Energy

Dine Listings

-
0

Welcome to our dining listings, a detailed guide by neighborhood of some great places to grab a bite, hang out with friends, or impress the ones you love with thorough knowledge of this delectable city. Restaurants are reviewed by Paul Reidinger (PR) or staff. All area codes are 415, and all restaurants are wheelchair accessible, except where noted.

B Breakfast

BR Saturday and/or Sunday brunch

L Lunch

D Dinner

AE American Express

DC Diners Club

DISC Discover

MC MasterCard

V Visa

¢ less than $7 per entrée

$ $7–$12

$$ $13–$20

$$$ more than $20

DOWNTOWN/EMBARCADERO

Boulevard runs with ethereal smoothness — you are cosseted as if at a chic private party — but despite much fame the place retains its brasserie trappings and joyous energy. (Staff) 1 Mission, SF. 543-6084. American, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Brindisi Cucina di Mare cooks seafood the south Italian way, and that means many, many ways, with many, many sorts of seafood. (PR, 4/04) 88 Belden Place, SF. 593-8000. Italian/seafood, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Bushi-tei melds East and West, old and new, with sublime elegance. Chef Seiji Wakabayashi is fluent in many of the culinary dialects of East Asia as well as the lofty idiom of France, and the result is cooking that develops its own integrity. The setting — of glass, candles, and ancient lumber — shimmers with enchantment. (PR, 3/06) 1638 Post, SF. 440-4959. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

Café Claude is a hidden treasure of the city center. There is an excellent menu of traditional, discreetly citified French dishes, a youthful energy, and a romantic setting on a narrow, car-free lane reminiscent of the Marais. (PR, 10/06) 7 Claude Lane, SF. 392-3515. French, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Chaya Brasserie brings a taste of LA’s preen-and-be-seen culture to the waterfront. The Japanese-influenced food is mostly French, and very expensive. (Staff) 132 Embarcadero, SF. 777-8688. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Cortez has a Scandinavian Designs-on-acid look — lots of heavy, weird multicolored mobiles — but Pascal Rigo’s Mediterranean-influenced small plates will quickly make you forget you’re eating in a hotel. (Staff) 550 Geary (in the Hotel Adagio), SF. 292-6360. Mediterranean, B/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cosmopolitan Cafe seems like a huge Pullman car. The New American menu emphasizes heartiness. (Staff) 121 Spear, SF. 543-4001. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

NORTH BEACH/CHINATOWN

Maykadeh Persian Cuisine is a great date restaurant, classy but not too pricey, and there are lots of veggie options both for appetizers and entrées. Khoresht bademjan was a delectable, deep red stew of tomato and eggplant with a rich, sweet, almost chocolatey undertone. (Staff) 470 Green, SF. 362-8286. Persian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Michelangelo Cafe There’s always a line outside this quintessential North Beach restaurant, but it’s well worth the sidewalk time for Michelangelo’s excellent Italian, served in a bustling, family-style atmosphere. The seafood dishes are recommended; approach the postprandial Gummi Bears at your own risk. (Staff) 597 Columbus, SF. 986-4058. Italian, D, $$.

Moose’s is famous for the Mooseburger, but the rest of the menu is comfortably sophisticated. The crowd is moneyed but not showy and definitely not nouveau. (Staff) 1652 Stockton, SF. 989-7800. American, BR/L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Pena Pacha Mama offers organic Bolivian cuisine as well as weekly performances of Andean song and dance. Dine on crusted lamb and yucca frita while watching a genuine flamenco performance in this intimate setting. (Staff) 1630 Powell, SF. 646-0018. Bolivian, BR/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Rico’s touts its salsas, and they are good, but so is almost everything else on the mainstream Mexican menu. (Staff) 943 Columbus, SF. 928-5404. Mexican, L/D, ¢, AE/MC/V.

SOMA

AsiaSF Priscilla, Queen of the Desert meets Asian-influenced tapas at this amusingly surreal lounge. The drag queen burlesque spectacle draws a varied audience that’s a show in itself. (Staff) 201 Ninth St, SF. 255-2742. Fusion, D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Bacar means "wine goblet," and its wine menu is extensive — and affordable. Chef Arnold Wong’s eclectic American-global food plays along nicely. (Staff) 448 Brannan, SF. 904-4100. American, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Basil A serene, upscale oasis amid the industrial supply warehouses, Basil offers California-influenced Thai cuisine that’s lively and creative. (Staff) 1175 Folsom, SF. 552-8999. Thai, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Big Nate’s Barbecue is pretty stark inside — mostly linoleum arranged around a pair of massive brick ovens. But the hot sauce will make you sneeze. (Staff) 1665 Folsom, SF. 861-4242. Barbecue, L/D, $, MC/V.

Butler and the Chef brings a taste of Parisian café society — complete with pâtés, cornichons, and croques monsieurs — to sunny South Park. (PR, 5/04) 155A South Park, SF. French, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

NOB HILL/RUSSIAN HILL

Crustacean is famous for its roast Dungeness crab; the rest of the "Euro/Asian" menu is refreshingly Asian in emphasis. (Staff) 1475 Polk, SF. 776-2722. Fusion, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

East Coast West Delicatessen doesn’t look like a New York deli (too much space, air, light), but the huge, fattily satisfying Reubens, platters of meat loaf, black-and-white cookies, and all the other standards compare commendably to their East Coast cousins. (Staff) 1725 Polk, SF. 563-3542. Deli, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

La Folie could be a neighborhood spot or a destination or both, but either way or both ways it is sensational: an exercise in haute cuisine leavened with a West Coast sense of informality and playfulness. There is a full vegetarian menu and an ample selection of wines by the half bottle. (PR, 2/06) 2316 Polk, SF. 776-5577. French, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Grubstake might look like your typical Polk Gulch diner — sandwiches and burgers, open very late — but the kitchen also turns out some good mom-style Portuguese dishes, replete with olives, salt cod, and linguica. If you crave caldo verde at 3 a.m., this is the place. (Staff) 1525 Pine, SF. 673-8268. Portuguese/American, B/L/D, ¢, cash only.

*Matterhorn Restaurant offers dishes that aren’t fondue, but fondue (especially with beef) is the big deal and the answer to big appetites. For dessert: chocolate fondue! (Staff) 2323 Van Ness, SF. 885-6116. Swiss, $$, D, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

CIVIC CENTER/TENDERLOIN

Mekong Restaurant serves the foods of the Mekong River basin. There is a distinct Thai presence but also dishes with Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and even Chinese accents. (PR, 1/06) 791 O’Farrell, SF. 928-2772. Pan-Asian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Olive might look like a tapas bar, but what you want are the thin-crust pizzas, the simpler the toppings the better. The small plates offer eclectic pleasures, especially the Tuscan pâté and beef satay with peanut sauce. (Staff) 743 Larkin, SF. 776-9814. Pizza/eclectic, D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Pagolac For $10.95 a person you and two or more of your favorite beef eaters can dive into Pagolac’s specialty: seven-flavor beef. Less carnivorous types can try the cold spring rolls, shrimp on sugarcane, or lemongrass tofu. (Staff) 655 Larkin, SF. 776-3234. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢.

*Saha serves "Arabic fusion cuisine" — a blend of the Middle East and California — in a cool, spare setting behind the concierge’s desk at the Hotel Carlton. One senses the imminence of young rock stars, drawn perhaps by the lovely chocolate fondue. (PR, 9/04) 1075 Sutter, SF. 345-9547. Arabic/fusion, B/BR/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

HAYES VALLEY

Frjtz serves first-rate Belgian fries, beer, crepes, and sandwiches in an art-house atmosphere. If the noise overwhelms, take refuge in the lovely rear garden. (Staff) 579 Hayes, SF. 864-7654; also at Ghirardelli Square, SF. 928-3886. Belgian, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Hayes Street Grill started more than a quarter century ago as an emulation of the city’s old seafood houses, and now it’s an institution itself. The original formula — immaculate seafood simply prepared, with choice of sauce and French fries — still beats vibrantly at the heart of the menu. Service is impeccable, the setting one of relaxed grace. (PR, 7/06) 816 Folsom, SF. 863-5545. Seafood, L/D, $$$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Sauce enjoys the services of chef Ben Paula, whose uninhibited California cooking is as easy to like as a good pop song. (PR, 5/05) 131 Gough, SF. 252-1369. California, D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Suppenküche has a Busvan for Bargains, butcher-block look that gives context to its German cuisine. If you like schnitzel, brats, roasted potatoes, eggs, cheese, cucumber salad, cold cuts, and cold beer, you’ll love it here. (Staff) 601 Hayes, SF. 252-9289. German, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

*Zuni Cafe is one of the most celebrated — and durable — restaurants in town, perhaps because its kitchen has honored the rustic country cooking of France and Italy for the better part of two decades. (PR, 2/05) 1658 Market, SF. 552-2522. California, B/L/D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

CASTRO/NOE VALLEY/GLEN PARK

La Ciccia offers the distinct cuisine of Sardinia — Italian yet not quite — in an appealingly subdued storefront setting in outer Noe Valley. Pizzas are excellent, and the food is notably meaty, though with some lovely maritime twists. A unique and riveting wine list. (PR, 6/06) 291 30th St., SF. 550-8114. Sardinian/Italian, D, $$, MC/V.

Côté Sud brings a stylish breath of Provence to the Castro. The cooking reflects an unfussy elegance; service is as crisp as a neatly folded linen napkin. Nota bene: you must climb a set of steps to reach the place. (Staff) 4238 18th St, SF. 255-6565. French, D, $$, MC/V.

Eric’s Dig into the likes of mango shrimp, hoisin green beans, and spicy eggplant with chicken in this bright, airy space. (Staff) 1500 Church, SF. 282-0919. Chinese, L/D, $, MC/V.

Eureka Restaurant and Lounge combines, in the old Neon Chicken space, a classic Castro sensibility (mirrors everywhere, fancy sparkling water) with a stylish all-American menu that reflects Boulevard and Chenery Park bloodlines. Prices are high. (PR, 12/06) 4063 18th St. SF. 431-6000. American, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

*Firefly remains an exemplar of the neighborhood restaurant in San Francisco: it is homey and classy, hip and friendly, serving an American menu — deftly inflected with ethnic and vegetarian touches — that’s the match of any in the city. (PR, 9/04) 4288 24th St, SF. 821-7652. American, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

HAIGHT/COLE VALLEY/WESTERN ADDITION

Metro Cafe brings the earthy chic of Paris’s 11th arrondissement to the Lower Haight, prix fixe and all. (Staff) 311 Divisadero, SF. 552-0903. French, B/BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

New Ganges Restaurant is short on style — it is as if the upmarket revolution in vegetarian restaurants never happened — but there is a homemade freshness to the food you won’t find at many other places. (Staff) 775 Frederick, SF. 681-4355. Vegetarian/Indian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Raja Cuisine of India serves up decent renditions of Indian standards in an unassuming, even spare, setting. Low prices. (Staff) 500 Haight, SF. 255-6000. Indian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Rotee isn’t the fanciest south Asian restaurant in the neighborhood, but it is certainly one of the most fragrant, and its bright oranges and yellows (food, walls) do bring good cheer. Excellent tandoori fish. (PR, 12/04) 400 Haight, SF. 552-8309. Indian/Pakistani, L/D, $, MC/V.

Tsunami Sushi and Sake Bar brings hip Japanese-style seafood to the already hip Café Abir complex. Skull-capped sushi chefs, hefty and innovative rolls. (Staff) 1306 Fulton, SF. 567-7664. Japanese/sushi, D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Zazie is one of the best, possibly the very best, of the city’s neighborhood French bistros. The excellent food is fairly priced and the service well-honed; even diners in the open-air garden at the rear of the restaurant will feel coddled. (PR, 1/07) 941 Cole, SF. 564-5332. French, B/BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Ziryab brings a touch of eastern Med class to a slightly sketchy block of Divisadero in the Western Addition. The menu graciously innovates Middle Eastern standards while adding a California twist or two for fun. Faux stonework lends a Vegas air to the setting. (PR, 3/07) 528 Divisadero, SF. 269-5430. Middle Eastern, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Zoya takes some finding — it is in the little turret of the Days Inn Motor Lodge at Grove and Gough — but the view over the street’s treetops is bucolic, and the cooking is simple, seasonal, direct, and ingredient driven. (PR, 12/05) 465 Grove, SF. 626-9692. California, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

MISSION/BERNAL HEIGHTS/POTRERO HILL

Cafe Phoenix looks like a junior-high cafeteria, but the California-deli food is fresh, tasty, and honest, and the people making it are part of a program to help the emotionally troubled return to employability. (Staff) 1234 Indiana, SF. 282-9675, ext. 239. California, B/L, ¢, MC/V.

Caffe Cozzolino Get it to go: everything’s about two to four bucks more if you eat it there. (Staff) 300 Precita, SF. 285-6005. Italian, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Caffe d’Melanio is the place to go if you want your pound of coffee beans roasted while you enjoy an Argentine-Italian dinner of pasta, milanesa, and chimichurri sauce. During the day the café offers a more typically Cal-American menu of better-than-average quality. First-rate coffee beans. (PR, 10/04) 1314 Ocean, SF. 333-3665. Italian/Argentine, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Il Cantuccio strikingly evokes that little trattoria you found near the Ponte Vecchio on your last trip to Florence. (Staff) 3228 16th St, SF. 861-3899. Italian, D, $, MC/V.

Chez Papa Bistrot sits like a beret atop Potrero Hill. The food is good, the staff’s French accents authentic, the crowd a lively cross section, but the place needs a few more scuffs and quirks before it can start feeling real. (Staff) 1401 18th St, SF. 824-8210. French, BR/L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Circolo Restaurant and Lounge brings Peruvian- and Asian-influenced cooking into a stylishly barnlike urban space where dot-commers gathered of old. Some of the dishes are overwrought, but the food is splendid on the whole. (PR, 6/04) 500 Florida, SF. 553-8560. Nuevo Latino/Asian, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Couleur Café reminds us that French food need be neither fancy nor insular. The kitchen playfully deploys a world of influences — the duck-confit quesadilla is fabulous — and service is precise and attentive despite the modest setting at the foot of Potrero Hill. (PR, 2/06) 300 De Haro, SF. 255-1021. French, BR/L/D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

*Delfina has grown from a neighborhood restaurant to an event, but an expanded dining room has brought the noise under control, and as always, the food — intense variations on a theme of Tuscany — could not be better. (PR, 2/04) 3621 18th St, SF. 552-4055. California, D, $$, MC/V.

Dosa serves dosas, the south Indian crepes, along with a wealth of other, and generally quite spicy, dishes from the south of the subcontinent. The cooking tends toward a natural meatlessness; the crowds are intense, like hordes of passengers inquiring about a delayed international flight. (PR, 1/06) 995 Valencia, SF. 642-3672. South Indian, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Double Play sits across the street from what once was Seals Stadium, but while the field and team are gone, the restaurant persists as an authentic sports bar with a solidly masculine aura — mitts on the walls, lots of dark wood, et cetera. The all-American food (soups, sandwiches, pastas, meat dishes, lots of fries) is outstanding. (Staff) 2401 16th St, SF. 621-9859. American, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack offers a tasty, inexpensive, late-night alternative to Pasta Pomodoro. The touch of human hands is everywhere evident. (Staff) 18 Virginia, SF. 206-2086. Italian, D, $, cash only.

Foreign Cinema serves some fine New American food in a spare setting of concrete and glass that warms up romantically once the sun goes down. (Staff) 2534 Mission, SF. 648-7600. California, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Front Porch mixes a cheerfully homey setting (with a front porch of sorts), a hipster crowd, and a Caribbean-inflected comfort menu into a distinctive urban cocktail. The best dishes, such as a white polenta porridge with crab, are Range-worthy, and nothing on the menu is much more than $10. (PR, 10/06) 65A 29th St, SF. 695-7800. American/Caribbean, BR/D, $, MC/V.

Herbivore is adorned in the immaculate-architect style: angular blond-wood surfaces and precise cubbyholes abound. (Staff) 983 Valencia, SF. 826-5657; 531 Divisadero (at Fell), SF. 885-7133. Vegetarian, L/D, $, MC/V.

MARINA/PACIFIC HEIGHTS/LAUREL HEIGHTS

*Quince doesn’t much resemble its precursor, the Meetinghouse: the setting is more overtly luxurious, the food a pristine Franco-Cal-Ital variant rather than hearty New American. Still, it’s an appealing place to meet. (PR, 7/04) 1701 Octavia, SF. 775-8500. California, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

Rigolo combines the best of Pascal Rigo’s boulangeries — including the spectacular breads — with some of the simpler elements (such as roast chicken) of his higher-end places. The result is excellent value in a bustling setting. (PR, 1/05) 3465 California, SF. 876-7777. California/Mediterranean, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Rose’s Cafe has a flexible, all-day menu that starts with breakfast sandwiches; moves into bruschettas, salads, and pizzas; and finishes with grilled dinner specials such as salmon, chicken, and flat-iron steak. (Staff) 2298 Union, SF. 775-2200. California, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Rosti Getting half a chicken along with roasted potatoes and an assortment of vegetables for $7.95 in the Marina is cause for celebration in itself. (Staff) 2060 Chestnut, SF. 929-9300. Italian, L/D, $, AE/DISC/V.

Saji Japanese Cuisine Sit at the sushi bar and ask the resident sushi makers what’s particularly good that day. As for the hot dishes, seafood yosenabe, served in a clay pot, is a virtual Discovery Channel of finned and scaly beasts, all tasty and fresh. (Staff) 3232 Scott, SF. 931-0563. Japanese, D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

Sociale serves first-rate Cal-Ital food in bewitching surroundings — a heated courtyard, a beautifully upholstered interior — that will remind you of some hidden square in some city of Mediterranean Europe. (Staff) 3665 Sacramento, SF. 921-3200. Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Sushi Groove is easily as cool as its name. Behind wasabi green velvet curtains, salads can be inconsistent, but the sushi is impeccable, especially the silky salmon and special white tuna nigiri. (Staff) 1916 Hyde, SF. 440-1905. Japanese, D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

SUNSET

Sea Breeze Cafe looks like a dive, but the California cooking is elevated, literally and figuratively. Lots of witty salads, a rum-rich crème brûlée. (Staff) 3940 Judah, SF. 242-6022. California, BR/L/D, $$, MC/V.

So Restaurant brings the heat, in the form of huge soup and noodle — and soupy noodle — dishes, many of them liberally laced with hot peppers and chiles. The pot stickers are homemade and exceptional, the crowd young and noisy. Cheap. (PR, 10/06) 2240 Irving, SF. 731-3143. Chinese/noodles, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tasty Curry still shows traces of an earlier life as a Korean hibachi restaurant (i.e., venting hoods above most of the tables), but the South Asian food is cheap, fresh, and packs a strong kick. (PR, 1/04) 1375 Ninth Ave, SF. 753-5122. Indian/Pakistani, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tennessee Grill could as easily be called the Topeka Grill, since its atmosphere is redolent of Middle America. Belly up to the salad bar for huge helpings of the basics to accompany your meat loaf or calf’s liver. (Staff) 1128 Taraval, SF. 664-7834. American, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Thai Cottage isn’t really a cottage, but it is small in the homey way, and its Thai menu is sharp and vivid in the home-cooking way. Cheap, and the N train stops practically at the front door. (PR, 8/04) 4041 Judah, SF. 566-5311. Thai, L/D, $, MC/V.

*Xiao Loong elevates the neighborhood Chinese restaurant experience to one of fine dining, with immaculate ingredients and skillful preparation in a calm architectural setting. (PR, 8/05) 250 West Portal, SF. 753-5678. Chinese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Yum Yum Fish is basically a fish store: three or four little tables with fish-print tablecloths under glass, fish-chart art along the wall, and fish-price signs all over the place. (Staff) 2181 Irving, SF. 566-6433. Sushi, L/D, ¢.

RICHMOND

*Pizzetta 211 practices the art of the pizza in a glowing little storefront space. Thin crusts, unusual combinations, a few side dishes of the highest quality. (PR, 2/04) 211 23rd Ave, SF. 379-9880. Pizza/Italian, L/D, $.

Q rocks, both American-diner-food-wise and noisy-music-wise. Servings of such gratifyingly tasty dishes as barbecued ribs, fish tacos, and rosemary croquettes are huge. (Staff) 225 Clement, SF. 752-2298. American, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

RoHan Lounge serves a variety of soju cocktails to help wash down all those Asian tapas. Beware the kimchee. Lovely curvaceous banquettes. (Staff) 3809 Geary, SF. 221-5095. Asian, D, $, AE/MC/V.

Singapore Malaysian Restaurant eschews decor for cheap, tasty plates, where you’ll find flavors ranging from Indian to Dutch colonial to Thai. Seafood predominates in curries, soups, grills, and plenty of rice and noodle dishes. (Staff) 836 Clement, SF. 750-9518. Malaysian, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Spices! has an exclamation point for a reason: its Chinese food, mainly Szechuan and Taiwanese, with an oasis of Shanghai-style dishes, is fabulously hot. Big young crowds, pulsing house music, a shocking orange and yellow paint scheme. Go prepared, leave happy. (Staff) 294 Eighth Ave, SF. 752-8884. Szechuan/Chinese, L/D, $, MC/V.

BAYVIEW/HUNTERS POINT/SOUTH

Bella Vista Continental Restaurant commands a gorgeous view of the Peninsula and South Bay from its sylvan perch on Skyline Boulevard, and the continental food, though a little stately, is quite good. The look is rustic-stylish (exposed wood beams, servers in dinner jackets), and the tone one of informal horse-country wealth. (PR, 3/07) 13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside. (650) 851-1229. Continental, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cable Car Coffee Shop Atmospherically speaking, you’re looking at your basic downtown South San Francisco old-style joint, one that serves a great Pacific Scramble for $4.95 and the most perfectest hash browns to be tasted. (Staff) 423 Grand, South SF. (650) 952-9533. American, B/BR/L, ¢.

Cliff’s Bar-B-Q and Seafood Some things Cliff’s got going for him: excellent mustard greens, just drenched in flavorfulness, and barbecued you name it. Brisket. Rib tips. Hot links. Pork ribs. Beef ribs. Baby backs. And then there are fried chickens and, by way of health food, fried fishes. (Staff) 2177 Bayshore, SF. 330-0736. Barbecue, L/D, ¢, AE/DC/MC/V.

BERKELEY/EMERYVILLE/NORTH

Café de la Paz Specialties include African-Brazilian "xim xim" curries, Venezuelan corn pancakes, and heavenly blackened seacakes served with orange-onion yogurt. (Staff) 1600 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-0662. Latin American, BR/L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Cafe Rouge All the red meat here comes from highly regarded Niman Ranch, and all charcuterie are made in-house. (Staff) 1782 Fourth St, Berk. (510) 525-1440. American, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

César You’ll be tempted to nibble for hours from Chez Panisse-related César’s Spanish-inspired tapas — unless you can’t get past the addictive sage-and-rosemary-flecked fried potatoes. (Staff) 1515 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 883-0222. Spanish, D, $, DISC/MC/V.

OAKLAND/ALAMEDA

Mama’s Royal Cafe Breakfast is the draw here — even just-coffee-for-me types might succumb when confronted with waffles, French toast, pancakes, tofu scrambles, huevos rancheros, and 20 different omelets. (Staff) 4012 Broadway, Oakl. (510) 547-7600. American, B/L, ¢.

La Mexicana has a 40-year tradition of stuffing its customers with delicious, simply prepared staples (enchiladas, tacos, tamales, chile rellenos, menudo) and specials (carnitas, chicken mole), all served in generous portions at moderate prices. (Staff) 3930 E 14th St, Oakl. (510) 533-8818. Mexican, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Nan Yang offers too many great dishes — ginger salad, spicy fried potato cakes, coconut chicken noodle soup, garlic noodles, succulent lamb curry that melts in your mouth — to experience in one visit. (Staff) 6048 College, Oakl. (510) 655-3298. Burmese, L/D, $, MC/V. *

Superlist No. 830: Empower lunches

-
0

› superlists@sfbg.com

With the fast-paced hustle and bustle of the Financial District’s lunch hour and the high cost of eating responsibly, it’s difficult to find an MSG-free meal that won’t run you the whole organic farm. Not to worry, my health-conscious, busy urban comrades: no longer must you run around like a free-range chicken to eat a reasonably priced and responsible lunch. You’re about to get the skinny on where to find a healthy and organic lunch downtown … cheap. Don’t say we never taught you anything.

The Boxed Foods Co. (245 Kearny, SF. 415-981-9376, www.boxedfoodscompany.com) is a great place to relive the packed-lunch experience made famous by moms all over the United States — only this lunch does not include Oscar Mayer mystery meat, the chemical engineering miracle known as Kraft Singles, or that pasty Wonder Bread. Inside the small emerald interior, a smiling staff packs its boxes with the nutritional righteousness of prosciutto, asparagus, and parmesan panini and red and golden beet salads. Get your box to go, or relax in the back patio under cute blue umbrellas.

At Harvest and Rowe (55 Second St., SF. 415-551-7771, www.harvestandrowe.com), you can stop by on a cold, blustery afternoon and warm yourself up with some ever-changing and ever-healthy artisanal stews and soups, such as basil chicken chili and yellow split pea. You can even start your day with an organic breakfast in the form of fresh fair-trade coffee. Extend your shrinking lunch hour by grabbing a quick and wholesome snack or a custom-built salad, or order pick-up food online.

The ceilings are high, the cost is low, and the menu is extensive at Sellers Markets (595 Market, SF. 415-227-9850, www.sellersmarkets.com). Committed to buying from local artisanal farmers with pledges to sustainable agriculture, this refectory isn’t happy just feeding its guests healthy food — it also educates its patrons about environmentally responsible dining. Jim and Deb Sellers hold the quarterly Sustainable Social, at which experts from culinary, art, environment, and design backgrounds speak about a range of taste, ecological, health, and agricultural issues.

Mixt Greens (120 Sansome, SF. 415-433-MIXT, www.mixtgreens.com) may be known for its amazing "eco-gourmet" menu, but what really set this place apart are its continual efforts toward reusable energy. Not only is the design-your-own-salad menu extensive and the filet mignon cheesesteak organic, but these fortifying meals come packaged in recycled materials made from a corn-based plastic, not petroleum products. What makes this the most guilt-free meal in town is the building and furniture, all made with sustainable, nontoxic materials. *

Superlist No. 824: DIY dog washes

-
0

› superlists@sfbg.com

San Francisco dogs have it made, don’t they? Their owners coddle them with gourmet food from boutique pet stores, groomers who treat them like royalty, and the biggest spoiler of them all, our many acres of parks and beaches. But this sweet deal is not without its price. In the case of the last indulgence, this means the dirt pits, mud puddles, and pee-soaked grass your little stinker can’t resist rolling in. Bathing your dog at home can be quite a production, especially if you live in tight quarters. Fortunately, the city has a nice selection of places where you can scrub your mucky pup for a small fee, leaving you and your buddy with the soothing knowledge that you won’t have a bathtub to clean or a floor to mop afterward.

Nine years after setting up shop in Bernal Heights, owner Tony Chrisanthis has built Bernal Beast (509 Cortland, SF. 415-643-7800, www.bernalbeast.com) into a bit of a local legend. Packed wall to wall with supplies, food, and some hard-to-find supplements, this is a destination for pet lovers from around the Bay. At the back of the shop is the rather roomy washing station, where for $12 you get all-natural shampoo and conditioner, towels, driers, grooming tools, and an apron.

Conveniently located only a few blocks from the beach, Bill’s Doggie Bath-O-Mat (3928 Irving, SF. 415-661-6950) is a hit with folks taking their pup for a swim. The clean and fuss-free shop is equipped with three wash stations, available for self-service from Tuesday to Saturday. For $14 (and $10 for each additional dog) you will get all the necessary accoutrement needed to wash away the sea.

For dog lovers down in Glen Park, Critter Fritters (670 Chenery, SF. 415-239-7387) offers two dog-washing stations and two grooming tables in the spacious back room. The cost of the service is $13 — negotiable if washing multiple dogs — and includes all-natural shampoos, towels, chamois cloth, driers, grooming tools, and an apron. Tubs are equipped with "power wash" nozzles, which give quite effective, dirt-loosening blasts of water, guaranteeing a deep clean for your grubby pet.

For a bit of small-town charm here in the big city, try the Pawtrero Hill BathHouse and Feed Co. (199 Mississippi, SF. 415-882-7297, www.pawtrero.com). Designed with an old-fashioned seed store theme, using wooden produce crates to display its many tempting organic and natural wares, the shop offers a homey wash-up for your dog. The bathhouse at the back of the store is equipped with two raised tubs buttressed by ramps. For $15 you get everything you’ll need to make your mutt squeaky-clean: all-natural shampoo, towels, driers, brushes and clippers, and an apron to keep yourself dry. Save money with the buy-10-baths-get-one-free discount program.

Mercifully, the newest dog-washing addition to the city, Puppy Haven (772 Stanyan, SF. 415-751-7387), set up shop on Haight Street, where even humans need a postpromenade bath. Founded by longtime neighborhood resident Gordon Ruark — a font of knowledge with 25 years of pet store experience — the shop offers a spacious wash room equipped with two cleaning stations and will soon have a grooming station. For $10, Ruark gives you everything you need: shampoo, towels, forced-air driers, and a peaceful respite from the sometimes frantic energy lurking outside.

Cheerfully adorned with warm, playful colors and scores of houseplants, the Soggy Doggy Bath and Barktique (4033 Judah, SF. 415-664-3644), another oceanside option, is a relaxing place to take your pooch after a romp on the beach. There is one wash station with an elevated tub and a separate grooming table. For $13 you can hose away the sand with all-natural shampoo and conditioner, after-bath spritz, towels, and grooming tools. Get your ninth self-serve wash free with a "Repeat Rover Miles" card. Hours for self-serve are 3 to 7 p.m., Wednesday to Friday, and 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends, but call ahead anyway.

Pawtrero’s sister store, the South Paw BathHouse and Feed Co. (199 Brannan, SF. 415-882-7297, www.pawtrero.com), offers similar services and the same holistic philosophy but with a South Beach flavor, as indicated by the pastel furniture and "Beach Access" sign above the entrance to the washing quarters. Fifteen dollars gets you the same provisions as those supplied by Pawtrero, and the same discount program applies.

With a steady business of full-service dog grooming, Wags: Pet Wash and Boutique (1840 Polk, SF. 415-409-2472, www.sfwags.com) limits self-service to Sundays, but try calling ahead Tuesday to Thursday. Decked out in brightly colored shower curtains, the washing area is set up with two tubs and one combination tub-grooming station. For $20, Wags supplies you with all-natural shampoo, towels, and driers. *

Antiwar movement turns four

-
0

By Amanda Witherell


› amanda@sfbg.com

The Iraq War turned four years old March 19, but so did the antiwar movement, and thousands of people marked the event with protests, rallies, and direct actions around the Bay Area.

The largest event was the March 18 march on Market Street, led by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition, one of more than 1,000 rallies around the country. The protesters marched under a "No Blood for Oil" banner, "Impeach" signs donated by Working Assets, and Whole Earth flags that fluttered in the westerly wind funneling down San Francisco’s main drag. The Chronicle estimated the crowd at 3,000; ANSWER claimed it was 40,000. We estimated the march at 10,000 strong.

Education seemed to be the point protesters were driving home, as if the knowledge of the war’s injustices would reverberate like the chanting voices against the walls of the Financial District and into the minds of the children who wandered through the crowds of thousands.

"Will this stop the war May First?" Glenn Borchardt asked. "No, but it will stop it some day."

Sandee Dickson, a retired teacher, was with about 50 other purple-shirted Democrats of Napa Valley and said she was protesting "to keep it on the front page."

"There are all sorts of people here, from all walks of life, sending the message that American people say, ‘No more war.’ "

More than 40 cops watched the chanting crowd from their post, leaning against the front of the Westfield shopping center, guarding the commerce. "A couple of years ago a couple windows got smashed," one of the police officers said to the Guardian. "I guess they’re pretty expensive."

The crowd was pretty tame, though, and there were no arrests. There seemed to be just as many baby strollers in the crowd as people marching alongside them. Balloons bounced from the wrists of children, and a Girl Scout was making a killing selling cookies off the back of her Radio Flyer wagon for $3.50 a box.

Captain Denis O’Leary from Southern Station said there were about 270 officers on patrol, plus additional platoons of traffic and tactical officers, prepared for violence he wasn’t really anticipating.

"They might get arrested," he said, gesturing to some anarchists waving red and black flags at the edge of Larkin Street. A cop in this city for 25 years, O’Leary has responded to many demonstrations of all sizes and flavors and thinks they’ve changed a lot over the years. He mentioned the 1989 protest outside the Westin St. Francis against the first President George Bush. "That was an angry tone, it was massive, and there were arrests."

When asked if he looks at the crowd and worries about the safety of all the children who could get caught up in a sudden action, he said, "Yes, because my daughter is out there." He said she’s 15.

Sue Martin was marching with her son, Sean Martin-Hamburger. For his first protest, the eight-year-old had made a colorful cardboard sign that read, "Have some peace in your heart." He was too shy to say much to us, but his mom was less reticent: "We’re demonstrating because we don’t want to see any more violence, anywhere actually."

Though it was Sean’s first march on Market, his mother has been protesting for 35 years and agreed the age range was one of the big differences, as was the energy. "It feels more creative and less angry, like we’re starting to embody the peace and not respond to the violence with violence. It doesn’t feel vengeful, but maybe I’m just getting older."

On March 19, there were some people willing to face off with the police at a die-in. Hundreds of protesters lay down on the sidewalks and in the streets of downtown San Francisco, representing the 3,200 American soldiers and the estimated 160,000 Iraqi civilians who have died in the past four years. A helicopter whirring overhead and the corpses under blood-spattered sheets gave the direct action an eerie Vietnam feel, but there seemed to be more cops than corpses. They got something to do when 57 protesters became the walking dead, rising up from the sidewalk and dying again in Market Street traffic, disrupting the flow of daily life and garnering some misdemeanor charges.

Across the bay, 14 people also prepared for arrests, locking themselves into a human chain across the entrance to Chevron’s corporate headquarters in San Ramon. For the third time in four years, more than 100 representatives from Bay Rising, US Labor Against War, Amazon Watch, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered to speak against the other axis of evil: oil, profits, and war.

"Under the new Iraqi Oil Law, Chevron is standing to directly benefit from a law that comes from Bush. Two-thirds of [Iraq] oil will be owned by foreign companies," Sam Edmondson of Bay Rising said. "The fear is that US troops will be used to secure that oil."

Back in San Francisco, in front of the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, "Stop Funding the War" called on the woman who controls the purse strings to tighten them.

A few hundred people gathered outside the Federal Building to hear veterans, mothers of soldiers, local progressives, and city officials, such as Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who’s authored local resolutions against the war.

"I think [Pelosi] should be lining up votes to cut off funding for the war," former supervisor and 2003 mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales said. "If they cut off money, there’d be an interesting crisis."

Former congressional candidate Krissy Keefer was there as well. When asked where she’d be if she’d been voted into Pelosi’s seat, she said, "I would be here to provide leadership to San Francisco. San Francisco is really, really important, and we need to constantly reinforce the position that we play. The middle-of-the-road position that Pelosi takes squashes the best intentions of the Democratic Party." *

Sam Devine and Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.

The giant extension-cord plan

-
0

EDITORIAL It’s only because of a dark moment in San Francisco’s history that city officials are trying to figure out what to do about an underwater electricity cable that’s slated to run from Pittsburg onto port property and provide additional power for the tip of the Peninsula.

San Francisco was supposed to have its own power cable, carrying its own power over the bay from the hydroelectric dam at Hetch Hetchy. In fact, in the 1920s the city built 99 miles of cable, from the high Sierra to the South Bay … and mysteriously ran out of copper wire a few yards from a new Pacific Gas and Electric Co. substation in Newark.

That was a key moment in the Raker Act scandal, the ongoing violation of federal law that has allowed PG&E to operate a monopoly private power agency in a city that’s supposed to have public power.

But now PG&E controls all the power coming into town — and the California Independent System Operator, which is responsible for the state grid, says the supply coming into San Francisco is too limited and not sufficiently reliable.

As JB Powell reports in "Power Play" on page TK, Babcock and Brown, an international financial firm based in Australia, has put up $300 million for a Trans Bay Cable that would link the city to the East Bay. Ironically, a public power agency — in Pittsburg — would wind up making money off the project by selling power in San Francisco. Other than rent at the port, this city will get nothing out of the deal.

There are some basic conceptual problems with the project. Most of the power shipped along the 57-mile, 400-megawatt line would be produced by fossil fuel plants. That’s contrary to the direction the city is trying to go: San Francisco is in the process of building solar projects and is looking into using tidal energy. The Hetch Hetchy project, of course, is hydropower. And critics say that the new line would flood San Francisco with an oversupply of electricity, discouraging the environmentally sound approach of conservation.

But there’s a larger problem here: a private venture firm will own the cable — and could sell it to another entity, perhaps PG&E. So the city’s energy future under this scenario will still be tied to unaccountable private interests.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, whose Local Agency Formation Commission held a hearing on the cable plan in January, asked San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) staffers why the city doesn’t have its own line. The agency, staffer Barbara Hale said, has been looking into that — but any project would be years away.

Still, this line, if the city goes along with the deal, will be with us for decades — and the Board of Supervisors shouldn’t just approve it without looking at its role in a long-term municipal energy program. San Francisco is moving inexorably toward public power — too slowly, but inexorably. How, exactly, does this cable fit into a municipal power system? Does San Francisco even need it? Is a publicly owned transbay power line something that ought to be on the agenda? Why would the city want to go along with this private venture if there is (or ought to be) a city project in the wings?

Nobody has answered those questions, because the city still lacks a detailed public power plan. Before the supervisors approve this cable, the SFPUC needs to look at all the energy options, prepare a long-term plan, and evaluate whether this giant extension cord fits into it. *

Power play

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will soon decide the fate of the Trans Bay Cable (TBC), a privately financed, underwater power line that would plug the city’s electric grid into power plants in the East Bay.

Backers call the cable the best way to avoid blackouts, like those the city saw in the wake of the energy deregulation debacle of the late 1990s. But green power activists argue that the developer of this 57-mile extension cord is cashing in on California’s blackout fears and that approving the project would go against the city’s commitment to finding sustainable sources of energy.

Australian financial firm Babcock and Brown has staked $300 million on the cable’s construction and offered more than $28 million for a community benefits package if the project is approved. The developer plans to profit on its investment with a guaranteed 13.5 percent rate of return, granted to it by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for the sale of power running through the cable. Power plants in and around Pittsburg would generate most of the juice going though the 400-megawatt-capacity line. Ratepayers across the state would foot the bill.

The California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the public benefit corporation in charge of the state’s electric grid, has asked for San Francisco supervisors to approve the cable as soon as possible so that it can begin service by 2010. Cal-ISO’s sole mission is to keep the lights on, and when there isn’t enough power in the system, it coordinates the dreaded rolling blackouts that most Californians remember from the energy crisis. CAL-ISO representative Larry Tobias brought up those dark days at a San Francisco Port Commission meeting Feb. 27. "Without the Trans Bay Cable project," he warned, "we will be back in that situation again." Electricity from the TBC, Tobias told commissioners, will give the city’s system the "reliability" to prevent blackouts.

Tobias said if supervisors reject the cable project, CAL-ISO will have to seek alternative proposals. At a January meeting of the city’s Local Agency Formation Committee (LAFCo), Tobias brought up a plan previously put forward by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which looked to bring power across the bay from a substation in Moraga. In 2005, PG&E asked for more time to finish its design. CAL-ISO rejected its request and chose the TBC instead.

But some local activists say the city does not need the cable, or any other privately funded power line. Steven J. Moss of San Francisco Community Power told the Guardian a 400-megawatt cable would flood the power grid with "an enormous oversupply" of electricity. "That would be a waste of resources," he said. Moss claims CAL-ISO is understandably obsessed with reliability but the probability of its doomsday blackout scenarios is incredibly small. How small? At the Port Commission’s March 13 meeting, Moss said his calculations indicate there is only a "0.0002 percent chance that the [TBC] will be needed."

Even in the worst-case scenario, Moss told us, the city is only "looking at a 50- to 60-megawatt gap [in energy supplies] 10 years from now." His figures, he said, are based on Cal-ISO’s own estimates, adding, "The real way to plug that gap [is] demand management — solar, wind, all the things that San Francisco talks about constantly and that are good for us."

At the January LAFCo hearing, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi questioned officials from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) about the city’s plans to acquire its own power line from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir’s hydroelectric stations. The city already owns most of the 200-mile transmission route from the Yosemite power stations, but PG&E possesses the last 30 miles and charges the city fees to bring electricity up the Peninsula from Newark. "Why can’t we have our own cable?" Mirkarimi asked SFPUC staffer Barbara Hale. She said the agency has been "studying the feasibility" of the proposed city-owned line but cannot yet commit to a firm "coming online date" like the TBC’s developer can.

For years the city has been seeking a way to secure full ownership of the Hetch Hetchy lines as a step toward forming a public power utility, independent of PG&E control. Ironically, if the TBC is built, a public power agency would own the cable and profit from it, just not San Francisco’s power agency. Pittsburg’s municipal utility is slated to take over the line once Babcock and Brown finishes its construction.

At the same hearing in January, Moss pointed to such projects as the proposed Hetch Hetchy line, as well as the city’s evolving plans to implement more renewable power sources, as proof that supervisors should reject the TBC. Calling the cable a "potlatch," Moss said, "Time is our friend" in power matters. "Technology will change and improve, [and] we’re potentially rushing into a very expensive project." Mirkarimi did not return calls for comment, but at the hearing, he indicated he is still studying the cable and has not yet formed a position on it.

Philip DeAndrade, chair of the city’s Power Plant Task Force, expressed concerns that Pittsburg’s power plants burn "very available fossil fuels" for their generation and that these cheaper sources of electricity "might take out of the market mix" more renewable energy. DeAndrade also brought up the four gas-fired combustion turbines, known as peakers, that the city is in the process of bringing online. With these generators scheduled to go into service in 2009, as well as several PG&E transmission projects either in the works or already operational, DeAndrade said, "I’m not convinced [the TBC] is a good deal for San Francisco. What it looks like is a good deal for Babcock and Brown and the City of Pittsburg."

CAL-ISO insists that the TBC is the best reliability option for the region. Spokesperson Gregg Fishman said the peakers and other local energy projects will allow the system operator to stop relying on the inefficient Potrero Hill Power Plant. "But all that really does is keep us even in San Francisco. It doesn’t improve the reliability of the system at all — and in fact, with load [demand] growth we are actually falling slowly behind." Fishman later mentioned the added benefits of having power come in from a different direction. Currently, all power lines feeding the city travel up the Peninsula.

On March 13 the TBC cleared its first local regulatory hurdle when the Port Commission approved a licensing agreement for the cable’s facilities. Port officials, along with staff from the Mayor’s Office and other city agencies, spent weeks negotiating the terms of the deal with Babcock and Brown. The agreement grants the port annual rent payments in excess of $1 million, a needed cash infusion for the strapped agency.

The community benefits package gives the port an additional $5.5 million, with an as yet undetermined portion of those funds to be spent on open-space and energy-related projects on port-owned land. In addition to payments to the port, Babcock and Brown pledged more than $23 million to the SFPUC for sustainable energy programs, such as solar, wind, and tidal power initiatives.

Despite passing the licensing and benefits packages, port commissioners and their staff said they were not ruling on the project’s merits in terms of energy policy. Port special projects manager Brad Benson, who spearheaded the negotiations, told us, "Port staff does not believe we have the required expertise to rule on energy policy aspects [of the TBC]. We believe the Board of Supervisors is the preferred venue" to settle those questions.

Reached for comment, several San Francisco supervisors, either directly or through staff, told us they are still making up their minds about the project. Sup. Sophie Maxwell told us even if the cable is built, the city will not allow the new power line to sidetrack its efforts to use more environmentally friendly energy. "The city’s policy is renewable energy. Fossil fuel is not our first and primary desire." But, she added, Cal-ISO "determine[s] our power needs, and so we have to go along with that. We can’t say, ‘No … you’re wrong.’ "

Babcock and Brown vice president Dave Parquet praised the Port Commission for approving the licensing agreement and benefits package, telling us, "We are very pleased with the port’s [approval] and look forward to the Board of Supervisors’ decision." Samuel Wehn, the TBC’s project manager at Babcock and Brown, said, "I don’t think San Francisco [officials are] going to put their city in the position where they’re not going to be able to provide the kind of energy that’s needed to keep this city running."

Moss said those kinds of arguments are "business as usual" for the state in terms of energy policy. "Here [we] go again with another large infrastructure project that doesn’t contribute to solving climate change or moving our energy agenda forward."

He added, "It’s classic political science. Out of [the average ratepayer’s bill] it’s pennies per month, so nobody cares about it … but that doesn’t mean it’s not an expensive project. It is." Babcock and Brown, he said, "saw an opportunity to make a very fat profit margin, and they went for it like any good profiteer." *

Emergency exits

-
0

› marke@sfbg.com

I’ve got one copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace strapped under my right foot, one strapped under my left. The new 1,400-page Penguin Classics translation by Anthony Briggs makes for a great pair of platforms. My fantasy party posse’s at my side: Felicia Fellatio rocking a hot red bandito bandanna, a full white tutu, and a number 5 Tim Hardaway jersey; Baby Char Char in an oversize pajama-print homeboy hoodie and a pair of random, paint-spattered Levi’s; Nova all angles on her retro-future ’80s Nagel dangling neon banana earrings, turquoise ruffled skirt, and shoulder-padded acid-washed cropped jacket trip; and Hunky Beau in Juicy Couture pipe pants and war paint.

Somebody else is in the corner, wearing pink panties on his head and a giant chain, but no one knows his name.

I feel great. I just finished six weeks of Third Street Gym boxing boot camp, and you could bounce a full congressional subpoena off my abs, darling. (OK, that’s a lie — but I think about going to the gym every time I light up a smoke. That should count for something, no?) We’re out the door to my drag idol Juanita More’s weekly Saturday all-nighter, Playboy, at the Stud (www.juanitamore.com), when suddenly it hits me: today is Saturday, right? I better check the Internet.

I put down my flask of Cuervo and log on, and this little box of "gay news" pops up. (How does the Internet know? Oh, that’s right: all my online porn accounts.) "UN Confirms Anti-Gay Death Squads in Iraq" the top headline reads. Kidnappings, mutilation, charred bodies found by the road. Hmm. A few clicks later: "Iraqi Leaders OK Gay Pogroms." According to activists, Shiite militias are engaging in one of the "most organized and systematic sexual cleansings in history" with the government’s two-cheeked kiss of approval, and the US is refusing asylum to gay Iraqis.

Oh dear. Suddenly the thought of whooping it up while my gay Iraqi rainbow family burns seems kind of, you know, gross.

I’m so fucking sick of feeling powerless against this stupid war. Of always tucking the grief of it somewhere in the back of my mind as I down another shot and hit the dance floor. Not only is it a major buzzkill among other omnipresent buzzkills — global warming, fundamentalist terror, constant surveillance, government-sanctioned queer discrimination, bad hair days — but, as a citizen of the allegedly participatory democracy that started the whole thing, I feel somehow responsible, no matter whom I voted for however many times. And just admitting that, I feel like a spoiled American. It sucks.

On top of that, I have to watch myself and many of those around me struggle to keep the flame of resistance sparkling. It seems exhaustion has seeped into our consciousness and may actually be taking root. I fondly recall the first exhilarating flush of protest — of taking back the streets until my pumps wore through on the first night of "shock and awe," of lying down and blocking traffic in an orange jumpsuit (on purpose for once) as the bombs continued to rain down on civilians half a world away, of wildly dancing with Code Pink and cute Puerto Rican socialists in the NYC streets during the 2004 Republican Convention, hoping the nets the cops threw over us wouldn’t snag my weave. Sure, I still bang my pan with a stick at the occasional ANSWER weekend protest, despite my massive hangover. But after four years of war, it often seems I’m banging fruitlessly. If a club freak chants in a vacuum, will the killing please stop now?

Thank goddess I’ve got the beautiful souls I’ve met at the clubs around me. The kind of nightlife I love is inherently subversive: when one kind of music, location, or style becomes dominant, a host of alternatives immediately springs up. That energy refuels my rebellious spirit and keeps my fight up during the day. Yes, yes, partying is an escape from reality — but it’s also a play space, a way to work out the anxieties of the world by fooling with your identity, a place to push the boundaries of society into a personal utopia.

To me, underground nightlife can also be a fascinatingly warped mirror of the problems facing the world, its trends the raw expression of deep-seated angst. As W. consolidated his political power in the early ’00s, nightlife fashions and music (and drugs) returned to the tastes of the Reagan and Thatcher ’80s, when angular pop and cold synths were a loud rebuke to false sincerity and hubris. The recent explosion of pre-AIDS-era disco and imagery in many gay clubs may be an unconscious wish to transport ourselves to the time before the Republicans’ disastrous "morning in America." And the vibrant local hyphy scene is based on auto sideshows: literally wasting gas (use it while you got it!). Now, well into W.’s second term, we’re reliving the rococo styles of Bush the Elder without irony. Dance floors are looking like a punk rock Cosby Show, and I’m into it.

But that’s all theoretical musing. The most important thing about nightlife is community, whether you’re a full-time club kid or just going out for a drink after work with your friends. You want to be around other people, to not feel so alone in this crazy world, to make a connection. You walk into a bar, and suddenly you’re in a minisociety, one you hope you can handle better than society at large.

Can this community make a difference? Sure. The nightlife community, gay and straight, was instrumental in the fight against AIDS (and still is). It banded together to defeat the antirave legislation of the early ’00s. Tons of parties raise money for good causes. Currently, party-oriented groups such as the League of Pissed Off Voters (sf.indyvoter.org), which reaches out to young people through DJ events, and the SF Party Party (www.sfpartyparty.com), which influences local politics by combining education with clubbing, are doing their best to change the world.

"People on the left these days seem to think that denying themselves pleasure is the only way to take back the government. The early energy of protest against Bush has turned into a kind of self-punishment. That’s so dry and boring — and ultimately useless," says Dr. Stephen Duncombe, editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and author of the new book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. I called him because I wanted to talk about the guilt some of us feel about partying when the world’s going to shit. He’s been a prime mover in theatrical resistance groups such as Reclaim the Streets, the Lower East Side Collective, and the utterly fabulous Billionaires for Bush. (He’s also kind of cute in a young-professor-at-NYU way.)

"We should be using the positive energy of nightlife to show people that politics can be both entertaining and transformational," he continues. "Politics should be a fun, interactive spectacle, like the kind nightlife provides. No one wants to get involved with something if it seems like more work."

Yet still I worry. What would life be like if the war were here? What if I were a gay Iraqi? I trolled the Internet gay hookup sites to find a gay Iraqi to talk to about it. All I could find at first were half-naked American soldiers stationed in the Middle East (we are everywhere!). I eventually came upon a Western-educated gay Iraqi refugee living in Jordan who identified himself as Arje. He said I was being foolish. "Go out and have fun," he replied when I wrote that I didn’t feel like partying off the weight of the world. "Have a dance for me."

Building the bomb

-
0

It seems to be a matter of when, not if, another terrorist bomb will go off in the United States. One day we’ll come across the headline and let out an anguished "Oh, fuck" — a little later we’ll watch a stately funeral in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC. After such tragedy, will I ever be able to walk into a bar and order a nifty Irish Car Bomb again? What’s the buffer zone of alcoholic irony? With limited time before the next blast, I’d like to devote some space to bomb cocktails — in which a shot of something is dropped into a glass of something else — before it’s too late. Something about the plop of the shot and the glup of the drink always leaves a grin. And since I go drinking to get giddy, I’m all for drinks that make me giddy by their mere inception.

Because bombs fall below the purview of many published cocktail guides, there’s actually some debate about what to call them. Johnny Raglin, the bar manager at swanky Absinthe, insists they’re called boilermakers. But that seems to be too general a term: most mixologists say a boilermaker refers only to a shot with a beer. Many bombs don’t involve beer. Gary Regan, author of The Joy of Mixology, told me that he thought "depth charge" sounded good. But ordering a depth charge makes me feel like I’m at a WWII-era flea market. Mark Petrus of the Haight’s Gold Cane Cocktail Lounge may agree; he said he’d probably just call them bombs as well. Below are some of my local favorites — raise a glass and set it off.

BROSEPH


(Mandarin vodka in Sparks)

The arrival of Red Bull led to a proliferation of bombs in America. It was long accepted that the receiving ingredient (what’s in the glass) ought to be carbonated. So before there was Red Bull, beer, champagne, soda, and sparkling water were the only available mediums, and the latter three were rarely used. When Red Bull blew up, it became the bomb tinkerer’s experimental plaything. The Tic-Tac (mandarin vodka dropped in Red Bull) is one of the better leftovers from this heyday of discovery. But now its 2007, and Sparks energy drink has proven its mettle by tasting better. Commendations, then, to the Knockout for upgrading the Tic-Tac to this new formula.

Knockout, 3223 Mission, SF. (415) 550-6994, www.theknockoutsf.com

ORANGE-CICLE


(Baileys and mandarin vodka in Red Bull)

Like the Broseph, the Orange-cicle is just one permutation away from the Tic-Tac. Yet the two couldn’t taste further apart. When tossed back with the proper intensity, the Orange-cicle is creamy and full-bodied and definitely deserving of its name. Aub Zam Zam is also one of those perfect bars for enjoying bombs. With simple decor and a convex bar taking up much of the front room, the cocktail lounge makes it easy to remain focused on drinking.

Persian Aub Zam Zam, 1633 Haight, SF. (415) 861-2545

LA CUCARACHA


(Amaretto and Kahlua, with a flaming floater of 151 rum dropped in cerveza)

The Flaming Dr. Pepper (amaretto and rum dropped in beer and set on fire) is one of the oldest bombs outside a shot of whiskey dropped into some cheap beer. It is also the most notorious: numerous novice drinkers (most of them rowdy teens) have found themselves in the emergency room with second-degree burns after gulping down too many rounds of FDPs. It seems best to avoid the drink, out of fear not for one’s delicate lips but for one’s reputation — who wants to look like an amateur? Fortunately, La Cucaracha at Bahia, which just adds a little Kahlua to the mix, is even better than the original. First of all, it disposes of the pretension that the drink tastes like Dr. Pepper. More important, though, the Kahlua gives it added bite — round after round, this bomb never fizzles out.

Bahia Restaurant, 3239 22nd St., SF. (415) 642-7224, www.forored.com/bahiarestaurant

WISCONSIN LUNCHBOX


(Amaretto dropped into Pabst with a splash of orange juice)

I slowed down halfway through gulping back the Wisconsin Lunchbox at Mauna Loa Club because it tasted so good. The nutty tones of amaretto mix great with the citrus kick of the OJ, but the tastes blend even better with the sweet starchiness of Pabst. Two sips later, though, and I knew my lax pacing was a mistake. When the cocktail’s drunk slowly, all the flavors that once sailed off hand in hand became boorish. It tasted like a way-too-fruity beer. Throw this one down quickly.

Mauna Loa Club, 3009 Fillmore, SF. (415) 563-5137

ABC


(Soju in champagne)

In Korea business deals are consummated over a drink called Poktanju ("alcohol bomb," or "bomb shot"), which is whiskey or the less expensive Soju dropped into beer. Seeing as we don’t have the same thirst for beer as Koreans, I wouldn’t feel comfortable completely copying them. It’s better we go our own way with this sprightly and slightly tangy bomb. Hitherto, I’ve only been able to chug champagne in those moments when I recognize how boring my friends are and start daring myself to see how many gulps of bubbly I can take in a row. On this occasion, at Bar 821, after the clank of the shot glass and the fizz of the drink, I just got caught up in the bliss of it.

Bar 821, 821 Divisadero, SF. www.bar821.com

SUICIDE BOMB


(Red Bull in Jägermeister)

What tonnage! The Suicide Bomb will definitely lead you into some mischief. Pops Bar doesn’t regularly serve this cocktail — I found it while screwing around on Wikipedia, and Pops was willing to serve it to me at a reasonable price. You could probably ask for a shot of Red Bull to drop into a half glass of Jäger almost anywhere. Just as a grain of vermouth does wonders to bury the edges of gin in a martini, the Red Bull brings precisely enough luster to this drink. That’s not to say it tastes good. But with a little Red Bull, you at least have something else to focus on while you pour flat, heavy, extremely alcoholic goop down the hatch.

Pops Bar, 2800 24th St., SF. (415) 401-7677

>

On white planes

-
0

By Johnny Ray Huston


› johnny@sfbg.com

Life on tour isn’t just about partying. It’s partly about crafty use of time and space. In that sense, the German electronic duo Booka Shade are expert pragmatists. Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier don’t just attempt to write songs while they’re on planes or in hotel rooms — they’ll record them as well. "In a traditional studio you always have the same atmosphere. Day and night changes, of course, yet it’s basically the same," Kammermeier explains over the phone from Berlin. "But if you travel and have a laptop with you, you can look out the window and see a new, completely different thing while recording."

Such flexibility is at the core of Booka Shade’s second album, on their self-run label, Get Physical. Its very title, Movements, reflects a recording process propelled by the touring connected with flagship club hits such as "Body Language" and the irresistible dance floor stormer "Mandarine Girl," which boasts a melody that sounds like it was made with a gargantuan electronic woodwind. "We had a good time meeting people internationally, and all that energy went into Movements," Kammermeier says, discussing the record, which like most of the group’s releases sports Hannah Hoch–like cut-with-a-kitchen-knife body parts on its sleeve art. "That’s probably why it’s a lot less dark than Memento [the duo’s 2004 debut] and has more drive."

It would be hard for Movements to be darker than Memento, considering Booka Shade’s first album, complete with a name that might have been borrowed from Christopher Nolan, repeatedly digs into the realm of film ("16MM") and especially film noir ("Vertigo"). "It’s not like we have a library of 10,000 DVDs, but we like the combination of pictures and music," says Kammermeier, who also scores commercials with Merziger. "One thing we did for [Memento] was put a film on with the sound off and watch the pictures while we were working — that atmosphere gave us a lot of inspiration."

GET A REP


Booka Shade’s inspiration and reputation stem from their label as much as their music. In recent years Get Physical has garnered a critical rep that calls to mind canonical imprints such as Warp and the still thriving house-inflected Kompakt. This praise is due to Booka Shade’s constant collaborations with mix-oriented labelmates such as DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y. and to their production work on tracks such as a pair of classic early singles by Chelonis R. Jones, "One and One" and "I Don’t Know?" Those tracks are peerless in both a pop and a club sense, with "I Don’t Know?" suggesting what would happen if a male diva from the heyday of Chicago house who possessed encyclopedic brilliance hooked up with "Blue Monday"–era New Order. "The chorus of ‘One and One’ wasn’t originally a chorus as Chelonis had sung it," Kammermeier says while discussing the collaborations. "We placed it there, like part of a puzzle."

Working with a talent as singular as Jones is a far cry from the duo’s early days in the music business, when they created Europop for Spice Girls–esque major-label prefab acts such as No Angels, a girl group for whom they designed a cover of Alison Moyet’s "All Cried Out." The dead-end results of those efforts and of Merziger and Kammermeier’s first venture as a group, called Planet Claire, led them to start Get Physical. That, and a desire to broaden the formulaic boundaries of techno in particular and electronic music in general — a desire further sparked on hearing well-arranged ’70s- and ’80s-tinged tracks by the likes of Metro Area.

"Walter and I were both kids of the ’80s," says Kammermeier, who grew up with a jazz musician father and guitar- and piano-playing siblings, while Merziger was raised by a Richard Wagner–loving father. "Anything that came out of England — Soft Cell, the Smiths, Depeche Mode — was very influential to us." Last year the duo’s ’80s influences came full circle when Booka Shade remixed and shared concert bills with the last group. And it turns out Kammermeier is listening to Soft Cell again, having recently downloaded both their underrated aggro 1984 finale, This Last Night in Sodom, which includes early studio work by the influential producer Flood, and their 1983 sophomore effort, The Art of Falling Apart. "I just listened to [Art] again," Kammermeier admits. "There’s so much frustration and darkness in those songs."

THE ART OF COMING TOGETHER


There’s so much frustration that it might seep into Booka Shade’s sound, if song titles are worthwhile clues. One single from The Art of Falling Apart was the club ho litany "Numbers," and it turns out the first single from Booka Shade’s next full-length recording will bear the same name. "We want to introduce a vocal side on the next album," Kammermeier says when describing "Numbers" and some of the group’s other songs, including a track created by Merziger in a Rio hotel room. "We’ll introduce it in a different way — not verse-chorus vocal but little parts that we perform. We’re not great fans of these ‘featured artist’ albums, where people just get a handful of star vocalists to perform on different tracks. Also, we can’t bring a bunch of vocalists or a session vocalist on the road."

That said, Booka Shade do aim to put their show on the road in the old-school sense — an ambitious plan at a time when many of the best electronic music makers are still better off DJing than pulling rock star poses on a stage. "People always ask what instrument I play, and I say, ‘I’m one of those guys who hangs out with musicians — I’m a drummer,’ " Kammermeier jokes. He’ll have to put that joke into practice as he and Merziger embark on their second US tour — and maybe he’ll write and record some songs while in flight as well. *

BOOKA SHADE

With Future Force and Hours of Worship

March 23, 9 p.m., $14 advance

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

www.getphysical.com

For a top 10 list from Booka Shade’s Get Physical labelmate Chelonis R. Jones, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

SF Port to Vote (and maybe cash in) on the Trans Bay Cable

-
0

By JB Powell

Tomorrow could be ‘show me the money’ day for the SF Port Commission. Commissioners there will vote on the Trans Bay Cable, a privately financed, $300 million power cord that would run underwater from Pittsburg. For weeks, staff members from the port as well as various other city agencies have been hammering out the details of a community benefits package with the cable’s developer, Australian financial firm, Babcock and Brown. The Guardian has obtained a staff report with details of the proposed benefits package. Several officials had already told us it was “significant” and they were right. If the deal goes through, the port will reap millions in rent and licensing fees, a needed cash-infusion for the strapped agency. The package also includes hefty sums for waterfront open space and, in perhaps the biggest news for the city, millions of dollars for the SF Public Utilities Commission. The SFPUC plans to use the funds to bankroll sustainable energy projects, including solar, wind, and tidal initiatives.
Why the largesse? Many of the cable’s shore-side facilities would be on port land. That means Babcock and Brown needs port commission approval before the project can move on to the last local regulatory step, the Board of Supervisors. If the cable goes through, it would plug the city’s electrical grid into 400 megawatts of power from plants in and around Pittsburg. But green power advocates claim the “59 mile extension cord” would be a “waste of resources.” Their biggest fear is that bringing all those relatively cheap megawatts into the city from fossil-fuel burning plants across the bay will derail the city’s plans to rely on more eco-friendly energy.
But the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) insists the city needs the cable or it will see blackouts in the future. Cal-ISO is the “public benefit corporation” in charge of the state’s grid. Sources in and around city hall have described the bind local leaders are in: they would rather look to greener power projects to solve the city’s energy needs, but electricity can be the third rail of California politics. Just ask Gray Davis. So, in an attempt to have their megawatts and eat them too, staff from the mayor’s office and several supervisors, as well as the port and SFPUC, pushed hard for the best “benefits package” they could get from the developer. It remains to be seen if the money for renewable energy projects will placate the activist community. Stay tuned to the Guardian for more coverage on the issue in the coming weeks.

SF Port to Vote (and maybe cash in) on the Trans Bay Cable

-
1

By JB Powell

Tomorrow could be ‘show me the money’ day for the SF Port Commission. Commissioners there will vote on the Trans Bay Cable, a privately financed, $300 million power cord that would run underwater from Pittsburg. For weeks, staff members from the port as well as various other city agencies have been hammering out the details of a community benefits package with the cable’s developer, Australian financial firm, Babcock and Brown. The Guardian has obtained a staff report with details of the proposed benefits package. Several officials had already told us it was “significant” and they were right. If the deal goes through, the port will reap millions in rent and licensing fees, a needed cash-infusion for the strapped agency. The package also includes hefty sums for waterfront open space and, in perhaps the biggest news for the city, millions of dollars for the SF Public Utilities Commission. The SFPUC plans to use the funds to bankroll sustainable energy projects, including solar, wind, and tidal initiatives.
Why the largesse? Many of the cable’s shore-side facilities would be on port land. That means Babcock and Brown needs port commission approval before the project can move on to the last local regulatory step, the Board of Supervisors. If the cable goes through, it would plug the city’s electrical grid into 400 megawatts of power from plants in and around Pittsburg. But green power advocates claim the “59 mile extension cord” would be a “waste of resources.” Their biggest fear is that bringing all those relatively cheap megawatts into the city from fossil-fuel burning plants across the bay will derail the city’s plans to rely on more eco-friendly energy.
But the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) insists the city needs the cable or it will see blackouts in the future. Cal-ISO is the “public benefit corporation” in charge of the state’s grid. Sources in and around city hall have described the bind local leaders are in: they would rather look to greener power projects to solve the city’s energy needs, but electricity can be the third rail of California politics. Just ask Gray Davis. So, in an attempt to have their megawatts and eat them too, staff from the mayor’s office and several supervisors, as well as the port and SFPUC, pushed hard for the best “benefits package” they could get from the developer. It remains to be seen if the money for renewable energy projects will placate the activist community. Stay tuned to the Guardian for more coverage on the issue in the coming weeks.

Noise ‘N’ Pop

-
0

The line outside Mezzaninelast night may have been ridiculously long (the hidden cost of “free” admission), and the venue may have reeked of body odor (or cheap weed?), but both were worth the entertaining, irreverent kick off to a week of Noise Pop fun. We were immediately heartened that we all got in, even though I was the only one who’d registered online, and that the DJ was playing catchy, pseudo-indie (since what does “indie” mean anymore, anyway?) classics like the Ramones and Violent Femmes between sets. harmar2.JPG

And though there was plenty of hipster eye candy, the place was noticeably devoid of the pretentiousness one might expect from an event headed by uber-underground-cult-favorites Tapes n Tapes. No, we were all equally, geekily excited by the Extra Action Marching Band (your high school half-time show meets Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with tattooed tuba players and provocative pom pom girls … and boys)tuba.JPG, comedian David Cross (managing to simultaneously deliver and skewer sponsor Doc Martens’ marketing message – “Change the world, starting by buying these shoes…”), and one man freakshow – and talented vocalist and performer – Har Mar Superstar (whose mantra “I’m fucking awesome” is so ironic, it’s actually true).

The highlight of the night, though, was Tapes ‘N’ Tapes, all humble and sweet and soft-bodied and dorky, just like a proper indie band should be. The sound up front was a bit too loud and distorted for my taste (I hear the music sounded perfect from the bathroom), but the band’s energy mostly made up for it — and Cowbell was perfect: raw and lilting, just like I like it.

Mmmmm….poppy goodness at its noisiest. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the week serves up.

P.S. More photos to come…

(By Molly Freedenberg)

Noisepop cracks up: trading jibes with Patton Oswalt

-
0

Our little bundle of noise is almost all grown up. Damning the brooding tradition of adolescence, Noise Pop has learned to laugh at itself — and anything that involves swigging beer and heckling Patton Oswalt without a two-drink minimum sounds like pure fucking genius to me. I recently spoke to Oswalt on the phone from Burbank. After soaking in enough indie to keep you cloaked in scene points until next year, you may want to check out his act alongside fellow comedians Brian Posehn and Marian Bamford. (K. Tighe)

SFBG You’ve been gigging at indie rock venues for a while — and now you are getting booked at festivals such as Noise Pop and Coachella. A lot of bands must be pissed off at you.

PATTON OSWALT Getting invited to these things is really flattering, but my rider’s still simple. As long as there is old scotch, I’m fine.

SFBG Have you ever been to the Noise Pop festival?

PO No, but I’m really excited. I’ve only ever listened to Genesis, so I’m hoping to discover new stuff.

SFBG You used to live in San Francisco. Are there any old haunts you still frequent when you play here?

PO I have about 10 old haunts. They are all Starbucks now.

SFBG El Farolito or Cancun?

PO La Cumbre all the way. They are mighty, mighty, mighty, and they’ve never fallen.

SFBG Your San Francisco act is always incredibly liberal — how much do you need to alter your political material from city to city?

PO I don’t have a tailored act. I trust the audiences to rise to the occasion. There are more and more pockets of resistance everywhere. Besides, the things I say aren’t all that outrageous compared to what is actually going on.

SFBG Any early thoughts on the 2008 presidential race?

PO I’m saying it now: the Democratic ticket will be Mickey Rourke and the original lineup of Journey.

COMEDIANS OF COMEDY

Sun/4, 5:30 and 8:30 p.m., $24

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

MORE NOISE POP PICKS

FEB. 28

DAMIEN JURADO


At a recent gig in Seattle, Damien Jurado recounted an interview with a French journalist who had asked him if folk music was the new grunge. The singer-songwriter dismissed the question, but it was clear he was as comfortable cracking wise as he is creating the bleak portraits and doleful characters that inhabit his songs. Jurado’s latest release is not new but a reissue of Gathered in Song (Made in Mexico), which was originally put to tape in 1999 by friend and fellow plaintive songwriter David Bazan. Three months older though still freshly minted is And Now That I’m in Your Shadow (Secretly Canadian), a milestone recording with Jurado’s first permanent band, including cellist Jenna Conrad and percussionist-guitarist Eric Fisher. Here the trio essays the same lyrical and windswept landscapes that dominate Jurado’s discography, though gone are the upbeat pop numbers that have peppered past albums. The result is at once tender and forlorn. John Vanderslice headlines; the Submarines and Black Fiction also perform. (Nathan Baker)

8 p.m. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. $14. (415) 771-1421

MARCH 1

TRAINWRECK RIDERS


Despite critical acclaim for their latest album, Lonely Road Revival (Alive), Trainwreck Riders remain as down-home as their sound. Proof the San Francisco boys haven’t gone Hollywood yet: vocalist Andrew Kerwin still works at Amoeba in the city, and the band recently got arrested and Tasered by Houston police at a show with former labelmates Two Gallants. Songs such as "In and Out of Love" combine roots rock, punk, and country that sound familiar, retro, and refreshing all at once. The harmonica in "Christmas Time Blues" makes me want to flee to my favorite dive bar to sulk, even on a good day. (Elaine Santore)

9 p.m. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. $12. (415) 861-2011

MARCH 2

DAVID DONDERO


If ever there were a diamond in the indie rock rough, it is David Dondero. National Public Radio named him one of the 10 best living songwriters, but he still tours in his truck and has probably served you pints at Casanova. Nick Drake may have lamented that "fame is but a fruit tree," but he checked out long before his notoriety took root and grew. Dondero, on the other hand, has worked for years in relative obscurity. His latest effort, South of the South (Team Love), was bankrolled by Conor Oberst, an overdue invitation to the feast from a man who freely admits to copping Dondero’s style. Jolie Holland headlines; St. Vincent opens. (Baker)

9 p.m. Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $20. (415) 346-6000

TED LEO AND THE PHARMACISTS


Naming your band is one of the early hurdles for any would-be rock star. Ted Leo and his mates had a stroke of genius the day they alighted on the Pharmacists, arguably trumping even the Beatles for best tongue-in-cheek rock ‘n’ roll pun. Not that ingenuity is lacking in this outfit, which packs as much fevered punk energy into a four-minute tune as a mitochondrion does into a cell. For those who slept through freshman biology, that’s the part of a cell that, among other things, processes adrenaline. And anyone who has ever attended a Leo show is all too familiar with this chemical. (Baker)

8 p.m. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. $18. (415) 885-0750

MARCH 4

CAKE


The genre-bending Sacramento band known for funky arrangements, monotone vocals, droll lyrics, and a whole set of cabaret, country, and soul cover songs (including Gloria Gaynor’s "I Will Survive" and Black Sabbath’s "War Pigs") finishes Noise Pop with characteristic verve and vibraslap. This indie-turned-mainstream-turned-indie quartet has gotten increasingly political in recent years — check out the band’s Web site (www.cakemusic.com) if you want to see what I mean — so expect some social commentary with your catchy ditties. It’s also worth showing up for the textured pop sound and cheeky lyrics of opening band the Boticcellis; Money Mark and Scrabbel also perform. (Molly Freedenberg)

7:30 p.m. Bimbo’s 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, SF. $25. (415) 474-0365

>

Feeling the spirit

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Yeah, I was a club kid once. It’s a bit of a blur, but somehow somewhere in the ’90s I went from punk and indie to baggy pants and glow sticks in the flick of a switch. I put away my Fall records and picked up endless white-label 12-inches and compilation CDs with titles like Ultimate Techno Explosion. Or something to that effect. Like I said, it’s a blur. I remember the dancing, though — suddenly my punk ass liked to shake! It’s a shame most of my indie friends chose to stay behind, but this was the ’90s. In those days, never the twain shall meet….

It’s now a full decade later, and — finally! — the indie kids are cutting loose without fear of bruising their street cred, thanks to artists such as the Rapture, !!!, and LCD Soundsystem. Turns out rock and dance music don’t have to be mutually exclusive terms. Need further proof? Take Austin’s finest ambassadors of electropunk mania, Ghostland Observatory. The duo — composed of vocalist-guitarist Aaron Behrens and keyboardist-drummer Thomas Ross Turner — whip up a mighty frenzy of swaggering rawk bravado and delirious vocal acrobatics delivered with a come-hither fluster over sweltering beds of booty-bouncing beats. Music for getting hot and bothered, certainly — or maybe songs for unleashing demons. Take your pick.

"We’re two entirely different people," Turner says, chuckling, over the phone from the Texas capital, in explanation of how their quite dissimilar influences have coalesced into the flipped disco of 2005’s delete.delete.i.eat.meat and last year’s Paparazzi Lightning (both Trashy Moped Recordings). "Aaron’s more into the rock showman thing — people like Prince and Freddie Mercury. For me, Daft Punk pretty much are my heroes — they got me into electronic music and club culture. That’s where we’re each coming from."

They might be coming from different places, but their destination is clearly shared, as evidenced on Paparazzi Lightning. Picture an evening of unbridled debauchery — one in which a club night teeters on the brink of collapse — condensed into 35 frantic minutes, and you’re on your way to understanding the Ghostland Observatory vision. Behrens can clearly work a room into whatever mood he sees fit, whether through stomping and yowling with wanton glee on the thundering "All You Rock and Rollers" and "Ghetto Magnet," or the seething taunts of "Move with Your Lover." Meanwhile, Turner effortlessly guides us on the emotional travelogue of a never-ending night, flashing away with the urgency of red-carpet paparazzi as he peppers the album with synth shrieks, squelches, and Daft Punk–worthy rhythms.

Asked about their live shows, Turner gives fair warning: "It’s really nonstop. We just give and give until everybody’s wiped out and goes home." All right, indie rockers and club kids — you heard the man. Better start stocking up on energy drinks. *

GHOSTLAND OBSERVATORY

With Honeycut, the Gray Kid, and Landshark

March 3, 9 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

(415) 625-8880

>

Another problem with Googlink Wifi

-
0

By Tim Redmond

Or maybe I should call it Earthgoo.

Either way, Sasha at Leftinsf has a good summary of the pros and cons of the mayor’s plan. I’ve been following this for a while, and my analsyis (no surprise) has always been based on the notion that the city shouldn’t allow a private vendor to build and control such critical infrastrucutre.

But there’s another issue here. Sarah Phelan gets into it here. Sasha puts it this way:

The network will be exclusive. Although the network is not an explicit monopoly, it will essentially take up all the bandwidth at the frequency wi-fi uses, so it would be difficult or impossible to have a competing network without using a completely different (and likely more expensive) technology.

Think about this for a second. San Francisco is full of all sorts of little (and not-so-little) wi-fi networks. SFLAN, for example, is building a free wifi service with a rooftop-to-rooftop backbone. Lots of people have smaller wi-fi setups that let them, for example, sit out in their backyards with a laptop and check their email. And if Googlink puts up its private wi-fi cloud, all of those other networks will run into interference.

I’m not an expert on the technical details here, but Tim Pozar, who runs United Layer, is, and here’s how he explaned it to me:

“The type of spectrum we’re using is interference-prone. There’s just not that much space on the spectrum. The number of access points that are required [to set up citywide wi-fi] could mean one every block. That’s a lot of radio frequency energy. It will significantly impact others who are trying to use that same part of the spectrum.”

If your entire wi-fi network is inside your house or business, it might be okay, since these radio signals degrade quite a bit when they pass through walls. If you use wi-fi outside, or if it connects to anyone else outside, it might not work any more. Same goes for a cordless phone.

The problem, Posar told me, is that federal law pretty much forces you to accept interference on the wi-fi spectrum; there’s nothing legally you can do to stop a big operator from stepping on little guys.

the Googlink system won’t be that fast — but if anyone else wants to get into the game and offer something better, it will be nearly impossible.

If the city were controlling this, we could do something about it. But it will all be in the hands of a private corporation.

Bush and the Hetch Hetchy mystery: Who do you suppose put that mysterious pro-PG&E line in Bush’s $2.9 trillion budget?

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, there it was in the Chuck Squatriglia story in the Feb. 7 Chronicle: the mystery story with the mystery headline: “Hetch Hetchy line in Bush’s budget blasted.”

The lead continued the mystery story with a mystery lead: “A single line deep within President Bush’s $2.9 trillion federal budget has renewed the debate over draining the Hetch Hetchy Valley and returning it to its natural state.”

The second paragraph added some mysterious detail to the mystery: “The president set aside $7 million within the National Park Service budget to ‘support Hetch Hetchy restoration studies’ that would explore the environmental and recreational benefits of draining a reservoir that provides water for 2.4 million Bay Area residents.”

In the second to last paragraph in the story was yet another mysterious paragraph that added to the mystery: “No one at the Department of Interior or within the Park Service or the Office of Management and Budget, which compiles the president’s budget proposal, could say who included the Hetch Hetchy item in the spending plan or why.”

Gosh, golly, gee: How in the world did a line asking for funds to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley get into the federal budget of one of the most anti-environment presidents of all time? The Chronicle and everyone else who covered the story without gulping, including the Sacramento Bee/McClatchy papers and their self-immolating tear-it-down-and-damn-the-consequences position. could not come up with the answer. Nobody even seemed to try or disclosed who they called or what anybody told them or indicated how hard the papers tried to tackle this tough Washington story with a big local angle. Nor did the papers call anybody from the public power forces to see if they had a clue or a comment.

Well, we have a clue. Bush is no sudden born again environmentalist and he doesn’t really give a damn about opening up a dammed up valley in a national park. “But,” as our Wednesday editorial states, “he’s a hell of a privatizer, and supports almost anything that shifts public resources into the hands of profit-making companies. And blasting the city’s water and hydropower dam into dust would be a huge favor to one of the nation’s largest private power companies–and a huge blow to public-power efforts in San Francisco.”

The federal Raker Act that allowed San Francisco to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley for water also mandated that the dam generate electricity, and that the cheap power be sold to the residents and businesses of the city as a public alternative to PG&E’s private monopoly. Thus, PG&E would be the biggest beneficiary of any restoration project.

Once again, I am curious why the restore Hetch Hetchy forces are so adamant on restoring Hetch Hetchy, but seemingly not as interested in other major environmental issues. Why do they not put at least comparable energy into saving and taking back the Presidio? Or properly funding the other major longtime maintenance problems at Yosemite? Or helping stop the moves to privatize the national park system and other public assets? Or moving to stop and/or criticize and confront the many moves of the Bush administration to turn back the clock on the environment and environmental protections?

All of these issues, let me emphasize, are not important to PG&E and its allies except to help PG&E’s astroturf green campaign to stop the inroads of public power and enforcement of the Raker Act to bring our own Hetch Hetchy public power to our own people in San Francisco. Repeating for emphasis: PG&E would be the major beneficiary of any restoration project. Anybody have any other suggestions or ideas? B3

Professional note to Hearst corporate in New York via Chronicle/Hearst publisher Frank Vega and Editor Phil Bronstein: Isn’t it about time, after all these decades of abject Hearst obeisance to PG&E, to allow your reporters and editors in San Francisco to tell the truth and do the real story about the PG&E/Raker Act scandal. (See Guardian stories and editorials going back to the pioneering story of Professor Joe Neilands in the l969 Guardian). B3, who is for restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley only after public power and real environmental reform come to San Francisco under the public power mandates of the Raker Act and a U.S.Supreme Court decision, much more to come, stay alert

P.S. Ever wonder why the Washington press corp and the mainstream media couldn’t figure out what Bush was up to with his propaganda march into Iraq? And why they now are having so much trouble with those anonymous military sources who are now beating the tom toms about Iran influence in Iraq? Go back and read this story again and follow our coverage on what we consider to be the biggest scandal in U.S. history involving a city. The PG@E/Raker Act scandal is also, let me emphasize, one of the most censored stories in U.S. history. Details to come.

Idle question: do you suppose those “competitive” Dean Singleton papers down the Peninsula, in the East Bay, in Marin, all over the place, will pick up on the mystery and figure it out?

SFBG ONLINE: Bush’s big favor to PG&E

Modesto Bee-Hetch Hetchy Editorials

San Francisco lovin’

-
0

Valentine’s Day date ideas
V-Day shopping guide
Complete V-Day events listings

› culture@sfbg.com

Oh! What a web of tangled flesh we postbohemian, rapidly gentrifying, pandemic-aware, pre-spray-on-condom and mint-flavored chewable RU-486 San Francitizens weave! Folks still trot out the ol’ misty-eyed cynicisms: romance is dead, sex is boring, love is impossible, "I’m too fat"…. But that doesn’t stop ’em from doing it until their knees ache when they get the winky come-on (or hoping for Mr. or Ms. Right to ease the tax burden). Sure, in the age of the Internetz, sex is now a shopping trip — just log on for huge fake tits (aisle four), smart-mouthed ghettosexuals (aisle six), muffin tops gon’ wild (aisle nine), or guys who inject a gallon of saline into their shaved balls (clean up, aisle five). No need to be a bitch or a ho — you’re already both on the webcam, dude. Don’t forget your password.

But still. Love exists, right? Christina Aguilera tells us so. And love leads to sex. Or to real sex. Or the other way around. Something. And don’t even ask about the whole monogamy thing! Can’t it all be easier? Aren’t we robots yet? No, not yet. For good or ill we live in a magical place where impulse meets emotion in technology’s dark corner and heads upstairs with it to a small room marked "free love" ($29 an hour) — leaving behind a trail of used rubbers, hopefully. Below we delve into the sex-and-romance pros and cons of some especially San Franciscan things. Maybe it’ll help make things a little clearer. Maybe!

BEING A STRAIGHT GIRL


Carrie Bradshaw, Marissa Cooper, and Dr. Meredith Grey have their trumped-up Trumps, Shin-die schlubs, and Doc McDreamys, but what do so many straight, single women get in the Bay bohemia otherwise known as America’s gay mecca? Commitmentphobic Peter Pan–ders, crusty granola cronies who only cruise twentysomethings, workaholic geeks who seldom see the light of day (apart from the blazing orbs of Burning Man), and windburned adventurers with a never-ending thirst to mountain bike, lick that downward dog, and hike the closest REI. Face it: single straight sistahs have the toughest lot in this town. A 2004 San Francisco magazine story estimated that unmarried straight 20- to 44-year-old SF men outnumbered their female counterparts by about 12,000. But I bet most eligible gals feel — nay, know — that the ratio is weighted in the dudes’ favor. It doesn’t help that years of STD- and AIDS-inspired social conservatism seem to have spurred peeps and perps to hook up early and less often — despite our fair city’s freewheeling rep when it comes to sex roles, relationships, and gender politics. San Francisco’s single chicks sometimes find themselves wondering, "Whatever happened to dating? Where did everyone go? Is it my breath?" When one male friend told me his ex’s claim that she’s dating multiple fellahs in various NorCal cities, my bullshit detector started honking. Tell it to all the attractive, smart, independent, and nubile femme singletons I know who are sitting home Saturday nights.

Pros: Never having to worry about getting macked on at guycentric sports events, shows, and construction sites. Women are always free at the Power Exchange. There’s sisterhood in desperation. You can always join a girl gang and accost hapless men walking alone in dark parking lots. That yawning bore across the table is looking better every sec.

Cons: Dating. Shooting down poseurs who are into shopping for the pick of the litter. Resigning yourself to your anemic online-dating shopping options. And how depressing is it to go to a sex club by yourself? That yawning bore across the table is looking better every sec. (Kimberly Chun)

BEING A STRAIGHT GUY


I worked security at the Endup for four years. As a straight guy, I found myself jealous of my gay compatriots out there on the dance floor, nuts to butts, letting it all hang out. Obviously, gay men have committed, complicated, and drama-filled relationships too. But boys will be boys, and it seemed things were so much simpler and, pardon the pun, more straightforward for gay guys in San Francisco. Less of a mating ritual and more mating. It’s the classic straight guy’s lament: if women acted like dudes, I’d be getting laid right now. Or, as Michael Dean once said in a Bomb song, "The girl that I miss is just me in a dress." Still, after 15 years in San Francisco, I’m starting to see the bonuses of being single, straight, and not so young in a city known worldwide for Rice-a-Roni, sourdough bread, and buffed-out, hunky young gay guys.

Pros: At 35, I may actually be starting to enjoy dating. No one’s lugging around that "my heart was broken, and I can’t go through that again" cross anymore. We’re all adults here, and like the young, restless, and gay, we’ve gotten in touch with our biological needs. Thirtysomething Bay City rollers know they need to get off and they don’t have to meet their soul mate to do it. Sure, the roller coaster of love is one hell of a ride, but sometimes it’s enough to get Indian food, hit a bar with a good jukebox, rent a movie, go home, and fuck.

Cons: People really do get married. Which means the thirtysomething dating pool shrinks and you can end up dating someone younger. This might seem like a pro, until you try to make a pop culture reference on a date and hear crickets chirp. There’s not a lot of eye-to-eye going on when your love interest ejects Mania, by the Vibrators, to put on Green Day. (Duncan Scott Davidson)

BEING A QUEER


Oh, the burden! Straight guys think you get laid more than them. Straight girls think you get laid more than them. Both of them think you like turtlenecks and cologne. It’s horrifying! And history! Here you are over the rainbow, in the fiercely romantic-looking burg all those haters in high school screeched at you to move to, and you’re scrounging for any bit of affection you can find among the forest of online profiles and the coral reef of lopsided haircuts. Plus you’ve got billboards screaming "AIDS!" in your face on every corner. It’s enough to drive a lonely fag to the gym or a dyke to the (one) bar, if that weren’t just as fucked-up a defense mechanism as huddling with your old Smiths EPs and a tankard of Merlot in your cubby. But c’mon, at least you can walk home from your trick’s house….

Pros: Be all you can be! Journey of discovery! There’s a new opportunity around every corner. The hottest FTMs on the face of the planet. Boys aren’t wearing so much product as in 2002. Being the envy of the gay world. Invisible lipstick lesbians. Trash drag. Crystal meth played out (pretty much). Domestic partnership laws (if only …). Gay love is real (ask your serial monogamous friends). Hey, at least it’s not Chelsea!

Cons: Too many to choose from. No need to grow up. Too many bottoms. Ever-present feeling you should get more tattoos — or is that trying too hard? Everyone wants to be your fag hag. Monogamous or "negotiated"? Holier-than-thou activists, hotter-than-thou street life. "What if I’m really straight?" Knowing everyone’s as shy as you but not being able to do anything about it. (Marke B.)

OUR PLAYBOY MAYOR


What a difference a few screaming headlines make. Throw in a Scientology siren, underage cocktail gulpers, and a couple plowed society babes with fiercely straightened fright wigs and outta-hand cheekbones — and ya got yerself a mayor! All we need are some flesh-eating pigs and anesthesia-free surgery to dub this the return of the wild, wild, perhaps very wild, especially when tanked, west — a Deadwood of sorts, if that didn’t imply a kind of flaccid fumbling. Nonetheless, let’s call it the latest in a grand tradition of San Francisco’s romantic and sexual politico-explorers from days of yore — from Harvey Milk to Willie Brown — that we have Mayor Gavin Newsom finally unchained from his legal-eagle Victoria’s Secret model missus and free to allegedly cruise Cow Hollow’s finer drinking establishments after hours, as rumor has long had it. Oh, the list is long and ever growing: encompassing the CSI: Miami starlet and the city mag editor eager to vet her boy’s cover pic alike. Now comes the real test of testosterone: whether Newsom can summon that ironclad Clintonesque charm to weather the latest scandal. My question for the Gavinator: what are you doing for Valentine’s Day?

Pros: The ever-changing cast of hotties at parties and photo ops sure dresses up society pages. No more tacky Harper’s Bazaar fashion spreads. Plenty of heavily gelled, aerodynamic-looking helmet hair. The notion of a Scientologist mayor clears rooms. We can now use that hallowed line, "Is that your Plump Jack — or are you just excited to see me?" Feeling privy to the secret life of frat boys. He’s never boring.

Cons: Kennedy comparisons are starting to grate. Clinton comparisons are starting to chafe. And there’s too much chafing in general. The ever-changing cast of hotties is starting to resemble a sale crowd riding the revolving door at Neiman. Paris Hilton?! And we won’t be shocked to see Britney Spears stumbling out of a mayoral Four Seasons suite next. He’s so predictably not boring that it’s starting to get tiresome. (Kimberly Chun)

OLD HIPPIES


You see them everywhere but mainly on the Muni and at medical marijuana rallies. Some of them look saintly but a little crazed, as if they see a spaceship in your hair. Others resemble your sexy-yet-matronly high school French teacher, smiling indulgently but always ready to rap your knuckles with a day-old baguette if you get your future perfects wrong. Still others seem like they can’t wait to explode with rage at … well, anything, really. All of them are lovable in a historical light. When they’re off their meds — not so much. They’re living monuments to the golden age of free love, and, as medical science advances and rent-control laws stand, they’re not going away anytime soon. (Can young people afford to move here anymore anyway?) They also have a world of sensual knowledge to impart.

Pros: Mother figures, father figures, lusty lovers, spiritual guides — these Baudelairean kickers against the pricks can do it all — and they bake a mean hash brownie to get it all started. Plus: years of experimentation have made them freaky. You may have to crank up the solar defibrillator, but they’re experts in how to "get your motor running."

Cons: Occasional bad-trip flashbacks. Always slightly wary. Strawberry-scented oxygen tanks. Pillow talk = Allen Ginsberg stories. Hairy. Half tantric. Forgot if they put out candles. Ponytail or braid can get caught in teeth. (Marke B.)

BURNING MAN FLINGS


Burning Man is a sexual and emotional cauldron. Liberally mix together a world of sensory delights, a spirit of reckless abandon, beautiful exposed bodies everywhere, sudden sandstorms that send you scurrying into the nearest tent or trailer, countless peak experiences, exposure to a myriad of lifestyles and communities, and 40,000 people with time on their hands, goodwill in their hearts, and lust in their loins, and it’s no surprise that people end up hooking up left and right. This place oozes sexual energy while stripping away our emotional defenses and leaving us exposed to Cupid’s arrows.

Pros: Whatever you want, it’s here, often with no strings attached. When people come back from the playa all blissed-out and saying how it changed their lives, that’s usually not just the drugs talking. People do things they wouldn’t do in the everyday world — and then they do it again and again. And if you follow the sound advice of veteran burners to leave your expectations at home and just be open to the experience, then you’re also in the ideal place to not just get laid but truly find love. Believe it or not, I know of lots of lasting, loving marriages between people who met on the playa.

Cons: All the things that make Burning Man so conducive to sex and romance can also create problems. People get emotionally splayed by the often overwhelming nature of daily life on the playa. They’re vulnerable to everything from small slights that get exaggerated to the predators who invariably exist in any town. Couples get tested. Singles can at times feel lonely and desperate. Everybody has a few hard mornings after. And as a practical matter, dust gets everywhere — and I mean everywhere. (Steven T. Jones)

LUSTY LADIES


The Bay has a long and luxuriously twisted history of female sexual empowerment, full of Brights, Queens, Dodas, Califias, Blanks, Chos, and other sparkling heroines of don’t-do-it-and-die philosophy — some of whom have gone on to become heroes, even. The two major, classic phalanxes of gyno-horno-positivism to have arisen from the mists of all that groundwork are the Lusty Lady and Good Vibrations. The Lady, currently a worker-owned stripper co-op, has been baring a broad variety of intelligent, worldly-wise physical types for almost 30 years, and Good Vibrations, a women-centered chain of erotica shops that offer a plethora of workshops and training sessions for both women and men, has helped make vibrators the Tupperware of the new millennium. Despite the ubiquity of silicone enhancements and Girls Gone Wild antics in today’s culture, the Lusty Lady and Good Vibrations try to keep it real by focusing on the pleasures inherent in strong, natural femininity. In an era when guys are being forced like never before to question their physical attributes and sexual virility, thanks to size-queen porn and erectile dysfunction spam, the gals — who’ve had to deal with that kind of shit forever — may have a bit of an upper hand, self-image-wise, thanks in part to these two affirming San Francisco institutions. Not that it’s a competition.

Pros: Lusty Lady’s the best place to take your gay friends for a fabulous girls’ night out. Everything I know about labias I learned from Good Vibrations.

Cons: I have to hand-wash all my plates because my dishwasher’s usually full of Good Vibrations dildos. I have to hand-wash all my clothes because I spend all my quarters in the booths at the Lusty Lady. (Marke B.)

PORN AND TECHNOLOGY


Right up the Peninsula from Silicon Valley, we find ourselves in techie heaven. Most of the global advances in online technology burst first and foremost from our fertile area. The bust and boom that locked the Bay in a violent coital grasp in the early ’00s exhausted us, but Web 2.0’s got us all atingle again. This time we’re sure we won’t make the same mistakes. We’ll keep it social, we’ll keep it personal. Most of all, we’ll keep it sexual. Thanks to advances in digital production and online distribution — and our wondrously pervy nature (not to mention our desirable market) — the porn industry in San Francisco has exploded. The city is now home to a majority of the biggest gay porn companies and quite a few straight and fetish ones.

The most barefaced manifestation of the lucrative intersection of porn and technology is the purchase of the ginormous Armory in the Mission by fetish header Kink.com to house its offices, studios, and online operations. (Personally, I can’t wait for them to open a Kink Café in there as well. St. Andrew’s croissandwich, anyone?) This may be a harbinger of things to come. We’re not exactly holding our collective breath for Bang Bus to take over the LucasArts HQ in the Presidio or for the former Candlestick Park to be rechristened Naked Sword Arena — but hey, it could happen. Alas, the fortuitous marriage of porn and technology may be about to hit the skids. Hi-def can reveal a whole lot of ass pimples and nipple lifts — Blu-ray killed the porn star? Then again, it might just provide more employment opportunities for digital touch-up artists. "Hey, man, what’s your new gig?" "I’m rastarizing Busty Fillips’s underarm stretch marks — full-time, plus benefits." Local HMOs are lining up.

The ever-rising tide of digital wonders raises more sensual — and sensitive — boats than porn, however. While no one’s yet perfected the vibrator–cell phone (what ringtone would I put on that? Oh yeah, Beyoncé), rest assured that some little tech elf is working fiendishly away in his or her bright pink laboratory to bring that dream to fruition. Which brings us to the new iPhone. It may not be dildo-ready, exactly — watch that touch screen! — but some of its romantic applications were immediately apparent on its unveiling here in January. What other piece of handheld technology allows a person to be rejected in so many different medias at once? Now when you want to break up with someone, you can call them, text them, and e-mail them all at the same time. Plus, you can share a break-up song on iTunes with them and even throw in a YouTube clip of yourself gently weeping to show how torn up you are inside (clip must be less than 10 minutes in duration and not imitative of copyrighted material). Send a slide show! Skype an e-card! Use PayPal to buy them a "Just Got iDumped" mug on eBay! The possibilities are infinite.

Now if only there were software that could mend a broken heart. Sigh.

Pros: Online hookups? No problem: anywhere, anytime. You don’t have to be physically present to enjoy an entire relationship. Everyone’s a winner: people unable to afford the latest gadget or upgrade get to feel more real. Soon everyone in the city will have a job at Kink.com.

Cons: Much of the Bay population is more interested in staying up all night with a two-liter of Coke, a cold pizza, and a roomful of servers than a warm body. Web 2.0 has brought a horny flood of freshly flush Googlers, Tubers, Diggers, ‘Spacers, and Mac heads on the make to already packed and overpriced Mission bars (watch for those hybrid Tundras parked on the median). You will literally go blind if you jack off to video iPod porn in the bathroom stall at work — that screen’s so small! Soon everyone in San Francisco will have a job at Kink.com. (Marke B.)

More than the affair

-
0

EDITORIAL OK: let’s put this all in perspective.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble.

He has just admitted to having a drinking problem and is going to seek "treatment" — although it’s not clear at all what that means, except that he won’t be entering a residential center.

The heart of the scandal was just an affair — yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem (and something most of corporate America put an end to 20 years ago) — but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse, and the world will keep turning. It seemed silly to us to call on Newsom to resign over that, just as it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

But there’s a much bigger problem here.

For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco isn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many), Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported in "Mayor Chicken" (1/10/07), he never attends public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet, and the glitterati at Davos, Switzerland — but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our Jan. 10 cover story, "the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites, and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t established in advance."

And whether we like it or not, this latest "lapse in judgment" — and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly — is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. The mayor’s latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as a symptom of his shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

We wish Newsom well in his battle with alcoholism. But for the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about), he’d be better off announcing he isn’t going to run for reelection now.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career — plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

Newsom says right now that he’s staying in the race, but he’s clearly wounded; that air of political invulnerability has taken a hit. When a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks typically start to circle. That hasn’t happened yet; if anything, over the past few days, the highest-profile potential contenders have been pretty quiet about taking Newsom on.

But somebody has to do it. That’s never been clearer.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who has the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously. *

Newsom’s dodge

-
0

By Chris Albon
Mayor Gavin Newsom is still dodging questions about his affair with his campaign manager’s wife and his alcohol problem, even as masses of reporters show up at his public appearances, such as today’s event touting a PG&E program.
The small press conference at the Academy of Art University on San Francisco’s new $11.5 million Energy Watch program, sponsored primarily by PG&E, was Newsom’s first event since he announced yesterday that he was seeking treatment for alcohol abuse at Delancey Street Foundation.
Newsom was 15 minutes late and a small crowd of reporters were anxiously loitering and watcing every Lincoln Town car that crept through lunchtime traffic. When the limo finally arrived, Newsom locked in a smile, looked forward, and walked in the building to PG&E’s display table of high-tech light bulbs.
The mood was tense and the event’s organizers and the mayor’s staff seemed skeptical that the media was there to get information on the plan to distribute more energy efficient light bulbs to small businesses.
“I know many of you are here because you care so deeply about climate change,” was how Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San Francisco department of the environment, expressed his cynicism.
When Blumenfeld introduced Newsom to speak, the room was awkwardly quiet. No one applauded.
“Thank you everyone, for the applause,” Newsom said. Only then did the small crowd applaud.
After his speech on the new plan, the mayor did take questions, but he was not going to dive into the affair or his alcohol problem.
“Any more questions,” Newsom asked adding, “on this issue?” before it was too late.
As the mayor walked out, I thought it a perfectly appropriate and respectful question to ask the mayor “if there was going to be a time when he would take questions on his alcoholism or his affair,” but apparently he didn’t agree.
“You’ve taken liberty with the question,” he said.
I took that as a “no.” Maybe I should have asked why a mayor who purports to support public power was helping to prop up PG&E’s aggressive greenwashing efforts. Next time.

Singleton buys another daily paper and further locks up the Bay Area market .Where’s the U.S. Attorney General and the California Attorney General?

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so it comes to pass that Dean Singleton, already weighted down with 56 daily newspapers and l20 non-dailies in l3 states, including a virtual monopoly of the Bay Area daily market, is buying the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The story in the San Jose Mercury News/Singleton paper is a snapshot of how things stand in California journalism.The announcement came from out of state (Singleton himself from his Denver headquarters). The paper was bought in a quick shuffle aimed at giving Singleton an even tighter lock on the Bay Area market: Ottaway of New York, a subsidiary of Dow Jones, sells to another New York-based firm (Community Newspaper Holdings Inc) two months ago. And then CNHI sells to Singleton and Singleton says without blushing in a house press release, “We are delighted to accquire the Santa Cruz Sentinel and expand our reach in this very competitive region. The Sentinel is a fine newspaper today but it will be strengthened by the resources of our existing papers.” Chop, chop, whack, whack.

Technically, the Sentinel will be acquired by a Singleton-controlled entity called the California Newspaper Partnership, with the Gannett chain headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, and Stephens Media, out of Las Vegas and Little Rock, Arkansas, as the remaining partners. Meanwhile, as the newly unsealed federal court documents show, Singleton out of Denver and Hearst out of New York have been collaborating on several levels and Hearst is now a major investor with Singleton and helping finance his acquisitions.

This is Singleton’s modus operandi: he doesn’t compete, he clusters and collaborates. I once asked him, back when the old Hearst Examiner was up for sale, why he didn’t come to town and buy it. “Dean,” I said, “come to San Francisco and compete with the Chronicle and we’ll make a real man out of you.” Nope, he replied in five words, “Too much energy, no profit.” And that was that. In short, Singleton and his “competitors” are now partners and there will be no real daily newspaper competition in the Bay area. Why is the only major impediment to this monopoly mess Clint Reilly and his attorneys Joe Alioto and Dan Shulman? Where is the outrage?

Repeating: where is the U.S. Attorney General and the California Attorney General as the monopoly noose of ever more conservative newspapers tightens on one of the world’s most liberal and civilized areas?
Not a peep from former AG Bill Lockyer, who lived under the thumb of Singleton in Hayward with the Hayward Review, and not a peep from current AG Jerrry Brown, who lives under the Singleton thumb in Oakland with the
Tribune and an East Bay monopoly now stretching all the way south to Santa Cruz and Monterey and north to Vallejo. Thank God there are three lively alternative newspapers in the area: the Santa Cruz Good Times and the Santa Cruz Metro and the Monterey County Weekly in nearby Seaside. There’s now even more for them to do. B3

The Mercury News: MN owner acquires Santa Cruz newspaper

More than the affair

-
0

OK: Let’s all stop and take a deep breath.

Gavin Newsom did something almost unbelievably, incalculably stupid. He’s in a lot of political and possibly legal trouble. But in the end, it was just an affair – yes, an affair with a subordinate, which is a real problem, but nobody’s dead, he hasn’t started a war, the city isn’t about to collapse and the world will keep turning. It’s silly to talk about Newsom resigning over this, the same was it was silly for the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton over an Oval Office blow job.

Besides, there’s a much bigger problem here.

————————————————

For months, long before this tawdry story made the front pages, it’s been clear that the mayor of San Francisco wasn’t focused on the job. For whatever reason (and there may be many reasons) Newsom has been checked out for quite some time now. As we reported Jan 10, he never does public events that haven’t been carefully scripted. His relations with the Board of Supervisors are damaged beyond repair. He’s offering absolutely nothing in the way of leadership on the murder epidemic, the housing crisis, Muni’s meltdown, or much of anything else. He’s had plenty of time for glamour and glitz, for movie stars, rides on the Google corporate jet and the glitterati at Davos – but not much energy for the gritty reality on the streets of his city.

He is, we noted in our cover story, “the imperious press release mayor, smiling for the cameras, quick with his sound bites and utterly unwilling to engage in any public discussion whose outcome isn’t determined in advance.”

And whether we like it or not, this latest “lapse in judgment” – and Newsom’s embarrassing failure to deal with it properly – is only going to make things worse.

To be blunt, for a lot of reasons that have little to do with this week’s tabloid sensation, we don’t see how Gavin Newsom can effectively run San Francisco for another four years. This latest mess isn’t a scandal as much as it’s a symptom of Newsom’s shaky grip on the frighteningly tricky world of high-stakes politics. He’s acting like a dizzy kid at a rock-star party who doesn’t have the maturity to handle what’s coming at him. Even his close allies have warned us that the wheels are coming off his administration. It’s not even clear that he wants to be mayor.

For the good of the city (and the causes he claims to care about) he’d be better off announcing now that he isn’t going to run for re-election.

That wouldn’t be the end of his political career – plenty of people (John Burton comes to mind) have taken some time off from politics to deal with their personal lives, and come back much stronger. It might be the best thing Newsom could do for himself.

——————————————————

If Newsom stays in the race, he will quickly (and for perhaps all the wrong reasons) be seen as deeply politically vulnerable. And when a local politician is looking bloodied, the sharks start to circle. The potential for a feeding frenzy – with half a dozen or more politicians who suddenly see City Hall Room 200 beckoning starting to jockey for support and stab each other in the back – is all too real. That’s a bad way for progressives to proceed.

Running for mayor is serious business, and if there’s going to be a strong candidate challenging Newsom on the issues, the left needs to think about who it ought to be. Who has the experience and skills to take on the campaign? Who can appeal to a wide enough group of voters to win? Who as the sort of record and platform that progressives can support and unite around?

Those discussions need to start soon. But they need to be deliberate and thoughtful. Newsom’s political (and yes, personal) failures have given progressives an opening. There’s a chance to elect a mayor who really represents San Francisco values, in deeds as well as words. Let’s take it seriously.

Drama mama

-
1

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Relationships can suck sometimes. You know, the drama — the toxic chewing at the meat of a romance on the verge of imploding. Your nerves may feel destroyed after going a dozen rounds in an all-night bender over some questionable glance or wry crack, but love’s hang-ups do make for the best songs.

Take it from Des Ark’s Aimée Argote: she has no qualms about expressing herself and is no stranger to confronting her demons through song. A listen to the melancholic lyrics that escape from the Durham, N.C., native’s raspy voice on her band’s recent split EP with Ben Davis and the Jetts, Battle of the Beards (Lovitt), makes that much evident, in the lyrics of drug addiction, sexual freedom, and most prominently, unsparing heartache.

On the acoustic "The Subtleties of Chores and Unlocked Doors," Argote confesses distressingly, "We can get naked together, take dirty naps, whatever / But so long as we suffer apart from one another / You can hold my hand but you can never hold my heart." Throughout the recording the vocalist’s spirit sounds broken as she tells tales of tortured love, a theme that seems to haunt her but never really shatters her self-esteem.

During a recent phone interview, however, Argote’s cheery voice suggested anything but a bout with the blues. "Music is the way I process things that make me sad, and all of those feelings are so hard to articulate," she said. "I feel really inarticulate as a person in conversation form but much more articulate through music. I see it as an opportunity to explain the things that are making me insane, so they usually come out as bummers."

But not all of Argote’s songs sound as if she’s down on her luck. Though her new songs are hushed ballads augmented with acoustic guitar, piano, and symphonic textures courtesy of University of North Carolina orchestra members, Des Ark’s history stretches beyond that. The project began as a trio in 2001 but by the following year shrunk to a two-piece: Argote and drummer Tim Herzog. The pair’s music was a mix of angular riffs roaring from Marshall cabinets and hard-as-nails drum brio. Argote’s vocals ranged from primal wailing to throat-wrenching howling, and together the duo sound reminiscent of PJ Harvey fronting Unwound. Known for in-your-face live shows, Des Ark ditched the stage for floor performances to ensure an engaging experience for band and crowd.

"It’s weird when an audience feels connected to a band but you feel completely disconnected from the audience," Argote said. "I felt it was important to break down the performer and paying customer boundary because it really bothered me and makes music inaccessible."

Videographer Charles Cardello — who released Des Ark’s sole full-length, Loose Lips Sink Ships (2005) on his label, Bifocal Media — sees the connection. "There are not too many performers out there who can simultaneously scare the shit out of you, turn you on, induce fits of hysterics, confuse your musical sensibilities, and rock you to your foundation," he wrote in an e-mail. Argote "could probably just stand there without a guitar and wail for a few minutes, and you’d get the aforementioned effect."

Unfortunately, Herzog’s time in Des Ark was short-lived, and the band’s dynamic soon changed. In September 2005 the duo played their last show together, right before Herzog departed for Washington, DC, to become a bike messenger. Argote disclosed that though the split was amicable, she was really sad when he left.

"When Tim moved away, it was like ‘Well, there goes the one drummer I wanted to play with,’ " she explained. "There’s a lot of phenomenal drummers, but in terms of the type of music I wanted to play, I thought we made a good pair."

After considering a move to DC herself, Argote decided to remain in Durham because "it’s homegrown and not affected by the labels and popularity contests." She also contemplated whether Des Ark’s erstwhile aggressive sound was compensating for qualities lacking in the music. "I think becoming a quiet musician changed the way I perceived space," the vocalist said. "In our culture that’s a way people tend to become oppressed, and I struggle with it a lot. When you walk into a club with a six-foot-something guy and you’re in a loud band, it’s a lot different than walking into a club when you’re a five-foot girl with a banjo."

Argote views Des Ark’s current sound as a natural progression — the EP’s music possesses a certain repose, but the energy remains. Nonetheless, she said that — although she has a small collection of quiet songs she wants to record for her next album — she’d like to throw a rocker or two in.

"It’s not like I sit at home and write rockers, ’cause I also like writing quiet ones as well," she said. "When I’m at home and all I have is my piece-of-shit, busted-up, acoustic thing, I pretty much write busted, piece-of-shit acoustic songs as opposed to loud ones." *

DES ARK

With the New Trust and Polar Bears

Fri/2, 10 p.m., $10

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

(415) 621-4455

www.bottomofthehill.com

>

Newer skin

-
0

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

Who would have thought that the column with the letter from the guy who was contemputf8g gluing his dick shut to spare his wife contact with his precome would have garnered so much attention?

Mainly, I got suggestions for changing the flavor of semen (nobody but me seemed to notice that it was not semen but Cowper’s gland fluid that was bugging them), most involving pineapple juice. This subject has been covered and covered but suffice it to say that some people get good results with pineapple juice or parsley or figs wrapped in prosciutto or whatever the experts are suggesting these days, and others diligently down the stuff and remain pretty gamy. The last time I wrote about this I made fun of Yum-Cum or whatever, that powdered stuff that was hawked all over the Web a few years ago; I heard back from some indignant executive for Yum-Cum who wanted to send me a sample, but my lab partner wasn’t having any of that.

Precome is pretty near flavorless, and if someone’s were actively raunchy, I’d be sending that dude straight to urology. I assumed that the wife was just an unusually delicate flower, a princess and the pee hole, if you will, but when body fluids are a little too piquant, I recommend starting with lots of water and fewer bitter alkaloids such as nicotine and caffeine before making any dire dietary changes. Ingesting lots of fresh, sweet fruits and vegetables is rather nice, though; so by all means, eat up if the spirit moves you.

After the pineapple juice people, the next guy suggested a thumb cot, which is pretty much the same suggestion as a condom rolled down to cover only the head, except nobody seems to carry (or make?) thumb cots. Finger cots, sure. The only thumb cots I could find were wool-lined, and that just cannot be good. I did find a rather startling product, though: Finger Gloves. They are eight to ten times thicker than a finger cot, so are probably not ideal for our purposes, but they "snugly conform," and the Web site, www.fingergloves.com, is strangely alluring — rather beautifully designed and given to eccentric but persuasive pronouncements of product virtue: "Can be utilized during virtually any circumstance. A contingency where rigid inflexible tools awkwardly struggle." I’m not at all sure to what sexual purpose Finger Gloves might properly be put, but I urge someone to figure it out.

And then there was this guy, whose letter I present chopped to bits, as it was about eleventy billion paragraphs long.

You missed one suggestion that’s perfect for this guy, and it’s a big miss — from Mantak Chia’s book Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, "External Locking: the Three Fingers Method."

A man can press an area near the perineum right before the point of ejaculation. [Complicated instructions, etc.] He still has wonderful orgasms, except this external pressure blocks the semen from shooting out the penis and into his wife’s mouth. It gets reabsorbed into the body (and doesn’t leave a man in that worn-out, must-sleep post-come state, either). I did this for a few months, and it was amazing — come without the mess.

You can get to the point where you can do it with your internal musculature, but that takes a lot of training. There are more amazing benefits to it, but one of those will be keeping his foul-tasting semen from his wife’s mouth. I’m sorry, but it sounds like you’re not empathizing with how much a layer of latex decreases the sensitivity of a penis. He wanted uncovered penis solutions, not creative condom usage.

Anyway, he should practice it solo before giving it a try with the partner.

You must know about Chia’s The Multiorgasmic Man. I’ll assume you have ignored his earlier works because their Taoist approach brought you horrid visions of new age, aikido-practicing, vibing, oversensitive, and completely unfuckable men.

Yep, right on the money there, chum. I’m not opposed to Taoist-tantric-shamanistic-kabbalistic-woohooistic ways of knowing, as long as I don’t have to practice them myself. I do know people who have learned some pretty advanced tricks (sorry, I do think of them as tricks, like eating light bulbs or squirting water out your eye) that way. I do believe this writer when he claims to have successfully cultivated a habit of retrograde ejaculation, the only remaining question is, why bother? All the theories about the benefits of conserving precious bodily fluids kind of fall apart when you realize that the body is saving exactly nothing — no calories, no nutrients, no effort — by depositing semen into the bladder instead of into a wad of dirty laundry. It’s a little less messy is all. The other "amazing benefits" are ineffable as well as unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, being more in your head than in your pants. But hey, you go. It still won’t help our guy, though, since it wasn’t semen. It was precome, and I dare you to stop precome by humming at it and poking yourself in the perineum.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Burning Man goes green

-
0

Burning Man founder Larry Harvey chooses the theme for each year’s event — such as 2002’s the Floating World and last year’s Hope and Fear — but it usually doesn’t have much impact on the basic character of the event. This year’s theme, Green Man, is different.

"It’s the first theme that has any kind of practical, political character," Harvey told the Guardian, noting that Green Man has sparked big changes in how the event will be staged, a campaign to improve burners’ environmental practices, and a new way of reutf8g to the outside world.

"We’re looking at every aspect of the event: solid waste, energy, and materials," said Tom Price, who has filled the newly created full-time position of environmental director, which was a natural offshoot from his previous work as Burning Man’s lobbyist and the founder of Burners Without Borders, which formed to do Gulf Coast cleanup after Hurricane Katrina hit (see "From Here to Katrina," 2/22/06).

Harvey said it was the good that burners did in Mississippi that started him thinking about the green theme and the idea that Burning Man needed to start turning its energies outward at a time when global warming and other environmental problems are growing public concerns.

"We’re working our way back into the world. Maybe not the mainstream but certainly onto Main Street," Harvey said. "There’s a lot out there that needs reform. The time of the reformer is at hand, I believe."

Among the projects Price is now working on are expanding the already large recycling effort at the event, finding ways to use more solar panels and fewer generators, coordinating theme camps to share power sources, using the purchase of emissions credits to offset the greenhouse gases created by Burning Man, and creating incentives for art projects to use alternative fuels.

"The whole process is being driven by the community," Price said.

Ramping up Burning Man’s environmental activism and commitment has been the goal of several movements within the larger event, such as Cooling Man (www.coolingman.net) and Greening the Burn (tribes.tribe.net/greeningtheburn), as well as being a priority for many Burning Man employees, such as technology dominatrix Heather Gallagher, a.k.a. Camera Girl, and facilities manager Paul Schreer, a.k.a. Mr. Blue.

"We’ve been hippie busybodies pushing for this on the inside," Gallagher told us. "And when [Harvey] announced the theme, I was, like, ‘Yesss!’ "

"What’s exciting about the Green Man theme and this year’s event is it’s a perfect illustration of the power of community," Price said, noting that networking and experimentation have always been hallmarks of the event. "Going back 10 years, Burning Man has been a place for early adopters who are on the cutting edges of a lot of disciplines."

That makes it a good place to experiment with new technologies and evangelize those that work well.

"I’ve always believed Burning Man would eventually partner in some way with the environmental movement," Harvey said. "It’s almost a historic inevitability."

Since the theme was announced, the organization has been overwhelmed with offers from individuals and groups that want to help green the event, from someone who donated $350,000 worth of solar panels to power the eponymous man and surrounding activities this year to artists such as Jim Mason, who has developed a gasification system he wants to use to turn center camp coffee grounds and other waste into fuel that would in turn power his machine (and probably shoot fire as well).

"So I’m proposing drag racing to a more responsible environmental future. As usual, the ravers are not going to save the world. But at least they can power their indulgent disasters with the fuel the local gearheads turned reluctant environmentalists have made for them," Mason, the controversial artist who helped spearhead the Borg2 revolt a couple years ago, wrote by e-mail to the Guardian.

Price said he’s excited by the implications of Mason’s project, noting that it simultaneously addresses energy issues and waste disposal.

"If he can do this, he will have solved two problems," Price said. "Our relationship to nature on the playa is very intimate. Just being at the event, we’ve learned in a way those in the city haven’t what it means to deal with your garbage and to provide your energy."

Harvey sees this year’s theme as a turning point.

"In some ways, we hope this year will be an environmental and alternative energy expo," he said, although he expects it to resonate on an even deeper level that participants will carry back into their communities. "It’s a much broader thing than environmental politics. It’s about our relationship to nature." (STJ)

1...969798...103Page 97 of 103

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org