Green

Feast: 6 noodle-icious dishes

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I’m a guy who knows a little something about noodles. How could I not, living in San Francisco? From the steamy rice-stick pho of the Tenderloin to the hand-pulled ramen of Japantown (RIP, Mr. Noodle), the Outer Richmond’s squiggly fried delights, and the sauce-smothered delicacies of North Beach, the city’s awash in traditional noodley goodness. As winter’s rain approaches, folks like me start scouring the town for fortifying — and unexpected — pasta gems. We’re Marco Polos on a mouthwatering mission, searching high and low for pressed dough.

HOÀNH THÁNH MÌ HÀI KÝ


A robust bowl of Vietnamese yum, served at the unassuming Hai Ky Mi Gia in the Tenderloin, this dish ($6.45) is basically an Asian mulligatawny, containing shredded chicken and pork, fish balls, delectable wontons, and strips of Spamlike pressed meat served over a bed of thick or thin egg noodles and doused with one of the most delicious chicken-based broths I’ve ever had the pleasure of slurping down. (Yes, I tipped the bowl.) Also available in an equally slurpable vit tìm version ($6.95), with a whole braised duck leg tossed into the bowl. Difficult to navigate with chopsticks but, I’m proud to tell you, entirely possible.

707 Ellis, SF. (415) 771-2577

MADILLI AL PESTO


Mi dio, mi dio! Served at brand spanking new Italian stunner Farina Focaccia and Cuccina Italiano in the Mission, this is handkerchief pasta smothered in pesto ($15). What is handkerchief pasta? It’s basically one giant noodle — uncut, unedited, and layered gently on the plate. But to pasta lovers like me, it’s a dream pillow. The light, garlicky pesto laces each tender bite with a kick of heavenly spice. When it’s accompanied by Farina’s justly famous cappon magro vecchia Genova ($15) — chilled salad with halibut, lobster, mussels, shrimp, cauliflower, carrot, green bean, potato, beet, and boiled eggs — you’ll float off contentedly into the night.

3560 18th St., SF. (415) 565-0360

SEAFOOD GAN ZAZANG


This one’s only for the truly hardy among us, but incredibly rewarding. Order this at Zazang Korean Noodle in the Western Addition and you’ll be served a bowl of curly yellow flour-based noodles, a side dish of pickled vegetables, raw onions, and gooey duck sauce, and another bowl — the main event — of black bean pasta sauce so dark it almost swallows the high-beam fluorescent light buzzing about the place. The sauce contains calamari, mussels, shrimp, and chunks of fish — and once the squid ink settles in with the black beans, the sauce evokes the flavor and texture of dark chocolate fudge. Mix it with the noodles, swallow a few mouthfuls, and you may never want to leave. Also of interest is the goo choo jap chae ($12.95) — clear yam noodles, stir-fried with bell pepper, onion, and juicy beef. Fair warning: each order is enough to stuff four.

2340 Geary, SF. (415) 447-0655, www.zazangworld.com

GEBRATENE REHMEDAILLIONS IN ROTWEIN-PFLAUMENSOSSE MIT ROTKOHL UND SPÄTZLE


Purists will object, protesting that spaetzle reside more in the dumpling wing of the house of pasta, but, hey, I’m a rebel, and in German cuisine these doughy tidbits, or "little sparrows," serve much the same function as noodles. This dish ($18.50), from Suppenküche in Hayes Valley, is a heaping plateful of hearty venison medallions in a thick red wine and plum sauce, accompanied by a pile of savory red cabbage salad and a big scoop of buttery Knöpfle, or button spaetzle. After washing it all down with a giant glass of Köstritzer beer, you may feel yourself sinking through one of Suppenküche’s table-benches into pure Teutonic bliss. Arrive early, though — ever since the new Hayes Green opened nearby, this restaurant has been packed to the Germanic gills.

525 Laguna, SF. (415) 252-9289, www.suppenkuche.com

WHOLE ROAST CRAB WITH GARLIC NOODLES


Get that bib on — PPQ Dungeness Island in the Outer Richmond is about to soak you in garlic butter like you’ve never been soaked before. First of all, hurray for Dungeness crab season (already reaching full Alaskan swing and about to hit our fair shores in November.) Second, a fond how-do-you-do to PPQ’s prix fixe whole crab menu ($50 for two). Mouthwatering Imperial rolls and piquant shredded cabbage with chicken launch your 90-minute culinary journey, and fried bananas with ice cream bring you back around, but in the middle — oh, the middle: a steaming, full-size, whole roast crab drenched in thick butter sauce and spattered with chunks of garlic, served with a generous bowlful of PPQ’s renowned sticky garlic noodles, perfect for dipping into the creamy pool beneath the crab’s soon-to-be demolished shell.

2332 Clement, SF. (415) 386-8266, www.ppqdungeness.com

TAGLIOLINI "PEPATI"


Hand-crafted thin, flat egg noodles in a blissful roasted tomato sauce with smoked bacon, thickly sliced jalapeños, butter, arugula, garlic, and peccorino and asana cheeses, topped with grated parmesan. Wow. This kicky, diet-busting wonder ($12), created at Aperto in Portrero Hill, rivals any similar North Beach concoction — even those available at one of my favorite restaurants of all time, L’Osteria del Forno. If you’re lucky enough to order this for lunch on a day when Aperto is serving its fabulous carrot-fennel soup, you may want to cancel your afternoon appointments, order a couple of glasses of sangiovese, and savor every mouthful. That’s what I did.

1434 18th St., SF. (415) 252-1625, www.apertosf.com

Feast: A refulgence of pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

You might think a city with broad and deep Italian roots would be a city with great pizza, and you’d be right — if you were thinking of New York or Chicago, havens of thin crust and deep-dish, respectively. But San Francisco? Despite the obvious Italian character of this town, despite its being named for an Italian saint, Francis of Assisi, pizza here has long tended to be a little rummy, as the English are wont to put it — and the English know from rummy food, and especially from rummy pizza. Pizza in England? Let’s get some fish onto bicycles.

The crusts of too many of our local pies have tended to be too thick, bready, or spongy, and they’ve often turned soggy from too much sauce. Toppings have been relied on to make up in point-warping bulk what they lack in inherent interest; sausage has generally meant Italian sausage, reeking of fennel seed, with mushrooms of the button variety, presliced and quite possibly frozen, and the highly suspect cheese an industrial-process mozzarella. Then there is the terrible take-out question: it doesn’t help any pizza to be birthed from a cardboard box, after a long gestation period in a car driven by a teenage delivery boy with pimples.

Even in the dark ages of pizza, of course, when bad pizzas were enjoyed with bad pizza wines poured from ignominious jugs, there were points of light, monasteries of wondrousness. When Rose Pistola (532 Columbus, SF; 415-399-0499, www.rosepistolasf.com) opened in North Beach in the mid-1990s, the place was almost instantly notable for the pizza-style flatbreads emerging from the wood-fired oven, whose smoky perfume filled the entire restaurant. Crusts were elegantly thin and crisp, while toppings were imaginative without becoming silly and were laid on with some judiciousness. Restaurant LuLu (816 Folsom, SF; 415-495-5775, www.restaurantlulu.com) too had it going on, with first-rate pies emerging from its wood-fired oven (were we seeing the beginnings of a pattern there?), including one with an unforgettable topping of calamari. And over in the Gold Coast, toward the frenzied end of the 1990s, you could find a first rate tarte flambé — an Alsatian pizza, finished with blue cheese and caramelized onions, at Adi Dassler’s gorgeous if dot-commie–swamped (and now defunct) MC2.

And so it went. If you wanted good pizza, you could get it, but you’d have to go to one of just a few pretty nice restaurants with white-linen napkins, and you’d pay. While doubtless these places were flattered by your interest in their pies, they were also hoping you were interested in, and would order, something more, something pricier. Lately, though, one has noticed a definite surge in artisanal pizza and in pizza for its own sake.

The renaissance might have begun in the Marina, of all places, with the opening of A16 (2355 Chestnut, SF; 415-771-2216, www.a16sf.com) in the space (with a wood-fired oven!) long occupied by Zinzino. A16’s inaugural chef was an authentic pizzaiolo, certified by Neapolitan authorities, and although the restaurant offered a full menu of dishes that owed much to the Italian region of Campania, you could go there for pizza and not be ashamed.

The pizza-friendly trend among full-spectrum restaurants has only accelerated. At La Ciccia, which opened two years ago in Upper Noe Valley, the pizza (like the rest of the food) has a Sardinian slant, and in a retrograde pleasure, you get to butcher the pies yourself, with a steak knife. And at the freshly opened Farina (3560 18th St., SF; 415-565-0360), in the Mistro, you can treat yourself to a Ligurian-style flatbread that’s as good as any thin-crust pizza you’d find in New York’s Little Italy.

But the real revolution has been the blooming of pizzerias, restaurants that emphasize pizza but not take-out pizza (though takeout, box and all, tends to be available at them). Rome is full of such places, and such places are usually full of Romans, sitting at sidewalk tables in the warm evenings with sweaty bottles of Nastro Azzurro beer, waiting for their pies. Maybe our dearth of mild evenings helps explain our dearth of pizzerias, or maybe it’s the lack of Nastro Azzurro. But if evenings haven’t grown balmier around here, the shortage of pizzerias appears to be ending.

Our first stop is Pizzetta 211 (211 23rd Ave., SF; 415-379-9880, www.pizzetta211.com), which has been packing them in for several years despite the un-Roman fog that so often shrouds its Richmond neighborhood. Fog or no, you can sit, Roman-style, at sidewalk tables at Pizzetta 211 — and you might have to, since the pizzeria occupies a modest storefront and most of the space is given over to the kitchen. There are just a few tables, along with a counter set with a globe of olives and books about Italian wine, and the indoor seats fill up quickly. The pizzas themselves have a Zuni-like quality, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the pizzas are the sorts of pizzas you’d expect to find at Zuni, if Zuni were a tiny pizzeria deep in the Avenues. Organic ingredients are stressed, and each pizza crust is tossed by hand while you watch. Hunger pangs while you wait? Nibble some olives.

The highest profile of new pizzerias has to be Pizzeria Delfina (3621 18th St., SF; 415-552-4055, www.delfinasf.com), which opened three summers ago next door to the mother ship, Delfina, in a tight space appealingly trimmed with stainless steel, blond wood, and plenty of glass. If Pizzetta 211 is urban rustic, with a certain bohemian air, then Pizzeria Delfina is modern Milanese: chic, sleek, slim, knowing. The place was a scene from the moment it opened, and while the sidewalk tables (within little stainless-steel corrals) help alleviate overcrowding inside, they also raise the watch-me factor. It’s almost like a cruise bar, except with pizza, and the pizza is superior: wonderfully thin, with blistered crusts and toppings both innovative and traditional. And there is a wealth of well-conceived, well-made side dishes that emphasize our local trinity: seasonal, local, organic.

A little homier is Gialina (2842 Diamond, SF; 415-239-8500, www.gialina.com), which opened earlier this year in the Glen Park village center. That village center has been utterly transformed in the past few years by the arrival of such concerns as Canyon Market — a kind of cross between Whole Foods, Rainbow, and Bi-Rite — and Le P’tit Laurent, an au courant French bistro, and Gialina reflects the new ethic. The clientele appears to be young and well-off; more than a few have small children. Gialina accommodates the tot community and is the noisier for it, but the pizzas — not quite round, not quite square — are more than enough to compensate. Crusts are brilliantly thin, and toppings tend toward the seasonal and eclectic (green garlic in springtime, say). They’re also bold. If the menu says that some combination is spicy, take this seriously. Gialina also offers a few nonpizza dishes, including antipasti and a nightly roast of some sort, but pizza is the main attraction.

Far across the city, in the onetime industrial wasteland of Dogpatch, we find yet another avatar of first-class pizza. The purveyor’s name is Piccino (801 22nd St., SF; 415-824-4224, www.piccinocafe.com), which suggests smallness, and the place is indeed small: no more than a few seats bigger than Pizzetta 211, if that, and much of the space likewise given over to the kitchen. And — again likewise — there’s sidewalk seating. Since the weather in Dogpatch can actually be warm and sunny from time to time, with little or no wind, eating alfresco isn’t quite the exercise in chilled futility it can be in the city’s more windward quarters.

Piccino is, perhaps, slightly less a pure pizzeria than Pizzeria Delfina and Gialina. Or we might say the menu is pizza-plus. In the evenings, particularly, the cooking broadens to a wider palette of Franco-Italian dishes, and you might have a brief vision of being at some junior offshoot of Slow Club. Then the neighbors start showing up to claim their take-out pies, duly boxed — pies topped with arugula, maybe, and speck (a smoked prosciutto-style ham), or maybe with just tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil (the faithful margherita pizza) or capers, black olives, and anchovies (a Neapolitan-style pie). Crusts, of course, are wafer-thin and crisp.

The horse having galloped from the barn, let me now pointlessly close the door by disclosing that I prefer, strongly, obviously, thin-crust pizza. It is more elegant, less starchy, and harder to make well. Also, it does not thrive in boxes, which means it is, in a sense, as perishable as a delicate piece of fruit. A good thin-crust pizza has to come right out of the oven and be hurried to the table, where people are eagerly waiting. Anticipation is one of life’s most impressive pleasures, especially when the pleasure we’re anticipating is subject to rapid depreciation. The moment will pass, the ship will sail, we made the train or we missed the train, and the crust is soggy, and we will have to wait until next year — or if not next year, a little while, at least.

I like deep-dish pizza too, though it resembles a macho quiche at least as much as pizza and has never been much of a player here. Zachary’s (1853 Solano, Berk.; 510-525-5950, www.zacharys.com) wins regular plaudits, and even people I know who’ve lived in Chicago and eaten Lou Malnati’s deep-dish pizza speak respectfully of it. This must count for something. On the other hand, competition is minimal. For some years, the Chicago chain Pizzeria Uno operated an outpost on Lombard; I went once and found it satisfactory in the way that McDonald’s cheeseburgers in London are satisfactory: the food is a recognizable and edible simulacrum of the authentic item, a credible counterfeit. The Uno on Lombard closed and became something else. Deep-dish pizza remains a mystery here. Thin is the word.*

Feast: 4 guides to hot wines

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Good lord, the grape. Living in a world-class wine region (or rather, living so close to several) literally drenches one in delightful tannins and myriad notes of blackberry, chocolate, tobacco, apple, and plum. But while we’ve definitely forgone our youthful tastes for brown-bagged Mad Dog breakfasts in favor of a late-night glass or two of Lavis Langrein at Bar Bambino (www.barbambino.com) or a dinnertime flight of fantastically obscure German whites at Cav (www.cavwinebar.com), we admit that when it comes to which fashionable corks to pop for fall, we haven’t quite graduated from “oh, whatever” to outright oenophiles. Sure, we dip into the media stream enough to know what’s hip in the bars and clubs these days (rose and sparkling wines are so over; Lambrusco is on its way back), but honestly, if you asked us the difference between syrah and shiraz, we’d probably answer, “Doesn’t one of them have a yellow kangaroo on the label?” So we took it upon our taste buds to go straight to the source, and ask a few of our latest favorite wine bars and stores for the juice on what’s big. Chin-chin!

 

QUE SYRAH

This funky little wine bar in West Portal specializes only in delightful small production wines, but proprietor Stephanie McCardell tells us that in the overall big picture her clientele’s tastes are trending toward syrahs, white Rhônes, Roussanes, and viogniers. (White Rhônes and viogniers are especially attractive to those among us suffering from Chardonnay fatigue.) A current hot seller right now is the Vin Nostro Syrah, grown in Red Hills, Lake County, which McCardell describes as smoky, with dark fruit notes and that slight bacon aspect inherent to most syrahs. Que Syrah also carries wines from all over the world and is currently featuring two from Croatia — Bibich Reserva, a Dalmatian red with a subtle fruit and red pepper quality, whose main grape is a relative of Zinfandel, and a Croatian Malvasia, a dry, crisp white with peachy and other stone fruit characteristics.

230 W. Portal, SF. (415) 731-7000, www.quesyrahsf.com

 

OTTIMISTA ENOTECA

Ottimista Enoteca is a gorgeous Italian wine bar and restaurant in the Marina with an outdoor patio to die for and a menu to match. (Hello, fontina-stuffed risotto balls. Hello, nutmeg-sugared ricotta doughnuts.) Ottimista’s Melissa Gisler tells us that requests from her clientele for Sicilian wines have been off the charts lately, and a recent rise in import volume has allowed Ottimista to offer a much wider breadth of options from the region. (Two hot Sicilian labels: Nero d’Avola and Cantine Berbera.) Due to the volcanic nature of Sicily’s soil, these wines tend to have a tang of acid and notes of minerality, but also come bearing a powerful fruity flavor, with a very clean quality. The trend toward Sicilians has been noticeable, Gisler says, because Ottimista usually focuses on Northern Italian wines — like those produced in the Piedmont region, or from areas near the Austrian and Slovenian border — where the days are hot and the nights are cold.

1838 Union, SF. (415) 674-8400, www.ottimistaenoteca.com

 

BIONDIVINO

Carrie Smith of Biondivino, a sleek Russian Hill wine boutique that offers a mind boggling array of labels (yet provides enough comforting atmosphere and information to guide you through it all), has also noticed an upswing of interest in wines from Sicily, especially those from Etna. But another “strange surge” of interest, she says, is in the return to classics from the Tuscany and Umbria regions. A big winner among Biondivino winetasters this year has been the intensely fruity and now near impossible-to-find Valdicava Brunelo di Montalcino (brunello is closely related to sangiovese, another hot grape this year). Smith’s favorite white at the moment is Piedmontese Timorasso — lush and rich, creamy without being oaky or buttery, with a golden acidity. “It’s a good brain slap that makes you think, and want some more,” she says. Her favorite red is Vigneti Massa, from a Croatian varietal. With the power of a brunelo and the structure and elegance of a borello, she says, this wine is dark and rich, with nice-ending tannins.

1450 Green, SF. (415) 673-2320, www.biondivino.com

 

SWIRL ON CASTRO

“Tiny production California wines as well as pinot noirs and Argentine Malbecs are going to be all the rage this fall,” according to Jerry Cooper, one of the owners of this spiffy wine shop. According to him, the tiny productions most in demand are coming from Santa Barbara and Mendocino Counties. Increasingly popular are organic and biodynamic wines, whose producers employ a holistic, “metaphysics meets Farmer’s Almanac” approach to growing and harvesting. The reason for this popularity? “The qualities of these wines are of an artisan nature, with more flavor. They taste more of the regions they hail from.” Cooper also notes that while Bordeauxs have waned in popularity, Burgundies have maintained their place on the trend roster, especially in anticipation of the arrival of the 2005 vintage. Also hot: South African wines from the Cape. But mostly he sees wine becoming a more localized affair, including the way in which it’s encountered and purchased. “The wine bar has become the new neighborhood institution,” he says.

572 Castro, SF. (415) 864-2262, www.swirloncastro.com

Feast: 5 East Bay breakfasts

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San Francisco is a city of the night. We like to go out late, stay out till early, and start our days when most other cities are half-finished with theirs. But if the city is ruled by the moon (and maybe some MDMA), the East Bay is ruled by the sun — and not just because they actually get some. Sure, there are places in Berkeley and Oakland to go after dark, but our sisters across the water are places best experienced while clear yellow light is still shining through green trees onto wide streets lined with charming wooden houses — or charming little breakfast spots. I won’t argue that the East Bay has better breakfast places than San Francisco does — though the competition is formidable — but I will say that if I’m in Emeryville or Alameda, the likelihood of me getting up in time to have breakfast is much, much greater than if I’ve spent the last hours of yesterday and the first of today in the Mission or Polk Gulch. And so here is a guide to my favorite places to enjoy that first meal of the day at a time when you don’t have to call it dinner, and in a place where being up that early is, well, worth it.

WAT MONGKOLRATANARAM (A.K.A. THE THAI TEMPLE)


There’s nothing that says Berkeley like Sunday brunch at the Thai Temple: ethnic food, an eccentric crowd, ridiculous prices, and a certain amount of in-the-know-ness that’s required to even find yourself there. Sure, the mango and sweet rice or spicy green beans and tofu are more lunch fare than what we’d traditionally think of as breakfast food, but the temple starts serving them at 9 a.m. — and the delicious and just-oily-enough meat or veggie options are the perfect hangover cure for a night out in the city. A few extra hints: bring your own drinks, unless you want the stellar Thai iced tea; get there before 12:30 p.m., when they start running out of the good stuff; and, if in a group, use a divide-and-conquer, multiline approach to ordering. Then stretch out on the lawn of the library next door for a nice, sunny afternoon nap.

1911 Russell, Berk. (510) 849-3419

COCKADOODLE CAFÉ


The name may be silly, but the Mexican-inspired fare at this Old Town Oakland eatery is serious. The real draw is the back patio, which manages — with large umbrellas and red and white checkered tablecloths — to be both classy and casual at the same time. But crispy potatoes served with sour cream, savory crepes with chicken-apple sausage, and an omelet made with slow-roasted pork would even make sitting inside worth it. Extra extra bonus points for including a Michelada (a beer and tomato juice cocktail, sometimes called a poor man’s Bloody Mary) on the menu, as most people have never even heard of it.

719 Washington, Oakl. (510) 465-5400, www.cockadoodlecafe.com

MEAL TICKET


Don’t let the fact that you have to order at the counter fool you — this is no fast-food bagel joint. It’s cornmeal blueberry pancakes and bacon-onion scrambles so deliciously and lovingly prepared that when you’re done, you’ll hardly remember that no one showed up at your table with a notepad. Plus, you can enjoy your meal either in the intimate dining room — breakfast with your best bud, anyone? — or on the back patio. Who needs table service too?

1235 San Pablo, Albany. (510) 526-6325

CAFÉ CACAO


I love breakfast food. Always have, even if I’m eating it at midnight. So it’s hard to make me unhappy with an early-day menu. But it’s equally hard to impress me with every single part of a breakfast — and Café Cacao manages it. You could argue I’m distracted by the aroma of chocolate wafting over from the Scharffen Berger factory next door, or that I’m charmed by the classy-yet-casual Eurostyle architecture. But I know it’s really that the eggs are poached to perfection, the levain toast has just the right combination of texture and taste, the rosemary brown butter is rich and flavorful without being too heavy, the accompanying salad is fresh and not overdressed, and the hot chocolate (made with real chocolate) is the best I’ve ever had in my life.

914 Heinz, Berk. (510) 843-6000, www.cafecacao.biz

VENUS


How is it that Venus is both pretty and unpredictable? With breakfast haunts, usually you have to choose one or the other. But not at this lovely, less crowded alternative to La Note. Brick walls and a map-inspired (or maybe collage-inspired) menu give it a homey feel. Creative options — from a framboise mimosa to Indian breakfast served with banana raita — make the food distinctive. And true culinary virtuosity — the fresh fruit and cashew, almond, and poppyseed brittle over yogurt could make me give up omelets forever — make the establishment worth trying again and again. Plus, everything here is seasonal, organic, and sustainable: good for your body and your conscience.

2327 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 540-5950, www.venusrestaurant.net

Feast: 8 places to get your chocolate on

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It all starts innocently enough. One day you decide to order a mocha instead of your usual cappuccino; the next you grab a few Ghiradelli squares from the impulse aisle at Safeway. By the end of the week, you’ve blown your savings at Joseph Schmidt and are curled in a fetal position, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on loop, stuffing your face with take-out pastries from Tartine. Scharffen Berger and Cocoa Bella are only the tip of the iceberg — San Francisco is host to one of the premiere chocolate cultures of the world. Submitted here are eight places to get your cocoa fix — no golden ticket required.

FOG CITY NEWS


Most San Franciscans know Fog City News as a gargantuan newsstand tucked into the insufferably bleak confines of the financial district. This Market Street storefront might sport the largest collection of periodicals by far in the Bay Area, but it’s also home to one of the largest selections of chocolate bars in the country. Every person on staff is a chocolate authority, well schooled in the nuances of the cacao bean and happy to help you choose from the hundreds of options. Just remember not to refer to any of the products as candy — they take their chocolate seriously here.

455 Market, SF. (415) 543-7400, www.fogcitynews.com

CIRCOLO


Sure, it’s novel to insist that chocolate is at the top of the aphrodisiacal pecking order, but we all know that when it comes to stroking the libido, nothing can topple alcohol from its throne. Luckily for us, every bartender with a cocktail shaker and a boredom streak fancies themselves a mixologist. The folks at Circolo have taken it a step further with their White Chocolate Martini, an inspired combination of Godiva chocolate liqueur, Chambord, and Frangelica. The deliciously creamy result is decadent enough to make even Dionysus blush.

500 Florida, SF. (415) 553-8560, www.circolosf.com

CHARLES CHOCOLATES


Recent studies trumpeting the antioxidant qualities of chocolate have raised eyebrows worldwide, but while the jury is still out on the cocoa bean, there isn’t a skeptic alive who would dare challenge the medicinal benefits of tea. The experts at Charles Chocolates have collaborated with the Berkeley tea room Teance to create the Tea Collection, milk chocolates infused with tea such as oolong, jasmine green, and even lichee red. No flavor-drop shortcuts for this boutique chocolatier — the leaves are actually steeped in milk to make sure every subtle note of the tea makes it into the chocolate.

6529 Hollis, Emeryville. (510) 652-4412, www.charleschocolates.com

BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE CAFÉ


Chocolate has been consumed as a beverage for thousands of years, so anyone who sets out to make the perfect cup of hot chocolate has a long history to contend with. With its extensive menu of cocoa drinks, Bittersweet Chocolate Café is up to the challenge. From the exotic spices of its White Chocolate Dream to the pepper and rose of its Spicy! concoction, this Pac Heights café shows Swiss Miss who’s boss.

2123 Fillmore, SF. (415) 346-8715, www.bittersweetcafe.com

COLIBRI MEXICAN BISTRO


Mole is hard to get just right. The delicate balance of chile peppers, spices, and Mexican chocolate stewed together at the perfect ratio is something only a well-seasoned grandma can truly master, but Colibri comes close. Its flavorful Mole Poblano is prepared in classic Puebla style and represents the savory side of chocolate well. Bonus points for an obscenely large tequila selection.

438 Geary, SF. (415) 440-2737, www.colibrimexicanbistro.com

MAGGIEMUDD


During my vegan days, ice cream always proved to be a challenge. Once the thoughts of cookies and cream, mint chocolate chip, or the holy combo of chocolate and peanut butter started swirling through my mind like so much chocolate marbling, Tofutti Cuties just didn’t cut it. Thank goodness MaggieMudd realizes that vegans love chocolate too! The flavors scooped out at this Bernal Heights sweet spot taste better than their dairy counterparts. Seriously. Really. No joke.

903 Cortland, SF. (415) 641-5291, www.maggiemudd.com

CACAO ANASA


Anthony Ferguson just might be insane. The mad scientist behind San Francisco’s most eccentric culinary boutique, Cacao Anasa, runs his confection shop like a laboratory. No flavor is off limits in Ferguson’s kitchen: curry, basil, ginger, roses — hell, even merlot — all make their way into his artisinal truffles.

(415) 846-9240, www.cacaoanasa.com

GUITTARD CHOCOLATE CO.


The original gangster of San Francisco’s chocolate scene was founded during the gold rush, when a French immigrant realized that miners were willing to pay top dollar for fine chocolate. Guittard is still the oldest family-owned chocolate company in the United States; its baking products remain the top choice of pastry chefs world-round. The secret is in the simplicity: pure cane sugar, full-cream milk, and premium cacao beans have made Guittard’s a consistently perfect chocolate for almost 150 years.

10 Guittard, Burlingame. (650) 697-4427, www.guittard.com

Feast: 5 sexy suppers

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Some dates are sweet. You go to a nice restaurant with lacy tablecloths, order food that won’t make your breath stink later, have polite conversation while shyly catching each other’s eye over the rim of your wine glass, and hold hands tentatively as you walk to the car, wondering if you’ll share a delicate kiss before you part ways for the night. But these aren’t usually the dates I want. More often, I like my dates down and dirty, boozy and bawdy, or, at the very least, out of the ordinary. I want to be either seduced by the cuisine or seduced by my company, but either way, I want my evening out to get me off. Here are some date destinations that are a guaranteed sure thing.

ASIASF


You can’t talk about food and sex and San Francisco without talking about this SoMa phenomenon. The food is good — the crab cakes are more crab than filler, and the beef in the steak salad was good quality — but the real reason you’re here is the drag show, though "drag show" is an anemic phrase for describing what you’ll see. This swanky spot features some of the hottest women this side of the Y chromosome (or Thailand) and some of the best dramatic performances this side of the Fringe Festival. My personal favorite? Red-haired Ginger, who downed a liter of Grey Goose and a bottle of "pills" while lip-syncing to "All by Myself." Pair her performance with the mint-heavy pomegranate mojito, and you’ll find yourself trying to take her home at the end of the night. (Note: She won’t go — she has a beau.)

201 Ninth St., SF. (415) 255-2742, www.asiasf.com

MAHARANI’S


You know those fantasies you have about being royalty in some foreign country while you seduce your polite, well-mannered, yet kinky lover-to-be over a plate of something steamy? This is the place you want to do it. The main dining room isn’t much to look at, but get a reservation for the Fantasy Room and you’ll find yourself in a private, beaded booth with cucumber-infused drinking water, warm towels scented with rose water, and Indian food served more elegantly than you ever imagined it could be (think geometric plates and California cuisine–<\d>style garnishes). The prix-fixe menu is a bit overpriced, but the Kama Sutra cocktail really is titilutf8g. And there’s something to be said for having control over your own lights and playing shoeless footsy under your private table.

1122 Post, SF. (415) 775-1988, www.maharanirestaurant.com

OVATION AT THE INN AT THE OPERA


San Francisco does dive bars, and does them well. But this city also does sexy elegance in a way that’s particularly ours, and Ovation is a perfect example. This hotel restaurant is opulent and classically romantic, with green velvet chairs and white tablecloths and entrées that cost more than most parking tickets. But in true Bay Area style, it’s also accessible, comfortable, and beautiful in an understated way — all of which make it sneakily sexy. The small, intimate bar grounds the dining room, and a fireplace warms the dignified décor, which might otherwise seem cold and baroque. Plus, is there anything hotter than illicit bathroom sex when you’re all dressed up?

333 Fulton, SF. (415) 553-8100

WOODHOUSE FISH CO.


I’m not sure I understand the appeal of oysters. I’ve trained myself to like them, especially with a bit of horseradish and ketchup. But are they really an aphrodisiac? Is it because of their obvious resemblance to female body parts? Or is it because you know that if your date can handle their mucusy texture and fishy flavor, they surely can handle, uh, yours? I can’t begin to guess. I prefer the sides of broccoli and fries (both well made) over the seafood at this joint in the Safeway district. But there’s one thing I find truly sexy about Woodhouse oysters: on Tuesday nights, they’re $1 apiece. Which means that after filling up, there’s still enough cash for a shot of tequila at the Transfer and coffee in the morning. And what’s sexier than shellfish? A date that doesn’t break the bank.

2073 Market, SF. (415) 473-CRAB, www.woodhousefish.com

SUPPERCLUB


Dinner in bed? It’s almost too obvious. But you can’t deny the appeal of overt sexuality, even if it’s delivered in a stylized, sometimes-too-LA package. The all-white dining room at this dinner-as-experience destination is striking, and I’ve rarely tasted food so delicious and subtle — particularly the vegetarian options — as it is here. And whether it was watching a tranny strip down, without fanfare or theatricality, to his bald, tattooed, masculine self, or whether it was the Late Night Sneaky I ordered (top-shelf tequila, a Corona, and an ExportA cigarette in a shot glass), or whether it was just settling into the couch cushions as my dirty martini settled into my bloodstream, it was hard to wait to jump my date until we got home.

657 Harrison, SF. (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com*

Censored!

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>>Project Censored’s 15 missed-story runners up

>>Big local stories that never made mainstream headlines

>>The story behind a censored story that was killed by The Nation

amanda@sfbg.com

There are a handful of freedoms that have almost always been a part of American democracy. Even when they didn’t exactly apply to everyone or weren’t always protected by the people in charge, a few simple but significant rights have been patently clear in the Constitution: You can’t be nabbed by the cops and tossed behind bars without a reason. If you are imprisoned, you can’t be incarcerated indefinitely; you have the right to a speedy trial with a judge and jury. When that court date rolls around, you’ll be able to see the evidence against you.

The president can’t suspend elections, spy without warrants, or dispatch federal troops to trump local cops or quell protests. Nor can the commander in chief commence a witch hunt, deem individuals "enemy combatants," or shunt them into special tribunals outside the purview of our 218-year-old judicial system.

Until now. This year’s Project Censored presents a chilling portrait of a newly empowered executive branch signing away civil liberties for the sake of an endless and amorphous war on terror. And for the most part, the major news media weren’t paying attention.

"This year it seemed like civil rights just rose to the top," said Peter Phillips, the director of Project Censored, the annual media survey conducted by Sonoma State University researchers and students who spend the year patrolling obscure publications, national and international Web sites, and mainstream news outlets to compile the 25 most significant stories that were inadequately reported or essentially ignored.

While the project usually turns up a range of underreported issues, this year’s stories all fall somewhat neatly into two categories — the increase of privatization and the decrease of human rights. Some of the stories qualify as both.

"I think they indicate a very real concern about where our democracy is heading," writer and veteran judge Michael Parenti said.

For 31 years Project Censored has been compiling a list of the major stories that the nation’s news media have ignored, misreported, or poorly covered.

The Oxford American Dictionary defines censorship as "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts," which Phillips said is also a fine description of what happens under a dictatorship. When it comes to democracy, the black marker is a bit more nuanced. "We need to broaden our understanding of censorship," he said. After 11 years at the helm of Project Censored, Phillips thinks the most bowdlerizing force is the fourth estate itself: "The corporate media is complicit. There’s no excuse for the major media giants to be missing major news stories like this."

As the stories cited in this year’s Project Censored selections point out, the federal government continues to provide major news networks with stock footage, which is dutifully broadcast as news. The George W. Bush administration has spent more federal money than any other presidency on public relations. Without a doubt, Parenti said, the government invests in shaping our beliefs. "Every day they’re checking out what we think," he said. "The erosion of civil liberties is not happening in one fell swoop but in increments. Very consciously, this administration has been heading toward a general autocracy."

Carl Jensen, who founded Project Censored in 1976 after witnessing the landslide reelection of Richard Nixon in 1972 in spite of mounting evidence of the Watergate scandal, agreed that this year’s censored stories amount to an accumulated threat to democracy. "I’m waiting for one of our great liberal writers to put together the big picture of what’s going on here," he said.

1. GOOD-BYE, HABEAS CORPUS


The Military Commissions Act, passed in September 2006 as a last gasp of the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Bush that Oct. 17, made significant changes to the nation’s judicial system.

The law allows the president to designate any person an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," shunting that individual into an alternative court system in which the writ of habeas corpus no longer applies, the right to a speedy trial is gone, and justice is meted out by a military tribunal that can admit evidence obtained through coercion and presented without the accused in the courtroom, all under the guise of preserving national security.

Habeas corpus, a constitutional right cribbed from the Magna Carta, protects against arbitrary imprisonment. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called it the greatest defense against "the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny."

The Military Commissions Act has been seen mostly as a method for dealing with Guantánamo Bay detainees, and most journalists have reported that it doesn’t have any impact on Americans. On Oct. 19, 2006, editors at the New York Times wrote, in quite definitive language, "this law does not apply to American citizens."

Investigative journalist Robert Parry disagrees. The right of habeas corpus no longer exists for any of us, he wrote in the online journal Consortium. Deep down in the lower sections of the act, the language shifts from the very specific "alien unlawful enemy combatant" to the vague "any person subject to this chapter."

"Why does it contain language referring to ‘any person’ and then adding in an adjacent context a reference to people acting ‘in breach of allegiance or duty to the United States’?" Parry wrote. "Who has ‘an allegiance or duty to the United States’ if not an American citizen?"

Reached by phone, Parry told the Guardian that "this loose phraseology could be interpreted very narrowly or very broadly." He said he’s consulted with lawyers who are experienced in drafting federal security legislation, and they agreed that the "any person" terminology is troubling. "It could be fixed very simply, but the Bush administration put through this very vaguely worded law, and now there are a lot of differences of opinion on how it could be interpreted," Parry said.

Though US Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) moved quickly to remedy the situation with the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, that legislation has yet to pass Congress, which some suspect is because too many Democrats don’t want to seem soft on terrorism. Until tested by time, exactly how much the language of the Military Commissions Act may be manipulated will remain to be seen.

Sources: "Repeal the Military Commissions Act and Restore the Most American Human Right," Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams Web site, www.commondreams.org/views07/0212-24.htm, Feb. 12, 2007; "Still No Habeas Rights for You," Robert Parry, Consortium (online journal of investigative reporting), consortiumnews.com/2007/020307.html, Feb. 3, 2007; "Who Is ‘Any Person’ in Tribunal Law?" Robert Parry, Consortium, consortiumnews.com/2006/101906.html, Oct. 19, 2006

2. MARTIAL LAW: COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU


The Military Commissions Act was part of a one-two punch to civil liberties. While the first blow to habeas corpus received some attention, there was almost no media coverage of a private Oval Office ceremony held the same day the military act was signed at which Bush signed the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, a $532 billion catchall bill for defense spending.

Tucked away in the deeper recesses of that act, section 1076 allows the president to declare a public emergency and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he determines them unfit for maintaining order. This is essentially a revival of the Insurrection Act, which was repealed by Congress in 1878, when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in response to Northern troops overstaying their welcome in the reconstructed South. That act wiped out a potentially tyrannical amount of power by reinforcing the idea that the federal government should patrol the nation’s borders and let the states take care of their own territories.

The Warner act defines a public emergency as a "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition in any state or possession of the United States" and extends its provisions to any place where "the president determines that domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order." On top of that, federal troops can be dispatched to "suppress, in a state, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy."

So everything from a West Nile virus outbreak to a political protest could fall into the president’s personal definition of mayhem. That’s right — put your picket signs away.

The Warner act passed with 90 percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously. Months after its passage, Leahy was the only elected official to have publicly expressed concern about section 1076, warning his peers Sept. 19, 2006, that "we certainly do not need to make it easier for presidents to declare martial law. Invoking the Insurrection Act and using the military for law enforcement activities goes against some of the central tenets of our democracy. One can easily envision governors and mayors in charge of an emergency having to constantly look over their shoulders while someone who has never visited their communities gives the orders." In February, Leahy introduced Senate Bill 513 to repeal section 1076. It’s currently in the Armed Services Committee.

Sources: "Two Acts of Tyranny on the Same Day!" Daneen G. Peterson, Stop the North America Union Web site, www.stopthenorthamericanunion.com/articles/Fear.html, Jan. 20, 2007; "Bush Moves toward Martial Law," Frank Morales, Uruknet.info (Web site that publishes "information from occupied Iraq"), www.uruknet.info/?p=27769, Oct. 26, 2006

3. AFRICOM


President Jimmy Carter was the first to draw a clear line between America’s foreign policy and its concurrent "vital interest" in oil. During his 1980 State of the Union address, he said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."

Under what became the Carter Doctrine, an outpost of the Pentagon, called the United States Central Command, or CENTCOM, was established to ensure the uninterrupted flow of that slick "vital interest."

The United States is now constructing a similar permanent base in Africa, an area traditionally patrolled by more remote commands in Europe and the Pacific. No details have been released about exactly what AFRICOM’s operations and responsibilities will be or where troops will be located, though government spokespeople have vaguely stated that the mission is to establish order and keep peace for volatile governments — that just happen to be in oil-rich areas.

Though the official objective may be peace, some say the real desire is crude. "A new cold war is under way in Africa, and AFRICOM will be at the dark heart of it," Bryan Hunt wrote on the Moon of Alabama blog, which covers politics, economics, and philosophy. Most US oil imports come from African countries — in particular, Nigeria. According to the 2007 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations, "disruption of supply from Nigeria would represent a major blow to US oil-security strategy."

Though details of the AFRICOM strategy remain secret, Hunt has surveyed past governmental statements and reports by other independent journalists to draw parallels between AFRICOM and CENTCOM, making the case that the United States sees Africa as another "vital interest."

Source: "Understanding AFRICOM," parts 1–3, b real, Moon of Alabama, www.moonofalabama.org/2007/02/understanding_a_1.html, Feb. 21, 2007

4. SECRET TRADE AGREEMENTS


As disappointing as the World Trade Organization has been, it has provided something of an open forum in which smaller countries can work together to demand concessions from larger, developed nations when brokering multilateral agreements.

At least in theory. The 2006 negotiations crumbled when the United States, the European Union, and Australia refused to heed India’s and Brazil’s demands for fair farm tariffs.

In the wake of that disaster, bilateral agreements have become the tactic of choice. These one-on-one negotiations, designed by the US and the EU, are cut like backroom deals, with the larger country bullying the smaller into agreements that couldn’t be reached through the WTO.

Bush administration officials, always quick with a charming moniker, are calling these free-trade agreements "competitive liberalization," and the EU considers them essential to negotiating future multilateral agreements.

But critics see them as fast tracks to increased foreign control of local resources in poor communities. "The overall effect of these changes in the rules is to progressively undermine economic governance, transferring power from governments to largely unaccountable multinational firms, robbing developing countries of the tools they need to develop their economies and gain a favorable foothold in global markets," states a report by Oxfam International, the antipoverty activist group.

Sources: "Free Trade Enslaving Poor Countries" Sanjay Suri, Inter Press Service (global news service), ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=37008, March 20, 2007; "Signing Away the Future" Emily Jones, Oxfam Web site, www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp101_regional_trade_agreements_0703, March 2007

5. SHANGHAIED SLAVES CONSTRUCT US EMBASSY IN IRAQ


Part of the permanent infrastructure the United States is erecting in Iraq includes the world’s largest embassy, built on Green Zone acreage equal to that of Vatican City. The $592 million job was awarded in 2005 to First Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting. Though much of the project’s management is staffed by Americans, most of the workers are from small or developing countries like the Philippines, India, and Pakistan and, according to David Phinney of CorpWatch — a Bay Area organization that investigates and exposes corporate environmental crimes, fraud, corruption, and violations of human rights — are recruited under false pretenses. At the airport, their boarding passes read Dubai. Their passports are stamped Dubai. But when they get off the plane, they’re in Baghdad.

Once on site, they’re often beaten and paid as little as $10 to $30 a day, CorpWatch concludes. Injured workers are dosed with heavy-duty painkillers and sent back on the job. Lodging is crowded, and food is substandard. One ex-foreman, who’s worked on five other US embassies around the world, said, "I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken."

These workers have often been banned by their home countries from working in Baghdad because of unsafe conditions and flagging support for the war, but once they’re on Iraqi soil, protections are few. First, Kuwaiti managers take their passports, which is a violation of US labor laws. "If you don’t have a passport or an embassy to go to, what do you do to get out of a bad situation?" asked Rory Mayberry, a former medic for one of First Kuwaiti’s subcontractors, who blew the whistle on the squalid living conditions, medical malpractice, and general abuse he witnessed at the site.

The Pentagon has been investigating the slavelike conditions but has not released the names of any vioutf8g contractors or announced penalties. In the meantime, billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded to First Kuwaiti and other companies at which little accountability exists. As Phinney reported, "No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site."

Source: "A U.S. Fortress Rises in Baghdad: Asian Workers Trafficked to Build World’s Largest Embassy," David Phinney, CorpWatch Web site, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173, Oct. 17, 2006

6. FALCON’S TALONS


Operation FALCON, or Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally, is, in many ways, the manifestation of martial law forewarned by Frank Morales (see story 2). In an unprecedented partnership, more than 960 federal, state, and local police agencies teamed up in 2005 and 2006 to conduct the largest dragnet raids in US history. Armed with fistfuls of arrest warrants, they ran three separate raids around the country that netted 30,110 criminal arrests.

The Justice Department claimed the agents were targeting the "worst of the worst" criminals, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "Operation FALCON is an excellent example of President Bush’s direction and the Justice Department’s dedication to deal both with the terrorist threat and traditional violent crime."

However, as writer Mike Whitney points out on Uruknet.info, none of the suspects has been charged with anything related to terrorism. Additionally, while 30,110 individuals were arrested, only 586 firearms were found. That doesn’t sound very violent either.

Though the US Marshals Service has been quick to tally the offenses, Whitney says the numbers just don’t add up. For example, FALCON in 2006 captured 462 violent sex-crime suspects, 1,094 registered sex offenders, and 9,037 fugitives.

What about the other 7,481 people? "Who are they, and have they been charged with a crime?" Whitney asked.

The Marshals Service remains silent about these arrests. Whitney suggests those detainees may have been illegal immigrants and may be bound for border prisons currently being constructed by Halliburton (see last year’s Project Censored).

As an added bonus of complicity, the Justice Department supplied local news outlets with stock footage of the raids, which some TV stations ran accompanied by stories sourced from the Department of Justice’s news releases without any critical coverage of who exactly was swept up in the dragnets and where they are now.

Sources: "Operation Falcon and the Looming Police State," Mike Whitney, Uruknet.info, uruknet.info/?p=m30971&s1=h1, Feb. 26, 2007; "Operation Falcon," SourceWatch (project of the Center for Media and Democracy), www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operation_FALCON, Nov. 18, 2006

7. BLACKWATER


The outsourcing of war has served two purposes for the Bush administration, which has given powerful corporations and private companies lucrative contracts supplying goods and services to American military operations overseas and quietly achieved an escalation of troops beyond what the public has been told or understands. Without actually deploying more military forces, the federal government instead contracts with private security firms like Blackwater to provide heavily armed details for US diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries where the nation is currently engaged in conflicts.

Blackwater is one of the more successful and well connected of the private companies profiting from the business of war. Started in 1996 by an ex–Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the North Carolina company employs 20,000 hired guns, training them on the world’s largest private military base.

"It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration’s so-called global war on terror," author Jeremy Scahill said on the Jan. 26 broadcast of the TV and radio news program Democracy Now! Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was published this year by Nation Books.

Source: "Our Mercenaries in Iraq," Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232, Jan. 26, 2007

8. KIA: THE NEOLIBERAL INVASION OF INDIA


A March 2006 pact under which the United States agreed to supply nuclear fuel to India for the production of electric power also included a less-publicized corollary — the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture. While it’s purportedly a deal to assist Indian farmers and liberalize trade (see story 4), critics say the initiative is destroying India’s local agrarian economy by encouraging the use of genetically modified seeds, which in turn is creating a new market for pesticides and driving up the overall cost of producing crops.

The deal provides a captive customer base for genetically modified seed maker Monsanto and a market for cheap goods to supply Wal-Mart, whose plans for 500 stores in the country could wipe out the livelihoods of 14 million small vendors.

Monsanto’s hybrid Bt cotton has already edged out local strains, and India is currently suffering an infestation of mealy bugs, which have proven immune to the pesticides the chemical companies have made available. Additionally, the sowing of crops has shifted from the traditional to the trade friendly. Farmers accustomed to cultivating mustard, a sacred local crop, are now producing soy, a plant foreign to India.

Though many farmers are seeing the folly of these deals, it’s often too late. Suicide has become a popular final act of opposition to what’s occurring in their country.

Vandana Shiva, who for 10 years has been studying the effects of bad trade deals on India, has published a report titled Seeds of Suicide, which recounts the deaths of more than 28,000 farmers who killed themselves in despair over the debts brought on them by binding agreements ultimately favoring corporations.

Hope comes in the form of a growing cadre of farmers hip to the flawed deals. They’ve organized into local sanghams, 72 of which now exist as small community networks that save and share seeds, skills, and assistance during the good times of harvest and the hard times of crop failure.

Sources: "Vandana Shiva on Farmer Suicides, the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal, Wal-Mart in India," Democracy Now!, www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/13/1451229, Dec. 13, 2006; "Genetically Modified Seeds: Women in India take on Monsanto," Arun Shrivastava, Global Research (Web site of Montreal’s Center for Global Research), www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ARU20061009&articleId=3427, Oct. 9, 2006

9. THE PRIVATIZATION OF AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE


In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ushered through legislation for the greatest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system, 41,000 miles of roads funded almost entirely by the federal government.

Fifty years later many of those roads are in need of repair or replacement, but the federal government has not exactly risen to the challenge. Instead, more than 20 states have set up financial deals leasing the roads to private companies in exchange for repairs. These public-private partnerships are being lauded by politicians as the only credible financial solution to providing the public with improved services.

But opponents of all political stripes are criticizing the deals as theft of public property. They point out that the bulk of benefits is actually going to the private side of the equation — in many cases, to foreign companies with considerable experience building private roads in developing countries. In the United States these companies are entering into long-term leases of infrastructure like roads and bridges, for a low amount. They work out tax breaks to finance the repairs, raise tolls to cover the costs, and start realizing profits for their shareholders in as little as 10 years.

As Daniel Schulman and James Ridgeway reported in Mother Jones, "the Federal Highway Administration estimates that it will cost $50 billion a year above current levels of federal, state, and local highway funding to rehab existing bridges and roads over the next 16 years. Where to get that money, without raising taxes? Privatization promises a quick fix — and a way to outsource difficult decisions, like raising tolls, to entities that don’t have to worry about getting reelected."

The Indiana Toll Road, the Chicago Skyway, Virginia’s Pocahontas Parkway, and many other stretches of the nation’s public pavement have succumbed to these private deals.

Cheerleaders for privatization are deeply embedded in the Bush administration (see story 7), where they’ve been secretly fostering plans for a North American Free Trade Agreement superhighway, a 10-lane route set to run through the heart of the country and connect the Mexican and Canadian borders. It’s specifically designed to plug into the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas, taking advantage of cheap labor by avoiding the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose members are traditionally tasked with unloading cargo, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose members transport that cargo that around the country.

Sources: "The Highwaymen" Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html, Feb. 2007; "Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway," Jerome R. Corsi, Human Events, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15497, June 12, 2006

10. VULTURE FUNDS: DEVOURING THE DESPERATE


Named for a bird that picks offal from a carcass, this financial scheme couldn’t be more aptly described. Well-endowed companies swoop in and purchase the debt owed by a third world country, then turn around and sue the country for the full amount — plus interest. In most courts, they win. Recently, Donegal International spent $3 million for $40 million worth of debt Zambia owed Romania, then sued for $55 million. In February an English court ruled that Zambia had to pay $15 million.

Often these countries are on the brink of having their debt relieved by the lenders in exchange for putting the owed money toward necessary goods and services for their citizens. But the vultures effectively initiate another round of deprivation for the impoverished countries by demanding full payment, and a loophole makes it legal.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast broke the story for the BBC’s Newsnight, saying that "the vultures have already sucked up about $1 billion in aid meant for the poorest nations, according to the World Bank in Washington."

With the exception of the BBC and Democracy Now!, no major news source has touched the story, though it’s incensed several members of Britain’s Parliament as well as the new prime minister, Gordon Brown. US Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Donald Payne (D-N.J.) lobbied Bush to take action as well, but political will may be elsewhere. Debt Advisory International, an investment consulting firm that’s been involved in several vulture funds that have generated millions in profits, is run by Paul Singer — the largest fundraiser for the Republican Party in the state of New York. He’s donated $1.7 million to Bush’s campaigns.

Source: "Vulture Fund Threat to Third World," Newsnight, www.gregpalast.com/vulture-fund-threat-to-third-world, Feb. 14, 2007

>>More: The story of U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein’s conflict of interest

Project Censored: The runners up

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11. THE SCAM OF "RECONSTRUCTION" IN AFGHANISTAN


Sources: "Afghanistan, Inc.: A CorpWatch Investigative Report," CorpWatch, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13518, Oct. 6, 2006; "Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan" Ann Jones, Tomdispatch.com, www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=116512, Aug. 27, 2006

12. ANOTHER UN MASSACRE IN HAITI


Source: "UN in Haiti Accused of Second Massacre," HaitiAction.net, www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/1_21_7/1_21_7.html, Jan. 21, 2007

13. BUSH PUSHES IMMIGRANT ROUNDUPS FOR POLITICAL ENDS


Sources: "Migrants: Globalization’s Junk Mail?" Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus, www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4022, Feb. 23, 2007; "Workers, Not Guests," David Bacon, Nation, www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20070219&s=bacon, Feb. 6, 2007

14. IMPUNITY FOR US WAR CRIMINALS


Source: "A Senate Mystery Keeps Torture Alive — and Its Practitioners Free," Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly, public.cq.com/public/20061122_homeland.html, Nov. 22, 2006

15. CHEMICALS DAMAGING DNA


Source: "Some Chemicals are More Harmful Than Anyone Ever Suspected," Peter Montague, Rachel’s Democracy and Health News, no. 876, www.precaution.org/lib/06/ht061012.htm#Some_Chemicals_Are_More_Harmful_Than_Anyone_Ever_Suspected, Oct. 12, 2006

16. NO HARD EVIDENCE CONNECTING OSAMA BIN LADEN TO SEPT. 11


Source: "FBI Says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11," Paul V. Sheridan and Ed Haas, Ithaca Journal, June 29, 2006

17. FACTORIES EXCEED WATER POLLUTION LIMIT


Sources: "Green Fuel’s Dirty Secret," Sasha Lilley, CorpWatch, www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13646, June 1, 2006; "Factories, Cities across USA Exceed Water Pollution Limits," Sunny Lewis, Environment News Service, www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2006/2006-03-24-05.asp, March 24, 2006

18. MEXICO’S STOLEN ELECTION


Sources: "Mexico’s Partial Vote Recount Confirms Massive and Systematic Election Fraud," Al Giordano, Narco News Bulletin, www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2010.html, Aug. 14, 2006; "Welcome to the Nightmare: Al Qaeda de Mexico?" John Ross, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org/ross09132006.html, Aug. 13, 2006; "Evidence of Election Fraud Grows in México," Chuck Collins and Joshua Holland, AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org/story/39763, Aug. 2, 2006

19. BOLIVIA REJECTS IMF AND FTA


Source: "Is the US Free Trade Model Losing Steam?" American Friends Service Committee, Trade Matters, www.afsc.org/trade-matters/trade-agreements/LosingSteam.htm, May 3, 2006

20. ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ARE NOW TERRORISTS


Source: "Response to Andrew Kohn: The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act is Invidiously Detrimental to the Animal Rights Movement (and Unconstitutional as Well)," David Hoch and Odette Wilkens, Vermont Journal of Environmental Law, www.vjel.org/editorials/2007S/Hoch.Wilkens.Editorial.htm, March 9, 2007

21. US SEEKS WTO IMPUNITY FOR ILLEGAL AGRIBUSINESS SUBSIDIES


Source: "US Seeks "Get-Out Clause" for Illegal Farm Payments," Oxfam, www.oxfam.org/en/news/pressreleases2006/pr060629_wto_geneva, June 29, 2006

22. NORTH INVADES MEXICO


Source: "Border Invaders: The Perfect Swarm Heads South," Mike Davis, TomDispatch.com, www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=122537, Sept. 19, 2006

23. DIANNE FEINSTEIN’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST IN IRAQ


Source: "Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict," Peter Byrne, North Bay Bohemian, www.bohemian.com/metro/01.24.07/dianne-feinstein-0704.html, Jan. 24, 2007

24. MEDIA EXAGGERATES THREAT FROM IRAN’S PRESIDENT


Source: " ‘Wiped Off the Map’ — the Rumor of the Century," Arash Norouzi, Global Research, www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20070120&articleId=4527, Jan. 20, 2007

25. NATIVE ENERGY FUTURES


Source: "Native Energy Futures," Brian Awehali, LiP, www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featawehali_nativefutures.htm, June 5, 2006

Censored in San Francisco

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Project Censored can’t cover everything — most of the stories the group looks at are national and international in scope. But there are huge local stories in every community that the mainstream media black out, ignore, or underplay. We’ve talked to political activists and media experts around the Bay and come up with a (short) list of Bay Area censored stories. We list them in no particular order.

THE MONOPOLIZATION OF LOCAL DAILY NEWSPAPERS


The deal that gave Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control of almost every daily newspaper in the Bay Area made the business pages — but the impact on news coverage and the damage caused by the homogenization of local news to communities and the political debate were almost entirely ignored.

COMMUNITY CHOICE AGGREGATION AND PG&E’S ATTACK ON PUBLIC POWER


The importance of Community Choice Aggregation as an alternative to Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s private-power monopoly was badly under-covered — as was PG&E’s looming attack on CCA and public power.

GAVIN NEWSOM’S REAL RECORD


The daily papers love to talk about polls that show the mayor’s popularity (and they love to talk about his personal life), but nobody’s looking at his failure to fulfill many of his original promises.

SHUTTERED PUBLIC HOUSING


Until Mayor Newsom suddenly noticed the problems in local public housing last week, the major news media had overlooked the fact that hundreds of public housing units are shuttered while thousands of people wait for affordable housing.

THE ATTACK OF THE HIGH-RISES


The mainstream media reported with glee on the proposals for giant new towers at the Transbay Terminal, but failed to mention that at least 10 more giant towers are already in the works.

MORE HIGHWAYS, LESS TRANSIT


Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to talk green, but the news media haven’t compared his cuts to public transit with his plans to build more highways.

Green City: Burning contradictions

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>>Gonzo burner Paul Addis’s exclusive statement to the Guardian about burning the Man early — and our readers’ reactions

steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Well, the Man was back up the morning of Aug. 30, albeit without a head. And because the Man didn’t have a head, the green pavilion under its feet was still cordoned off and closed to visitors when I visited, so my impressions of this year’s Green Man theme are lacking a key input.

The environmental pavilion was only open for a few hours before the Man’s premature Aug. 27 burn, and most of those who went in were underwhelmed. It was like a wordy trade show exhibit, too earnest and static to stir much inspiration in the average burner.

One exhibit just outside the perimeter displayed an electric car, complete with promotional signage with phrases like "Electric cars equal freedom." Ugh.

But even if the official, environmentally themed installations fell a little flat, the green theme has permeated many of the large-scale artworks all over the playa.

There are pedal-, wind-, biomass-, alt-fuel-, and solar-powered pieces of all kinds, from spinning solar artwork and theme camps (including my own, which runs almost completely on solar power) to vehicles that run on gasified fuel to pedal-powered blenders to Peter Hudson’s Homouroboros, which uses pedals to power its spinning monkeys and drums to power the strobe lights that make the monkeys appear to swing from branch to branch.

I caught up with mayoral candidate and longtime burner Chicken John Rinaldi as he was tinkering with his Café Racer truck, which runs on gasified walnut shells. He was basically happy with the green theme and liked how the pavilion under the Man served as a green salon where people could share their ideas and technologies.

But he was less happy with how that sort of community building and discussion didn’t happen about the event that has overshadowed everything this week: the torching of the Man, allegedly committed by 35-year-old San Franciscan Paul Addis. "I think this was an excellent opportunity to have some democracy," Rinaldi said, noting that the burner community should be able to weigh in on whether Black Rock City presses charges or pushes for leniency, or even whether and how the Man should be rebuilt. "The reaction has been very top-down," he said.

BRC communications director Andie Grace said the community, through the organization and the volunteers who build the Man, was coming together in reaction to the incident. "To me, this turned into an opportunity for Black Rock City to shine," she said. "It’s heartbreaking, for sure, but it’s not going to break us."

Rinaldi has a different take. He’s known Addis since 1995, when they attended Burning Man together, and he said that he 86ed Addis from his old Odeon Bar maybe a dozen times. They ran in the same social circles, both tied closely to estranged Burning Man cofounder John Law (who is currently suing BRC over his partial ownership of the event’s icons) and the Cacophony Society, which originally brought the Man to the Black Rock Desert.

Rinaldi, Law, and many of their cohorts who helped run the event in the early days have long talked about burning the Man early. In fact, Rinaldi said, cofounder Larry Harvey clashed with Law in 1995 — the beginning of their falling out — when the latter wanted to burn the Man early and had to be talked out of the idea by his friends.

"[Addis is] a hero. He did the thing that we’ve been talking about doing for a decade," Rinaldi said. "No matter how misguided he was, his intention was to facilitate art."

Indeed, it was a piece of performance art that has overshadowed the Green Man theme, with all of its earnest good intentions, returning Burning Man to its anarchic roots and injecting chaos back into a routine that had become well established and, to some, a bit tired.

Because at the end of the day, Burning Man isn’t green. It’s a city that runs mostly on fossil fuel–powered generators and lights flammable fuels and gases just to see them burn.

The Burning Man experiment is one that many of us want to influence the world. But to expect it to play a leadership role in the environmental movement was probably too much. We can do many things, but we can’t simultaneously commit ourselves to fire and to global cooling, at least without wrestling constantly with Burning Man’s many contradictions.<\!s>*

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

Where is the love?

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OPINION Distant dreams of flowing colored scarves, glowing tie-dyed shirts, and rainbow dashikis commingling with mounds of facial hair and peace signs filled my mind as I walked through a deep recess of quiet green on a hidden trail in Golden Gate Park. It was 7 a.m. I was there to meet Mary X, an OG Summer of Love attendee, as she hastily closed her camp before, as she put it, "the po arrested me and stole all my stuff."

Despite the romantic images of the 1967 events, Mary’s campmates — black, brown, and white houseless elders, several of whom are veterans of the Vietnam War — were barely clothed in soiled flak jackets and torn tie-dyed shirts.

Further shattering the mythos of peace, human love, and community caring, many of these elders sported overlong beards that, unlike those in so many white-ified Jesus pictures, were filled with crumbs and spittle. Their hands were crippled with arthritis and barely able to hold their coffee cups, much less make a peace sign. "I was there," Mary stated plainly, her black eyes searching nervously for the next Department of Public Works truck or park police officer. "I was at the original Summer of Love in 1967." She stopped talking, picked up her backpack, and left without looking back at me.

Mary is a diagnosed schizophrenic, she told me during our original phone call, and like many poor folks in the United States — like my poor mama, Dee, who passed away last year — she has no money for mental health services. Her indigent program allows her a biannual visit with a disaffected psychiatrist who hands her a medication prescription she can’t afford to fill. Her only income is earned from long hours spent collecting cans and redeeming them for small change, very hard work that we at Poor call microbusiness — and a line of work that our magazine, in a recent exposé ("The Corporate Trash Scandal," 8/15/07), discovered is more likely to erase our collective carbon footprint that any corporate recycling company.

While Mayor Gavin Newsom continues with his daily sweeps of homeless people in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius writes weekly hit pieces that demonize and lie about the poor folks surviving in public spaces, equating them with the wild coyotes that roam the park. Nevius’s hit campaign begs the question for all of us: where is the love?

As thousands celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, how can we criminalize people for the sole act of living without a home and occupying public space? And who should really determine who belongs in open spaces like parks, beaches, streets, and sidewalks?

How have we in the United States come to equate cleanliness with a lack of poor human beings, and how are the people who have come to celebrate the Summer of Love — with their trash, picnic baskets, cars, belongings, and recreational drugs — any cleaner than the homeless folks who live and work in the park year-round and have nowhere else to go?

Tiny

Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the cofounder of Poor magazine and the Poor News Network (www.poornewsnetwork.org) and the author of Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America.

Eye spy

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea: I’ve found myself a femmy boy who’s willing — nay, enthusiastically prepared — to wear green eye shadow in public. This is delicious. However, we live in Colorado Springs, Colo., which is for its size a wealthy and well-educated town, but also headquarters for Focus on the Family, New Life Church, Will Perkins, Fort Carson, NORAD, and the Air Force Academy. One of my femmy-boy friends was recently chased down an alley downtown by some of the local military simians for the apparently gender-treacherous crime of wearing a top hat. It was lucky for him he knew the area well and wasn’t nearly as plastered as they were.

My two questions about the eye shadow thing are these: First, and I understand if you’re not able to answer because you don’t live here, if we do go on a date while he’s wearing it, what do you think our chances are of finishing the evening without getting the shit beaten out of us? And second, what’s your opinion on where one should put one’s feet while treading the fine line between keeping yourself safe and taking a stand for the right to do what you want with your body if it’s not hurting anyone else?

I guess the question is along the same lines as, how do you feel about him wearing a ball gag and leash to the local Starbucks? Eye shadow is just a less overtly sexual signal. Well. To some people. Not to me. Love, Don’t Kick Me

Dear Kick: Gotcha. And no, I surely do not live there, nor would I, but we did blow out a tire there on a cross-country trip once and got stranded for a couple days. Pretty town. Really nice park. I knew all that stuff (Air Force, antigay groups, etc.) was there, but you can’t tell by visiting — it’s not like there are giant "Fags go home" banners flying gaily over Main Street or anything. But would I, were I a guy, dress up in my gayest glad rags and sashay down the same main drag in a pair of darling red wedge espadrilles and a panty-girdle? I would not. I suspect you would not, either, were you a guy (you’re not, right?). It would be no safer for you to accompany your new girly-boy while he did it either. There is sticking up for your inalienable right to be a weirdo, and there is stupidity. I draw the line at stupidity in any other context, so why would I make an exception for this one?

There was a time in the late ’80s and early ’90s when all the cool kids were making a spectacle of themselves in the name of political action: visibility, I think we called it. All you had to do was print up some T-shirts or stickers and show up en masse where you weren’t expected and you got to feel all brave and thrillingly transgressive and challenging to heterosexual hegemony and stuff. It was great. It was also kind of fake — when you’re surrounded by a few dozen or hundred or thousand of your closest friends and you’re in San Francisco or New York or Washington, not Jakarta or Beijing or rural Rwanda, you’re pretty safe. Even if the cops get you, you’re going to be cited and set free; protesters in the United States are rarely brought to trial, let alone found bound and beheaded in a ditch. That doesn’t mean that nothing we do here is dangerous, though, and unfortunately walking certain streets in a state of visible gender ambiguity can still get you kicked in the face.

There is no set point on the continuum from safe but stifled to "Kick me" that I can recommend you find and cleave to, never again to stray. I do not think it would be very smart to dress your boy up and parade him around near the base at bar-closing time on a Saturday night; nor do I think those of us who fail to conform in every particular to local community standards for gender performance need cower at home forever for fear of attracting a disapproving glance. Somewhere between "Don’t frighten the horses" and "Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke" lies the perfect level of public self-expression for you two as individuals of your particular place and time. Find it. Also consider finding some fellow gender traitors with whom to make your scene, even if that scene is no more trangressive than going out for fish and chips (I’m pretty sure that’s what I ate at your local brew pub while waiting for our truck to be fixed so we could get the hell out of there) and the late showing of Snakes on a Plane. I think you’ll be OK. I wouldn’t recommend the Starbucks–ball gag excursion, but that’s because it’s in bad taste, not because it could get you killed. You’ll have to use your common sense. If you haven’t got any, I really do think you’d better stay home. Love, Andrea

Andrea’s on vacation this week: this column ran previously (8/22/06). But she’s still checking e-mail and eagerly awaiting your questions about love and lust! Contact her at andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com.

Stone’s throw

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS While y’all were at Burning Man, I was in the bathtub. I was taking a bath. I was floating in a swimming pool with a mojito in one hand and a grilled hot sausage on a long fork in the other. I was walking in a fog.

I was eating a popsicle, running naked through sprinklers, stepping on worms.

I was listening to Elton John. In my room. Window open. I was eating salad and salad and salad. The greens were green and crisp, the tomatoes not quite ripe.

I was slicing white onions. I was eating white onions, raw, and hot peppers. I slept real hard and figured out how to open my window and walked around in the sun and the shade, looking people in the eye.

I took a bath and a shower at the same time, and drank ice water out of a glass, the outside of which frosted over, so I licked it. I dressed conservatively.

I hung out in coffeehouses. I am writing this in coffeehouses. Coffee. Iced coffee. Green tea. Italian sodas. This morning I went to a different coffeehouse, and I tried to see if I could eat Korean barbecue with rice for breakfast, in a coffeehouse.

I could! While y’all were at Burning Man, I was at the Pebbles Café in Glen Park, at 8:30 in the morning, eating bulgoki over rice, with a salad. Bulgoki, or bulgogi, means "fire meat" in Korean. In this case it’s beef, very thinly sliced and marinated in something salty and sweet, with onions and peppers and carrots and ohmigod! For having this on the menu, and for serving it to me at 8:30 a.m., Pebbles Café is my new favorite coffeehouse.

I think that people are vegetarians. I say this because I was sitting at a table full of dudes in a different coffeehouse, and they started talking about Burning Man this, Burning Man that. So I cleared my throat. I told them my idea for bringing Camp Chicken Farmer to Burning Man. They looked at me like I was crazy, and I looked at them like they were vegetarians.

The idea for Camp Chicken Farmer ’08 was hatched at Camp Trans, while I was interviewing someone about why didn’t they have eggs. And they said it was too hard to keep eggs without refrigeration, or even ice. Thing is: the freshest egg in the world is as warm as a mug of coffee, and the freshest meat is still moving.

To illustrate this natural fact, I am going to take Camp Chicken Farmer to Burning Man next year, if I can raise the funds and recruit farmers. So far I have one. Well, by myself then, if necessary, I’m going to haul a pick-up truck of live chickens to Black Rock Desert, and a sack of feed, and a hatchet. I’m going to dress conservatively, stay sober, and just fry fresh eggs and butcher and barbecue all week long, go to sleep early.

Now, my attentive readers are going to go: "Wait a minute, Chicken Farmer, you had a hard enough time killing Houdini."

Exactly. And what’s the cure for not hardly being able to kill a chicken? Killing hundreds of them. Anyone could tell you that. On the other hand, it takes a paid professional specialist like me to tell you about the intricacies of coffeehouse Korean barbecue in Glen Park. For breakfast.

Two drunk guys on a sidewalk in Chicago got in my face. They asked impolitely if I was a transvestite.

"I’m everything," I said. "I’m trans."

"You mean you used to be a man and now you’re a woman?" one guy asked while the other started going on about how God made you one way. "You don’t mess with that," he said.

"I did," I said.

The light changed while they were still in my face. "I’d love to stay and chat," I said, flashing them the peace sign and stepping in the street, as if I had somewhere to be.

In fact my bus didn’t leave until two a.m. I had time to kill. The sun was just setting. The tops of the tall buildings were lit, and we were in it, in one sense, like ants under a magnifying glass. I had time to kill, and time was killing me. So while you were at Burning Man, I was still in Chicago on the sidewalk between bums, drunk, hungry, discussing theology, not giving anyone any hand jobs, laughing, and on fire.<\!s>*

PEBBLES CAFE

Monday–<\d>Friday: 6:30 a.m.–<\d>3:30 p.m.; Saturday: 8:30 a.m.–<\d>3:30 p.m.; closed Sunday

2852 Diamond St. S.F.

(415) 333-2270

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Wheelchair accessible

Green City: Signs of asbestos

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› sarah@sfbg.com

A new front has opened up in the fight for environmental justice in the asbestos-dusted Bayview–Hunters Point community, this time featuring a Nation of Islam–affiliated nonprofit that’s using Proposition 65 — California’s "right to know" law — to force Lennar Corp. to take responsibility for what activists say is a failure to provide clear and reasonable warning that thousands of Californians are being exposed to asbestos on a daily basis in Bayview–Hunters Point.

It’s a creative use of the 21-year-old law to promote environmental justice.

On Aug. 2, the Center for Self-Improvement and Community Development, which runs the Muhammad University of Islam school next to the Parcel A work site, filed suit individually, and on behalf of the public, against Lennar Corp., Lennar Homes of California, Lennar Communities, Lennar BVHP, Lennar Associates Management, and Lennar’s subcontractor, Gordon N. Ball.

At issue is the alleged failure of Lennar and its subcontractor to notify the surrounding community of exposures to asbestos dust during the 16 months that an entire hilltop has been graded on Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard in preparation for developing a 1,500-unit condominium complex.

The suit contends that Lennar and Ball engaged in construction site activities, including grading, scraping, and excavation of materials containing asbestos as well as storage and transportation of materials off site, and continues to engage in these activities without first providing "the adjacent community and persons working at the site with toxic health hazard warnings under California’s ‘right to know’ law."

Enacted in 1986, Prop. 65 was intended to protect California citizens and the state’s drinking water sources "from hazardous chemicals and to inform [citizens] about exposure to any such chemicals." As such, it requires the state to maintain lists of hazardous chemicals and requires businesses to provide a "clear and reasonable warning" before exposing individuals to any of these listed chemicals.

But though asbestos has been listed as a carcinogen since 1987 and has been subject to Prop. 65’s warning requirements since 1988, Minister Christopher Muhammad, who heads the school, claims he first learned that asbestos was in Lennar’s Parcel A construction dust six months after grading began in 2006 —and two months after Lennar admitted to the city that its air monitoring equipment hadn’t been working.

"I did not know that the dust contained asbestos until a young worker, Christopher Carpenter, blew the whistle in October 2006, the same day he got fired from the site after asking the crew to stop digging on account of the dust being too heavy," Muhammad told the Guardian. He recalled how Carpenter visited the school, worried it hadn’t been notified after he saw children playing right next to Lennar’s site.

"The dust clouds were so thick during the summer of 2006, they were like minitornadoes on the hill, which is surrounded by water, so the wind swirls upwards," Muhammad said. He noted that the baseball courts, classroom windows, and jungle gym are 10 feet from a chain link fence that is the only thing separating Lennar’s site from the school, and noted that a Boys and Girls Club, a public housing project, and many residences lie in close proximity to Parcel A, whose dust was seen drifting across the entire neighborhood.

There’s a strong case here: there’s no doubt that the construction project was generating asbestos dust — and still may be. The suit seeks to prohibit Lennar and Ball from engaging in construction activities or any other work at the site "without first providing clear and reasonable warnings to each exposed person residing, working, or visiting the adjacent community and to workers at the site regarding asbestos exposures."

Enforcing Prop. 65 is the responsibility of the state attorney general, the local district attorney, or the city attorney, but as attorney Andrew Packard told us, the law also allows private entities to sue.

Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the office is "keeping an eye on the situation, including this private effort, and would take it very seriously if a determination is made that a case of action exists in favor of the city."

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

Socked and odd

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Sockywonk’s sister Sisterwonk made Socky a sock monkey with multiple piercings and horns, so she named it after herself. She named it Socky. Now I have to call Sockywonk "Wonk" for short, to avoid confusion. We made a fine pair, the three of us — me, Socky, and Wonk — in Kansas, and at Cracker Barrel, and all along the Loneliest Road in America.

Truck stop to truck stop we did not get beat up or even pointed at, we three freaks: the tranny chicken farmer, the punkish weirdo, and the devilish sock monkey with a fetish for road kill. Well, one little kid cried when Wonk showed Socky to him, and that was it.

Yes, you heard me right: Cracker Barrel. It wasn’t my idea, but I admit to being down with it. All I needed to know was fried okra, and Sockywonk kept saying it, like a mantra, "fried okra, fried okra, fried okra." Then when we finally found one she said, "Prepare to be shocked and awed."

I didn’t know about shocked. I didn’t know about odd. All I needed to know was fried okra, and that was what I ordered with my chickens and dumplings. They give you three sides, and I chose okra, okra, and okra. None of them were really worth writing about. I’m not going to write about the chickens and dumplings, either. Don’t worry.

The only thing remarkable about Cracker Barrel, besides the novelty of it, for me, was sweet tea and real butter.

And what Sockywonk really wanted more than mushy beige food, I figured out later, was to be able to call her mom and dad and say, "Guess what! We ate at Cracker Barrel!"

There are some things in life that I understand.

Other things, I am learning, like how to not always look like a chicken farmer. We went into a lot of thrift stores, and Sockywonk played big sister, fashion checking all my purchases. She did let a bit of gingham slip through, but other than that, weather permitting, I am now going to be leggier and chestier than I used to be. Just to warn you. If you see a totally hot chick walking around town without any chickens, say hello because that’s me.

I’m back! Safe, and unsound.

The day after our return, I waited for the Wonk to leave, and then I donned my new gingham pants and orange "I Rock It Old School" tank top, painted my toenails neon green, and drove up to the woods to a chicken coop dedication party. I took my steel drum with me, and my country buddy Mountain Sam, who was stuck in the city and kinda could use a ride home.

We stopped and bought a watermelon. We stopped and got a rack of baby backs, a bag of potato chips, and two big beers. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be back in the Bay Area, y’all, and in particular to be back in my beloved Sonoma County, west county, in the redwoods, sitting on a stone wall with the Mountain, and sucking down a rack of ribs. There was a blue grassish band called the Wronglers, and they were playing "Red River Valley," "Home on the Range," and other ideal soundtracks to pork and beer on a stone wall in the woods.

For now, I still live in Noe Valley. But my new favorite barbecue is in Petaluma. It’s called Lombardi’s and they have a whole chorus line of barrel smokers in front, kicking out chickens and ribs and tri-tip, salmon, burgers and dogs, and even nonmeat grillables like corn, asparagus, and mushrooms.

I can speak for the baby backs: excellent! We saved some for Veronica. I dipped potato chips into the leftover sauce. Between sets, I whipped out my steel pan and played a handful of chicken farmerly songs, like the one about how I first became a chicken farmer, and the one about how my chickens drink my bath water, and the one about how I want to be a chicken, and the one about how when I die, I’d like for my chickens to eat me, please.

And all the while I didn’t have a single chicken in the world, and lived in a yardless basement apartment with grocery store eggs in the fridge.

Still, kids and old folks loved me. Our hostess said she was going to name one of their new baby chicks after me, and then I knew that I had made it.

LOMBARDI’S

Daily: 10 a.m.–8 p.m.

3413 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma

(707) 773-1271

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Elisa’s Cafe and L’s Caffe

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› paulr@sfbg.com

No matter how you prefer to spell café — or caffe, or even cafe — you probably have a favorite one. Haunting a particular café is a prerogative of city dwelling, and in a coffee-involved city like ours, the possible forums for such socially acceptable loitering are vast, even including places that don’t have espresso machines. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Cafés, you see, don’t have to be about coffee, really, though most serve it in some form and some serve it in many forms. Cafés can also be about food, and in this sense we use the word in more or less the same sense the Parisians do, to describe the most casual sort of restaurant, the sort of place that doesn’t necessarily have full table service but does have tables where you are welcome to linger and discuss and rap your knuckles for emphasis even after you’ve finished eating whatever it was you were eating.

And what were you eating? Nacatamales? Have my typing fingers gone into spasm? Did I mean to type tamales but succumbed to overenthusiasm? No: I meant to type nacatamales because the nacatamal is the tamale of Nicaragua (and Honduras), and you can get them at Elisa’s Café, along with other Central American delicacies. Along with coffee — but not espresso.

Elisa’s opened late in the spring in the Excelsior space occupied for a number of years by Bistro E Europe, a restaurant that served the foods of Hungary and the Roma (a.k.a. the gypsies). The rather Spartan-looking space has been given a nice freshening, with peach paint and black furniture, and you no longer have that forgotten-city feeling while sitting in the window, watching the world go by.

Nacatamales ($5.50), as prepared by Elisa’s kitchen, are bigger and squarer than ordinary tamales. They’re about the size of a watch box and are steamed in plantain leaves, which are peeled away before the plate is presented to you. Otherwise, the similarities are manifest; we are talking about a squarish molding of masa (a close, corn-meal relation of polenta) in which potatoes, rice, tomatoes, onions, raisins, mint leaves, and possibly beef, pork, or chicken, have been cooked, as in a clafoutis or berry muffin. The boundary between the filling and the enclosure is indistinct, in other words.

The nacatamales are big. One is plenty for a single person and might even be splittable if you open your repast with, say, some soup. Soups vary according to the day of the week, and some are pricier than others. The least costly appears on Friday and is meatless: a black-bean soup ($4.50), whose namesake legumes are reduced to a thin purée in which bob peeled boiled eggs and coiled ropes of red pepper. Since the soup is basically mild, enlivenment is provided on the side in the form of a white salsa, a mince of onions steeped in vinegar. The sauce emits almost unbreathable fumes, but once in the soup it settles down to the general benefit.

Other dishes seem more familiar — the sorts of things you might find at other restaurants serving the foods of Mesoamerica — including bistec encebollado ($8.75), several pieces of beef sliced minute-steak thin, then pan-fried and finished with a tousled cap of sautéed onions. There’s also a salad on the side, iceberg lettuce with cucumber coins and quartered tomatoes. Quite American, I thought, as if the shock of Nicaraguan cooking must be buffered somehow for yanqui sensibilities.

When you are sitting in L’s Caffe, on 24th Street between Bryant and Florida, you are sitting in what I think of as the deepest heart of the Mission. And because the Mission is changeable and ever-changing, a café at its heart would almost necessarily be polyglot. The principals of L’s are all named Lozano — which is a Spanish name but also turns up occasionally in Italy. Italy and Spain, of course, have taken turns ruling bits of each other over the centuries.

As if to honor this long entwinement, the café offers a casually international menu, with definite Italian flourishes along with Spanish touches spoken in a New World accent. You can get bagels smeared with lox and cream cheese, or with hummus; you can get a PB&J or a sandwich with pepperoni, mozzarella, and pesto. You can get Chilean-style empanadas ($3 each), half-moon shaped pastry pouches filled with shredded chicken or just vegetables — which might mean mostly spinach.

There’s a minestrone soup ($4.50) whose thick, spicy tomato sauce and flotsam of white beans and pasta would do credit to many an Italian restaurant. The soup goes nicely with, perhaps, a turkey and Swiss sandwich ($5.95), which would be totally all-American if not for the swoosh of hummus on the top slice of whole-wheat bread. Even a five-bean salad ($3.25), a staple of midsummer picnics, features a broad constituency of legumes: black, pinto, lima, and green beans, along with chickpeas.

Not all recent changes in the Mission are awful, if we factor into our judgment L’s Caffe’s commitment to organic agriculture — all the coffee beans are organic, as is much of the food — and to reducing its waste stream through a conscientious program of composting and recycling. As someone who recently had a burrito at a long-beloved taqueria (also in the Mission) and was horrified to see a reckless flow of aluminum foil, Styrofoam, and other manufactured leavings into the garbage, I can tell you that this matters.

ELISA’S CAFÉ

Mon.–Fri., 7 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sat–Sun., 8 a.m.–5 p.m.

4901 Mission, SF

(415) 333-3177

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

L’S CAFFE

Mon.–Thurs., 6 a.m.–9 p.m.; Fri., 6 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sat–Sun., 7 a.m.–9 p.m.

2871 24th St., SF

(415) 206-0274

www.lscaffe.net

Beer and wine

DC/DISC/MC/V

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Class of 2007: The Dry Spells

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CLUBS Bulgarian Throat-Singing and Bare Trees Appreciation Society, Analog Tape-Cutter Pep Squad

SUPERLATIVE Most Likely to Run Away from Grad School and Join a Band of Gypsy Violinists

How did four fresh-faced young women with freshly minted bachelor’s-degree diplomas from New York’s Bard College and a yen for Left Coast adventure end up making music amid the fog banks, dim sum depots, and Russian sweet shops of San Francisco’s Richmond District? Pure chance, thanks to guitarist-vocalist Adria Otte, a music and Asian studies major who gravitated toward the Bay Area after the foursome’s 2004 graduation, magnetized by the experimental music and the Asian American communities, pulling her Dry Spells bandmates — vocalist-guitarist Thalia Harbour, vocalist-violinist April Hayley, and drummer Caitlin Pierce — into her orbit.

"After graduating, we all had our freak-out, like, ‘What are we doing?’ " Otte, 25, says, just leaving her job at Meridian Gallery. The four met at Bard — Harbour was Otte’s freshman dorm neighbor, and Pierce dwelled just down the hall and had befriended Hayley — and formed the Dry Spells in 2002 and, as Otte puts it, "just played for fun because we were all supposedly serious students." But as academic distractions peeled away and they ended up in the same Richmond-area house, they began to buckle down and play seriously.

The Dry Spells’ diligence has paid off, with a self-released, self-titled, and semimastered EP. Beautifully recorded on tape by the Fucking Champs’ Tim Green at his Louder Studios, The Dry Spells echoes with reverb-y lyric guitar, plinging bells, a touch of droning melodica, and baklava-sweet harmonies that evoke the minimal post-punk of Electrelane and the maximal ethno-folk-punk of Camper Van Beethoven. The band may cite Fleetwood Mac and Fairport Convention as primary sources, but they’re neither as pop-y nor as reverent as those groups. Imagine, instead, indie-rock babes in the woods, a short 38 Geary ride from a mist-strewn Lone Mountain, kidnapped by Romany rovers in order to study the dark, dreamy arts of folk song.

Yet who knows what forms the Dry Spells will assume or what sounds they’ll adopt or adapt in the future? At a Café du Nord show in July, bassist Diego Gonzalez — with whom Otte, Harbour, and Hayley performed in kindred Bard grad Ezra Feinberg’s Citay — joined the group on stage. He stuck out like a sore thumb, I joke, though Otte assures me that he’ll likely remain a permanent member. And now Pierce has departed to work on a sociology doctorate at Johns Hopkins University — the EP, it turns out, was a rush job preceding her move. "We wanted something that sounded more organic," Otte says, "because we definitely come out of a more organic place." (Kimberly Chun)

www.myspace.com/thedryspells

A fine ‘Mesh?

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A defining characteristic of the US imperial program in Iraq, we are often told, is the resolute refusal to learn anything from history. True to the TV-weaned attention spans of our triumphant culture, history here usually means the past four years — at least before stretching to include the eerily identical adventures of the British Empire less then a century ago, let alone anything going back any further. But as Bush’s recent Vietnam-Iraq comparison suggests with trusty ass-backwardness, it’s not losing track of history that the current administration does so well as it is roundly and brazenly bastardizing it to suit present purposes — namely, the perennial ones of greed and power.

It falls to others without quite so much of a vested interest in conquest to actually learn from history, by which we mean something more than crudely customizing it to serve nefarious opportunities. This is part of the impetus behind Berkeley-based TheatreInSearch’s exploration of the earliest of Mesopotamian adventurers: an ancient Sumerian king of way back in the BC who comes down to us via 12 clay tablets draped in legend and myth, in the guise of history’s first superhero.

But what exactly can we learn from so historically remote a text? TheatreInSearch’s production itself seems unsure. As if to at once employ and distance us from our own contemporary intellectual and aesthetic lenses, director George Charbak’s free adaptation of The Epic of Gilgamesh (retitled here The Epic of Gilgamesh with a Long Prologue) frames the ancient hero’s exploits with certain knowing modern references, including a comical couple of Beckett-like pseudo-philosophizing gadflies (Michael Green and Elias D. Protopsaltis) and, more centrally, a seemingly all-knowing, modern-day narrator (Ana Bayat).

The narrator, addressing the audience like a museum docent, literally pulls the veil from the archaic literary figure — seated statue-like at the summit of a pyramidal series of steps at the center of set designer Kim Tolman’s clean, uncluttered gallery of ancient artifacts — while furnishing the title’s not overly long but definitely muddled prologue. Half ironical and half indignant over her semidivine subject (played with an at times penetrating boyishness by the soon walking and talking Roham Shaikhani), she asks her audience in somewhat mocking tones to study Gilgamesh as a specimen of outrageous hubris and mindless destruction.

Rather statically staged and inconsistently acted, the more dramatic scenes get some added lift from off-stage musical accompaniment by Larry Klein on the oud. The more successful humor in the play, meanwhile, arises not from the strained (and overly intrusive) vaudevillian posturing of the two philosopher-commentators but from smart use of the text’s repetitive language and its human situations.

The serious aspects of the play are less consistent. Certain characters lack adequate definition, while some scenes could do with some judicious trimming. If, as the play’s narrator suggests, superheroes from Gilgamesh to Rambo (to real-life superhero manqués like George W. Bush in his flight suit) represent nothing so much as a flight from history, with its attendant lessons and responsibilities, then they deserve only our scorn. But a superannuated superhero like Gilgamesh, confronting death as man and myth together, would seem to provide other opportunities.

In this respect, our narrator is far from a reliable one. Perhaps intentionally (though in truth text and performance are too confused to really say), her one-note "modern" perspective is itself being held up for critique, as if to demonstrate the pitfalls of too superior an attitude to barbarisms past and present. Either way, by the time of the accompanying epilogue, the narrator’s indignation and sarcasm devolve into little more than an awkward rant that closes the play without any sense that the journey in between has counted for anything.

When at the end the veil is again tossed over Gilgamesh, however, his posture is no longer erect, and his features bleed through; he leans desperately forward, his face just visible through the gauze, twisted into a frightened mask of everlasting perplexity. Shaikhani’s expression tells us infinitely more here than any expert could and in doing so almost saves the show single-handedly at the last moment. A neat feat that would have been for a fallen superhero.

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH WITH A LONG PROLOGUE

Through Sept. 2, $12–$20

Fri–Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun, 2 p.m.

Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk.

(510) 262-0584

Green City: Nice day for a green wedding

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The desire to go green is starting to color everything, even the traditional white wedding. There is an increasing desire to make an ecofriendly statement on the big day, according to the Feb. 11 New York Times article "How Green Was My Wedding?" In fact, the demand is large enough now that a directory called Green Elegance Weddings (www.greeneleganceweddings.com), which aggregates contact info for green wedding vendors and services in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, was created to satisfy it.

In her new book, One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (Penguin Press HC), author Rebecca Mead estimates that during her three years of research from 2004 to 2006, the US wedding industry’s annual revenue grew by $40 billion to $161 billion, twice the amount of 1990. With so many greenbacks going into weddings, it’s no wonder that everyone from brides to entrepreneurs is considering how to marry the ceremonies with a desire to do the right thing.

One enterprising environmentalist, Corina Beczner, started Vibrant Events, a planning service based in Marin that pulls together local resources to create resource-efficient weddings for like-minded couples who are about to tie the knot. She got the idea after witnessing the weddings of friends while in business school.

"I realized the lack of meaning in modern weddings … and that aligning values of sustainability with weddings was a great way to integrate a more meaningful experience for everyone," Beczner wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.

Weddings planned by Vibrant Events and other green wedding planning agencies, such as Chico’s Love Events, are fairly similar in time frame, staff volume, and other traditional planning factors. But they also use fewer finite resources, offset any possible pollution caused by the wedding, and take other steps to promote localism and sustainability.

This can mean using locally grown organic flowers and ingredients (in hors d’oeuvres and the cake), local vendors, and shuttle services and venue selections designed to cut down on emissions. Those who want a green wedding must be committed to the cause before any planning gets done.

Kelly Nichols and Alan Puccinelli of Danville, who met four years ago at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, are set to get married in October and hired Beczner to help them create a sustainable wedding. "I had taken a class on global warming, and I just felt that a wedding was the best venue to show my friends and family what they could do" to combat it, Nichols told us.

Nichols says that Beczner, who holds an MBA in sustainable management, let her take the reins in picking vendors, a location, methods of transportation, and other expenses. "There wasn’t any specific part of the planning process that was mandatory. [Beczner] made suggestions based on what we wanted to do for the wedding, such as telling us where to go to offset our carbon emissions and get local and organic food."

The couple’s green choices include the wedding site, Wildwood Acres in Lafayette, which rents chairs, tables, and china plates to patrons, cutting down on the long-term waste of resources on those obligatory supplies. Also, the couple reserved rooms for out-of-town guests near the Lafayette BART station, meaning celebrants can take the train in lieu of polluting taxi rides from the airport.

But greening one’s wedding isn’t cheap. Beczner estimates that a green wedding costs up to 15 percent more for items like flowers, food, and alcohol; that increase comes on top of the Bay Area’s higher [tk: mean or median? average] total wedding cost of approximately $35,000, according to Beczner — 125 percent the approximate national average of $28,000 reported in Mead’s book. This money ends up in the pockets of an average of 43 businesses at wedding’s end, according to Mead.

However, all those involved in the industry don’t share the benefit equally. When asked how lucrative Vibrant has been, Beczner replies, "I’d have to say that I’m making less money now than I was when I worked for nonprofits."

Of course, the financial aspect isn’t the most important to Beczner. She told us, "I’m much more excited [about helping] the earth than anything else."<\!s>*

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

Sudachi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Trends fade, except when they don’t — and then you have hip. Sushi is hip food; its appeal to the cognoscenti is perennial. Tapas (a.k.a. small plates, little plates, or shareable plates) have been a trend for quite a number of years now and have assumed all sorts of ethnic guises while their claim to permanence has strengthened. At Sudachi, a new restaurant on Sutter Street at the edge of a still-sketchy run of Polk Street, the tapas appear in Asian guise: Eurasian fusion on a small scale. "Sudachi" turns out to be the name of a citrus fruit from the Far East; so, interestingly, is "yuzu" — which, capitalized, becomes the name of a Japanese-fusion restaurant in Cow Hollow. Do we bear witness to the beginnings of a trend?

Sudachi and Yuzu are similar in many ways, from food to interior design (lots of wood and splashes of green in each), but they are unlike in at least one important sense: their relation to their environs. Yuzu is a temple of young, well-to-do heterosexuals in a precinct of young, well-to-do heterosexuals. It is part of a euphonious whole. Sudachi, by contrast, is next door to a Yemeni mosque and just steps away from Polk Street, where the boy trade is diminished but not completely dried up. If its neighborhood is a neighborhood in transition, then signs are mixed as to what direction it might take.

But there’s always a place at the table for graciousness, and Sudachi is rich in modern graces, beginning with the host, who greets you with a youthful smile when you step from the street into the vestibule. The fluttering curtains part, and you find yourself being led into the front dining room, rather airy and loftlike and connected — via a length of burnished-fir bar, complete with a pair of cheery barkeeps — to a second dining room in the rear. The high brick wall behind the bar is trimmed with strips of steel: mementos mori of sorts, reminders of what can happen to unreinforced masonry in earthquakes. (What can happen? Fall down, go boom.) The bar itself is trimmed with youngish, dot-commie-looking people, waiting for a table or the rest of their party or just idling. They appear to be slightly edgier than their Marina counterparts, though clad in the same hideous designer jeans.

Chef Ming Hwang’s menu takes a step all seafood emporiums would do well to emulate: it tells us where much of the fish comes from. Not much of it comes from around here, unfortunately, and even an offering of albacore (which I love) labeled as local on the printed bill of fare turned out to be from Croatia. The specialty rolls, on the other hand, aren’t burdened with this information, which is unfortunate but also makes them easier to order: one less factor to weigh. Spyder roll ($9.50) — with its characteristic superstructure of (in this case, soft-shell) crab tempura — and California roll ($7), with crab, avocado, and cucumber, were both excellent if routine. Because the crab in them is cooked, they can help mollify the squeamish without completely putting off purists and sophisticates.

Still, said sophisticates — if not purists — would probably be happier with something like the Death by Sushi roll ($12.50), a very California combination of tuna, shiso leaf, avocado, snap peas, and gobo, rolled in rice and covered with a translucent blanket of salmon slices, with a throw pillow of sweet black sesame sauce. I liked the spicy tuna roll ($6) too, but I always do. It’s no-nonsense, a sushi equivalent to that Jack in the Box burger that’s nothing but layers of meat and cheese, barely contained in an envelope of starch.

As for the rawphobes, Hwang has saved some of the best for them, and it’s all cooked. One of the brightest stars of the tapas menu has to be the lamb lollipops ($16), a troika of frenched, broiled chops served with mint-edamame sauce, quartered new potatoes, and ribbons of pickled red onion. The red onion was too vinegary (pickling is a form of balancing, so add some sugar too, please), but the juicy tenderness of the meat obliterated that quibble.

Buddha’s pouches ($16) consisted of little piles of well-crisped Sonoma duck confit suitable for lading into a flotilla of endive canoes moored around the edge of the plate, along with a splash or two of sherry hoisin sauce. Potato croquettes ($8) were crunchy golden bullets laced with sweet corn, chive, and white truffle oil and served with a porridgelike shrimp sauce perfumed with basil.

I liked the shrimp sauce better than the shrimp proper: marinated prawns ($12) grilled on skewers and plated with jamón serrano, tad soi, bean sprouts, and a sesame caramel sauce. Shrimp are more forgiving of chefly neglect or mishandling than other forms of seafood; they don’t easily dry out or fall apart, but if they do dry out, they’re pretty dismal, no matter how gussied up. These shrimp were peeled, which probably contributed to their desiccation but also made it possible to eat them quickly.

Unlike many Asian-oriented restaurants, Sudachi offers desserts (all $6) to be reckoned with. Chocolate gelato, served as a pair of globes in a martini glass, along with strawberries and mint, was pleasantly ordinary, but the key lime ice cream — another set of globes, another martini glass — was an extraordinary blend of sweet and sour and a richness of texture that reminded me of well-chilled mascarpone. And chocolate decadence for once lived up to its much-used name, appearing as a hemisphere of brandy-scented chocolate ganache. A festooning of griottines cherries (pitted and halved) brought some color, but the overwhelming experience of the ganache was one of luxurious moistness, as if some kind of triple cream fudge sauce had been artfully thickened into a cake. And some people think decadence is a bad thing!<\!s>*

SUDACHI

Mon.–<\d>Thurs., 5:30–<\d>10:30 p.m.; Fri.–<\d>Sat. 5:30 p.m.–<\d>1 a.m.

1217 Sutter, SF

(415) 931-6951

www.sudachisushi.com

Full bar

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Fall Arts: Sing or swim

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

 

AUG. 28

Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass (Def Jux) We’ll see if ‘Sop has lost his edge livin’ in ol’ Frisky. Blockhead and Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle take a pass on the nervy rhymes.

Akon, Konvicted (Konvict/Upfront/SRC/Universal Motown) Konvinced? Or just plain a-korny?

Evelyn Champagne King, Open Book (RNB/Jaggo/Fontana) The disco queen who was discovered while cleaning the offices of Philly International brings “Shame” into the 21st century.

Ledisi, Lost and Found (Verve Forecast) The local singer’s debut for the true diva cathedral of all jazz labels has been three years in the making.

Liars, Liars (Mute) Work that skirt.

Noreaga, Noreality (Babygrande) Wake me up when Noreality TV has finished its broadcast day. Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Jadakiss, Three 6 Mafia, David Banner, and a cast of thousands trade off on enabling duty.

Scorpions, Humanity — Hour 1 (New Door/UME) Oh, the inhumanity; Billy Corgan scorps out new turf.

Yung Joc, Hustlenomics (Block/Bad Boy South) Joc’ed up on java with the first single, “Coffee Shop,” off this Neptunes-, Fixxers-, and Gorilla Zoe–produced disc.

 

SEPT. 4

Calvin Harris, I Created Disco (Almost Gold) The brazen Scot is irreverent enough to lay claim to inventing the big D, the buzzword of this year and the year before.

 

SEPT. 11

Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam (Domino) Helmed by frequent Sun City Girls producer Scott Colburn, their eighth album’s nine songs include one dedicated to Al Green.

B5, Don’t Talk, Just Listen (Bad Boy) Diddy’s answer to the Backstreet Boys unknowingly use the favorite phone phrase of the Weepy-Voiced Killer as the title for their album.

Dirty Projectors, Rise Above (Dead Oceans) Another punk machismo-reclamation project? Queerific art rockers team with Grizzly Bear playas to rewrite Black Flag’s Damaged — from memory and with a hearty helping of cracked experifolk whimsy.

50 Cent, Curtis (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope) The artist also known as a form of VitaminWater that tastes like grape Kool-Aid continues his marketing onslaught.

Go! Team, Proof of Youth (Sub Pop) Will their first single, “Grip Like a Vice,” hook till it hurts?

Jenny Hoyston, Isle Of (Southern) The Erase Errata guitarist finds paradise far from the dashboard blight.

Modeselektor, Happy Birthday! (BPitch Control) Genre-hopping Berlin duo go the celebrity cameo route, enlisting the vox of Thom Yorke and others.

Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs (Touch and Go) Will this top Pinback’s last album, Summer in Abbadon, which sold more than 80,000 copies? Indie music sellers wanna know!

Qui, Love’s Miracle (Ipecac) Jesus Lizard David Yow’s quid pro quo — with covers of Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” and Frank Zappa’s “Willie the Pimp.”

Simian Mobile Disco, Attack Decay Sustain Release (Interscope) I got my pulverizing bass in your acid keyboard scrunchies!

Kanye West, Graduation (Roc-A-Fella) West’s mom has been caught saying that this is his best album ever. Making or breaking the case: West has said that Lil’ Wayne will rap over a song titled “Barry Bonds.”

 

SEPT. 18

Babyface, Playlist (Mercury) The onetime close, personal friend of Bill just wants do covers, like “Fire and Rain,” “Time in a Bottle,” and — hoo boy — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

James Blunt, All the Lost Souls (Custard/Atlantic) U-g-l-y, this ain’t got no alibi.

Chamillionaire, Ultimate Victory (Chamillitary/Universal Motown) The H-town star’s long-delayed sophomore effort has a mammoth supporting cast even by commercial-rap standards; it kicks off with a single featuring Slick Rick.

The Donnas, Bitchin’ (Purple Feather/Redeye) Named after the fluffy puppies overrunning their studio?

Eve, Here I Am (Aftermath/Interscope) Had anyone been looking? Listening in are producers Dr. Dre, Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, and Pharrell Williams.

Rogue Wave, Asleep at Heaven’s Gate (Brushfire/Universal) Just don’t drift off around Marshall Applewhite while wearing black-and-white Nikes. A new bass player — Patrick Abernathy — and a new label for the locals.

Angie Stone, The Art of Love and War (Stax/Concord) The road back from VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club may yet be one to salvation, since it’s passing through the holy land of Stax.

 

SEPT. 25

Devendra Banhart, Smokey Rolls down Thunder Canyon (XL) Gael García Bernal sings on one track, and Vashti Bunyan sings on two; Noah Georgeson produces a collection that is supposed to flit from Gilberto Gil breezes to Jackson 5–style pop.

The Cave Singers, Invitation Songs (Matador) Pretty Girls Make Graves–Murder City Devils, Hint Hint, and Cobra High grads calcify in intriguing country-folk shapes.

Keyshia Cole, Just like You (A&M/Interscope) Two years on, it’s clear that Oakland girl Cole’s The Way It Is was the best R&B debut since What’s the 411? Through the sheer intense focus of her singing, she rescues overexposed Missy and Lil’ Kim on the first single here.

José González, In Our Nature (Mute) Yes way, José. The long wait for the follow-up to Veneer is over. González recorded this in his hometown over a three-week period after obsessing about today’s religion and (lack of) ethics.

PJ Harvey, White Chalk (Island) Peej draws in longtime collaborator Eric Drew Feldman and Jim White of the Dirty Three.

Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog (Sub Pop) Here’s hoping three’s the charm for Sam Beam.

Jagged Edge, Baby Makin’ Project (So So Def/Island) Yet another case for population control.

Mick Jagger, The Very Best of Mick Jagger (Rhino UK) It’s semiofficial: the best of Mick Jagger is worse than the worst of the Rolling Stones.

Bettye LaVette, The Scene of the Crime (Anti-) A singer who can bring out the black-and-blue tone of that title, especially because the scene of the crime is Muscle Shoals, Ala., where she returned to record this album. She’s backed by Drive-by Truckers.

Matt Pond PA, Last Light (Altitude) Neko Case and Kelly Hogan hold a candle.

Múm, Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Let Your Crooked Hands Be Holy (Fat Cat) Mum’s the word?

Meshell Ndegeocello, The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams (Decca) Connecting her MySpace page to the gender-bending edges of her cover of Bill Withers’s “Who Is He (and What Is He to You?),” you might say the man of her dreams is Miles Davis.

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Raising Sand (Rounder) Why does my mouth fill with sand when I think about this project?

Queen Latifah, Trav’lin’ Light (Verve) Latifah steps to a song that will always be owned by Billie Holiday — and sings some other songs as well — on her debut album for one of Lady Day’s main labels today.

Scott Walker, And Who Shall Go to the Ball? (4AD UK) The enigma returns more quickly than usual, albeit with a four-movement instrumental mini-LP composed for a dance piece.

Will.i.am, Songs about Girls (Interscope) The Black Eyed Pea with the lamest name loves the ladies, egged on by Snoop Dogg.

 

OCT. 2

Cassidy, B.A.R.S. (Full Surface/J) The Philly battle rapper rebounds from injury and lockup and leans on Bone Thugs, John Legend, and others for faith.

Annie Lennox, Songs of Mass Destruction (Arista) No doubt about it, “Why?” can be very irritating. But this title suggests she’s really amped up the damage inflicted by her tunes.

 

OCT. 9

Band of Horses, Cease to Begin (Sub Pop) Ben Bridwell expresses his love for YouTube video directors on this Phil Eks–produced second LP.

Dengue Fever, Untitled (M80 Music/NAIL/Allegro) On recordings, they’re sometimes glorious, sometimes not — will the third time be a charm for the group led by Chhom Nimol’s dynamic voice?

The Fiery Furnaces, Widow City (Thrill Jockey) The prolific sibs thrust forth their sixth full-length, emboldened by engineer John McEntire of Tortoise.

The Hives, The Black and White Album (Interscope) The ebullient Swedes will be donning black after a dozen or so shows opening for Maroon 5.

Jennifer Lopez, Brave (Epic) Are listeners courageous or is she?

Robert Pollard, Coast to Coast Carpet of Love and Standard Gargoyle Decisions (Merge) Two releases in one day — guided by bipolar voices?

She Wants Revenge, This Is Forever (Geffen) Let’s hope not.

Amy Winehouse, Frank (Island) Pre–US juggernaut album by the singer in rehab, for anyone who doesn’t think she’s overexposed or wouldn’t rather look at Ronnie Spector and listen to Ruth Brown.

 

OCT. 16

Nicole Scherzinger, Her Name Is Nicole …(Interscope) …and she’s the Pussycat Doll whom you can tell apart from the other Pussycat Dolls — I think. She falls in seconds-long love at first sight with prospective members of her group during auditions, if the trashiest TV show in recent memory is to be believed.

 

OCT. 23

Ashanti, The Declaration (The Inc.) I’ll flabbergast many by saying that Ashanti has served up more quality hit singles than the other R&B diva releasing an album this week.

Alicia Keys, As I Am (J) She can sing, she can play, she can sell Proactiv Solution like few others. But will she ever truly let that voice loose?

 

OCT. 30

Backstreet Boys, Unbreakable (Jive) Do we really want it that way again? Can they give it to us that way? One thing’s for sure — this should give Chelsea Handler months of comedy material.

Chris Brown, Exclusive (Jive) Yeah, he’s cuter than kitten posters. But his appearance in a tribute to the Godfather of Soul at last year’s Grammy Awards verged on sacrilege.

 

NOV. 13

Wu-Tang Clan, The 8 Diagrams (Street Recordings) Their first album in six years — thus their first post-ODB recording — takes its title from the Shaw brothers’ film Eight Diagram Pole Fighter; in tune with the George Harrison revival, it includes a cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

 

NOV. 20

Six Organs of Admittance, Shelter from the Ash (Drag City) The Redwood Curtain’s guitar-wielding heir to John Fahey breaks out a new LP, said to be smokin’.<\!s>*

 

Visual raids

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Kimberly Chun


1. Billy Childish Who can fathom the mind of a Childish? The insanely productive garage rock legend carves out a space in yet another medium, exhibiting the woodcuts and paintings that inspired him to cofound the stuckism art movement, a figurative response to the Charles Saatchi–championed so-called Young British Artists.

Sept. 5–30. Reception Sept. 5. Needles and Pens, 3253 16th St., SF. (415) 255-1534, www.needles-pens.com

2. "American Cuisine" To serve man? Ramekon O’Arwisters riffs on the notion that people of color will be dished at America’s last supper, cooking up sculpture and other pieces that examine the cultural codes crammed into Oreos, watermelons, bananas, and other loaded comestibles.

Sept. 14–Oct. 14. Luggage Store Annex, 509 Ellis, SF. (415) 255-5971, www.luggagestoregallery.org

3. "Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker: S.A.N.E." The acronym may stand for the head-scratching "something, anything, nothing, everything," but we can all relate to the bad trips, group gropes, and ritualized get-downs of psychedelic flip-outs both yesterday and today. Those are the focus, filtered through ’60s exploitation flicks, of Hewicker’s paintings and videos, while Hengst relies on handmade signs and wall drawings to explore other unhinged hues. In conjunction with the exhibit, the duo have also put together Good Times: Bad Trips (Gallery 16 Editions), a volume of ill-fated acid-gobbling accounts.

Sept. 14–Nov. 3. Reception Sept. 14. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., SF. (415) 626-7495, urbandigitalcolor.com/gallery16/galleryframe.html

4. "John Slepian: Caged" Is it an alien hedgehog or some hairy displaced and dismembered body part? The onetime San Francisco Art Institute instructor’s interactive sculpture delves into what makes us feel human and how we identify with the, ugh, other.

Nov. 29, 2007–Jan. 5, 2008. Catharine Clark, 150 Minna, SF. (415) 399-1439, www.cclarkgallery.com

5. Maria Forde Keep your peepers peeled for this follow-up to the San Francisco artist’s 2006 solo show, "A Strange 31 Years," which comprised 32 oils based on each pop culture–dappled year of her life.

Dec. 1–22. Little Tree Gallery, 3412 22nd St., SF. (415) 643-4929, www.littletreegallery.com

ALEXIS GEORGOPOULOS


1. "Bruce Conner and James Rosen" Multimedia artist and filmmaker Conner will show a number of highly detailed drawings, contrasting with Rosen’s take on the often-religious paintings of old masters.

Oct. 31–Nov. 24. Gallery Paule Anglim, 14 Geary, SF. (415) 433-1501, www.gallerypauleanglim.com

2. "Something Was There: Early Work by Diane Arbus" An exhibition of more than 60 prints highlights the otherworldly, haunting world of Diane Arbus, capturing her early years, from 1956 to 1962.

Sept. 6–Oct. 27. Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary, SF. (415) 981-2661, www.fraenkelgallery.com

3. "Will Rogan" The artist’s photographs work an uncanny magic as deceptively everyday subjects are choreographed in a poignant, poetic way.

Oct. 4–Nov. 3. Jack Hanley Gallery, 395 Valencia, SF. (415) 522-1623, www.jackhanley.com

GLEN HELFAND


The contemporary art world tends to get all academic and serious on us, so it’s interesting to note that a good number of fall gallery and museum offerings mine colorful, dreamy realms of spectacle, luxury, and humor — a welcome respite from all the truly problematic shit going on out there.

1. "Libby Black: The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It" This Goldie winner may have left San Francisco for her home state of Texas, but the move has served to sharpen her handmade take on the LVMH luxury empire. Black’s new work includes a Louis Vuitton disaster-center cot, complete with deluxe valise and accessories that stow perfectly underneath, and a series of paintings that exude the pansexual myths of the West — as found in high-fashion adverts. It’s the perfect prelude to the Union Square opening of the retail dream house, Barneys New York, this fall.

Sept. 6–Oct. 27. Reception Sept. 6. Heather Marx Gallery, 77 Geary, SF. (415) 627-9111, www.heathermarxgallery.com

2. "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" and "Jeff Wall" Fitting factoid: Danish artist Eliasson, the subject of a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art–organized survey, was actually commissioned by Louis Vuitton to create its 2006 Christmas windows. The works that constitute this much-anticipated show are large scale and immersive and use water, light, and scent to generate natural phenomena and delightful shifts in perception. We’re looking forward to the tunnel that will wrap around the fifth-floor catwalk. A related exhibition is a showcase for Eliasson’s BMW-sponsored hydrogen-fueled race car enmeshed in a skin of stainless steel and ice. If you need something with a different kind of theory, check out SFMOMA’s other big fall exhibit, a major survey of Wall’s glamorously, cinematically politicized light box–mounted photographs, co-organized by SFMOMA director Neil Benezra.

"Take Your Time" runs Sept. 8, 2007–Feb. 24, 2008; "Jeff Wall" runs Oct. 27, 2007–<\d>Jan. 27, 2008. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

3. "Michael Arcega: Homing Pidgin" Bay Area artist Arcega’s stock in trade is a smooth fusion of easily accessible materials (his infamous manila folder galleon) and politically barbed pun (it was called Conquistadork). As part of the de Young’s Connections Gallery program, Arcega has been rooting around in the museum’s extensive Oceanic collections, creating new display contexts that highlight colonialization and the ensuing cross-cultural visual influences. Serious stuff, but Arcega’s sure to imbue it with incisive wit.

Oct. 6, 2007–Jan. 20, 2008. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. (415) 750-3614, www.thinker.org/deyoung

4. "© MURAKAMI" Los Angeles is not such a long haul to stop you from getting a look at this humongous homage to the Japanese artist, who arguably comes closest to carrying Andy Warhol’s torch. Takeshi Murakami’s got his own factory and corporate ID, KaiKai Kiki, and with it he’s produced a sprawling range of licensed characters, sexualized manga heroes, art business strategies, and a brand-new giant self-portrait as Buddha, all of which will be included in this show, organized by Paul Schimmel, the curating impresario who brought us the notorious art spectacles "Helter Skelter" and "Ecstasy."

Oct. 29, 2007–Feb. 11, 2008. Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, 152 N. Central, LA. (213) 621-1741, www.moca-la.org/museum/moca_geffen.php?

JOHNNY RAY HUSTON


1. Open Studios Yes, the museums and even some smaller spaces have epic shows planned this fall. But are any of these blockbusters as truly expansive as Open Studios, an event that’s also closer to the everyday creation of art in the city than any other? Look for an interview in our Pixel Vision blog with ArtSpan executive director Therese Martin, whose vision includes activist elements and who is bringing new facets to Open Studios.

Oct. 6–Nov. 4. Throughout San Francisco. (415) 861-9838, www.artspan.org

2. "Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination" and "Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from About 1992 until Now" These neighboring shows should illustrate waves in the flux between film and video and spark discord and discourse about their connections to museum space. Obviously, Cornell’s legacy is broader and richer than such concerns — as the rather opaque name of his exhibition hints, maybe? As for Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho is here.

"Joseph Cornell" runs Oct. 6, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008; "Douglas Gordon" runs Oct. 27, 2007–<\d>Feb. 24, 2008. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

3. "Capp Street Project: Mario Ybarra Jr." SoCal contemporary artist Ybarra has made a metamural for our city, the result of intensive research into the history of murals and the history of the Bay Area. I can’t wait to see it.

Sept. 6, 2007–Sept. 6, 2008. CCA Wattis Institute, Logan Galleries staircase, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.cca.edu, www.wattis.org

4. "The Fox Sisters Crack Their Toes" Paintings that use glitter and beauty products as main ingredients are a special San Francisco treat, thanks to the polish — nail polish, that is — flair, and talent of Rodney O’Neal Austin and the late Jerome Caja. Now Jamie Vasta adds ambiguity to the practice; you’d have to be looking beneath the sparkle to figure out she’s butch and, in some cases, to realize that she’s even using something other than traditional ingredients.

Nov. 1–Dec. 15. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

5. "James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography" This year’s winners include Walt Odets. As a teen, Odets had the guts to photograph family friend Jean Renoir and the observant instinct required to do an excellent job of it. Today he discovers surprising planes of vision, details, and passages within everyday settings.

Oct. 23–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

STEVEN JENKINS


1. "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" Love your laptop more than your boyfriend? Logging on more than getting off? Salvage your relationship and sharpen your carpal-tunnel vision at this exhibition of interactive works inspired by and sourced from the Internet, where Chechen secessionists, mail-order brides, hand lickers, and Morrissey-mad conspiracy theorists meet the ghosts of David Wojnarowicz and Princess Di.

Sept. 6–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

2. "Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson" From some freezing fjord located in the dreamland between Vespertine and Volta comes Icelandic multimedia artist Eliasson, whose immersive installations play with temperature, moisture, and light to icy-hot effect. This ambitious retrospective — the artist’s first major US show — promises to transform SFMOMA’s pristine galleries into hallucinatory zones of global warming and feverish desire.

Sept. 8, 2007–Feb. 24, 2008. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

3. "Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History" A welcome follow-up to this summer’s spectacular Sugimoto retrospective at the de Young, this savvy exhibition juxtaposes the Japanese artist’s deceptively minimalist photographs with prehistoric fossils and 15th-century religious artifacts from his personal collection. Will this be a history of progress, faith, or violence?

Oct. 12, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008. Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin, SF. (415) 581-3500, www.asianart.org

4. "Biotechnique" Featuring a hothouse of hydroponic organisms, semiliving objects, mad-professor lab equipment, bacteria paintings, easy-being-green gizmos, and Silicon Valley inventions, the creepy-crawly conceptual "Biotechnique" digs beneath the topsoil of technology to unearth decidedly unnatural growths and cultures. Or, in the words of tennis racket–<\d>wielding arachnophobe Alvy Singer, "We’re talking major spider."

Oct. 26, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2700, ybca.org

5. "Marie-Antoinette and the Petit Trianon at Versailles" Froufrou flourishes pile up like buttery petits fours in this frilly, silly, splendid re-creation of Kirsten Dunst’s shopaholic alter ego’s Versailles getaway. Queeny interior decorators, slip on your pretty pink pumps, eat cake, and prepare to swoon.

Nov. 17, 2007–Feb. 17, 2008. California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park (near 34th Ave. and Clement), SF. (415) 750-3600, www.thinker.org/legion

Green City: The last hour

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY For sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, the last possible moment to lessen humanity’s impact on the environment — the 11th hour, from which the new documentary they cowrote and codirected aptly takes its name — has come upon us. But unlike other doom-and-gloom envirodocs that engulf viewers with guilt about how we are tearing apart our only planet, this movie is supposed to demonstrate that it’s not too late to shift old habits.

The 11th Hour "really helps you understand what’s happening," Conners Petersen told the Guardian about the Warner Brothers Independent release, which opens in theaters Aug. 17. The movie places the often oxymoronic combination of pragmatism and idealism hand in hand: "You feel a better sense of control in that way," she says.

Conners Petersen and Conners spent three years conducting lengthy interviews with 71 top thinkers and activists, ranging from physicist Stephen Hawking to Paul Hawken, the Marin author of The Ecology of Commerce (Collins, 1994). In their film, they juxtapose 91 minutes of the ecoexperts’ wisest words with quick-paced, music video–<\d>style montages of both environmental destruction and at least partially counteracting ideas and innovations like biomimicry.

And unlike 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, this film — narrated and produced by seasoned ecoactivist Leonardo DiCaprio — spends only about seven minutes covering global warming. "Our film contextualizes global warming as being part of a larger problem," Conners says.

The codirectors emphasize this holistic, all-part-of-a-larger-puzzle approach, which they say the mass media seldom takes when examining any environmental problem.

The environment "isn’t a single-article issue," Conners says. "When Leo’s on camera, he says it’s a convergence of crises. It’s all of it together that’s making it a tipping point. And all of it includes our behavior."

It’s our habits of "disconnect, denial, and laziness," she adds, that keep people from bothering to examine — or change — their impact on the Earth. "It’s like you’re sick with a disease with a known cure, and the medicine’s right there, and you look at it and say, ‘I’m not taking that.’<\!s>"

Environmental action, they say, does not necessarily have to extend to planting trees in Kenya, as Nobel Peace Prize winner and 11th Hour interview subject Wangari Maathai did through the Green Belt movement, or running a scientific radio series, as did interviewee David Suzuki. It’s about being aware of organic peaches that are shipped to the supermarket from Chile and drinking water that may not be from the finest geyser.

"Once you start connecting the detergent under your sink to a dead zone, you start seeing the world as a whole, and your relationship with this planet and life on it will deepen," Conners Petersen says.

The sisters created the Web site 11thhouraction.com to allow individuals and communities to discuss ways to bring the film’s broad-scale ideas and innovations to the local level, whether those efforts involve sharing the most energy-efficient household appliances (compact fluorescent light bulbs, anyone?) or putting solar panels on a high school.

Conners Petersen stresses her "Why wait for the federal government to take action?" mentality by pointing out that nearly 600 mayors in the United States have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol without permission from President George W. Bush.

"If you fight against these things that are so big and immovable, you’ll give up," Conners says. "So if you start locally, [ask] what’s the position of your city council person and the mayor?"

The sisters are no amateurs on the environmental-media scene. Conners Petersen is the founder and codirector of the Tree Media Group and executive editor of Global Viewpoint. They’ve produced two documentaries — Global Warming (2001) and Water Planet (2004) — for DiCaprio’s Web site, and Conners will soon be directing her first narrative feature, Earthquake Weather.

The 11th Hour used 150 hours of stock footage, more than any other documentary in history. The lofty quotes that didn’t make it into the film have found a home on YouTube and the movie’s official Web site, wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour.

"Even though there’s a lot of information, it’s an emotional film," Conners says. "Rather than just telling you information that you intellectually take into the world, I feel like the film is done in such a way that you feel the world in a different way."<\!s>*

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

Their neighborhood

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› amanda@sfbg.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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