Green

Vizzy with the possibilities

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KATIE KURTZ PICKS


•"The Wizard of Oz" Not much has changed since L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz debuted over a century ago and gave Americans something we still crave: escape to a fantastical land free of wicked witches. These days it’s not the Emerald City that Dorothys everywhere are tripping toward but a place called "hope." The works in this group show curated by Jens Hoffmann, including more than 20 artists (Clare Rojas, Raymond Pettibon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, et al.), were made either in response to the classic tale or relate to the story’s many layered meanings.

Sept. 2–Dec. 13. Reception Sept. 2. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, 1111 Eighth St., SF. (415) 551-9210, www.wattis.org

•"Vocabularies of Metaphor: More Stories" In this group show of works on paper highlighting deconstructed narratives, all but two of the 16 artists included are women — one of Henry Darger’s Vivian Girls drawings makes an appearance. "Vocabularies" is a chance to see how women are considering the figure — female, male, and animal — in a postnatural world, though this idea is not the exhibit’s emphasis. Of note are Rachelle Sumpter’s gauzy gouaches, Canadian Yuka Yamaguchi’s dismembered turtles, and Pakistani Shahzia Sikander’s nature-inspired pattern-making.

Sept. 6–Oct. 18. Reception Sept. 6. Hosfelt Gallery, 430 Clementina, SF. (415) 495-5454, www.hosfeltgallery.com

•California Academy of Sciences The mothership of scientific and sustainable nerdiness finally opens! This Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified facility includes a planetarium, swamp, rainforest, and a living roof. If you prefer your nature virtual, you can always hang out with the PenguinCam.

Big Bang opening gala Sept. 25; free to the public all day Sept. 27. 55 Music Concourse, Golden Gate Park, SF. (415) 379-8000, www.calacademy.org

•"Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900" Scientific photography of yesteryear is a healthy reminder of just how long we’ve been trying to discover everything that can possibly be discovered and recording it for posterity. More than 200 photographs, American and European, scientific and pseudoscientific.

Oct. 11–Jan. 4, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

•"The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres" Co-curated by Berin Golonu and independent curator Veronica Wiman of Sweden, this activist exhibition is intended to further the green dialogue through collaborations between artists and organizations, conversations with the public, and urban interventions.

Oct. 31–Jan. 11, 2009. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

KIMBERLY CHUN PICKS


•"Barbara Holmes and Casey Logan" What a dump! The two artists’ four-month residency climaxes with 3-D work inspired by and composed of salvaged material. Sculptor Holmes worked with wooden lattice to create a series of kaleidoscopic forms in assorted states of weatheredness, while Logan morphed musical gear and other detritus into pieces that meld with his fascination with science and fiction.

Sept. 26–27. SF Recycling Art Studio, 503 Tunnel, SF. www.sfrecycling.com/AIR

•"Nikki McClure" The graphic rep of Olympia, Wash.’s riot grrrl scene is undoubtedly best known for her bold, iconic paper cuts revolving around nature, motherhood, activism, and community. Music cover-art, illustrations, and books have all found a place in a vision grounded in simple gestures, uncontrived pleasures, and everyday labors.

October–November. Needles and Pens, 3253 16th St. SF. (415) 255-1534, www.needles-pens.com

•"Outpost" Exploding the imaginary and futuristic dimensions of architecture, "Outpost" collects the apocalyptic planes and jagged rubble of Bay Area sculptor David Hamill and the dazzling grids and Spirograph-esque constructs of New York City artist Jeff Konigsberg.

Sept. 5–Oct. 18. Reception Sept. 5. Johansson Projects 2300 Telegraph, Oakl. (510) 999-9140, johanssonprojects.net

•"Hilary Pecis" Folktronica, meet your maker: the SF artist creates her downright psychedelic panoramas by layering drawings with fragments sliced from glossy magazines. Pecis was also recently named as a recipient of the 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts and will be showcased at SF Arts Commission Gallery.

Sept. 6-26. Reception Sept. 6. Receiver Gallery, 1415 Valencia, SF. (415) 550-RCVR, receivergallery.com. Also "Immediate Future: the 2008 Murphy and Cadogan Fellowships in the Fine Arts," Sept. 6-Oct. 18. SFAC Gallery, 401 Van Ness, SF. (415) 554-6080, www.sfacgallery.org

•"Yves Saint Laurent" Viva le smoking! The beloved groundbreaker may be dead, but Yves Saint Laurent has never been hotter, judging from this autumn’s many attempts at rich-hippie/gypsy folklorico, highly sexed men’s wear for women, and silky Parisian-lady drag. This major retrospective’s single US turn showcases more than 120 accessorized ensembles in addition to drawings, photos, and videos.

Nov. 1–March 1, 2009. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF. (415) 750-3600, www.famsf.org/deyoung

JOHNNY RAY HUSTON PICKS


• "I Feel I Am Free But I Know I Am Not" See “Connect four,” this issue

Sept. 4–Nov. 1. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, 2nd floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

• "Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas" Olivo Barbieri looks at Vegas as toy town.

Sept. 18–Jan. 4, 2009. SFMOMA, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

•"Bayete Ross-Smith: Pomp & Circumstance" and "Jonathan Burstein: Visage" Ross-Smith’s prom portraits are fresh, and Burstein’s paintings of museum guards trampoline off the humor present in his handsome past portraits of himself.

Sept. 4–Oct.11. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetwogallery.com

• "Lutz Bacher: ODO"

Oct. 31–Dec.31. Ratio 3, 1447 Stevenson, SF. (415) 821-3371, www.ratio3.org

• Open Studios A step outside the galleries, museums, and art fairs — for better, for worse, and for real.

Oct. 11–Nov. 2. Various locations, SF. (415) 861-9838, www.artpsan.org

• "Dustin Fosnot: Simmons Beautyrest" Fosnot’s comic inventiveness should be a relief.

Oct. 14–Nov. 15. Steven Wolf Fine Arts, 49 Geary, suite 411, SF. (415) 263-3677. www.stevenwolffinearts.com

• "LA Paint" A survey of 11 painters, sure to fan a variety of Bay-and-LA flames.

Oct. 4–March 8, 2009. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak, Oakl. (510) 238-2200, www.museumca.org

• "These are the People in Your Neighborhood" Mr. Rogers is quoted for this 15th birthday celebration including work by Libby Black and Xylor Jane, among others.

Sept. 12–Oct. 17. Gallery 16, 501 Third, SF, www.gallery16.com

•"Artists Ball Seven: The New Party" Stanlee Gatti and Mos Def, together at last.

Oct. 3. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2700, www.ybca.org

•"Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered" A prelude to "Warhol Live," which hits the de Young next year.

Oct. 12–Jan. 25, 2009. Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission, SF. (415) 655-7800, www.thecjm.org

>>More Fall Arts Preview

Reclaiming San Francisco — from cars

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY On Sunday, Aug. 31, the Mayor’s Office and several community groups join forces to bring San Francisco into an international movement to increase physical activity, break down invisible borders, and make scenic space available to all during the city’s first ciclovia.

More than 4.5 miles of streets will be closed to cars that day from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. for Sunday Streets, the first of two ciclovias scheduled this summer. The idea of the ciclovia — which is Spanish for "cycle way" or "bike path" — was conceived in Bogotá, Colombia, during the mid-1990s and has since spread throughout the world.

The concept is to take existing roads — the province of cars — and turn them into temporary paths for walking, jogging, cycling, and other physical activity.

"I think it really helps us re-imagine our city streets as places of safe, non-auto physical activity," said Wade Crowfoot, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s director of global climate change. "From an environmental perspective, it’s time we re-imagine our space and our streets, and to make streets accessible to everyone."

The route extends from Bayview Opera House, up Illinois Street to the Embarcadero, along the waterfront, and across Washington Street into Chinatown. Five activity pods will feature dance classes, yoga, hopscotch, jump rope, and more, and participants are encouraged to explore as much of the route as they can. The Giants’ stadium will be open to pedestrians and bikers who want to run the bases, and event facilitators say they hope this 4.5-mile stretch will grow into something bigger.

"We hope this is just the beginning, and that it succeeds all over the city," said Andy Thornley, program director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

The man largely credited with starting the ciclovia is Gil Penalosa, who implemented the idea as Bogotá’s commissioner of parks and recreation in 1995. Penalosa now runs a nonprofit called Walk and Bike for Life that promotes the ciclovia and other forms of active living.

San Francisco’s event is modest: Bogotá closes off more than 80 miles of looping streets every Sunday and on holidays. More than 1.5 million people turn out each week, according to the Walk and Bike for Life Web site. Ottawa closes more than 30 miles of space on Sundays from May to September, and events have taken place all over Europe in addition to the American continents.

The ciclovia is also part of the car-free movement, an international effort to promote alternatives to car dependence and automobile-based planning.

Besides saving energy and promoting fitness, event planners at ciclovias in Bogotá noticed the events were causing a cultural shift. The Christian Science Monitor reported in an Aug. 18 article that residents from different neighborhoods began interacting as never before. Indian residents of poorer neighborhoods used to halt at the imaginary dividing lines of the more affluent European neighborhoods, and vice versa, but now people mingle freely.

San Francisco organizers hope to use Sunday Streets to create a similar effect here.

"We deliberately chose the route that connects the Bayview to Chinatown, two communities that are historically disconnected," said Susan King, the event’s organizer. "We want people to go to Hunters Point and Chinatown and see what’s out there, with the hope that people will see things they want to come back to."

King also noted that these two neighborhoods lack adequate open space. "We want people in those communities to experience what people who live adjacent to Golden Gate Park and the Presidio get to experience on a regular basis — an opportunity to exercise and not worry about getting hit by cars," King said.

Another international trend that Sunday Streets continues is the reclaiming of waterfront space. Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, said he recently visited Vancouver and experienced its 28 miles of bicycle and pedestrian paths along the water. Paris also has a ciclovia every summer that closes a major expressway and creates a beachfront and promenade along the Seine.

"[The Embarcadero] — that big, dangerous roadway — cuts the city off from the waterfront," Radulovich said. "We want to think about the possibility of reclaiming the water space more successfully for San Franciscans."

One of the few voices of opposition to Sunday Streets came from a group of Pier 39 merchants who worried about the economic impact.

The Board of Supervisors voted Aug. 5 not to delay the event until an economic impact report had been released, but Crowfoot said traffic impact analyses will be done this weekend so that there will be better understanding of the impact of any future events. But many ciclovias have actually increased business because people are more prone to stop and look in stores when they walk by instead of just driving past them.

PG&E’s blank check

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› amanda@sfbg.com

For a complete list (2.35 MB) of everyone who signed on to a PG&E-paid ballot argument and a full list of all of the individuals, companies, and nonprofits that get PG&E money every year, click here (Excel).


It’s Saturday morning, Aug. 23, and at the plumber’s union hall on Market Street, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. employees are leading a rally in opposition to San Francisco’s Clean Energy Act. A table at the back of the room sags with urns of coffee and uneaten pastries. To the side are towers of glossy black "Stop the Blank Check" window signs. E-mails sent by event organizers said Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Mayor Gavin Newsom were expected to attend, but so far, there’s no sign of either.

"On behalf of the men and women at PG&E, thanks for giving up your Saturday," PG&E vice president John Simon tells participants, who will be spending the afternoon walking San Francisco’s streets passing out No on Proposition H propaganda.

But the audience isn’t listening.

Most of the people packed into the room are Asian kids, giggling and chatting and ignoring the English-only presentation. One group of boys playfully pushes each other, accidentally bumping into some stage lighting and earning a reprimand from a rally organizer. The kids ignore him. I ask some of the young people if they’re with a school or club, or if they’re part of JROTC, which has an informational booth in the vestibule. They look at me blankly and turn away, muttering in Cantonese. I question a few others and get similar responses.

Outside, I find a young man who speaks English. He tells me the kids aren’t really here for the rally. "It’s just a job," he says. They’re getting $15 an hour to hang flyers on doorknobs — flyers that read "hand-delivered by a Stop the Blank Check Supporter."

The Committee to Stop the Blank Check is the official campaign committee fighting the Clean Energy Act, which will appear as Prop. H on the November ballot. The group, however, is funded by a blank check from PG&E.

"They’ve pledged enough to educate every voter in San Francisco," the committee’s campaign manager, Eric Jaye, told the Guardian at the Saturday rally.

It’s no surprise that the campaign workers are paid for by PG&E — in fact, just about everyone who has come out against Prop. H seems to be getting money from the utility.

The Clean Energy Act sets ambitious goals for moving the city into renewable energy — goals that go far beyond current state mandates. It also calls for a study into San Francisco’s energy options and authorizes the city to issue revenue bonds to buy or build energy facilities.

An investigation into the elected officials, committees, and groups that oppose Prop. H shows cash from PG&E in nearly every coffer.

The official ballot argument against the Clean Energy Act is signed by Feinstein, Newsom, and three supervisors initially appointed to the board by the mayor: Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Sean Elsbernd.

Feinstein’s loaded with PG&E money. Since 2004, Feinstein has received $15,000 in direct contributions from PG&E, according to OpenSecrets.org. More significant, perhaps, is that Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, serves as chairman of the board of CBRE, a real estate firm that did $4.8 million in business with PG&E in 2007, according to an annual report the utility files with the state of California.

Campaign finance disclosure statements from Feinstein state that her husband receives fees and income from CBRE, and has $250,000 and $500,000 in investment holdings.

Feinstein’s spokesperson, Scott Gerber, said there was no conflict of interest. But Citizens for Responsibility in Ethics spokesperson Naomi Seligman added, "The ethics rules are so incredibly narrow that unless Senator Feinstein was pushing or voting for something that would impact only Mr. Blum, it doesn’t count as a conflict."

Still: Feinstein’s getting cash directly from PG&E, and then doing the company’s political bidding.

NEWSOM’S PG&E PARTY


Newsom, who has won campaigns with PG&E’s financial support in the past, is hosting a party called "Unconventional ’08" in Denver this week. Guess who’s one of the three listed sponsors? PG&E. (The other two are AT&T and the carpenter’s union.) And, of course, the person running Newsom’s campaign for governor is PG&E’s main man, Eric Jaye.

Sups. Alioto-Pier and Elsbernd? Both had PG&E money shunted through independent expenditure committees. Sup. Chu is currently running to keep her seat in District 4.

Former Mayor Willie Brown tops the list of endorsers on Committee to Stop the Blank Check’s Web site. PG&E paid Brown $200,000 in consulting fees during 2007.

Neither Brown nor PG&E returned calls for comment and clarification on what exactly Brown’s consulting involves, or how much he’s getting this year.

Of the 30 paid ballot arguments that will be listed in November’s Voter Information Pamphlet, PG&E bought 22 of them — many for well-funded organizations like the Bay Area Council, Golden Gate Restaurant Association, and the Republican Party that could presumably pay for their own $2-per-word screeds against the measure.

The arguments all make the same points and parrot the same PG&E lines.

Jaye said that ballot arguments were routinely paid for by other entities, and of the groups that have healthy bank accounts, he said, "We’d rather those groups invest their money in capacity building for November."

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, the Building Owners and Managers Association, and Plan C all paid for their own ballot arguments. In 2007 the Chamber received more than $350,000 from PG&E in the form of dues and grants. BOMA got a $26,500 grant from the utility company, which also hired the outfit for almost $100,000 worth of consulting work. Plan C’s Political Action Committee regularly receives deposits from PG&E during election season.

Other entities that signed arguments paid for by PG&E include: the San Francisco police and firefighter unions, which are constantly asking the city for more money (and now oppose a potential revenue source); the Asian Pacific Democratic Club; the Small Business Network; the Rev. Amos Brown, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Paying for their own No on H arguments: former San Francisco Public Defender and California Public Utilities Commission member Jeff Brown, the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods, BART board member James Fang, and prominent small businessowner Harold Hoogasian.

PG&E spends millions each year on consultants — and at campaign time, that money turns into political support.

"PG&E’s philanthropy has been paying off into manipuutf8g a network of supporters who believe [Prop. H] is going to do something adverse to their interest when in reality it’s not," said Sup. Ross Mirkarimi.

Money isn’t everything for some organizations. Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights received a $10,000 grant from PG&E in 2007. Cofounder Van Jones has endorsed the Clean Energy Act.

There’s no paper trail for how much PG&E has spent to date on this campaign and the utility will be free to spend money without scrutiny until Oct. 6, when the first financial statements related to the November election are due at the Ethics Commission.

THE OTHER SIDE


But PG&E can’t buy everyone — and the coalition supporting the Clean Energy Act is large, broad, and growing.

Prop. H has been endorsed by eight of the city’s 11 supervisors, Assemblymembers Fiona Ma and Mark Leno, and environmentalist and author Bill McKibben. Groups with a variety of different interests, like the League of Conservation Voters, the SF Democratic Party, SEIU 1021, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and the Senior Action Network also have given it a green light.

"I think the coalition for it is a much broader coalition than has been for it in the past," said Susan Leal, former head of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, who supports Prop. H. "Because of that, PG&E has ramped up the campaign and put a lot more money into it than in the past."

Mirkarimi, who authored the measure, called the early phone banking, mailers, and door knocking a "signature blitzkrieg campaign," similar to what he witnessed as the manager of the 2001 public power measure that also raised PG&E’s ire — and which lost by about 500 votes. "That’s why PG&E is working so hard now. We were so close in 2001."

John Rizzo of the Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club said his group has already committed money and people to walk districts. But he noted that he has already seen Committee to Stop the Blank Check signs posted in windows on the west side of the city. "We expected it," he said of the resources PG&E has spent to date. "The only thing they have is money."

Rizzo said the Sierra Club has endorsed past public power measures and considers this an environmental issue. "We are finding it’s a pretty broad coalition of folks who might not be together on an environmental issue. The San Francisco Women’s Political Committee PAC just recommended endorsing it to their membership, and that’s not normally an environmental group — though they are a good group."

Leal says the Clean Energy Act really transcends arguments against public power. "I’m mystified why people would not be on board for something that’s cleaner and cheaper," said Leal. "I think I know why a number of others have gotten on board. They recognize that this is the path to clean energy for power."

Jaye wouldn’t assign a specific dollar amount to how much the company is willing to spend to defeat the measure — but he made it clear that there are no limits: "It could take $1 million, it could take $5 million." In 2006, when public power was on the ballot in Yolo County, PG&E spent almost $10 million keeping the 77,000 customers they would have lost to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. The measure lost by one percentage point.

Jaye, who also manages Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign, is quick to point out that the committee has already received 12,000 signed cards of support. Still, he said, they weren’t asking for money from these potential campaign donors "because we have significant and sufficient resources pledged from PG&E."

Gnarls Barkley

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PREVIEW Many a gnarly happening has occurred since I last spoke with Danger Mouse, né Brian Burton. If memory serves, at that time in 2004, around the time he remixed The Beatles ("The White Album") (EMI, 1968) and Jay-Z’s The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam, 2003) into The Grey Album, the grounded DM was easily forthcoming about his standard-setting, electronic civil disobedience–inspiring endeavor and waxed rhapsodic about art house cinema. The years — and, no doubt, experience as a prolific collaborator (Gorillaz, Van Dyke Parks, and rumored future projects with Sparklehorse and Black Thought) and producer (Beck, the Rapture) — have left Burton more reserved. Regarding Gnarls Barkley — DM’s project with Cee-Lo Green, which recently released the acclaimed The Odd Couple (Atlantic) — Burton chooses to simply rough out the partnership as that of hometown buds from the Atlanta area. "We knew a lot of the same places growing up," Burton says from Athens, Ga., where Gnarls Barkley concluded a recent tour. "I’d try to sneak in with people, and I’m sure he was already walking right in the front door."

But affection for late rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Ike Turner brings the Mouse out of his shell. Burton wanted to produce Turner and enlisted the Black Keys to serve as the backing band and songwriters. "We did some demos for some of the songs, but it didn’t quite go in the direction we wanted," Burton says. "Ike’s voice was so deep and so heavy — it didn’t really fit as much as Dan’s." So instead DM agreed to produce the Keys’ kudo-clad Attack & Release (Nonesuch). Turner even got to hear the finished product, and plans were in the works for the Keys to write fitting songs in varied styles for the musical elder before he died. Now Burton tells me he’ll try to work with some of the Turner-Keys tracks, and he’ll remember the man, who "randomly" stepped in to play on the last Gorillaz release, as a longtime friend who was "very honest. I don’t know what he was like when he was younger, even though he told me many stories. But he made you humble."

GNARLS BARKLEY with Ozomatli, the New Pornographers, Medeski Martin and Wood, and Lebo at Slow Food Rocks. Sat/30, 11 a.m.–7 p.m. (Festival continues Sun/31 with Phil Lesh and Friends, G Love and Special Sauce, John Butler Trio, and London Street.) $10–$160. Great Meadow, Fort Mason, SF. 1-877-655-4849, www.festivalnetwork.com/sfr

“Japanese Wolf”

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P>REVIEW When was the last time you chatted on your cell in a crowd of yaks? Or honored the dewy lavender morning with a steaming cup of green tea and a goat friend? Or crouched with a pack of sunset wolves howling on your back?

No offense, but I bet your social circle isn’t this diverse. For the girl-woman at the center of Yumiko Kayukawa’s paintings, though, communing with nonhuman creatures is typical. Born in the small town of Naie in Hokkaido, Japan, Kayukawa found her muses amid the land’s sweeping beauty and native fauna. Her connection with those elements runs throughout her body of work: the giant tiger perched atop the earth, enjoying the company of three lounging pop-tart girls in Sekai De Ichiban Neko (The World’s Biggest Cat); the wide-eyed tarsiers helping to hang wishes for stars on bamboo in Tanabata (Star Festival); and the contented whales cuddling a pink scuba-suited underwater heroine in Oshizukani (Quiet Please). Kayukawa makes such intimate relationships with the wild animal kingdom look effortless.

And seductive. Kayukawa’s humans are young and pouty-lipped, with bright eyes, suggestively bent backs, and painted nails that are never chipped — even when keeping a frothing bear at bay. Saturated hues and pastels — sea green, cantaloupe, camellia, pale yellow — heighten this playfulness, as do the requisite kanji, floating in space like manga dialogue and titling each curious scene. Kayukawa’s eroticized pop vision is imbued with a fearless openness, evident in her decisive lines but even more so in the intention embedded in these paintings. When was the last time you had a tiger by the tail, much like her protagonists, and got away with it?

JAPANESE WOLF Through Sept. 6. Tues.–Sat., noon–7 p.m. Shooting Gallery, 839 Larkin, SF. (415) 931-8035, www.shootinggallerysf.com

Hearst: Here come the ‘far left factions’

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Extra! Extra! Hearst suddenly finds “far left factions” at work all over town

And now Wyatt Buchanan in his otherwise fine story on supervisorial candidates and public financing (8/25/2008) came up with a new derogatory term for progressives: “far left political factions.”

Yup, first it was “ultra liberals” in the Heather Knight story of Aug. 15. That didn’t seem to fly after the Guardian and others raised the obvious questions about the definition of an “ultra liberal” and where the term came from and the fact that it tied in with the Mayor Newsom operatives who want the term “progressive” for Newsom and the PG&E/downtown operatives who want to bash progressives pushing clean energy and other progressive measures on the November ballot.

So now it’s “far left factions,” even according to Buchanan “far left factions” suddenly operating in, surprise, surprise, the Richmond, Mission, Bernal Heights, and Excelsior Districts. I sent an email to Buchanan and his metro editor, Ken Conner, and asked what they meant by “far left factions.” No answer.

Impertinent questions to the Chronicle’s political reporters and editors: Can you define “ultra liberals” and “far left factions?” If not, why not? Why not just cover this critical election honestly and professionally and tell us what PG&E is really doing to kill the Clean Energy Act? It’s quite a story. I know, I know, this is not the fault of the Chronicle’s reporters and editors. It’s Hearst DNA at work again.

B3, a Rock Rapids (Iowa) liberal who is tired of watching the fumes from my office window of the Potrero Hill power plant, courtesy of PG&E, Mayor Gavin “the Green” Newsom, and Hearst journalism.

Ethics? PG&E, Willie Brown, and Hearst

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What is there in the Hearst DNA that keeps it honoring the shameful deal that William Randolph Hearst made with PG&E in the late 1920s to reverse his long standing pro-public power and anti-PG&E position?

By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so when our Guardian reporter Amanda Witherell flashed the word that ex-mayor Willie Brown is still on the PG&E payroll, I sent the following note to Hearst corporate in New York City (which owns the San Francisco Chronicle):

“PG&E has disclosed a $200,000 payment to Willie Brown for ‘consulting services’ for 2007 in its annual report to the California Public Utilities Commission. Now that Willie is doing a featured top-of-the-page political column each Sunday in the Chronicle, I’m curious if he is doing a Chronicle column while still providing ‘consulting services’ for PG&E?

“If so, does Hearst have an ethics policy that covers this apparent conflict? Would it at minimum require disclosure of PG&E payments to Willie in this year and previous years and what was the nature of these ‘consulting services?’ I would appreciate a comment.”

Chronicle Editor Ward Bushee to his credit called me promptly to respond to my questions. (Let us just say his predecessors adopted a variety of stonewalling techniques to avoid answering such questions from the Guardian.)

As attentive Guardian readers know, there is a long history here between Hearst and PG&E and the Willie/PG&E incident is but the latest example of a geologic outcropping of some shameful Hearst history. Hearst was a powerful influence in pushing the original Hetch Hetchy public power project through Congress and beyond, then reversed his policy in the late 1920s as a condition to get a major loan from a PG&E-controlled bank. The pro-PG&E/anti-public power policy continues to this day and nobody I’ve talked to from Hearst through the years can explain why the policy is still in effect to this day.

There is also a juicy history with then Mayor Willie Brown and Hearst. Willie as mayor helped secretly orchestrate for Hearst the deal that allowed Hearst in 2000 to buy the Chronicle, give away the Examiner to the Fang family, and dissolve the Ex/Chron joint-operating agreement with the approval of the Justice Department. Remember all those horse-trading charges in which then Examiner publisher testified under oath that he had used the Examiner editorial pages as a bargaining chip with Willie. (“The Truth Hurts,” by Tali Woodward and Tim Redmond, Guardian 5/10/2000.)

Chronicle editor Ward Bushee to his credit promptly called me to respond. This was a refreshing change from his predecessors who went to creative lengths to stonewall on such questions. I asked Bushee if he knew about the PG&E payment to Willie and if Hearst considered this a conflict with its ethics policy for Willie to be on the PG&E payroll while, among other things, attacking the progressives who voted for the Clean Energy Act that PG&E is opposing with mighty muscle and many millions.

Bushee did not see a conflict nor think that disclosure of Willie’s clients was necessary. Bushee said that Willie is widely known, is “a man about town,” has a popular column, is subject to “strenuous editing,” but is “a freelance columnist who is free to pursue his business interests as any other person who is not a part of the staff.” He said that, if Willie were on staff, he would be subject to Hearst’s “ethical standards.”

Since this issue is of such journalistic importance, I summarized Bushee’s positions and sent him an email and asked if I had properly and fully reflected his and Hearst’s position. I also asked how he could reconcile his and Hearst’s position with the Ethics Code of the Society of Professional Journalists which states that “journalists should be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know…should avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived…disclose unavoidable conflicts. (The Guardian and many media use the SPJ code.)

Bushee responded by email by my deadline (missing it by two minutes). He wrote, and I quote in full,

“I’m not going to cover the same ground that we did this morning. However, I will say that since Willie Brown’s column was introduced into the Sunday Chronicle, it has been very well received by readers because it is amusing, topical, controversial and informed. Willie has special connections to the Bay Area. That Wiliie Brown has outside interests and income was well noted when he undertook the column and was no secret to anybody who has followed his career.

“A summary of his political career was published when the column was launched.

“You well know that Willie is one of the most quoted San Franciscans in the Chronicle and other media outlets around the Bay Area. He is a sought-after guest for local, regional, and national TV shows. I’m told that you have been a guest of his radio show with Will Durst. Willie is not a journalist or a member of the news staff of the Chronicle, but his column goes through extensive planning with one of our most experienced journalists and then then same rigorous editing processes as any staff produced article. Our freelance agreements give the newspaper complete control of the content we use including his column. So if you question is that Willie is somehow avoiding ethical scrutiny, that’s not correct.

“Look, Bruce. If we ever found that Willie had knowingly used his column to benefit his clients, we would end the relationship. As with any agreement, trust is implicit.

“The Chronicle news staff always has aggressively—and fairly—covered Willie Brown as a newsmaker. And I have told our editors that I expect nothing less when Willie Brown makes news in the future.

“Besides that, Willie writes a great column. I’m delighted he is in the Sunday Chronicle.”

Well, I am still unable to crack the Hearst corporate fortress that has protected and promoted PG&E all these years and is now protecting and promoting Willie Brown as PG&E’s Secret Agent Man in this critical Clean Energy election. PG&E is conducting the most massive and nasty campaign ever against clean energy and public power, with huge Lies, and Hearst is once again refusing to cover the story, correct the lies, or give any indication it is not going to once again back PG&E all the way. Why?

This enduring Hearst position of more than eight decades raises some of the most tantalizing questions in American journalism: What is there in the Hearst corporate DNA that forces its editors and reporters in San Francisco to keep in effect honoring, against early Hearst history, against all evidence, and against all ethical standards, the shameful deal that William Randolph Hearst made with a PG&E- controlled bank in the 1920s to reverse his pro-Hetch Hetchy/anti-PG&E stand and go forever after with PG&E and against public power? (For details, see previous Guardian articles, Bruce blogs, and the authoritative David Nasaw biography of Hearst called “The Chief.”) Repeating for emphasis:

Why does Hearst allow a key PG&E lobbyist to write a featured political column in its Sunday paper without proper disclosure by either Willie or Hearst? Will the Chronicle today, in August of 2008, with a non-Hearst publisher and non-Hearst editor (meaning Frank Vega and Ward Bushee, both experienced executives who came new to Hearst with solid Gannet credentials) be allowed to cast off this terrible yoke and start covering PG&E, clean energy, public power, and the Raker Act scandal in a professional manner? Will Hearst and the Chronicle cover this critical Obama/Clean Energy election honestly?

Meanwhile, I am waiting anxiously to see what Willie and Hearst will report on the big Newsom party that PG&E is helping pay for at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Newsom is gearing up to run as the “green progressive” candidate for governor, but there is no way in the world he can be Gavin the Green when he fronts for PG&E against the Clean Energy campaign in San Francisco and then lets PG&E stamp its logo on his forehead and derriere before a national political audience in Denver.

Newsom and Willie want to be known as real progressives but alas they are “PG&E progressives” and their opposition to the Clean Energy Act only illustrates the difference in 96 point Tempo
Bold between a real progressive with real green credentials and a PG&E progressive taking money to help with PG&E greenwashing and progressive bashing. Guardian City Editor Steve Jones will be at the Newsom event in Denver and will keep you posted. On guard, much more to come, B3

P.S. 1: The Hearst and Willie horse-trading story is my favorite example of Hearst ethics. (See our “The Truth Hurts” story.) Just a few hours into the Clint Reilly antitrust trial challenging the Hearst monopoly deal, Examiner publisher Tim White admitted, in no uncertain terms, that he had used the paper’s editorial pages as a bargaining chip with then Mayor Willie Brown shortly before Wille’s reelection bid in November of l999. White testified that at the Aug. 30, 1999 lunch with Willie, he suggested that the Examiner would give Willie more positive coverage if he’d get behind Hearst’s plan to take over the Chronicle and create a daily monopoly.

“You were doing a little horse trading of your own, weren’t you?” asked Reilly attorney Joseph M. Alioto.

“I was,” White said calmly.

The day after White’s testimony, Hearst issued a press release saying the company had “reaffirmed its policy that the content of news and editorial pages may not be negotiated or compromised in any way.”

And then came many pious denunciations from Hearst of White’s “horse-trading” with Willie and many solemn promises from Examiner and Chronicle editors that their news and editorial coverage wasn’t for sale. The ethics problem for Hearst was that, despite several news stories critical of Willie, the paper wound up two months after the lunch giving Willie a glowing endorsement for mayor with no reservations or discouraging words whatsoever. Willie had earned the endorsement by working with the ranking local and national Democrats to orchestrate the deal and knock out any official opposition. He even told Hearst that he had called then U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and gotten assurances that the U.S. Justice Department would not intervene to stop the deal.

As we put it at the time: “The bottom line: it appears, based on all available evidence, that White was doing exactly what he had been sent out here to do–buy the Chron, shut down the Ex, and create a monopoly–and if he offered to trade positive coverage in the pages of the paper for the political clout it took to make that deal, that was just fine with the people at Hearst headquarters back in New York.”

However, we put some questions to Hearst and found that if such an ethics policy really existed at Hearst, nobody from Hearst could produce it, then or later, either at corporate in New York or at the Examiner in San Francisco. The Hearst spokesperson in New York told us that each Hearst publication had independent editorial policies and that we should contact the Examiner.

We contacted then Editor Phil Bronstein who told us the Examiner had an ethics policy, but that it covered reporters and editors, not publishers. “It certainly doesn’t cover situations like this,” he told us. He promised to fax over a copy but it never arrived. Again: Why don’t Hearst ethics policies apply to Willie and PG&E?

MoveOn isn’t backing Newsom’s party

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Gavin Newsom’s coziness with PG&E and other big businesses is starting to come back to haunt him as he stumbles forward in his campaign for governor.

Newsom has this big party planned for the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and as Leftinsf blogger Sasha McGee reported, he had listed his sponsors as PG&E, AT&T and MoveOn.org. Getting MoveOn behind him would be a major coup and would create considerable liberal cred for a guy who can’t possibly win a Democratic primary without progressive support.

But the Newsom camp made a big mistake: MoveOn isn’t terribly fond of PG&E, but is really pissed at AT&T. The organization now says that it was all a miscommmunication, that MoveON was actually sponsoring another event at the same time. And for the record, MoveOn is NOT sponsoring the Newsom gig.

But the whole thing makes Team Newsom look foolish — and gives bloggers the chance to once again poijnt how that Newsom, the purported green mayor, is siding with PG&E and against the Clean Energy Act.

Kim Gordon gets down in Saratoga

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gordon_kim.jpg

“C’mon and turn it up,” for sure. I really dug Kim Gordon’s last project, Free Kitten’s Inherit (Ecstatic Peace) – the resurrected Gordon, Julie Cafritz (Pussy Galore), and Yoshimi (Boredoms) collabo came out earlier this year. But what sort of feline mischief has the Sonic Youth player been up to of late? Apparently the indie-underground icon has been toiling as an artist-in-residence at the garden-green Montalvo Arts Center in otherwise-burby Saratoga – so says the press release that came over the transom recently. Sounds like Montalvo is picking up where it left off with the 2006’s noise- and art-filled Bleeding Edge Festival, which brought together Matmos and Zeena Parkins (also working with Gordon this time around), Yo La Tengo, Sunroof!, and Tim Hecker:

“On Sept. 26, Montalvo Arts Center will present the world premiere of ‘Kim Gordon Meets Phantom Orchard,’ a musical collaboration featuring internationally renowned artists at the forefront of the alternative music scene. Kim Gordon, bassist, guitarist and founding member of Sonic Youth, joins the Phantom Orchard duo of laptop artist Ikue Mori and harp innovator Zeena Parkins, plus special guests Trevor Dunn on bass and drummer Yoshimi. The artists are in development with their new project, entitled ‘The Song Project,’ as part of their Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Programs residency.

“Kim Gordon has enjoyed a long and storied career as a musician and a visual artist. In 1981 Gordon, with future husband Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, helped found seminal alt-rock band Sonic Youth. Though they started out as a decidedly underground act, Sonic Youth emerged from the New York City music scene to become one of the most iconic and influential American rock bands, earning praise for their unique, unorthodox rock guitar style, strong studio albums (which have been included in Rolling Stone’s ‘Greatest Albums of All-Time’ list), and career stamina that has spanned over the course of nearly three decades. An established visual artist and curator, Gordon has exhibited her work across the U.S., Japan and Europe (sometimes incorporating live music in her exhibitions), written for respected art publications and has had several books published highlighting her original art.

ZeenaParkins_IkueMori310.jpg
Flower children: Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins.

The circle game

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Say "Kumbaya," somebody. Despite vast differences in sound, intent, and commercial appeal, a thin yet unseverable bloodline connects the big, bold, Brill Building, pop-factory-perfect songcraft of Carole King, last heard coursing off the AM radio, and the stripped-raw, close-to-bare-bones rasp and moan of Tiny Vipers’ Jesy Fortino, delivered to a small clutch of listeners at the Elbo Room last year. Eyes squeezed shut, plucking her acoustic guitar beside just one other guitarist, Ben Cissner, she was a small dark star, poured fully concentrated into the sparse minor key chords of "Swastika," and, as gutsy as the loudest reaches of the underground, she sang as if her life depended on it: "If I would let you into my heart / Would you thank the Lord / Would you tear it apart?"

Superficially, so far away — doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore? — from King’s monumental oeuvre, which seems almost incidental amid the gushy, gossipy tidbits propelling Sheila Weller’s bio, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation (Atria), concerning King’s beleaguered marriage to her first husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, with whom she wrote such songs as "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," among many other classic pop numbers, even after he fathered a child with one of the pair’s vocalists. Likewise Weller makes much of Mitchell’s out-of-wedlock daughter and penchant for using her songs to seduce paramours like Leonard Cohen, Graham Nash, and James Taylor — the last often credited with spurring the singer-songwriter movement and acting as a unifying thread between Mitchell, King, and Simon — and Simon’s uninhibited, proto-pro-sex feminist "eroticism"; read: sex in a cab was "no problem." Yet as remote as the early-’70s phenomenon of the singer-songwriter seems, the form appears to have returned: could this be the revival of core values of craft and voice, the intimacy and immediacy of a writer on a single instrument, during a tumultuous time for the music industry, post-Auto-Tuned disasters and Ashlee Simpson lip-synch blowouts — the adult flip-side to the bubblegum remnants of High School Musical, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers?

The initial energy of so many turn-of-the-millennium garage rock bands may have petered and innumerable hip-hop artists may have turned toward dully materialistic navel-gazing, so hail the return of the soft-spoken singer-songwriter who can break down a tunes to its bare, unadorned components. The stars are aligned; the signs, apparent: from Outside Lands headliner Jack Johnson landing at the top of the Billboard 200 chart with his latest album, Sleeping Through the Static (Brushfire/Universal), earlier this year, to ex–Castro Theatre ticket-taker, proudly folkie Devendra Banhart being adopted by Parisian couturiers and glitterati, from the MySpace-inspired success of Colbie Caillat and Kate Nash to the iTunes-buttressed popularity of Eureka native Sara Bareilles — hell, not to mention everyone and their dog documenting their solo acoustic version of "Bubbly" and posting the video on YouTube. This quiet flurry of activity undoubtedly whetted someone’s appetite for all things unplugged.

Those with eyes trained on pop cycles might point to the rise of antiwar sentiments throughout the country, coupling it with the renewed attention given to the softer, sincere sounds of singer-songwriters — a worthy theory, though apart from the many unfortunate CD-Rs of anti-Bush agit-pop that crossed my desk during the last two presidential elections, the generally apolitical vibe of the music from this crop of singer-songwriters seems to belie that notion: championing green issues are as didactic as these writers get. Instead this current wave of earnest songsmiths has more to do with both a reaction against the insincere, canned, possibly un-nutritious mainstream boy-band and Britney-centric breed of pop from the recent past — the likes of which could only be enjoyed with a semi-size dose of irony — and a response to an easy access of technology, which allows just about anyone and their mutt to make their own music at home, bypassing Brill Building–style hit-factories.

This time, the slew of sensitive men — solo fliers ranging from Iron and Wine, Conor Oberst, and Adam Green to Josh Ritter, Jonathan Rice, and Ray LaMontagne — sequestered behind acoustic guitars or pianos, working freak-folk, soft-rock, commercial pop, and Grey’s Anatomy–friendly veins, are being almost eclipsed by the multitude of womanly singer-songwriters. Natural women all, including Feist, Kimya Dawson, JayMay, Brandi Shearer, Yael Naim, and Ingrid Michaelson, among others. As much as King, Mitchell, and Simon are considered mothers of these singer-songwriters — along with predecessors like Woodside resident Joan Baez and ’60s folk hit mistress Judy Collins and successors like the many estrogen-laden ladies of the ’90s Lilith Fair outings — so too are indie sisters Liz Phair, Sarah Dougher, and Cat Power, a holy trinity to homemade, once-bedroom-bound DIY divas who make their own clothes, hope to carve out their own path, and find their own vox.

Of course, one can’t discount the release of resurrections and reissues of neglected and forgotten femme singer-songwriters such as Vashti Bunyan and Ruthann Friedmann and late greats Judee Sill and Karen Dalton, whose latest private recordings were unearthed via Green Rocky Road (Delmore) in June. And Mitchell’s unique guitar tunings, experimental mindset, and maidenlike purity of sound has made her one of the most oft-referenced artists of the last few years, thanks to such explicit shout-outs as Wayfaring Strangers’ Ladies from the Canyon (Numero, 2006). But no less influential is Phair, whose classic Exile in Guyville (Matador) got the royal reissue treatment this summer: her pro-sex, third-wave feminist, Midwestern rejoinder to riot grrrl writ large, with a gatefold sleeve and a slip of naughty nipple peeking through. At the same time, Dougher — cover girl in Johnny Ray Huston’s take on the last, more-riot grrrl-centered singer-songwriter movement in the Guardian about a decade ago — took a more polemical tack on the Northwest coast with her K Records releases, while working tangibly for greater female rock visibility by organizing the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls and teaching courses on the history of women in rock at Portland State University.

But Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, appears set to be the Joni Mitchell of this generation — even as Marshall has largely turned her back on originals with her latest Jukebox (Matador). The Seattle-based Fortino’s almost gothic melodrama seems to draw more than a little inspiration from Marshall’s What Would the Community Think (Matador, 1996), while San Francisco transplant Thao Nguyen of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down borrows Marshall’s clarion-call, half-sung, half-spoken phrasing for her far more fancy-free, loose-limbed, and shambling songs. Nguyen sounds positively, happily tipsy on the old-timey bounce, finger clicks, and sandpapery soft-shoe shuffle on We Brave Bee Stings and All (Kill Rock Stars).

Yet Marshall’s most indebted sib might be Emily Jane White, 27, whose Dark Undercoat (Double Negative) evokes the former’s haunted and haunting, hollowed-out sensuality as well as her songwriting savvy and way with a hook. "Everybody’s got a little hole in the middle / Everybody does a little dance with the devil," the Oakland singer-songwriter croons on her "Hole in the Middle," sliding around the curves of this verb or the other and letting her voice drift off into the meaningful silences between the words.

The surprise is that this intensely eerie, closely miked singer-songwriter also turns out to be one of the more deliberately political-minded. Of "Hole," she said recently while breaking from the recording her second album with Greg Ashley, "I originally wrote that in response to the war in Iraq when that first started. Yeah, it’s about American imperialism."

And perhaps that’s the key to why the music by this former member of an all-girl band, the Diamond Star Halos — much like those seemingly apolitical numbers by other singer-songwriters — has increasingly relevance today: White and other crooners are foregrounding the everyday loves as well as the overseas skirmishes in a way that transcends the desensitizing glut and so-called objectivity of news headlines, sound-bites, and bloggable blurbs — and acutely personalizes it all. Call it the resensitizing of pop.

"I’ve always believed that your personal experience is political," says White, echoing the first wave feminist tenets, "and everyone has a story to tell, about how they’ve lived their lives and what has happened to them, and the experiences they’ve gone through. Not that what I think I do is revolutionary or anything, but one positive thing about being a singer-songwriter is people have contacted me and said they’ve felt a strong sense of encouragement or inspiration, so I think putting myself out there says something."

Emily Jane White plays Aug. 22, 8 p.m., $8, at the Uptown, 1928 Telegraph, Oakl. www.uptownnightclub.com

Singing softly, carrying big ideas

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NICOLE ATKINS AND THE SEA


Atkins would probably do well on American Idol. Her big, bellowing voice sounds tailor-made for balladeering, and breathy, heartbroken pixie girls have edged talent like hers out of the indie market. But Atkins refuses to cover "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and has instead crafted a huge power-pop sound all on her own. (Laura Mojonnier)

1:40 p.m. Sun/24, Presidio stage, Lindley Meadow

DEVENDRA BANHART


Is the Venezuelan-bred naturalismo god a freak-gypsy poet-prophet, or just a rambling, acid-damaged ghost of San Francisco past? You decide, long-haired child. (Mojonnier)

2:15 p.m. Sat/23, Sutro stage, Lindley Meadow

BON IVER


Which one’s Bon? And is this really a … singer-songwriter? Regardless, Justin Vernon has made a gorg album — multitracked vocals and all — with For Emma, Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar). (Kimberly Chun)

3:10 p.m. Sun/24, Presidio stage, Lindley Meadow

BECK


Known as much for his musical range as his idiosyncratic artistic sense, Beck’s songs veer from dadaist dance tunes —à la Guero (Interscope, 2005) — to melancholy blues ballads like those on Sea Change (Geffen, 2002). He’s come a long way from 1994’s single "Loser" with his latest album, Modern Guilt (Interscope), a collaboration with coproducer Danger Mouse and guest Cat Power, proving that he’s no one-hit wonder, but rather a truly multidimensional songwriter. (Molly Freedenberg)

6:40 p.m. Fri/22, Sutro stage, Lindley Meadow

ANDREW BIRD


It isn’t easy to overshadow Ani DiFranco — especially in a concert hall filled with her fans. But that’s exactly what Bird did when he opened for the quintessential singer-songwriter on her 2005 tour. Bird’s spectacular vocal and musical abilities — particularly his trademark whistling and violin playing — are mesmerizing. But even more so is his ability to weave beautiful, emotionally honest songs from so many kinds of lyrical and musical threads. The combination has brought him not only acclaim, including a position blogging about his songwriting process for the New York Times, but status as an indie heartthrob. (Freedenberg)

3:35 p.m. Sun/24, Twin Peaks stage, Speedway Meadow

JACKIE GREEN


Polished Versatility is the SF singer-songwriter’s middle name, his first is Jackie, but fans call him their own personal Roots Savant. (Chun)

1 p.m. Sun/24, Lands End stage, Polo Fields

SEAN HAYES


Don’t you know you gotta water sunshine? The fiercely independent SF singer-songwriter has worked with all manner of great artists round town, including Ches Smith, Ara Anderson, Etienne de Rocher, and Jolie Holland. (Chun)

3 p.m. Sat/23, Presidio stage, Lindley Meadow

NELLIE MCKAY


So get off McKay’s back and take your ape-ish size 12 shoes off her madcap persona because, as the New York City singer-songwriter drawls on "Identity Theft," "I’m tired of maturity, airport and security, running from the thought police, fighting with the go-betweens." Yes, I hear Bob Dylan in those wildly loopy lines, but you gotta love the musical theater-inspired, wittily whittled wordsmith’s divine verbosity — via songs that leave ’em crying, with glee, at the disco. (Chun)

4:20 p.m. Sat/23, Panhandle stage, Speedway Meadow

REGINA SPEKTOR


Is it Spektor’s old world beauty or postmodern songwriting — both evident in her breakthrough video "Fidelity" — that charms audiences so much? We think it’s probably both, though her distinctive vocal style, songs that read more like short stories, creativity with instrumentation, and magnetism onstage are surely what have brought the Russian-born chanteuse so much success. (Freedenberg)

5:15 p.m. Sat/23, Sutro stage, Lindley Meadow

M. WARD


Sometimes Ward’s friends let him play on their records (Bright Eyes, Cat Power, Jenny Lewis). Sometimes Ward gets his friends to play on his records (My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Neko Case). Sometimes Ward’s gently rollicking guitar flirts with Zooey Deschanel’s sweet country honey (She and Him). And sometimes Ward plays a big outdoor festival all by himself. (Mojonnier)

3:40 p.m. Sat/23, Sutro stage, Lindley Meadow

Feed our elders well

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Conventional wisdom is that it costs more to eat well, but Alameda County Meals on Wheels has found real value in switching from processed foods to the kind of fresh, local, sustainable fare being touted at the upcoming Slow Food Nation conference, which begins Aug. 29 in San Francisco.

Bay Area Community Services (BACS), the nonprofit that manages Meals on Wheels, has been struggling with a perennial budget deficit, rising fuel and food costs, and a waiting list of 200 seniors eager to join the program.

Even though the easy, heat-and-serve method is the national model for feeding large amounts of people cheaply, BACS was finding that trying to supply 1,200 people a day with meals in their homes and at 21 different congregate sites through a contract with a food processing company just wasn’t working.

"Our solution to the problem was a social enterprise kitchen," Jenny Huston told the Guardian. The 20-year veteran chef and educator is director of Culinary Social Enterprise at BACS. She and her boss, executive director Kent Ellsworth, took the program in a new direction. They went "farm to table," meaning they stopped serving frozen food and started serving meals made with fresh meat, dairy, fruits, and vegetables, and they did it by establishing a culinary arts training program with a curriculum based on the day-to-day work of preparing the Meals on Wheels fare from scratch.

"If you have a structural deficit, why are you spending more money on food?" Huston pondered, asking herself the question many critics might raise. "Sure," she said, "processed stuff is much cheaper, but you’re not seeing the full cost."

What is that full cost? That’s a hot topic for the Slow Food Nation forums, such as how far an avocado travels to become guacamole in Maine. Beyond aligning meals with produce that’s locally available, Huston and Ellsworth are attuned to what happens to a community when its most vulnerable populations — children, seniors, and the disabled — stop eating well.

"Good foods are not the privilege of people who have money. It’s the right of everybody," Ellsworth told the Guardian. "When we buy wholesale, local, and fresh, we get a better product for a good price. It’s the right way to do business."

But raw ingredients require more kitchen work. By partnering with a number of organizations, including the Pleasant Valley Adult School and Oakland Adult and Career Education Program, BACS was able to find budding cooks though a free, 12-week job training program.

They also connected with Community Alliance for Family Farms, a network of local growers and distributors who could provide up to 350 pounds of each raw ingredient a day. Just a few months into the new program, a typical Meals on Wheels lunch now includes all local milk, 10 percent local meat, and 19 percent local produce — and it’s made from scratch by workers who are learning enough food preparation skills to qualify for entry-level kitchen jobs.

And they’re doing it for just pennies more a day. "Our food cost has only gone up five cents per meal since we’ve gone farm to table," Huston said. Yet donations since April have increased 25 percent — about $20,000 — meaning that people who were once asked to give a dollar or two for their lunches are voluntarily giving more for better food.

Though the Meals on Wheels budget gap hasn’t disappeared, Huston likens it to the first few months of any business, when turning a profit is elusive. They’re hoping to expand catering services and market the meals to other day and residential programs.

At the Aug. 14 graduation dinner, Ellsworth announced that a foundation had approved a $200,000 program investment loan to purchase new equipment, remodel their kitchen, and grow the school. It was welcome news for the first class of five cooks. Reflecting on the experience, Geri Haas said, "It was really nice going there, knowing I was relied upon to provide fresh food for our elders."

Orlando De’Aguero, another graduate, announced that he got a job with a local organic food preparation company, eliciting cheers from the gathering of friends, family, and fellow classmates. He said, "I wouldn’t have traded the three months I had here for anything at a culinary school."

Dreams of Obama

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› news@sfbg.com

Barack Obama, it is true, is a transformational leader. But he needs a transformational movement to become a transformational president.

He is transformational not only by his charisma and brilliance, but by embodying the possibility of an African American being chosen president in the generation following the civil rights movement. Whether he wins or loses, the vast movement inspired by Obama will become the next generation of American social activists.

For many Americans, the possibility of Obama is a deeply personal one. I mean here the mythic Obama who exists in our imaginations, not the literal Obama whose centrist positions will disappoint many progressives.

Myths are all-important, as Obama writes in Dreams from My Father (Three Rivers Press, 2004). Fifty years ago, the mythic Obama existed only as an aspiration, an ideal, in a country where interracial love was taboo and interracial marriage was largely banned. As Obama himself declared on the night of the Iowa primary, "Some said this night would never come."

The early civil rights movement, the jazz musicians, and the Beat poets dreamed up this mythic Obama before the literal Obama could materialize. His African father and white countercultural mother dared to dream and love him into existence, incarnate him, at the creative moment of the historic march on Washington. Only the overthrow of Jim Crow segregation opened space for the dream to rise politically.

In one of his best oratorical moments, Obama summons the spirit of social movements built from the bottom up, from the Revolutionary War to the abolitionist crusade, to the women’s suffrage cause, to the eight-hour day and the rights of labor, ending with the time of his birth when the walls came down in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., and Delano. As he repeats this mantra of movements thousands of times to millions of Americans, a new cultural understanding becomes possible. This is the foundation of a new American story that is badly needed.

Obama’s emerging narrative also includes but supercedes the other major explanation of American specialness, the narrative of the "melting pot," by noting that whatever "melting" did occur was always in the face of massive and entrenched opposition from the privileged.

John McCain represents a very different aspect of the American story. His inability to limit the adventurist appetite for war is the most dangerous element of the McCain, and the Republican, worldview. It is paralleled, of course, by their inability to limit the corporate appetite for an unregulated market economy. In combination, the brew is an economy directed to the needs of the country club rich, the oil companies, and military contractors. A form of crony capitalism slouches forward in place of either competitive markets or state regulation.

Yet McCain has a good chance, the best chance among Republicans, of winning in November. He appeals to those whose idea of the future is more of the past, buying time against the inevitable. And McCain is running against Obama, who threatens our institutions and culture simply by representing the unexpected and unauthorized future.

My prediction: if he continues on course, Obama will win the popular vote by a few percentage points in November, but will be at serious risk in the Electoral College. The institution, rooted in the original slavery compromise, may be a barrier too great to overcome.

The priority for Obama supporters has to be mobilization of new, undecided, and independent voters in up-for-grabs states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, while expanding the Electoral College delegates in places like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and possibly Virginia.

There are many outside the Obama movement who assert that the candidate is "not progressive enough," that Obama will be co-opted as a new face for American interventionism, that in any event real change cannot be achieved from the top down. These criticisms are correct. But in the end, they miss the larger point.

Most of us want President Obama to withdraw troops from Iraq more rapidly than the 16 months promised by his campaign. But it is important that Obama’s position is shared by Iraq’s prime minister and the vast majority of both our peoples. The Iraqi regime, pressured by its own people, has rejected the White House and McCain’s refusal to adopt a timetable.

The real problem with Obama’s position on Iraq is his adherence to the outmoded Baker-Hamilton proposal to leave thousands of American troops behind for training, advising and ill-defined "counterterrorism" operations. Obama should be pressured to reconsider this recipe for a low visibility counterinsurgency quagmire.

On Iran, Obama has usefully emphasized diplomacy as the only path to manage the bilateral crisis and assure the possibility of orderly withdrawal from Iraq. He should be pressed to resist any escalation.

On Afghanistan, Obama has proposed transferring 10,000 American combat troops from Iraq, which means out of the frying pan, into the fire. On Pakistan, and the possibility of a ground invasion by Afghan and US troops, this could be Obama’s Bay of Pigs, a debacle.

On Israel-Palestine, he will pursue diplomacy more aggressively, but little more. Altogether, the counterinsurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are likely to become a spreading global quagmire and a human-rights nightmare, nullifying the funding prospects for health care reform or other domestic initiatives.

In Latin America, Obama has been out of step and out of touch with the winds of democratic change sweeping the continent. His commitment to fulfilling the United Nations anti-poverty goals, or to eradicating sweatshops through a global living wage, is underwhelming and — given his anti-terrorism wars —will be underfinanced.

And so on. The man will disappoint as well as inspire.

Once again, then, why support him by knocking on doors, sending money, monitoring polling places, and getting our hopes up? There are three reasons that stand out in my mind. First, American progressives, radicals, and populists need to be part of the vast Obama coalition, not perceived as negative do-nothings in the minds of the young people and African Americans at the center of the organized campaign.

It is not a "lesser evil" for anyone of my generation’s background to send an African American Democrat to the White House. Pressure from Obama supporters is more effective than pressure from critics who don’t care much if he wins and won’t lift a finger to help him. Second, his court appointments will keep us from a right-wing lock on social, economic, and civil liberties issues during our lifetime. Third, it should be no problem to vote for Obama and picket his White House when justified.

Obama himself says he has solid progressive roots but that he intends to campaign and govern from the center. It is a challenge to rise up, organize, and reshape the center, and build a climate of public opinion so intense that it becomes necessary to redeploy from military quagmires, take on the unregulated corporations and uncontrolled global warming, and devote resources to domestic priorities like health care, the green economy, and inner-city jobs for youth.

What is missing in the current equation is not a capable and enlightened centrist but a progressive social movement on a scale like those of the past.

The refrain is familiar. Without the militant abolitionists, including the Underground Railroad and John Brown, there would have been no pressure on President Lincoln to end slavery. Without the radicals of the 1930s, there would have been no pressure on President Franklin Roosevelt, and therefore no New Deal, no Wagner Act, no Social Security.

The creative tension between large social movements and enlightened Machiavellian leaders is the historical model that has produced the most important reforms in the course of American history.

Mainstream political leaders will not move to the left of their own base. There are no shortcuts to radical change without a powerful and effective constituency organized from the bottom up. The next chapter in Obama’s new American story remains to be written, perhaps by the most visionary of his own supporters.

Progressives need to unite for Obama, but also unite — organically at least, and not in a top-down way — on issues like peace, the environment, the economy, media reform, campaign finance, and equality like never before. The growing conflict today is between democracy and empire, and the battle fronts are many and often confusing. Even the Bush years have failed to unite American progressives as effectively as occurred during Vietnam. There is no reason to expect a President McCain to unify anything more than our manic depression.

But there is the improbable hope that the movement set ablaze by the Obama campaign will be enough to elect Obama and a more progressive Congress in November, creating an explosion of rising expectations for social movements — here and around the world — that President Obama will be compelled to meet in 2009.

That is a moment to live and fight for.

Tom Hayden is a longtime political activist and former California legislator. This article was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, of which the Guardian is a member, and is being carried in newspapers across the country this week.

Eye of the needle

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW During the fall of 2004, I interviewed Bruce Conner, who had no shortage of viewpoints regarding contemporary art. "Many people," he said, "will develop a style of painting or subject matter or content that appears to be very innovative, and their next solo exhibition will be made up of 20 paintings that are all the same, aside from tiny variations."

Lauren DiCioccio offers a remedy for just such a malaise. Though her current show at Jack Fischer Gallery isn’t fully solo — she’s exhibiting with Aliza Lelah — she’s crammed five or six exhibits’ worth of ideas into her half. The extreme density and the versatile expansiveness of DiCioccio’s approach acquires special potency when one considers its relationship to the space: working from the smallest gallery in 49 Geary, Fischer presents intuitive outsider work with casual aplomb. His best shows present an experience akin to stumbling out of a sterile mini-museum into the residential hotel room of a smart enthusiast.

At the moment, that room includes 47 pieces by DiCioccio that stem from at least a handful of specific individual practices. Like some other young Bay Area artists such as Ruth Laskey, DiCioccio’s brand of personal creativity involves obsessive repetition. In other words, she’s transutf8g craft into art, with imagination and without much pretense. She sews unusual.

In the realm of nostalgia, DiCioccio threads lightly. Her series of works at Jack Fischer include 14 semi-amazing facsimiles of 35mm slides made by hand-embroidering bridal organza; five sculptures constructed from individual paper pads and thread; three mini-Mead spiral notebooks with felt covers and cloth pages sporting machine-sewn lines; eight "color codification dot drawings," in which she assigns colors to letters of the alphabet then paints on frosted Mylar after placing it over a magazine page; 11 variations on the classic plastic "Thank You" shopping or food-delivery bag, again made with organza; and, perhaps most strikingly, six pieces in which she sews through the top page of an entire issue of the New York Times encased in muslin.

Got that? DiCioccio’s show demands more viewing time than it takes to process the above sentence-long paragraph, and rewards that commitment with contemplative pleasure. At a moment when the average artwork gets around five seconds of zombie dead-eye before going gazeless once again, that’s saying something. Some of what DiCioccio is doing is derivative, or at least bears an obvious kinship to other projects. Her "Thank You" bags, for example, are a proletarian cousin to Libby Black’s experiments in paper designer wear. The paper-rad effect of her paper pad configurations isn’t far from origami, even if the waterfall effect she creates with aqua thread in one piece is lovely. But her best ideas are matched by a skill and dedication that honors humor and open-ended playfulness.

The open-ended quality of DiCioccio’s work is evident in the color paintings, which use a cryptic-yet-ripe foundation of meaning: the recent "green" issue of Vanity Fair with Madonna on the cover. ("And incredibly, looking not a day older," reads the parenthetical title of one of these untitled works.) Here, DiCioccio’s color-by-letters method highlights the structural beauty of mastheads and two- or three-column text configurations complete with pull-quotes. As she covers the magazine and its text, she simultaneously teases out ironies about Madonna and the notion of eco-friendly paper periodicals.

Green turns into gray lady — and Madonna’s unforgivingly ageless brand of masculine femininity gives way dour old boys and even Old Glory — in DiCioccio’s Times series. There, her threads meet up with disposable, obsolete newspaper, a material not far from dust in more ways than one. As with DiCioccio’s 35mm slide facsimiles, which bear micro-images of landmarks like Mount Rushmore, there’s a sense of an American way of life nearing death, and the artist is smart and honest enough to play it every which way but heavy-handed. Instead of trying for perfection, she lets threads hang loosely, suggesting a spirit left behind.

LAUREN DICIOCCIO AND ALIZA LELAH

Through Sat/16

Jack Fischer Gallery

49 Geary, Suite 440, SF

(415) 956-1178

www.jackfischergallery.com

PG&E’s Lie of the Week

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The mailer that arrived last week shows a bullet hole blown through a pile of money and urges voters to beware the Board of Supervisors’ $4 billion takeover of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. It was paid for by the "Committee to Stop the Blank Check, a coalition of concerned consumers, small businesses, labor, community organizations and Pacific Gas and Electric Company." PG&E, needless to say, is picking up the check for the campaign.

Nowhere does the mailer specify the legislation it’s attacking. Why not? Because the charter amendment is called the Clean Energy Act, a proposition mandating that the city pursue a comprehensive plan for 100 percent renewable energy. That plan may include buying or constructing an electricity distribution system — which is what PG&E is really fretting about.

"The only thing green about it is cost," the flyer says. "The fact is, this proposal is backed by many of the same supervisors who are trying to build fossil fuel power plants in San Francisco."

Actually, the Clean Energy Act was authored by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who consistently opposes burning more fossil fuel for energy and is against the city power plants.

PG&E, on the other hand, gets 41 percent of its electricity from burning fossil fuels and the company is not on track to meet the state’s meager mandate of 20 percent renewables by 2010. In fact, the company’s record is only getting worse: four new PG&E-owned fossil fuel plants are under construction — the Tesla plant in Alameda County, Gateway in Antioch, and two other facilities in Colusa and Humboldt.

Sun protection failures

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Have you ever spent a day at the beach, dutifully slathering yourself with sunscreen — only to return home with the unmistakable prickle of a sunburn?

It’s probably because your sunscreen isn’t doing what it claims, according to a recent analysis conducted by the Washington, DC–based Environmental Working Group. The nonpartisan, nonprofit group known for watchdogging consumer products studied 952 sunscreens with a sun protection factor (SPF) of 15 or higher and discovered that 80 percent contain harmful chemicals and didn’t really protect skin from the most damaging rays of the sun.

And, the report charged, the three top selling sunscreen companies — Coppertone, Banana Boat, and Neutrogena — produce some of the most toxic and useless products. Even ones you might find on the shelves of your health food store, like Alba organic lavender sunscreen, contain oxybenzone, which allegedly disrupts hormones.

Although there is no definitive science on the effects of oxybenzone, studies have shown that "mothers with high levels of oxybenzone in their systems were more likely to have low birth weight baby girls," said Rebecca Sutton, a staff scientist with a PhD in environmental chemistry who works for the Oakland office of EWG.

Julie Lux, a spokesperson for Coppertone, said the company’s products are reviewed by independent scientists and dermatologists and said she’s "concerned that reports like the one released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) will inappropriately discourage consumers from protecting themselves from the sun."

Ariel Kern, a spokesperson for Sun Pharmaceuticals, said the company "stands behind the safety and efficacy of Banana Boat products" and Iris Grossman, a spokesperson for Neutrogena, said that company’s products have been patented and tested.

A sunscreen’s SPF indicates protection from the short-wave UVB rays that cause sunburn, but it’s the long-wave ultraviolet radiation (UVA) that is more directly linked to cancer. Even so, protecting against UVA radiation isn’t currently required. Furthermore, nearly 50 percent of the products tested by EWG deteriorated in the sun, "raising questions about whether these products last as long as the label says," read the report.

The Food and Drug Administration has the authority to regulate sunscreens, but the agency’s standards have been a 30-year work in progress and are relatively limited. Despite a congressional mandate to update the regs by May 2006, the FDA is just now entering the latter stages of its rulemaking, spokesperson Rita Chappelle told us.

Currently the agency is proposing more thorough labeling protocols, including a new four-star system for UVA protection. Additionally, sunscreens manufacturers will not be allowed to say that their products are waterproof, and the upper threshold of SPF will rise from 30 to 50+.

In an attempt to light a fire under the FDA, Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) have introduced the Sunscreen Labeling Protection Act of 2008, which would require finalized sunscreen safety standards within 180 days.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal released a statement supporting the legislation. "The FDA has failed to implement proposed sunscreen labeling rules that would bar false claims about all-day protection, waterproof, broad spectrum UVA/UVB protection, and SPF over 50," he wrote.

Claims on the label are also a factor in the potential danger of sunscreens. "With claims like ‘all day protection’ people don’t reapply," Sutton said.

Though EWG’s analysis (which can be found at www.cosmeticdatabase.com was criticized as "junk science" by one doctor cited in a New York Times report, the group stands by its work. "We use industry standard methods, so it’s hard for criticism to stand," Sutton said.

EWG’s ratings were based on three factors: UVB protection, which SPF indicates; UVA protection, which blocks the more harmful rays; and overall stability of the ingredients. The group recommends that sunbathers search for products with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, which are less readily absorbed by the skin and provide more of a physical barrier between users and the sun. While these minerals may be safe on your skin, they’re not so great in your lungs. So give the spray and powder versions a pass, and beware products that have been reduced to nanoparticle size.

And, of course, spend more time in the shade.

Black exodus emergency

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› sarah@sfbg.com

San Francisco is losing its black population faster than any other large city in the United States — and the trend is unlikely to stop unless the city takes immediate action.

So says a draft report from an African American out-migration task force put together by the Mayor’s Office last year. It wasn’t published in final form early enough to have an impact on the June 3 election, when voters green-lighted Lennar Corp.’s plan to develop thousands of luxury condos in Bayview/Candlestick Point, one of the few remaining African American neighborhoods in San Francisco.

Task force members didn’t get to present their draft recommendations, which include preserving and improving existing housing and producing new affordable housing, until an Aug. 7 public hearing called by Sup. Chris Daly.

The out-migration task force, which used 2005 US Census and state demographic data, places the city’s African American population at 1/16 of San Francisco’s total population in 2005, compared to its two largest minorities, Asians and Hispanics, which make up 1/3 and 1/8, respectively.

"We saw that the African American population has declined by 40.8 percent since 1990, and as a share of the population decreased from 10.9 percent in 1990 to 6.5 percent in 2005," the report states.

"That’s not enough people to fill Candlestick Park," observed Fred Blackwell, executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which has been faulted for deliberately displacing blacks from the Fillmore District during the 1960s and for not doing enough to protect blacks in its Bayview-Hunters Point redevelopment plans.

The task force further projects that the city’s black community will continue to decline to 32,300 in 2050, or 4.6 percent of the total population.

Blackwell cited the lack of affordable housing, as well as a lack of educational and economic opportunity, severe environmental injustice, an epidemic of violence, and lack of cultural and social pride, as the reasons blacks are leaving, or not moving to, San Francisco.

"A lot of people mentioned the notion of being an outsider looking in," Blackwell said. "People can see a Chinatown and a Little Italy, but there wasn’t an area of town that seemed to celebrate the African American community."

The findings were not exactly news to the task force or the black community.

"We could paper the walls of this building with reports that have been made on this issue," said task force chair Aileen Hernandez, citing similar studies in 1995 and 1972.

Fellow task force member Barbara Cohen said the draft recommendations "should have long ago been called the final recommendations."

The Rev. Amos Brown accused Daly of not bonding with the black community. "I’d like to see you coming to church on Sunday, to NAACP meetings, to be down in the trenches, walking arm-in-arm," Brown said. "Let me know next time there’s a NAACP meeting, and I’ll be there," Daly replied.

Calling the city’s black depopulation an emergency, the Nation of Islam Minister Christopher Muhammad urged the Board to take the issue out of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s hands.

"It’s time to begin to change the culture of redevelopment," said Muhammad, who wants to establish endangered community zones in BVHP and the Western Addition.

"It’s revolutionary, but doable," said Muhammad, who characterized the city’s Redevelopment Agency as a "cheap grant-hustling operation" after the agency admitted that it cooked a state grant application this May by claiming it needed $25 million so it wouldn’t have to mothball a project the city and Lennar are developing at Hunters Point Shipyard.

Blackwell defended the mayor.

"This is not a set of recommendations that have been sitting on the shelf," said Blackwell, claiming that Newsom is working to implement a violence prevention plan and rebuild public housing.

Blackwell also recommended expanding the agency’s certificate of preference program citywide, an idea that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has already placed before the Board.

Goat Hill Pizza

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› paulr@sfbg.com

While the denizens of Washington, DC must nourish themselves with Capitol Hill Blue, we of the Blessed Realm have easy access to Goat Hill Pizza, and although there aren’t any goats on Potrero Hill any more, in blue or any other color, the views are still magical, the pizza is pretty good, and a longtime spirit of San Francisco abides, despite the passing of a third of a century and the ebb and flow of various funny-money economic tides.

Goat Hill is more than a pizzeria with a view (though a better view you won’t easily find), more than a place long famed for its Monday night, all-you-can-eat pizza dim sum extravaganza (though a better deal you won’t easily find): it’s a kind of community center, a locus of mingling, with the restaurant’s co-owner, Philip De Andrade, serving as mingler-in-chief as he moves from table to table, chatting and checking. The restaurant’s long walls are regularly hung with paintings for sale, and, on certain warm weekend afternoons, the place becomes a kind of art gallery that smells of linguica and cheap red wine — just the sort of environment in which to stumble across a surviving Beat writer or unheralded master painter.

Goat Hill is a still-glowing ember of a bohemian San Francisco where life’s riches were enjoyed but neither obsessed over nor paraded as status symbols. If, in a sense, it’s an ambassador from the past, it’s an envoy that’s survived a host of Bible-worthy plagues, from earthquake, disease, and fire to the dot-com boom-bust (in with the Porsches, out with the Porsches!) and the long adventure in misrule that began with a stolen election and will eternally bear the name of the unbearable George W. Bush. The little man will be gone soon, holding hands with Dick Cheney in one of their undisclosed locations while Mesopotamia burns, but Goat Hill will still be there, packing them in on Monday nights.

While a wait for a table is generally an annoyance for people who are hungry to eat dinner, the Monday-night wait at Goat Hill is rather festive, especially in mild weather. Clots of people loiter on the sidewalk and in the street near the door, chatting and flirting and occasionally taking the long view down the slope of Connecticut Street to the city’s luminous skyline, which seems close enough to touch. Of all the skyline views I’ve observed over the years, only those on the eastern slopes of Russian Hill are the equal of those on the north face of Potrero. With a view like that, who needs food? And yet, from time to time, the host does emerge from the restaurant to call out a name, and a party of people — maybe a twosome, but just as likely a sixsome or even more — eagerly marches inside.

The dim sum comparison is as old as time, but it isn’t quite apposite. (Visitors to Goat Hill’s arriviste location in the SoMa flatlands will find the all-you-can-eat deal in effect every day.) Whenever I’ve had actual dim sum at a Chinese place, the servers check off little boxes on a tab when we’ve chosen items to eat, so the final bill varies. At Goat Hill, you pay a flat fee (at the moment $10.95 per head), which buys you unlimited access to the salad bar along with unlimited access to the pies that emerge regularly from the kitchen. A pie arrives; its topping is announced, and, as at a Sotheby’s auction, you point or mumble or in some other way indicate an interest, and you are given a slice. But step lively, because the next pie could be just seconds behind. Or, minutes might elapse, an interval in which you can thoughtfully chew your crust rinds. Some of these can look a little scorched.

The toppings themselves show signs of being drawn from the culinary equivalent of an auto dealership’s parts bin. There’s pepperoni, of course, and also pepperoni with sausage, and sausage with mushroom. (No pepperoni with mushroom.) How about ground beef with green onions ("Italian hamburger"), or spinach with tomato and feta cheese, or chicken with sun-dried tomatoes? Green bell pepper makes repeated appearances, as does pineapple, with ham or with sausage, with or without chunks of jalapeño pepper.

Linguica — the garlicky Portuguese sausage — is underrated as a pizza topping; its flavor is every bit as potent as pepperoni’s, but (at least at Goat Hill) it’s richer and less salty. This last is always an important consideration for the pizza eater who is beyond 30 years of age. I love pizza, and I retain an affection for the sort of pizza gluttony Goat Hill enables, but the older you get, the more likely you are to be sorry the next day not to have exercised more restraint in enjoying your pizza. (The pizza crusts, incidentally, are sourdough and find a nice middle ground between crackery and bready, but the rinds nonetheless have a way of piling on paper plates around the tables. Only across the way, at a table filled with avid men in their 20s, did I notice the crust rinds being efficiently dispatched. It was like watching bright-eyed jackals polish off a wildebeest carcass, bones and all.)

The salad bar, amid all this crust, is not an afterthought. Although it has the look of something you’d find at Howard Johnson’s, complete with sneeze shield, it does offer a broad range of non-bloating items, including kidney beans and chickpeas, tomato slices, mushrooms, lettuce, grated cheese, beets, pepperoncini, and, of course, choice of dressing, to be ladled from big crocks. There’s even a view, at no extra charge.

GOAT HILL PIZZA

Sun.–Thurs., 11:30 a.m.–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m.

300 Connecticut, SF

(415) 641-1440

www.goathill.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noise does not preclude conversation

Wheelchair accessible

If the glass fits

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By Marianne Moore

Delirium Tremens is the name of a Belgian beer. It’s also a condition that results from severe alcohol withdrawal—its symptoms are convulsions and hallucinations, and untreated, it’s quite deadly*. At nine percent alcohol by volume, the Belgian pale ale could be said to be both the cause and the cure of the syndrome it’s named for (Oh no! He’s got delirium tremens; quick! Give him some Delirium Tremens). Like most beers with a high alcohol concentration, DT on draft is served in an itty bitty little glass—about six to eight ounces. In reference, no doubt, to the visions brought on by the rum fits, the glass has tiny pink elephants all over it.

Delirium Sign.JPG

After a couple of those at Luka’s taproom in Oakland last week, plus one or two of their signature Green Hornets (think margarita, only strangely gritty and awesome), my friend and I were getting ready to pack it in. As we were giggling and scraping bacon-sprinkled mac & cheese into a cardboard box, I casually mentioned to my friend that it’d be pretty cool if she could manage to swipe her pink elephant DT glass. Without a word, she snapped the box closed and grabbed the glass.

Instinctively, I headed for the door. Once outside, thinking she was right behind me, I gave a victory whoop and practically ran past the 300 pound bouncer. I got about 50 feet from the door before I realized I was alone—my friend still had to untie her bike, which happened to be locked up right next to the security walrus. If I’d been a little more casual about it, we might have been able to slip past without him noticing, but as it was we got a lecture and I was forced to shuffle back into the bar and replace the glass. As we headed towards 19th Street BART, my friend turned around and yelled, “You know you get those for free, right?”

Ah, my drunk, delirious hero.

*Python straight man Graham Chapman was suffering from delirium tremens while shooting Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Imagine if you had to stare at Terry Gilliam for hours on end while tripping balls…

Breaking: Leno endorses Sanchez

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Just got word that state Assemblymember (and Senator-elect) Mark Leno is going to endorse School Board member Mark Sanchez for supervisor in District 9. “We’ve got his endorsement,” Sanchez just told me by phone. “We’re putting out the press release today.”

That makes two Green Party members the Democratic lawmaker is backing; he’s also endorsed Ross Mirkarimi in D5. Good for Leno not to let the irrational fear of Greens that so many Democrats harbor influence him; this is, after all, a nonpartisan race.

It’s a tough choice in D9 — Sanchez, Police Commission member David Campos and housing activist Eric Quezada are all good progressives and any of the three would be a great supervisor. Quezada, I think, never had much of a chance with Leno; he’s pretty close to Sup. Chris Daly, who was a strong backer of Carole Migden in the bitter Migden-Leno senate race. Campos is close to Sup. Tom Ammiano, who was neutral in the Leno-Migden brawl — but Campos, who is on the Democratic County Central Committee, voted for Aaron Peskin as chair. Leno’s candidate (and he was pusing him hard) was Scott Weiner, who narrowly lost.

Quezada also ran for DCCC, but didn’t win.

Sanchez, as a Green, was able to stay out of both the Migden-Leno fight and the Peskin-Weiner contest. Oddly enough, not being a Democrat may have helped him here.

Campos, by taking the stand he thought was right and voting for Peskin (despite immense pressure), may have scotched any chance of getting Leno’s endorsement. “That’s politics,” he told me. Yes, it is.

(UPDATE: Sanchez corrects me: He endorsed Leno for state Senate months before the election. So the Leno endorsement is even less of a surprise.)

B Star

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If you run a successful restaurant on Clement Street, apparently you face a terrible temptation to open another restaurant on Clement Street — across the road, perhaps, or on the next block. And the new place should appeal to a different socioeconomic stratum. For grand Clémentine, this formula resulted in the opening, about four years ago, of Bistro Clement, an earthier and less formal sibling that trafficked in traditional French bistro dishes.

Now the Burma Superstar people, just a block or so to the west of Clémentine, have borrowed a page from the Clémentine script and, in early May, opened their own companion venture, B Star. In a small, or not-so-small, irony, B Star occupies the space held by Bistro Clement before it went under. If that is a bad omen, let’s consider some favorable ones: unlike Bistro Clement, B Star represents an upmarket, not downmarket, move. (Burma Superstar’s lofty reputation has to do with its food, not its ambience) Also, the menu is, of course, Burmese (-ish), and the new place is on the same side of the street as the parent restaurant.

If you’re on foot, in fact, you’re not likely to miss B Star. It’s the mid-block spot with would-be patrons idling and swirling on the sidewalk and in the doorway. Yes, the crowds have already descended, apparently drawn by alluring whiffs of upmarketry and innovative Asian cooking. That formula has been working at nearby Namu, and now it works at B Star, though the two are hardly interchangeable. While Namu is of the night, B Star has the look of day: knotted pine floors, creamy yellow walls, globes of soft light dangling from the ceiling, and a fair amount of lush greenery. If Namu is an ersatz nightclub, then B Star has a certain gazebo quality, even in the evening.

The menu card adverts to "simple and wholesome Asian-style comfort foods." Never have so few syllables signaled so much to so many; they make me think of meatloaf tataki. B Star doesn’t offer that (does anyone?), but the kitchen does turn out dishes all along the innovation spectrum, from a fabulous, if traditional, platha ($4.50) — a disc of pastry-like flatbread, cut into quarters and presented with an irresistible curry sauce for dipping — to a heart-shaped potpie ($14) filled with Thai-style salmon, carrots, red peppers, zucchini, and snap peas awash in a green curry coconut milk sauce that doesn’t lack for chile punch.

Most of the dishes strike a reasonable balance between familiarity and wildness. Care is taken with putf8gs and other small touches, and the ensemble of crockery, rich in eccentric shapes, has a museum-of-modern-art feel that subtly elevates the food it carries. Also, the kitchen is keenly attentive to the matter of texture and to the value of crunchiness, in particular. We detected a definite crispness in a vegetarian samusa soup (a $7 bowl was plenty for two), whose delights included cabbage, lentils, potatoes — worthies all, though soft — and falafel. I love falafel but had never before enjoyed it in any other form than wrapped in a pita or lavash. Here it resulted in a soup that went crunch, and we only wished that the murky, curry-scented, slightly metallic broth had been a little less harsh.

"It’s missing something," my companion said. Salt? Salting helped but did not cure. Something freshening or fruity, maybe?

Additional crunch turned up in kau soi ($11), a large, shallow bowl filled with noodles, bean sprouts, pickled mustard greens, and ground chicken, each in its place, which made the bowl look like a 3-D map of some ethnically fractured island. It fell to the diner to mix and mingle (as with the Korean beef salad known as bi bim bop), and one of the first things this diner noticed was that the chicken — more shredded than ground, I thought — was wonderfully crispy, in contrast to the soft-focus players. If any dish at B Star manages a rustic sophistication, it’s this one.

Since the menu offered no meatloaf tataki, we settled for a spicy-tuna version ($8.50). The fish had been crusted with crushed peppercorns au poivre-style, seared, cut into slices, and served with a gingery mush dotted with bits of jalapeño pepper and flecks of cilantro. It was also quite chilly, which suggested pre-preparation but also brought a cold-flash counterpoint to a parade of dishes that ranged from warm to scorching.

A nicely balanced dish, in this respect, was the duck lettuce cups ($8). The lettuce consisted of long spears, crisp and cool as an early spring in morning; they were on hand here so we could scoop up the duck, a pile of cooling but still warm shredded meat (like the pork in mu shu pork) perfumed with five-spice powder and laced with a mince of red bell pepper, carrots, celery, and scallions. Our only complaint was that the lettuce spears were not particularly useful as scoops; the regular lettuce cups (of broader and more pliant butter-leaf lettuce) would have been better.

Just as it must be hard to be the child of a famous or accomplished parent, so it must be difficult to be the offspring of a restaurant that uses "superstar" for part of its name. Expectations are bound to be stoked. "Star" is at least more modest than "superstar," particularly when it’s denoted by a symbol rather than spelled out as a word. And B Star does have glints of something special: the best dishes are memorable, the look is appealing, and the staff is as young and energetic as the crowd. A B is good, but give us an A !

B STAR

Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–10 p.m.

Lunch: Tues.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

127 Clement, SF

(415) 933-9900

www.bstarbar.com

Beer, wine, soju

MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Questions for Gavin the Green

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Why did Mayor Newsom recently buckle three times to PG@E? How can he be a “green” mayor and a “green” gubernatorial candidate if he’s scared of PG@E?

By Bruce B. Brugmann

Last Saturday (July 26), out driving in my car, I was startled to hear Mayor Gavin Newsom on the Progressive Talk Radio Show Green 960 show. He was the host, interviewing Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame, and generally sweating away to appear clean and green, green, green, and green some more.
However, he greened over his recent classics in green self-immolation. So I sent him and the station some questions by email and then on to his press secretary Nathan Ballard. No answer as of blogtime almost a week later.

Dear Gavin,

I was interested to hear you this morning on the Progressive Talk Radio Green 960 program. I am curious to know why, as a purported “green” mayor and a purported “green” candidate for governor, and a “purported” radio host on a green 960 show, you have buckled twice recently to PG&E? The first time you buckled to PG&E and changed your position on the Potrero Hill peakers, allowing PG&E to continue to control the power plant and city energy policy.

The second was your quick and hard rejection of the clean energy initiative. How can you be a “green” mayor if you are buckling to PG&E on the big green issues? I will be posting the questions and answers on my Bruce blog at sfbg.com, so I would appreciate hearing from you. Thanks, Bruce B. Brugmann, Guardian editor and publisher

P.S. 1:And now there is a third Newsom instance of buckling to PG@E: Newsom’s five PG@E-friendly appointments to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. None had any public power or community choice aggregation credentials. And Nora Vargas, director of the Latino Issues Forum, was not only considered PG@E friendly, but PG@E between 2004 and 2005 had given $150,000 as part of their community grantmaking.

More: Guillermo Rodriguez, former public relations flak for PG@E, is on the board of the forum (along with two other private private utility executives. Rodriguez left PG@E to head the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which receives gobs of money from PG@E on a regular basis and in return provides “community services” for PG@E.

This, ladies and gentleman, is yet another example of how PG@E exerts its power and uses the mayor to subvert any real moves toward real clean and green power, such as the Clean Energy Initiative. PG@E has used this maneuver successfully for decades: they influence the mayor to make PG@E-friendly appointments to the PUC and then the PG@e-friendly appointees never put a pebble in the path of PG@E or raise serious questions about its illegal private power monopoly. So far, it’s always worked but a new day may be coming. On guard!

P.S. 2:Why doesn’t the station bring on people from the clean energy campaign? Why doesn’t it appear to allow call-in questions on the show (at least I didn’t hear any during my listening time?)

P.S. 3: Alert: Let us know of any PG@E astroturfing and greenwashing as the campaign goes along. PG@E is more worried than ever and it will be spending millions to try to convince San Francisco voters that clean green energy is not for San Francisco. Their propaganda line: leave the greening to PG@E and Gavin the Green. B3

Click here to hear the podcast of the Gavin Newsom Show from Saturday July 26th.

Lennar’s lawsuits

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Two years after Lennar Corp. reported that asbestos dust had neither been monitored nor controlled during major grading and earthmoving operations on its Parcel A construction site on Hunters Point Shipyard last year (see "The corporation that ate San Francisco," 3/14/08), the fallout from these failures continues.

On June 19 a dozen Bayview–Hunters Point residents and workers sued Lennar, as well as international environmental consultant CH2M Hill and Sacramento-based engineering consultant Gordon N. Ball, in Superior Court on behalf of their preschool and school-age children. The parents allege that their children suffered headaches, skin rashes, and respiratory ailments during Parcel A excavations, which occurred next to a predominantly African American and Latino community.

The plaintiffs charge Lennar, CH2M Hill, and Ball with public nuisance, negligence, environmental racism, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and battery. They are asking for monetary damages, a jury trial, and court costs.

But Lennar is apparently seeking to deflect the blame for these problems at the site entirely onto CH2M Hill through a new federal lawsuit, despite revelations in the Guardian (see "Question of intent," 11/28/07) that Lennar reprimanded its own staffer, Gary McIntyre, when he tried to bring Ball to heel for the company’s failure to properly control the toxic asbestos dust.

On June 23, Lennar BVHP LLC sued subcontractor CH2M Hill for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract, express indemnity, and unfair business practices in connection with its work on Parcel A.

"Lennar seeks to recover for the significant economic harm it has suffered in addressing the ramifications of CH2’s gross and reckless misconduct in failing to provide competent asbestos air monitoring services for Lennar’s redevelopment of a portion of Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco," states the suit, which seeks damages, restitution and indemnity, attorney fees, court costs, and a jury trial.

"Lennar’s economic harm vastly exceeds $75,000," the suit notes. "CH2 has provided no compensation to Lennar and no other relief for its failures. Indeed, CH2 has never publicly acknowledged its clear responsibility for these failures."

CH2’s Oakland-based vice president, Udai Singh, who signed a $392,600 contract with Lennar in January 2006 for asbestos dust monitoring services, told the Guardian, "Unfortunately I’m not working on that, so I have no clue what you are talking about.

"I thought I might have seen something about that, but since I have been working mostly on EPA stuff, I haven’t been involved in this one," continued Singh, who has been project manager for remedial projects on Superfund sites for the federal EPA’s Region IX, which includes Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada.

Singh referred us to CH2’s Denver-based counsel Kirby Wright, who referred us to CH2’s public relations director, John Corsi, who did not return the Guardian‘s calls as of press time.

But while Lennar BVHP continues to contract with Gordon N. Ball at the shipyard, local resident Christopher Carpenter has sued the Sacramento-based contractor in Superior Court for whistleblower retaliation, wrongful termination, racial discrimination, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

As the Guardian reported, ("Green City: Signs of asbestos," 8/29/07), Carpenter was fired shortly after he complained about dust that was kicked up by a Ball backhoe excavating the Parcel A hillside on Oct. 2, 2006.

"Carpenter became surrounded by a cloud of dust that was caused by Gordon Ball’s failure to water the ground prior to commencing grading," the suit alleges, noting that Carpenter complained about Ball’s unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, some of which violated Bay Area Air Quality Management District regulations and the city’s Health Code, before he was fired.

At City Hall, Sup. Sophie Maxwell is seeking to amend the city’s Building Code to require more-stringent dust control measures for demolition and construction projects. (The Building Inspection Commission opposed Maxwell’s proposal in December 2007, in a 4–3 vote).

On July 22, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to support Maxwell’s dust legislation.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Christopher Muhammad, who represents the Muhammad University of Islam adjacent to Parcel A, asked the San Francisco Health Commission to investigate why it took until July 14 for the local community to learn of an asbestos-level violation that occurred at Lennar’s Parcel A site just four days before the June 3 election.

Muhammad suspects the infraction was hushed up because Lennar was engaged in the most expensive initiative battle in San Francisco’s history, plunking down a total of $5 million to support the ultimately successful Proposition G, which gives the developer control of Candlestick Point and the shipyard.

Amy Brownell of the Department of Public Health told the Guardian that the violation, which registered at 138,800 structures per cubic meter of air (the city’s work shutdown level is set at 16,000 structures) did not trigger a work suspension because there was no work planned at Lennar’s site May 31 or June 1, which was a weekend.

Clean Energy Act makes ballot

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The San Francisco Clean Energy Act isn’t the only charter amendment on the November ballot, but it’s already shaping up to be the political lightning rod of this fall’s election.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. sent out mailers opposing the measure even before the Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 on July 22 to place it on the Nov. 4 ballot. Mayor Gavin Newsom also announced his opposition to the act moments after Assemblymember Mark Leno, former San Francisco Public Utilities Commission General Manager Susan Leal, and a cadre of progressive supervisors announced their support for it on the steps of City Hall.

Authored by Sups. Ross Mirkarimi and Aaron Peskin, the Clean Energy Act requires San Francisco to fulfill 51 percent of its electricity needs through renewable sources by 2017. That requirement rises to 75 percent by 2030, and to 100 percent, “or the greatest amount technologically feasible or practicable,” by 2040.

The SF Clean Energy Act also mandates that a feasibility study be undertaken to look at the best way to provide clean, green energy, which could lead to PG&E losing its stranglehold on energy if the study finds public power to be the best option.

Explaining the importance of mandating a feasibility study, Mirkarimi said, “Otherwise PG&E has a monopoly here until the planet dies.”

Supporters say it is important for San Francisco to set up a model that others can follow. “As goes San Francisco, so goes the state of California, and so goes the nation,” Peskin said at the July 22 rally, just before the Board voted to place the act on the ballot. “This is a time when people can change the destiny of the planet.”

Moments after that rally ended, Mayor Newsom took a minute to explain his opposition.

“We have other things we should be focusing on,” Newsom told reporters at a press conference at the War Memorial Building to announce housing bonds for veterans. “Let’s call it what it is. It’s a power takeover of PG&E,” he said.

But the elected officials and myriad organizations who showed up at City Hall to support the Clean Energy Act say that public vs. private power is not the main issue.

“The public power considerations have been drafted in a thoughtful and reasonable way,” Leno told the crowd. “It would involve study after study after study, and testimony from experts.”

Leno noted that 42 million Americans have public power, and if San Francisco did turn to public power, it would be embracing something as American as mom and apple pie. “Unlike their private power company counterparts, public power systems serve only one constituency: their customers,” Leno said.

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval opined that government is better able to assume renewable energy risks. “The private industry is not going to take that risk,” Sandoval said. “It’s always going to take the cheap way out, which is fossil fuels.

Others warned the audience not to be swayed by PG&E’s anti–Clean Energy campaign, which Newsom’s chief political consultant Eric Jaye is working on.

“This is not some crazy takeover scheme,” Leal said. “It’s about protecting the environment and the rights of San Franciscans and their rate payers.”

The Clean Energy Act has been endorsed by the Sierra Club, San Francisco Tomorrow, ACORN, the San Francisco Green Party, the League of Young Voters, Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice, the San Francisco Green Party, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education and a supervisorial candidate in District 9, described showing “An Inconvenient Truth” to the eighth-grade science class he teaches. “What can I say to my kids — we don’t have the policies in place to mitigate the damage they see?”

The Sierra Club’s John Rizzo noted, “This act insures that San Francisco is at the center of this economy. Not in Japan, China, or Germany. It will be here.”

Aliza Wasserman of the League of Young Voters stated that “PG&E is not investing $1 in renewable energy beyond state mandates, and they lobby against measures to raise those mandates.”

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