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From our Bay to Norway

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› johnny@sfbg.com

I hear a new world calling me. It’s beeping transmissions from some faraway place in the future and the past where a mysterious craft hovers near calypso rock and choruses of friendly voices — some human, some not — echo or call to each other. It’s a free-floating territory charted by someone obsessed with creating and sharing sounds that would otherwise go unheard. Only those with a similar obsession seem to respond to its clarion call.

I hear a new world, so strange and so real. Something tells me this world has ties to Norway and the Bay Area, that it streams from Oslo to San Francisco and back. Along the way it opens doors — some familiar, some not — to unheard-of zones. In Norway it can’t help isoutf8g and celebrating a conga rhythm from a vintage Michael Jackson track. It also combines the famous chords of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and the roller coaster sensuality of Donna Summer’s Giorgio Moroder–produced "I Feel Love" in order to fill and feel space with as much pleasure as possible. In San Francisco it forms warm electronic waves, uses white magic to surf those waves’ white diamond tips at midnight, and then wakes up the next morning with a heartbreaking conversational hymn.

I hear a new world, haunting me from beyond the known realms of space disco, the shorthand term writers have applied to the music of Norway’s Lindstrøm (who has combined Strauss with Summer), Prins Thomas, and Todd Terje (the aforementioned Jackson mix master). It asks me to explore the songs of San Francisco musicians who offer clues to — and share — those Norwegians’ vast and prodigious love of sound and song. It suggests I contact Sorcerer (a.k.a. Daniel Judd) and Hatchback (a.k.a. Sam Grawe), brothers in oceanic melody and rhythm, who have both been remixed by Thomas. It tells me to talk with Dominique Leone, whose gorgeous and deranged pop will soon be released by Lindstrøm on his Feedelity label. It implores that I reach across this small town of super sounds to speak with Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos, who has forged a cluster of electro-Nordic projects in which beauty emerges — with a sunlike glow — from intensity.

I hear a new world, calling me to chart links between musicians in San Francisco and in Norway, to discover that neighboring, unacquainted San Francisco sound makers can share friendships with the same Norwegian musicians. Perhaps this musical passage from Norway to our Bay is pure folly. Perhaps the seaside Northern European kingdom recently voted the most peaceful country in the world by the Global Peace Index doesn’t share the same spirit as coastal Northern California. Perhaps the country that remained neutral in World War I and rebelled against insurgent World War II Nazism doesn’t have much in common with Bay Area resistance. Perhaps Oslo and San Francisco only share a pocket-size but ferocious love of black metal. I still hear a new world — how can I tell what’s in store for me?

THE BEACHSIDE BRAIN WAVES OF SORCERER


Donna Summer has already come and gone on the jukebox of the Van Ness corner bar with the bright yellow sign as Sorcerer’s Daniel Judd looks at the cover art for Prins Thomas’s Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo). Thomas’s epic, oft-resplendent two-CD mix opens with "I Hear a New World," the title track of producer Joe Meek’s innovative 1960 exploration of the outer spaces of stereo and studio sound. It then segues into the country twang and power-chord dub of "Devil Weed and Me," by the late-’70s Nashville, Tenn., session-player supergroup Area Code 615. "It’s funny that the CD starts that way," Judd says with characteristic almost-sly-or-shy understatement. "My friend Sam [Grawe, of Hatchback,] is a big fan of Area Code 615, and I love "I Hear a New World." The fact [Thomas] put those two songs together is weird, like he was reading our minds."

Encyclopedic musical passions bring serendipity. But Thomas and Judd’s bond dives deeper: Thomas has remixed "Surfing at Midnight," the slow-blooming single from White Magic (Tirk), the first album Judd has recorded as Sorcerer. White Magic is a casual labor of love (all too rare in these studied-yet-throwaway days) that’s easy to fall for on the first listen. Judd — who sometimes writes about music for the Web site Dream Chimney — is still capable of the Johnny Marr–like rush, push, and spangled jangle he brought to the band Call and Response, but freed from group strictures he lands on a relaxed approach to writing and recording that allows for gorgeous chord changes, compositions that morph, and keyboards and guitars that shimmer.

White Magic’s track listing primarily consists of two-word titles — "Airbrush Dragon," "Egyptian Sunset," "Bamboo Brainwave" — that inspire visualization, and on MySpace, Judd invents a variety of apt and funny pseudogenres, such as "’80s montage music," to describe the Sorcerer sound. "So many friends, when I played [Sorcerer’s] music for them, would say, ‘This would be great for an ’80s movie scene or a montage,’" he explains when asked about the various substyle terms he coined on a lark. "I definitely grew up during that period and watched the movies, so it’s ingrained. I thought I might as well just go for it. I like having some humor and playfulness, like Thomas Fehlmann, the Kompakt [label] guy who was in the Orb…. At some point [more recently] electronic music got caught up in always trying to do something new. That’s fun for the musician but not always for the listener. In my stuff the beat isn’t what’s making you go, ‘Oh wow.’ If it’s happening, it’s from the chords."

Judd and his girlfriend recently moved from Oakland — where he’d also spent much of his early childhood with a mom who loves Prince — into the Mission. Sorcerer, however, can usually be found loitering on either side of a magic door where kitsch transforms into loveliness. One side of that door definitely opens onto the beach. White Magic‘s "Blind Yachtsman" is a love child born from Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman and yacht rock. Judd often draws on whatever he’s listening to or watching, but other seafaring Sorcerer songs, such as "Surfing at Midnight" and "Hawaiian Island," flow directly from his experiences while surfing and scuba diving.

"Maybe the beach represents this free place, away from computers and technology," Judd posits when I mention that Norwegian counterparts such as Terje (whose MySpace interests are "Coconuts, Hawaiian sunsets, moose/dolphins/unicorn/practically everything in a sunset") share his fondness for littoral motifs. Whether discussing his girlfriend’s most recent Midnites for Maniacs–ready movie rental (Side Out, a beach volleyball drama starring C. Thomas Howell) or a weekend visit to Nippon Goldfish Co. on Geary ("You’re so close to the animals, and they look kind of crazy"), Judd keeps returning to the waterfront. "In the ocean," he notes, "you feel like there’s almost no rules. You’re having fun, and it’s almost dangerous fun — a kind that you don’t find in the city."

THE RISING AND SETTING SUNS OF ARP


A setting sun, bisected by clouds, hovers over darkening ocean waves on the cover of In Light, the first album by San Francisco’s Arp; the title, drawn in slim neon-tube cursive by San Francisco artist Tauba Auerbach, is suspended from the upper left-hand corner of a tangerine and gold sky. The summer sun happens to be setting outside the upper Guerrero living room window of Arp’s Alexis Georgopoulos as he talks about this image (partly inspired by the melancholic found-film cosmograms of visual artist Tacita Dean) and how it relates to the music on the album, which will be released by the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound next month.

"An overwhelming number of people still tend to think of electronic music as being cold," Georgopoulos says while sitar notes from an LP quietly resonate through his and roommate Kathryn Anne Davis’s blue-walled apartment, where a large chunk of coral rests on a clear Plexiglas coffee table. "I wanted to make something that was warm, that had human qualities, that was a little worn, and that — along with the imagery of the record — dealt with memory, the degradation of memory, and revisionist memory. I also wanted to make something that referenced landscape and light and natural things in a way that wasn’t new age." I point to a fat tome about the proto–new age label ECM on a nearby bookcase, which Georgopoulos built. "Proto–new age music, if you select carefully, can be amazing," he responds. "Even the kernels of early sequencing in Ash Ra Tempel sound really radiant."

If a new age of electronic music spanning from San Francisco to Oslo is dawning (or setting), then Georgopoulos — a chief member of Tussle until just after the group recorded last year’s Telescope Mind (Smalltown Supersound) — has taken it to the bridge and maybe even been the bridge. In 2002, after writing about the graphic design of Smalltown Supersound’s Kim Hiorthøy for Tokion, Georgopoulos — who edits the music section of SOMA magazine and sometimes contributes to the Guardian — offered to put together a Bay Area showcase at Club Six for the label. "I don’t think he had done anything like that before; he just wanted to have us over, which was very generous," label owner Joakim Hoaglund recalls via e-mail before turning to a discussion of his and Georgopoulos’s latest collaboration. With Arp, "it’s a relief [for me] to do a small personal project. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel [In Light] has this great and unique mix of US West Coast art and culture with European avant-gardism and kraut rock. It’s a very special album."

Clutter and clusters are on Georgopoulos’s mind as we discuss music and its surroundings. "I was a huge stacker [of books and records]," he says when I mention his well-ordered home studio. "But I take after my mother — she’s very neat and feels like she can’t do the work she needs to do unless things are organized." The first-generation American child of parents from France and Greece, Georgopoulos has chosen the dreamy, maternal lull of a track titled "St. Tropez" to open In Light before "Potentialities" surges out of speakers (or from headphones) with a subtly rising force that’s ultimately awesome to behold. Most of In Light‘s seven meditative tracks were first showcased in a 2006 group exhibition at New Langton Arts, where up to two listeners could climb into a feather bed enclosed in a small podlike space. "It wasn’t cerebral. It wasn’t about dissecting a suspended space," Georgopoulos says. "Though with a lot of [Arp]’s music, suspension is one of the effects I’m trying to create."

For Georgopoulos, Arp’s state of suspension runs counter to different kinds of tension. While discussing his love for the analog organ-drum machine sounds employed by groups such as Cluster (a few of whose albums have just been reissued by Oakland label Water), Suicide, and Spacemen 3, he notes that "too much electronic [today] sounds like coke-related music." In contrast, Arp’s electronic music is humane — a rarity not just in electronic music but also on the streets of San Francisco during the Gavin Newsom era, when homelessness has become more difficult and abject and attitudes toward it more hostile. "I can’t remember the last time I left the house and didn’t have a confrontation with a very disturbing sight, and after a long time that really starts to chip away at you," Georgopoulos says. "I drove a cab for four years, until 2004, and when I think about it I can’t believe that I did. It suited my life at the time, but you’re interacting with [people on] PCP, meth, and all kinds of shit — you just never know. Now that I don’t drive a cab I’m hardly ever in the Tenderloin."

PRINS THOMAS, LINDSTRØM, AND THE INTERNATIONAL UNDERGROUND


Wearing a pair of shades, Prins Thomas is chatting with the doorman of his hotel in the Tenderloin when I stumble out of a taxi to interview him. It’s a sunny, hot late afternoon, but Thomas — who has just woken up — isn’t exactly on Norway time or California time. Later in the evening he’ll be DJing Gun Club’s night at Temple Nightclub. Right now, though it’s too late for lunch and too early for dinner, the moment calls for a meal, so we settle into a restaurant on Polk Street. "I used to play in Oslo for the same people again and again," he says after we order food. "Now I can travel and meet like minds. It’s inspiring to meet people who can help you out and who you can help out."

In San Francisco two such people are Sorcerer’s Judd and Hatchback’s Grawe. Only after remixing tracks by Judd’s and Grawe’s solo projects did Thomas discover (by following Web links) that they also record together as Windsurf. Next year he plans to release some Windsurf recordings on a new label, Internasjonal, that will step outside the Norwegian and dance music confines of his established label, Full Pupp. This season, though, he and Lindstrøm have released — in addition to a variety of vinyl projects — a full-length collaboration (Reinterpretations, the beat-driven follow-up compilation to their 2006 debut on Eskimo) and individual mix CDs. Lindstrøm has contributed a chapter to the mix series Late Night Tales (released by the label of the same name), while Thomas has unleashed Cosmo Galactic Prism (Eskimo), a two-and-a-half-hour CD cornucopia that moves from strange and delightful multigenre tracks by Glissandro 70 (the bizarrely beautiful "Bolan Muppets") and Metalchicks (the awesome "Tears for Fears/Conspiracy") through Hawkwind into the classic disco of "Get Down Boy" by Paper Dolls.

"I thought it fit the whole collection as an introduction," Thomas says when I ask him about Cosmo Galactic Prism‘s opener, "I Hear a New World," which Arp’s Georgopoulos also says he’s included in mixes. "It kind of sets the tone — it’s so freaky that anything that comes after it is going to sound pretty normal. When I first heard it I couldn’t tell if it was new or old. There’s a similar quality to a track by Art Blakey called "Oscalypso" [from the 1956–57 album Drum Suite, now on Dusty Groove]. The drums are so distorted that it sounds relevant next to new, compressed dance music, even though it’s 50 years old."

It isn’t surprising that Thomas’s expansive love for and knowledge of music stems from his family. "My stepfather has been as obsessed with music [as I am]," he explains while charting Lindstrøm’s background in country and gospel bands and his own early days DJing hip-hop records at youth clubs. Thomas’s stepfather "would play Ry Cooder and the Sex Pistols for me. He had the Robert Christgau Consumer Guide books, which are great. I think it’s funny how [Christgau] can write similarly about an Eric Clapton album and a Chic album. For me, it really isn’t about bad music or good music, but about music that excites you and music that doesn’t."

It also probably isn’t surprising that one genre Thomas’s stepfather didn’t like — prog rock — figures heavily in his and Lindstrøm’s music. As for newer terms or styles, like Lindstrøm (who good-naturedly told me, "I guess the good thing is that some people are telling me I invented a genre"), Thomas has a sense of humor about the phrase space disco. "It could have been a lot worse," he says. "It could have been called crunk or syrup [Houston’s cough syrup–influenced hip-hop sound]. In my hometown, at underage school dances 15-year-old girls used to soak their tampons in moonshine. I guess that’s the Norwegian version of syrup."

UP, UP, AND AWAY WITH DOMINIQUE LEONE


When I meet Dominique Leone, he’s sitting in a San Francisco café that might have the highest number of laptops per square foot. Leone has one too, but instead of staring into its screen he’s feverishly using a pencil to draw on a page in a sky blue Strathmore sketchbook. I’m not surprised, because scribbler nonpareil Sol LeWitt caps a list of audio and visual influences on Leone’s MySpace page. That site also offers an opportunity to hear the gorgeous song "Conversational," on which Leone’s spare keyboard arrangement and ascendant choirboy-gone-slightly-cuckoo voice update the plaintive yet celestial highlights ("I’ll Be Home," "Living Without You") of Harry Nilsson’s classic 1970 cover collection Nilsson Sings Newman (Buddha).

Leone’s MySpace page contains audio treats, but what about his sketchbook page? It turns out he’s drawing, in his words, "a giant skyscraper-sized robot that streams music and scents into the air and every 10 minutes or so spews out free kittens." Indeed, Leone’s sketch does look a bit like that, so when he says he’ll try his hand at an idea I have — a constellation that playfully demonstrates links between San Francisco and Norway musicians — I take him up on the offer.

Though Leone doesn’t include himself in the finished rendering ("More an exploding molecule than a constellation," he says), which accompanies this article, he belongs in a nearby orbit, thanks to his collaborations with Lindstrøm. In addition to providing the quiet heart of that artist’s Late Night Tales mix, "Conversational" is also featured on an EP, simply titled Dominique Leone, that Lindstrøm is releasing next month on Feedelity (with art by Hiorthøy) as a precursor to Leone’s album. The gonzo centerpiece of the EP is "Clairevoyage — a Medley Performed by the 16th Rebels of Mung," on which Lindstrøm and Oslo Bee Gees maniacs Mungolian Jet Set, responding to Leone’s song "Claire" (on the EP’s B-side), construct a 12-minutes-plus propulsive fantasia that builds to a helium-voiced climax not far from the munchkin antics of Meek’s "I Hear a New World." Leone is no slouch at reaching countertenor octaves naturally or through tape manipulation. But since the EP also credits Mungolian figures named Katzenjammer and Izzy Tizzy as vocalists, it’s anyone’s guess as to who has inhaled a few balloons before singing.

Leone says he grew up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and the latter’s influence is especially apparent in the semielated, semiagitated high harmonies that fly through intricately braided compositions like his "Nous Tombons dans Elle." A self-described "band nerd" in high school and music major at Texas Tech University, he feels a kinship with the more overtly postmodern academic songwriting approaches of friends such as Matmos and Kevin Blechdom. To Lindstrøm, though, he’s a 21st-century answer to the progressive pop of Todd Rundgren (who happens to be a favorite of Sorcerer as well). "I remember the first time Lindstrøm wrote to me [about my music]. He was talking about Paul McCartney, but his big thing was Rundgren," Leone says with a laugh. "I wasn’t a big Rundgren fan, but [Lindstrøm] wasn’t the first person to listen to my music and mention Rundgren.

"The first track [‘Forelopic Bit’] on Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas is, to me, the best example of how to make a dance track from prog and fusion influences," Leone notes before adding some observations that probably stem from his experience as a freelance music writer for Pitchfork more than from his far-flung everyday listening tastes, which have ranged from salsa to bluegrass over the past few months. "A lot of people are trying to [bring prog and fusion to dance floors] right now. You can go out [to a club] and hear these Balearic and beardo DJs just playing tracks. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But Lindstrøm is one of the few guys who are actually trying to make original songs incorporating those influences."

A HATCHBACK DRIVE TO WINDSURF


Sam Grawe of Hatchback and Windsurf sings the praises of his Sony tape recorder as I place my old, cheap, and wonderful Panasonic next to some glasses of wine on a table in his home recording studio. Plastic owl wall fixtures and a rug with shaded steps of color that resemble the volume bars of a digital stereo rest above and below the assortment of keyboards (including that prized prog possession, the Rhodes) in the room. "You can listen to instrumentals as background music, but I’ve always been into [moments] when music connects you with what’s happening or what you’re doing," Grawe says. "So much of my [youth] was spent driving around the rural countryside and finding the perfect song. Sound can fulfill an opening or void in your emotional experience. Images can be part of it, smell can be part of it, but sound can take it to another level."

Grawe’s sympathy for trusty old tape recorders, his playfully decorated recording space, and the attentiveness to setting in his reminiscence all make sense — by day he is the editor in chief of the modern architecture and design magazine Dwell. By night and whenever else he can find the time, he listens to and makes music. It’s an enduring passion that goes back to high school years spent using MIDI to put music theory into practice and compose fugues in the manner of Rick Wakeman and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. "The guy who stocked the import section [at a nearby record store] was some crazy prog freak," Grawe remembers. "A friend of mine had The Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock, so I could read about some crazy Italian or German band and then go to the mall and buy the CD."

"White Diamond," the 21st-century prog rock of Gibraltar that Hatchback has just made public (on the UK label This Is Not an Exit), showcases the fuguelike interplay between simplicity and complexity in Grawe’s compositions. While a 17-minute remix by Prins Thomas adds club elements, the original version, with its hallucinatory, starlit varieties of arpeggio, makes for an ideal personal soundtrack. Hatchback’s next 12-inch release on This Is Not an Exit, a track called "Jet Lag," is funkier yet similarly majestic, layered, and emotive. In both cases vocals would be a pointless distraction — synthesizers seem to sing to one another, becoming increasingly, endearingly creaturelike by song’s end. "Friends chide me for not knowing the words to songs I’ve heard a thousand times," Grawe says after testifying to his love for the film scores of Vangelis, Piero Umiliani, and Francis Lai. "But often a little synth part [in a song] is more interesting to me."

Grawe sings on some of the Windsurf songs that he and Judd have recorded for Prins Thomas to release on Internasjonal. Windsurf allows him to tap into a longtime interest in duos and groups ranging from the many projects of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono and Neu!’s Michael Rother (Grawe recently contributed liner notes to an upcoming reissue of Rother’s first solo album, 1977’s Flammende Herzen, by Oakland’s Water) to … Steely Dan. "To a lot of people they embody what’s wrong with music," Grawe says of the last. "But to me they embody everything that’s right. Not only is their music well crafted, but some of their lyrics, to me, are on a par with [Bob] Dylan."

As for Oslo and San Francisco, Grawe — who recently created a Venn diagram for Mike Bee of Amoeba Music that illustrates the fusion of influences within Sorcerer, Hatchback, and Windsurf — welcomes the growing, glowing galactic prism formed by artists from both areas who have an affinity for one another’s music. "I think it’s interesting that all these records happened without [the people involved] ever meeting in person or sometimes even talking on the phone," Grawe says. "It’s all been through the Internet. It was great to finally see [Thomas] when he came to town and hang out, have dinner, and play records. We connected instantly."

I HEAR A NEW WORLD


To trace musical connections between a pair of geographical areas is reductive. The artists I’ve written about love music from a number of other countries (Germany and Brazil, to name just two) and cumulatively have friendships with contemporary musicians from all over the globe. But in focusing on sonic signals being sent forth between Norway and our Bay, signals that have yielded some of my favorite recordings of the past year, I also discovered unexpected commonalities that open into new words about — and worlds of — sound. Almost all of the San Francisco musicians I spoke with also write about music, and three of them are journalists, for example. It seems the divisions between writers and musicians continue to blur, leading to the formation of a new music of the spheres.

When Joe Meek composed and recorded I Hear a New World: An Outer Space Music Fantasy (RPM) in England in 1960, his intense, obsessive love of music and sound resulted in the audio equivalent of what is called visionary. But he remained isolated. Today it’s great to see — and hear — figures such as Meek and disco innovator Arthur Russell living on, their spirits floating through many people’s songs and being revived in upcoming documentaries. Meek heard a new world of sound, calling him and haunting him. He couldn’t tell what was in store for him, but his new world of sound has arrived. It spans from Norway and our Bay to the farthest reaches of inner and outer space.

Hear it!

www.dominiqueleone.com

www.feedelity.com

www.myspace.com/feedelity

www.myspace.com/arp001

www.myspace.com/dominiqueleone

www.myspace.com/fullpupp

www.myspace.com/hatchback76

www.myspace.com/mungolianjetset

www.myspace.com/prinsthomas

www.myspace.com/sorcererjams

www.myspace.com/toddterje

www.myspace.com/windsurfmusic

www.smalltownsupersound.com

www.sorcerermusic.com

Famous Rib Shack

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REVIEW Some people might tell you that when it comes to barbecue, it’s all about the sauce. But to paraphrase Dr. Dre: sauces ain’t nothin’ but hos and tricks. Which is to say, even the most powerful sauce is destined to be turned out by the true pimp in the grilled-meats game: the smoke. The folks at San Bruno’s Famous Rib Shack are above passing off mere flash-fired meats as smokalicious BB-to-the-m-f’in’-Q. I walked in with my daughter, Dolly, and ordered the Tailgate for Two combo: three pork ribs, three beef ribs, a quarter chicken, one hot link, two pieces of corn bread, and two sides (I chose mac and cheese and collard greens), all for a measly $26.95. These were not teensy little ribs; they looked like they’d been cut off the local 4-H club’s prize sow and cow. The pork fell off the bone, and the beef was flavorful, though a tad chewy in spots. Hot links often come direct from the factory, but this one was spiced to perfection and purportedly hand-made by the owner, Isaac Mejia. The chicken was good too, but poultry is more of a cleansing palliative in between ribs than real barbecue — chicken is a vegetable with wings.

The sauces? Mild, hot, and maple, and all good, though Mejia has his priorities straight and got the meat right first and foremost. His corn bread was bangin’, which is important, as I’m not a fan of joints that slap a slice of flimsy white bread on a paper plate and call it authentic. That’s cheating. Greens should not taste like stewed lawn clippings either, and the shack’s tasted like, well, pork — the Cadillac of meats. Finally, nothing makes a kid happier than a brownie for dessert, especially when it’s covered in nuts and marshmallows.

The word on the Internet is that the Famous Rib Shack used to be called Jimmy’s Famous Rib Shack. No disrespect to Jimmy, but unless he was St. James of the Rib Rack, his food could not have been better. Long live Isaac’s Famous Rib Shack.

FAMOUS RIB SHACK Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–9 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–10 p.m. 223 El Camino Real, San Bruno. (650) 952-2809

Imitation of life

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

Lonely, socially awkward dude becomes obsessed with an eerily lifelike female doll. Uh, I’ve seen that movie before, when it was a horror flick called Love Object. But if you can imagine the same plot transferred into a bittersweet romance and with the kink factor dialed way down, you’ll have a grip on Lars and the Real Girl, a movie so softhearted it implies the silicone-worshiping misfit in question (Ryan Gosling) doesn’t even have sex with his sex doll. They do smooch on occasion, though.

From Craig Gillespie — the director of Mr. Woodcock, a far less gentle 2007 affair — and scripter Nancy Oliver (a frequent Six Feet Under writer), Lars and the Real Girl couches its outrageous concept in classic Amer-indie trappings, including a naturalistic setting that incorporates small-town vistas, snowy cinematography, and a Sundance Channel–ready cast. Besides genre darling Gosling, there’s Patricia Clarkson as Dagmar, a sympathetic doctor; Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer as Lars’s concerned brother, Gus, and pregnant sister-in-law, Karin; and Kelli Garner as Margo, Lars’s endearingly dorky coworker. Margo’s sweet on Lars, but he’s so terrified of human interaction that he’d rather form a relationship with Bianca, the Angelina Jolie–esque plastic vixen that arrives via UPS one chilly morning.

Naturally, Gus and Karin are horrified — Gus is perhaps more mortified — when they meet Lars’s much-exalted new girlfriend (he met her on the Internet, you see). Having an anatomically correct doll as a constant companion is spooky enough, but Lars believes she’s real and conducts one-sided conversations with her and tenderly looks after her well-being. Before long, Bianca trades in her fishnets and hooker makeup for sweatpants and bangs, settles into her very own wheelchair, and accompanies Lars everywhere he goes.

Surprisingly, the community comes to accept Lars’s new friend — they all love Lars, a lifelong resident. His mother died in childbirth, and older bro Gus has only recently reentered his life, having moved away to sow oats while leaving Lars in the care of their cold, distant, now-deceased father. This is a guy who feels pain when he’s touched — no wonder his dream girl is even less alive than Kim Cattrall in Mannequin (or, to cite my favorite movie with an inanimate humanoid as its main character, Terry Kiser in Weekend at Bernie’s). Thanks to the fact that everyone in town plays along with Lars’s Bianca-is-real delusion, the doll does begin to take on a life of her own. She volunteers! She gets a job! She’s elected to the school board! Much to Lars’s annoyance, she’s too busy to spend every waking moment with her boyfriend — even though she is technically not awake.

Lars and the Real Girl has its moments of broad comedy, but its delicate tone demands that it underplay any sight-gag potential. After Half Nelson (and, perhaps no less so, The Notebook) cinephiles have come to expect great things from Gosling’s performances; he’s got a way of elevating even uninspiring material to a more meaningful plane, in the manner of Edward Norton or Sean Penn. As Lars he’s pudgy, slovenly (except for his perfectly slicked-back hair), and mustachioed, with a nervous blink and a hunched, shy demeanor. He interprets Lars’s overflowing reserves of fear and grief with subtle grace. At first a salve for loneliness, Bianca becomes both a coping strategy and a way for Lars to externalize his repressed anguish. Any actor able to transfer such complicated emotions onto a plastic costar is clearly as real as they come. *

LARS AND THE REAL GIRL

Opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters

www.larsandtherealgirl-themovie.com

41st Anniversary Special: Wrecked park

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› news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department has a long history of maintaining parks, community centers, and other recreational offerings. In fact, it controls more land in the city than any other entity, public or private. But after seeing its budget repeatedly slashed during lean fiscal years, the underfunded department has become a prime target for some controversial privatization schemes.

There are ongoing efforts to privatize city golf courses, supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Rec and Park general manager Yomi Agunbiade (see “Bilking the Links,” page 22). And there are ongoing fears that the city intends to privatize its popular Camp Mather vacation spot, something the RPD studied a few years ago and Sup. Jake McGoldrick has fought and highlighted.

Rec and Park has identified $37 million in needs at Camp Mather — the product of a private study the agency has been unable to fully explain to the public (see “From Cabin to Castle,” 4/4/07) — but left Camp Mather off a big bond measure planned for February 2008.

“They say $37 million you need up here, and how much you got in there for the ballot measure? Zip, zero,” McGoldrick told the Guardian. “It’s a familiar pattern: you underfund the hell out of something, and then you turn around and say, ‘We, the public sector, cannot handle taking care of this.'<0x2009>”

Rec and Park spokesperson Rose Dennis denies there are plans to privatize Camp Mather or that its omission from the bond measure is telling. “Many people disagreed — including you — with the funding needs and whether we could back it up,” she explained as the reason for its omission from the bond measure.

In his Oct. 1 endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said, “We actually made some commitments just this last week with Sup. McGoldrick to help support his efforts, because he’s very protective of Camp Mather, and I appreciate his leadership on this, to help resource some of the needs up there without privatizing, without moving in accordance with your fears.”

And while Newsom said he hoped to avoiding privatizing Camp Mather, he refused to say he wouldn’t: “I’m not suggesting it’s off the table, because I’m not necessarily sure that the conditions that exist today will be conditions that exist tomorrow, and I will always be open to argument.”

But at least the Camp Mather and golf arguments have been happening mostly in public. That’s what voters intended in 1983 when they passed Proposition J, which requires public hearings, a staff study, and a vote by the Board of Supervisors before city services can be privatized. Yet over the past couple of years, there’s been an effort to quietly shift operations at a half-dozen rec centers away from city programs and toward private nonprofits.

It’s called Rec Connect. Its supporters bill it as an innovative effort to bring much-needed recreation programs to underserved, low-income neighborhoods. “This is a pilot program to see if a collaboration between a community-based organization and a rec center yields a richer program and a more engaged community,” said Margaret Brodkin, director of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which created the program and oversees that and other uses of the city’s Children’s Fund.

But to members of the Service Employees International Union Local 1021 — which includes most city employees and has filed grievances challenging Rec Connect — the program is a sneaky attempt to have underpaid, privately funded workers take over services that should be provided by city employees, who are better paid, unionized, and accountable to the public.

“The city took funds from the city’s coffers and gave them to the Department of Children, Youth and [Their] Families,” Margot Reed, a work-site organizer for the union, told the Guardian. “DCYF is using these funds, through Rec Connect, to contract out to private nonprofits work that rec staff were doing for a quarter of the cost.”

Brodkin was the longtime director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth — a perpetual thorn in the side of City Hall and the author of the measure that set aside some property taxes to create the Children’s Fund — before Newsom hired her to head the DCYF. She sees her current role as a continuation of her last one, and she sees Rec Connect as an enhancement of needed services rather than a privatization.

“There is a commitment that no jobs would be lost. I’m a big supporter of the public sector,” Brodkin said, while acknowledging that the RPD is chronically underfunded. “I am certainly aware of the resources issue at Rec and Park…. I’d be a happy camper if the Rec and Park budget was doubled. But I’d still believe in this program and say it offers a richer experience.”

Rec Connect began in 2005 with a study that looked at unmet recreational needs and evaluated facilities that might be good places to bring in community-based organizations to offer specialized classes. The whole program was financed through a mix of public funds and grants from private foundations. The three-year pilot program started just over a year ago.

“The Rec Connects,” Newsom told the Guardian, “are a way of leveraging resources and getting more of our CBOs involved and using these great assets and facilities, instead of limiting use to the way things have been done.”

Rec Connect director Jo Mestelle denied that the initiative is a privatization attempt.

“Rec and Park brings the facilities, the sports, and traditional recreation. The CBOs bring the youth-development perspective and nontraditional programming,” Mestelle said. “Hopefully, together we build a community that includes youth-leadership groups and advisory councils.”

Few would dispute the need for more after-school or other youth programs, particularly in the violence-plagued Western Addition, where some of the Rec Connect centers are. But the means of providing these programs is something new for San Francisco, starting with the fact that even though Mestelle works in the DCYF office, her salary is paid for entirely by private foundations.

That relationship and those funders aren’t posted anywhere or immediately available to the public, but Brodkin agreed to provide them to the Guardian. They include the Hellman Family Philanthropic Foundation ($50,000), the Hearst Foundation ($50,000), the San Francisco Foundation ($128,000), the Haas Foundation ($100,000), and the SH Cowell Foundation ($150,000).

Brodkin and Mestelle characterized those foundations as fairly unimpeachable, and Brodkin defended the arrangement as part of a national trend: “The thing that’s odd about SEIU’s perspective is this is happening all over.”

That’s precisely the point, SEIU’s Robert Haaland says.

“It’s been a strategy since the ’70s to, as [conservative activist] Grover Norquist calls it, ‘starve the beast,'<0x2009>” or defund government programs, Haaland said. “On a national level there is a lot going on that impacts us locally.”

Minutes from a recent Recreation and Park Commission meeting confirm that rec center directors have only about $1,000 each year to cover the cost of buying basketballs, team jerseys, referee whistles, and other basic sports and safety supplies. The SEIU grievance also notes that recreation staff positions have decreased by a third just as senior management positions increased by a third.

“We don’t have enough dollars for $20-an-hour rec center staff who are directly responsible for the kids and are well known to the community. We believe kids deserve great coaches, consistency, longevity, and commitment,” Reed said.

SEIU Local 1021 chapter president Larry McNesby is also the Rec and Park manager who oversees Palega Park, one of the Rec Connect sites. He told the Guardian that while his rec directors are “under pressure from the mayor to show him numbers of people that they are serving,” Rec and Park’s new online registration fails to reflect the “hundreds of drop-ins” that rec staff serve on a daily basis.

But he said the department has been set up to fail by chronic underfunding.

“I’d love Rec Connect and DCYF to be on a level playing field, because my directors could out-recreate theirs any day,” McNesby said. “You can’t just eliminate our jobs and replace them with someone who makes just above minimum wage.”

Actually, Brodkin and Mestelle note that negotiations with SEIU over Rec Connect have resulted in a guarantee that no jobs will be replaced and an agreement by the city as to 250 different tasks that the Rec Connect CBOs can’t perform. Still, they say the program brings innovation to a stagnant city agency.

“Before Rec Connect the rec centers always had a Ping-Pong table and some board games, but some of them were really poor, many were tired looking, none had computers or Internet. So we’ve had to think outside the box. Rec [and] Park is a big department, and it’s not always efficient,” Mestelle said.

Public records show that in 2006, the DCYF, whose primary function is to administer grants, sent $1 million in public money to Rec Connect from the Children’s Trust Fund, a pool of cash the city gathers each year by levying 3¢ per dollar of property tax.

Both Rec Connect and city workers stress the importance of offering a range of good programs to young people. “Our work is at a more social level,” McNesby says. “Every minute a kid spends in a rec center is a minute they’re not breaking into a car or victimizing someone or being victimized.”

The question is who should provide those programs. “It’s society’s value system that controls where the money goes,” Rec and Park spokesperson Dennis said. “It’s a really provocative discussion. There are some very compelling trade-offs argued in convincing fashion by intelligent people on both sides. These aren’t easy decisions.”

But the union people say that when it comes to Rec Connect, that discussion isn’t happening in public forums in a forthright way. As Reed said, “Gavin Newsom never went to the voters and said, ‘Here’s what we want to do: cut the rec staff and bring in private nonprofits.'”

41st Anniversary Special: Connect the Connects

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› steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom has created an entirely new branch of city government that is private, funded by undisclosed corporate donations, staffed by volunteers who are often city employees or his campaign donors, and unaccountable to any internal controls or outside scrutiny.

Yet rather than being a cause for concern, Newsom has touted San Francisco Connect and its four subprograms — Project Homeless Connect, Tech Connect, Green Connect, and Project Children and Families Connect — as his proudest achievement, a model he is actively exporting to other cities.

According to its Web site, "The mission of SF Connect is to mobilize residents and sectors for a stronger San Francisco. SF Connect is about engaged residents volunteering their talent and time for the City, as well as innovative partnerships between the private, public, and social [nonprofit] sectors."

Green Connect (and "partners" that include Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Oracle), does cleanup and tree planting. Tech Connect (and partners Netgear.com and Hewlett Packard) works on "digital inclusion." And Project Homeless Connect (Gap, Visa, AT&T, Blue Shield, IBM, the Hotel Council, and Charles Schwab among its partners) does homeless outreach events.

During his endorsement interview with the Guardian, we asked Newsom about the programs and how they allow the private sector to take a more active role in delivering public services on behalf of city government, sometimes with the help of public resources. Is that a model he likes?

"Oh, you’d better believe that!" Newsom said. "Am I for actual responsibility and civic service and duty? You’d better believe it. I think it should be mandated for everyone who graduates from our public education system. I think they should be forced to give back and contribute in community service. What the Connects are all about is community service and connecting the dots. The Rec Connects, which may be what you’re referring to, is a way of leveraging resources and getting more of our [community-based organizations] involved."

All of those involved with SF Connect also seem to sing its praises. But there’s another side to Newsom’s feel-good approach to delivering public services: they often displace social services delivered by qualified providers, supplement underfunded city services with private providers rather than simply fixing and funding them, provide wedges for corporations to take over public spheres (as the Google-EarthLink wi-fi deal through Tech Connect very nearly did), and allow corporations to buy influence with unregulated contributions to a politician’s pet program.

"If you look at the ways of privatizing, volunteering is one, and it sounds nice," said Margot Reed, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021.

Yet that volunteerism sometimes replaces services that previously were provided by government or nonprofit agencies whose contracts and performance could be scrutinized. But Newsom’s approach through SF Connect doesn’t allow that kind of transparency.

To illustrate the problem, the Guardian made a Sunshine Ordinance records request to the Mayor’s Office, asking for a complete breakdown of the budgets of all the Connect programs. The office refused to provide the information, referring us instead to SF Connect, but that organization has a history of refusing to provide the Guardian and other media organizations with its budget and donor lists.

Last year the San Francisco Chronicle fought the Newsom administration for two months to get it to reveal the donor list, finally winning the release of the names of donors who had agreed to be disclosed (some asked for their money to be returned instead). SF Connect’s donors included PG&E, which gave $25,000; Google investor Ron Conway, who gave $100,000; Wells Fargo Bank, which gave $20,000; and Carmen Policy (the former 49ers top dog who was recently named to push a June ballot measure on a new stadium that Newsom wants to build), who gave $2,500. Other donors included Newsom appointees, contributors, and companies that do business with the city.

When we tried to get a current list of donors, staffers didn’t respond to Guardian phone calls or e-mails.

We also asked Newsom’s office for a complete breakdown of city staff time, money, and other resources that have gone into supporting the Connect programs, knowing that city staff have been involved in their events and e-mails have gone out from city offices.

"There is no line item in any budgets nor any reporting within our office on time spent coordinating with SF Connect," Joe Arellano from the Mayor’s Office of Communications responded by e-mail after repeated requests for answers.

That’s probably because there seems to be no clear line drawn between where the private SF Connect ends and where the public-sector Mayor’s Office begins. Call the phone number on the San Francisco Connect Web site for Project Homeless Connect, and it rings at the desk of Judith Crane in the Department of Public Health.

Even getting a list of privatization proposals by Newsom hasn’t been easy. The Mayor’s Office cited technical inadequacies when we asked it to search all of Newsom’s speeches, press releases, e-mails, and other documents for the words "public-private partnership," a favorite Newsom phrase.

We know that he’s unsuccessfully sought to privatize jail health services, security at the Asian Art Museum, and the city’s golf courses (see "Bilking the Links," page 22) and to create a citywide wireless Internet system run by Google and EarthLink.

But ask Newsom about it, as we did, and you’ll hear his semantic gymnastics: "Privatization is failing, so I’m not pro-privatization. I don’t look to privatize. I look for ways to manage more creatively and more efficiently."

41st Anniversary Special: The privatization of San Francisco

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

William M. Tweed was one of the greatest crooks in American political history, a notorious Tammany Hall boss in New York who managed in the course of just a few years, starting in 1870, to steal more than $75 million (the equivalent of more than $1 billion today) from the city coffers. The way he did it was simple. As Elliott Sclar, a Columbia economist and expert on privatization, notes, Tweed took advantage of the fact that much of the work of city government was contracted out to private companies. Boss Tweed controlled the contracts; the contractors overcharged the city by vast sums and kicked back the money to Tammany Hall.

This is a rather extreme example, but not, Sclar argues, an atypical one: the worst corruption scandals in American history usually involve private contractors and public money. In fact, he argues, privatization is almost by its nature a recipe for scandal and corruption.

Nothing in the public sector — no incompetence, no waste, no bureaucratic bungling — begins to compare with what happens when private operators get their hands on public money. And the cost of monitoring contracts, making sure contractors don’t cheat or steal, and forcing them to act in ways that reflect the public interest is so high that it dwarfs any savings that privatization seems to offer.

That’s the message of the Guardian‘s 41st anniversary issue.

It’s relatively easy to investigate government malfeasance. The records are public, the players are visible, and the laws are on the side of the citizens.

But when Bruce B. Brugmann started the Guardian in 1966 with his wife, Jean Dibble, he realized that the real scandals often took place outside City Hall. They involved the real powerful interests, the giant corporations and big businesses that were coming to dominate the city’s skyline and its political life. The details were secretive, the money hidden.

One of the first big stories the paper broke, in 1969, involved perhaps the greatest privatization scandal in urban history, the tale of how Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had stolen San Francisco’s municipal power, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The famous Abe Ruef municipal graft scandals of the early 20th century, the Guardian wrote, were "peanuts, birdseed compared to this."

When I first came to work here, in 1982, Brugmann used to tell me that daily papers, which loved to try to expose some poor soul who was collecting two welfare checks or a homeless person who was running a panhandling scam, were missing the point. "If you look hard enough, you can always find a small-time welfare cheat," he’d tell me. "We want to know about corporate welfare, about the big guys who are stealing the millions."

And there were plenty.

In his new book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Knopf), Robert Reich, the economist and former secretary of labor, argues that during the cold war, when American politicians railed against the socialist model of economic planning, this country actually had a carefully planned economy. The planning wasn’t done by elected officials; it was done by a handful of oligarchic corporations and military contractors.

Modern San Francisco was born in that same cauldron. During World War II, captains of industry and military planners took control of the city’s economy, directing resources into the shipyards, collecting labor from around the country to build and repair Navy vessels, and making sure the region was doing its part to defeat the Axis powers. It worked — and when the war ended the generals went away, but the business leaders stayed and quietly, behind closed doors, created a master plan for San Francisco. Downtown would become a new Manhattan, with high-rise office buildings and white-collar jobs. The East Bay and the Peninsula would be suburbs, with a rail line (BART) carrying the workers to their desks. Private developers, working under the redevelopment aegis, demolished low-income neighborhoods to build a new convention center and hotels.

Nobody ever held a public hearing on the master plan. And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that San Franciscans figured out what was going on.

By 1971 the fight against Manhattanization began to dominate the Guardian‘s political coverage. It would play center stage in San Francisco politics for two more decades. The paper ran stories about high-rises and freeways and environmental impact reports, but the real issue was the privatization of the city’s planning process.

Ronald Reagan soared into the White House in 1980, rolling over a collapsing Jimmy Carter and a demoralized, moribund Democratic Party. Reagan and his backers had an agenda: to dismantle American government as we knew it, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society, to get the public sector out of the business of helping people and give the benefits to private business. "Government," Reagan announced, "isn’t the solution. Government is the problem."

The Guardian was firmly planted on the other side. We supported public power, public parks, public services, public accountability. We had no blinders about the flaws of government agencies — I spent much of my time in the early years writing about the mess that was Muni — but in the end we realized that at least the public sector carried the hope of reform. And we saw San Francisco as a beacon for the nation, a place where urban America could resist the Reagan doctrine.

Unfortunately, the mayor of San Francisco in the Reagan years might as well have been a Republican. Dianne Feinstein’s faith in the private sector rivaled that of the new president. She turned the city’s future over to the big real estate developers. She vetoed rent control and gave the landlords everything they wanted. And when the budget was tight, she ignored our demands that downtown pay its fair share and instead raised bus fares and cut library hours.

When gay men started dying of a strange new disease, there was no public money or service program to help them, from Washington DC or San Francisco. So the community was forced to build a private infrastructure to take care of people with AIDS — and years later, as Amanda Witherell notes in this issue, those private foundations became secretive and unaccountable.

In 1994 we got a tip that something funny was going on at the Presidio. The Sixth Army was leaving and turning perhaps the most valuable piece of urban real estate on Earth over to the National Park Service … in theory. In practice, we learned, some of the biggest corporations in town had come together with a different plan — to create a privatized park — and Rep. Nancy Pelosi was carrying their water. Every detail of the Presidio privatization made the front page of the Guardian — and still, the entire Democratic Party power structure (and much of the environmental movement) lined up behind Pelosi. Now we have a corporate park on public land, with that great pauper George Lucas winning a $60 million tax break to build a commercial office building in a national park.

And still, it continues.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a rising star in the Democratic Party, who told us he’s no fan of privatization, demonstrated the opposite in one of his signature political campaigns this year: he tried (and is still trying) to turn over the city’s broadband infrastructure — something that will be as important in this century as highways and bridges were in the last — to a private company. That’s what the whole wi-fi deal (now on the ballot as Proposition J) is about; the city could easily and affordably create its own system to deliver cheap Internet access to every resident and business. Instead, Newsom wants the private sector to do the job.

The Department of Public Health is running public money through a private foundation in a truly shady deal. The mayor’s Connect programs operate as public-private partnerships. Newsom wants to privatize the city’s golf courses, and maybe Camp Mather. He’s prepared to give one of the worst corporations in the country — Clear Channel Communications — the right to build and sell ads on bus shelters (and nobody has ever explained to us why the city can’t do that job and keep all the revenue). Housing policy? That depends entirely on what the private sector wants — and when we challenged Newsom on that in a recent interview, he snidely proclaimed that the city simply has to follow the lead of the developers because "we don’t live in a socialist society."

This is not how the city of San Francisco ought to be behaving. Because when you give public land, public services, public institutions, and public planning initiatives to the private sector, you get high prices, backroom deals, secrecy, corruption — and a community that’s given up on the notion of government as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.

You start acting like the people who have been running Washington DC since 1980 — instead of promoting a city policy and culture that ought to be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America.

Gimme less

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The Internet’s all abuzz (OK, the part of the Internet flooded by celebrity-obsessed housewives and former jazz dancers) about Britney Spears’ just-released music video for her single “Gimme More.” So what are you missing by watching mayoral debates or clipping your cuticles instead of cruising YouTube for mentally challenged bubblegum pop stars?

This:

Or I can just summarize it for you: Britney dances around a pole. Britney dances around a pole. Some other girls dance with Britney around a pole. Britney dances around a pole. Girls smile. The end. (Did I mention Britney dances around a pole?)

Though the video isn’t as dismal as her performance of the song at the VMAs – she actually looks awake in the video – it’s still pretty uninspired and uninspiring, especially for an artist who’s as much about performance as she is about actual music. Take away the seizure-worthy camera angle changes and it’s just, well, boring.

What’s less so? The Sex Pistols. So to add a bit of punk to your pop diet, read about Johnny Rotten calling Green Day “old gorgonzola cheese in old boots” and Britney’s VMA performance “like a school play by 11-year-olds” during an interview about the Sex Pistols reunion tour.

Scavenging’s new spirit

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› culture@sfbg.com

>>Click here to check out our Style 2007 Guide

It’s a warm September night, and I’m standing in a crowded art gallery in South San Francisco, staring at a metal octopus that moves its tentacles when you press a button. In many ways, it’s like every other reception I’ve been to: a table with snacks and wine, a healthy feeling of snobbery in the air, and a swath of hipsters blocking my view of everything. But as I walk around I notice some differences. The smell of decomposing flesh, the sound of heavy machinery, the walk-in "free shed," dozens of trash cans, and the mounds of refuse on the horizon all suggest that I’m standing in the middle of a landfill. Which, well, I am. It’s the site of the art exhibition "Waste Deep," by Nemo Gould, the San Francisco Dump’s artist in residence. And what’s most striking? I feel completely at home.

After spending most of September with junk collectors, vintage clothing nerds, and art diggers, I’m now completely accustomed to wallowing in trash and noticing freebies. For example, before driving to the SF Dump this evening I ate free baked goods at the X-rated Cake Gallery in SoMa, scrounged through leftovers at an estate sale in Bernal Heights, and knocked back pints of free Pabst at Broken Record in the Excelsior.

Yes, friends, I have become a bona fide freeloader. But like my newfound partners in grime I shun the connotations of the term. I choose instead to see myself as a sort of hip cultural revolutionary, one of the loose band of entrepreneurs and artists I’ve met over the past month who shamelessly revel in their personal gain because, at the end of the day, they know they’re "working" for a good cause. Not only are we getting a lot of cool free shit, but we’re also helping to transform the traditional hippy-dippy recycle-reuse-redistribute ethos into something more refreshing.

The freestyle movement is growing. Freeganism, a ragtag philosophy of cost-free living in a gift economy, has gained some national attention of late — especially in these economically challenging times — and the freegan ethos incubated in San Francisco, where groups like the Diggers gave away food during the ’60s. This city knows a thing or two about priceless give-and-take. And thanks to the freegan types I’ve been hanging out with, I now look at scavenging as an art form, a party, and a necessary lifestyle, one that has more to do with fashion, art, music, booze, and friendly competition than with fighting world hunger, globalization, or the war machine. Oh, most scavengers are concerned with all of that too, but creating awareness (about irresponsible consumption and the effects of wastefulness on the environment and humanity) is the fortunate by-product of the lifestyle, rather than its focus — which is, of course, copping free stuff.

THRIFTY EYE FOR THE HIP GUY


My journey from a life spent paying to consume to one consumed by the pursuit of freebies began two years ago, when I moved into a new building in the Mission. My neighbor was Aaron Schirmer — a reclusive artist who lives in a world of secondhand designer denim, seminew Macintosh computers, and used sound systems — whom I’d occasionally run into on my way to buy cigarettes and Jim Beam. Usually we’d smile and nod. But one day while he sat smoking on the stoop, he flagged me down. "Check out what I found today," he said.

At his side sat a large bag of American Apparel man panties and a crate of old-school electro cassettes. When I asked where they’d come from, he rambled on about free markets, dumpsters, and swap meets. Then he stopped abruptly, fished for the keys to his house, and said, "Here, I’ll show you."

I followed him into a hallway lined with half-finished paintings and strategically cracked mirrors, through a ’50s-style kitchen, and into his living room. In the corner, beneath a dangling gold and green Eames-style lamp, sat a 50-inch color television. His bedroom walls were lined with random bric-a-brac and outsider art, and his couch was a row of velvet-lined theater seats. Schirmer spread his arms and did his best Vanna White. "Here it is," he said. "I found all of this shit on the streets. People leave piles everywhere, and I just roam around all day and pick through them."

I quickly fell into a routine with Schirmer, a retired world-traveling DJ who now spends his days spinning rare records, tending his garden, and scavenging. I would come over to his house after work, crack a beer, and check out his finds, occasionally claiming certain items for myself. We’d then scroll through the Free section on Craigslist to devise a tentative map for the following day’s scavenge. I rarely had time to join him on his daily hunts, but I quickly learned that the free pot is virtually bottomless. And I was hooked.

These days I roam the neighborhood (corporate dumpsters are always a good bet) or scour the Internet anytime I need something. On my most recent search I found a stuffed bunny, a six-foot-tall stack of records, a pair of cowboy boots, and — I shit you not — Sharon Stone’s old couch. But I’m no expert. Anyone can search a Web site, but it takes a true connoisseur, someone like Kelly Malone, to build a business from scavenging.

FREE-MARKET ECONOMY


Malone, cofounder of the Mission Indie Mart, spent 10 years climbing the retail ladder at places like the Gap and Limited until she worked her way up to a glamorous life as a traveling designer. But then tragedy struck — in the form of ovarian cancer and its debilitating treatment process — and she had to quit. After spending the first few days of her indefinite vacation watching television, drinking too much at the Phone Booth, and watching old movies, she decided to revisit an old hobby: scavenging. "I just started over and kept positive," Malone said. "When I wasn’t sick from the chemo, I was trash-picking for cool stuff to sew and reconstruct." Malone began meticulously scouring estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales for that perfect owl clock or a one-of-a-kind sundress. She also got into interior and exterior design, grabbing spare paint and building materials off the streets, then enlisting her friends to help construct a backyard oasis.

Soon, though, Malone’s home had morphed into a retro junk museum. Her backyard was now dotted with old benches, barbecue grills, sculptures, and a sound system. Clothes were spilling out all over the place, and she had enough paint to cover a mansion. It was time to expand.

Malone began taking her stuff down to the flea market in South San Francisco. She set up a booth with music and goodies, offered free beer and hot dogs to friends, and spent whole weekends selling dolled-up vintage goods and making friends with others who did the same. It was there that she struck up a business relationship with Charles Hurbert, a public relations representative at a marketing firm who has a penchant for outsider art and found fashion. Soon Malone and Hurbert combined forces and decided to look beyond sanctioned venues. Malone’s backyard beckoned. The Mission Indie Mart was born.

The first mart went off without a hitch. Malone and Hurbert invited swap meet–interested friends to set up booths in Malone’s backyard. Cheapo flyers were designed, beer was purchased and resold at cost, and reimagined found apparel was offered for sale. It was a thrifty one-off that felt like an illegal rave, and people loved it. Mission District locals swarmed Malone’s backyard and nearly bought up her entire inventory. When she held it again the next month, the mart was even more successful and attracted more people — so many that her landlord threatened to evict her. So Malone sought sponsors and a new venue. The next Mission Indie Mart will be at 12 Galaxies and will feature a set by DJ Lovedust, extremely cheap Stella Artois, and an even bigger collection of vendors.

The mart’s success suggests that this model benefits its founders, who make some income from the event, and attendees, who get cheap goods, as much as it does San Francisco’s thriving community of independent designers, vintage-clothing dealers, and the recycling-scavenging movement in general. Malone and Hurbert are proving again that with a little effort and creativity, free shit can be turned into gold.

FRUGAL PHILANTHROPY


That’s also what Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez, the founders of SwapSF, are doing at CELLspace — but for them the party and the product are more important than the money.

The couple started SwapSF a few years ago as a way to poach their friends’ unwanted apparel. "I had this friend who owned like a million pairs of limited-edition sneakers that he never wore," Lewis said. "The swap idea started as a way for me to get my hands on some of them." So Hernandez and Lewis, who have been throwing events since they met at a party five years ago, did what came naturally: they drew up a flyer, bought a bunch of cheap beer and pizza, and invited their friends to get down.

The idea has taken off, as I witnessed Sept. 22 when I threw a few shirts, a pair of pants, and some old hats in a bag and pedaled down to Bryant and 18th Street to volunteer at their recent event, the Most Hyperbolically Stupendous Clothing Swap Ever. It was to be a win-win situation: a little time in exchange for first dibs at free clothes. I arrived at CELLspace at 11 a.m. to find a DJ spinning downtempo hip-hop, a handful of kids sorting through bags, and Hernandez, who greeted me with a smile, a name badge, and a beer. I’d envisioned spending a leisurely afternoon sipping beer provided by Trumer Pilsner (the event sponsor) with about a hundred other scavengers, and the day seemed to be turning out that way.

But neither I nor the organizers were quite prepared for the four-hour clusterfuck that awaited us. Soon the volunteers were drowning in a mile-high volcano of pants, shirts, scarves, and underwear. By noon, the event’s official start time, a line wound around 19th Street. At 12:30 p.m. the place was packed. It was as if every hipster in the Mission had gotten wind of an opportunity for free music, beer, and dancing and had gathered up their unwanted clothes to join the party — a party that happened to result in free clothing for charity organizations like A Woman’s Place, the AIDS Emergency Fund, and San Francisco General Hospital.

FREE YOUR MIND


Since starting in Lewis and Hernandez’s apartment and then relocating, the SwapSF event has become so popular that it’s getting hard to handle. Even the duo have been surprised by its sudden and exponential growth. It seems that by using sarcastic graphic design on their flyers, guerrilla promotion techniques (word of mouth, stickers, blogs, etc.), and a refrigerator full of beer, Hernandez and Lewis have tapped into a new way to market charity events to a community of self-obsessed hipsters. Like Malone, the SwapSF duo see something wrong with the way our culture consumes and wastes, but they’re reluctant to jump on a soapbox — or even stand close to one.

Which may be why their parties have been garnering more attention and support than have the more traditional free markets that have been held across the nation for years. Malone and her contemporaries are creating awareness with no pretenses, no preaching, and no Hacky Sack–playing hippies. They are nurturing a world of gift exchange that speaks to a new generation of recyclers who enjoy the selfish thrills of scoring, a good party, and daytime drinking more than — or at least as much as — the satisfaction people find in collective self-sacrifice and charity.

Even San Francisco Dump artist Nemo Gould isn’t making his garbage art purely, or even mostly, as a political statement. "By virtue of it being made out of garbage, my art does make a statement about waste and overconsumption," Gould said. "But that’s not what it’s really about." Although Gould sees the danger in the complex environmental situations that create places like the SF Dump, his desire to work there had more to do with personal satisfaction than with changing the world. The dump’s Artist in Residence Program offers one of the most coveted positions in the city because it guarantees lifelong access to free garbage.

"There’s a scavenger spirit," Gould said. "Whoever has it is compelled to collect. Whatever comes after that is up to the scavenger."

The scavenger spirit is currently creating a subculture. Like skateboarders who view the city’s byways as a concrete playground, the new breed of scavengers looks at the urban environment from a different perspective. In their eyes the streets of San Francisco are aisles in a seven-mile-by-seven-mile warehouse of free shit. Their primary goal is to decorate their homes with one-of-a-kind furniture, dress their bodies in fly gear, and pad their pocketbooks, all while avoiding overdraft charges and, on the side, helping to generate awareness. In their separate and edgy styles, Gould, Malone, Hernandez, Lewis, and Schirmer have managed to turn this spirit into a lifestyle that doesn’t alienate people with its self-righteousness. I mean, everyone wants free shit, right? Who can’t relate to that?

THE (FREE) SHIT LIST

There’s a fine line between scavenging to make a statement and being a straight-up freeloader. Luckily, it’s up to the individual to decide exactly where that line is drawn. Here are some resources for learning more about the score.

FREEGAN.INFO


Information about strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism; includes freegan hot spots in San Francisco.

freegan.info/?page=SanFrancisco

REALLY, REALLY FREE MARKET


A monthly alternate-economy festival and a really good place to get rid of your old stuff.

www.reallyreallyfree.org

MISSION INDIE MART


Kelly Malone and Charles Hurbert’s unique party take on the freegan ethos.

www.myspace.com/missionindiemart

SWAPSF


Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez’s fabulous swap bonanza.

www.swapsf.com

MYOPENBAR.COM


A list of every open bar, happy hour, and extremely cheap alcohol event in the city.

sf.myopenbar.com

GOING.COM


A cross between MySpace and Yelp that focuses entirely on events, including a free section featuring happy hours, art openings, and concert ticket giveaways.

www.going.com

SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT


Official city site for recycling, disposal, and reuse information.

www.sfenvironment.org

SAN FRANCISCO DUMP


Learn about our city’s unique take on garbage and strategies for recycling.

www.sunsetscavenger.com

SCRAPEDEN SF


An art foundation dedicated to transforming trash into interactive public sculptures.

www.blackrockarts.org/projects/scrapeden-sf

ARTGOODHITLERBAD


Mission Indie Mart cofounder Hurbert blogs his best scavenger finds.

www.artgoodhitlerbad.com

NEMO GOULD


The latest artist in residence at the SF Dump has been making cool stuff from garbage for years.

www.nemomatic.com

Atmosphere and an actress

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Olivier Assayas’s films are both strange and engrossing, so much so that they may evade broad comprehension on the first go-round. Whereas instigating French new wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut played fast and loose with tone and narrative structure to create jarring juxtapositions, Assayas does so to effect a subtler, more mysterious sense of illumination. We frequently lose our bearings in cinema Assayas — as in two poetic refractions of the same scene in Irma Vep (1996) and Demonlover (2002): the female lead donning an alter ego, scurrying through hallways, committing a crime in a space that seems to overlap reality, dream, and fantasy — but there is always an underlying trust in the director’s guiding hand, earned by his hyperkinetic narration and apparent devotion to his actors. Assayas’s résumé does indeed resemble the archetypal new wave trajectory (from Cahiers du Cinéma critic to what Manny Farber calls a termite filmmaker), but the connection runs deeper still: like his forebears, he makes films about what it means to live in the modern world.

It’s a world that invariably entails the restless confusion and complex social systems of the globalized marketplace. He arrives in this slipstream through any number of inputs. For starters, his films are multilingual, multilocation affairs (in this respect they resemble spy thrillers, though it’s only Assayas’s most recent film, Boarding Gate, that feels pointedly designed along genre lines). Second, his plots usually revolve around business people. Even in Les Destinées (2000), an intimate fin de siècle period piece, a lapsed minister struggles for "new methods and new machines" to capture the American market for porcelain. This concern for France’s mediated role in global trade — it supplies luxury items in Les Destinées, film production in Irma Vep, and Internet pornography in Demonlover — is a constant in Assayas’s work, as are characters who are swallowed whole by an abstract marketplace. In Irma Vep, the film that still seems like Assayas’s most intuitive work, it’s a film director (played by new wave favorite Jean-Pierre Léaud) who succumbs to the impossibilities of postmodern enterprise, in this case remaking a French classic (Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires) with an actress from Hong Kong (Maggie Cheung).

Film Comment critic Amy Taubin is right to point out that Boarding Gate is "closer to Feuillade than [Assayas’s] Irma Vep," though it seems to me that this is as much a matter of the film’s riveting embodiment of Feuillade’s metaphor of society as so many trapdoors and secret passageways as it is "because [Boarding Gate‘s Asia] Argento is a contemporary Musidora [the star of Les Vampires]." Feuillade confined his lucid vision to the backstreets of Paris, whereas Assayas snaps between the City of Light and Hong Kong. More disconcertingly, he evokes virtual realities as well. In Irma Vep and Demonlover, alter egos take on a confusing, extrareal presence befitting the Internet age. Compulsively drawn to modern, floating spaces, Assayas frequently sets his action in glassy airports and offices. In this respect, the director’s use of Brian Eno’s ambient music, in Boarding Gate, seemed a long time coming, though Sonic Youth’s harmonics had previously supplied the same glide to Irma Vep and Demonlover.

Of course, all of these touches are only so much window dressing for Assayas’s mesmerizing female leads. Godard’s dictum that cinema is a matter of "a girl and a gun" falls short with Assayas: for this director it takes atmosphere and an actress. Irma Vep, Demonlover, and Boarding Gate all abide by the "a woman in trouble" scheme espoused by David Lynch, but with cleaner lines and punchier scrambles. Is there any doubt that Irma Vep conveys the plight of an actress lost in the marketplace with greater grace and acuity than Lynch’s slogging Inland Empire (2006)?

Because really, cinema Assayas could hardly be called glum or even despairing in spite of its heavy themes. Indeed, some of the filmmaker’s champions were upset with Demonlover for crossing that line into David Cronenberg country (the film is being screened at the PFA with the Canadian director’s 1983 Videodrome), but in Irma Vep and Cold Water (1994) it’s striking just how light Assayas’s touch remains even when he broaches oceans of malaise. Some of this, of course, is simply a matter of finely honed cinematic storytelling: fluid editing, detailed soundscapes, and restless handheld-camera work all give his films a stylishness that seems miles away from Dogma austerity.

Despite lacking the dreamlike depths of Irma Vep and Demonlover and the closely observed social mores of Les Destinées and Cold Water, Boarding Gate might just be the smoothest machine Assayas has built yet. The film’s minimalist, on-the-run scenario allows the director to intensify his stylistic template — the cutting has never been more electric, the natural light never so beautifully pale. And to return to Taubin’s point, Argento may well be the perfect Assayas heroine for all of her different looks — in Boarding Gate she’s alternately terrifying and terrified, spasmodic and inert, in control and at a loss. Unlike so many damsels in distress, she’s essentially active — as is cinema Assayas.

OLIVIER ASSAYAS IN RESIDENCE: CAHIERS DU CINÉMA WEEK

Oct. 4–11, $5.50–$9.50

See Rep Clock for schedule

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-1124

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Injunction dysfunction

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› news@sfbg.com

When seven people were shot in the span of 12 hours in June at the Friendship Village and Yerba Buena Plaza East housing complexes in the Western Addition, city and community leaders decided immediate action was necessary to remedy the increasing level of gang violence.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who represents the area, demanded 24-hour police patrols as a temporary measure. Rev. Regnaldo Woods of Bethel AME had a broader vision — get the gangs to call a truce. But City Attorney Dennis Herrera already had his own plan well in the works, a controversial approach that has nonetheless been embraced at City Hall by leaders desperate for solutions to the intractable and escautf8g problem of gun violence.

Herrera and his staff in July announced they were seeking civil gang injunctions in the Western Addition and the Mission District modeled on a similar effort last year against the Oakdale Mob in Bayview–Hunters Point. He went after alleged members of the Norteña gang in the Mission and targeted three gangs in the Western Addition, all centered on Eddy Street and the public housing complexes that stretch from Gough to Divisadero: Eddy Rock, Chopper City, and Knock Out Posse.

Two Superior Court judges, Patrick Mahoney and Peter Busch, heard arguments for and against the injunctions Sept. 18 and are expected to issue rulings at any time. The injunctions would prevent the alleged gang members they name from associating with one another within a prescribed area, among other restrictions.

The injunctions have pitted Herrera and his allies against Public Defender Jeff Adachi, civil liberties advocates, and some community groups, who have rallied to stop the injunctions and criticize them as a "criminalization of people of color," a charge Herrera stridently rejects and has publicly condemned as "race-baiting."

But beyond the emotional politics of this controversial tactic, there are some practical problems with the injunctions, particularly in the Western Addition, where they may stifle community-based solutions to the problem of gang violence.

"[The injunctions] slowed us down considerably," Woods, a life-long Fillmore resident, told the Guardian. "It’s going to impact the movement if it stays as it is. I think there needs to be changes."

Woods and other leaders from Bethel and from his nonprofit, Up from Darkness, met with the gang members a total of 43 times throughout the summer. When word of the injunctions spread, Woods said he had to restart from square one. Rather than bring people together for a dialogue, he had to explain why this was happening, what the injunctions meant, and how the injunctions would affect those included.

Woods planned to hold a summit, which "shot callers" from each of the gangs would attend and at which they would call a truce as well as receive access to employment guidance and mental health services. The summit never happened, but gang violence in the Western Addition nevertheless decreased rapidly in the following months. Northern Police District Capt. Croce Casciato said there hasn’t been a gang-related homicide in the district since May.

The American Civil Liberties Union says the injunctions will strip alleged gang members of due-process rights and give police a roving warrant to harass whomever they deem a gang member. Adachi and Kendra Fox-Davis, of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, said their offices have received numerous complaints from youths in the Mission and the Western Addition that police are already using the injunctions to hassle people even before they’ve been approved.

"There’s been a tremendous amount of misinformation about the injunctions," Adachi said. He questions the effectiveness of injunctions and said these give police carte blanche to harass anyone they suspect of being affiliated with gangs. His biggest issue, though, is the fact that the alleged members don’t have the necessary resources to contest the label.

Herrera derided the racial implications levied by Adachi, and in an e-mail to us, press secretary Matt Dorsey wrote, "The fact is, the debate over these proposed injunctions — most especially the one in the Mission — has been characterized by increasingly dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric. This isn’t just someone’s innocent misunderstanding, either: ‘the criminalization of people of color’ is wildly misrepresentative, and it’s deliberate."

Herrera acknowledges people’s concerns, but he stands by his decision.

"I really wish it wasn’t necessary that it has come to this point where I say, ‘Hey, this is a tool we have to pursue,’" Herrera told us. "But the facts are the facts. We have a gang problem in San Francisco. I think I’d be neglecting my responsibility if I didn’t bring another tool to the table to help address the issue."

Woods doesn’t raise the same racial concerns that Adachi does, and he isn’t too animated about the civil liberties issues. To him, the injunctions are just too broad and counterproductive to the community-based approaches that have the best chance of addressing the problem. He thinks the gang members themselves must help solve the problems they’ve created.

"It’s us getting together every day and doing something positive," said Steve Johnson, a 27-year-old targeted member of Eddy Rock, which claims the Plaza East housing complex as its turf. "It has nothing to do with the injunction. We’re trying to get all the different complexes in the Western Addition together."

Paris Moffet, the alleged leader of Eddy Rock, added, "We’re the only ones stopping the violence. We needed to. We are going to stop this."

It may come as a surprise that reputed gang members might be helping to stop the violence that was once a part of their daily lives, and several members of Eddy Rock acknowledged they have a long way to go in reshaping their images.

But, they say, they are committed to reforming themselves, and they recently held a barbecue at the complex parking lot to display some of their positive work. In the small community center at Plaza East — locally known as the OC, for "Outta Control" — Eddy Rock, with the help of Woods and others, has created Open Arms, a nonprofit geared toward educating the younger kids in the complex about staying in school and computer literacy.

Asked about the sudden turnabout by Eddy Rock, Marquez Shaw, a 26-year-old alleged member of the gang, explained that the level of violence at Plaza East had taken its toll on everyone, not just uninvolved residents. "[The violence] affected me, very much so," he said. "There’s been more bloodshed here than anywhere else in the community. We’re the only ones man enough to do something."

But Herrera said the recent relative quiet in the area doesn’t make up for more than five years of chaos. "Has there been a lull? Yeah," he said. "But earlier in the summer there were some brazen shootings. June isn’t that long ago."

Woods acknowledged that the members shouldn’t be given a free pass, considering their troubled past. "They’re not angels," he said. "But let’s try to help them before they go to prison. That way you might save the old lady’s life. You might save a youngster’s life. If they had something to do, they wouldn’t do the shootings."

At the Aug. 14 Eddy Rock barbecue, about 50 or so people from the Plaza East complex snacked on ribs, chicken, hot links, and spaghetti. Two beat officers from the Northern Station stood in the distance and oversaw an impromptu football game between juveniles and alleged gang members.

A clipping of a newspaper article hangs on the wall in the community center; it’s about how director Spike Lee is urging inner-city youths to make films about their experience growing up with violence and to use the Internet to broadcast them to others.

Given a camera, Shaw has done just that. During a recent visit to Plaza East, he was using iMovie to edit a video that he planned to post on YouTube. On the video, an older black man says, "Now it’s time to look at what’s going on, not what’s happened in the past."

Nas’s "I Know I Can" plays on Hannibal Thompson’s video as he flatly explains how the area is deprived of proper resources and lacks preventative measures. Thompson, a 20-year-old named in one of the injunctions as a member of Eddy Rock, says six of his friends have been murdered since 2005 — three of them less than a block away, at Eddy and Laguna, where cameras affixed to streetlights are meant to deter criminal activity. He said increased police presence and the work of Woods have led to the decrease in violence, something he embraces.

"The best thing that ever happened to this community was the 24-hour police patrol. That’s way better than the injunction," he said. "They should have done that years ago."

Casciato doesn’t doubt that Eddy Rock, which has terrorized residents for years, might have turned the corner. But he calls the injunctions one additional tool to fight the long-term battle against gang violence. Casciato said it was too soon to tell how an injunction would affect regular police procedure. Like others in the community, though, he emphasized the effectiveness of outreach work.

"There has been a great collaborative effort on the community’s part," Casciato said. On gang members reforming themselves, he said, "I’m sure they did. Success is going to come from within, not from the outside. All our efforts are for naught if there’s no buy-in."

Under the current terms of the injunctions, the aforementioned barbecue would be prohibited, since it involved literally the whole gang. The targeted individuals could freely associate with one another inside the community center but would need to go in and out separately, which critics say is not a realistic scenario. If targeted members violate the injunctions, they can be charged with misdemeanors and put in jail for up to five days.

The injunction tactic "undermines antiviolence efforts of community advocates and organizations working in the Western Addition, like Woods, by effectively preventing the individuals most in need of support services from participating in them," Fox-Davis wrote in an e-mail.

Herrera and his deputies submitted more than 4,000 pages of evidence, including expert declarations from the gang task force, which detailed the reign of terror of the three gangs. He said they’ve been careful to name only shot callers in the injunctions and to carefully detail the case against them.

Fox-Davis and other critics contend the Western Addition injunction is too broad, unlike the first one in Oakdale, which only covered four square blocks. A total of 15 blocks are designated as the "safety zone" in the Western Addition, stretching from Eddy and Gough in the east to Eddy and Webster in the west, bordered by Turk and Ellis to the north and south, for Eddy Rock.

For Chopper City and KOP — which had in the past aligned themselves against Eddy Rock — the safety zone is a six-block area north of Turk to Ellis, between Divisadero and Steiner, which includes the Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King housing complexes. In Bayview, only one of 22 targeted members lived in the housing complex, whereas a total of seven of 19 identified members of Eddy Rock live within that purposed safety zone, according to the City Attorney’s Office.

"The restrictions that are proposed in this injunction go far beyond what is necessary to address the nuisance the city attorney claims is being caused by gang violence," Fox-Davis said.

But Herrera says the "nuisance" amounts to communities being terrorized by violence and his office would be remiss to not address the problem. A total of 11 homicides in three years have been linked to the three Western Addition gangs, according to court documents.

"I’ve never been one to say we should be dissuading communities from being involved and trying find solutions and making contributions to solving the problem. To me it’s not mutually exclusive. It’s not an either-or proposition. I think it’s important that we get the community to be a vital stakeholder in trying to stem the tide of violence," Herrera said. "But there has to be accountability."

To quell critics’ concerns, Herrera said his office has included numerous safeguards, including training cops to properly enforce the injunctions. Targeted members also have a "buyout option," meaning if they can prove that they are no longer involved in gang activity, they can appeal to have their names removed from the list.

Herrera points to the perceived success of the injunction in Bayview as proof that the tactic is effective in restoring calm and peace to neighborhoods once plagued with murder. Herrera also notes that the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution almost unanimously that supported injunctions by the city attorney.

Mirkarimi, however, said his support of the current injunctions being sought was "tentative at best" and said he considered them "an act of desperation." He too said community work and traditional police enforcement — like the 24-hour patrols — are better ways of addressing the root causes of gang violence.

The alleged members of Eddy Rock agree.

"We just need something to do," said Maurice Carter, 32. "We did the crime, we did the time. Now we just want a second chance."

Endorsements: Local ballot measures

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Proposition A (transit reform)

YES


This omnibus measure would finally put San Francisco in a position to create the world-class transportation system that the city needs to handle a growing population and to address environmental problems ranging from climate change to air pollution. And in the short term it would help end the Muni meltdown by giving the system a much-needed infusion of cash, about $26 million per year, and more authority to manage its myriad problems.

The measure isn’t perfect. It would give a tremendous amount of power to the unelected Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a semiautonomous agency created in 1999 to reform Muni. But we also understand the arguments of Sup. Aaron Peskin — who wrote the measure in collaboration with labor and other groups — that the MTA is free to make tough decisions that someone facing reelection might avoid. And the measure still would give the Board of Supervisors authority to block the MTA’s budget, fare increases, and route changes with seven votes.

We’re also a little worried about provisions that could place the Taxicab Commission under the MTA’s purview and allow the agency to tinker with the medallion system and undermine Proposition K, the 1978 law that gives operating permits to working drivers, not corporations. Peskin promised us, on tape, that he will ensure, with legislation if necessary, that no such thing happens, and we’ll hold him to it.

Ultimately, the benefits of this measure outweigh our concerns. The fact that the labor movement has signed off on expanded management powers for the MTA shows how important this compromise is. The MTA would have the power to fully implement the impending recommendations in the city’s Transit Improvement Project study and would be held accountable for improvements to Muni’s on-time performance. New bonding authority under the measure would also give the MTA the ability to quickly pursue capital projects that would allow more people to comfortably use public transit.

The measure would also create an integrated transportation system combining everything from parking to cabs to bike lanes under one agency, which would then be mandated to find ways to roll back greenhouse gas emissions from transportation sources to 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2012. And to do that, the agency would get to keep all of the revenue generated by its new programs. As a side benefit — and another important reason to vote for Prop. A — approval of this measure would nullify the disastrous Proposition H on the same ballot.

San Francisco faces lots of tough choices if we’re going to minimize climate change and maximize the free flow of people through our landlocked city. Measure A is an important start. Vote yes.

Proposition B (commission holdovers)

YES


Proposition B is a simple good-government measure that ends a practice then-mayor Willie Brown developed into a science — allowing commissioners to continue serving after their terms expire, turning them into at-will appointments and assuring their loyalty.

Members of some of the most powerful commissions in town serve set four-year terms. The idea is to give the members, many appointed by the mayor, some degree of independence: they can’t be fired summarily for voting against the interests (or demands) of the chief executive.

But once their terms expire, the mayor can simply choose not to reappoint or replace them, leaving them in limbo for months, even years — and while they still sit on the commissions and vote, these holdover commissioners can be fired at any time. So their jobs depend, day by day, on the whims of the mayor.

Prop. B, sponsored by the progressives on the Board of Supervisors, simply would limit to 60 days the amount of time a commissioner can serve as a holdover. After that period, the person’s term would end, and he or she would have to step down. That would force the mayor to either reappoint or replace commissioners in a timely manner — and help give these powerful posts at least a chance at independence. Vote yes.

Proposition C (public hearings on proposed measures)

NO


Proposition C sure sounds good: it would mandate that the supervisors hold a hearing 45 days in advance before putting any measure on the ballot. The mayor would have to submit proposed ballot measures for hearings too. That would end the practice of last-minute legislation; since four supervisors can place any ordinance on the ballot (and the mayor can do the same), proposals that have never been vetted by the public and never subjected to any prior discussion often wind up before the voters. Sometimes that means the measures are poorly written and have unintended consequences.

But this really isn’t a good-government measure; it’s a move by the Chamber of Commerce and downtown to reduce the power of the district-elected supervisors.

The 1932 City Charter gave the supervisors the power to place items before the voters as a check on corruption. In San Francisco it’s been used as a check on downtown power. In 1986, for example, activists gathered enough voter signatures to place Proposition M, a landmark measure controlling downtown development, on the ballot. But then–city attorney Louise Renne, acting on behalf of downtown developers, used a ridiculous technicality to invalidate it. At the last minute, the activists were able to get four supervisors to sign on — and Prop. M, one of the most important pieces of progressive planning legislation in the history of San Francisco, ultimately won voter approval. Under Prop. C, that couldn’t have happened.

In theory, most of the time, anything that goes on the ballot should be subject to public hearings. Sometimes, as in the case of Prop. M, that’s not possible.

We recognize the frustration some groups (particularly small businesses) feel when legislation gets passed without any meaningful input from the people directly affected. But it doesn’t require a strict ballot measure like Prop. C to solve the problem. The supervisors should adopt rules mandating public hearings on propositions, but with a more flexible deadline and exemptions for emergencies. Meanwhile, vote no on Prop. C.

Proposition D (library preservation fund)

YES


In the 1980s and early 1990s, San Francisco mayors loved to cut the budget of the public library. Every time money was short — and money was chronically short — the library took a hit. It was an easy target. If you cut other departments (say, police or fire or Muni or public health), people would howl and say lives were in danger. Reducing the hours at a few neighborhood branch libraries didn’t seem nearly as dire.

So activists who argued that libraries were an essential public service put a measure on the ballot in 1994 that guaranteed at least a modest level of library funding. The improvements have been dramatic: branch library hours have increased more than 50 percent, library use is way up, there are more librarians around in the afternoons to help kids with their homework…. In that sense, the Library Preservation Fund has been a great success. The program is scheduled to sunset next year; Proposition D would extend it another 15 years.

If the current management of the public library system were a bit more trustworthy, this would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the library commission and staff have been resisting accountability; ironically, the library — a font of public information — makes it difficult to get basic records about library operations. The library is terrible about sunshine; in fact, activists have had to sue this year to get the library to respond to a simple public-records request (for nonconfidential information on repetitive stress injuries among library staff). And we’re not thrilled that a significant part of the library’s operating budget is raised (and controlled) by a private group, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, which decides, with no oversight by an elected official, how as much as 10 percent of library money is spent.

But libraries are too valuable and too easy a budget target to allow the Library Preservation Fund to expire. And the way to fend off creeping privatization is hardly by starving a public institution for funds. So we’ll support Prop. D.

Proposition E (mayoral attendance at Board of Supervisors meetings)

YES, YES, YES


If it feels as though you’ve already voted on this, you have: last November, by a strong majority, San Franciscans approved a policy statement calling on the mayor to attend at least one Board of Supervisors meeting each month to answer questions and discuss policy. It’s a great idea, modeled on the very successful Question Time in the United Kingdom, under which the British prime minister appears before Parliament regularly and submits to questions from all political parties. Proposition E would force the mayor to comply. Newsom, despite his constant statements about respecting the will of the voters, has never once complied with the existing policy statement. Instead, he’s set up a series of phony neighborhood meetings at which he controls the agenda and personally selects which questions he’s going to answer.

We recognize that some supervisors would use the occasion of the mayor’s appearance to grandstand — but the mayor does that almost every day. Appearing before the board once a month isn’t an undue burden; in fact, it would probably help Newsom in the long run. If he’s going to seek higher office, he’s going to have to get used to tough questioning and learn to deal with critics in a forum he doesn’t control.

Beyond all the politics, this idea is good for the city. The mayor claims he already meets regularly with members of the board, but those meetings are private, behind closed doors. Hearing the mayor and the board argue about policy in public would be informative and educational and help frame serious policy debates. Besides, as Sup. Chris Daly says, with Newsom a lock for reelection, this is the only thing on the ballot that would help hold him accountable. Vote yes on Prop. E.

Proposition F (police pensions)

YES


We really didn’t want to endorse this measure. We’re sick and tired of the San Francisco Police Officers Association — which opposed violence-prevention funding, opposed foot patrols, opposes every new revenue measure, and bitterly, often viciously, opposes police accountability — coming around, tin cup in hand, every single election and asking progressives to vote to give the cops more money. San Francisco police officers deserve decent pay — it’s a tough, dangerous job — but the starting salary for a rookie cop in this town exceeds $60,000, the benefits are extraordinarily generous, and the San Francisco Police Department is well on its way to setting a record as the highest-paid police force in the country.

Now it wants more.

But in fact, Proposition F is pretty minor — it would affect only about 60 officers who were airport cops before the airport police were merged into the SFPD in 1997. Those cops have a different retirement system, which isn’t quite as good as what they would get with full SFPD benefits. We’re talking about $30,000 a year; in the end, it’s a simple labor issue, and we hate to blame a small group of officers in one division for the serious sins of their union and its leadership. So we’ll endorse Prop. F. But we have a message for the SFPOA’s president: if you want to beat up the progressives, reject new tax plans, promote secrecy, and fight accountability, don’t come down here again asking for big, expensive benefit improvements.

Proposition G (Golden Gate Park stables)

YES


This is an odd one: Proposition G, sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, would create a special fund for the renovation of the historic (and dilapidated) horse stables in Golden Gate Park. The city would match every $3 in private donations with $1 in public money, up to a total of $750,000. The city would leverage that money with $1.2 million in state funds available for the project and fix up the stables.

Supporters, including most of the progressive supervisors, say that the stables are a historic gem and that horseback riding in the park would provide "after-school, summer and weekend activities for families and youth." That might be a bit of a stretch — keeping horses is expensive, and riding almost certainly won’t be a free activity for anyone. But the stables have been the target of privatization efforts in the past and, under Newsom, almost certainly would be again in the future; this is exactly the sort of operation that the mayor would like to turn over to a private contractor. So for a modest $750,000, Prop. G would keep the stables in public hands. Sounds like a good deal to us. Vote yes.

Proposition H (reguutf8g parking spaces)

NO, NO, NO


It’s hard to overstate just how bad this measure is or to condemn strongly enough the sleazy and deceptive tactics that led Don Fisher, Webcor, and other downtown power brokers to buy the signatures that placed what they call "Parking for the Neighborhoods" on the ballot. That’s why Proposition H has been almost universally condemned, even by downtown’s allies in City Hall, and why Proposition A includes a provision that would negate Proposition H if both are approved.

Basically, this measure would wipe out three decades’ worth of environmentally sound planning policies in favor of giving every developer and homeowner the absolute right to build a parking space for every housing unit (or two spaces for every three units in the downtown core). While that basic idea might have some appeal to drivers with parking frustrations, even they should consider the disastrous implications of this greedy and shortsighted power grab.

The city has very little leverage to force developers to offer community benefits like open space or more affordable housing, or to design buildings that are attractive and environmentally friendly. But parking spots make housing more valuable (and expensive), so developers will help the city meet its needs in order to get them. That would end with this measure, just as the absolute right to parking would eliminate things like Muni stops and street trees while creating more driveways, which are dangerous to bicyclists and pedestrians. It would flip the equation to place developers’ desires over the public interest.

Worst of all, it would reverse the city’s transit-first policies in a way that ultimately would hurt drivers and property owners, the very people it is appealing to. If we don’t limit the number of parking spots that can be built with the 10,000 housing units slated for the downtown core, it will result in traffic gridlock that will lower property values and kill any chance of creating a world-class transit system.

But by then, the developers will be off counting our money, leaving us to clean up their mess. Don’t be fooled. Vote no.

Proposition I (Office of Small Business)

YES


Proposition I got on the ballot after small-business leaders tried unsuccessfully to get the supervisors to fund a modest program to create staff for the Small Business Commission and create a one-stop shop for small-business assistance and permitting. We don’t typically support this sort of after-the-fact ballot-box budgeting request, but we’re making an exception here.

San Francisco demands a lot from small businesses. It’s an expensive place to set up shop, and city taxes discriminate against them. We supported the new rules mandating that even small operations give paid days off and in many cases pay for health insurance, but we recognize that they put a burden on small businesses. And in the end, the little operators don’t get a whole lot back from City Hall.

This is a pretty minor request: it would allocate $750,000 to set up an Office of Small Business under the Small Business Commission. The funding would be for the first year only; after that the advocates would have to convince the supervisors that it was worth continuing. Small businesses are the economic and job-generation engines of San Francisco, and this one-time request for money that amounts to less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the city budget is worthy of support. Vote yes on Prop. I.

Proposition J (wireless Internet network)

NO


It’s going to be hard to convince people to vote against this measure; as one blogger put it, the mayor of San Francisco is offering free ice cream. Anyone want to decline?

Well, yes — decline is exactly what the voters should do. Because Proposition J’s promise of free and universal wireless Internet service is simply a fraud. And the way it’s worded would ensure that our local Internet infrastructure is handed over to a private company — a terrible idea.

For starters, San Francisco has already been down this road. Newsom worked out a deal a year ago with EarthLink and Google to provide free wi-fi. But the contract had all sorts of problems: the free access would have been too slow for a lot of uses, faster access wouldn’t have been free, there weren’t good privacy protections, and the network wouldn’t have been anything close to universal. Wi-fi signals don’t penetrate walls very well, and the signals in this plan wouldn’t have reached much above the second floor of a building — so anyone who lived in an interior space above the second floor (and that’s a lot of people) wouldn’t have gotten access at all.

So the supervisors asked a few questions and slowed things down — and it’s good they did, because EarthLink suddenly had a change in its business strategy and pulled out of citywide wi-fi altogether. That’s one of the problems with using a private partner for this sort of project: the city is subject to the marketing whims of tech companies that are constantly changing their strategies as the economic and technical issues of wi-fi evolve.

San Francisco needs a municipal Internet system; it ought to be part of the city’s public infrastructure, just like the streets, the buses, and the water and sewer lines. It shouldn’t rely just on a fickle technology like wi-fi either; it should be based on fiber-optic cables. Creating that network wouldn’t be all that expensive; EarthLink was going to do it for $10 million.

Prop. J is just a policy statement and would have no immediate impact. Still, it’s annoying and wrongheaded for the mayor to try to get San Franciscans to give a vote of confidence to a project that has already crashed and burned, and Sup. Aaron Peskin, the cosponsor, should never have put his name on it. Vote no.

Proposition K (ads on street furniture)

YES


San Francisco is awash in commercialism. With all of the billboards and ads, the city is starting to feel like a giant NASCAR racer. And a lot of them come from Clear Channel Communications, the giant, monopolistic broadcast outfit that controls radio stations, billboards, and now the contract to build new bus shelters in the city with even more ads on them.

Proposition K is a policy statement, sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, that seeks to bar any further expansion of street-furniture advertising in the city. That would mean no more deals with the likes of Clear Channel to allow more lighted kiosks with ads on them — and no more new bus shelter ads. That’s got Clear Channel agitated — the company just won the 15-year bid to rebuild the city’s existing 1,200 Muni shelters, and now it wants to add 380 more. Clear Channel argues that the city would get badly needed revenue for Muni from the expanded shelters; actually, the contract already guarantees Muni a large chunk of additional funding. And nothing in Prop. K would block Clear Channel from upgrading the existing shelters and plastering ads all over them.

On a basic philosophical level, we don’t support the idea of funding Muni by selling ads on the street, any more than we would support the idea of funding the Recreation and Park Department by selling the naming rights to the Hall of Flowers or the Japanese Tea Garden or the golf courses. On a practical level, the Clear Channel deal is dubious anyway: the company, which runs 10 mostly lousy radio stations in town and gives almost nothing of value to the community, refuses to provide the public with any information on its projected profits and losses, so there’s no way to tell if the income the city would get from the expanded shelters would be a fair share of the overall revenue.

Vote yes on K.

How wifi might work in SF

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Slate has a great piece by Tim Wu, author of “Who Owns the Internet,” that points out why Mayor Newsom’s public-private partnership idea for municipal wifi will never work.

Wu’s point (also bloggednicely in leftinsf)

“The basic idea of offering Internet access as a public service is sound. The problem is that cities haven’t thought of the Internet as a form of public infrastructure that—like subway lines, sewers, or roads—must be paid for. Instead, cities have labored under the illusion that, somehow, everything could be built easily and for free by private parties. That illusion has run straight into the ancient economics of infrastructure and natural monopoly. The bottom line: City dwellers won’t be able to get high-quality wireless Internet access for free. If they want it, collectively, they’ll have to pay for it.”

And yet, Newsom’s crew are out raising money for a ballot measure, Prop. J, that would lock the city in to a “public-private” free-lunch partnership. I’ve just looked at the Ethics Commission filings on it, and in many ways it’s the usual Newsom bunch: Eric Jaye of Storefront Media, Newsom’s chief consultant, is running the campaign. Jim Sutton is doing the legal work. The money’s come from downtown types (the Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe law firm gave $500), Newsom’s father (who gave $1,000) Newsom’s political allies (Assessor Phil TIng gave $250) and labor groups that want to stay on the mayor’s good side or owe him favors (Sign painters, transport workers, and firefighters). What a waste of time and money — unless this whole thing is about providing a back-channel way to give cash to the mayor.

Magic time: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band return

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brucesml.bmp
Brooooce. Photo by Mark Seliger.

By Todd Lavoie

They’re back! Well, almost. This coming Tuesday, Oct. 2, to keep things official and all. That’s when the Magic happens.

Proving that patience really does pay off from time to time, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are about to reward us rather handsomely for riding out their extended hiatus. Their latest Columbia Records thunderer Magic hits the racks, and if the glowing adjectives tossed around by the press are any indication, the phrase “return to form” is written all over it. Sure, I could’ve already checked for myself, maybe even previewed a couple of songs – thanks to this handy-dandy Internet thing all the kids are raving about – but I really do relish the freshness of a CD when it’s been shucked from its shrink-wrap within hours of its release into the world. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? In an age where everything seems to be so readily available and spoilers are just a click away, I’d rather keep it old-school, thank you all the same. And so I’ll wait till Tuesday to find out for myself. Besides: why would I want to get rid of the one single interesting feature Tuesdays have to offer?

“But it’s Bruce Springsteen – big deal!” Yes, I can already hear them, snipping and quipping away up there on the horizon, a veritable sea of ironic haircuts and tight-legged trousers poo-pooing away my excitement over what promises to be a highlight of this already-impressive fall music season. Maybe it’s because the Boss reminds the Vice Generation too much of Dad or Uncle Joe?

Furthermore, I doubt Springsteen possesses a single ironic bone in his body; there’s no cheeky winks or clever-for-clever’s sake at play here. He’s far too straight-up for that, thankfully, but such directness might come across as so unfashionably retro in or post-everything culture. It’s probably only a partial explanation, and I could even counter my own argument by pointing out the wonderfully refreshing arrival of what I’ve taken to calling the current sincerity movement in indie rock: witness the impact of emotionally-direct, irony-free acts such as Antony and the Johnsons, Joan as Policewoman, and perhaps even Broken Social Scene.

Reading is fundamental

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Made Man

(Aspyr; PlayStation2, Windows)

A couple of weeks ago I was facing a stretch without the possibility of any money besides what I had in my pocket. I have experienced this before, and the way I have learned to deal with it is to stay in my apartment, sleep a lot, and eat very little, counting the days. At my age and with my diet of cigarettes and coffee, Internet porn will only go so far. So I have found that the best way to kill the hours when I am conscious has been to play video games. With my meager budget, I set aside what I needed to buy some games and hit the mall. I came home with two, neither of which was a new release, but they were cheap. One, Made Man, has a gun on the cover, so I bought it. The other shares its theme with one of my favorite movies of all time, Jaws. I settled into my apartment with a stock of food, water, and my new video games.

Made Man tells the story of a Vietnam vet who gets mixed up with the Mafia after his tour of duty. This could easily be an amazing game. The story could have been pretty good if its makers had put it together with some semblance of caring; without warning, you jump from the city to the jungle and back, and apparently you are trying to find some gold. Finding gold? This is stupid, right? But the game has slimy feds and two-faced friends stabbing you in the back — can’t miss there.

Early on, however, you realize that whoever made this game had either never played video games or heard there was a lot of money to be made and, like the guy in Field of Dreams, figured, "If we make it, they will buy." I can enjoy almost any game if I play it long enough. Throw in parts that take place in Vietnam, with an actual "The End" rip serving as the soundtrack, and you would be hard-pressed not to make me happy. I love Vietnam War games, shooting guns, and Mafia cutaway scenes. But holy lord, Made Man sucks. Every weapon you fire is so clunky and inaccurate, in terms of killing people, that it’s actually unfun. This was a first for me. Your enemies, however, shoot like gods. They never, never, never fucking miss. Their bullets also often defy physics. I hate this game. Even though I still had weeks to kill, I tossed it and took a nice 16-hour nap.

Jaws Unleashed (Majesco; PlayStation2, Xbox, Windows) would save me. How bad could it be? Even if it was awful, it’d be good for some laughs. You get to play as the shark. This had to be fun. And maybe there’s a Quint minigame. I love Quint.

Perhaps the copy I bought was pirated — hence cheap — because it didn’t work. No magic could make this game work. No matter how many times I blew on the disc, blew inside the PlayStation2 unit, inserted and reinserted the game, tap-tap-tapped — I still got that "No Disc" screen. I even tried winging the disc across the room, screaming, crying, and stomping on the console. No dice.

I was looking at an endless line of empty days spent staring at my walls. As a last resort I played God of War 2 (Sony; PlayStation2) on Titan mode, which is the hardest setting and possibly not actually meant to be played by humans. For anyone bothering to try this, when you get to the fight with Zeus at the end, you might as well just go ahead and kill yourself, because the shit can’t be done.

With 10 days of no money left, I gave up on PlayStation killing time for me. I gave up on porn, YouTube, everything. I even gave up on cigarettes. I read a book.

Gayest. Music. Ever.

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› marke@sfbg.com

Something horrible happened.

The promo package, marked Special, arrived on my desk in May from Ultra Records in New York City. Hastily, I tore the envelope open and yanked out the CD within, letting squiggles of packing confetti fall where they may. A bronze and glistening, near-naked, possibly underage Brazilian boy stared fiercely from the cover. His bulging genitalia were not quite stuffed into a Gummi-red Speedo. His hair dripped with viscous product. Posed stiffly against a seaside shack the color of processed cheddar, he looked like he was about to either blow me or feast on my liver. The text across his sculpted, slightly veiny torso read DJ Ricardo! Presents Out Anthems 2.

Oh, good lord. If there’s anything that turns me off more than DJs with exclamation points appended to their monikers — OMG! The ’90s! Low carb! Wow! — it’s some gay fool from Ultra Records in New York City trying to tell me what my "out anthems" are. Sorry, but tin-eared "Don’t Want No Short Dick Man" remixes, spacey-diva "Deeper Love" covers, mindless melodramatic thumpers, and obnoxious washes of sizzle and screech don’t quite sum up my raggedy, faggoty lifestyle or speak to my proud, if occasionally morally compromised, experience.

I adore dance music — it’s my life. Any packed dance floor is a good thing in my book. But I also have some taste, and this was the apogee of cheesiness. The presumption that these bland corporate farts are the tunes of my loony-queer times crosses a clear homo-to-homo line in the shimmering sands. (For the record, Ultra Records, my current personal out anthems are the Cinematics’ "Keep Forgetting," Shazzy’s "Giggahoe," and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ "Love Is Always on Your Mind." Go mix that.)

Listen, I can ride with the tsunami of cheap and sleazy DJ dance compilations that has flooded various music stores, in-boxes, and jittery Wal-Marts for the past decade or so, featuring tightly clenched glutes, toxic tans, and spandex-stretching silicone explosions. (And that’s just the music. Someone should really publish a picture book of all of the blindingly awful, grinding-Barbie-in-headphones cover designs. Title suggestion: Writhe the Ibiza Abysmal. Or how about just Champagne and Crap?) There’s definitely a market out there for pulsating pabulum, and I dug my own grave with two coke spoons and a mirror ball when I became a nightlife critic. I was even OK with the knowledge that because I had Out Anthems 2 grasped shakily in my hot little palm, it meant that somewhere out there an Out Anthems 1 must exist. You go, DJ Ricardo!! Work it however you can. No, that wasn’t the horrible part.

SPLICING THE MONOLITH

The horrible part was this: I actually kind of liked it.

Bursting with a weird glee that’s unique to our media-saturated moment — "Holy shit, you’ve got to hear-see-watch this, it’s the most horrifying thing ever!" — I had rushed the CD over to my boyfriend Hunky Beau’s house before listening to it, eager for us to put it on and tear it a new one together. That’s our modern gay love.

Yet once I’d slipped the disc into Hunky’s Mac and readied myself a hot shot of schadenfreude, I realized I don’t hear this sort of heinous stuff when I’m out and about as much as I used to. The once-omnipresent, thousand-nostriled behemoth of overbearing, poorly produced circuit and "progressive house" music has been somewhat tamed. Sure, much of the CD was atrocious, but now that this cookie-cutter hokum is no longer forced on me at every gay turn I take, pouring forth from restaurant patios and flashy video bars, after-hours megaclubs and fisting pornos, open gym windows and passing Miata convertibles, I could listen to it not as some soulless dominant paradigm that was threatening to rob gay culture of every last ounce of scruff and sparkle, but as mere tacky noodling: harmless fun in an ironic way, if you’re into irony anymore. (Not poor Hunky Beau, though. A die-hard devotee of skinhead mosh and East Bay punk, he dived beneath the covers as soon as the first few high-hat sprays had rung in the air, moaning like he had aural hepatitis.)

What happened that night — a night that found me wriggling around in my Underoos and torturing my man with shouts of "Look at me! I’m a tweaked-out fan dancer!" — sparked the more masochistic aspects of my curiosity.

Ever since the supastar DJ scene of the late ’90s and early ’00s became economically impossible to sustain — the Sisyphean task of convincing thousands of people to spend $40 to hear a scrawny dude from Manchester, UK, or Miami spin yet again burned many promoters out — the dance floor playing field has blown wide open. Megaclubs, with their monolithic sounds, gave way to smaller venues where independent promoters could experiment with fresh ideas and vent their wacky stylistic impulses, minus hefty cover charges and pat-down security. Clubs became more like house parties: the kid with the most friends or the biggest iTunes collection could plug into the DJ booth and let ‘er rip.

Gay clubs, especially, had followed the newfound freedom from big-time pressure and flight-booking budgets in myriad zany directions. Today’s gay club scene is more diverse than it’s ever been. Almost every night of the week there are options.

So maybe it was time for me to reappraise a style that I’d grown to hate, now that it was fading from mainstream gay scene ubiquity in favor of sleek hip-pop and ’80s hair bands. Maybe I could stare into the numb, drooling jaws of circuit and progressive terror and dance, dance, dance. Could it really be as bad as I remembered? Was I ready to let go of my bitterness toward a music so insidious that even my grandmother thought my life was one big party scene from — gag — Queer as Folk?

Was it possible for me to tune into KNGY, 92.7 FM (Energy), the aggressively gay-friendly "pure dance" local radio station that had become synonymous with such music — and had recent hosted a party spotlighting, yes, DJ Ricardo! — without retching uncontrollably at the first few modulated wails?

Perhaps. I dug out the hand-crank radio from my earthquake emergency kit because, like, transmission radio — who still listens to that? I reacquainted myself with how to adjust a dial. Then I turned the volume up.

DOWNSIZE QUEENS

Mention Energy 92.7 to most gay men, and curious things happen to their bodies. The shoulders pop, the eyes roll, the hands begin to gesticulate wildly. Those are the gay men who love the station. The others absolutely loathe it. Their bodies convulse in a spasm of disgust. Their faces twist into ghoulish grimaces. Spittle flies from their lips. The hatred is palpable. There’s no middle ground when it comes to Energy. I’ve been in cars where people have fought over it until blood spurted.

Such reactions may be the legacy of the circuit party scene. Fifteen years ago, if you asked the average straight person to close their eyes and think about "gay music," the image that would first leap to his or her mind would be a turtlenecked show-tune queen clipping pink rosebuds in her garden while whistling something from Les Miz. Or, if the hetero were more contemporary, the archetype called up would be a sweat-dripping, mustachioed disco nymph collapsing into a pile of Studio 54 fairy dust or a bleached and tragic Madonna fan in an oversize cable-knit sweater with a regrettable yen for cheap eyeliner. Many gay club kids today would gladly take those images over what replaced them in the mid-’90s: buffed-out ‘roid heads in sailor caps and tighty whiteys frantically tooting whistles while some faceless diva yelped them into an aerobic frenzy.

The colossal circuit scene had its strengths: with its world-conquering voraciousness, it served as an accessible entry point for the vast numbers of gay men who came out at the time. Clattering circuit beats and ecstatic progressive swells and breaks — the natural evolution of corporate rave music in a mainstream gay environment — pushed many HIV-positive men through despair in the time before effective AIDS meds became available, and served as an all-purpose celebration template afterward. But circuit parties also marginalized queers with no taste for militaristic conformity, gratingly regurgitated tunes, or the alphabet soup of designer drugs then in vogue. The fact that the circuit had once been a credible, if snobbish and expensive, underground movement held no sway when it hatched into a gargantuan space tarantula from Planet GHB that swallowed all semblance of queer individuality. It was the Will and Grace of clubland, and most of us got jacked.

But that was then, this is neu. Dissing the circuit scene for gay club music’s discouraging popular image is like nail-gunning a dead, glitter-freckled horse. "The scene has really downsized, along with the whole megaclub thing in general," a popular San Francisco circuit DJ confided to me recently. "The energy we’re riding on is nostalgia."

Michael Williams, co-owner of Medium Rare Records in the Castro, the go-to store for dance mix compilations, told me, "We still sell a lot of that music, but people aren’t asking for it as they once did. I think the market got oversaturated and quality became a real factor. People began asking, ‘Where’s the talent?’ Our biggest sellers now are more complex artists like Shirley Bassey, Thelma Houston, and Pink Martini, or DJs who really work to have an interesting sound, like Dimitri from Paris." Even the odiously corporate Out magazine declared the circuit party over in its current issue, so you know it must be true.

Still, the sour taste of the circuit era in many alternaqueers’ mouths has proved hard to wash out. And the stereotype of awful gay club music still reigns supreme in the straight world. Even though Energy 92.7’s been around for less than three years and is in truth, as I found out after tuning in, more prone to playing Billboard Hot 100 pop remixes than actual circuit music, it’s had to bear the backlash brunt. As the most visible mainstream gay dance music giant of the moment, it’s become guilty by association.

CREEPIN’ LIKE BOUGAINVILLEA

Greg: "Oh my god, he is such a freakin’ moron."

Fernando: "Thirty-six percent approval ratings is far too high for this president."

Greg: "The only way my gay ass would be impressed by [George W.] Bush is if he put a VJ in the Oval Office. Bitch, please — how many more troops have to die?!"

Fernando: "You’re listening to Energy, 92.7 FM. Here’s Rihanna with ‘Don’t Stop the Music.’"

—Fernando and Greg in the Morning

This is how gay Energy 92.7 is: when I first visited the station recently, the station’s party promoter, Juan Garcia, recognized my hair product from 50 paces. "Little orange can, girl?" he called out to greet me.

This is how gay Energy 92.7 is: when I sat in on the morning show with hosts Fernando Ventura and Greg Sherrell, they agonized during songs over the fact that something called the "smart-fat diet" forbade them to eat nuts for a week. "You can write anything you want," Sherrell, a high-voiced, blond spitfire who frequently informs listeners that he’s wearing his most expensive jeans, told me. "But if you don’t say I’m thin, I finna kill you."

Fernando and Greg in the Morning, on air weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m., is one of the most popular shows on Energy, which has a potential reach of 3.2 million listeners. The show could be accused of a lot of things — gay minstrelsy, pandering to stereotypes, making me get up at 4 a.m. to sit in — but it could never be accused of being unexciting. It’s the only openly gay morning show on commercial radio, and some of the live quips traded by DJ Fernando, Greg "the Gay Sportscaster," and their "straight man" producer Jason are dizzy scandal. Vaginal pubic hair "creeps up like bougainvillea," poppers are bad on first dates "because they’ll make your throat sore," and Kylie Minogue gets the verbal knockdown but "Oh, we love her: she had breast cancer!" Interspersed with segments like "Homo vs. Hetero," during which one caller of each orientation is quizzed about the other’s lifestyle, are Kelly Clarkson and the Killers remixes, "Vintage Beats" by Blondie and Michael Jackson, and current dance-chart toppers by Bananarama, David Guetta, and the Sunlovers.

It’s a thing of wonder in a society still riddled with homophobia — I dare you to find a YouTube video with more than 5,000 views that doesn’t have the word fag in the comments — to have such an unequivocally queeny experience, with a strong straight following, sail through the airwaves each morning. The tunes take a backseat to the dish. "At 9:30 in the morning you can only get so adventurous with your music selections," Ventura, an easygoing, bearish guy, told me. "I mostly stick with the hits."

The station, located in a murky green downtown office building, is a buzzing hive of fluid sexuality and good-natured candidness. The hyperdrive strains of DJ Tiesto and Deepface fill the air. As the only independently owned and operated commercial radio station in San Francisco, Energy’s done well. As a suitor of the gay audience, it’s done spectacularly. Even though its press materials emphasize its appeal to a broad variety of dance music fans, Energy’s known as "the gay dance station" to most San Franciscans. (That’s not so much the case across the bay, where Energy has gained a lot of traction in the Latino and Asian communities.)

Balancing a constant need for revenue with gay political intricacies can get tricky. A chill shot through me when I saw "Energy 92.7 owns the gay community" printed in bold and underlined in the station’s media kit — apparently we’re all slaves to remixed Cher. And even though the station is a major sponsor of most large gay charity events, there have been a few controversies. The gay media has fussed that Energy is co-owned and run by a straight man, Joe Bayliss, and the station has been blamed for dumbing down gay culture to grasp the pink dollar (although that’s like saying Britney Spears’s performance sucked because her heel broke). And last year Energy released a branded compilation mix CD — with an Army recruitment ad slipped into the packaging.

"We made a mistake. It was just stupid and insensitive on our part," Bayliss, a frank, handsome man with a ready smile, said when I asked him about the Army debacle. "This institution offered us a lot of money, and hey, we’re a struggling, independent business. We answered every complaint personally to apologize. We learned our lesson." (A new, military-free compilation comes out next month, to be carried by Best Buy, with proceeds going to local AIDS charities.)

PROGRAMMED RAINBOWS

That’s the politics, but what about the music? "I’m starting to build up a dance music collection," said Bayliss, who’s been working in radio since he was a kid. "This particular format tested through the roof in this market when we were looking to buy the station. I had no idea who Paul Oakenfold or Kaskade was when we started. I used to run a country station, and I didn’t know Merle Haggard from a hole in the ground either. But we’re 100 percent committed to this music and its audience. We have to be — our listeners are very dedicated."

Rabid may be a better word. The phone lines were jammed while I was there, and according to programming manager John Peake, the in-boxes are full every morning with e-mails from gaga enthusiasts. Good portions of Energy listeners stream the station online, and employees interact continuously with members of Energy’s E-Club virtual community. Even the afternoon DJs were leaping up and down in the booth while I was there, pumping their fists heavenward.

"Often we’ll get these enormously long e-mails from people listing every song we played that night, going into intense detail about each one and exactly why it was so important to them," Peake told me. "We get a lot of e-mails at six in the morning."

Looking compact in a lavender oxford, faded jeans, and a kicky Italian snakeskin belt, Peake took me through the music selection process. Each week he and music programmer Trevor Simpson go through new releases, recently submitted remixes, and requests from the station’s fans. They form a playlist based on what they think will most appeal to listeners and then program their picks into a hilariously retro MS-DOS program called Selector with, I shit you not, a rainbow-colored interface. "It’s tacky, but it’s bulletproof," Peake said, laughing. DJs either punch up the tracks automatically or refer to the playlist to make their own mixes using Serato software. Zero vinyl’s involved.

Peake and I talked about the criteria for choosing songs. "It’s a moving target. There’s definitely a ton of music out there that falls within our brand, and our nighttime and weekend DJs get to play a huge variety of mix music from around the world, so there’s a lot of latitude. I think our biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of hip-hop. Our younger listeners demand it, but a lot of our demographic is still afraid of it. If we play something with rapping in it, we get flooded with angry callers screaming, ‘How dare you play this! Don’t you know it’s homophobic?’"

Later I spoke with Energy’s promotions director, Tim Kwong, about the backlash against the station. "We get it from both sides," Kwong, a young Bay Area native with impressively gelled hair, said. "Trance and progressive fans say, ‘Why don’t you play more harder, locally produced records?’ Rock and hip-hop fans want us to play fewer remixes of their favorite songs. We try to strike a balance, but the truth is what we do works for our audience."

"I can totally understand the frustration people feel when a certain image is projected that doesn’t fit them," he continued, addressing the gay question. "As an Asian American with a punk and indie background, I have a lot of experience with stereotypes, believe me. But we try to be as broad as possible in our appeal and acknowledge differences. And we’re not bribing people to listen to us."

(OTHER)

To their credit, the folks at Energy also acknowledge that their programming may not be in sync with what’s going on in the gay club scene now. "It’s apparent when you listen to the morning show that I don’t go out to clubs very much," DJ Fernando told me. "But when I do, I notice there is so much more choice these days. In the past there were a bunch of huge nights or clubs, and everybody went. Now there’s a night or a bar for everybody."

"Ick! I think it’s total crap. It’s like the dance music equivalent of Weird Al," said Bill Picture, who, along with his partner, DJ Dirty Knees, is the city’s biggest gay rock club promoter, when I asked him his opinion of Energy. "We’re much more into visceral rock energy and seeing live, local queer punk. But a lot of gay people do like that kind of music. And I’m glad that there’s a radio station that they can tune in to. How boring would it be if all gay people liked the same things? We’re happy to be an alternative."

The alternatives have arrived aplenty. In addition to Picture’s metal events, there’s DJ Bus Station John’s bathhouse disco revival scene, which fetishizes pre-AIDS vinyl like the smell of polished leather. There’s DJ David Harness’s Super Soul Sundayz, which focuses on atmospheric Chicago house sounds. There’s Charlie Horse, drag queen Anna Conda’s carnivalesque trash-rock drag club that often — gasp! — includes live singing. Queer-oriented parties with old-school show tunes, square dancing, tango, hula, Asian Hi-NRG, hyphy, mashups, Mexican banda, country line dancing, and a bonanza of other styles have found popularity in the past few years. The night’s a sissy smorgasbord of sound.

There’s even a bit of a backlash to all of this wacky fracturation and, especially, the iTunes DJ mentality. A segment of gay club music makers is starting to look back to the early techno and house days for inspiration, yearning for a time when seamless mixing and meticulously produced four-on-the-floor tunes — not sheer musical novelty — propelled masses onto dance floors.

Honey Soundsystem, a gay DJ collective formed by DJs Ken Vulsion and Pee Play and including a rotating membership of local vinyl enthusiasts, attempts to distill Italo disco, Euro dance, acid house, neominimal techno, and other cosmic sounds of the past three decades into smooth, ahistorical sets spanning the musical spectrum from DAF’s 1983 robo-homo hit "Brothers" to Kevin Aviance’s 1998 vogue-nostalgic "Din Da Da" to the Mahala Rai Banda’s 2006 technoklezmer conflagration "Mahalageasca (Felix B Jaxxhouz Dub)."

"Girl, that shit must be pumped out by a computer with a beard somewhere," the 21-year-old Pee Play opined of Energy 92.7’s music. I didn’t tell him how close to the truth he was as he continued, "But I’m over most of the goofy alternashit too. I never lived though circuit, but the music is fucked-up. I’m just really into quality. I want to play records that every time you hear them, they just get better."

PLAY LIKE BROTHERS DO

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as gay music. If there were, its representative incarnation would probably be closer to experimental duo Matmos’s homophilic soundscapes, like those on their 2006 album The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast (Matador) — each track named for a gay community hero and composed of poetically related sampled objects ("Sequins and Steam for Larry Levan," "Rag for William S. Burroughs") — than anything that ever soared from Donna Summers’s throat. As far as gay dance goes, the epochal choreography of the uncompromisingly out Mark Morris, currently the hottest dance maker in the country, may prove more historically resilient than the image of semiclothed bears raving on a cruise ship.

Yet despite the Internet drain, clubs are still where homos meet to get sweaty, and the music they get sweaty to has a big impact on the culture at large. Dance music is ephemeral in the best sense: how good it sounds has everything to do with how and where you experience it and what and who you experience it with. Energy’s playlist was perfectly amusing in a broadcast booth full of campy, happy people or while twirling half naked in my BF’s bedroom. But in a club setting, maybe not so much — it all depends on who my been-there, done-that ass is dancing next to, no?

I recently spoke with Steve Fabus, one of the original DJs at San Francisco’s legendary Trocadero Transfer gay disco, launched in 1977. He’s been spinning continuously for 30 years and has pretty much seen it all. "Dance music is magic — it’s what gay people are," he explained. "It brought us together and kept us going through some incredibly hard times. Disco gathered everyone under one roof, and then house came along and did the same. Circuit was fun in the beginning, but it got too aggressive, and people of color or people into other things didn’t feel welcome. It took over everything, and, of course, it burned out."

"I love that kids are expressing themselves in smaller clubs, with different kinds of playing. It’s encouraging," he continued. "But it’s a shame that circuit took the big clubs down with it, where everyone could share in this experience together. Of course, there are other factors involved — crystal meth, the Internet, economics. You have to be very clever to be gay and live here now. It’s just so damned expensive."

"But oh well," he said with a laugh. "Everything comes in cycles."

Extra! Click here for the Gayest. Videos. Ever.

Click here for a list of upcoming alternaqueer dance events

To see or not to see

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I did not know the screaming man, nor did I know what country he was in. My view of him was shaking — the video was probably taken with a cell phone or cheapo digital camera with limited vid capability. Suddenly another man came into the frame and cut out the first man’s throat, which didn’t stop the screaming but instead turned it into a horrible, high-pitched wheezing. Eventually he sawed off the rest of his victim’s head and threw it around a little bit just for good measure. I had to stop watching, so I killed the tab in my browser.

My first thought was: what the fuck? And then, as the nausea subsided: what the fuck are these people trying to prove by killing a man like this? I was hungry for context.

The next day, I found myself asking more questions, but not about the motives of the murderers. Instead, I wondered about the communications technologies that allowed me to see that video in the first place. A group of bloodthirsty guys had to have handheld video-capture devices, video editing software, and a high-speed Internet connection to upload the finished product. Then they had to host the video somewhere that anybody could see it. In this case, that somewhere was the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco devoted to the preservation of history in digital form.

Most of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) is organized as a physical-world archive would be: curators like film historian Rick Prelinger donate rare and antique collections of media that they’ve digitized, and the archive makes them available to the world. But archive founder Brewster Kahle has a populist streak. He believes the public should have a say in what gets preserved in the historical record, so he invites the public to contribute. That’s why the Internet Archive has a small area on its Web site called the Open Source Movie Collection, where anyone can archive his or her media.

Kahle wasn’t expecting to host raw war footage when he created the open source collection. But curator Alexis Rossi says the archive receives about 30 to 50 Arab-language videos per day that are related to the Iraq war. "About two or three per week are really violent," she adds. "They are taxing to watch." Kahle, for his part, wasn’t sure what to do about them. They are undeniably a legitimate part of the historical record of the war and other conflicts in the Middle East. Watching them provides people in the West with a rare opportunity to see what Iraqi groups, including terrorists, are saying about themselves.

These videos don’t threaten national security, and they aren’t illegal because obscenity laws apply only to sexual content. So Kahle’s worries are purely about social good. Though these videos form a crucial part of the historical record of the war, something about them seems just, well, wrong. Then again, who is to say what is wrong in this case? War is brutal and deadly — hiding that fact isn’t going to help us achieve peace.

After agonizing over how to deal with the archive’s growing collection of war videos and consulting with experts, Kahle has come up with a solution that satisfies both his archivist and populist sides. He’s planning to set up a system on the archive that will allow users to post warnings about violent footage. These warnings will show up before other people see the videos; this way, the community can warn its members not to watch unless they are prepared for extremely graphic content. Rossi also hopes that the Internet Archive community will get involved in other ways too. "I’d love somebody to translate some of these videos for us," she says. (You can find many of the Arab-language videos at www.archive.org/details/iraq_middleeast.)

That warning policy is similar to community-policing systems on the movie-sharing site YouTube. The difference is that the Internet Archive — unlike YouTube — will rarely remove a video. Kahle is committed to preserving history in all its forms, even the ugly ones. It’s a lesson he thinks the mainstream media, with its whitewashed coverage of the war, would do well to learn. If we don’t remember the past, we’re doomed to repeat it.

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who always pays attention to what she’s told to forget.

The underground campaign

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Click here for the Guardian 2007 Election Center: interviews, profiles, commentary, and more

› news@sfbg.com

Elections usually create an important public discussion on the direction of the city. Unfortunately, that debate isn’t really happening this year, largely because of the essentially uncontested races for sheriff and district attorney and the perception that Mayor Gavin Newsom is certain to be reelected, which has led him to ignore his opponents and the mainstream media to give scant coverage to the mayoral race and the issues being raised.

To the casual observer, it might seem as if everyone is content with the status quo.

But the situation looks quite different from the conference room here at the Guardian, where this season’s endorsement interviews with candidates, elected officials, and other political leaders have revealed a deeply divided city and real frustration with its leadership and direction.

In fact, we were struck by the fact that nobody we talked to had much of anything positive to say about Newsom. Granted, most of the interviews were with his challengers — but we’ve also talked to Sheriff Mike Hennessey and District Attorney Kamala Harris, both of whom have endorsed the mayor, and to supporters and opponents of various ballot measures. And from across the board, we got the sense that Newsom’s popularity in the polls isn’t reflected in the people who work with him on a regular basis.

Newsom will be in to talk to us Oct. 1, and we’ll be running his interview on the Web and allowing him ample opportunity to present his views and his responses.

Readers can listen to the interviews online at www.sfbg.com and check out our endorsements and explanations in next week’s issue. In the meantime, we offer this look at some of the interesting themes, revelations, and ideas that are emerging from the hours and hours of discussions, because some are quite noteworthy.

Like the fact that mayoral candidates Quintin Mecke and Harold Hoogasian — respectively the most progressive and the most conservative candidate in the race — largely agree on what’s wrong with the Newsom administration, as well as many solutions to the city’s most vexing problems. Does that signal the possibility of new political alliances forming in San Francisco, or at least new opportunities for a wider and more inclusive debate?

Might Lonnie Holmes and Ahimsa Porter Sumchai — two African American candidates with impressive credentials and deep ties to the community — have something to offer a city struggling with high crime rates, lingering racism, environmental and social injustice, and a culture of economic hopelessness? And if we’re a city open to new ideas, how about considering Josh Wolf’s intriguing plan for improving civic engagement, Grasshopper Alec Kaplan’s "green for peace" initiative, or Chicken John Rinaldi’s call to recognize and encourage San Francisco as a city of art and innovation?

There’s a lot going on in the political world that isn’t making the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The interviews we’ve been conducting point to a street-level democracy San Francisco–style in all its messy and wonderful glory. And they paint a picture of possibilities that lie beyond the news releases.

THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT


As the owner of Hoogasian Flowers on Seventh Street and a vocal representative of the small-business community, mayoral candidate Hoogasian describes himself as a "sensitive Republican," "a law-and-order guy" who would embrace "zero-based budgeting" if elected. "The best kind of government is the least kind of government," Hoogasian told us.

Those are hardly your typical progressive sentiments.

Yet Hoogasian has also embraced the Guardian‘s call for limiting new construction of market-rate housing until the city develops a plan to encourage the building of more housing affordable to poor and working-class San Franciscans. He supports public power, greater transparency in government, a moratorium on the privatization of government services, and a more muscular environmentalism. And he thinks the mayor is out of touch.

"I’m a native of San Francisco, and I’m pissed off," said Hoogasian, whose father ran for mayor 40 years ago with a similar platform against Joe Alioto. "Newsom is an empty suit. When was the last time the mayor stood before a pool of reporters and held a press conference?"

Mecke, program director of the Safety Network, a citywide public safety program promoting community-driven responses to crime and violence, is equally acerbic when it comes to Newsom’s news-release style of governance.

"It’s great that he wants to focus on the rock star elements, but we have to demand public accountability," said Mecke, who as a member of the Shelter Monitoring Committee helps inspect the city’s homeless shelters to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect. "Even Willie Brown had some modicum of engagement."

Mecke advocates for progressive solutions to the crime problem. "We need to get the police to change," he said. "At the moment we have 10 fiefdoms, and the often-touted idea of community policing doesn’t exist."

Hoogasian said he jumped into the mayor’s race after "this bozo took away 400 garbage cans and called it an antilitter program." Mecke leaped into the race the day after progressive heavyweight Sup. Chris Daly announced he wasn’t running, and he won the supervisor’s endorsement. Both Hoogasian and Mecke express disgust at Newsom’s ignoring the wishes of San Franciscans, who voted last fall in favor of the mayor attending Board of Supervisors meetings to have monthly policy discussions.

"Why is wi-fi on the ballot [Proposition J] if the mayor didn’t respect that process last year?" Mecke asked.

Hoogasian characterized Newsom’s ill-fated Google-EarthLink deal as "a pie-in-the-sky idea suited to getting young people thinking he’s the guns" while only giving access to "people sitting on the corner of Chestnut with laptops, drinking lattes."

In light of San Francisco’s housing crisis, Hoogasian said he favors a moratorium on market-rate housing until 25,000 affordable units are built, and Mecke supports placing a large affordable-housing bond on next year’s ballot, noting, "We haven’t had one in 10 years."

Hoogasian sees Newsom’s recent demand that all department heads give him their resignations as further proof that the mayor is "chickenshit." Mecke found it "embarrassing" that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi had to legislate police foot patrols twice in 2006, overcoming Newsom vetoes.

"San Francisco should give me a chance to make this city what it deserves to be, " Hoogasian said.

Mecke said, "I’m here to take a risk, take a chance, regardless of what I think the odds are."

ENDING THE VIOLENCE


Holmes and Sumchai have made the murder rate and the city’s treatment of African Americans the centerpieces of their campaigns. Both support increased foot patrols and more community policing, and they agree that the root of the problem is the need for more attention and resources.

"The plan is early intervention," Holmes said, likening violence prevention to health care. "We need to start looking at preventative measures."

In addition to mentoring, after-school programs, and education, Holmes specifically advocates comprehensive community resource centers — a kind of one-stop shopping for citizens in need of social services — "so individuals do not have to travel that far outside their neighborhoods. If we start putting city services out into the communities, then not only are we looking at a cost savings to city government, but we’re also looking at a reduction in crime."

Sumchai, a physician, has studied the cycles of violence that occur as victims become perpetrators and thinks more medical approaches should be applied to social problems. "I would like to see the medical community address violence as a public health problem," she said.

Holmes said he thinks the people who work on violence prevention need to be homegrown. "We also need to talk about bringing individuals to the table who understand what’s really going on in the streets," he said. "The answer is not bringing in some professional or some doctor from Boston or New York because they had some elements of success there.

"When you take a plant that’s not native to the soil and try to plant it, it dies…. If there’s no way for those program elements or various modalities within those programs to take root somewhere, it’s going to fail, and that’s what we’ve seen in the Newsom administration."

Holmes spoke highly of former mayor Art Agnos’s deployment of community workers to walk the streets and mitigate violence by talking to kids and brokering gang truces.

The fate of the southeast sector of the city concerns both locals. Sumchai grew up in Sunnydale, and Holmes lived in the Western Addition and now lives in Bernal Heights. Neither is pleased with the city’s redevelopment plan for the Hunters Point Shipyard. "I have never felt that residential development at the shipyard would be safe," said Sumchai, who favors leaving the most toxic sites as much-needed open space.

Despite some relatively progressive ideas — Holmes suggested a luxury tax to finance housing and services for homeless individuals, and Sumchai would like to see San Francisco tax fatty foods to pay for public health programs — both were somewhat averse to aligning too closely with progressives.

Sumchai doesn’t like the current makeup of the Board of Supervisors, and Holmes favors cutting management in government and turning services over to community-based organizations.

But both made it clear that Newsom isn’t doing much for the African American community.

ORIGINAL IDEAS


The mayor’s race does have several colorful characters, from the oft-arrested Kaplan to nudist activist George Davis to ever-acerbic columnist and gadfly H. Brown. Yet two of the more unconventional candidates are also offering some of the more original and thought-provoking platforms in the race.

Activist-blogger Wolf made a name for himself by refusing to turn over to a federal grand jury his video footage from an anarchist rally at which a police officer was injured, defying a judge’s order and serving 226 days in federal prison, the longest term ever for someone asserting well-established First Amendment rights.

The Guardian and others have criticized the San Francisco Police Department’s conduct in the case and Newsom’s lack of support. But Wolf isn’t running on a police-reform platform so much as a call for "a new democracy plan" based loosely on the Community Congress models of the 1970s, updated using the modern technologies in which Wolf is fluent.

"The basic principle can be applied more effectively today with the advent of the Internet and Web 2.0 than was at all possible to do in the 1970s," Wolf said, calling for more direct democracy and an end to the facade of public comment in today’s system, which he said is "like talking to a wall."

"It’s not a dialogue, it’s not a conversation, and it’s certainly not a conversation with other people in the city," Wolf said. "No matter who’s mayor or who’s on the Board of Supervisors, the solutions that they are able to come up with are never going to be able to match the collective wisdom of the city of San Francisco. So building an online organism that allows people to engage in discussions about every single issue that comes across City Hall, as well as to vote in a sort of straw-poll manner around every single issue and to have conversations where the solutions can rise to the surface, seems to be a good step toward building a true democracy instead of a representative government."

Also calling for greater populism in government is Chicken John Rinaldi (see "Chicken and the Pot," 9/12/07), who shared his unique political strategy with us in a truly entertaining interview.

"I’m here to ask for the Guardian‘s second-place endorsement," Rinaldi said, aware that we intend to make three recommendations in this election, the first mayor’s race to use the ranked-choice voting system.

Asked if his running to illustrate a mechanism is akin to a hamster running on a wheel, Rinaldi elaborated on the twin issues that he holds dear to his heart — art and innovation — by talking about innovative ways to streamline the current complexities that artists, performers, and others must face when trying to get a permit to put on an event in San Francisco.

"I’m running for the idea of San Francisco," Rinaldi said. He claimed to be painting a campaign logo in the style of a mural on the side of his warehouse in the Mission District: "It’s going to say, ‘Chicken, it’s what’s for mayor,’ or ‘Chicken, the other white mayor.’"

He repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; when we asked him what he’d do if he won, he told us that he’ll hire Mecke, Holmes, Sumchai, and Wolf to run the city.

Yet his comedy has a serious underlying message: "I want to create an arts spark." And that’s something he’s undeniably good at.

THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT VIEW


Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris aren’t being seriously challenged for reelection, and both decided early (despite pleas from their supporters) not to take on Newsom for the top job. In fact, they’re both endorsing him.

But in interviews with us, they were far from universally laudatory toward the incumbent mayor, saying he needs to do much more to get a handle on crime and the social- and economic-justice issues that drive it.

Hennessey said San Francisco’s county jail system is beyond its capacity for inmates and half of them are behind bars on drug charges, even in a city supposedly opposed to the war on drugs.

"I had this conversation with the mayor probably a year ago," Hennessey said. "I took him down to the jail to show him there were people sleeping on the floor at that time. I needed additional staff to open up a new unit. He came down and looked at the jails and said, ‘Yeah, this is not right.’"

Asked how he would cut the jail population in half, Hennessey — in all seriousness — suggested firing the city’s narcotics officers. He readily acknowledged that the culture within the SFPD is a barrier to creating a real dialogue and partnership with the rest of the city. How would he fix it? Make the police chief an elected office.

"From about 1850 to 1895, the San Francisco police chief was elected," he said. "I think it’d be a very good idea for this city. It’s a small enough city that I think the elected politicians really try to be responsive to the public will."

Hennessey said that with $10 million or $15 million more, he could have an immediate impact on violence in the city by expanding a program he began last year called the No Violence Alliance, which combines into one community-based case-management system all of the types of services that perpetrators of violence are believed to be lacking: stable housing, education, decent jobs, and treatment for drug addiction.

Harris told us so-called quality-of-life crimes, including hand-to-hand drug sales no matter how small, deserve to be taken seriously. But it’s not a crime to be poor or homeless, she insisted and eagerly pointed to her own reentry program for offenders, Back on Track.

More than half of the felons paroled in San Francisco in 2003 returned to prison not long thereafter, reaffirming the continuing plague of recidivism in California. Harris said more than 90 percent of the people who participated in the pilot phase of Back on Track were holding down a job or attending school by the time they graduated from the program. "DAs around the country are listening to what we’re saying about how to achieve smart public safety," she said of the reentry philosophy.

But at the end of the day, Harris is a criminal prosecutor before she’s a nonprofit administrator. And her relationship with the SFPD at times has amounted to little more than a four-year stalemate. Harris and former district attorney Terrence Hallinan both endured accusations by cops that they were too easy on defendants and reluctant to prosecute.

To help us understand who’s right when it comes to the murder rate, Harris shared some telling statistics. She said the rate of police solving homicides in San Francisco is about 30 percent, compared with 60 percent nationwide. And she said she’s gotten convictions in 90 percent of the murder cases she’s filed. Nonetheless, cops consistently blame prosecutors for crimes going unpunished.

"I go to so many community meetings and hear the story," she said. "I cannot tell you how often I hear the story…. It’s a self-defeating thing to say, ‘I’m not going to work because the DA won’t prosecute.’ … If no report is taken, then you’re right: I’m not going to prosecute."

YES AND NO


In addition to the candidates, the Guardian also invites proponents and opponents of the most important ballot measures (which this year include the transportation reform Measure A and its procar rival, Measure H), as well as a range of elected officials and activists, including Sups. Aaron Peskin, Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, and Daly.

Although none of these people are running for office, the interviews have produced heated moments: Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann took Peskin and other supervisors to task for not supporting Proposition I, which would create a small-business support center. That, Brugmann said, would be an important gesture in a progressive city that has asked small businesses to provide health care, sick pay, and other benefits.

Taxi drivers have also raised concerns to us about a provision of Measure A — which Peskin wrote with input from labor and others and which enjoys widespread support, particularly among progressives — that could allow the Board of Supervisors to undermine the 29-year-old system that allows only active drivers to hold valuable city medallions. In response, Peskin told us that was not the intent and that he is already working with Newsom to address those concerns with a joint letter and possible legislation.

"If San Francisco is going to be a world-class city, it’s got to have a great transportation infrastructure," Peskin told us about the motivation behind Measure A. "This would make sure that San Francisco has a transit-first policy forever."

Measure A would place control of almost all aspects of the transportation system under the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and give that panel more money and administrative powers in the process, while letting the Board of Supervisors retain its power to reject the MTA’s budget, fare hikes, or route changes. He also inserted a provision in the measure that would negate approval of Measure H, the downtown-backed measure that would invalidate existing city parking policies.

Ironically, Peskin said his approach would help prevent the gridlock that would result if the city’s power brokers got their wish of being able to build 10,000 housing units downtown without restrictions on automobile use and a revitalization of public transit options. As he said, "I think we are in many ways aiding developers downtown because [current development plans are] predicated on having a New York–style transit system."

Asked about Newsom’s controversial decision to ask for the resignations of senior staff, Peskin was critical but said he had no intention of having the board intervene. McGoldrick was more animated, calling it a "gutless Gavin move," and said, "If you want to fire them, friggin’ fire them." But he said it was consistent with Newsom’s "conflict-averse and criticism-averse" style of governance.

McGoldrick also had lots to say about Newsom’s penchant for trying to privatize essential city services — "We need to say, ‘Folks, look at what’s happening to your public asset’" — and his own sponsorship of Proposition K, which seeks to restrict advertising in public spaces.

"Do we have to submit to the advertisers to get things done?" McGoldrick asked us in discussing Prop. K, which he authored to counter "the crass advertising blight that has spread across this city."*

Boen on SOL

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Up here near the North Pole, we are watching you at night via the live internet pod cast dancing in the afternoon sun in Northern California. Everyone here is much more aware than one might think of everything we do and have done in California. Here they have built the perfect egalitarian society, in California we have not. I just wish more Americans would wake up and read their Bill of Rights and Constitution. It says nothing about the Corporation for which we stand; it is the Republic for which we stand. America has nothing to do with any capitalist, communist, socialist, Nazi, or any other kind of goal. America is a Republic by the people, of the people, and for the people. And if those words are forgotten and the Bill of Rights and Constitution are forgotten, then all Americans will become enslaved and the electronic advances we now enjoy will become the whip our slave masters will use to drive us like cattle wherever they wish. I wish more Americans would wake up and Make Love, Not War. And once in awhile, read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights

Sucks to be you

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

My wife and I are the proud parents of an eight-month-old boy. While I was prepared for the postpartum lull in the bedroom, I was not at all prepared for the combination of sex and nursing.

My wife has gotten really into attachment parenting and co-sleeping and it took me a while to get comfortable with having sex with the baby in the bed, but, generally, my appreciation for the rare opportunity always ends up outweighing any discomfort. However, the last two times we’ve had sex, he has awakened in the middle of things, and rather than stopping, my wife has just put him to her breast and said to go ahead with things on my end. I’m really not comfortable sharing my wife with my son in this way. And frankly, no matter how much she moans and sighs, I just don’t think she can be that into it when her attention is divided like that!

When I’ve brought up my concerns, she accuses me of not having our son’s best interests at heart and points me to all of the attachment parenting literature about how not responding to his needs will hurt his neurological and emotional development. I don’t want to hurt my son, but I also don’t want to sleep with a vending machine. You’re a mom now — am I being a jerk?

Love,

Married to the Lunch Lady

Dear Lady:

My first response to your letter (after the admittedly rude cackling noise I made on reaching the part where she gaily calls out, "Carry on!" as though she hadn’t just grabbed the child and held him out in front of her as a human shield against any further attempted intimacies on your part) was sorrow that it was unprintable. You are not, after all, a sad, snaggy guy being slowly pushed out of the marital bed when the little one said, "Roll over!" You are a (female) online bud of mine who wrote this letter as an exercise following a discussion of what makes for good column fodder, and I bless you for it! It’s a great letter, fictional or not, and hey, lookit, I don’t even have to correct your spelling. So let’s just act as if, shall we?

Your wife has not so much adopted attachment parenting as she has, I wager, been assimilated by the Übermamas, a leaderless cult whose hive mind is headquartered at the MotheringDotCommune Internet forums. It is fashionable in that milieu not only to parent children to within an inch of their lives but to view husbands the way a lady mantis might describe her views on marriage and partnership, if asked: good for one job only, and that easily performed without thought or decision-making privileges or, indeed, a head. Dude, you must reclaim your head and put a stop to this — if not for yourself, then for your son! What sort of model of manhood is this for him?

Actually, he’ll be fine. It’s you I worry about. You must know that attachment parenting does not even require that you adopt what is optimistically known as the "family bed" (often, in practice, a "Mommy and baby while Daddy sleeps on the couch" bed), let alone the abomination that is "Oh, carry on, don’t mind him stuck on my tit here." All shock and revulsion at the actual act aside (about which more in a minute), you must realize that "go ahead with things on my end" means that there’s nothing going on on her end. I’m sure there are readers who will spaz out over the child abuse aspect, but I assure you there is none. This isn’t about sexualizing the child; it’s about desexualizing you. You will soon find yourself consigned to, at best, the couch or, at worst, someone else’s couch. If nobody’s ready to have the baby sleep in his own room yet (I am not a huge fan of banishing baby, myself) then get a side sleeper or a dresser drawer or something and let him snooze away peacefully in there while you and your wife snuggle or sleep or do other things starting with s. Speaking of which, this is serious.

Now, as for what your wife may be feeling, I confess to oversimplifying in an earlier column when I denied that suckling could ever feel anything like, well, sucking. Of course it can. Not only are the sensations superficially similar (although I don’t advise partners to do the weird rhythmic press-and-swallow thing while making a fishy-mouth face, not sexy), we have only so many physiological responses available to us. Nursing can feel good, and it releases the same hormones that sex, or rather having had sex, does. I’d even venture to say that the release of good feelings (mostly hormonal-emotional, but to some extent physical as well) is adaptive, evolutionarily speaking. Then I’d say that that’s all very well but we have evolved pretty far and we can keep these things separate and I heartily encourage us to do so. More later.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Witch, please

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

If you can end your Toronto International Film Festival experience with a movie that climaxes in a 10-minute fistfight (roofs collapse, cinder blocks are smashed, tables become splinters, ankle bones snap like twigs, and vengeance is won … but at what price?), that qualifies as a joyous note in my book. And fortunately, it’s my book we’re talking about — specifically, my TIFF screening list, which by the end of my festival stint was completely mangled by incoherent scribblings and intricate schemes involving cinematic scheduling and basic human needs (chief among them sleep, which was often totally disregarded).

There’s a fine art to festivalgoing. I’m not sure I’ve mastered it yet. But I managed to see 26 (and a half) movies, probably missing some that I should have seen and certainly digesting a few disappointments. Another critic could spend a week in Toronto and see none of the films that I saw; my tastes run toward horror, documentaries, Hollywood and accessible indie stuff by directors I admire, and Hong Kong cinema (like the ankle buster mentioned above, the Donnie Yen–<\d>starring Flash Point). Plus, you gotta work in at least a few totally random selections — otherwise, what’s the point of being surrounded by cinema 24-7?

The big bananas in the horror bunch were Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears, the long-awaited conclusion to his witch-happy Three Mothers trilogy, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, hyped as the legendary zombie king’s return to no-frills filmmaking. I also followed my thrill-sniffing snout to Spanish newcomer Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage and the French Frontier(s), directed by Xavier Gens (whose Hollywood debut, video game–<\d>based Hitman, is currently trailered on Death Sentence). I’m a huge fan of Argento’s gialli and flashy, trashy, blood-soaked horror epics — and while I’m aware of the argument that he hasn’t made a great film since 1985’s Phenomena, Mother of Tears offers vintage pleasures galore. You want a coherent story and subtle acting? Look elsewhere (perhaps to the ghostly, Guillermo del Toro–<\d>produced fable The Orphanage). Argento’s tale starts with a cursed urn and snowballs into mad hysteria, grabbing a gold-toothed witch, Argento ex (and Mother star Asia Argento’s real-life mother) Daria Nicolodi, a creepy monkey, and exorcist Udo Kier en route to a church-burningly ridiculous conclusion. In other words, I loved it.

I wasn’t as sold on Frontier(s), a well-made but derivative Texas Chainsaw Massacre descendent that squanders its interesting Paris riots context. And it’s my sad duty to report that Diary of the Dead is hardly essential Romero. Glowing reviews published elsewhere baffle me. Diary works an of-the-moment theme of kids subverting the mainstream media via user-controlled Internet sites — post–<\d>undead apocalypse, the only source of truth for the masses. But it becomes caught up in Making a Statement, and its narrative device — camera-wielding film student obsessively documents the undead uprising — is completely irritating. Sorry, but I’ll take the flawed-but-fun Land of the Dead any day.

Enfolded into my documentary diet were several music-themed entries, including Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Joy Division, and the doclike narratives Control and I’m Not There. We all know things are bad in Iraq, but Heavy Metal puts them on a regular-dude level that CNN reports don’t often facilitate. Metal outfit Acrassicauda love Slayer and Metallica, and they (and their fans) just wanna rock. At the start of the film (exec-produced by Spike Jonze and codirected by Suroosh Alvi, the cofounder of Vice magazine, and Eddy Moretti), the musicians claim they aren’t a political band. Attitudes change, thanks to Scud missiles (which destroy their practice space and all of their instruments), pressure from a culture that frowns on long hair and headbanging, and a post–<\d>Saddam Hussein environment of extreme danger (machine-gun fire is just part of the street noise). Less contemporary but no less absorbing is Joy Division, Grant Gee’s reverent and artful look at Manchester’s pioneering post-punkers. Lead singer Ian Curtis is the focus of Control, a black-and-white wonder by music-video vet Anton Corbijn that focuses mostly on the troubled Curtis’s rocky personal life. Meanwhile, Todd Haynes creatively interprets the music biopic — as he’s done before with Superstar and Velvet Goldmine — with I’m Not There, a freewheeling (yet carefully calibrated) look at Bob Dylan. An array of famous folks — the stunning Cate Blanchett among them — portrays an array of Dylanesque characters. Though I could feel the movie being deliberately arty at times, it worked for me. And I’m not even a huge Dylan fan.

I’m running out of space, and I haven’t even gotten to three of my favorite TIFF films, so I’ll just lump ’em in here. Son of Rambow got mad props at Sundance, and with good reason; you’d have to be completely heartless to not love this tale of two British boys who bond over the one thing they have in common: First Blood. You know you’re gonna see No Country for Old Men anyway, because seeing the new Coen brothers movie — well, that’s a no-brainer. Lucky for you, it’s their best film in years. If Oscar don’t bite, there’s no hope for Oscar. I know the gold guy will totally ignore Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, and that’s OK. I doubt the multiplex crowd will go for its sweetly bizarre tale of celebrity impersonators (Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe specifically, but other faux familiar faces, including Abe Lincoln and Buckwheat, make appearances) — and that’s not even mentioning Werner Herzog or the skydiving nuns. Amid all the witches, zombies, and actual movie stars, it was my favorite TIFF film.*

Do wi-fi right — ourselves

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OPINION Although it’s only a "declaration of policy," Proposition J (the mayor’s wi-fi initiative) is garnering a lot of opposition. Taken at face value, the initiative seems like a no-brainer: of course we should have free, high-speed wi-fi for everyone, with adequate privacy and no public money, right now. The initiative makes it sound like all we have to do is bend over and pick up the golden wi-fi network lying in the street. Like other stories about precious paving, though, the reality is considerably less shiny.

Since Mayor Gavin Newsom filed Prop. J to whip up support for his proposed EarthLink network, that company pulled out of the San Francisco deal. EarthLink also pulled out of its agreement with Houston (paying $5 million in penalties) and laid off almost all of its municipal network division staff.

Prop. J was created to rally support for a deal that doesn’t exist anymore. Should we pass it anyway? Well, the problems that Prop. J points out are real. At least a fifth of San Franciscans have no home Internet access, and many more residents have only dial-up access.

Unfortunately, Prop. J is written to make a political point, not to ensure universal Internet access. In order to make that point, it insists on two features that were part of the EarthLink deal but don’t make sense if we’re actually trying to achieve access for everyone.

First, wi-fi is almost certainly not the technology on which to base a citywide network. It’s suited to quick-and-dirty outdoor networks or to extending indoor networks to multiple rooms, but as a network that’s supposed to cover large outdoor areas and reach into buildings, it’s got serious limitations.

A smarter approach would likely use wi-fi only where it makes the most sense as part of a larger network. A truly universal network would likely utilize a combination of wi-fi, the fiber-optic line that San Francisco already owns, and possibly other technologies, like copper wires or fixed-point wireless.

Second, Prop. J specifies that the network be built as a public-private partnership. The fall of the EarthLink deal proves that the fantasy of a company coming into San Francisco and giving everyone free Internet is just that: a fantasy. Simply declaring that we want a public-private partnership is not going to conjure some unknown company out of thin air to build a universal network in San Francisco.

Although the measure is not legally binding, many of its opponents, including several unions and a number of community groups, understandably fear that it’ll be used as an excuse to rush into a bad deal. If we’ve committed to a public-private partnership and "implementing … agreements as quickly as possible," we’re not exactly staking out a great bargaining position.

The mayor seems dead set on finding a private company to build this network, whether or not that makes sense. He’s likely to use Prop. J, if it passes, as a way to ignore the likelihood that we’re better off pursuing a city-run network. If ensuring that every San Franciscan has access to the Internet is something we really feel is important, it’s something that’s worth doing right, and if we want to make sure it’s done right, we should do it ourselves.

Sasha Magee

Sasha Magee is an activist who blogs at leftinsf.com.

How soon is now?

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW Sixteen minutes with Lars Laumann? Well, I didn’t say no, and discovered that his video Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana is as uncanny as its title is ludicrous. This present-day conspiratorial artifact makes a Smiths devotee feel like Jim Garrison during a virgin viewing of the Zapruder film. Laumann weds a looped melody from the Smiths’ instrumental "Oscillate Wildly" to TV news footage, music-video clips, and visions from the ’60s kitchen sink cinema that have inspired (and provided) Morrissey lyrics, using all of the above as a backdrop to a voice-over lecture that links the 1986 album The Queen Is Dead to the Aug. 31, 1997, death of Princess Diana. Even if you have no interest in (or an aversion toward) the title’s pair of late 20th-century British cult figures, the result casts a comic yet eerie spell.

At this point, it’s fair to say that Smiths-inspired art has become a subgenre, a phenomenon flourishing to the degree that it deserves a book-length essay — ironic, since most of the video and visual art projects responding to Morrissey and company are far superior to the shelf of books that have been written off of his name.

Laumann’s video doesn’t pack the emotional wallop of the Istanbul-set karaoke in Phil Collins’s installation dünya dinlemiyor (The world won’t listen), which did time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last fall. But the Oslo, Norway, artist is exploring something different than is Collins, whose update of Andy Warhol’s screen tests allows for compassionate views and expressions of fandom. Drawing heavily from David Alice’s site www.dianamystery.com, Laumann’s short work reaches for the extraterrestrial stars in presenting the organic quality of conspiracy theory during the Internet era. As in Lutz Dammbeck’s Unabomber documentary The Net, the final conclusion (if there is such a thing) matters less than the numerous revelatory or ludicrous destinations that are part of the narrative’s crazy maze.

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana helps kick off a staggered series of videos showcased over the next two months in "There Is Always a Machine Between Us," at SF Camerawork. Curated by Kate Fowle, Karla Milosevich, Chuck Mobley, and Chuck Orendorff, the overall exhibition toys with Skype, mouse-triggered wall projections, and an orange-hued approximation of living-room DVD viewing. Some viewers might find it inherently problematic for lo-res video to receive bigger-screen treatment. Regardless, the varied combos of form and context here aren’t as provocative as the material gleaned by the select group of Web trolls whose research is on display.

Web trolling as gallery fodder — is this just one more ploy to destruct ye olde sacred art space so it can be mistaken for YouTube or an amusement park? If so, I’m happy that the likes of Cliff Hengst, Matthew Hughes Boyko, and Matt Wolf are doing the handiwork. More than one contributor to the exhibition’s DVD library includes the YouTube mainstay CPDRC Inmates Practice Thriller, yet Hengst’s, Boyko’s, and Wolf’s compilation DVDs also showcase distinctively deranged aesthetics. Hengst gives us Anna Nicole Smith outtakes, Barbra Streisand swearing at a heckler, and an industrial clip he aptly titles Clowns vs. Old People: The Final Battle. Beginning with another YouTube hit, Cobra vs. Baby, Boyko’s DVD moves on to revealing moments when onlookers seize control of imagery from stars, such as an unedited version of Tom Cruise getting sprayed in the face at a War of the Worlds premiere and the aftermath of Tara Reid inadvertently flashing a post-op nipple during her zillionth red carpet stroll.

Wolf’s DVD, featuring moments such as Kerri Strug Olympic Vault (singled out for its revealing masochism) and a clip of Ryan Phillippe playing the first gay teen in daytime soap history, offers only a taste of the imitations of Imitation of Life found on his site, mattwolf.info. More than the research DVDs provided by some of the show’s other videomakers, it adds to the richness of his work on display. In Smalltown Boy, Wolf — who is currently working on a documentary about the late musician Arthur Russell — picks up the baton left by Todd Haynes sometime at the cusp of the ’90s, combining TV-documentary motifs such as voice-over and interview to tease out a link between the late David Wojnarowicz and a teenage girl obsessed with My So-Called Life. The conspiratorial thread that runs through "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" resides within Smalltown Boy as well, in a manner that is all the more effective for being muted.

Fifteen minutes with Markus Linnenbrink? Well, I didn’t say no — and didn’t regret spending that amount of time and a bit more with his wall painting, epoxy resin paintings, and sculpture at Patricia Sweetow Gallery. Though slick on the surface, with a lively sense of color that exposes the rote and drab quality of some Bay Area work, on closer examination the German Linnenbrink’s paintings possess candy cane sickliness. The queasy factor is only magnified by the suspended drops of paint that hang from the bottom of some works, or, in the case of ALLESWIRDWEITERGEHNINEEINPAARSEKUNDEN, by hundreds of pockmarks. (Twisting things inside out once again, these pocks are gorgeous on closer examination, resembling the interiors of porcelain saucers or cups.) The muscularity of Linnenbrink’s process — Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock would approve — is counterbalanced by his fondness for bits of glitter and his droll flair. Though he’s understated in comparison with Douglas Gordon when it comes to temporal commentary, his titles sometimes question whether it is the paintings or their viewers who are loitering.

THERE IS ALWAYS A MACHINE BETWEEN US

Through Nov. 17

Tues.–Sat., noon–5 p.m., free

SF Camerawork

657 Mission, second floor, SF

(415) 512-2020

www.sfcamerawork.org

FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH YOU

Through Oct. 20

Tues.–Sat., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m., free

Patricia Sweetow Gallery

77 Geary, mezzanine, SF

(415) 788-5126

www.patriciasweetowgallery.com

Calling all island girls

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Oh, island music — the soft swish of silky trade winds, the gentle rustle of swaying palms, and the way-organic click-hop drone of crickets. From where I’m lounging at press time, in a humid picture-postcard tourist paradise outside the ’20s-era pink pachyderm of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, it’s also the sound of a few bruddahs playing a 12-string and electric bass version of "Brown-Eyed Girl." That was my island soundtrack growing up in Honolulu, along with the music of the Rascals and Earth, Wind and Fire, though surprisingly little Beach Boys, who had the vocal interplay Hawaiians adored but sounded like they probably didn’t really surf.

The Beach Boys just liked the idea of it, but then, don’t we all, buying into the seductive constructs of island fantasias, though we native born have always had a complicated hate-love relationship with the visiting cultural imperialists who drive the tourism-focused economy. Little surprise locals use the term transient like it’s a dirty word.

Speaking of island music, locally we have the Treasure Island Music Festival, the first two-day music event of its size on the human-constructed isle built to boost San Francisco pride by proximity and buoy the 1939 World’s Fair. The lineup, by the way, banishes memories of pop-period Van Morrison (though not fond thoughts of Hawaiian music materfamilias Aunty Genoa Keawe, who still plies audiences with her dulcet falsetto every Thursday at the Waikiki Marriott’s Moana Terrace) and includes Modest Mouse, Thievery Corporation, Spoon, Built to Spill, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, M. Ward, Gotan Project, MIA, Ghostland Observatory, Dengue Fever, and Mocean Worker, in addition to a bevy of talented locals like DJ Shadow (with Cut Chemist), Two Gallants, Zion-I, Honeycut, and Trainwreck Riders.

Noise Pop founder and IODA CEO Kevin Arnold, 38, told me the event has been a long-cherished dream for himself and Noise Pop co-organizer Jordan Kurland. The organizers had expanded NP in the past, to Chicago, before pulling back; they’re now venturing out again, working with Another Planet Entertainment. And why this fantasy island? "Because it was there," Arnold says. "We spent a lot of time looking around San Francisco and where people have been able to stage concerts in the past and make the event stand out. The island has all of that going for it: the location is pretty idyllic and beautiful, and it seemed like a fun thing to do."

Arnold and Kurland had come to a turning point with Noise Pop 14, and lately, he says, "we felt like it was time to really go for it and see if we can expand and actually make some money on what had been a large hobby for a long time. [Noise Pop] had broke even but had not done much more." So they took a loan out, hired staffers like general manager Chris Appelgren, Lookout! Records’ last head, and are now — in addition to coproducing a series of music-oriented City Arts and Lectures talks — putting on an event that, at an estimated 10,000 attendees per day, threatens to consolidate SF’s rep as a ground zero for must-catch music fests. And who can resist the chance to see these acts with an open-air backdrop of the city, glistening across the water? "I think for a lot of people, it’s this big question mark in the middle of the bay — what is it?" Arnold says, recalling that he witnessed a Robot Wars event there a decade ago but has never tangled with the military police once positioned there (ask a certain Oakland hip-hop star about that). "I think it’s a neglected space, and it’ll be good to educate people about what the island is."

SHAPE-SHIFTING CLUBLAND Venues come and go and morph radically — hey, maybe Treasure Island will become our next no-parking Speedway Meadow. Thus, while the Make-Out Room has been getting a makeover, to be unveiled Sept. 7, and scales live music back to Fridays to Sundays, word comes from D’Jelly Brains’ John Binkov that legendary SF punk joint Mabuhay Gardens will reopen at 443 Broadway, under the aegis of punk and metal bookers Tambre Bryant and Tonus Atkins. D’Jelly Brains join Victim’s Family member Ralph Spight’s Freak Accident for the revived Fab Mab’s first show Sept. 7. "Hard to believe," he e-mails. "Went by there to check it out last night. Locked and shuttered…. But at least no sports bar, yuppie tunnel crowd, meat market."<\!s>*

TREASURE ISLAND MUSIC FESTIVAL

Sept. 15–<\d>16, 12:30–<\d>10 p.m.; $58.50 per day, $110 for a two-day pass

www.treasureislandfestival.com

FREAK ACCIDENT

With D’Jelly Brains and the Radishes

Fri/7, 9 p.m., $8

Mabuhay Gardens

443 Broadway, SF

www.myspace.com/mabuhaygardens

SETTING THE STAGE FOR OKKERVIL RIVER’S WILL SHEFF

Are Tinsel Town train wrecks responsible for Austin, Texas, band Okkervil River’s latest CD, The Stage Names (Jagjaguwar)? Inspired by documentaries about Clara Bow, various show folk, and the poet John Berryman, vocalist-guitarist-songwriter Will Sheff wrote the album in a cheap rental in Brooklyn, a vast change from the rustic origins of 2005’s Black Sheep Boy. There, he found several lyrical themes running through the songs, concerning "having to be a fan and having to do with entertainment and what happens to you when you’re on the furthest extreme of life after entertainment. But it wasn’t necessarily as if I was trying to make some sort of finely tuned point, because if I wanted to do that I would write an essay and post it on the Internet."

To read the full interview, see the Noise Blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

OKKERVIL RIVER

Wed/5, 8 p.m.,$13 (sold out)

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Also Thurs/6, 6 p.m., free

Amoeba Music

1855 Haight, SF

www.amoeba.com

The death of Polk Street

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› news@sfbg.com

Click here to read about the Polk’s long, queer history

Kelly Michaels was following the San Francisco dream when she escaped her small Alabama hometown at 17 and hitchhiked westward. It was 1989.

"I had stars in my eyes," Michaels told the Guardian, sitting on the floor of her friend’s small single-room occupancy Tenderloin apartment, hints of a Southern drawl now paired with Tammy Faye mascara and bleached-blonde hair. "When you’re 16 or 17 and have dreams of being famous, you come to California — and you probably end up on Polk Street in drag."

Michaels arrived on Polk with little more than blue jeans, a bra, and rubber falsies to her name, making ends meet as a street sex worker. It wasn’t what she was looking for; the Polk was plagued with drugs and violence. But her dad was embarrassed by his transgendered daughter and didn’t her want her back. The neighborhood was a home.

She found a community at fierce Polk Gulch trans and boy-hustler bars like Q.T. and Reflections, where clientele included one "big, tall, black Egyptian transsexual hell-raiser" known to draw a gun. Scores of boy hustlers "coming in daily from the Greyhound station" danced naked on the bars. At the end of the night, Michaels’s new family members would pool their money and rent a hotel room for $30.

"The bars were the churches, the sanctuaries," Michaels’s friend Terri, an African American man in his 50s, told us. "You weren’t really going to be hassled there."

Not any more. "Polk Street is dead," Michaels told us. "Dead as fuck now."

THE NEW POLK STREET


The new kids on the block are calling it "revitalization."

After the three-decades-old gay bar Kimo’s is transferred to a new owner at the end of September, there will be only two queer bars left on a street that was San Francisco’s gay male center in the 1960s and a gritty, affordable home for low-income queers, trans women, and male sex workers in the following decades. Where scores of hustlers lined up against seedy sex shops and gay bars just a few years ago, crowds of twentysomething Marina look-alikes now clog the sidewalks in front of upscale clubs.

Polk’s queer residents and patrons are now being priced and policed out of their neighborhood — and their city — as business and tourism interests continue to eat away at the city’s center. Lower Polk Gulch, just blocks north of City Hall and one block east of Van Ness, has in the past few years succumbed to multimillion-dollar businesses, upscale lofts, increased rents at SRO hotels and apartments, and a new million-dollar city streetscape beautification plan. The related increase in policing and new efforts to clean up the street is making the area an unwelcoming place for the marginal queers who for so long called it home.

It has been the most down-and-out segments of the queer population — male sex workers, trannies, young people, poor people of color, and immigrants — who have often been the queer population’s boldest and most innovative actors, pushing the movement forward in new ways. What does queer San Francisco lose when our most marginalized members are pushed, policed, and priced out of the city?

HEART OF A COMMUNITY


Michaels stood under a neon purple Divas sign, advertising the three-story transgender club that has stood in Polk Gulch for more than three decades. Divas manager Alexis Miranda, a friend, stepped outside to chat, and a dozen characters from the neighborhood stopped by to shoot the shit. One man rubbed Miranda’s belly through her leopard bodysuit. "This is my baby," he told us jokingly.

Divas is as much a community center as it is a club. Girls from out of town and out of the country know to come to Divas when they step off the boat, plane, or bus. Many trans immigrants make a living as prostitutes, and while Miranda insists that she does not allow them to work inside the club, the close vicinity of San Francisco’s tranny prostitute district has meant tension for Divas.

Miranda told us the police have been targeting the club because of complaints from new merchants. "Some of the people who have new businesses don’t want the people who live here to stay. They want to close us down," she said. "They’re trying to gentrify the neighborhood."

Neville Gittens, a police spokesperson, told us that the San Francisco Police Department performs "regular enforcement in that area" but said any targeted operations cannot be discussed.

Theresa Sparks, a trans woman who chairs the Police Commission, said Miranda made the same claim at the commission meeting Aug. 15. "I don’t know if that’s true or not," Sparks told us. "My intent is to find out what is going on."

Sparks agreed that gentrification is driving trans people out of the Polk Gulch neighborhood: "It is very, very difficult for a transgendered person to survive in this city."

Miranda pointed to a bar across the street. Until 2000, the Lush Lounge was the cruisy trans and hustler bar Polk Gulch Saloon. Now, under a new owner, white twentysomething heterosexuals sip apple pie martinis.

Sonia Khanna, a 28-year-old trans woman with long, curly brown hair and mocha skin told us she doesn’t feel welcome there. "If you’re a tranny, they think you’re a whore," she said.

Miranda said the owner, Steve Black, ejected her when she went to welcome him to the neighborhood. Miranda, a former empress in San Francisco’s Imperial Court System, reported him to the Human Rights Commission. The inquiry was closed when the owner informed the commission that he allows transgendered people into the bar. He didn’t deny tossing out Miranda; he said he just disliked her personally.

The bigger problem may be the neighborhood’s increased property values. Divas owner and Polk Gulch resident Steve Berkey told us that rents have pushed out other established queer businesses on Polk. The only reason Divas stays open is that he owns the building. "It used to be that so many girls lived in the neighborhood," he said. "They packed the place. But now rents have driven them off."

CENTER OF THE STORM


The reasons behind the death of the queer Polk are complex, likely including the ascendance of the Internet as a social networking tool, rising property costs, and the aging of the bars’ core clientele and owners. But most of the community’s rancor has focused on the most visible manifestation of change: neighborhood associations representing new, upscale businesses working with police and the city to clean up the streets.

At the center of the storm is a glass-walled architecture studio at the bottom of Polk Gulch, around the corner from Divas. Two freshly planted palm trees in front of the studio are conspicuous on a site next door to a bleak, institutional homeless shelter outfitted with security cameras and across the street from a porn shop promising "Hot Bareback Action!"

Case+Abst Architects has been the workplace and home of husband and wife Carolyn Abst and Ron Case since they were lured by the area’s low cost in 1999. The trees were the first of 40 planted in a campaign they initiated last year as cofounders of Lower Polk Neighbors. Abst told the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2005 that she "wants a fruit stand [on Polk Street], and we’ll take a Starbucks too."

The group has had an impact: District Attorney Kamala Harris said at a recent community meeting organized by the LPN that she has responded to association agitation by having representatives of the District Attorney’s Office walk the neighborhood with police and installing high-tech surveillance equipment to gain more criminal convictions. Sup. Aaron Peskin has asked the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to include the Lower Polk in its Neighborhood Marketplace Initiative, a program designed to revitalize neighborhood business districts. As part of this program, a part-time staff person now acts as a liaison between Lower Polk merchants and police. Another city program is scheduled to spend $1 million on installing new lights and planting trees later this year.

Activists say the LPN focus is not on outreach, therapy, or support for the Polk’s marginalized residents but on pushing undesirables out of the neighborhood and ejecting outreach programs like a local needle exchange.

Last year Abst was the subject of a "wanted" poster put up on Polk by the group Gay Shame. The group calls the LPN a "progentrification attack squad" whose goal is to "remove outsider queers and social deviants from our neighborhood in order to accelerate property development and real estate profiteering."

The hustler bar Club RendezVous lost its lease in 2005 after the property was bought and razed. Its co-owner, David Kapp, didn’t return our phone calls seeking comment, but he told the Central City Extra in February 2006 that a "smear campaign" by the LPN stopped him from relocating down the street. A First Congregational Church is now being constructed where RendezVous once stood. The church was designed by Case+Abst.

Case told us that the Planning Department wanted to see neighborhood support for the RendezVous move. The LPN asked that RendezVous provide security, but the bar’s owners refused. "They always had younger, underage boys hanging out," Case said. "There are a lot of families in this neighborhood. We wished them well, but it’s also a community." He told us he wants not to gentrify the neighborhood but to make it clean and safe.

But safe for whom?

Chris Roebuck, a medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley, told us that the increased policing has also meant increased harassment of trans women. Sex workers, many of them immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand, are "increasingly being pushed into the alleyways, into unsafe spaces," he said. He’s also noticed a criminalization of what he called "walking while trans" in the six years he has spent interviewing trans women on Polk Street.

At a community meeting with the district attorney earlier this month, two trans women said the police, despite sensitivity trainings, do not take them seriously when they report a crime.

"Getting rid of the public space for trans women and drug users is not safe for them," Polk resident Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Mattilda) told us. "Deportation [of immigrant sex workers] is not a safe space. The needle exchange actually does make people safer. Getting rid of it does not make people safer."

Sycamore, editor of the book Tricks and Treats: Sex Workers Write About Their Clients, is concerned with what he calls a "cultural erasure" in the area. "Polk Street has been the last remaining place where marginalized queers can come to figure out how to cope, meet one another, and form social networks," he told us. "That sort of outsider culture has been so dependent on having a public space to figure out ways to survive. That is the dream of San Francisco — that you can get away from where you came from and cope, and create something dangerous and desperate and explosive."

POLK VILLAGE?


When Kimo’s changes hands at the end of September, San Francisco will lose one of the last vestiges of a hustler culture housed on Polk Street since at least the early 1960s.

On a recent night, six gray-haired men sat chatting or reading the paper, relics of Polk Street’s heyday. A young man with a shaved head and black hoodie stood outside the front door and gave a suspicious look to a young blonde woman in bikini straps who breezed in with two friends, laughing, oblivious to him. A sign in front read "No Loitering In Front of These Premises."

The state’s Department of Alcohol Beverage Control mandated the warning, Kimo’s bartender John David told us. He said he thinks that was the result of pressure from the LPN. "Kimo’s is the new whipping boy," he told us. "RendezVous is out, and now it’s our fault that people are on the streets."

Case denies that his group had anything to do with the crackdown on Kimo’s.

A tall man with shaggy brown hair standing on the sidewalk near Kimo’s, who asked to be identified by his porn-actor name, Eric Manchester, complained that a way of life is coming to an end. Manchester said he started hustling on Polk at age 17 after leaving the "redneck, racist town" of Martinsville, Ind., in 10th grade and being stationed in San Diego by the Navy.

"It wasn’t just money for me," Manchester told us. "This was a good place to come and get advice, comfort, support. There are people that need people, and they’re going to take that all away. San Francisco is going down the tubes. All the heterosexual people are moving in. They like the police-state mentality."

Among the new arrivals is the owner of the $6.5 million O’Reilly’s Holy Grail Restaurant that stands just a few doors down Polk Street from Kimo’s. On a recent evening, a musician played soft jazz on a black grand piano, while men in starched pastel button-down shirts stood around on the hickory pecan floor.

Myles O’Reilly opened the restaurant two years ago, when he also transformed a low-rent residential hotel above the space into 14 European-style hotel suites. Neighbors point to the property as a tipping point in Polk’s transformation. But O’Reilly sounded almost defeated when he talked about his "multimillion-dollar jewel in the middle of the desert."

"We are only a couple blocks from City Hall and Union Square," he told us. "But tourism doesn’t come this way."

With the goal of transforming the area, he teamed up with John Malloy, the head of the recently founded Polk Corridor Business Association, who has also chaired the LPN.

One of their projects is on view outside the restaurant and along the street. Colorful banners read: "Welcome to Polk Village … working together to build a cleaner, safer, more beautiful community." The PCBA plans to circulate a petition to officially change the name of Polk Gulch to Polk Village in a few years, but O’Reilly isn’t waiting. He defiantly lists the restaurant’s address as 1233 Polk Village on his building.

That "village" will house a small army if these merchants have their way. "We need foot patrols up and down Polk Street," Malloy, who lives in the neighborhood, told us. "We’re going to get more police even if we have to go out there and hire them ourselves."

O’Reilly took out his cell phone and started showing me photos. "This is defecation on the sidewalk outside," he said, pointing to a smudgy image. "This is condoms on the sidewalk. You see this lovely photograph? That’s a condom in the flowerbed. That’s what my son had to see this morning. And nobody helps."

"There are 1,000 condos being built here," O’Reilly said. "Something has to be done to restrict the number of street people."

VANISHING NEIGHBORHOODS


The Tenderloin, and to a lesser extent Polk Gulch, risked being swallowed by the expanding downtown financial district and tourist industries in the late 1970s. But in the 1980s, community activism secured a moratorium on the conversion of residential hotel units, required luxury hoteliers to contribute millions of dollars in community mitigations, downzoned dozens of blocks of prime downtown property, and created a nonprofit housing boom.

It is these achievements that new merchants and residents point to when distancing themselves from the word gentrification. LPN cofounder Case told us that because apartments in the area are rent controlled, gentrification is "not possible."

Not so, said Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee. "Look at the Castro," he told us. "It’s full of rent-controlled buildings. All you have to do is evoke the Ellis Act, or you buy out the tenants."

Or look next to the Congregational Church construction on Polk. There stands an almost-completed four-story building whose 32 units are being sold for up to $630,000. A large glossy poster in its window advertises the units’ "open living and dining areas," along with "stainless steel appliances, custom cabinets, [and] granite counters."

Brian Bassinger, cofounder of the AIDS Housing Alliance, told us that in one of the buildings where his organization houses people a few blocks south of Polk Gulch, rent is now $1,700 a month, up from $1,325 just a few years ago.

Gayle Rubin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and a historian of South of Market leather cultures, told us that gay neighborhoods are disappearing across the country as the core of major cities are transformed into high-value areas. This puts pressure on the economic viability of queer neighborhoods, most of which — despite the stereotype of the wealthy gay — have taken root in marginalized, poor neighborhoods.

"Polk Street is just one little battle in the war," Mecca told us. "The Mission was a working-class lesbian area. That whole lesbian culture got lost overnight. The bustling culture of queer artists in the Castro — all gone. The South of Market leather scene — gone. Parts of our culture, the very thing we came to San Francisco for, keep getting wiped out."

Kelly Michaels did develop a certain amount of celebrity as a performer at the famed club Finocchio’s and as a porn star; fans still post photos and gush over her online. And she remains drawn to the Polk, even if her relationship with the neighborhood is deeply ambivalent.

"It’s so evil, so dark, full of drugs and despair," she told us outside Divas. "But this is my home and my family."

"The people left here are going to fight for their home," she said. "Some people have been here forever. Their whole life is here. It’s impossible to get an apartment in other places of this city."

"This is a sanctuary," she said. "They’re taking the sparkle out of San Francisco."

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