food

Play it again

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was sitting outside in the bathtub with a barbecued pork rib in one hand and a jar of wine in the other, watching the sun go down through apple blossoms and redwood branches when the thought occurred to me: If Albert Einstein, our smartest example of a human being, a cat so smart his name has come to mean smart, is capable of saying something as profoundly stupid as "God does not play dice," then might not the chicken farmer, the clown, the fool, the imbecile, one day, by accident, say something completely fucking wise?

Is that a Shakespearean thought?

I don’t know, but it’s a long sentence. To make up for it, here are a bunch of short ones:

Shirts are so anal.

It’s a beautiful day in hell.

There were other dreams.

Oh, great, now my house is haunted.

This is the part of the poem where punctuation does all the work.

Touch me, or I will cry.

Building blocks, broken pieces, shards of tinkling colors . . .

Thank you, thank you. The above poem is not a poem, or wasn’t intended to be. I randomly picked one of my several thousand little pocket memo books and randomly chose a handful of out-of-context scribblings of mine from seven random pages, in search of hidden wisdom. Not there. Not yet. I think it makes a decent accidental poem, but none of the thoughts, in and of themselves, I don’t think, are smart enough (or dumb enough) to do Einstein’s justice. I’ll keep looking, and I’ll keep filling up little notebooks, I promise — but not on your time.

Al, you übereyebrowed genius you, you were all over your e‘s and mc‘s, but (a) god? And (b) even assuming god, god most certainly would play dice, dude. And did, according to Darwin. And cards, according to me, and basketball, I believe, until that thing with His ankle.

That’s it. I’m done studying physics, and even doner with metaphysics. I’m moving on to karaoke. Encore Karaoke Bar, to be exact, on California near Polk. It’s my new favorite restaurant, and it’s not even a restaurant! They just happened to have a table full of free, help-yourself chicken wings, Einstein, and meatballs and duck bones. Lasagna. Other stuff. I think it was someone’s birthday. Not mine.

I was all dolled up for dancing, because that’s what I thought I was doing last Saturday night. Now this. Earl Butter and me had already eaten even, at Memphis Minnie’s — again. I can’t seem to stay away from that place all of a sudden. Reason being they make fried barbecued chicken wings now, just like me and Wayway only Minnie smokes hers first, then fries them, then serves them drenched in this special zingy sweet hot barbecue sauce that’s better than any of their tabletop sauces.

And they have sweet tea.

And afterwards we were supposed to meet up with Yo-Yo and Georgie Bundle and some of their friends and shake our booties or groove thangs or some such. Except they all decided to go to this karaoke bar first, and we agreed to meet them there.

I might have sang, or sung, an Elton John song, or two, except my mouth was too full of free chicken wings, free meatballs, and free duck bones, etc., the whole time we were there. Had we known, we wouldn’t have gone to Memphis Minnie’s first, and then the wings, at any rate, would have tasted a lot better than they did. But the ducks were great, and the lasagna had meat in it, and it sure was cheap eats, and the bar was great and there were lots of colorful people there, including drag queens, and some really good bad singers, and even some good good ones.

I meant to ask someone where all the food had come from. If I had, my reviewing it might actually make some sense. But that didn’t happen, and neither did dancing. Yo-Yo and Bundle and their friends sang their songs, got bored, and left.

Me and Earl ate too much, and left.

What do you think? I can give you the scoop on Memphis Minnie’s, but technically I already reviewed it, nine years ago when it was in the Mission. Now it’s on Haight Street, everybody knows, and the three-way taster is almost exactly twice what it cost then ($16.95). Is that bullshit?

I don’t know, but just in case … SFBG

Encore Karaoke Lounge

Daily, 6 p.m.–2 a.m.

1550 California, SF

(415) 775-0442

Full bar

Not quiet

Not wheelchair accessible

Counting tines

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Marion Nestle’s hefty new book, What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating (North Point, $30), is on one level the successor to The Supermarket Epicure, Joanna Pruess’s 1988 book about managing to eat well with foods bought at places like Safeway. This was tricky enough 20 years ago, and as Nestle demonstrates, it has become more so.

In the past two decades, food companies have become even bigger and their marketing tactics even more sophisticated, which means, more or less, that when you step into a supermarket today, you are like a lab rat entering a maze in some elaborate experiment. You must have your wits about you if you hope to negotiate the maze to your advantage, and while Nestle’s book isn’t exactly a pocket-size guide, it can profitably be examined beforehand, so when you finally do set off to do the food shopping, you will have a pretty good idea of what you can expect to find — in particular, how the marketing machine will attempt to manipulate you, and why.

In the largest sense, of course, the why isn’t difficult, for it is the job of food companies and supermarkets to sell you as much or as many of their most lucrative products as they can, and their most lucrative products are likely to be full of inexpensive, highly processed ingredients (i.e., corn syrup), bundled up in gaudy packaging, and not especially good for you — surprise!

There isn’t much revelation in How to Eat, but Nestle is an attractively peppery writer, and she brings a good deal of lore — about nutrition, marketing, agriculture, politics — to her scrutiny of a routine chore too many of us think too little about. She repeatedly makes a point, too, that’s worth repeating: The true value of organic agriculture isn’t that it might result, here and there, in slightly higher levels of certain nutrients or even that it definitely reduces the presence of pesticides and other chemical dangers in the food we eat. What really matters, she writes, is that organics represent "a political choice. When you choose organics, you are voting with your fork for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil, and cleaner water supplies … for conservation of fuel resources and the economic viability of local communities, along with freshness and better taste." By Jove, I think the forks have it!

Paul Reidinger

Whole paycheck

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› amanda@sfbg.com

On a Sunday afternoon, the Cala Foods at Stanyan and Haight is a dismal sight. Thrifty shoppers, beckoned by the 60–70 percent off price tags walk out into the drizzle, empty-handed. The doors close permanently May 24, and there isn’t much left.

The owner of the building, Mark Brennan, plans to demolish the place, and is negotiating with Whole Foods — the fast-growing organic food chain — to build a new store on the site. Some Haight neighbors are looking forward to the organic option, but many are scowling about the potential for increased traffic in the foot-friendly hood — and the fact that Whole Foods is known for high-end products with high-end prices. They refer to the store as "Whole Paycheck."

According to plans, the 28,000-square-foot store will be capped with 62 residential units, seven below market rate, and will sit on three levels of underground parking, tripling the current number of spaces. It will also be the westernmost Whole Foods location in the city, potentially drawing traffic eastward through the park.

"We talked briefly with Trader Joe’s and Rainbow Grocery, and sent a letter to Berkeley Bowl," Brennan told the Guardian. "Whole Foods is the only one willing to wait for development."

The construction is expected to take up to five years, so those in need of a local supermarket will be hard up for a while. "I’m very worried about the old ladies," said Spencer Cumbs, who’s worked at the Cala location for 11 years and often delivers groceries for the more infirm. "Where are they going to shop?" He tells them to visit him at the Cala on California and Hyde, where he’s been transferred, but that’s a long bus ride. There’s no other full-service supermarket in the area.

Like any chain store moving into a neighborhood, Whole Foods could hurt small local businesses, like Haight Street Market, an organic grocery started 25 years ago by Gus and Dmitri Vardakastanis and currently managed by the third generation of the family, Bobby Vardakastanis. "I don’t know if the neighborhood could support it," Bobby told us. "But we have a lot of loyal customers who don’t want to see us get hurt."

Fresh Organics, on the corner of Stanyan and Carl, is also optimally situated to take a hit. "This place rocks," said Erik Christoffersen, with his daughter strapped to his back and arms full of local produce. But he confesses he’d shop at Whole Foods too. "They don’t get meats and fish," he says of the local corner store. A recent Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council meeting on the future of the site drew some 80 residents. According to Calvin Welch, HANC’s housing and land use chair, the major concerns were that Whole Foods is too high-end and, he included, that "people would prefer a unionized grocery store like Cala."

The union issue is huge all over California, where unionized grocery stores are trying to compete against giant nonunion competitors like Wal-Mart. And the San Francisco supervisors are trying to give locals a degree of protection.

A new Grocery Worker’s Retention Ordinance, signed into law by Mayor Newsom on May 12, mandates a 90-day period of continued employment for grocery workers when retail stores larger than 15,000 square feet change hands. It would benefit workers at union stores, like Cala, that are replaced by nonunion retailers, like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s.

Sup. Fiona Ma, who introduced the measure, was inspired by a meeting with employees facing potential job losses due to new ownership at three Albertson’s stores in the city, Bill Barnes, an aide to Ma, told us. An endorsement of her run for State Assembly from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 648, which advocated for the ordinance, was probably pretty inspiring as well.

Still, the bill comes too late to help the Cala workers. Employees at the Haight Ashbury store have been transferred to other locations, while ten workers trumped by their seniority have been laid off. SFBG

Get thee to a naanery

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Polk is a many splendored strasse, with lower lows and higher highs, socioeconomically speaking, than practically any other road in town, with the possible exception of Market Street. Below California, there is still an agreeable crunch of urban grit under your feet, you still see the occasional boy hustler, and the restaurants tend toward the ethnic and cheap — but this neighborhood is the western edge of the Tenderloin, after all.

Above Broadway we are in chi-chi-land, cheek to cheek with some of the town’s swellest swells (but what cheeks do I mean?) and gazing upon the menu cards of such redoubts of swankery as La Folie and Le Petit Robert. Is this, then, a bipolar story, a tale of haves and have-nots or -littles, grit and glamour, worlds apart? Have I forgotten the stretch of Polk north of California and south of Broadway, the transition zone? I have not.

It is on this very stretch of street, in fact, that we find Indian Aroma, a nicely middle-class South Asian restaurant in a middle-classy neighborhood in a city whose middle class seems to be disappearing in our drive for third world–style stratification of wealth and status: a handful of chubby-cheeked plutocrats and masses of the disenfranchised. The place is far from a dive, with handsomely set tables, a paint scheme of sponged ochres and umbers, a huge round mirror mounted in one wall like a giant’s monocle, a nonperfunctory wine list (including several selections by the glass), and professional table service. On the other hand, it’s not particularly pricey (most main dishes are within a tick or two of $10), it’s easy to glide into, and there is the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet — at $8.99, not the cheapest buffet of its kind in town, but pretty reasonable all the same and with better-than-average food.

Indian Aroma is a reincarnation of sorts of Scenic India, which, until it closed three years ago owing to loss of lease, was one of the better Indian restaurants on the Valencia Street corridor and held a strategic location near the corner of 16th Street. The new location can’t match the old for hipster-central cachet, but it does have its charms, mainly of variety: The Civic Center and Tenderloin are within walking distance, as are the hillier, tonier precincts of Nob and Russian Hills and the human parade a block west, along Van Ness.

There is also the stabilizing presence of owner and head chef Tahir Khan, whose Bangladeshi-influenced cooking features spices ground and blended in-house — hence the Indian aroma, which wafts onto the street and helps drifting pedestrians distinguish between the restaurant and the Christian Science Reading Room next door — halal meats, and for those averse to meat (halal or otherwise), a wide variety of meatless choices.

Khan’s kitchen does a decent job with flesh — there is a good lamb curry ($8.95), with cubes of boneless (and reasonably tender) meat in a tomato-based sauce, and a nice, slightly sweet version of shrimp bhuna ($12.95), large prawns sautéed in a stir-fried spice mixture with tomatoes, ginger, and garlic — but really, if the only nonvegetarian items on offer were of chicken, you wouldn’t complain. Chicken is possibly the meat most compatible with, even in need of, strong spicing, and the tandoori chicken ($8.95 for a half bird) is marvelous, tangy-tender with an edge of char, while the chicken tikka masala ($10.95) met with the enthusiastic approval of the CTM aficionado, who spent several minutes wiping up the remnant gravy with shreds of cooling naan. Even the plain chicken tikka ($10.95) — chunks of boneless, marinated meat cooked on skewers in the tandoor — met the highest standards of moistness and tastiness despite an absence of sauce.

The vegetable dishes too are solid, if stolid, citizens. Spinach, the bane of many a childhood but a cherished source of antioxidants for adults, appears in two guises: cooked simply with tomatoes and a curry blend (saag bhaji, $5.95) and with chunks of white cheese instead of tomatoes (saag paneer, $6.95). Mutter paneer includes cubes of the same fresh white cheese but replaces the spinach with peas for a touch of sweetness that nicely smooths the edge of the curry sauce, while chana masala ($5.95) lets chickpeas be chickpeas, with gentle spicing that bolsters rather than competes with the beans’ naturally nutty flavor.

Many of these dishes turn up at the lunch buffet, along with a mild, though dramatically yellow, mulligatawny soup (a close relative of dal, the famous Indian lentil stew) — the presence of turmeric was strongly suspected — and fabulous pappadum, the wrinkly, crackery disks of flash-fried lentil flour still carrying a slight sheen of oil. Lunch also includes pakora, the fritters of shredded vegetables, though like forensic examiners studying the evidence of an especially baffling murder, we were unable to establish which.

The naan, of course, is splendidly pillowy and warm. At lunch it’s free and abundant — so go then if you’re hooked — but even at dinner, when you have to pay by the piece, you get a disk the size of a medium pizza for just $1.50. Adherents to a variety-is-the-spice-of-life philosophy might opt instead for the puri ($1.50), a naanlike round of dough that’s puffy, golden, and slightly crisp from a turn in the deep fryer rather than the oven; like its distant relation langos (the fried bread of Hungary), it resembles a pizza crust made of pastry. But enough pillow talk. SFBG

Indian Aroma

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

Lunch: Daily, 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1653 Polk, SF

(415) 771-0426

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Comfortable noisewise

Wheelchair accessible

That’s amore

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

There are some serious-minded films on the program of this year’s San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, like Cracked Not Broken, about a stockbroker turned crack addict, and The Chances of the World Changing, about one man’s crusade to save endangered turtles. But when there’s an option in life to sample something called Pizza! The Movie, there’s really no way around it. You have to go for the pie.

Director Michael Dorian is good-natured enough to include a clip from "the other" Pizza: The Movie — a low-budget 2004 comedy about a lovelorn delivery dude — in his doc; he’s also clever enough to wrap his film around the theme that pizza is, by nature, a competitive sport. Rivalries lurk in all aspects of the business. The simple question of whose pizza tastes the best is paramount; dozens of parlors, from New York to Los Angeles to an Ohio spot famed for its meat-laden "butcher shop" special, are visited, and many friendly opinions are shared. But other points of contention run deeper than Chicago-style crust, including which trade magazine can claim superiority (bad blood runs twixt upstart PMQ and old-school Pizza Today); mass-market (i.e., Pizza Hut) versus artisan-style pies; and who invented which new twist when, exemplified by a chef who claims he created all of California Pizza Kitchen’s original recipes.

So, clearly, the pizza industry attracts strong personalities. But the absolute highlight of Pizza! The Movie is the Bay Area’s own Tony Gemignani, a champion acrobatic pizza tosser whose skill with dough is as awe-inspiring as his deadly serious approach to his craft. Frankly, I can’t believe Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell hasn’t starred in a feature film based on this guy; the entire 90 minutes of Pizza! The Movie are worth watching just to see Tony’s take on The Matrix, complete with bullet-time dough-throwing. Good thing DocFest goes down in the Mission, where pizza is plentiful — after the movie, there’s no way you won’t be in the mood for a slice.

Another DocFest film with a tempting title is Muskrat Lovely, Amy Nicholson’s affectionate study of a small-town Maryland beauty pageant. The specter of Corky St. Clair looms over the proceedings, which transpire during a festival with twin highlights: the crowning of Miss Outdoors, of course, and a muskrat-skinning contest. (In a tidy display of synergy, one of the pageant girls skins a muskrat as her talent.) The importance of glamour — even when one is a teenager living in an isolated Chesapeake Bay community — is addressed, as is the importance of removing the muskrat’s musk gland before you cook it.

A less triumphant tale unfolds in The Future of Pinball, local filmmaker Greg Maletic’s ironically titled work-in-progress doc about pinball’s painful decline. He focuses on a 1999 invention optimistically dubbed Pinball 2000, a wondrous machine dreamed up by the industry’s most talented (and increasingly desperate) pinball designers, a dedicated group whose job titles were made nearly extinct by the video game boom. Despite a groovy lounge music soundtrack, Pinball weaves a sad tale of creativity being stamped out by big business; also, as it turns out, the eventual fate of the Pinball 2000 happens to be one more thing we can blame on Jar Jar Binks.

The hour-long Pinball plays with Natasha Schull’s 30-minute ode to gluttony, Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas. Drawn in by such gimmicks as the $2.99 shrimp cocktail, self-proclaimed buffet connoisseurs arrange incredible and unlikely food combinations on enormous plates; casino employees, used to dealing with gob-smacking amounts of consumption, ponder how a horseshoe-shaped restaurant really allows for "more flow." Meanwhile, Sin City pigs grunt on a farm outside town, eagerly awaiting the leftovers. After all, as the farmer’s wife points out, humans and pigs have nearly identical digestive tracts. SFBG

SAN FRANCISCO DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

Fri/12–May 21

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

$10

www.sfindie.com

Also Women’s Building

3543 18th St., SF

One down, one to go

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

As the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. prepared to finally shut down its Hunters Point power plant May 15, environmentalists were gearing up for another task — pressuring the Mirant Corp. to replace its 40-year-old, pollution-spewing cooling system near Potrero Hill. The two plants have been blamed for a wide variety of health problems in the southeast part of San Francisco.

Community groups aren’t the only ones decrying the aging facility. Sup. Sophie Maxwell, City Attorney Dennis Herrera, Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin, and San Francisco Public Utility Commission general manager Susan Leal all plan to appear at the May 10 Regional Water Quality Control Board meeting to call on Mirant to update the cooling system of its Potrero Unit 3 with more modern technology.

Critics claim the current unit absorbs nearby polluted sediment through its cooling system and discharges it into Bay waters.

The water board will be considering whether to green-light a discharge permit drafted by its staff. But the RWQCB staff proposal, according to Hererra spokesperson Matt Dorsey, is really an extension of a permit Mirant was granted all the way back in 1994. The permit was extended by the water board in 1999 and again in 2004, meaning that the permit has fallen "out of compliance with current environmental standards," Dorsey said.

SF-based Communities for a Better Environment says the permit does not take into account new technologies that would eliminate the need to suck up Bay water for cooling purposes. If Mirant does not switch to the alternative "upland cooling," CBE says, the plant should be closed.

"We’re hoping for there to be as big a turnout as we can get," CBE’s Greg Karras said in a phone interview. "This is the most important issue for the community’s goals on the existing Potrero plant. This plant’s ancient cooling technology is known to kill hundreds of millions of larval fish every year and poison the fish people rely on for food."

The Board of Supervisors passed a resolution April 25 asking the water board to reject the current draft discharge permit and adopt an alternative "community permit" that includes the requirement of a new cooling system.

Lila Tang, chief of the wastewater division of the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, said the water board needs more time to "fully assess and analyze alternatives for compliance" before addressing new pollution rules that were passed in 2004. But she insisted that the current draft permit includes updated toxicity monitoring requirements and imposes discharge limits on copper and mercury concentrations where such requirements haven’t previously existed.

The water board meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, May 10 at 9:00 a.m. at 1515 Clay St. in Oakland (near the 12th Street Oakland City Center BART station). The deadline for submitting written remarks has passed, but interested parties can still show up at the meeting to make a public comment. Call the water board at (510) 622-2300 for more information.

The Mirant plant has become the new target for environmentalists now that the Hunters Point plant is finally closing. PG&E announced in late April that the long-awaited closure of the plant would finally be completed by May 15. Energy production was transferred to another transmission line April 29. Construction of the new transmission line began in January 2005, but Bayview–Hunters Point residents have waited for nearly a decade to see the old plant closed as concerns over widespread asthma symptoms in the area grew.

Longtime Hunters Point power plant closure advocates Greenaction and the Huntersview Mothers Committee will throw a community celebration of the plant closure May 12 in the Huntersview public housing project, 227 West Point Rd., near Evans, in San Francisco. All are welcome. SFBG

Dumpling drifter

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Me and Wayway went to the store and bought 67 chicken wings, a carton of buttermilk, and a big bottle of oil. Then we went out to eat. I had a show that night in the Sunset, at my new favorite bar, the Riptide, so the plan was to point ourselves in that direction and just roll.

The Riptide is on Taraval, way out there, almost all the way to the beach. But we barely got past 19th Avenue, of course, before we had to stop rolling and walk. What pulled us over was this new Hawaiian joint where JT’s diner used to be. It looks pretty good. I looked in the window, and Wayway looked at the menu in the window.

"Eggs and rice," Wayway said. "Spam and eggs."

"Hay," I said. "Straw."

We meant all these things as compliments. You know, sometimes I wear Hawaiian shirts when I play the Ping-Pong, and sometimes I wear Western shirts. If I had been wearing a Hawaiian shirt, I might have had a new favorite Hawaiian restaurant to tell you about, but as fate would have it, I was wearing a Western shirt.

Which was just as well because I’d already eaten about five eggs that day anyway. We looked into a couple other places and wound up agreeing on a hole-in-the-wall just a few doors down called White Horse Dim Sum & Restaurant.

Hot dang it smelled good in there. It smelled kind of like celery. There was no art on the walls, no music, and just a couple of tables. So the atmosphere was the smell of celery. And general hominess. The White Horse family, from little kids to Gram and Gramps, was just sitting down to eat at this one big table. Every now and again one or another of them would get up and pour our tea and take our order and cook and everything.

So now, finally, I have a new favorite Chinese restaurant. Check this out: Dim sums are 60 cents each, they have Shanghai dumplings for $3.50 for six, lunch specials for $3.95 with rice and wonton soup or coffee, and they have almost 20 kinds of soup for under 5 bucks, most of them under 4. Rice plates, noodles … a lot of $3.50s, $3.95s, and $4.50s. I don’t think anything was more than 5 bucks.

What I’m getting at: Cheap!

And don’t forget that it smells real good in there. So, OK, so what we wanted, in honor of yet another soupy San Francisco day, was soup. And the guy sitting behind us was eating dumplings, so, sure, we were going to need dumplings too. You can’t talk about frying and barbecuing chicken wings without dumplings. At least a dozen.

Wayway told me how when he was living in Shanghai he used to eat these things for breakfast every day, and how sometimes, because of the language barrier, he’d ask for six, which was one order, and they’d bring him six orders of six.

"I want to live somewhere with a language barrier," I said.

Shanghai dumplings, those are the steamed pork ones with like little bowls of soup in them. Pig drippin’s, you figure. It pools inside while the pork cooks, and stays warm but somehow not too hot, and then when it erupts inside your mouth you get this flow of buttery, greasy goodness all over your tongue, and … and … um . . .

I lost my train of thought.

Chicken wings. Buttermilk. Barbecue sauce. Strategy. Celery. Oral sex. Oh yeah, soup. That was the other thing we were eating. Fish ball noodle soup, and pork noodle soup ($3.95 either way). Both were great. The broth was excellent, the noodles had to have been homemade, they tasted so good, and the vegetables were done perfectly, with still a little life left to them. Bok choy, broccoli, celery.

I’ll tell you, I walked out of the White Horse feeling really good. And I stayed that way all through the rest of the evening. Pabst Blue Ribbon. Rum. Coffee, next morning, and we went to work like two well-oiled machines, Wayway frying, or parfrying the wings, and the chicken farmer manwomanpersoning the grill. Barbefried chicken. My joke is that it’s health food, if two wrongs make a right, which, conventional wisdom being, for our purposes, damned, they do. Right? SFBG

White Horse.

Mon.–Sat., 7 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sun., 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.

937 Taraval, SF

(415) 665-9080

Takeout available

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Splitsville

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Without Reservations

› paulr@sfbg.com

Split is a splendid little word, one of my favorites, at least when we are wandering through the joyous realm of sparkling wine. Who wouldn’t want an adorably petite bottle of bubbly for one’s own, complete with cork wrapped in fancy foil in a cage of golden wire? Yet split, alas, has other meanings too; in that terrible, inevitable restaurant moment when the check arrives, the word becomes the occasion for close scrutiny of the bill, who had what, some people drank more than others, tax is always a muddle, multiple credit or debit cards (all confusingly similar in appearance) are produced, and, at the very end, there is the dreadful business of agreeing on a tip. It is a business negotiation, basically, a moment for teams of accountants, and it sounds a slightly off note at the end of a lovely evening.

Splitting a check is somewhat less cumbersome and embarrassing in cash transactions, true — which tend to be smaller anyway — and I would grant an exemption for gigantic get-togethers like birthday-party dinners, where 20 or more people can gather at a single table and the tab can easily drift past $500 or even higher. But: For the usual small rendezvouses, têtes-à-têtes and so forth, somebody should just pick up the check. I nominate rich people. Rich people should pay. The richest person at the table should fess up or, better yet, just discreetly snatch the bill when it comes and discreetly whip out the putf8um card to settle the matter. This would be a kind of gracious ad hoc socialism that would also meliorate a small but galling social blight, and while it wouldn’t necessarily assure the fate of one’s eternal soul, if any ("Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" — Matthew 19:24), it couldn’t hurt. Spending money on food is a virtue, as is spending money on other people — so spending money to feed other people must be doubly virtuous.

How to determine who the richest person at your table is? I recommend the stare-down. And if two rich people happen to be having dinner? (Surely this happens from time to time.) One pays this time; the other, the next — socialism for the rich, kind of. SFBG

Crazy on you

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Kookez looks like a name from The Epic of Gilgamesh, or perhaps the name of some lost city in ancient Persia — near Shiraz? — but really it’s a kind of phonetic or spoof spelling. Hint: Resist the urge, almost irresistible in this city, to see the word kook; remember that we deal in food and restaurants here and visualize … cookies! (No, not whirled peas.) For Kookez Café is, indeed, in part about cookies; they are the pride of founder, owner, and baker Lynn Marie Presley, and a selection of them, along with other tempting baked goods, is on display in a glass case just inside the entryway.

But Kookez is about more than cookies. It is the successor to the long-running and successful Miss Millie’s (recently decamped to the East Bay) and accordingly has inherited the pole position in Noe Valley’s busy weekend brunch derby. It is also a cozy evening spot, serving "coast to coast" American comfort-food dishes — many with a decidedly Southern accent — in as appealingly old-fashioned a setting as you’re likely to find around town. The look is that of some venerable, family-run café on a narrow lane in Paris or London: lots of warm wood, yellowish wall lamps, snug booths, and a small garden in the rear whose charms are, thus far in this indescribably dreary spring, hypothetical. Those with long memories will recall that the space, before becoming Miss Millie’s, belonged to a coffeehouse named Meat Market, which took its name from the butcher shop that once occupied the premises.

An overhead rail for hanging split carcasses is still mounted from the ceiling just in front of the small exhibition kitchen, where the chef, Amir, goes about his business. When Miss Millie’s opened, in the mid-1990s, the original menu was vegetarian, and the rail was left in place as an ironic reminder, a kind of memento mori for meat eaters, or maybe non–meat eaters. But Miss Millie’s later expanded beyond meatless offerings as the neighborhood changed, and as Kookez picks up the baton, the neighborhood continues to change.

Noe Valley is known as the city’s "baby belt," and really you can’t go a block without encountering a baby stroller, a nanny, a pack of tots, or a young father carrying an infant in some kind of chest sling. The Kookez brain trust is on the case; in addition to the cookies, the restaurant offers a kids’ menu (cupcakes included), the waitstaff seems unfazed by strollers zooming to and fro inside, and the cards of fare are laminated. I understand the precautionary nature of taking this last step, since children do have a way of spilling, scattering, smearing, and otherwise making messes with their food. At the same time, the menu card entombed in plastic does summon for some of us the ghosts of forgettable meals in chain restaurants near freeways at the outskirts of cookie-cutter cities in the heart of the heart of the country.

For the most part, Kookez pulls off its Comfort Food Nation conceit pretty nicely. The familiar stuff is the best: a bowl of New England clam chowder weighted with potatoes and bacon and heady with black pepper ($4.95); a chicken pot pie ($10.95) with a lovely golden pastry crust and a pea-rich stuffing; an excellent hamburger ($8.50), subtly swabbed with chipotle aioli and served with a stack of garlicky home fries in need of but a sprinkle of salt to come to attention; an herb-roasted half chicken ($12.50), tender and moist and plated with garlic mashed potatoes (under- and perhaps unsalted) and sautéed zucchini.

The chilled tomato tower ($7.75) — basically a napoleon, layers of red and gold tomato slices buffered by disks of mozzarella and seasoned with basil and balsamic vinegar — would be a lovely dish in summer, when the tomatoes are soft, juicy, and deeply flavored. At the end of winter, one tastes mainly the chill. The mango quesadilla ($7.50) is a worthy attempt to dress up a possibly overfamiliar friend; the decorations include a nippy blend of jack and brie cheeses, the aforementioned mango, and slices of strawberry on top. The strawberry slices looked a little forlorn on the golden half disk, as if the door to a party had been shut in their faces and they were left to pace around outside. At the same time, their presence did suggest not just seasonality but the possibility of some clever innovation: How about pureeing them with some garlic, cilantro, cayenne, and lime juice into a kind of spring salsa?

One of the best of the Southern-inflected dishes is the bayou butter-BQ dippin’ shrimp ($21.50), eight or nine big sautéed prawns accompanied by three lengths of grilled fresh okra — a surprisingly appealing bit of exotica — and not one but two dipping sauces: a peppery bourbon-butter number and a fruity-sharp jam of ginger and chilis that’s reminiscent of something you might be served with pot stickers. I would say this dish is well worth its sticker price, while noting that the sticker price is slightly lofty for a neighborhood joint. And it isn’t alone in being on the high side of $20; two other dishes also wander above the tree line, while several more are in the upper teens. But … this is the new Noe Valley, the Beverly Hills of the Googleocracy.

This can be a depressing line of contemplation, and a ready antidote is the infantile pleasure of dessert: a slice of rich amaretto cheesecake ($7.95), say, with blood orange sorbet. Or just a cookie — maybe chocolate chip ($1.50) — if you’re not nuts about such a rich finish. SFBG

Kookez Café

Dinner: Wed.–Sat., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9 a.m.–2 p.m.

4123 24th St., SF

(415) 641-7773

www.kookez.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Going low-tech

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› naturesucks@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I had the urge to be low-tech, so I spent a day walking across Manhattan. If you believe that culture is the new nature, my trek was roughly equivalent to an amble through the forest. I bought a bagel and lox at Zabar’s, stuck my earbuds in on the corner of Broadway and West 80th Street, and headed south. Surely a Neanderthal could have had this same experience munching on meat and humming to herself as she wandered through Europe 42,000 years ago.

The Upper West Side — bounded by Central Park on one side and Riverside Park on the other — is actually full of old-school traditional nature. There are trees and slightly stinky bodies of water and birds. I know there’s supposed to be some dramatic cultural difference between the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, but I think my relentlessly Californian senses prevent me from discerning what it is. Both sides of the park are full of well-maintained residences, doctors’ offices, corner stores built in the 1950s, and nannies ambling with baby strollers.

Exiting the park’s south side is pretty much like walking into a really dirty waterfall next to sharp rocks. In fact, scratch that — traditional nature has no metaphors adequate to describe the sheer human hell of this place. Its dense cultural outcroppings and vortices stretch at least to 40th Street below Times Square and create the sensation of being in a crowd that’s just on the verge of rioting in response to a piece of entertainment. This is very different from being in a crowd whose protoviolence is prompted by a desire for food or political freedom.

At the heart of Times Square I made a left and detoured briefly into the Condé Nast building to visit one of my editors. Four Times Square is one of the only high-rise office buildings in Manhattan constructed from eco-friendly materials. Supposedly the windows are specially made to maintain a moderate temperature, and air ducts keep fresh air circuutf8g through the place. I couldn’t really tell whether the building felt any "healthier" than, say, one of the scary buildings near Penn Plaza where I once interviewed a bunch of guys in suits. But it was amusing to try to identify which people in the elevator worked for Vogue and which worked for the New Yorker. After eating a genetically engineered banana with my editor among the translucent plastic structures that bloom like gigantic flowers all over the Condé Nast lunchroom, I returned to Broadway.

I slowed down when I hit 30th Street, moving through each neighborhood and watching the population change gradually the way I would watch a beach becoming forest if I were hiking on the California coast. The closer you get to Union Square Park near 12th Street, the more you start seeing young hipsters and frenetic middle-class people with bags of groceries. Continuing south, I skirted the edge of Greenwich Village and scooted past New York University, where everybody has floppy hair and Converse sneakers and jeans with stitching on the pockets.

Everyone got older and richer briefly in SoHo, but that group dissipated quickly around Canal Street. On Canal it was impossible for me not to examine at least four or five unlicensed pieces of trademarked and copyrighted media. People stuck handfuls of pirated DVDs under my nose; street vendors sold knockoff Hello Kitty and Gucci. If only this crowd could slake the thirst of those protorioters in Times Square, I don’t think we’d have any violence.

The buildings got taller and the air between them colder as I approached the downtown financial district. People in suits with whimsical ties almost distracted me from my favorite part of Broadway downtown: the enormous brass bull statue near Wall Street that celebrates the crude joys of financial power. I never get tired of looking at its huge balls, which hang in remarkably realistic detail between its raised tail and abstract cock. Capitalists have never been a shy bunch, nor do they have any difficulty finding metaphors from nature to explain their peculiar form of culture.

And then, at last, I was at the Staten Island ferry, which brought me to the one place where Manhattanites fear to tread. SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who isn’t afraid of Staten Island.

Sorta corny Copia

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So this weekend Hunky Beau and I hitched it up to Napa to dine with the ‘rents at Copia, the giant food-wine-museum-garden “experience” launched by Robert Mondavi (with some star power oof from Julia Child) a few years ago. It’s an awfully Wine Country thing to do, all bourgeous mauves, flowing linen skirts, and bipolar smiles. The ghost of Cesar Chavez hovered.

There are edible gardens with patches like “Sauvignon Blanc” and “Petite Syrah” planted with the fruits, herbs and trees associated with each individual wine’s flavor (grapefruit, rasperries, vanilla, tobacco, etc.) That was pretty cool, as were some of the displays in the food museum, which is actually a reliquary of antique name-brands. (I now know the entire back story of Kool-Aid.) We dined in a “lunch program” that took place on what looked like a television cooking show set, and were treated to carcass-heavy details about the lamb being served, followed up, for some reason, with an a capella version of “Georgia On My Mind” from our really gay presenter, a baritone. Luckily, copious amounts of wine were served throughout.

winerave06_ON.jpg

Copia also offers frequent seminars led by super-friendly, slightly crazed blondes who gush about “marketing to millenials,” “emerging alternative wine packaging,” “biodynamics: moving beyond organics” and “the rebirth of pink!” Considering the retired-looking crowd, however, all this marketspeak probably only served to make wine more intimidating, which in turn, as happens with wine, probably made it all the more fascinating. The best thing, though, was when we were cheerily yet firmly urged to come back on May 13 for the “Wine Rave,” which artfully combines wine tasting with a DJ in an effort to “market to the millenials” (ages 11-24) on a “level they can relate to.” The rave is from 9 p.m. to midnite. I’m so going.

{Empty title}

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At one time in my life, I thought I had a handle on the meaning of the word "service." Service is "the act of doing things for other people." Then I heard these terms which reference the word
service:

Internal RevenueService
Postal Service
Telephone Service
Civil Service
City and County Public Service
Customer Service 
Service Station

Then I became confused about the word "service." This is not what I thought "service" meant. So today, I overheard two farmers talking, and one of them said he had hired a bull to "service" a few of his cows.

BAM!

It all came into perspective. Now I understand what all those "service" agencies are doing to us.
I hope you now are as enlightened as I am.
 
***********
 

Black and White
(Under age 40? You won’t understand.)

     You could hardly see for all the snow,
     Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
     Pull a chair up to the TV set,
     "Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet."

     Depending on the channel you tuned,
     You got Rob and Laura — or Ward and June.
     It felt so good. It felt so right.
     Life looked better in black and white.

     I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys,
     Dennis the Menace, the Cleaver boys,
     Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train,
     Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane.
     Father Knows Best, Patty Duke,
     Rin Tin Tin and Lassie too,
     Donna Reed on Thursday night! —
     Life looked better in black and white.

     I want to go back to black and white.
     Everything always turned out right.
     Simple people, simple lives.
     Good guys always won the fights.
     Now nothing is the way it seems,
     In living color on the TV scr! een.
     Too many murders, too many fights,
     I want to go back to black and white.

     In God they trusted, alone in bed, they slept,
     A promise made was a promise kept.
     They never cussed or broke their vows.
     They’d never make the network now.
     But if I could, I’d rather be
     In a TV town in ’53.

     It felt so good. It felt so right.
     Life looked better in black and white.

     I’d trade all the channels on the satellite,
     If I could just turn back the clock tonight

     To when everybody knew wrong from right.
     Life was better in black and white!

 
 ***********
 

For Oldtimers:

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting ecoli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the river or lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE . . . and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries, but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now..

Flunking gym was not an option . . . even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

Oh yeah . . . and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee ! sting? I could have been killed!

We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt spanked again when we got home.

I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amock.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that?

We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive?

Small Business Activist: Comet Skateboards

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458 Brannan, SF
(510) 625-9045
www.cometskateboards.com

What if we saved our precious natural resources by not transporting our food and clothes halfway around the world? What if Oakland had its own BART-accessible skate park? And what if everyone there were riding skateboards made from stuff that wasn’t gnarly on the planet?

The proprietors of Comet Skateboards, founders Jason Salfi and Jonathan Reese and co-owner Don Shaffer, want to make all of these grand ideas realities. They’re already doing so with their stylishly designed skateboards, with many decks sporting artwork by Oakland youths. Manufactured by Glissade Snow Board Company, a solar-powered facility in SoMa, the boards are made from sustainably grown bamboo or maple and will be glued together with a soy-based resin.

By "merging sustainability ethos with pop culture," as Salfi explains, "[Comet] can help push things over the edge" in terms of influencing youth to think more about the environment.

But their eco-consciousness doesn’t just end with the manufacturing of their boards. The entrepreneurship would also like to foster other small businesses in the Bay Area while saving the planet at the same time.

For the past two years, Shaffer has been busy working toward his vision of living economies. He started the San Francisco office of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, which connects local agriculture with local business to encourage people to sell Bay Area–made goods locally. The organization, which has chapters in Philadelphia and Victoria, British Columbia, also supports the principle that when businesses stay small and local, they better serve the community, labor, and the environment.

As for that skate park, the company is planning the Hood Games block party for May 13 at 15th and Franklin Streets in downtown Oakland, all to help fund the park on Jefferson Square.

While Shaffer works with BALLE, Salfi involves himself with Earth Alliance Institute, which gets youth involved in solving global environmental problems. Looks like Comet Skateboards will have many successors in the next generation. (Deborah Giattina)

Arthur Jackson Diversity in Business Award: Fabric8

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3318 22nd St., SF

(888) 554-4321, www.fabric8.com

Hoping to spread San Francisco style — in all its bounty of shapes, sounds, and colors — across the land, Olivia Ongpin and Antony Quintal founded Fabric8 10 years ago. They started selling locally made, youth-oriented clothing, jewelry, and other handicrafts on the company’s Web site.

When they recently had the chance to open up a brick-and-mortar storefront, they leapt at the opportunity to showcase a diverse selection of today’s young Bay Area artists and designers. Found-object dioramas by Swiss-born, Bay Area–bred DJ-artist Romanowski, small paintings priced for the collector on a budget, and mix CDs by homeboys Tom Thump and UFO reflect an eclectic SF-based flavor in the Mission District shop’s kooky-kitsch homage to the quaint. (Think indoor suburban backyard, complete with illuminated sky-blue ceiling, wall-to-wall SYNLawn, and a treasure trove of tiki-themed paraphernalia.)

A background in supporting the underground art scene drove the pair to get into retail. Ongpin, a San Francisco native with roots in nonprofit food distribution and jazz writing, and Quintal, a computer engineer and designer, first made a name for themselves hosting hip, club-inspired trunk shows and DJ-driven events. It was through these activities that the two met well-known Bay Area artists such as Sirron Norris, Brian Barneclo, Ursula Young, and Nomzee, who have all contributed to a mural of familiar San Francisco landmarks stained into the store’s woodwork.

Aside from offering local art at very affordable prices, the store also ventures into more retail-oriented fare. One highlight is the brainchild of local boy Manuel "Gonz One" Gonzalez, maker of the aMonster plush toy. These handmade, furry creatures come with built-in speakers and an interior pouch for an iPod or CD player — a very cute way for music freaks to amplify their tunes. Chiquita Banana walkie-talkies, old Nike belt buckles, a Mr. T Chia Pet, and a set of Lucite napkin rings with built in salt and pepper shakers are also for sale, much of it stuffed like bric-a-brac into the store’s dresser drawer–like display system. "Museum store meets Sanford and Son," is how the owners describe their particular aesthetic combination of creative sprawl and cuddly nostalgia. (Sidra Durst)

Cav Wine Bar

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REVIEW Maybe it’s the flight of robust German reds talking, but Cav seems like the sleekest, yet somehow the most laid-back, entry in the recent rush of wine bar openings. (Is there, like, a wine bar mafia hiding out here lately?) While other new oenophile venues certainly have their particular charms, Cav’s the only one that aims for hipness without turning class into sass.

Owners Pamela S. Busch and Tadd Cortell have fashioned a list with global reach (Portugal, Australia, the surprising Germany) that highlights the adventurously cozy and pairs it with a full menu of worldwise California fare — gnocchi with crayfish and sunchokes ($7.50/$15), lamb osso buco with creamy semolina polenta ($10/$20), both available as tapas or main courses. Along with the quiet, humming atmosphere, outgoing staff, and clean-lined, low-lit interior (like being on "a train ride for taste buds," as a friend described it), this makes Cav a perfect date place — strange wines to talk about and comfy food to share. Another bonus: Because Cav focuses on little-known foreign regionals, there’s no pressure to look like an expert. Menu and flights change weekly. (Marke B.)

CAV WINE BAR Mon.–Sat., 5:30 p.m.–1 a.m.
Kitchen closes 11 p.m. Mon.–Thurs., midnight Fri.–Sat.
1666 Market, SF. (415) 437-1770, www.cavwinebar.com. D/MC/V, $$$

 

Deeper into sushi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Opera Plaza doesn’t look like restaurant heaven, and, for the most part, it isn’t. The development’s long-running success story is Max’s Opera Café, a faux deli that deals in mountainous portions, with dill pickles and fries. Over the years there have been a few places with more style, among them Carlo Middione’s Vivande and Bruce Cost’s Monsoon, but in neither case was traction established, and neither concern lasted long.

The crash of Monsoon isn’t all that difficult to understand in retrospect. Whereas Vivande at least had a big sign overlooking the busy corner of Franklin and Golden Gate Avenues to let potential patrons know it was there, Monsoon (which opened soon after the 1989 earthquake) was buried deep in the complex and wasn’t all that easy to see even from the interior courtyard, complete with its Stalinist concrete and fountain. Here, too late, are my directions: Enter the courtyard from Van Ness, with A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books on your right, pass the fountain, and shear to your right as you approach the movie theater. You will see a neon sign and, beyond some glass doors, will find yourself at the host’s station in a restaurant, and while the restaurant won’t be Monsoon (which closed early in 1993), it will be pretty good. It is Shima Sushi and represents a return to respectability for a centrally located yet obscure site that had fallen into slightly tacky gloom.

A postulate I have been forming recently is that many troubled and oft-flipped restaurant spaces find a stable life serving sushi and other Japanese food, and Shima Sushi bolsters the argument. It helps, certainly, that uncooked fish has long been a form of fast food in Japan, for the large lunchtime crowds at Shima consist, one supposes — to judge by the office garb and accoutrements — largely of people who work in the neighborhood’s complex of municipal, state, and federal offices, and they are visibly under some time pressure. Shima accommodates them gracefully, with bento boxes ($7.95 for a choice of two items, $8.95 for three) featuring such delicacies as tuna sashimi and crisp-skinned, smoky-sweet salmon teriyaki, along with miso soup, mixed green salad, and bean sprouts with scallions. (There is also a vegetarian bento box.) Other choices include a sushi lunch special ($8.95), with a California roll (real crab is $1 extra and worth it) and a mix of sushi pieces likely to include tuna, hamachi, salmon, and shrimp. Those averse to raw flesh have recourse to various forms of teriyaki, tempura, donburi, and udon. Service is quite swift and polite, but the staff is too busy hurrying to do much hovering, and once you’re served, they’re likely to let you be unless you make some want or need known. Then they do come running.

By evening, the mood of the restaurant visibly softens: The light seems a bit yellower, the blond wood of the Japanese-style partitions a bit warmer, the bubbles in the aquarium a bit bigger and lazier. The patronage, too, mellows — but then, people do live in and around Opera Plaza, and for them, Shima is a jewel of a neighborhood restaurant, with a favorable quality-to-price ratio and enough room to accommodate walk-ins while keeping the noise level reasonable. The dinner menu resembles an expanded version of the lunch menu; the chief additions are a list of specialty rolls and a trio of "special combinations" — blow-out sushi festivals served in wooden boats. You order according to the size of your party; we were three and opted for the Shima special ($75, "serves three or more") but quailed when the ship approached the table looking like one of those freighters you sometimes see sailing through the Golden Gate, so laden with booty as to be nearly submerged.

"We’ll never be able to eat all that," said one of my fellow musketeers and one justly renowned for doughtiness in the face of huge amounts of food. As things turned out, we did empty the ship of its cargo, which the other musketeer, to my right, perhaps a bit less doughty, described as "tuna-heavy." As indeed it was, not that there was anything wrong with that. We worked our way through nigiri and sashimi editions of maguro, toro, and albacore (underrated; always fabulously buttery), along with salmon, red snapper (thin sheets of pearly flesh splashed with rose), and bonito, whose ribbing gave each piece the look of a chunk of burst all-terrain tire on the shoulders of a mountain highway. Astern, the ship had been laden with rolls, among them Super California — strips of barbecued eel laid atop rice disks stuffed with avocado and snow crab — and Lion King, a California roll wrapped in salmon, then baked in foil like a potato.

In due course the denuded ship sailed away, guided by a smiling server who nonetheless shook her head in polite awe at what we had accomplished. A few moments later she showed up with small bowls of green tea ice cream: reward or penalty? Neither; the ice cream was included in the deal, to be shipped under separate cover. The doughty musketeer made a face at the prospect of green tea ice cream but polished it off since, in the end, a sweet is a sweet is a sweet, especially if at no extra cost. SFBG

Shima Sushi

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sat., 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri., 5–10 p.m.

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

601 Van Ness, SF

(415) 292-9997

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

A strong small-business agenda

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EDITORIAL You read the academic journals these days, or peruse economic-development Web sites, and everyone seems to be talking about sustainable urban economics. It’s as if the mantra that was first put forward by Jane Jacobs, David Morris, and a few others a quarter century ago is very much in the mainstream today: Cities function best with diverse economies dominated by locally owned businesses, with money circuutf8g within the community. Cutting-edge restaurants talk about serving locally grown food. Beverage savants want local beer and wine. Just about everyone — including the mayor and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — wants to participate in a program called Shop Local.

It’s a wonderful, encouraging trend — but if it’s going to make any real difference in this city, it has to become a lot more than lip service. Consider: •Just as Mayor Newsom was proudly signing on to a Shop San Francisco program, the mayor and the supervisors were busy approving plans to allow Home Depot — an anticompetitive out-of-town corporation that destroys local small business and undermines the entire concept of a strong local economy — to build a giant store on Bayshore Boulevard.

 •It’s taken legal action by Sue Hestor and the neighborhood leaders to derail (for now) the mayor’s plans to build high-end condos all over the eastern neighborhoods — threatening hundreds of locally owned businesses.

•Downtown business leaders and the groups they fund still push for policies that hurt most of the businesses in the city — and too many small-business people still go along.

Here’s the reality: Supporting small businesses — and moving San Francisco toward a sustainable economy — requires a lot more than a slogan. The people who are behind the Shop Local movement know that. They’re promoting a wide range of national and local policies designed to change not only attitudes but the direction of public policy.

San Francisco, a progressive city known for its wonderful, lively, unique neighborhoods, ought to be a national leader in the battle. But others (Philadelphia, for example) are moving way ahead. This city is still stuck in an ancient (and regressive) economic mind-set.

There are a number of key things the city can do to turn that around and become a truly small-business–friendly place — and most of them go far beyond public-relations efforts and cutting through red tape. The basic approach to policy needs to change; here are a few ways to start:

 •Stop allowing big chains to come into town. That’s not exactly rocket science, and it isn’t so hard either: Hayes Valley and North Beach both have "formula retail" laws that restrict the chains, and there’s talk of doing the same in Potrero Hill. But why does this have to be fought block by block? Why not a citywide ordinance that protects every neighborhood commercial district — and, more important, keeps the life-sucking big-box giants away from the city altogether?

 •Make small, locally owned businesses part of the planning process. The city’s own (limited) studies have made clear that the type of development the mayor and the current city planning leadership has in mind would damage local businesses, particularly in the repair, distribution, and small manufacturing areas. That alone ought to be grounds to change directions. Why not a checklist for every new project that includes the question: Will this displace existing locally owned businesses? If the answer is yes, the project should be rejected.

•Take progressive business taxes seriously. There’s almost certainly going to be an effort this fall to change the city’s business-tax structure, with one of the goals being an increase in overall revenue. That’s great, and it ought to happen — but the tax rates have to be shifted too, so that a tiny local retail outlet doesn’t pay the same amount as the Gap. (Socking big-box outlets with a special tax or fee — possibly based on the fact that they are by nature car-driven operations — might be a nice way to bring in some cash.)

You can’t be friendly to small local businesses these days without taking sides in the national economic war — and that means coming out against the big chains. Until San Francisco does that, all the talk of supporting local merchants will amount to nothing. SFBG

Hey Culturatti

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Welcome to the Guardian’s new Pixel Vision blog — our day-to-day guide to the Bay’s best film, art. theatre, food, fashion, cultural, and goodness-knows-what-all happenings. If you’re a bleeding heart liberal like us, you’ll want to check back here often for the most organic, free range, fair trade, meatless news and views about our fair City’s goings-ons. But hey, we can’t tell you what to do — we’re not the government… yet. We just want to get the word out that you don’t have to waste much blood-for-oil fossil fuel or tap Big Pharma to get a healthy dose of culture — it’s all right here under your unbobbed nose. Cheers!

noodles.jpg

A Twinkie defense?

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› paulr@sfbg.com

A question too seldom pondered in these parts might be put as follows: Do twinkies eat Twinkies? The latter, of course, is the iconic cream-filled cake from Hostess; the former, a term for decorative if not decorous young men who can often be found at parties thrown by rich old queens with wine cellars full of Napa cabernets. And the answer to the question is almost certainly no, at least not if the twinkie ("twink" is a butch truncation — see Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City) is interested in maintaining his value on the sociosexual market. This is because Twinkies, like so many of their near relations on the supermarket’s junk food shelves, are bad for you, and may I be forgiven for being the bearer of this truly stunning news.

As a child in the 1960s I liked Twinkies well enough, but I have not eaten one for decades nor even thought about them for years, not until a press release arrived the other day like a bolt from the blue, announcing that Ten Speed Press — of all presses! — is bringing out The Twinkies Cookbook. I have not yet seen the book, so perhaps it will turn out to be a fabulous joke, but the press release is not reassuring, with its references to recipes for Twinkies-pecan bananas Foster, pumpkin-Twinkie bread pudding, Twinkie burritos, and chicken-raspberry Twinkie salad — all of them, apparently, submitted by red-blooded, star-spangled, born-on-the-Fourth-of-July American Twinkie lovers.

Since the Twinkie is famous for its long shelf life and (unlike the twinkie) its sponginess, my thoughts turned immediately to trans fat, the hydrogenated vegetable oil that is one of the most artery-clogging substances you can eat but, until the health furor of the past few years, has been immensely helpful to the food industry in keeping packaged baked goods moist and salable. In the last year or two, many junk food makers have responded to public pressure by phasing out trans fats with alacrity; would I find that the Twinkie had been upgraded too?

No, alas. A quick trip to a neighborhood market and a quick scan of the (lengthy) list of ingredients in Twinkies revealed the words hydrogenated and shortening. End of inquiry: When you see either of those words, you move on, whether you are or were a twinkie, or even if you aren’t or weren’t. SFBG

 

The burger hopper

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› paulr@sfbg.com

The hamburger has a certain Zelig quality in America: It turns up all over the place, in guises high and low, at fancy metropolitan restaurants and greasy truck stops on the outskirts of every Podunk and Palookaville from coast to coast. Some, like the famous Zuni burger, are made from carefully ground high-end beef; many others — many, many others — are made from meat whose provenance we probably don’t care to think about.

The hamburger, then, is democratic in the best American sense. It looks as good in coat and tails as it does in a pair of sweatpants. It uncomplainingly accepts the companionship of cheese, yes, all kinds of cheese, but also of bacon, avocado, mushrooms, and grilled onions — not to mention lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles. It can be made in a flash — cooked in a pan, under a broiler, on a griddle, over hot coals — and eaten with ease, being a variant of that incomparable finger food, the sandwich. It is suitable for practically any occasion; it is our national food. Presidents and paupers alike eat hamburgers.

Yet as democracy in America wanes, one cannot help wondering about the fate of the burger. Of course, San Francisco is not the ideal location for these kinds of ruminations, for this has never been much of a hamburger town. The city’s culinary roots are, instead, Franco-Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and maritime — none of them huge on ground-beef patties — and in later years we have witnessed a bloom of vegetarian regimes in which the trusty burger is anathema or worse. Add to all this a raft of concerns about mad cow disease and E. coli contamination, LDL and the ethical treatment of animals, and you have a recipe for … linguine with broccoli, or something.

Yet the burger is a hardy little fellow, and places that honor its tenacity persist and even, modestly, proliferate. One new such spot is Toad’s, which opened toward the end of January in the old Café Arguello space at Valencia and 26th Streets. You would not think, walking into Toad’s, that here is a restaurant dealing mainly in hamburgers and hot dogs, nor for that matter that you were entering a restaurant named Toad’s; the cream-and-dark-wood look is one of understated elegance and makes the tall, straight, boxy space look like a small Town Hall. The flat-panel television mounted above the bar toward the rear and tuned to ESPN does give a slight sports-bar air and does, perhaps, whet the appetite for such all-Americana as buffalo wings, potatoes, nachos, and curly fries, all of which the menu offers.

Not too many years ago, curly fries were a Jack in the Box exclusive, but now you can get them at one-off places like Toad’s, and they’re every bit as good — crisp and slightly spicy coils — as the fast-food version. You can get a full order of them, complete with buttermilk ranch dressing, for $3.95, but a better option might be to upgrade the fries included in the cost of your burger. This slight surcharge bumps the price of the well-seasoned and juicy avocado cheeseburger, say (with a half avocado’s worth of buttery, ripe slices and choice of cheese), from $8.95 to $9.95 and provides more than enough curly fries, unless you are really fixated.

In keeping with the restaurant’s handsome look, the Joe Six-Pack menu is full of sly upscaleness. The beef burgers are made from Black Angus, and there are several meatless choices available (including the amazingly lifelike Boca burger), along with homemade chili and soup of the day ($4.95 a bowl), which, even when it sounds drab — zucchini and mushrooms, maybe, classic bottom-of-the-bin, end-of-the-week stuff — is likely to be spiffed up with some cumin and chili pepper. You can get Stella Artois and Big Daddy IPA on tap. The one thing Toad’s doesn’t have is the alfresco option. For that you’ll have to traipse over to Barney’s Gourmet Burgers in Noe Valley.

Like Toad’s, Barney’s is a burger joint with a fair amount of discreet spit and polish. The space used to belong to a bistro, and the beer garden–worthy garden out front, set with umbrella-shaded tables and potted plants, was an important draw for diners who might otherwise be tempted to step into Little Italy (now Lupa) across the street. When Barney’s took over, there was quiet mourning in some quarters at fate’s lack of imagination, but the place has had a long run and — to judge from the crowds in the garden day and night — a successful one.

As it happens, Barney’s, too, offers curly fries, and they are as good as Toad’s (and Jack’s), right down to the ranch dressing. Although I made the mistake of ordering the curlies separately, I thought I was exercising moderation by getting only a half basket of them ($3.50) and was dismayed to find, when I weighed myself the morning after, that I’d gained five pounds. Moral of story: no morning-after weigh-ins, and curly fries should probably be eaten with tweezers, or handled with some of the same ceremony and officiousness that Seinfeld‘s übertoff Mr. Pitt brought to the enjoyment of his Snickers bars. (Knife! Fork! White linen napkin!)

The burgers, they are fine and conform nicely to the local standard. (Assuming you know what I mean, I shall say no more.) Lighter eaters and beefphobes will be relieved to learn that Barney’s offers turkey burgers outfitted in various ways — dusted with Cajun spices ($6.95), maybe, then blackened like Gulf red snapper. Such a burger might not play in Palookaville, but here in the big city, it’s the people’s choice, or one of them. SFBG

Toad’s

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–9:30 p.m.

Lunch: Sun., noon–3 p.m.

1499 Valencia, SF

(415) 648-TOAD

Beer and wine

MC/V

Potentially noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Barney’s Gourmet Hamburgers

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–10 p.m.

Sun., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.

4138 24th St., SF

(415) 282-7770

Beer and wine

MC/V

Pleasant noise level

Wheelchair accessible

Wild Pepper

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Travelers on Interstate 280, northbound across the south face of the city, may well have had occasion to use the San Jose Avenue exit, a two-lane ramp that curves through a tunnel and onto another multilane road scarcely different from the freeway itself, except for the Muni trains running along the median and the lower speed limit, which is generally ignored, as is the case on the freeway proper. But, like a wadi fading in some desert, San Jose Avenue soon becomes a ghost. Traffic curves onto Guerrero and speeds north, and San Jose itself seems to end even before reaching Cesar Chavez.

It doesn’t end, though. It’s just interrupted, and a block north of Cesar Chavez it resumes its languid progress as a kind of village lane all but inaccessible to the automotive furies on nearby thoroughfares and lined with quaint old houses and a small slice of park, beatifically calm. At the foot of this segment of street, in a building that could easily be mistaken for a Laundromat, we find Wild Pepper, a recently relocated Chinese restaurant (ne Long Island, on Church) notable not only for its isolation — for restaurants, like wolves (and humans!), tend to operate on a pack model, clustering together — but also for its offer of evidence that two people can indeed eat quite royally in this town and still get out the door for less than $40, maybe nearer $30. Those numbers include tax and tip, yes — the latter covering table service at tables covered with proper white linens and set with handsomely lacquered rosewood chairs.

None of this is to suggest that Wild Pepper is the lap of luxury. The setting, intimate to the city yet remote from it, has its charms, of course; I would not have been surprised to find a hitching post for horses outside the front door. The interior design too, while not without its flourishes, including an aquarium full of bubbles and decorative tropical fish, is Spartan in the manner of one of those semilegal in-law apartments in which the dehumidifier is always running. But all this means is that there is less sensory clutter to distract one’s attention from the excellent food.

As Wild Pepper’s menu reminds us, excellent Chinese food need not be imperial nor be prepared with a banquet table and 14 courses in mind. Earthiness helps, pepperiness too, along with an attention to freshness of ingredients and continence in the use of cooking oil. As an introduction to these admirable qualities, Wild Pepper offers a deceptively boring-sounding cucumber salad ($3.95); the crisp, cooling cuke is cut into coins and dressed with a simple but lively oil flecked by chili flakes and minced garlic. If you thought the cucumber was a dark green torpedo fit only to be made into effete little white-bread sandwiches for the high teas beloved of the garlic-fearing English, you will be pleased to think again.

Many of the menu’s more attractive offerings are to be found under the heading "chef’s specials." Here we find such treats as minced-chicken lettuce cup ($6.95), basically a variant of mu shu pork (including a small dish of hoisin sauce), with chicken substituted for the pork and immaculate leaves of iceberg lettuce for the pancakes. Also good, if on the richer side, is Szechuan crispy beef ($8.95), cords of shredded meat hot-wokked to a certain snappiness in the company of slivers of onion and an unassumingly brown but potent sweet-sour sauce laced with Szechuan peppercorns. For a Thai spin, try basil eggplant with prawns and scallops ($10.95) — the classic Siamese combination of sweet and spicy, with the eggplant neither tough nor mushy, those disastrous termini of many a home cook’s ministrations.

If there is a weakness on the menu, it lies in the hot appetizers and can be recognized by the alluring but somehow repulsive scent of the deep-fryer. The pork pot stickers ($4.50 for six) are an exception, being just pan-seared instead of dunked in a vat of hot oil. But they are an exception; also a bit floury. The combination plate ($6.25) gives the full oily effect; here we have egg roll and fried chicken wings (which consist of little more than deep-fried batter and some slender bones — but are tasty!), along with a pair of pot stickers and a couple of disks of crab Rangoon: crab meat mixed with cream cheese and, yes, deep-fried. Good, but positively Homer Simpson–esque.

A better hot first course might be one of the soups. Hot and sour ($2.75 for a cup) is fine in a mainstream way, but a more enriching choice might be the ocean party ($6.95 for a large, and that means at least six cups’ worth), an egg drop soup fortified almost beyond recognition. Emendations include seafood, of course (mainly scallops and chunks of white fish), along with shreds of bok choy, rounds of baby corn, panels of carrot, and slivers of shiitake mushroom. There is no obviously dominant ingredient in this soup, and its flavor is delicate — easily obscured, say, by the bite and fire of the preceding cuke salad, if you had eaten that first, as we made the mistake of doing. But we found that once the cuke fireworks had ended, the soup quietly asserted itself until its mild flavor filled our mouths and we could not get enough of it. Pepper, you see, is nice, whether red, black, white, or Szechuan, but it is not the only way to go.

Wild Pepper

11 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.

3601 26th St., SF

(415) 695-7678

Beer and wine

MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Inside the belly of the dog

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I CARTOON DAZE

Homeland Security asked the usual dumb questions when I slapped my passport on the counter: what countries did you visit? Business or pleasure? The laser page did not trigger any alarms — yet. I advanced to the carrousel to pick up my luggage. My suitcase had burst apart in Mexico City, spilling incriminating documents all over the terminal floor. Now it came down the ramp swaddled in plastic. As I reached to pull it off, all hell broke loose — bells began to clang, buzzers burped jerkily, strobe lights flashed crazily on and off, and an automated voice on the intercom kept repeating “this is an emergency — walk do not run to the nearest exit.”

I did not walk, nor did anyone else in the San Francisco International arrivals terminal. We were under terrorist attack! The twin towers were coming down upon us! Young and old, some in wheelchairs even, stampeded for the sliding doors, luggage carts tipping, travelers stumbling, elbowing each other in their mad rush to escape as customs inspectors implored us to return to have our suitcases checked for contraband once the emergency had subsided. No one in his or her right mind ever did.

Meanwhile, the escapees kept jostling and tumbling and the bells and buzzers and whistles and lights kept yowling their siren song. Yow! Burrrp! Pow! It was like a Saturday morning kids’ cartoon.

Of course, in the end, the terrorist turned out be some poor schmuck caught smoking in the men’s room.

It was a prescient re-introduction to the land where my father croaked. My month inside the belly of the Dog was kind of like a perpetual cartoon. I often felt like poor Bob Hoskins surrounded by a world full of Roger Rabbits. Cartoons were, in fact, motoring worldwide mayhem. Bim! Baff! Boff! The irreverent Danish magazine Jyllns Posten had published a dozen blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad — in one, he wore a turban with a bomb in it, in another the Messenger of Allah was depicted as a pig (the magazine had reportedly turned down caricatures of Jesus Christ as being in poor taste.) The publication of the cartoons had opened the scab of Islamic wrath and the Muslim world was on a murderous rampage from Indonesia to well, Khartoum.

The religious leaders of 57 Islamic nations meeting in Mecca declared fatwa and jihad on the infidel Danes and their damned cheese. In Tehran, a smirking Ahmadinejad announced big-money competition for cartoons of the Holocaust (he doesn’t believe it happened) and spurious drawings appeared in Europe of Anne Frank in the sack with Adolph while she scribbles in her diary.

The Christian anti-Muslim cartoon backlash tumbled Muhammad’s rating to an all-time low in U.S. polls. The New York Times Style section reported that rebel youth were jumping out of the djalabahs and into “extreme Christian clothing.” In Nigeria, Christians slaughtered their Muslim brethren, daubing “Jesus Christ Is The Lord” on mosque walls in their victims’ blood.

Then came the anti-Christian, anti-Muslim cartoon backlash. Churches were neatly stenciled with icons equating the cross to the Swastika in Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) California. And to close the circle, three white boys in Alabama took the crusade a step up and just burned the tabernacles down to the ground.

If you don’t think our nation is being devoured by religious psychosis, consider two recent Supreme Court decisions. Just the other day, the Supremes voted unanimously, with Justice Roberts on board, to uphold the right of a religious cult to guzzle potions brewed from the hallucinogenic Amazonian root Ayahuasca while they gabbed with god. Last summer, that court, with Sandra Day O’Connor still in place, voted to deny brain tumor victims medical marijuana to ease their agonies.

The ultimate cartoon was Cheney plugging his hunting partner in the ticker just like good ol’ Elmer Fudd. Ping! Pong! Blamblam! Senator Lindsey Graham, who shares a similar war-mongering dementia with the veep, reports that Dick Cheney told him that killing small birds kept him “sane.” Blap! Splat! Shazam! The late night joke mongers had a ball with the caper: “This Just In! We’ve learned that Vice President Cheney tortured his hunting partner for an hour before he shot him!” Yuk! Yuk! Did you hear the one about the CIA agent caught rifling housewives’ panty drawers during working hours in Virginia (you could look it up)? Yok! Yok! The U.S. teaming up with Iran to keep Gays out of the United Nations? Tweet! Tweet! Bird flu in of all places, Turkey (and Iraq)? Kaplooey!

Elmer and Daffy Duck scoot off into the sunset and the screen rolls up into a little round porthole where Bugs is cackling, “th-th-th-the-that’s all folks!”

II SCOUNDREL TIME

The problem is that that’s not all folks, and this may be loony tunes but it certainly isn’t merry melodies. These bastards are for real and it’s not really very funny. The title of Lillian Hellman’s slim volume on how HUAC hounded her and Hammitt is an insufficient one to describe these scum and their perverted torture war.

Every day the Seattle Times runs a few inches slugged “Terrorism Digest.” Aside from the usual shorts on Moussaoui, a rumored attack during March Madness, and an elderly ice cream truck driver in Lodi California who is accused of planning to blow up skyscrapers in Hollywood, most of the news is not about terrorism at all but rather the torture of alleged terrorists, perhaps tens of thousands of them in secret torture chambers hidden away in U.S. client states like Bulgaria and Morocco.

Here’s one. Ali Shakal Kaisi was the hooded man on the box with the electric cables snaking from his limbs, the poster boy for the abuse at Abu Ghraib. The photo is now on his business card. Originally, he was arrested for complaining to occupation troops about throwing their garbage on a soccer field in his Baghdad neighborhood. The Pentagon, in a display of perhaps the most hideous chutzpah in the Guinness Book of Records, refuses to comment on Mr. Khaisi’s case because it would “a violation of his Geneva Convention rights.”

Connoisseurs concede that Bush et al (heretofore to be referred to as “the scum”) have added some innovative techniques to Torquemada’s little catalogue of horrors. The reoccurring sexual pathology is disturbing. One accused Jihadist at Gitmo was wrapped in an Israeli flag and forced to watch gay porn 24 hours a day by military interrogators who passed themselves off as the FBI. Sadistic commandants shove feeding tubes up the nose of hunger strikers and rip them out roughly as the men piss and shit all over themselves while restrained in what Rumsfeld euphemistically describes as “a rolling padded cell.”

Why are these men being tortured? We learn from 5,000 pages of heavily-blacked-out military depositions released on court order to the Associated Press that at least three were detained because they wore Cassio F91W watches that have compasses on their face pointing to Mecca. “But our chaplains here all wear the same watch” protested one detainee.

All of this pain and suffering is being orchestrated in the much shat-upon name of freedom, the “freedom” as Sub Marcos puts it, “to choose between the carrot and the stick.” You know, as in “free elections” — Iraq’s three fraudulent elections that have led to massive bloodshed in that benighted land being the role models. But elections are not “free” when the Bushwas don’t win, like Hammas and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez and most probably, Lopez Obrador in Mexico this July. Maybe free elections are not such a hot idea after all.

The third anniversary of this despicable war is only days away as I write these scabrous lines. Extrapoutf8g the Lancet study, it is probable that 150,000 Iraqis have been crucified in this infernal crusade. The 2,300 or so GIs who died with their boots on fill just a few slabs in the charnel house Bush has built in Iraq.

I suppose the up side is that two thirds of those Yanquis surveyed think he is a liar and a baby killer — but many more will have to fall before the infidels are finally run off. Clearly, the resistance is working on it. Blowing the Golden Dome sky-high was a malevolent stroke of genius by the terroristas to incite sectarian (not civil) war, a scenario designed to foil the White House’s scheme to pull out of this treacherous quicksand and start bombing before the body bags queer the November elections.

Will it work? Shia death squads operating out of the Interior ministry are kidnapping dozens of Sunnis every day now and hanging them for public consumption. We can expect roadside gibbets next. The imminent spread of Shia-Sunni hostilities into neighboring oil lands has Washington biting its nails. We’re talking $100 a barrel here.

Sasha has a Skype pen pal in Baghdad, call her Fatima. She is a medical-science professor at the University, a middle class, somewhat secular woman who lives in a high rise in a mixed neighborhood. She writes when there is power and an Internet connection — the last three generator operators on the block have been shot dead. Her absence on the screen is always a cause for alarm. Fatima says she no longer sits writing in her window to take advantage of daylight because she is afraid of being hit by a stray bullet. I am forever amazed how concerned she is for us. Last week, she wrote “I am sorry my dear for not writing. I am ok but I am more afraid than before. Things are going from bad to very bad.” If we never hear from Fatima again, the blood will be on George Bush’s hands.

Is George Bush impeachable? He has committed multiple felonies in spying on 350,000 unsuspecting citizens without a court order, a stain on the Constitution and way beyond the pale of even Nixonian paranoia. He sold the country an illegal war based on shameless perjury in collusion with oil barons and defense contractors who have grown obscenely fat on the blood of the Iraqi people.

And he sought to sell off vital U.S. ports to “Arab terrorists”! Or at least that’s what his fellow Republicans seem to perceive. Fanning the fumes of anti-Arab racism has come back to bite Bush and the corporate globalizers of the planet on the ass. Who does Bill Frist think was operating these ports up until now? The bloody Brits, that’s who! This is Globalization, Savage Capitalism, Dog eat Dog. It’s the American Way. What do you know about Sheik Mo? Vital elements of the food chain (Church’s Chicken and Caribou Coffee for example) have already fallen into the hands of “Arab terrorists.”

Where was I? The Bill of Particulars, right? I’m sorry — it’s my birthday and I’m on a vent fueled by the one good thing about this country, Humboldt County sinsemilla.

George Bush — guilty of nuclear proliferation! What else would you call giving India enough fissionable material to blow a hole in China and Pakistan?

George Bush — guilty of blatant racism and incalculable callousness, strumming his guitar while the levees were bursting down in New Orleans, an interval much like the goat story on 9/11 of which Osama has reminded us in a recent communique. J’accuse George Bush!

Will a mush-minded congress apparently dosed to the gills on Ambien, the new sleepwalking (and sleep voting) wonder drug, vote to impeach? “Que se vayan todos!” the cry of the 2002 Argentinazo, “that they should all be kicked out” is an anthem for our time.

III SLEEPING IN SEATTLE

I’ve spent the last month sleeping in Seattle. Daytimes, I’ve churned out tens of thousands of words on my soon-to-be-published-if-it-ever-gets-finished opus, “Making Another World Possible: Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006.”

Seattle has spectral vistas but at heart, it is a city without a soul. It has been bitterly cold here, the wind whipping off Puget Sound like The Hawk off Lake Michigan. A sullen rain falls most days. When the sun comes out in Seattle, they say the suicide rate goes up because people can’t deal with the brightness.

I have been lucky to have had Sasha’s cozy room and half to hole up in. A lot of people in this city don’t even have a roof over their head. Old men sleep rough in Pioneer Square these freezing nights, young tramps camp out under the bushes up here on Cap Hill. There’s a Hooverville under the Viaduct.

The merchants don’t care much for all these deranged pariahs dragging around ragged sleeping bags like batman capes or curled up in fetal positions in one of Starbuck’s many doorways. Seattle has more pressing matters on its mind. Howard (Starbuck’s) Schultz is threatening to move the Sonics if he doesn’t get a new arena free of charge from the city. Then there is Bill and Melissa, the world’s wealthiest nation.

This is a smug city that has grown soft and wealthy on the backs of software billionaires, where no one gives a damn about anything that is not on a screen. The Stranger ran the Muhammad cartoons and no one flinched. The next week, the paper ran a feature on a man who was fucked to death by a horse. Again, no one flinched. Meanwhile, the homeless are dying out there in the street.

On Valentine’s Day, Sasha and I died in on the City Hall steps — she was the 50th victim to have died on the streets of Seattle in 2005. I was the 53rd. The Raging Grannies died in with us. I dedicated my dying to the spirit of Lucky Thompson, who recorded with Miles and Bird and spent his twilight years sleeping in Seattle parks. Seattle has a way of damaging its black geniuses. Octavia Butler, the towering writer of “conjectural fiction” whose work hones in on race and class like a laser, fell down the steps of her home here a few weeks ago. She lived alone — she always lived alone — and no one found her until she was dead. There is a statue of Jimi Hendrix right down the street.

What’s been good is watching Sasha blossom as an organizer. She’s been busy 25 hours a day putting together the visit of Eman Khammas, a courageous Iraqi journalist who speaks to the plight of women in Bush’s genocidal war. I saw Khammas last summer at the Istanbul War Crimes Tribunal and she is a firebrand speaker. Eman is part of the Women Say No To War tour put together by Global Exchange, two members of the delegation who had lost their families to the occupation, were denied visas because they did not have enough family left to “compel” their return to Iraq.

On the third anniversary of this madness March 18th, Eman Khammas will be a speaker at the march and rally set for the Seattle Federal building. That evening, she will talk at greater length at Trinity Methodist Church in the Ballard district. The kick-ass rebel singer Jim Page will open. No one turned away. Some of the moneys raised will go to the Collateral Repair Project (www.collateralrepairproject.org) which Sasha and her pal Sarah have created to help out the family of Mahmoud Chiad, an ambulance driver in al-Qaim who was gunned down by Bush’s crusaders October 1st, the first day of Operation Iron Fist in al-Ambar province, as he raced to aid victims of the massacre. There’s a widow and six kids, and Collateral Repair hopes to buy them a piece of land and some goats.

So I’m in the air back to Make Sicko City. The globalphobes are acting out at the World Water (Privatizers) Forum, which kicks off this week and when last heard from, Sub Marcos was trying to break into a prison in Guanajuato. I’ve got to finish this damn book in the next six weeks.

And Sasha and I? Who knows? I wear her name on a grain of rice around my neck and her door key is still wedged deep in my pocket and maybe it will open her heart to me again someday. We met in Baghdad with Bush’s bombs on the way and the bottom line is that we continue to fight this heinous war together. That’s good too.

John Ross has landed. But these articles will continue to be issued at 10-day intervals until “Making Another World Possible” is done. The deadline is May 1st. “Making Another World Possible” will be available at cost to Blindman Buff subscribers this fall.

 

 

 

28 years later

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If you live in or truly love San Francisco, you’ve seen The Times of Harvey Milk. Rob Epstein’s 1984 movie is one of the best nonfiction features ever made. It’s also one of the greatest movies about this city. Only time will tell whether Stanley Nelson’s new documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, is a work of similar importance, but the fact that I’m even mentioning it in the same context as Epstein’s movie says something about the reserved precision of its journalistic reasoning and the overwhelming emotional force of its finale.

Of course, there is another reason to connect Jonestown and The Times of Harvey Milk. The murder of Supervisor Milk and Mayor George Moscone by Dan White took place 10 days after the deaths of Jim Jones, Congressman Leo Ryan, and more than 900 members of Jones’s Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. One tragedy claimed the life of a man who was already a civil rights hero, while the other led mainstream media and true crime sources to portray a human being as a monster. Just as Epstein’s movie profoundly humanizes Milk, Nelson’s movie digs beneath stereotypes of pure evil to reveal a different Jones than the one used to sell quickie television and paperback biographies.

Twenty-eight years later, the tragedy in Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders still have an effect on San Francisco politics: In very different ways, they represent the death of progressive, district-based local activism and its afterlife. (Garrett Scott, codirector of the superb documentaries Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story and Occupation: Dreamland, was in the early stages of making a movie about the two events and their relationship to SF politics when he died earlier this year.) It seemed appropriate to have New York native Nelson discuss his movie with a contemporary political figure whose knowledge of local history runs deep. On the eve of Jonestown’s screenings at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, former San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez agreed to interview Nelson about the roads leading to the cataclysmic events of 1978 and the roads leading away from it.

MATT GONZALEZ I want to start by saying I had a typical impression of Jim Jones as a cult leader whose message was a hustle to get people into his church so he could take advantage of them when they were vulnerable. The thing that jumped out immediately to me in this film was that the fundamental part of his message throughout his ministry was this idea of racial integration and equality. The main component was there at the beginning, and in a place like Indiana, when Indianapolis was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. It made me rethink and see him as someone who exhibited a certain genuineness and courage at that time.

Did that surprise you about him?

STANLEY NELSON The depth of his commitment surprised me. During one of the anniversaries of the deaths in Guyana, I heard some Peoples Temple members talking about it on [the radio]. I started thinking, “This involved over 900 people — all these people weren’t crazy. So what was it that drove them to the church?”

Research made me realize that there was something much deeper going on and that this was a real political movement for a lot of the time the church was in existence.

MG Jones had been a member of a human rights commission out in Indiana. That also underscores a very self-conscious relationship between his church and what was happening in society.

SN Yes. [In the film] there’s that incredible audiotape when he’s giving his own history, where he talks about how his father didn’t want to let a black kid in his house. Jim Jones says, “I won’t come in either,” and he doesn’t see his father for years after that.

I don’t think it was a hustle at all, I think it was something he truly did believe in. Jim Jones was a very complicated individual. Everybody’s complicated — there are no simple people — but Jim Jones was much more complicated than most of us.

MG How hard was it to find folks in Indiana who knew Jones?

SN It was hard. But Lynn [Jones’s hometown] was very small, and we were able to find one person who could lead us to others. One thing that’s amazing when you do research is that you can go to high schools and grade schools, and they still have yearbooks. You find people’s names, use the phone book, and just start calling.

MG Over time, Peoples Temple gets a financial foundation because its members give their property to Jones. He’s then able to set up communal living arrangements. But when he’s in Indiana, if I’m to understand correctly, he’s selling monkeys door to door or something like that.

Was his message about communal living a part of the hustle, or do you think that was also a belief that he genuinely held?

SN I think he genuinely believed it. That component really came out of Ukiah, in Redwood Valley, where they [Peoples Temple] had this farm. People actually did travel with him from Indiana [in 1965], so how were they going to live when they’d sold their houses? They could live communally.

One thing that I found fascinating is that the older people who lived in these communal houses got better treatment than they ever could have gotten from the state or welfare or Social Security, because not only were they housed and fed, they were also loved. All of a sudden they had this family — the old people were revered in Peoples Temple.

MG Would you say those two components — racial integration and property held in common — were the cornerstone of his preaching?

SN I think they were a big part, but it was also more than just racial integration. There was a sense that “we have this power that none of us has as individuals.” This was a time when a lot of people were smoking dope and dropping out, but Peoples Temple members were active. They saw themselves as activists; they saw themselves changing the world with the church as a tool.

MG In 1971 Richard Hongisto was elected sheriff of San Francisco, and it was a very liberal campaign. [George] Moscone was elected mayor in ’75, and we know Peoples Temple played a part in that. Hongisto’s election was an early sign of growing liberal strength in San Francisco, enough so that you can look at the Moscone victory and not simply say, “Peoples Temple caused this to happen.” But there’s no question given how close the election was that they played a major role. How do you see their political impact then?

SN Peoples Temple was part of the mainstream politics of the Bay Area. I’m from New York. I had no idea that Jim Jones was head of the Housing Commission in San Francisco or that politicians came to Peoples Temple events and gave incredible speeches praising Jim Jones. That was something I discovered while making the film.

It’s part of the history of Peoples Temple, but it was also like a birthday cake–times-12 to the politicians. The politicians didn’t look too far behind this gift horse, because [Peoples Temple] was highly organized. People did what Jim Jones said. At one point they had 13 buses. They’d fill up the buses and —

MG — a politician could have an instant press conference.

SN Just one phone call and Jim Jones could come with buses. You’d have 500 people at your march.

MG Do you get a sense that what happened in Jonestown reverberates politically today? The players then aren’t necessarily in politics. Jackie Speier still is, but Moscone, Willie Brown, and others are not holding political office. Still, do you see any aftereffects?

SN I’m not sure on a local level, but one thing I think it did was help kill the idea of communes in this country [at a time] when there was a strong movement saying, “Let’s live together; let’s live on the land; let’s pool our resources.” All of a sudden that was associated with “look at what happened in Guyana.”

MG As I understand it, there are about five survivors who were there when the massacre took place.

SN There were about five people actually there [who survived], and of those, there are, to my knowledge, three left alive. Two of them are in the film.

MG People closely associated with Peoples Temple spoke to you and revealed some, I would think, very difficult, personal stories about sexual assault or the use of authority to express dominance. Was it difficult to get people to talk honestly?

SN It was surprisingly easy for us to get people to talk honestly. Time has passed. Partly because of a play [Berkeley Rep’s The People’s Temple] that was produced here in the Bay Area, I think people understood that maybe we were ready to hear a different version of the story that was much deeper.

MG In the film you see that Jones is abusing prescription drugs and probably has a mounting paranoia that’s associated with some mental condition. Is there a sense that he changed while he was in San Francisco, or was Peoples Temple headed toward this sort of cultlike finality from its inception?

SN We interviewed people who knew Jim Jones when he was a kid, and they talk about the fact that he was not normal even as a six- or seven-year-old boy. But I think that his behavior did get more extreme as time went on. He had this incredible power within the church, and he was this warped individual, and the combination affected his behavior. In the end, when they [Peoples Temple members] are isolated in the jungle, that’s [a reflection of] who he is.

MG Tell me about the wealth of material you have. There is film footage of a healing that is rather dramatic and recordings of his various sermons.

SN Going in, I had no idea that there was so much film footage. But we found a guy in LA who had shot in Peoples Temple over two days using three cameras and 16-millimeter film and had lit the whole church. His footage is just incredibly beautiful. The healing service, Jim Jones preaching, and the congregation singing and dancing are all part of that. He’d sold off bits and pieces to places like NBC, but we came along at a time when he felt that the film he wanted to make would never get made, so he agreed to sell us some footage.

We found members of Peoples Temple who had footage that had never been seen before. There are actually shots from the plane of them going down [to Guyana] — you can hear Jim Jones describing what he’s going to do — and shots of Jones cutting through the jungle with machetes.

Also, we were working very closely with the California Historical Society library, which has a Peoples Temple collection.

MG There was a recent book [Dear People: Remembering Jonestown] that compiled some of that material.

SN Also, Jim Jones recorded himself and his sermons at Peoples Temple. They actually audio-recorded the night of the suicides. As the people are dying, Jim Jones is encouraging them to drink the poison. There are audiotapes of the children and the women and men screaming and dying.

MG As a filmmaker going into a project like this, are you trying to present the truth? Are you trying to present an alternative reading of what happened? Are you trying to warn people?

SN I’m not trying to warn people or tell an alternative history, although obviously what we did turns out to be an alternative history. I was just trying to tell this incredible story and tell it with as much honesty as I can. Everybody in the film had a part to play in Peoples Temple. We really wanted it to be a film told in the voices of the people who lived through it.

MG In my notes I have a reference to the various CIA-related theories [about what happened in Guyana]. You don’t pick that up in the film, and I wonder if you might say something about that.

SN There are different theories that Jim Jones was a CIA agent and this was all a scary mind-control experiment. You know, we found nothing to back that up, and it just didn’t make sense for us to go down that road.

MG As I understand it, a lot of these theories stem from [the fact] that the government withheld documents related to Jonestown. I guess Congressman [Leo] Ryan had a bill pending, the Hughes-Ryan amendment, that would have required that CIA covert operations be disclosed to Congress before those operations could be engaged in. You didn’t find anything related to that?

SN No, we didn’t find any hard evidence. I’m trying to operate as a filmmaker and also as a journalist.

MG So you had access to material —

SN — and we just didn’t find it [evidence].

MG I’d be interested in seeing what the original accounts were like in the local press in San Francisco during the time of Guyana and the Milk-Moscone murders. There was probably a sense of how Moscone’s opponents might use his ties to the Peoples Temple for political purposes.

SN One reason for the article in [the magazine] New West that first exposed Jim Jones and called for an investigation of Peoples Temple was to discredit Moscone. Part of the media follow-up was that “here is someone that Moscone supported.” So that was already happening around a year before the deaths in Guyana.

MG There are folks who find objectionable the idea of referring to the deaths as mass suicides. Did you reach a conclusion about that?

SN The film has no narration, so we didn’t refer to that other than in a title card at the end that I think calls it the largest mass murder-suicide in history. It’s impossible to say exactly what went on that day, but it is very clear that the kids — something like 250 people who were under 18 — were all murdered.

It was something we struggled with: “What do we call it: suicide or murder?” I think by the end of the film you feel that it’s kind of both at the same time.

MG If Jim Jones had died in Guyana prior to Ryan’s visit, is your sense in talking to the survivors or those associated with the church that this is a project that would have sustained itself?

SN I just don’t know.

MG You don’t want to engage in a bit of speculative history?

SN I think they had a real problem in sustaining themselves. They were growing food, but they were bringing in food too. Financially there was a burden.

One fascinating thing about that day is that there weren’t a lot of people who left with Congressman Ryan — less than 20 people. It was more Jim Jones’s insanity, him thinking that 20 people leaving is devastating [that led to the massacre].

MG Other than the sermons, are there other records of his thoughts? Are there tracts and manifestos?

SN There are some things that he wrote. He didn’t write a definitive book of his philosophies, but there is a piece in which he picks apart fallacies in the Bible.

MG On the one hand, Jones could be critical of the contradictions in the Bible, and on the other, he could pick out the parts that were useful to him.

SN One thing that everybody said was that Jim Jones knew the Bible — he wasn’t just talking off of the top of his head. He was incredibly smart, prepared, and cunning.

MG What did you learn from making the film?

SN It’s a film I’m glad to be finished with. All films are hard to make, but it really took a lot out of me. We’ve only had two screenings, and both times afterward there was a kind of shocked silence. One was for the members of Peoples Temple and their friends to let them be the first to see it.

MG How it was received?

SN The Peoples Temple members loved the film. We screened the film in a small theater, and we had a reception outside. The Peoples Temple members who were there with their families just stayed in the theater for about 15 minutes talking among themselves. It made me a little nervous [laughs]. But when they came out they all said they loved the film and felt it was a powerful way of telling their story — a story that hadn’t been told that way at all.

JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLES TEMPLE

April 29, 6:15 p.m.; April 30, 7 p.m.; May 1, 7 p.m.; May 2, 4:30 p.m.

Part of the San Francisco International Film Festival

Various venues

Call (925) 866-9559 for tickets and (415) 561-5000 for more information.

www.sffs.org

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THE SOUNDTRACK FROM Garden State  (Twentieth Century Fox Home Video, $29.98) has now infiltrated a healthy percentage of San Francisco’s cafés and boutiques. The country is a-flower with new Shins fans, while the coffers of Messrs. Simon and Garfunkel, whose "Only Living Boy in New York" surfaces in the film at a moment of rain-soaked poignancy, are no doubt ringing with the cl ink ing sound of incoming royalties on the latest round of reunion-tour and greatest-hits albums. And if anecdotal evidence of an emergent cult can be entered into the record, perhaps it means something that my housemate’s younger sister, a college freshman, came to visit over the Christmas holidays equipped with a suitably drab Garden State T-shirt the color of UPS workers’ uniforms (promoting itself via self-effacement in the spirit of the film); matching buttons for her handbag; and knowledge of the DVD’s imminent release date fervently beating inside her brain like an extra pulse.

I, too, was waiting, though I counted my lucky stars when she bought the thing, saving me the discomfort and embarrassment of a rabid early-morning appearance at the DVD store. I’d already trekked out to West Portal to see Garden State near the beginning of its big-screen release. And stood in line again toward the end of its lengthy run in a (successful) attempt to create a convert (my girlfriend). And had a temper tantrum when it came in 97th in the Village Voice’s film critics’ poll – below that life-eating waste of time Coffee and Cigarettes, far below Anchorman (!) and The Polar Express (!!). Really, what are the chances that a story about a numb, spaced-out human being reentering Earth’s orbit will have less going for it than the sight of a  bunc h of famous people chatting off-script about coffee?

Directed, written, and starred in by Scrubs’ Zach Braff, Garden State is sweet and clever and filled with the kind of tiny, lovable moments – the broken-off gas pump handle, the fast-food knight, the hamster mansion, any shot with Peter Sarsgaard in it – that help turn a movie’s audience into a medium-size cult. Many critics have acknowledged these truths, but also complained about the film’s slightness, about Braff’s characterless character: the affect-deficient, emotionally hobbled Andrew Largeman (a name straight out of AP English), who’s chosen a trip home for his mother’s funeral to jettison a 17-year lithium habit and the inappropriate ministrations of his psychiatrist father. It has been suggested that Andrew’s emptiness leaves the film without a center. Other cavils concern the stock quirkiness of love interest/lifesaver Sam (Natalie Portman), whose cute meet and subsequent interactions with Andrew help reveal what sort of person he’s managed to become – despite the meds, a fairly original childhood trauma, and the chilly region of familial dysfunction he’s been circling for years.

What kind of slight, stock, characterless person would enjoy, adore, or want to own this film, with all its flaws? Perhaps the sort who sees traces of familiarity in Andrew’s predicament of feeling  closed  off from the events of his own life, or enjoys watching him slowly work his way in from the perimeter (or just wants to see Natalie Portman go swimming in her underwear). At every moment of such a story line, there are gaping pitfalls, violin strings waiting to be plucked, but Braff, a first-time director, shows an admirable kind of reserve that somewhat mirrors the strangely seductive, quiet blankness of his character. As a director, he’s constantly rejecting the violins and finding something charming or funny or even emotionally moving to offer instead.

There are problems, mainly with the pacing of Andrew’s healing process, which for a while is enjoyably fractional and then starts to snowball toward film’s end – why are endings so perilous in moviemaking? The last few minutes also bear the inorganic stench of the test screening, whether because there was one, or because of some other external or internal pressure. Nothing much clears the air on that point in the DVD version’s deleted scenes, or the commentary by Braff and Portman. However, the latter offering is charming and droll like the film itself, and pleasantly informative – alongside the usual statements of the obvious and uncomfortable attempts to get through the credits, Braff offers blow-by-blow allusions to autobiographical detail, visual quoting, and anecdotes borrowed from the lives of f riends. O ther treats include your standard making-of doc, a restrained collection of bloopers, and more charming commentary by Braff, D.P. Lawrence Sher, editor Myron Kerstein, and production designer Judy Becker, who gets the lion’s share of Braff’s elated praise. In the end, the latter is one of the nicest elements of the extras: Braff’s pleased excitement about the film he and the others have made proves a sweet antidote to any wash of cross-marketing considered necessary to keep the cult’s membership numbers up. (Lynn Rapoport)

 
Chop shop

Frankly, I’ve always been partial to Freddy. But the five-disc DVD collection Friday the 13th: From Crystal Lake to Manhattan (Paramount Home Video, $79.99) – dubbed the "ultimate edition," though you’ll have to shell out separately for Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X – has given me a new appreciation for the man behind the hockey mask. A string of unlucky Fridays are charted in the series’ first eight entries (1980 to 1989), with future stars like Kevin Bacon and Tony Goldwyn, plu s countless unknowns, battling the cranky ex-camper. Parts one and two are fairly similar, though nothing in any future Friday would ever best Betsy Palmer’s turn as Jason’s maniacal mama.  Friday the 13th: Part Three is notable for its plunge into 3-D (coming atcha: snakes, sproi ng-ing eyebal ls, assorted weaponry), while the fourth film (ahem, The Final Chapter) boasts a herky-jerky dancing Crispin Glover and a monster mask-obsessed Corey Feldman. Parts five (A New Beginning), six (Jason Lives), and seven (The New Blood) are less distinguished, though the films bust out grave robbings, troubled youths, in-jokes (especially part seven), and inevitably at least one scene where Jason crashes through a wall like the Kool-Aid Man. Part eight (Jason Takes Manhattan) flaunts the best title, though most of the flick takes place at sea – the "money shot" of Mr. Voorhees stalking through Times Square notwithstanding.

Half of the films come with individual commentaries; the set also packs a bonus DVD with extras. Each film gets a featurette with directors, makeup experts like the great Tom Savini, and where-are-they-now cast members (lots of Feldman) enthusiastically reflecting on their Friday experiences. Fun trivia that emerges: the origins of Friday’s signature sound motif; the fake shooting titles that were often employed to keep rabid Friday fans at bay; and the director of Jason Lives still keeps Jason’s prop tombstone in his backyard, to the horror of at least one meter reader. (Cheryl Eddy)

 
Heartbreak motel

Wim Wenders’s melancholic ode to family – and th e barren, beaut iful American southwest – Paris, Texas (Fox Home Entertainment, $9.98), finally makes the leap to DVD, 20 years after its release. As Paris, Texas begins, a man (Harry Dean Stanton) dressed in a suit and a baseball cap trudges through the desert; after he’s found collapsed in an isolated watering hole, his brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), is summoned from Los Angeles. It turns out that Walt hasn’t heard from his kin, who we learn is named Travis, in four years and that Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément), have been parenting Travis’s young son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, offspring of Karen Black and writer L.M. Kit Carson, who assisted with the Paris, Texas screenplay). The whereabouts of Hunter’s mother and Travis’s estranged wife, Jane (a luminously blond Nastassja Kinski), are unknown, other than the fact that she’s somewhere in Texas. Road trips dominate the movie, which was scripted by Sam Shepard, hauntingly scored by Ry Cooder, and lensed, all gorgeous skies and tricky scenes in cars, by Robby Müeller. Besides the film itself, the affectionate commentary by Wenders is the disc’s highlight. Unlike so many DVD commentaries, which feel either self-congratulatory or utterly pointless, Wenders’s track covers everything: casting and location choices, technical quirks (how do you shoot on a set built around a one-wa y mirror?), and  Kinski’s signature pink sweater, purchased at a garage sale hours before she wore it in a crucial scene. Less-essential extras include deleted scenes with optional commentary and a baffling bit of footage dubbed "Kinski in Cannes," presumably filmed during Paris, Texas’s Palme d’ Or-winning stint at the fest. The cast shuffles down the red carpet amid flashbulbs and cries of "Nastassja! Nastassja!" It’s worth a peek just to see Stockwell’s Colonel Sanders-inspired choice in ormal wear. (Eddy)

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