and mind control as diseases, then Persuaders is an equally potent and uniquely celebratory vaccine – a careful dosage bordering the illuminating and the lethal. It’s celebratory because it co-opts subliminal and similar techniques in order to start a conversation, rather than to sell or speak about any one thing in particular. It’s potent because it refuses to double back on itself without adding more meaning. The three sides, or collages – "You Have Been Suggested," "Penetrate to Deeper Levels," and "Slowly Replaced in Mirrors" – seldom ring the same bells twice. And yes, there are hidden messages: don’t be afraid to slow things down, speed them up, listen from afar …

The thing is, you’ve already heard Persuaders, sizzling through your mind just before or after media stimulation. When Cup, the other core half of IAS, sings, "We all need mirrors to know / Who we are now," over surprisingly guttural organ sounds, her expressive vocals and multi-instrumental prowess, here as throughout, lend a sense of flight to Donaldson’s Middle Earthy rhythms and organic mechanics. Imagine Laurie Anderson playing tag with Robert Ashley.

The material for Persuaders came from everywhere and nowhere. After years watching "thousands of films" but no television, Donaldson was shocked when a friend moved in and they got cable. "I just was absolutely unprepared for … the aggression in marketing tactics," he said. "Drug company television ads became a big source of, well, I guess it’s inspiration in some sense, something to create a mirror-state protest record around. We attempt, through this record, to send the same amount of energy back toward these sources. For every action there’s a reaction, and at some level there’s a neutralization, hopefully – in audio terms, phase cancellation.

"For me, specifically, there was about a year of experiments in sensory deprivation," Donaldson continued. "Sleep deprivation … also, going into the studio often late at night and turning off all the lights and turning on huge, 750-watt strobes … setting them at different tempos and playing drums to that and just getting out – open to receive." There was even a resulting side project, yet to be released, where nothing could be recorded until the entire group had been up for 30 hours. Of course, the results were carefully edited for clarity.

Excited, you should now flock to the Mezzanine prepared to buy whatever IAS chooses to sell. If you print your own money, make sure the paper sparkles, and don’t forget to record the sounds the bills make when they leap, calmly, into flames. *

I AM SPOONBENDER

With Steven Stapleton, Ariel Pink, and Phase Chancellor

May 11, 9 p.m., $15 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

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