Jobs Archives — Page 49 of 69 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

No gag

September 8, 2009

andrea@mail.altsexcolumn.com

Andrea is currently on vacation. This column originally ran in June 2006.

Dear Andrea:

About getting past my gag reflex while giving blow jobs: I have no idea of what’s the best way to practice this. I’ve tried bananas, but honestly that was just weird. I never bothered trying to deep-throat my ex because he was happy with a hand job. The new boyfriend has expressed much interest in it, and I think trying to deep-throat without practice first would be really awful. Any books on this? Recommended dildos? Anything?

Love,

Willing but Worried

Dear Will:

Indeed, but first let’s get our terms straight: Are you confutf8g the standard-issue blow job with the X-treme sport called "deep-throating" (taking the penis all the way into the throat), or has the boyfriend specifically requested the latter? "Deep-throating" has long had its place in the lexicon, but it has not replaced and ought not to replace "blow job," "giving head," or "going down on." They are not at all the same thing.

If all you two are interested in is mouth-penis contact, you shouldn’t need a textbook or a night of, you should pardon the expression, "cramming." You can practice a bit with nothing fancier or more banana-flavored than your own finger or a Popsicle stick, just to determine how far back you can tolerate an oral foreign body before you need to expel it. It does get easier with practice. Once you graduate to the real thing, you will find that the more control you take over the process (you do the moving, he just lies there being happy he has a penis), the less gaggy you will feel. If it still feels overly intrusive or out of control, wrap your hand (spit into it generously first, as though sealing a bargain) around the base and move this in concert with your mouth. Some men can easily detect the difference but many don’t care — friction is friction, after all, and warm, wet, and deep are usually good enough without having to get all picky about it. Most men enjoy a blow job, period, and few — I cannot say "none," but let’s not get distracted by the corner cases — get off on making girls gag or produce involuntary Roman showers.

If you can imagine yourself practicing on a dildo and not immediately collapse in giggles, you’re ahead of the game and I give you my blessing. Buy something realistically sized and inexpensive (jelly rubber, probably), pretend it’s attached to your boyfriend (the sillier the color the harder this is to carry off, I imagine) and see how deep, fast, et cetera, you can go without gagging. Keeping your neck straight and head slightly back are supposed to help, although the often recommended lie-on-your-back-with-your-head-off-the-edge-of-the-bed position strikes me as ill advised at best, since we are trying to avoid panic here, and what could be more panic inducing than having your airway and vocal capability cut off while somebody straddles your chest? Try lying prone or crouching, with the dildo upright as though projecting jauntily from your boyfriend’s pelvis as he lies on his back, and practice opening your throat as though chugging a beer or saying "Ah."

You may find, in time, that you really can control your gag reflex. The feedback provided by a real live boyfriend, though, in the form of appreciative gasps and groans, is a motivator the likes of which mere plastic, no matter how colorful, will never achieve. Not, at any rate, with today’s technology. Androids and replicants haven’t yet started rolling off the assembly lines and into our toy boxes.

Faking it with inanimate objects will only get you so far; if you really want to learn, you’re going to have to try it on the real thing. I don’t know your boyfriend, but I bet he’d be game for a little experimentation. Just make sure that the session is approached as an experiment, and that neither of you brings to it unrealistic expectations of immediate, spectacular success. Nobody’s born knowing how to do this sort of thing, at least not until those replicants get here.

If you two get this far and wish to — oh heck, there’s no better way to put this — go a little deeper, there’s good information to be found in instructional videos and DVDs, like the ones Nina Hartley puts out, and in books such as Violet Blue’s The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio, which contains nifty tips like how to keep your lipstick perfect throughout, as well as, yes, bona fide deep-throating techniques. I think deep-throating is overrated, myself, but then, I only borrow a penis and ought to defer here to those who possess them full time.

One last word of warning: Yes, there can be a somewhat unpleasant surprise at the end of a successful blow job. Inform him that he is responsible for early warning and withdrawal, no "whoopsies" allowed. This probably ought to be considered nonnegotiable at the beginning, subject to later review.

Love,

Andrea

See Andrea’s other column at carnalnation.com

The weird attacks on Van Jones

September 4, 2009

By Tim Redmond

It’s no surprise that the right-wing nuts are going after Van Jones, the Bay Area activist who is now Obama’s green-jobs advisor. The loonies have picked up on the fact that Jones was one of 100 people (along with Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Hawken) who signed a letter raising questions about the government response to the 9/11 attacks. It’s actually not that radical a letter; Indybay has posted it here.

But what amazes me is how quickly people who aren’t typically considered wackos have bought into this — take, for example, the former wife of the mayor of San Francisco, who appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to denounce Jones with some bizarre claims:

GUILFOYLE: Well, that’ s a problem. When you say, is there a problem with the vetting process? Clearly he wasn’t vetted. All they had to do was go and ask a couple of questions in San Francisco about this individual. You know there’s a problem when he’s not even wanted in the city of San Francisco where I come from. OK?

HANNITY: That’s a good point.

GUILFOYLE: That’s a huge red flag right there. What is this man’s qualification besides his anti-American theory? He’s far left, radical.

HANNITY: No, he’s a communist. I mean avowed.

GUILFOYLE: Yes.

CUPP: Self-avowed. Yes.

GUILFOYLE: Self-avowed communist. Why is he even in the White House? Is that the reward?

He’s “not even wanted in San Francisco?” What? Van Jones is an icon in this town. Some people think he gets too much fawning press; nobody I know thinks he’s unwanted.

And, um, self-avowed communist? Kimberly, that’s so 50s. I know Van Jones, and I know some communists, and I can tell you that Van Jones — for better or for worse — is not a communist. Guilfoyle must know that, too — in fact, there really aren’t a whole lot of communists left, even in the Bay Area. In the 1980s, I used to see the Revolutionary Communist Party types at political events, but you hardly ever hear from them any more. Calling someone a communist these days doesn’t even qualify as red-baiting; it’s just nutty-mouth.

HANNITY: All right. This is back in March of 2008. We examined this. He called on participants to take a pledge of resistance and — “Not in our name will we invade countries, bomb civilians, kill children, letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless.”

Now, I mean, we can keep going, look at the comment that he made about white polluters steering poison into black communities.

CUPP: Right.

GUILFOYLE: Well, this is an individual that doesn’t have the qualifications to be in the bizarre job that he’s in. And it just raises the issue here about these czars gone wild. This is someone who actually just doesn’t even like the United States of America, wants to reshape it, remake it into something that we would not even recognize, and what’s so wrong with this country that we have an individual like this coming in, meddling in our affairs that has no idea what he is doing, who really is traitorous in his comments against this country.

Actually, I spent several years of my life researching a book on the American environmental movement, which is now available in the remainder bins of finer used books stores here and there, and I can tell you that the question of environmental racism — in this case, of white-owned companies dumping toxic waste in black communities — is well settled. In fact, I was surprised to learn that chemical pollution wasn’t entirely a class issue — poor white communities got less poison than middle-class black communities. That’s 20-year-old news.

I know these guys need ways to attack Obama, but come on, Kimberly: You know better.

At least, I guess, Newsom can always distance himself; isn’t that what ex-wives are for?

The water wars

September 1, 2009

rebeccab@sfbg.com

When arch-conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity decided to weigh in recently on the contentious — and immensely complicated — issue of California water policy, here’s how he summed it up: "Farmers in California are losing their crops, their land, and their livelihood — all because of a two-inch fish!"

Television viewers were treated to scenes of the Central Valley, showing a lush field of crops — followed by a dusty, withered almond orchard that has been cut off from water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. A news anchor informed viewers that the nation’s most productive agricultural lands were "threatened by a small, harmless-looking minnow called the Delta smelt."

Because a federal judge ordered cutbacks in the amount of water shipped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms in the valley, a farmer explained on camera, growers have fallen on hard times. After showing a long line stretching around a food bank in the tiny agricultural town of Mendota, the newscasters concluded: "It’s fish versus families, and [the government is] choosing the fish."

It’s a dramatic portrayal, and the poor farm laborers who are out of work are truly struggling. But it isn’t the fault of a fish.

The state Legislature is now struggling with a series of bills to address a problem that sometimes seems to defy political solution, while agricultural interests — which consume the lion’s share of the state’s water supply — are campaigning aggressively to secure even more water for irrigation.
But while the political forces battle, an environmental nightmare is being created in the Delta. Years of massive water diversions are putting the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary at risk. Massive projects that take freshwater from the delta appear linked to declines in bay and delta fisheries, threatening not just endangered species but California’s salmon fishing industry, which lost more than $250 million last year as a result of declining salmon runs.

Delta exports (at left) have increased in recent years, while returning Chinook salmon populations have declined at the end of a three-year spawning cycle. Graph created using data from Porgans & Associates

Meanwhile, climate models predict that California’s tug-of-war over water will only get uglier as the state is hit with more frequent droughts. As lawmakers scramble to find a solution to the state’s water woes, the challenge isn’t just to balance the needs of families and fish — it’s to steer an increasingly crowded state toward smarter management of shrinking water resources.
"It all comes down to climate change," Lt. Gov. John Garamendi noted in a recent interview with the Guardian. "Everything we know about water in California is going to dramatically change."

Critics say the bills in Sacramento are, at best, a duct-tape-and-baling-wire solution to a problem that could define the state’s economy and environment in the coming decades. "The bills … have been slapped together in such a slapdash way that it’s reminiscent of energy deregulation," said Nick Di Croce, lead author of "California Water Solutions Now," a report produced by the Environmental Water Caucus.

As things stand, much of the problem is inherent in the system. The pumps that export water out of the delta regularly pulverize federally threatened and endangered fish, yet the government agencies that operate them are rarely held accountable. The agency that is supposed to monitor and protect the health of the San Francisco Bay and the fragile delta ecosystem also gets 80 percent of its budget from water sales. And the state water projects regularly promise more water than they can deliver.

THE GREAT SUCKING SOUND

California’s water wars stem from a tricky dilemma: two-thirds of the precipitation falls in the north, while two-thirds of the people live in the drier south. The delta, located primarily in Sacramento and San Joaquin counties, is the heart of the state’s water supply, where the freshwater flows of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and vein-like tributaries converge. It boasts the largest estuary on the west coast of North and South America, providing critical habitat for at least a dozen threatened or endangered species including salmon, smelt, splittail, sturgeon, and others.

The delta is also like a superhighway interchange of water for the state. Two vast plumbing networks — the Central Valley Project, operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the State Water Project, operated by the Department of Water Resources — transport water from delta pumping stations to cities and agricultural operations across the state.

Roughly 5.7 million acre-feet of water was exported annually from the delta in recent years, a high that many environmentalists say is unsustainable. (An acre-foot, or 325,853 gallons, is the amount that covers an acre one-foot deep.) Before the Central Valley Project was constructed in the 1930s, only 4.7 million acres of farmland were irrigated statewide. By 1997, the acres of thirsty cropland had climbed to 8.9 million, converting many areas that were once barren desert into lush green fields. Agribusiness dominates the sector, with some farming operations like agricultural empires, spanning tens of thousands of acres.

As cropland has expanded, so has agriculture’s demand for water. State and federal agencies sell delta water by issuing contracts to water districts, and the water is priced substantially lower for agricultural use. A report issued by the Natural Resources Defense Council suggests that delta water allocation has traditionally gone something like this: "Corporate and agricultural interests demanded more and more water, and the state and federal agencies let them have it."

No one can say just how much rain will fall from the sky in a given year, so stipulations were written into the water contracts to deal with allocation during times of water shortage. Depending on a district’s water rights — a status determined by a combination of seniority and a hierarchy of uses — it may get 100 percent of the amount promised on paper during a dry year, or a mere fraction of it.

But the districts continue to promise water to farmers, and the state continues to promise water to the districts.

This latest round of water wars is exacerbated by the drought, which has sapped water supply in California for three years in a row. The dry spell has led to cutbacks in delta water exports, affecting farms throughout the Central Valley and sending unemployment rates up. The drought was responsible for two-thirds of the roughly 1.6 million acre-feet shortfall in water exports, and the remaining third was withheld by federal court order to protect the endangered Delta smelt.

Making matters worse, many growers in water-deprived places like the Westlands Water District, in the Central Valley between Coalinga and San Joaquin, have recently shifted to permanent crops like almonds and pistachios instead of annual crops that might be more adaptable to unpredictable irrigation supply from year to year. It’s a bad time for the San Joaquin Valley to take a hit. The region is already plagued with high rates of unemployment from a loss in construction work, foreclosure, and other effects of the economic downturn.

HELL IN A HANDBASKET

State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) put the dilemma simply: "The question is, how do you ensure that two-thirds of the state has a reliable supply of clean water while at the same time acknowledging and addressing the fact that from an environmental standpoint, the delta’s gone to hell in a handbasket over the last five years?" Simitian has taken a leadership role in crafting legislation to reform the broken system.

"I just think that things have come together at this particular time to suggest that there ought to be a sense of urgency about all of this," Simitian added during a recent conversation with the Guardian. "But I worry that inaction is always the default mechanism, and in a conversation such as this one, I don’t think we can afford inaction very much longer."
Right now five bills are pending in Sacramento. Backers say they strive to meet two "co-equal goals" that in the past have proven to be at odds: more reliable delta water deliveries, and a restored delta ecosystem. Simitian’s bill would create a Delta Stewardship Council, a powerful body authorized to approve spending for a new system for moving water through the delta that could include a new version of the much-maligned peripheral canal, a hydraulic bypass diverting freshwater from the Sacramento River around the brackish delta to ship south.

A bill introduced by Assembly Member Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), who heads the water committee, would require a 20 percent reduction in statewide urban per capita water use by 2020. Other objectives in the legislation are to firm up ecological protections for the delta, reevaluate the state’s system of water rights, and establish new water-use reporting requirements.

"Is there a win-win here? I think there is," Simitian told us. "But only if you look at this from sort of a big-picture, comprehensive standpoint, which is why we’ve got five different bills that seek to make sure there’s a balancing of interests. One of the things we’ve talked about was the co-equal goals of a reliable supply of clean water with delta restoration. And that’s going to require not looking at any one of these issues in isolation, but taking it all together."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made it clear that he believes building a peripheral canal is the best plan. Variations of this idea have been proposed since the 1940s, but in 1982, Californians voted it down at the ballot (with an overwhelming majority of Northern Californians voting no).

Some groups perceive this as a water grab for Southern California and agribusiness, and delta interests say it would cripple both delta agriculture and the estuary by increasing salinity levels from seawater and preventing the delta from being flushed out by natural freshwater flows. Cost estimates for that project range from $10 billion to $40 billion.

Schwarzenegger has also threatened to veto any package proposed by the Democrat-controlled Legislature that doesn’t include bonds for new dams (in their current form, the bills do not). A bond bill would require a two-thirds majority, while the proposed water bills would only need a simple majority vote to pass.

"I think it’s helpful for the governor to weigh in and share his opinions," Simitian noted cautiously. "However, I did not think it was helpful for the governor to simply draw a line in the sand."

The proposals are being met with skepticism from all sides. Many environmentalists who’ve gone to battle over water policy issues for years have little faith, saying the proposed Delta Stewardship Council would cater to the governor’s agenda because he would have the power to appoint four out of seven members. They’re concerned that environmental issues will play second fiddle as plans are hatched.

Lloyd Carter, an environmentalist who grew up on a raisin farm in the Central Valley, is suspicious the policy will be weighted toward agricultural interests. "What’s most useful is to think of water as cash," Carter told us. "It starts out as cash in the public treasury, and one little segment goes in and scoops out as much as it can. Agriculture accounts for less than 5 percent of the state’s economy and they use 80 percent of the water."

Agricultural interests and the water districts that serve them, not surprisingly, view water cutbacks as a signal of government failure and are hard-pressed to go along with anything that doesn’t include provisions for new dams and a canal. Rather than recognize limits in the amount of available water, they want new projects that will increase the supply.

The Latino Water Coalition, an organization backed by agribusiness that has put together marches and rallies to protest the water cutbacks, is critical of the proposed package of bills because they say it doesn’t go far enough. "For years there’s been committee after committee, board after board. If the best that the legislature can do is propose a new committee, how can that be a good solution?" asked Mario Santoyo, technical adviser to the coalition. "There are people who don’t have jobs, there’s food that’s not being grown. It’s a human rights issue. There has to be a solution, and it has to be real."

Sarah Woolf, media spokesperson for the Westlands Water District, which is among the most vocal advocates for agricultural water, echoed Santoyo’s view. "If you do not have above-ground and below-ground storage and a peripheral canal, then you don’t have a solution," she told the Guardian. "There’s no point in passing legislation that doesn’t solve the whole problem."

But of course, when there’s not enough water to go around, building more dams and canals isn’t going to solve the whole problem, either.

SELLING WATER THAT ISN’T THERE

Patrick Porgans, a Sacramento-based water policy expert, is critical of the proposed package of bills for a very different reason. "We can’t expect the very government that created the problem to solve the problem, because they are the problem," he says.

Porgans arrived at the Guardian office not long ago dressed in a salmon-colored suit with matching snakeskin belt and shoes. The rail-thin 63-year old walks with a bit of a fragile step, but once he gets talking about water, he’s a bundle of uncontrollable energy. For more than two hours, he held a pair of reporters in thrall as he unpacked and held up big armloads of charts, color-coded graphs, and government documents.

It’s just a sampling from what Porgans calls his "database," and he’s got photos: a storage space piled to the ceiling with file boxes containing thousands of pages of documents. This is his life’s work, and it’s easy to wonder how he even has time to eat and sleep.

In the wake of the 1987-92 drought, his consulting firm, Porgans & Associates, publicized the fact that the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project had pumped more water out of the delta during the dry spell than at any other time in their history of operation. The firm is now suing the government for vioutf8g the Endangered Species Act.

Ask Porgans, and he will tell you that "the peripheral canal is a peripheral issue" because it couldn’t possibly address the underlying shortcomings of the water-policy system itself. He pointed out that 80 percent of DWR’s operating budget is derived from water contracts, and noted that many top officials in water-project agencies arrive through a revolving door from the water districts themselves. There’s a conflict of interest, he said, because the agencies are in charge of both selling off delta water and acting as the stewards of the estuary, a natural resource owned by everyone.

Then there’s the underlying problem of the government having sold off contracts for more water than it could actually deliver, a point Porgans highlighted in his notice of intent to sue. In the years following a drought that struck California in the late 1970s, plans were made to expand water storage for the State Water Project — but they fell through at the last minute. Unfortunately, the limited capacity didn’t slow the sale of water contracts.

From 2001 to 2006 alone, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation signed more than 170 long-term contracts with water districts around the state, promising to increase significantly water deliveries from the Central Valley Project for the next 25 to 40 years.

"Basically, they oversold the project," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations. "We had all these contracts to deliver all this water, but nobody looked to see how much water there was. More importantly, they didn’t look at the minimums that would be needed to protect the delta."

"The shortages are inherent in the project," Porgans said. A court opinion issued by California’s third appellate district court in 2000, plucked from his database, underscores this point. "DWR forthrightly admits that ‘the State Water Project (SWP) does not have the storage facilities, delivery capabilities, or the water supplies necessary to deliver full amounts of entitlement water,’" Judge Cecily Bond noted, citing a DWR bulletin. "There is then no question that the SWP cannot deliver all the water to which contractors are entitled under the original contracts. It does not appear that SWP has ever had that ability."

Grader puts the blame directly on the water districts. The growers, he said, are "innocent third parties affected by the actions of water districts that should’ve known better" because the water contracts specified from the beginning that there would be less water available during times of water shortage.

"We have nothing but empathy for farm workers who are unemployed," said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, a 501(c)3 nonprofit representing delta farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists. "But their leadership told them, go ahead and do it. We’ll get you the water."

Farmers have organized rallies and marches to protest the water cutbacks, angrily putting the endangered delta smelt at the front and center of its campaign. A band of farmers traveled up to San Francisco in recent months, chanting "turn on the pumps!" outside Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco Federal Building office.

Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican who represents Tulare County and parts of Fresno County, unsuccessfully tried to convince Congress to waive Endangered Species Act requirements to forego protection of the delta smelt and restore irrigation for struggling farmers. (Nunes even attended a Congressional hearing toting a goldfish bowl containing minnows to play up the fish-vs.-families mummery.) The Latino Water Coalition has been particularly vocal, getting airtime on Fox News and publicly appearing with Gov. Schwarzenegger to call for construction of new dams and a canal to ensure a more reliable water supply.

Carter, the environmentalist watching it all unfold from Fresno, shakes his head at the display. If their campaign is successful, he told us, the state will wind up embarking on expensive infrastructure projects that serve an agribusiness agenda at Northern California’s expense. "There’s a sense of entitlement down here," he said. "They say it’s ‘our water.’ But the rivers in California belong to all the people."

DEAD FISH

A series of studies, court decisions, and a Blue Ribbon Delta Vision Task Force convened by the governor have all found that massive water exports out of the delta pose a tremendous environmental problem, and the delta smelt is a mere indicator of the trouble. Failing to ensure adequate freshwater flows through the delta could spell doom for California salmon runs and sound a death knell for the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary. And many contend that building a peripheral canal would be the quickest route to the delta’s demise.

According to data Porgans & Associates has collected, excessive delta water exports are aligned with salmon-population nosedives. The numbers tell a tale: high water exports correlate with dramatic decreases in salmon returns after the fish’s three-year spawning cycle. Conversely, fish populations bounce back following years of reduced pumping.

Delta water exports reached an all-time high of 6.7 million acre-feet in 2005, and three years later, the salmon returns were so low that the commercial salmon harvest was cancelled for the first time. It happened again this year.

While Westlands farmers bemoan what they call a "man-made drought," they’re not the only ones facing job loss due to delta water issues — an estimated $255 million was lost last year as a result of low salmon returns, according to California Department of Fish and Game estimates. A report from the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based environmental research group, estimates puts farm losses due to water shortages at $245 million as of midsummer 2008.

"This closure is among the nation’s worst man-made fisheries disasters," an NRDC report notes. "It is on par with the loss of Atlantic cod fishery, and its economic impact for the fishing industry is comparable to the losses that followed the Exxon Valdez oil spill."

It’s said that California salmon were so plentiful 70 years ago that farmers plucked them from waterways with pitchforks. Now biologists say those salmon runs that haven’t already been listed as threatened or endangered are in a losing battle with worsening water quality and massive water pumps in the Delta.

An estimated 90,000 juvenile salmon die prematurely each year by being sucked into the heavy-duty pumps, according to a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources study. Sometimes the pumping levels are so high it reverses river flows, causing salmon to swim upstream instead of out to sea. "If you or I go out and shoot an eagle, we’ll go to jail," said Barrigan-Parrilla, from Restore the Delta. "But DWR has no accountability to the Endangered Species Act — they’re grinding up fish."

The salmon also suffer from poor water quality, which environmentalists say is a consequence of the voluminous freshwater diversions. If the freshwater isn’t available to flush out the ecosystem, the negative effects of toxins and pollutants discharged into the Delta are amplified, and the water gets warmer, dirtier, and saltier. The ramifications of salmon decline can ripple along the food chain, putting even southern resident killer whales, which feed heavily on Sacramento River salmon in the ocean, at risk.

The impacts of freshwater diversions aren’t limited to the region’s ecology: delta agriculture is taking a hit, too. The construction of a peripheral canal would "destroy the estuary and shift economic problems from one geographic location to another," said Barrigan-Parrilla. "Agriculture in the southern delta would not make it." South delta farmers have already had to contend with increasing levels of salinity due to the massive freshwater diversions, she says. A homegrown bean festival held every year in Tracy has had to resort to purchasing beans, she told us, because it’s become too salty to grow them.

"The estimates are $10 to $40 billion to build a canal," Barrigan-Parrilla said with a note of disbelief. "We’re going to spend that much money on a project when we have just gutted education and welfare?"

As Sacramento lawmakers pull at the threads of this tightly-wound knot, looming uncertainties are waiting in the wings. For one, the delta’s network of 1,100 miles of earthen levees is under increasing strain due to its age, making it susceptible to failure. In fact, some say a peripheral canal could help prevent levee failure. Meanwhile, climate change is a challenge that can’t be ignored because it will affect overall water supply even as the state’s population continues to climb.

"The science makes it increasingly clear that the current system is unsustainable, Simitian said. The scientists are telling us there’s a two out of three chance that in the next 50 years the whole system will collapse, and that serves neither the delta well nor the two-thirds of the state that relies on delta water." Simitian doesn’t endorse the canal, but told us that the system of water conveyance needs to be changed.

Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told us that thinking about water supply is just as important as thinking about how to move it around. He pointed out that some Colorado River dams just aren’t filling up anymore. If you build a new dam without managing the water supply, he said, "you have a big hunk of concrete that just isn’t doing anything."

Climate change will reduce the Sierra snowpack, an important natural reservoir, anywhere from 15 percent to 60 percent, according to the Department of Water Resources. The warmer air temperatures will also shift the runoff flows to earlier in the year, making major adjustments necessary. Climate change models also predict worsening drought. Water shortages worse than those caused by the 1977 drought could occur in one out of every six to eight years by 2050, and one out of every three to four years by 2100, according to the department’s study. The change in weather patterns will also increase the likelihood of floods.

Rising sea levels will also bring more saline ocean water into the delta, making it necessary to inject more freshwater into the system to maintain water quality and protect native species.

All told, climate change is expected to reduce overall delta water exports from 7 percent to 10 percent by 2050, and 21 percent to 25 percent by the end of the century — a heavy toll that can’t be managed without smarter water management.

Pending water shortages can be addressed in part with what NRDC calls California’s "virtual river," Obegi said, an aggressive system of water efficiency, waste-water recycling, groundwater cleanup and storm-water management that could yield a potential 7 million acre-feet per year.

As for agriculture, the 800-pound gorilla of water consumption in the state, there’s plenty of room for improvement. A report by the Pacific Institute estimates that annual agricultural water savings — with a combination of strategies like smarter irrigation management, modest crop shifting, and more efficient technology — could save up to 3.4 million acre-feet of water per year. The study strongly recommends avoiding expensive infrastructure projects that will burden taxpayers when the state has more budget-friendly options like targeted conservation and efficiency.

It won’t happen without the political will, however. During a discussion about the bills that are currently being debated in Sacramento, Barrigan-Parrilla said she fears the delta will lose out in the end. It’s hard for her to swallow the whole concept of "co-equal goals," she says, because it amounts to putting the environment, which is owned collectively, on equal footing with the interests of a small group of people who consume the vast amount of the state’s water supply.

"It just doesn’t make sense to me," she says. "You can’t have a reliable water supply unless you take care of the environment first."

Editor’s Notes

September 1, 2009

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The governor of California loves to talk about the state "living within its means." That, of course, means cutting education funding, closing state parks, stealing money from cities, wiping out hundreds of social programs, and never, ever, raising any taxes.

He has a different line on water.

The state’s economy is in a severe downturn, but California itself is far from broke. This is still a wealthy state. Between the big businesses and the rich individuals, there’s actually plenty of money in the overall economy to pay for schools and colleges and parks and health care. Defining our "means" as a level of spending that’s possible without raising taxes is a purely political decision that has nothing to do with economic reality. In fact, the California economy would be a lot better off today if Gov. Schwarzenegger hadn’t cut the vehicle license fee the day he took office. (Remember: public-sector jobs are just as legitimate a source of employment as private-sector jobs, and government spending is an excellent way to stimulate private growth.)

Freshwater, on the other hand, really is a finite resource. There’s only a certain amount of rain that falls on the state every year, only a certain amount of snowpack that melts in the spring, only a limited amount that can be stored in reservoirs. You can’t raise new water the way you can raise new revenue; even building new dams just takes water that would have gone downstream and holds it for another purpose.

The state’s freshwater has to meet a lot of demands. Farmers rely on it to irrigate crops — some of them crazy, unsustainable crops — in what is naturally a dry Serengeti. Giant cities and suburbs in the southern part of the state rely on it to fill swimming pools and water lawns. Most of the 38 million people who live in this state rely on precipitation runoff for their drinking water.

And if too much water from Northern California gets diverted before it reaches the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, then the complex, fragile ecosystem of the delta and the bay gets badly, maybe irreparably, damaged. And that has wide-reaching consequences (including the collapse of fisheries worth $250 million a year).

And yet, as Rebecca Bowe points out in this week’s cover story, the governor refuses to live within our hydrologic means.

It’s insane what’s been happening with the state’s water. Every year the Department of Water Resources offers to sell more water than the state actually has. In the severe drought of the early 1990s, water diversions from the delta were at record levels. In the current drought, diversions remain high. And that, the numbers suggest, is directly affecting fishing stocks. At this rate, there won’t be any salmon left in the delta in a few years. And that’s before the full impacts of global warming (and the likely decline in freshwater) play out.

Schwarzenegger’s solution: build more dams and a new canal to take more fresh water away from the delta.

The state Legislature is wrestling with a new water policy, and five bills are making the rounds. Some areas are getting desperate and trying what not long ago were considered nutty ideas — Marin County, for example, now wants to build a desalination plant, an expensive and energy-intensive way to get freshwater from the bay.

What nobody seems to want to say is that California, particularly the big agricultural operations in the Central Valley, simply waste too much water. The conservatives in the state capitol don’t believe in conservation.

Any serious Legislative plan has to start with a few fundamental facts. Freshwater flowing into the delta and out through the bay is not a wasted resource; the delta needs a lot more water than it’s currently getting to survive as an ecosystem. If that means the big water districts have to tell their clients to cut back on water use — using proven conservation methods and possibly switching to less water-intensive crops — then that’s a reality we’re going to have to live with. And more dams, canals, and pumping projects will just shift the problems from one part of the state to another.

California can survive on the water it has — if we stop the insanity.

Prison report: CDCR won’t admit mistakes

August 31, 2009

By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His blogs typically run twice a week.

It was a good week for Jaycee Dugard, who was discovered after being imprisoned for 18 years in an Antioch backyard. But it wasn’t a good week for the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office, which missed several opportunities to solve the case, including two visits to the home of Phillip Garrido, the paroled sex offender who is charged with kidnapping Dugard.

But at least Contra Costa Sheriff Warren E. Rupf had the courage to admit the mistakes, ask forgiveness and take steps to assure that something like this would never happen again.

What was the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation response? Remember, CDCR is responsible not only for people in prison but for people on parole. In typical fashion, agency spokesman Gordon Hinkle denied that anything had gone wrong or that CDCR had been remiss in any way, and said that that the parole agent had gone in Garrido’s backyard but because of the way it was situated didn’t find anything strange.

Wait: These agents visited a registered sex offender’s house once a month, yet found nothing awry?

Far be it for the people at CDCR to even admit that they are doing a poor jobs. They never admit responsibility for anything. Yet they are tasked with rehabilitation.

Isn’t a key component of the rehabilitation process admitting your mistakes? What kind of example does it set when the entity so concerned about the public’s safety is incapable of admitting it has done something wrong performed poorly?

Examples like this should make it obvious that CDCR is not protecting you but protecting itself through a continuous enterprise of lying, hiding the truth, covering up the facts and skewing information in order to paint a picture or inmates as unrepentant evildoers bent on destruction — while coloring itself as a benign bureaucracy with the unenviable job of keeping us at bay by “walking the toughest beat.”

The beat is so “tough” that the parole agents didn’t thoroughly investigate the back yard of a convicted sex offender. I guarantee my parole officer would investigate my back yard if it were in such disarray – at the very least, the yard was ripe to be a meth lab and Garrido’s deranged rants would be a cause for concern.

But you know what one of the big problems with the scenario is? The parole agent probably had 200 people to watch, 100 of them no nonviolent offenders, so he or she didn’t have time to thoroughly investigate what was going on.

Wait – it was 18 years! Good job, CDCR.

Government’s number on priority is to protect the public, but with that comes a responsibility to define what the public is being protected from. Do we really need to be protected from a casual drug user, or even addict (any more than we need to be protected from a casual drinker or even an alcoholic)? If drugs were decriminalized, taxed and regulated by the FDA — or even handed out free to registered addicts – a large percentage of our property crimes would disappear. The black market would collapse, prices would drop and drug-related murders would decline.

But most important, parole officers wouldn’t have to be so overwhelmed that they don’t have the time to investigate the jungle-like backyard of a convicted rapist who believes he was inspired by God to commit atrocities on teenage girls.

Who are the real criminals here?

Prison report: A bomb plant?

August 27, 2009

By Just A Guy

Editors note: Just A Guy is a California state prison inmate. His blogs typically run twice a week, depending on his ability to communicate from behind bars.

“On Wednesday, 8/26/09, at approx 2015 hours, [NAME] discovered an anonymous note while retrieving the sick-call slips from the Facility Four drop box. The contents of the note stated that bomb-making materials, weapons and a zip gun are being passed through 21 and 22 buildings en route to Building 19. The note also indicates a riot is planned on Facility Four this week.”

This is the memo we woke up to this morning at California State Prison, Solano. This is the fifth time in 60 days that an anonymous note has been “discovered” in which a zip gun was part of the threat, and at least the seventh time since April of 2008 that the institution was locked down or placed on modified program because of a zip gun.

No zip gun has ever been found. I can’t wait to see evidence of the bomb manufacturing facility. Apparently one building manufactured the bombs, sends them to the finishing plant building, which then sends the finished product to the distribution building to be used in the riot!

This, folks, is your tax dollars at work. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation doesn’t believe in the boy who cried wolf, because anonymous notes are apparently held as fact and many person-hours of your tax dollars will be spent searching for the contraband. But the only real contraband they will find will be the cell phones brought in by the very same people searching for contraband zip guns and bomb-making materials.

The funny thing about this is that if an inmate were to ask for protection because he wanted out of a gang or feared for his life, he would have to provide verifiable evidence of the threat. Anonymous information is only viewed as potentially factual if the threat is posed to the safety of the institution or its officers. Verifiability only comes into play when an inmate asks for his or her own protection.

On a bright note, Arnold called the Assembly gutless and questioned the ease by which the Republicans voted to cut funding for education but were so scared of prison releases. Good for him.

The hypocrites in Sacramento and in the CDC never cease to amaze me. They truly try to get the public to believe that public safety is their main concern, but do so much to ensure the public’s detriment that it defies description.

I keep saying it over and over and over: The people in prison with less than a year left, violent or not, are all going to get out anyway, you fucking idiots.

A spike in crime may occur, but is that going to be because of releases, or because California’s unemployment rate is above 11 percent, there’s no money for education, and those released (early or not) can’t get a fucking job?

What’s the unemployment rate for parolees? And now, in this economy, who is going to hire a guy who just got out of prison with no practical job training or experience when some cat with an MBA is also applying for that barrista job at Starbucks because Mr. MBA used to work for General Motors — and now Mr. MBA’s kids can’t get any financial aid for college because MBA made too much money the year prior to being laid off. And even if the kids did have the money, they wouldn’t be able to start school until spring, because classes have been cut, so they take jobs at McDonald’s that could have been gone to parolees.

Shit flows downhill …

Really, they should just send all those early-released inmates to CSP Solano, where there seem to be plenty of positions available at the bomb, weapons and zip-gun manufacturing facility.

(PS: The lockdown finally ended about 11 a.m. ….)

Somers Town

August 25, 2009

PREVIEW Black and white photography born out of technical necessity transforms Somers Town into a stark and poignant portrait of the drudgery and displacement of two wayward youths in modern-day England. Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), a cheeky runaway who perhaps in a past life was a Dickensian street urchin, flees Nottingham and hops aboard a train bound for London, seeking refuge from the banality of life in the Midlands. Cornered in an alleyway, robbed, and beaten, Tomo finally finds a reluctant and unlikely friend in Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a Polish immigrant who just moved to the U.K. Unbeknownst to his father, Marek begins hiding his homeless friend in his flat. Joining forces, the two boys bond by working odd jobs for their cockney landlord, stealing clothes from a local launderette, and fighting for the affections of a charming French waitress. Director Shane Meadows (2006’s This is England) instills Somers Town with humanity and humor mined from class and culture shock, with his subtle comedic stylings springing from simple interchanges like when Marek’s landlord insists that he remove his Manchester United jersey to avoid getting roughed up by soccer hooligans. Despite these comedic moments, Meadows does not shy away from the pain of feeling adrift in a new city or country and beautifully captures the melting pot mentality that is London. From their low-rent apartment overlooking a train station that holds the promise of Paris and love and friendship, Tomo and Marek slowly but surely build a brotherly camaraderie, awakening a dreamlike, limitless world that, in the end, is a little less black and white.

SOMERS TOWN opens Fri/28 in Bay Area theaters.

Made in USA

August 19, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

DRUG LIT You can go to these places. Reading Righteous Dopefiend (University of California, 392 pages, $24.95), I kept trying to pinpoint, via clues in the text, where on "Edgewater Blvd." — Bayshore — the homeless heroin addicts whose lives the book chronicles were encamped. You want to know if you’ve walked by them. Because what pulls you through this often dense ethnography are finely drawn portraits of the brutal lives of individuals.

Philippe Bourgois, a professor of anthropology and medicine who taught for a while at UCSF (he’s now at the University of Pennsylvania) and Jeff Schonberg, a photographer, spent nearly 12 years with a core group of 10 homeless drug addicts in and around the Bayshore area. In Righteous Dopefiend they’ve created a devastating, blow-by-blow indictment of the countervailing forces that conspire to keep these people — Hank, Petey, Tina, Carter, Felix — on the margins.

Of course, the authors recognize that the members of the group they’re following bear some responsibility for the day-to-day atrocity their lives have become. But they track these lines back carefully, conducting extensive interviews with family members, former employers, and ex-spouses who live more (or at least much less precariously) in the "mainstream." Part of what’s revealed in these back stories reminded me of William T. Vollmann’s argument, in his book Poor People (Ecco, 2007), about "accident prone-ness": that the cultures of poverty, addiction and marginalization have a snowball effect within individual lives. Meeting medical — or court — appointments becomes impossible without transportation; sores and open-container tickets turn into abscesses and bench warrants.

The book is divided into nine parts, each detailing an aspect of the everyday lives of the homeless addicts. In "Falling in Love," over the course of interviews, monologues, and Schonberg’s overwhelming black and white photographs, we watch the trajectory of Tina and Carter’s on-again, off-again romance. The chapter is bracketed by "Intimate Apartheid" and "A Community of Addicted Bodies," which illustrate the particulars of the group’s estrangements (from within and without) and its focal, primary romance — with heroin, crack, and alcohol.

In "Making Money," the few legal, and many more illegal, means of getting enough cash to fix are catalogued and considered. Bourgois considers the obsolescence of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, nationally and particularly in rapidly gentrifying cities like San Francisco. What interests the authors here, as elsewhere, are the ambiguously symbiotic, even parasitic relationships employers have with the homeless. One boss who relies on a member of the group pays him exactly enough for a bag of heroin, ensuring that he’ll be at work again first thing the next day.

Throughout the first-person narratives, Bourgois threads his argument: that the institutions, ostensibly set up to serve this body of addicts (from the police-state to community clinics) are, like the employers, both dependent on them (for government funding, menial labor, etc.) and ultimately at cross-purposes with them. The services senselessly undercut one another, forming a no-place for the homeless to barely survive in, characterized by the either/or of living purely by chance, in extreme squalor, or in a permanent maze of bureaucracy. So the Edgewater homeless carve out a life in between, under the freeways but with methadone treatment or an SRO perpetually on the horizon. It’s a shell game where the addict always loses.

There are plenty of good reasons to get this book and read it. If you’re interested in homelessness, addiction, or in the public health issues surrounding IV drug use, this is an excellent source of information. The authors treat their subject brilliantly and with great compassion. It is also a hell of a story, and it’s local. These people walk by you every day and should not remain invisible.

Moving backward

August 12, 2009

rebeccab@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s city budget was signed into law Aug. 4, but a group of city workers is pushing the Board of Supervisors to reverse a cut that they say reflects a giant step backward for progressive San Francisco values.

Service Employees International Union Local 1021, about 18,000 strong in San Francisco, has launched a campaign to restore pay cuts to certified nursing assistants (CNAs) and unit clerks who staff the city’s medical facilities, arguing that the demotions reverse a decades-old commitment pay equity between men and women.

Proposition H, approved by voters in November 1986, enshrined the principle of comparable worth in San Francisco. It required the city to ensure that municipal jobs dominated primarily by women provided wages on par with male-dominated jobs that have similar qualifications.

Jobs held by mostly female employees also tend be staffed by people of color, so the move to create equity in pay was meant to address systemic sexism and racial discrimination. Unit clerks and CNAs seem to fit the bill, and their salaries were gradually increased after 1986.

As part of the midyear budget cuts, 88 CNAs who work at SF General Hospital were laid off and simultaneously rehired as patient care assistants, a job with similar responsibilities but only 79 percent of the salary (from an average annual salary of $56,589 down to $45,032). Another group of CNAs is scheduled for similar demotions in November. Cuts to clerical workers’ wages are also pending and most will be reclassified with 15 percent less pay (from $52,845 to $45,266).

"It wipes out the advantage that they had," says Local 1021 health care industry chair Ed Kinchley. "Group by group, they’re wiping out the pay differential."

"This is the first wave of an overall effort to undermine comparable worth," union organizer Robert Haaland charged in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. "We ask you to join with progressives to defend the principle of equal pay for women and minorities."

SEIU held an Aug. 7 forum to discuss the cuts at SF General, with Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, and Ross Mirkarimi in attendance. CNAs and unit clerks packed the audience — a crowd that was indeed made up of many women of color.

One was Theresa Rutherford, a CNA at Laguna Honda Hospital and Rehabilitation Center. "We’re the first ones to note when a patient is not doing well," Rutherford explained to the supervisors. "It’s a job that requires a lot of commitment." She described the long hours and the bonds that develop with patients, saying CNAs are counted on by "the person who has no family members left — so you become the family member."

"Best-quality care costs," Rutherford added. "It’s not cheap."

Avalos, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee, said he was infuriated by the pay cuts. He spoke about a possible supplemental appropriation to address the issue. "We have to find the revenue for that to happen," he said. "Push as hard as you can on City Hall, and I’ll fight as well."

Tom Jackson, there representing Sup. Chris Daly, also urged the workers to apply pressure. "As far as labor practices go, this is a test," he said. "You’ve been fighting for decades [for pay equity] … and they’re ready to wipe it away because we have a bad economy."

Department of Public Health Chief Financial Officer Gregg Sass responded to SEIU’s charges by telling the Guardian: "We disagree with the SEIU comparable worth argument. Further, SEIU was not able to get member approval of a tentative agreement that might have prevented layoffs and position conversions during last fiscal year."

Supervisors added $500,000 back into the final budget to stave off some conversions. SEIU members contend that the add-back was supposed to retroactively restore cuts to the 88 CNAs, but Sass told us, "I am not aware of any action at the [Board of Supervisors] to that effect."

A memo that DPH Director Mitch Katz sent to Board President David Chiu noted that "difficult decisions had to be made to reach the financial target," and said the CNA conversions were made "following discussions with the city’s Department of Human Resources and SEIU."

At the forum, Halaand pointed to a report from the Controller’s Office revealing a 20 percent growth in management positions under Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration. "There’s a lot of padding of their wallets at the top. At the bottom, they’re devaluing," he told the workers. "There seems to be money out there, but it’s just not for us."

Campos told us he plans to request a hearing to examine managerial promotions as well as the ethnic and gender makeup of the city’s highest-ranking positions. As for whether some of these cuts might be restored, he told us, "I think that’s a real possibility. I am hopeful it will happen."

A study released this year by San Francisco’s Department on the Status of Women compares women’s median salaries to average men’s earnings. According to the report, the median annual wage for Latina women is 52 percent of men’s earnings; African American women earn 58 percent; Asian women 63 percent; and white women 88 percent.

Another round of pink slips go out Sept. 16, so SEIU is planning a rally at City Hall that day to demand that the city uphold comparable worth.

Worth it

August 12, 2009

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS He signs his e-mails Romeo. I sign mine Juliet. It’s cute, but you try not to think about how that one ends.

You know … well, you probably don’t know, so I’ll tell ya: if you’re a trans woman dating men, you can spend years and years and years trying to find one who doesn’t either cream his pants or throw up as soon as you take your clothes off. And then, by some miracle of shifting continents and a spectacularly rare alignment of stars, planets, and good hair days, you do! You find, in fact, the one. Now, like everybody else in love, you have to kinda wait. And see. What happens.

There are questions. There is distance. There are Capulets and Montagues, jobs, exes, currents. There are riptides and undertows, sharks, lions and tigers and bears … and there are days when you feel like you are on Cloud 10. I like those days. They’re way better than the other ones, where you feel like you are hacking your way through a jungle of impossibility with a plastic butter knife and without mosquito repellent.

Yo, Shakey, is this what love is supposed to feel like? A million mosquito bites? Probably not, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it because it’s perfect. It’s perfect! It really is — give or take 5,822 miles and a logistical conundrum that would make Alfred North Whitehead reach for his binkie — perfect.

My head hurts. Again. (And again and again.) The last time I remember feeling really physically good, let’s see, I was sitting in my new favorite restaurant with my soccery girlfriends, eating grilled meatball and green apple spring rolls dipped in this insanely delicious orange pork sauce.

And if you think that sounds slightly odd, the next item on the menu is a grilled shrimp Popsicle on sugar cane.

No, it’s not some kind of funky fusion foofoo place, it’s Pot de Pho, Geary and Parker streets, and I love it. Yeah, it’s a little pricier than most Vietnamese restaurants, but worth it because it’s worth it, and fun. They don’t overly worry about authenticity. I like that. It’s like, let’s do Vietnamese food with all the best ingredients possible, well-researched recipes, and a sense of fun.

Our waiterguyperson, like the menu, was full of enthusiasm. He told us he was starting a new happy hour thing, making cocktails and punch and stuff using just wine and sake by way of alcohol.

The pho was good, I didn’t order it, of course, because I’d eaten noodle soup for lunch and dinner the day before, and still had a big pot of it at home in my fridge. But I did taste.

It’s $10 for a large bowl, $8.75 for a medium, and $5 child size. And, although they do offer a chicken pho, a vegan pho, and even (for a couple bucks more) an ahi tuna pho, they don’t offer tendon and tripe as options for their beef pho.

That’s the kind of thing I might have made fun of them for a few years ago — even though I would have been snickering over a bowl with just rare steak, every time.

Oy.

Bean sprouts are in the soup, not on the side. Wide rice noodles instead of vermicelli. They have a Vietnamese sandwich, but in a green onion crepe instead of a crusty French roll … The authenticity snobs will complain. But you know what? The older I get, the more I couldn’t care less about words like authentic and traditional, and grammar in general.

If it wasn’t for inauthenticity and maltradition somewhere down the line, we’d all be having bananas and bugs for lunch. Thank you, I’ll try the green apple spring rolls and green onion crepes.

Speaking of crepes, I’m pretty sure the French gave pho to the Vietnamese, not to mention French bread.

That’s why Pot de Pho is my new favorite restaurant, for giving us grilled shrimp Popsicles. And because the teacups are a pretty shade of green, and the chairs there are cushy and comfortable. I need that right now. Pretty shades of green and a soft, comfy chair.

POT DE PHO

Tues.-Thurs., Sun.: 11 a.m.-10 p.m.

Fri.-Sat.: 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; closed Mon.

3300 Geary, SF

(415) 668-0826

Wine, beer

MC,V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

G’day sleaze!

August 12, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

In the late 1970s Australia suddenly looked like the new mecca for cinematic art, as movies like My Brilliant Career (1979), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Breaker Morant (1980)achieved unprecedented international critical and commercial success.

Those award-bait films are pointedly mentioned just in passing, for contrast, in Not Quite Hollywood, which is about all the other movies from Down Under during that period — those the tourist boards and arts councils preferred you didn’t know about. Subtitled The Wild, Untold Story of OZploitation!, Mark Hartley’s documentary is one of the best appreciations ever made of some of the worst films ever made.

Actually, they’re not all bad, by a long shot, though it’s measure of Not Quite Hollywood‘s infectious spirit that it induces a potent desire to see a number of films that in fact turn out to be pretty excruciating when seen in anything more than five-second increments. Their likes include 1978’s Stunt Rock — the predictably lame high-concept combination of stunt performers, magic tricks, and a justifiably forgotten band called Sorcery — not to mention extended dirty jokes like 1974’s Australia After Dark, 1981’s Pacific Banana, 1975’s The Love Epidemic, and 1975’s The True Story of Eskimo Nell. (The latter, however, features the following philosophically defining line: "There’s a day comin’ when I’m gonna stick me dick in the heart of the Earth and the bang’ll be heard in Alaska!")

Indeed, it was the belated relaxation of draconian censorship standards that opened the initially very smutty floodgates for Aussie exploitation cinema. While American audiences were enjoying the brief cultural moment known as "porn chic," folks on the other side of the planet were vicariously experiencing the sexual revolution in the softcore form of local snickerfests like 1973’s Alvin Purple ("The Bloke Who Has Everything But Inhibitions!") and 1972’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie ("Cripes! The Things These Porn Sheilas Will Do On Camera!"). As several older, wiser actors note, any thoughts at the time that showing skin was about "liberation" proved delusional.

Much of Not Quite Hollywood is in a similar mood of bemused recall, reflecting that most endearing national Australian characteristic, an allergy to pretension. Confessed Ozploitation fanatic Quentin Tarantino does most of the on-camera cheerleading here, while folks who actually worked on the films in question typically recount how daft, crass, and/or sometimes plain dangerous to work on these enterprises were.

Unlike the Peter Weir and Bruce Bereford movies that presented Australia’s high-cultural face to the world, Aussie genre films of the ’70s and ’80s were often deliberately origin-blurred, the better to appeal to a North American drive-in audience. (When the most famous of them all, 1979’s Mad Max, first got released here its dialogue was actually redubbed by American actors.)

Washed-up or third-tier international "stars" like Jenny Agutter, Steve Railsback, or Broderick Crawford were flown in for marquee value, often greeted with open hostility by local actors whose jobs they’d "stolen." If war stories recounted here are indicative, many got revenge by behaving very badly: Dennis Hopper, for instance, was so berserk on Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan (1976) that police finally escorted him to the airport, practically banning him from an entire continent.

Not everything here is craptastic. Gems ripe for rediscovery include the 1978 Long Weekend in which a horribly combative urban yuppie couple going camping attract ambiguous vengeance from a horribly pissed-off Mother Nature. Another deeply buried treasure is 1982’s Turkey Shoot, a Most Dangerous Game spin that Brian Trenchard-Smith turned into a "high camp splatter movie" when the unfortunate last-minute disappearance of half the planned budget x’d out the script’s more expensive ideas. Its zesty offensiveness still riles critic Philip Adams, a plummy-voiced snob who decries "these vulgar films" that "admitted to the wider world we were yahoos."

But what yahoos. Australian exploitation cinema has had a particular penchant for putting protagonists at the mercy of crazy-car-driving, sheila-ogling, unkempt and un-sane rural inbreds. Sometimes they’re the main peril, sometimes just an unfriendly preliminary to the central menace of giant killer hogs (Razorback, 1984), giant killer crocs (Dark Age, 1987), giant punk prisoner camps (Dead End Drive-In, 1986) or psychotic stalkers driving Mr. Whippy ice cream vans (Snapshot, 1979).

There’s a whatever-works (even when it doesn’t) spirit to these films personified by the career of Trenchard-Smith, whose boldly indiscriminate resume has thus far stretched from several Aussie kung fu movies to 1983’s BMX Bandits (with Nicole Kidman!) to 1997’s Leprechaun 4: In Space. It’s a little annoying when Tarantino brags about dedicating Kill Bill‘s Australian premiere to this prestige-resistant director just to piss off the local "snobs." But it’s gold when the man himself cheerfully admits "I am a guilty pleasure footnote." *
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF OZPLOITATION! opens Fri/14 in San Francisco.

The blackout factor

August 5, 2009

news@sfbg.com

This chart shows how customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. face far more power outages than customers of any of the public power agencies in the Bay Area

Noel Birbeck makes signs. In a low, nondescript building tucked into a south of Market side street, a printing machine spits out personal greetings and corporate messages in all colors, shapes, and sizes.

Until the power goes out.

"We print things that are up to 50 feet long," said Birbeck, the business manager of Budget Signs. "If the power goes out at foot 35, we have to start the printing process all over and throw out all that time and money that went into the initial printing."

And that, unfortunately, has been happening far too often. In fact, a Guardian review of available data shows that customers of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. lose power much more frequently than customers of municipally-owned and operated utilities.

That costs money and harms the local business climate.

"[Any disruption] is a huge deal," Birbeck said. "If we’re in the middle of a deadline and a customer expects something at a certain time, that can cost Budget Signs a huge amount of money. No one is going to pay you for something that is only kinda done."

The last major outage cost Budget Signs more than $300 in employee and company time as Birbeck and her workers waited for the power to return. It’s a manageable amount, but she insists she can’t put a price on the inconvenience, the uncertainty, and the potential loss of business.

Reliable power is a basic requirement of most businesses. Restaurants and markets need refrigeration, factories need to power production lines, office buildings run large computing systems, retailers need to run cash registers, lights, and credit card machines. An unexpected power outage can cost San Francisco businesses thousands of dollars.

A 2001 study by the Electric Power Research Institute estimates the cost of power disruptions to California businesses is between $11.5 million and $17.8 million annually.

No utility can guarantee year-round power without disruptions, surges, brownouts, or severe weather-related outages. But reliability varies widely among California utilities.

PG&E breaks its service area into districts, and, according to reports it submits annually to the California Public Utilities Commission, San Francisco customers experienced an average of two hours of non-weather-related outages per year over the last six years. (Weather-related incidents are not reported at the district level.)

That’s better than the three-hour average across PG&E’s entire California service area. Still, PG&E customers in San Francisco lose power, on average, 2.5 times as often as customers of other Bay Area utilities.

The Palo Alto Utilities Department, Silicon Valley Power in Santa Clara, Alameda Municipal Power, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have dramatically better records, ranging from 82 minutes a year of outage time in Sacramento to only 16 minutes in Santa Clara — and these numbers include all weather-related events.

In other words, the municipal utilities deliver power more consistently and at considerably lower rates — even before factoring in PG&E’s impending rate hike of 3.3 percent to 5.4 percent.

"We consider any widespread blackout a major event," said Larry Owens, division manager at Silicon Valley Power. "Systems can be managed to minimize storm related events — we do [that]."

MONEY FOR MAINTENANCE

There are a number of reasons why these public power sources are more reliable than PG&E: size of the service area, age of the infrastructure, administration of the organization.

"The general concept is that the more complex the topography is and the older the urban areas are … the more unreliable the system is going to be," said Mark Loy, a ratepayer advocate at the CPUC.

"For PG&E there are negative powers of scale," he continued. "They are so large and spread out that being bigger actually makes things more difficult for them to fix. In San Francisco, the circuitry PG&E uses hasn’t even been mapped out in some places, so it is all haphazard and harder to keep on top of."

Public power agencies also have more incentive to invest in maintaining their infrastructure.

Patrick Valath, manager of electric engineering at the Palo Alto Utilities Department, attributes his city’s annual average of only 65 minutes of power disruption to an "aggressive and sustained infrastructure replacement program that is spread over many years."

Alameda Municipal Power’s Alan Hangar said the annual average of only 25 minutes of outage in that city is due to years of building stability and redundancy into the system.

Santa Clara is by far the most reliable utility company in the area, Owens said, and is often ranked second in the nation. "Our current operating philosophy is to load the system with only half of what it is capable of carrying," he said. "That allows us to switch a customer to another circuit quickly, so we restore their power and make repairs on our time, not their time."

He also noted that the vast majority of Santa Clara’s power lines are underground, making them far less susceptible to damage from storms, accidents, and other interference.

Municipal utilities have more freedom than investor-owned companies like PG&E to shift the focus away from profits, revenue, and shareholder returns toward quality and customer satisfaction.

"We are customer-driven," Owens said. "They repeatedly tell us that reliability is the No. 1 priority. The cost of power is second. We have some customers who say they lose $1 million a minute in an outage, and that by far trumps the cost they pay for energy."

THE RIPPLE EFFECT

Business owners don’t need studies to tell them they are losing money because of PG&E.

Arienne Landry, owner of Just for You Café in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, faced a blackout during lunch service at her café several months ago.

"The power was out for four or five hours," she said. "During that time I’m paying people to work, but I can’t serve customers without power. I probably lost a couple of grand in sales. It’s not a severe loss, but it takes a little while to catch up."

Birbeck of Budget Signs remembers a power disruption that occurred when she was in the middle of two large printing jobs. She and an employee returned to the shop at 10:30 p.m. after a neighbor alerted her that the power had returned. She said they worked through the night to complete the jobs on deadline.

"They were our two largest jobs for our two largest companies at the time," she said. "Both jobs were over $10,000. Potential loss of either or both of these companies would have been disastrous to a small company. I really couldn’t even put a price on it."

And the cost of an outage doesn’t stop at that initial business. If the power goes out at Birbeck’s sign shop and a sign doesn’t get finished and a deadline isn’t met, Birbeck might lose money or even a client. But that client might have needed that sign for a business event, and that business event may have needed that client … and the losses can go on and on.

Those ripples are larger and go farther in many high tech industries. Larry Owens of Silicon Valley Power said that consistent, reliable power is especially important for the high tech firms located in Santa Clara, including Applied Technologies, Inc., McAfee, Inc., and Intel Corp.

"There are some processes that require a 21-day burn in," he said. "If there is a power outage, they have to start all over again. An outage can cause a company to lose market share or dominance or preferred vendor status. It ripples out a long way."

Some companies have such sensitive systems that a drop in voltage for a mere fraction of a second can shut them down and require rebooting.

"Our customers have become power-quality sensitive," Larry Owens said. "It doesn’t take an outage to harm a business. A fault on a transmission line causes the whole system to dip, a voltage dip. If you have a heavy load, it knocks the voltage down for milliseconds. If it drops enough, companies’ systems drop out."

State Sen. Mark Leno is intimately familiar with the problem — he owns Budget Signs. And he has called on the California Public Utilities Commission to investigate the problem.

"As a San Francisco small business owner, I am personally aware of the lost business I experience as a result of PG&E’s performance failures," Leno said in a press release. A June 18 letter Leno sent to the CPUC noted: "As the commission considers PG&E’s request to upgrade its grid, I would ask you to include both an investigation of these problems and PG&E’s proposed solutions to them."

Almost a month later Michael R. Peevey, president of the CPUC, responded, arguing that PG&E’s reliability rate in 2008 was better in the previous few years. He also pointed out that the utility has a formal process for filing claims and that the commission has no authority over system reliability.

That, Leno said, is unacceptable. "From reading that letter, one would never know that the mission of the California PUC is to be the protector of the ratepayer," he told us. "The ratepayers are being badly served by PG&E and the CPUC."

FILING A CLAIM

In theory, state law requires PG&E to reimburse businesses for losses caused by blackouts. A business owner or manager can find the claim form on PG&E’s Web site or can call the claims office. Each case is assigned to one of the 21 claims investigators who cover the utility’s service area. With the help of supporting documents, investigators look into the occurrence, determine PG&E’s liability and the degree of monetary loss, and compensate the business accordingly. All, according the Web site, within an average of 30 days.

Emily Mitra, owner of Dosa, which operates Indian restaurants in the Mission District and the Fillmore District followed this process — and it wasn’t that simple.

On Dec. 18, 2008, a PG&E transformer blew and both locations of Dosa lost power. Mitra had to contend with food spoilage, staff costs, down equipment, lost business, all of which added up to about $12,000.

"We filed claims, but it was a long process," she said. "A check came for the Valencia Street location immediately but for the Fillmore location, PG&E didn’t even have record of an outage."

After three months of badgering PG&E to no avail, Mitra said she contacted Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s office and the Small Business Commission.

"I was ready to sue them," she said. "I had dozens of witnesses, but that didn’t seem to faze them. It could have been a coincidence that they found the data right after we talked to the Small Business Commission. But it was a pretty quick turnaround after that."

A check arrived for the full amount of the claim. But Mitra couldn’t claim compensation for the time, energy, and frustration the claims process cost her over its three-month duration.

Birbeck told us PG&E never informed her that there was a formal claims process. "No one ever mentioned a claim to me — that has never been offered at all," she said. That’s a common complaint — although the forms are on PG&E’s Web site, the utility doesn’t widely promote or advertise that fact.

PG&E also asks business owners to provide a slew of paperwork ranging from tax records and bank statements to payroll records, revenue and expense statements, and sales receipts.

"We had to give them a lot of data," Mitra said. Because Dosa’s records are mostly digital and automated, supplying them to PG&E was the least of her problems. But, she conceded, "if you don’t run your business in a way that keeps all that data, it would be a pain in the ass."

Of course, the claims process does nothing to address issues of reliability. Neither does it guarantee that Mitra’s refrigerators won’t fail without notice, leaving her without food to serve.

It is, however, another reminder that San Francisco is not being well-served by its private utility monopoly.

Best of the Bay 2009: Food and Drink

July 28, 2009

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Editors Picks: Food and Drink

BEST CRAB TOWER TO HEAVEN

Somebody call the Fish Police — we should be cited for loitering at this convivial Italian seafood restaurant. Following the tradition of cicchetti, exquisite little dishes shared family style, Pesce offers communal creations that bring a playful yet authentic touch of Venice to Russian Hill. It can get a bit loud in the narrow, tiled dining room, but you (and hopefully a date or two) will be ensconced in your own world of flavor as you swoon over rich dishes like the porcini pappardelle with braised duck, delectable white anchovy-topped bruschetta, an inimitably tangy tonno puttanesca, and, if you’re lucky enough to visit when it’s on the dessert menu, a warm, sweet budin (bread pudding) garnished with seasonal fruits that makes "sharing" a risky maneuver. But the small plate that really sends us soaring is Pesce’s justly famous crab tower, less a tower than a little stairway to heaven layered with Dungeness, avocado, cucumber, basil, tomato, and a drizzle of red wine vinaigrette. Alas, it’s demolished all too quickly. Care to climb another?

2227 Polk, SF. (415) 928-8025, www.pescesf.com

BEST RECIPE FOR A COMFORT FOOD COMA

Restraint, self-discipline, and moderation have their place. But that place is not Hard Knox Cafe, the soul food kitchen that blithely (and thankfully!) ruins diets and courts cardiac arrest. This is a place of comfort and indulgence, with fried-chicken battered just right, ribs whose meat melts off the bone, and mac ‘n’ cheese so rich that even Southerners have trouble finishing it. Add in a couple moist, piping-hot corn muffins — worth the visit alone — and you’re on your way to a food coma that’ll last all day. So clear your calendar, put on your elastic pants, and settle into a cushy red two-seater for an afternoon of collard greens, blackened catfish, and black-eyed peas in portions big enough to sink a cow. We know you want it — and at $10 for an entrée with two sides plus muffins, we know you can afford it too.

2526 3rd St., SF. (415) 648-3770; 2448 Clement, SF. (415) 752-3770, www.hardknoxcafe.com

BEST PLACE TO RIND DOWN

Far from clueless snackers who group their cheeses by color and call it a day, fromage groupies are fervent about their curdy calling — which may be why the San Francisco School of Cheese has been consistently selling out its classes since opening in 2006. Courses cover everything from cheese species (cow, goat, and sheep, of course) to regions (France, Italy, Spain, Australia, and Wisconsin are all represented, as are a bevy of exotic locales off the Mediterranean coast). The courses also cater to all levels (amateurs and connoisseurs alike), and teach beverage pairings (beer, wine, what-have-you). Located on a quiet street in North Beach, the Cheese School offers two-hour evening classes taught by one of 10 instructors in spacious headquarters, all for about $60. Sounds bougie as hell? Sure, but it also sounds delicious.

2155 Powell, SF. (415) 346-7530, www.cheeseschoolsf.com

BEST USER-GENERATED CHOCOLATE

The Bay Area has long been home to innovative applications of technology. But rarely have those innovations been as tasty as TCHO, the experimental chocolate company created by Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto and cocoa guru Karl Bittong. Using software development as a model, the pair first launched the company by presenting chocolates in beta form and collecting consumer feedback. Their system for classifying tastes is similarly scientific, creating a flavor wheel that explains the different flavors inherent in chocolate (such as fruity, nutty, or citrus) and then making varieties that are the purest expressions of those attributes. Now in its 2.0 phase, the company produces sustainably sourced chocolate in a stark white lab-like factory at Pier 17, using manufacturing machinery rescued from an old European castle. But a stop by the adjacent café, where you can sample flavors and hear cocogeeks talk about the production process, illuminates where the science stops and the poetry starts — it’s in your mouth.

Pier 17, SF. (415) 981-0189, www.tcho.com

BEST ABUSE BOUCHE

Conan O’Brien’s 2007 commercial for a Chinese restaurant that has its front door next to the kitchen and doesn’t serve fortune cookies ("No fortune cookies," the actors exclaim. "Yay!") may be fake, but the place he (and Martha Stewart) are pretending to endorse is real: Chinatown’s Sam Wo. The institution — occupying parts of three stories — has been serving noodles, dumplings, and stir-fry in its cramped dining room for eons, and is as famous for its odd atmosphere and bizarre customer service as it is for its late-night hours. Too bad famed waiter (and Herb Caen darling) Edsel Ford Fong — known for screaming at customers, admonishing them for not washing their hands, or dumping soup on them — passed away in 1984. But fear not: we’ve heard reports that current servers have physically removed patrons for sitting in the wrong chair. If you’re looking for a place where the customer is always right and the bathroom is always clean, go elsewhere. But for some post-barhopping chop suey, served up with history and maybe some light abuse, there’s nowhere better.

813 Washington, SF. (415) 982-0596

BEST CAFÉ THAT SAVES THE DAY

Lazy Saturday mornings in San Francisco haven’t been the same since owner David Pinch peeled the Spiderman wrapping paper from Caffeinated Comics Company‘s windows this spring. Café culture has been heroically transformed. No longer must graphic novel geeks suffer the indignity of stares from those novel readers and crossword puzzle solvers, the coffee house elite whose imagined superiority is evident in every stripe of plaid on their cardigan. Here, Marvel fans can select their comics along with their Four Barrel coffee, browsing until they feel the rush of newfound superpowers — or maybe that’s the espresso. Either way, we predict this volatile combination of coffee and comics will have more staying power than Joss Whedon has brilliant ideas.

3188 Mission, SF. (415) 829-7530, www.caffcom.com

BEST IT’S-IT ITERATION

It’s hard to argue with the accessible, lowbrow perfection of an It’s It — that delightful ice cream and cookie concoction invented in San Francisco in 1928. But if you’re looking for an alternative a step or five higher on the culinary chart, look no further than Ici. This Berkeley shop features ice cream and cookies made from scratch with ingredients grown by local farmers, under the watchful eyes of former Chez Panisse pastry chef Mary Canales and her talented crew. Eleven flavors of creams, sorbets, and sherbets are available every day, featuring seasonal ingredients and available in cups, pints, or homemade organic cones — and topped with fresh toppings such as bittersweet hot fudge. Our favorite delivery method is between two delicate fresh-made gingersnaps or chocolate cookies, individually wrapped in foil for easy transport. It’s an It’s-It for the locavore generation. What’s next? An artisanal Big Stick? A sustainably-sourced Otter Pop? We can only hope.

2948 College, Berk. (510) 665-6054, www.ici-icecream.com

BEST HARD-TO-FIND BREAKFAST

There are no official hours at Pastores, the restaurant at the corner of Mission and Cortland that caters only to those in the know (which now includes you). But guessing when (and if) you can get huevos rancheros at this elusive Mission District kitchen is part of its charm. The front door is small and easy to miss. If you find it and then locate the scantily decorated restaurant at the end of a long hallway, you’ll already feel as though you’ve accomplished something. But the real treat comes when your server — also the cook and owner — greets you as if you’ve entered her home, takes your order, and then places a heaping plate of spicy eggs, salsa, rice, and beans before you. Is that burning sensation simply the homemade salsa sizzling against your chapped lips? Or is it the pride of discovery and serendipity? We’re going with the latter.

3486 Mission, SF. (415) 642-5385

BEST BACK-ALLEY WINE BAR

Not all wine connoisseurs are leisure-class snobs with fancy Italian boots, nice homes, and shiny sports cars. Some are the cooks, chefs, waiters, sommeliers, and bartenders who’ve been serving (deliciously) rotten grape juice to those with money to spend. It’s the latter group of experts that cook-turned-wine-guru Chris Fuqua had in mind when he started Hotel Biron, a wine bar with an atmosphere and menu designed to match the paradoxically high-end/lowbrow proclivities of those in the service industry. What does that mean? Beer offerings that range from obscure pilsners to Tecate in a can. Scrumptious meat and cheese platters. A mind-blowing wine list. And an unpretentious location next to a row of Dumpsters down a mid-Market alleyway. All of which adds up to the perfect nightly hangout for those with one foot firmly planted on either side of the American dream.

45 Rose, SF. (415) 703-0403, www.hotelbiron.com

BEST "RESTAURANT" WITHIN A RESTAURANT

It isn’t Lung Shan’s eggrolls or its all-you-can-eat buffet that has foodies in skinny jeans forming a line outside the restaurant on Thursday and Saturday evenings. In fact, none of the patient patrons — who sometimes wait more than an hour for a table — are here to eat at the Chinese restaurant at all. Sure, they sit in its dining room and enjoy food that comes out of its kitchen, but on these nights, Lung Shan becomes Mission Street Food, a restaurant within a restaurant that features different culinary talent each time. The phenomenon has earned a fanatical following despite — or perhaps because of — the things it lacks: a set menu, a space of its own, a regular chef. Each evening sees different deliciously playful dishes, like the Milky Snixertweers Kat, a terrine of candy bars and vanilla ice cream. Prices are low (most entrées hover around the $10 mark), and the profits are donated to charity. You don’t need a cookie to tell you that’s good fortune.

2234 Mission, SF. Missionstreetfood.blogspot.com

BEST RECESSION-PROOF SUSHI

Common wisdom suggests that sushi can be either cheap or good, but never both. Ichi disagrees. The Bayview-based company run by Erin Archuleta and her partner Tim, a veteran sushi chef, prides itself on providing restaurant-quality, sustainable (when possible) sushi in unconventional settings, all at low prices. Most locals know Archuleta’s rolls, nigiri, and specialty items from catered nights at Bender’s, the Knockout, Mr. Barbershop, or 111 Minna, where fresh fishy delights can be obtained for less than $5. But Ichi also provides lunchtime service for clients at Google, YouTube, IDEO Design, and 826 Valencia. Whether you’re looking for happy hour eats in the Mission or an alternative to a croissanwich platter at your office party in the Finanical District, you can’t beat Ichi in sushi-bang for your ever-dwindling bucks.

(415) 822-4024, www.ichisushi.com

BEST EAST BAY IMITATION OF WEST AFRICA

There may have been a time when authentic Senegalese food was just too exotic for the Bay Area palate — but that time has long passed. At Lam Toro, nothing has been watered down for American tastes, from the spicy kick of habanero relish to the bones you’re expected to pick out of your fish entrée. For an extra bit of authenticity, call ahead to have dishes like ceebu jen (fish sautéed in a tomato-spiced rice, considered the national dish) or yassa (chicken or fish simmered in a garlic, mustard, and lemon sauce) served family-style on a large plate in the middle of the table. Then enjoy hibiscus and ginger drinks while dining among a diverse crowd of West Africans, Afrophiles, and Peace Corps alumni. A fantastic East Bay complement to San Francisco’s Bissap Baobab, this bright, cheerful eatery is the perfect place to experience Senegalese hospitality without needing a passport.

2432 Telegraph, Oakl; (510) 832-1010

BEST CUSTARD IN A CUP

Sure, the mole at La Oaxaqueña Bakery and Restaurant is the shizzle. And the mammoth Mexican pizzas, along with other regional specialties served in this glaringly-lit hole-in-the-wall, are muy excellente. But it’s the housemade flan that really gets our locomotora running. Far from the boring dessert most of us have learned to ignore, this version is creamy and silken with intense vanilla flavor, lightly sweetened by a perfect puddle of caramel sauce. You won’t even care about the uninviting, disposable, cafeteria-style plastic containers the flan comes in — once you’ve licked ’em clean.

2128 Mission, SF. (415) 621-5446

BEST WAY TO GET PHAT

It’s no secret that the West Coast trounces our Eastern comrades on numerous fronts — weather, culture, blondes. But alas, there has always been the cheese steak factor, the one superior trait that your Atlantic Ocean-based relatives can hang over your head as cause for return eastward. Thankfully, Phat Philly’s has removed that weapon from your family’s arsenal. The 24th Street eatery features fresh Kobe beef, 12-inch Amoroso rolls shipped from Philly, and a cheese selection that includes Whiz, the glorious liquefied dairy product that covers steak and onions like a radioactive landslide. Not only is Phat Philly’s classic cheesesteak perfectly dialed to East Coast standards, but the restaurant’s menu also boasts an impressive range of other tasty options, such as crisscut waffle fries, steakhouse chili, and buffalo wings smothered in Mr. Pibb’s barbecue sauce. Add in a toppings bar of various peppers with limitless soda refills, and you may never have to visit your relatives again.

3388 24th St., SF. (415) 550-7428, www.phat-philly.com

BEST MOUTHFUL OF ZEN

The tea-mongers’ invasion of San Francisco is gaining momentum. Samovar Lounge has added its third venue to the fold, and all of "Zen Valley" is abuzz. Perched on the top of Page and Laguna, this branch of the tea empire is crafted from reclaimed wood and iron, including a long bar of wind-fallen redwood, and features a variety of teas sure to reclaim even the most jaded coffee palate. With a full spectrum of artisanal whites, greens, and blacks, plus edibles such as delicate lavender cookies, hearty Japanese maki bowls, and winsome sandwiches, Samovar’s emphasis on taste, texture, and traditional tea service both tantalizes the senses and engages the mind. Surprising, refreshing, and invigorating, a trip to Samovar is a bit like visiting a spa retreat for the tongue.

297 Page, SF. (415) 861-0303, www.samovarlife.com

BEST HOMEMADE HANGOVER FOOD

The original Moulin Rouge was known as a place for drinking and debauchery. Our favorite S.F. version is a friendly, family-owned diner perfect for recovering from such shenanigans. The husband-and-wife team serves up legendary omelets and corned beef hash in portions hefty enough to soak up last night’s alcohol, while teetotalling friends who’ve joined you for breakfast won’t be disappointed by cream cheese-<\d>stuffed thick-cut French toast. And everyone will appreciate being able to get a meal and coffee for less than $10 — especially when you won’t know how much you spent at that Tenderloin bar the previous night until you go back to pick up your forgotten credit card.

887 Geary, SF. (415) 928-0158

BEST WAY TO PRETEND TO EAT NONEDIBLES

Debbie Goard is to cake what Karl Lagerfeld is to cloth. Both have the eye of an artist, the hands of a sculptor, and a fondness for classic quilted Chanel bags. But while Lagerfeld’s denim and sequin satchels may look good enough to eat, Goard’s purse cakes actually are. The Oakland-based baker behind Debbie Does Cakes specializes in turning any object — and we mean any — into an edible masterpiece. She’s made a giant iPhone cake for Apple, tiny replicas of cosmetics for Benefit, and a three-foot version of San Francisco’s Union Bank of California to commemorate its 100th anniversary. And those are just the corporate jobs. Her Flickr account proves she can turn flour, sugar, and eggs into severed feet, rice cookers, dead rats, and just about every type of toy dog known to humanity. In fact, we’re willing to bet she could construct a confection of Lagerfeld himself.

www.debbiedoescakes.net

BEST PRE-GAME DOG

As Mission Bay continues its dull development in the shadow of AT&T Park, it is good to know that there are still some real-deal holdouts from a time before the neighborhood devolved into generic condo chaos. The Java House has been serving up delicious blue-collar fare for sailors and longshoreworkers since 1912 (before Willie Mays was even a pup), retaining its prime location along South Beach Harbor within pitching distance of the ballpark. Stop by for top-notch, pregame burgers and chili dogs — without the major league price gouging — or a breakfast of pancakes and eggs, all still served up by owner Philip Papadopoulos. Affordable, delicious food with history and a view? That’s a home run.

Pier 40, SF. (415) 495-7620, www.javahousesf.com

BEST DRIVE-BY BURRITO

Serving first-rate organic Southwest-style Mexican cuisine, Green Chile Kitchen has grown so popular for its fantastically fresh plates of blue corn enchiladas, green chile stew, and $2 bottles of Pacifico that seats are often in short supply. This is particularly true during peak feeding hours, when locals have grown inclined to bring along the entire family for one of Green Chile’s whole Fulton Valley rotisserie chicken meals (with cheesy mashed potatoes and fresh calabacitas). Luckily, for those who can’t wait for their grilled Niman Ranch pork burrito, the cozy NoPa eatery provides drive-by service. Just call in your order and cruise by the restaurant. Someone will run your grub curbside. Eager eaters and drive-through fans may never eat at Taco Bell again.

601 Baker, SF. (415) 614-9411, www.greenchilekitchen.com

BEST JAPANESE PIZZA

There are many cuisines you’d probably never want to see featuring pizza, though after you’ve tried okonomiyaki, you’ll realize that Japanese isn’t one of them. Okonomiyaki, served hot at Mifune Don at the Peace Plaza in Japantown, is a savory and highly addictive little pancake made with a flour-based batter that includes yam, cabbage, dashi, and eggs, then topped with ingredients such as mochi, seafood, and kimchi. Like pizza, the whole thing is often accompanied with cheese; unlike its Italian cousin, it sometimes includes mayonnaise. Though this description may sound revolting, the Osaka specialty is extremely difficult to dislike. And Mifune Don’s version is the best you’ll find this side of the Pacific.

22 Peace Plaza, SF. (415) 346-1993

BEST COOKING CLUB FOR COOL KIDS

Cook Here and Now is not just a statement, it’s a newfangled take on the old-fashioned potluck. This underground cooking and tasting club gathers for periodic food-a-thons in a donated kitchen space, often the Zocalo furniture store in Bayview. And while the movement has gained national attention — last year CHN appeared in Travel + Leisure and Food & Wine magazines, and it has inspired similar cooking clubs as far away as Melbourne, Australia — locally the group has remained under the radar. (Which is just as well, because attendees are ferociously loyal, and each event tends to fill the 40-or-so seats mere minutes after being announced.) Attendees must sign up in advance and agree to prepare part of the community meal based on a theme or ingredient. Then they shop for ingredients, bring kitchen tools to the meet-up, and spend nine hours cooking, chatting, drinking, eating, and cleaning — all in the pursuit of one-upping each other with well-sourced ingredients, cooking technique, and culinary wow.

www.cookhereandnow.com

BEST WAY TO GET FIRED UP

We are unfathomably fortunate to be rolling in great, rustic, old world bread in the Bay Area, never needing to suffer the indignities of spongy-goo crumbs and lifeless crusts that are the cruel fate of other carb-loving gastro-regions. Although we’re surrounded by many good bakeries, there is only one choice for King of the Loaves. That’s Oakland’s Firebrand Artisan Breads. This latest addition to the East Bay bakery scene crafts its incredible bread (the rye is our hands-down fave among baguettes and batards) in a wood-fired oven, which results in the crispest, heartiest, most robust crust that yeast, water, and grain can yield. It’s dense, rustic, and unparalleled. Plus, the shop’s a heckuva lot closer to San Francisco than Freestone’s Wild Flour Bakery in West Marin.

1552 Beach, Oakl. (510) 594-9213, www.firebrandartisanbreads.com

BEST PUCKER FOR PENNIES

Candies imported from Mexico and South America have gotten a bad rap in recent years. But that’s no reason to overlook the confection entirely — particularly when such an outstanding specimen is made in the East Bay: Dulceria Miriam‘s tamarind candy. Situated next to the cash registers of many a Latino market are the unpresumptuous plastic jars of Dulceria Miriam’s candy, whose sweet pucker cannot be beat. The ingredient list is deceptively simple: fresh tamarind and sugar, sometimes with the addition of salt and/or cayenne. But the way this independent candymaker cultivates this brown, sticky magic is a sour-candy fan’s greatest dream. Whether the dessert is stuck to a plastic spoon and wrapped in a wad of plastic (the messiest and the best) or served hard and chewy on a stick, the full-blown tropical flavor makes you salivate for more. And all that tang for a mere couple of quarters? Not since the first Pac Man arcade games have we found this much joy for this little coinage.

BEST "TACO" IN THE CASTRO

When considering eating in the Castro, most of us are more likely to think of attractive dining rooms and steep prices than impressive Indian cuisine. But one argument against this neighborhood’s culinary reputation for style above substance is Kasa Indian Eatery. This 18th Street eatery provides an attractive atmosphere along with delicious food, particularly the kati roll: Calcutta’s street food answer to the taco, featuring four flaky, ghee-laden wraps filled with flavor-forward curries. Particularly impressive are the veggie options, including bhangin bharta, a smoky-sweet eggplant mash punctuated with the pop of fresh peas, and karahi paneer, a toothsome cheese tossed with silken green peppers in a light tomato sauce. But carnivores won’t be disappointed with (free-range) chicken tikka, or one of the other rotating meat-based specials. And the rolls are just five bucks a pop. Affordable, edible, and attractive food in the Castro? The only thing better would be if they delivered to your neighborhood. Oh wait. They do.

4001 18th St., SF. (415) 621-6940, www.kasaindian.com

BEST LATE NIGHT PIG-OUT

Any restaurant open seven days a week until 3 a.m. deserves serious awesomeness points. But Pizza Zone & Grill not only has late hours (including delivery until 2:45 a.m. every day), but pizza that’s actually pretty damn good. Slices are made to order and come double-sized, so they’re always fresh and big enough for your post-bar belly rumblings. And if you’re not in the mood for pizza, you can also order burgers, sandwiches, salads, and appetizers. Right across from Zeitgeist and only blocks from the rest of northern Valencia’s watering holes, this convenient family-owned fueling station may forever eliminate your need to visit Taco Bell Heights’ namesake landmark. You’re welcome.

178 Valencia, SF. (415) 701-7300, pizzazoneandgrill.com

BEST MID-MORNING MENU

There’s breakfast, and then there’s brunch. Breakfast was invented to fuel your work day on the farm, or fight last night’s hangover, or maybe to make the price of your stay at the Comfort Inn seem like a better deal. But brunch is an indulgence, suggesting leisure, pleasure, and good company. One of our favorite spots for this meal-between-meals is Mission Beach Cafe. With a poetic menu, clean design elements, a sunny dining room, and the blissful absence of club music, this Guerrero Street stop is the perfect spot for a morning(ish) meal that’s stylish without trying too hard. Sip Blue Bottle coffee while you wait for a pulled pork sandwich with onion citrus relish, or soufflé pancakes with blueberry compote. Or simply eye those waiting in line (seating can take as long as 30 minutes on a weekend) while you imagine the beef brisket hash or spiced fried eggs with horseradish crème fraiche that are coming your way. And since this special meal takes the place of two regular ones, you might even consider your $15 entrée a bargain.

198 Guerrero, SF. (415) 861-0198, www.missionbeachcafesf.com

BEST FIELD TRIP FOR THE FRAT BOY IN ALL OF US

There are benefits to drinking local beers, beyond getting locavore points and microbrew cred. The best thing about having a brewery in your very own city is the chance to see how that most awesome of libations is made. Anchor Steam gives tours of its Potrero Hill facility every weekday — 45 minutes of walking and 45 minutes of tasting. Groups witness the whole process, including bottling, while getting a full history of Anchor’s trademark steam beer that’s been made in San Francisco since 1896 (though the current recipe has only been around since Fritz Maytag bought the business in 1965). The tour is something like a grade-school field trip mixed with a post-college wine tour. You’ll get all the educational (and mind-altering) benefits without the boredom (or the school-bus smell). Don’t believe us? Tours are so popular they are booked solid three to six weeks in advance.

1705 Mariposa, SF. (415) 863-8350, www.anchorbrewing.com

BEST SUSTAINABLE SHORE THING

Beach fare tends to fall into two food groups: snacks and beer. But where do health nuts go when they want to fuel up for sun and sand? A feel-good option for smoothie-drinking vegans and sustainability-conscious locavores alike is Judahlicious, a registered green business that serves sandwiches, raw vegan desserts, and fresh sandwiches hearty enough for a day of riding gnar gnar breaks or light enough for an afternoon of displaying brand-new hemp bikinis. Hippie jokes aside, though: we love that this independent business supports local organic farmers, uses compostable and recycleable products, and hand-sorts waste to contribute to organic soil for a small, native-plant nursery in the city. And it doesn’t hurt that the food is delicious.

3906 Judah, SF. (415) 66-JUICE, www.judahlicious.com

BEST WAY TO BRING HOME THE BACON

It’s just too easy making sexual jokes about how much the three women who own Avedano‘s love their meat. Besides, the trio who revamped a century-old butcher shop are nothing if not serious about their mission to serve curious carnivores. Co-owner and Sociale executive chef Tia Harrison and her partners have combined the traditions of a classic meat market with the sensibilities of sustainability to create a neighborhood butchery perfect for the eco-conscious-yet-bacon-loving city that spawned Meatpaper. The shop not only sells what’s for dinner, but offers classes on everything from butchering a suckling pig to handling a hacksaw — after which students take home $100 worth of fresh meat. But don’t think all this dedication means the Avedano’s ladies have no sense of humor. A recent sign board read, "Nothing Beats Back Fat." Uh, that’s what she said?

235 Cortland, SF. (415) 285-MEAT, www.avedanos.com

BEST BELLYFUL WITH BELLY DANCE

Some pundits will argue that belly dance is rarely, if ever, a regular part of African and Middle Eastern dining; they say, in fact, it’s a rare or underground activity made mainstream for Aladdin-loving tourists with Arabian Nights fantasies. To them we say, so what? Sometimes we want our dinner with a bit of Disney flair — particularly if the food itself is authentic and delicious. A perfect example is Al-Masri, the Egyptian eatery in a far-flung corner of the Outer Richmond whose cuisine and décor say "fertile crescent" and whose entertainment says "for Americans." Talented ladies jiggle their hips while you fill your stomach with towering columns of eggplant, perfect pyramids of spice rice, lamb kebabs, and lentil stew. What could be more festive? More delicious? More of a pleasant departure from the predictability of taquerias and mariachis in the Mission, and creperies and easy listening in the Castro?

4031 Balboa, SF. (415) 876-2300, www.almasrisfca.com

BEST PLACE NOT TO ORDER A COCKTAIL

Heaven’s Dog is nirvana for cocktail lovers — which is exactly why you should never order a cocktail here. Don’t get your usual. Don’t examine the drink list. Instead, look the bartender in the eye and confidently say these three words: freedom from choice. By doing, so you’ll be putting the fate of your drink order in the hands of the ridiculously talented bar staff, which specializes in flawless, bespoke libations. When your drink arrives, be it a Biarritz Monk Buck or a Bumble Bee, your guide — who is not only a master bartender but also a font of liquorous wisdom — will serve it up with a side of fascinating history. This is one bar that control freaks and those who fear change need not belly up to, but people with a little faith will be deliciously rewarded with the best drink they’ve ever had the good sense not to order.

1148 Mission, SF. (415) 863-6008, www.heavensdog.com

BEST FOOD CART WITH A CIVIC HEART

What would the pop-up food stand be without Twitter? In the case of the Creme Brulee Cart, it would be less of a community service organizer. Thanks to the micro-blogging tool, fans of Curtis Kimball’s fine desserts can find out where in the city he’s selling his lavender or orange Creamsicle-flavored delights (all costing less than a BART ticket to Berkeley). But lately, it’s also how Kimball is getting the word out about My Dolores Park, a new project focused on reclaiming — and cleaning up — the Mission’s favorite sunny-day stop. We’re fans of all three of the newest pop-up restaurateurs, including Murat from the Amuse Bouche Cart and Kimball’s brother, the Magic Curry Man. But we have a particular soft spot for the guy who’s dedicated to expanding hipster bellies and their civic engagement.

www.twitter.com/cremebruleecart, www.twitter.com/mydolorespark

BEST HAM ‘N’ EGGS ‘N’ HAM ‘N’ HAM ‘N’ HAM

In this town, necessity isn’t the mother of invention — eggs are. But whom should we credit for S.F.’s extensive ovo-innovation? Dr. Seuss, whose Green Eggs and Ham may have presaged the pesto or avocado scramble? Whatsisname Benedict (or was it Benedict Whatsisname?), who put the English muffin under the ham and hollandaise? The Mexicans, who added chili and tortillas and begot chilaquiles? The Jews, who threw unleaveded bread into the mix and made matzo brie? Locally, we’re voting for the Pork Store Café, home of the best nouveau melding of somethin’ ‘n’ eggs so far: the Scralifornia. Although the concoction of eggs, salsa, feta cheese, and avocado doesn’t seem particularly Californian (well, OK, the avocado does), the result transcends mere scrambles and statehood. Of course, the Pork Store didn’t get its name by doing right only by vegans. Word is that the ham, chorizo, pork loin, bacon, and other homages to the pig also go down real easy. Scralifornia, here we come.

1451 Haight, SF. (415) 864-6981; 3122 Valencia, SF. (415) 626-5523

BEST FROZEN YOGURT OF THE FUTURE

Remember when we used to refer to froyo with two separate words, flavors were limited to chocolate and vanilla (or, if you in a particularly exotic suburb, peanut butter), and people behind a counter decided how much to put in your cup? Times they are a-changin.’ And we like it. Especially at Icebee, the cheerily strange frozen yogurt shop behind the Westfield shopping center. Not only can you get delicious dessert made with live and active cultures (apparently, they do survive freezing) in flavors like green tea and mango (and plenty others — take that, Pinkberry). But the serve-yourself setup means you decide exactly what ratio of yogurt to toppings you want in your biodegradable cup. At 46 cents an ounce, you only pay for what you get, whether it’s a mere taste of blueberry yogurt and fresh fruit as a post-shopping refresher or a full serving of New York Cheese Cake with candy toppings as consolation for the crappy movie you saw across the street.

829 Mission, SF. (415) 882-7800, www.icebeeyogurt.com

BEST NEW SPOT FOR GETTING YOUR YAYAS

When Yaya closed, we thought our city’s steamy affair with Iraqi chef Yahya Salih was over. Lucky for us, the Middle Eastern gourmet is back with Jannah, a casual new eatery between Poleng Lounge and Papalote in the Western Addition. Under murals depicting blue sea and sky, diners can dig into traditional-sounding food that’s anything but predictable — all for under $11 a dish. We love the standards — hummus, baba ghanoush, and kebabs — but are even more delighted with juices made from fresh fruits, raisins, and mint; dips like mama ghanooge (accented with carrot and cardamom) or hudhud ghanoush (turnip and dates); and a savory phyllo dish with seafood, fava and garbanzo beans, and sun-dried lime. Desserts are equally revelatory, like kahi phyllo pockets stuffed with warm cardamom-redolent cream. Best of all? Now that our relationship with Salih is secure, we don’t have to roam the city for some embarrassing Yaya rebound.

1775 Fulton, SF. (415) 567-4400

BEST COMFORT CARB

Every culture has their comfort soup ingredient. Jews have matzo balls. The Japanese have miso. The … well … everyone … has noodles with chicken. But when it comes to belly-warming, tear-clearing supper on a spoon, it’d be hard for any culture to compete with that Chinese specialty, the wonton. When the fog rolls over the Richmond, or a metaphorical mist chills your heart, there’s no better place to cure what ails you than Shanghai Dumpling King. The steaming bowls of wonton soup are big enough to feed two, which means either a chance to administer a double dose of self-care or an opportunity to share with a friend (misery loves company, as does a good meal). If you’re sharing, you may have room for dim sum, graciously served for dinner. By the time you finish the BBQ pork buns and fresh, simple, perfectly chewy wontons in savory broth, you’ll hardly remember whatever misery sent you seeking Shanghai in the first place.

3319 Balboa, SF. (415) 387-2088

BEST LUNCH ON A LOADING DOCK

Ambiance is overrated. That’s what you learn by lunching at Kitchenette, the new eatery located in the oft-overlooked Dogpatch neighborhood. Instead of spending time and money designing a glitzy post-industrial space, the chef-owners behind Kitchenette opted for a real-deal industrial loading dock with a commanding view of the long-term storage facility across the street, allowing them to spend more time and money on what really matters: the food. A new menu, posted online the night before service, is available Monday through Friday from 11:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., or until the food runs out — which it often does, particularly on Taco Tuesdays, when lucky eaters chow down on corn tortillas filled with Niman Ranch pork carnitas topped with guacamole, salsa, and cabbage. Each lunch menu offers a superb veggie option (in the form of a salad, sandwich, or bento box) — as well as one for carnivores — alongside two or three additional snacks and a Cookie of the Moment (Hello, maple bacon snickerdoodles!).There’s really only one word that does Kitchenette justice: yum.

958 Illinois, SF. www.kitchenettesf.com

BEST BURGERS OVER 40

Not all burgers are created equal. You know it, we know it, and Hamburger Haven does too. Think about it: Anybody can heat up a patty, slap it on a bun, and call it grilled gold. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to taste good. It takes a lot of effort, love, and time to create a true masterpiece. Which is exactly what Hamburger Haven has been cranking out since 1968. Hamburger Haven does breakfast, dinner, and dessert, but the real focus here is on burgers. BBQ sauce-<\d>slathered, chili-drenched, Reuben-inspired — you name it and Hamburger Haven does it better than anyone else in the city. Which partially explains why the place has been around so long, but not entirely. The simple down-home charm of H.H. is what we appreciate. From the decor, to the service, right down to the presentation, Hamburger Haven is a no-nonsense burger shack where the only frills you’ll find will be mashed inside your buns. Simple, pure, haven-ly.

800 Clement, SF. (415) 387-3260

BEST PLACE FOR A PARISIAN DINNER DATE

On a charming, leafy Castro block, one with the spirit of a European neighborhood, sits L’Ardoise Bistro, a real-deal French bistro that effortlessly marries casual intimacy with romantic intrigue. Gracious French staff, closely set tables, and a chalkboard (the restaurant’s namesake) evoke your most beloved Parisian dinners, replete with the effortless sexiness that we love in a city like Paris. But what places it among S.F.’s beloved classic bistros, like Chapeau! and Clementine, is heartwarming food. Your date can’t help but cozy up to you after perfectly cooked coq au vin, duck leg confit, or seafood gratin. Escargot, pommes frites, and charcuterie also abound, with plenty of French wines to pair with. And the love needn’t dissipate once you get the check…. Portions are generous and the highest priced dish on the menu is $19. Viva la romance!

151 Noe, SF. (415) 437-2600, www.ardoisesf.com

BEST WABI-SABI AND COFFEE

We’re not sure if Hollow, the new café in the coffee-shop-deprived Inner Sunset, is actually an example of wabi-sabi design principles. But it’s undeniable the shop embraces simplicity, an affinity for nature, and an appreciation of the unconventional — the essence of the Japanese aesthetic philosophy, which the co-owners (an interior designer and freelance programmer) wholeheartedly appreciate. In fact, everything about Hollow is modest and unconventional: its tiny space; its earthy palette of green, brown, and silver hues; its limited selection of quality delicacies (truffles, cashew cookies) and Ritual espressos (no drip coffee here); and its selection of rustic trinkets for sale (birdcages and nests, African masks, antlers, retro matchboxes, and alchemist vases). Whether you know about Buddhist-inspired art forms or not, you’ll find that this cabinet of caffeine and curiosities is an exquisite sanctuary in the Inner Sunset.

1435 Irving, SF. (415) 242-4119, www.hollowsf.com

BEST FREE BBQ

Everyone knows the best hangover busters are a good, protein-heavy meal and a bit of hair of the dog. Problem is, those who need relief most tend to be the ones who spent the most money getting themselves hungover in the first place. What to do when you only have enough cash for beer or food, but not both? If it’s Sunday, go to (the aptly named) Bender’s. Every week the Mission dive provides free BBQ, including meat and veggie options. At $2, Pabst Blue Ribbon is so cheap you can afford to have hair from several dogs. And for those who live close enough, just hop on your fixie and take advantage of indoor bike parking. Just remember to pace yourself, because tomorrow lunch is gonna cost you.

Sundays, 3–7 p.m. 806 S. Van Ness, SF. (415) 824-1800, www.bendersbar.com

BEST GYPSY WOMAN WITH A PERMANENT ADDRESS

Is it the sexy, swanky décor that makes Gitane so appealing? The genius bartenders who whip up tasty tipples with a smile? The bacon bonbons and fresh bread served in a deceptively small dining room that feels both grand and intimate? Yes, yes, and hell yes. We didn’t know what to expect when the founders of Café Claude opened this gypsy-themed restaurant, but were delighted to find that the designers and chef took elements from gypsy culture and the countries where gypsies — or rather, the Roma people — have historically lived, and combined them into a lovely, unexpected, and unpredictably consistent mélange. Grab a date for a cocktail (perhaps the Gypsy, Gitane’s twist on the St. Germain’s elderflower trend) or dinner (if they’re on the menu, order the melt-in-your-mouth ribs), or simply stop in for a glimpse at the bar’s reflective ceiling or the mezzanine’s illuminated brick wall. Portions are ample enough that you may not have room for dessert — but no matter. An evening at Gitane feels decadent, sensual, and indulgent enough.

6 Claude, SF. (415) 788-6686, www.gitanerestaurant.com

BEST WAY TO EAT ROSEMARY’S BABY

It’s hard to remember life B.H.C.: Before Humphry Slocumbe. Sure, we have plenty of amazing ice cream, and suffer little for want of a good local scoop. But when fine-dining veteran Jake Godby applied his experience at Coi, Fifth Floor, and Boulevard to the art of ice cream, the results were nothing short of great. Stunningly original flavors like Secret Breakfast — a creamy heaven of bourbon and cornflakes — have become the new standard. And we expectantly follow Twitter waiting for postings of the day’s latest flavors, which could range from Peanut Butter Curry to Laphroaig Scotch Rye, and Red Hot Banana to Rosemary’s Baby (rosemary and pine nuts). Sure, those $7.50 pints add up, but what you’re getting for that costly juice (as in Jesus Juice, a flavor featuring Kermit Lynch Côtes du Rhône and Coke Classic flavor) is rich satisfaction mixed with a splash of adventure.

2790 Harrison, SF. (415) 550-6971, www.humphryslocombe.com

BEST SECRET SAZERAC

San Francisco suffers no shortage of well-made classic cocktails. The revival that began more than a decade ago — perhaps the final remnant of the 1990s swing revival — is still pouring it on, and terms like "sidecar," "bitters," and "Pimm’s" are ubiquitous on most upscale bar menus. For any gimlet greenhorns anxious to navigate the fraught waters of classic cocktailia with no potential embarrassment or pocketbook deflation, we recommend the generous, spacious, yet still mixology-audacious 83 Proof. Whether you order the Proof’s fancy basil gimlet (with a gentle splash of ginger Cello) or a sturdy, manly Manhattan (with a dark, house-candied Maraschino cherry), the attentive bartenders and companionable atmosphere will put you in a comfortably adventurous mood. If it’s a slower night, the staff may even mix you a kick-ass sazerac, the legendary, labor-intensive ur-cocktail from New Orleans made with rye whiskey, bitters, and sugar in an absinthe-prepped glass. Slink in on a Monday and ask nicely.

83 First St., SF. (415) 296-8383, www.83proof.com

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Avalos on the budget process

July 27, 2009

Editors note: Sup. John Avalos sent this letter in response to criticism (including criticism from the Guardian) of the city budget process.

By John Avalos

Responding to Tim Redmond’s editor’s notes posted on July 22: Robocop is one of my favorite movies too, especially for its anti-privatization message. Over the last 5 years that I worked in City Hall, I have actively opposed efforts to privatize City services like the security at the Asian Art museum and custodial work at City Hall. This year, when Jail Health Services were threatened to be contracted out to a for-profit corporation, I led the effort to push back, visiting both jails and meeting directly with those most impacted by the move.

As of June 29th, the night of the last Budget and Finance Committee hearing on the mayor’s budget, the Budget Committee had freed up only $20 million in cuts to prevent the massive cuts imposed by the Mayor. This was nowhere near enough to stop all the Prop J’s, the Mayor’s effort to contract out services, and restore cuts to essential services. Stopping the Prop J’s alone cost over $20 million.

Late that night, I met with a broad array of budget constituent representatives: seniors, youth, SRO tenants, city workers, homeless advocates, to get their input on priorities and strategies before President Chiu and I went headlong into negotiations with the Mayor’s office.

By the night of July 1st, we had $43 million to stop ALL the Prop J’s and restore over 23 million in other priorities.
We kept shelters open 24 hours, restored substance abuse and mental health services such as the single standard of care for mental health, continued immigrant rights and tenant services, protected seniors from losing meal programs and having to pay social workers to help them with their finances, prevented cuts to family support and violence prevention services, restored rec director jobs, rejected charging families for their child’s detention at YGC, reoriented the Mayor’s administration towards community development, promoted transit first parking policies, and set aside millions of dollars for job programs at the airport, port and PUC.

But I would not credit two newbie supervisors’ negotiating skills for restoring an unprecented $43 million in restorations in the worst year possible.

How healthy is Healthy SF?

July 22, 2009

news@sfbg.com

San Francisco is getting national attention for its attempt at universal health care. President Obama even applauded the city’s efforts in a speech: "Instead of just talking about health care, [San Francisco has been] ensuring that those in need receive it."

But Healthy San Francisco — a pioneering effort to do at the municipal level what the federal and state governments won’t — is running into some troubling problems, made worse by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget cuts.

The program was initiated by Tom Ammiano, now a state assemblymember, with backing from organized labor. Ammiano’s goal was to provide easy access to affordable health care for all of S.F.’s 60,000 uninsured. A local version of a single-payer program, he argued, could provide accessible primary and preventative care, alleviating the need for indigent patients to use the overcrowded and expensive San Francisco General Hospital emergency room as their primary medical provider.

Healthy San Francisco was launched on July 2, 2007, at two Chinatown clinics. It has grown dramatically, and now provides services to more than 34,000 residents at 27 clinics.

Although Newsom sat on the sidelines while Ammiano pushed the legislation, the mayor has now unashamedly claimed the program as his own to promote his gubernatorial campaign. On his Web site he boldly declares that "he’s created the only universal health care program in the country" — with no mention of Ammiano.

The $200 million-<\d>a-<\d>year program is partially funded by an employer-mandate requiring businesses with more than 20 employees either to provide health insurance or pay a fee to the city. The fees are broken down according to the size of the business; as of January 2009, employers pay between $1.23–<\d>$1.85 for every hour an employee works.

Like any traditional health insurance program, Healthy SF has annual fees and point-of-service charges paid by participants. The remainder of the program is funded through state grants.

Opposition to HSF surfaced immediately. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association sued the city even before the program started, alleging that the employer-spending mandate is a violation of federal law.

Kevin Westlye, the association’s executive director, claims his beef is not with the health care system, just with the employer mandate. He suggested that the city raise its sales tax to pay for the program — or that the financial burden should fall on the backs of the billionaires that run privatized health care and pharmaceutical companies.

But the city has only a limited ability to raise taxes, and any tax hike would require voter approval. The employer mandates and fees were much more politically feasible.

Deputy City Attorney Vince Chhabria, who is representing the city on the case, argues, "It is difficult to imagine, in these budget times, that San Francisco could provide universal coverage without employer health care spending requirements."

Federal courts sided with the GGRA initially, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the employer-spending mandate was legal. The GGRA appealed to the United States Supreme Court; the court will announce Oct. 5 whether it will hear the case.

That’s not the only litigation facing HSF. A group of low-income residents are suing the city, saying that the system’s annual fees and co-pays are too high. The program’s fees are scaled to the federal poverty level, which is currently set at an annual income of $10,830. A single person making between 101 percent and 200 percent of the federal poverty level — that is, between about $11,000 and $20,000 a year — pays $180 a year for HSF membership. People earning between $40,000 and $50,000 pay $1,350 a year.

There are also co-pays of $10 for medical visits and $5 to $25 for prescriptions — again, typical of health insurance plans.

Bay Area Legal Aid and the Western Center on Law and Poverty are representing three San Francisco residents who say those fees violate federal and state mandates, which stipulate that the city must provide free health care to those who can’t afford to pay. Healthy San Francisco is only one element of the lawsuit; it also claims that San Francisco General Hospital charges low-income people too much and that the city’s medical bills and collection practices aren’t fair.

One of the plaintiffs is Robyn Paige, a San Francisco resident with spine, foot, and hip injuries. Paige contends that she can’t afford the co-payments on her multiple medications each month and must either go without pain medication or borrow money. Lisa Qare, 21-year-old resident with MS, had to wait three weeks for medication for an eye condition that developed as a result of her condition.

A $10 co-pay may not seem like much, but when a patient needs several doctor visits a month and must pay $5 to $25 each for multiple prescriptions, it adds up. "As a result," Michael Keys, a Bay Area Legal Aid lawyer, told us, "those who can’t afford the charges are falling into medical debt or skipping services or medication."

And, not surprisingly, the cash-strapped city is having trouble finding enough staff and facilities to meet all the needs. Nancy Keiler, a Mission District resident and HSF participant, complains that clinic visits are too short, and that "the doctor is too hurried and has too many patients." (That’s a common complaint about private health plans, as well.) After waiting three hours, another HSF participant had to leave without her prescription to get back to work on time.

The long lines and waits will only get worse in the face of budget cuts. Pink slips were already handed out to several hundred San Francisco health care workers and 1,000 more may be laid off this fall.

Robert Haaland, who works with the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, told us the staffing cuts will make the situation much worse. Martha Hawthorne, a public-health nurse, said she thinks that there won’t be enough providers to provide good care — and that many health care workers losing their jobs will have to enroll in HSF themselves, putting even more strain on the system.

Ammiano, the author of the plan, is concerned too. "I’m very worried about it," he said. "It seems to me now that if there’s this budget pain, there will be impacts to San Francisco."

Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, tersely denied that HSF will feel any budget pain. Asked about critics’ allegations, he said, "They’re wrong. We are going to expand Healthy SF this year."

Earlier this month, insurance giant Kaiser Permanente joined HSF — meaning that the health care giant will now participate as a provider in the program. Haaland voiced concern about that move, calling it "privatizing through the back door."

Mitch Katz, the city’s public health director, agrees there are flaws to the system, but defends its success. "It is by no means a perfect program," he said, "but we’ve made a big impact." With national health care costs rising three times faster than wages (some believe that health care costs are rising five times faster than wages) the nation is starting to seriously talk about overhauling the entire system. San Francisco is being considered as a model for national health care reform.

Labor leaders have lauded the basic formula of HSF and pushed for the federal reforms to use it as a model. As San Francisco Labor Council executive director Tim Paulson said in a prepared statement, "In San Francisco we demonstrated that legislation providing public health access and corporate participation creates a real path to universal health care coverage."

Research assistance by Gabrielle Poccia

Bitter medicine

July 22, 2009

news@sfbg.com

The Democratic Party has been promising a major overhaul of the health care system for a generation or more. Now, with President Barack Obama and his party’s congressional leaders in a strong position to finally reach that elusive goal by next month, this should be a momentous time for the reform movement.

So why are so many health reform advocacy groups unhappy?

The answer involves policy and process. Rather than pushing for the single-payer system that many progressive groups demand and say is needed, Democratic leaders immediately opted for a compromise plan they hoped would be acceptable to economic conservatives and the insurance industry.

But Republicans are still calling them socialists for doing it, while the insurance industry — which loves the portion of the legislation that requires everyone to buy coverage — is still spending $1.4 million a day to either kill the complicated bills or turn them to its advantage.

When congressional Democrats unveiled America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) on July 14, many reformists thought a long-awaited, dramatic overhaul to a broken system was close at hand. The insurance companies would finally be made to adhere to ethical practices, and the Democrats would defend their plan to establish a government-run health insurance option that could compete with private insurers and keep them in check.

“American families cannot afford for Washington to say no once again to comprehensive health care reform,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who chairs the crucial House Education and Labor Committee.

The Democrats’ bill does address some critical flaws in the health care system. It would greatly expand Medicare to ensure coverage for low-income individuals, and would subsidize coverage for those earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, defined as $43,320 for an individual and $88,200 for a family of four. The bill would forbid insurance companies from denying coverage to patients based on a preexisting condition, age, race, or gender. It would eliminate co-pays for preventative care and establish a cap on annual out-of-pocket expenses. To pay for it, the proposal would create a graduated tax on households earning more than $350,000 a year, with the top bracket being a 5.4 percent levy on incomes of more than $1 million.

Progressive members of Congress threw their support behind the bill because — and only because — it included the public option. “The public option is central to our support of health care reform,” read a statement from the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma), who chairs the CPC, was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “We have already compromised. More than 90 percent of the progressive caucus would vote today for a single-payer system. And so for us to compromise and get behind a really good strong public plan, I mean that’s as far as we’re going.”

While that statement indicates the precarious nature of the current legislation — which will likely be weakened further as it works its way through the process and merges with legislation from the more conservative U.S. Senate — many progressive groups aren’t even willing to go that far.

COVERAGE ISN’T CARE

Many single-payer supporters say some reform is better than none, and that the passage of HR 3200 would represent a major win. “We can advance many of the principles that we support with the House bill,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California and an organizer for the national reform advocacy group Health Care for America Now. The nation, he believes, needs to endorse principles such as universally covering Americans and making sure patients aren’t left alone “at the mercy of the private insurance industry.”

Yet other groups fear this cure would be worse than the disease, sending millions of new customers into a private insurance system that simply doesn’t work, and compounding existing problems.

“We’re still pushing for a national single-payer bill,” Dr. James Floyd, a health reform researcher with the nonprofit group Public Citizen, told the Guardian. “While we’re open to other options, we haven’t seen anything [in proposals by Democratic congressional leaders] yet that is acceptable.”

That position has plenty of support among the general public and reform-minded organizations, for whom single-payer continues to be the holy grail.

The current proposal “doesn’t change the system one bit,” said Leonard Rodberg, a member of Physicians for a National Health Program, who works in health policy. “These bills are requiring that people buy insurance, but there are no numbers about how much the insurance would cost. And if the cost of the insurance is still too high, you can remain uninsured.”

And as negotiations center on the government-run insurance option, the concept of scratching the status quo and offering free Medicare-like health care to every American instead has fallen to the wayside.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) got 84 co-sponsors for his single-payer bill, HR 676, and hearings were held in June to explore the option. But congressional leaders then took it off the table. The reasons why seem to be as much about political will as they are about campaign contributions from the insurance industry. As one high-level congressional staffer told us, many lawmakers won’t back a single-payer system in part because they “don’t want to have to respond to being accused of being a socialist by the right wing.”

Then there’s the insurance lobby. “They spend hundreds of millions,” the staffer said. “They lobby Congress, and they provide millions to campaigns. They have Fox News. But the single-payer movement is growing leaps and bounds.”

Rodberg said the insurance industry would love to see a mandate to buy insurance approved at a time when insurers are losing customers because the economy is shedding thousands of jobs each month. “This is a bailout for the insurance companies,” Rodberg told us. “But there’s absolutely nothing in this legislation that will control costs, because it just leaves it to the insurance companies and the market.”

Dr. Jim G. Kahn, president of the California Physicians’ Alliance and a professor at UCSF with expertise in health policy, told us he believes the proposed bill falls short of the goal of comprehensive, universal coverage. “‘Universal’ was recently redefined by [Montana Sen. Max] Baucus as 95 percent — i.e., 15 million uninsured,” Kahn told us via e-mail. “Reaching even that level will be hard, due to the complexity of enforcing an ‘individual mandate’ on families with only modest income (and hence no subsidies). And in eagerness to reach that level, more and more people will become underinsured, with inadequate coverage and a further boost in already high medical bankruptcy.”

Medical debt contributed to nearly two-thirds of all bankruptcies in 2007, according to a study in the American Journal of Medicine. The majority of those afflicted were solidly middle-class homeowners at the start of their illness, and most had private health insurance.

Health Care Now, a hub for single-payer grassroots groups, is planning a large rally in Washington, D.C., for July 30, the anniversary of the founding of Medicare, on which many single-payer plans would be based. “Single-payer is the only plan that would truly be universal and contain costs,” said Katie Robbins of Health Care Now, arguing that the current plan pushed by congressional leaders “doesn’t protect us from the ills of the insurance-based system as we know it.”

Other progressive groups are withholding judgment for now, hoping the good aspects will ultimately outweigh the bad. “We’re digging through them now. We support a bill that has a true public option, and the House bill has that,” said Consumer Watchdog’s Jerry Flanagan. “But we really dislike the individual mandate [to purchase health insurance]. The insurance companies really don’t want the public option, but they really want the mandate.”

LEAVING OPTIONS OPEN

Even if single-payer isn’t going to be the national model yet, advocates say it’s crucial that states such as California be allowed to experiment with the option anyway. Single-payer advocates in Congress have insisted the health care legislation be amended to explicitly allow states to do single-payer (otherwise, federal preemption laws and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act might prevent states from doing so).

On July 17, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) successfully inserted such an amendment into the bill that cleared the House Committee on Education and Labor with a 25-19 vote, which included significant Republican support. The amendment was opposed by Miller, indicating Democratic Party leaders oppose the change and may ultimately succeed in stripping it from the bill.

“George Miller is a longtime supporter of a national single-payer plan and health care reform. The truth is, however, there are not enough votes in the House or the Senate to pass a final bill that contains single-payer language. That is unfortunate but it is also the truth,” Miller spokesperson Rachel Racusen told the Guardian.

California is a hotbed of single-payer activism. Even a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Assemblymember Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) — who appeared on the steps of San Francisco City Hall on July 15 to receive the endorsements of a long list of local elected officials — has made single-payer advocacy a central plank in his campaign.

The movement is so strong in California that it actually had legislators vying for who would get to carry its banner. San Francisco’s own state senator Mark Leno, a longtime single-payer supporter, was selected this year to take over the landmark single-payer legislation previously sponsored by termed-out legislator Sheila Kuehl, which has passed twice, only to be vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The more I dive into this issue, the more convinced I am that the answer has to be single-payer,” Leno told us. “The only reform that truly contains costs is single-payer.”

Leno doesn’t fault Obama for taking a more cautious stance — but he does believe the federal government shouldn’t block states like California from creating single-payer systems. “States should be incubators of trying different proposals. We have a great history with that,” Leno said.

But even with a Democratic governor, there’s no guarantee that single-payer would be approved. Mayor Gavin Newsom is running for governor, featuring health care reform in his platform. He chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors National Health Care Reform Task Force, which is pushing for approval of the Obama plan. But even Newsom won’t promise to back the Leno plan.

“He doesn’t think single-payer is the best option now,” Newsom’s campaign manager Eric Jaye told us when asked whether Newsom would sign the legislation as governor. “He hopes and believes that as governor he will be supporting a national public option.”

But in the end, the governor may not matter. Leno said the political reality in California is that voters, rather than legislators, will need to approve the single-payer system. The funding mechanism for any ambitious health care plan would require a two-thirds vote in the legislature, a political impossibility.

“The difference in California is the voters will have the final say. And I’m excited about that. The voters of California will be able to say to the insurance companies, ‘We’ve had enough, now go away,'” Leno told us. He said he expects a ballot campaign in 2012.

Of course, it won’t be that simple. Leno knows that the insurance industry will spend untold millions of dollars to defend itself and a “status quo that is only working for them, not for anyone else. This is an enormously powerful industry and they control the debates.”

“Our effort here in California is an educational one. We have from now until the election in 2012 to make the arguments,” Leno said.

THE COST OF INSURANCE

Testifying at a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in June, Geri Jenkins, a registered nurse and the co-president of the California Nurses Association, related the story of Nataline Sarkisyan. The 17-year-old girl needed a life-saving liver transplant, Jenkins explained to Congress members. “But CIGNA would not approve it,” she told them, “until I, and hundreds of others, protested. During one of the protests, I was with Hilda, Nataline’s mother, when she got the call of approval.”

Hilda’s relief didn’t last long. By the time the hurdle had been cleared, Jenkins testified, “it was too late. Nataline died an hour later.”

Nataline’s story sparked national outrage, and it has since become a flagship tale highlighting all that is wrong with this country’s health care system. But as the debate about health care reform continues inside House and Senate committee chambers, discussion about “universal health care” — a phrase with a simple ring to it — has grown murkier.

“We have a universal health care system now,” Flanagan said, referring to how all Americans with serious medical conditions have a right to treatment — even if that treatment comes with great expense in an overcrowded public hospital emergency room. “It’s just the most inefficient system imaginable.”

With the August congressional recess coming up fast and Obama leaning on Capitol Hill to shift into high gear on an issue that was a hallmark of his campaign, the pressure is on to vote on the historic health care reform legislation within weeks.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a health care reform bill July 16 that is similar to the House bill, with the vote split along party lines. Now, national attention has turned to the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Baucus, which continued its efforts last week to achieve a bipartisan bill.

Many of progressive reform advocates simply don’t trust the players in Washington, D.C., to get this right, particularly Baucus. “He’s the voice of the insurance companies in the Senate,” Flanagan said.

A recent article in the Washington Post estimated that the insurance industry is spending an estimated $1.4 million per day to influence the outcome of the health care legislation, and pointed out that many of the lobbyists were Washington insiders who had previously worked for key legislators, such as Baucus.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group that tracks money in U.S. politics and operates the Web site opensecrets.org, launched an intensive study of health care sector lobbyist spending, including cataloguing industry contributions to individual candidates from 1989 to the present. Baucus received more industry campaign contributions in that time than any other Democrat, the CRP study reveals, with a total of $3.8 million. Henry Waxman (D-<\d>Los Angeles), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, received a total of $1.4 million in that same time, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) received $1.2 million.

Starting in the 2008 election cycle, the health sector gave more to Democrats than to Republicans, according to the CRP’s analysis.

To overcome that kind of money and influence, advocates say it was crucial to wield a credible single-payer option — a sort of death penalty for the insurance industry — for as long as possible.

“Having single-payer discussions on the table really informs the debate over the public option,” Flanagan said. “But by removing single-payer, it made the public option the left flank.”

Flanagan, like many, is worried about how a 900-page bill will turn out. “There are a thousands ways to get it wrong,” he said. “An easy way to get it right would be to just do a single-payer system.” ————

HEALTH CARE BY THE NUMBERS

• Uninsured Americans: 47 million

• Uninsured Californians: More than 6.7 million (about one in six)

• African Americans without health insurance in California: 19 percent

• Latinos without health insurance in California: 31 percent

• Whites without health insurance in California: 12 percent

• San Franciscans without health insurance: 15.3 percent

• Rise in health-insurance premiums from 2000 to 2007 in California: 96 percent

• Projected rise in health care costs per family without reform: $1,800 per year

• Percentage of bankruptcies attributed to an individual’s inability to pay medical bills: 62 percent

• Percentage of Americans who skip doctor visits because of the cost: 25 percent

• U.S. rank of 19 industrialized nations on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions: 19

• Jobs that would be created by extending Medicare to all Americans: 2.6 million

• Annual U.S. spending on billing and insurance-related administrative costs for health care: $400 billion

Sources: Health Care for America Now, American Journal of Medicine, Physicians for a National Health Program

The show must go on!

July 22, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

Furloughs. Layoffs. Cutbacks. These are the dirty words that have been added to the vocabularies of those working in Bay Area theaters ever since, as one person so eloquently phrased it, "the shit hit the fan." It’s hard to pinpoint when it began, but most theater heads agree that by October of last year, the somber headlines regarding the economy began to feel frighteningly real. Theater companies of all sizes have reported reduced ticket sales, lower individual donations, and less foundation and grant giving. On stage, actors are performing to empty chairs.

As a result, individuals like San Jose’s City Lights executive director Lisa Mallette have had to work overtime to keep their businesses afloat. "The economy has shaken up everyone — no one can be complacent anymore," she said. "It’s making everybody think how they can run leaner and meaner."

Being creative on stage isn’t enough anymore. These days the minds behind Bay Area theaters must apply their ingenuity behind the scenes. According to a study released in April by the theater organizations Theatre Bay Area and Theatre Communications Group, more than half the respondents from local nonprofit theaters say they expect cash flow problems by the end of the year.

With these kinds of expectations, many theatre managers have taken on second jobs as theater pruners, snipping extra costs wherever they can. For companies that have always survived on a shoestring, it’s a matter of plucking one leaf at a time. This means staff members use the back side of used paper, drink water from the tap, and save every screw, costume, and prop that can be recycled for the next production.

"It’s been a tough road, but [the theater community] is going to learn good lessons out of this," Mallette said. "The things we’re learning now we will continue to use no matter what the economy is like."

According to Cheshire Isaacs, managing director of Berkeley’s Impact Theatre, one of the biggest challenges has been making up the season’s ticket losses. At its high point, a 1980s version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream became the theater’s biggest financial success in its 13 seasons. At its low point, a show that debuted in mid-November called Tallgrass Gothic resulted in unprecedented loss at the box office.

"My gut feeling is that the economy is making people more selective with what they see," Isaacs said. "They’re going to the must-see shows, and shows that would previously have done well are not getting the audience."

Audience members have outnumbered cast members, Isaacs said, though sometimes not by much. On the lowest evening, he estimated that only a dozen people came to the show, an experience he found "depressing."

"For actors, it’s difficult to play to sparse houses. It’s demoralizing," he said. "It’s a worse experience in a different way for the audience members themselves. It’s hard to be in an audience where you’re one of 15 people."

For a theater where ticket sales account for 90 percent of its income, the loss was a major hit. To offset the damages, the company tightened its belt in other areas. One solution, Isaacs said, was to stop mailing postcards. The decision to go digital saved the company $500. Impact, like most other theaters, has begun relying on free to low-cost technologies like Facebook and Twitter. For one, they are easy and cheap marketing tools. They also provide ways to reach and build a network of younger theatergoers. Even companies that are experiencing growth at this time, such as San Francisco’s Boxcar Theatre and Berkeley’s Shotgun Players, are making sure they keep their fingers on the pulse of the trends.

"We’re constantly looking at how we can be ahead of the curve," said Patrick Dooley, Shotgun’s artistic director. "Our audience is much younger, so we damn well better be on those sites. If anyone is supposed to be hitting that shit, we are!"

As much as things are changing backstage, there are also changes onstage. At Z Studio Space, a San Francisco company that develops new theater work, executive director Lisa Steindler admits she passes up on scripts with a cast of 12 or more. She simply can’t afford it. These days, she said, even playwrights realize they must write scripts with two or three actors if they want a play produced. "It’s interesting how the economy is shaping the canon of work that being made," she said. "Ten years from, now we’ll look back and see how artists tailored their work [to the financial situation of this time]."

As theater companies streamline their businesses, some cuts run deeper than others. Many have accepted pay freezes, cut back work hours, and foregone bonuses. At the end of 2008, Tiffany Cothran, managing director of San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theater, did something she had never done: she and the artistic director decided to give up their salaries for three months to avoid ending the year with a deficit.

"We had to do it for the health of the company," Cothran said. "It was hard emotionally, though, because everyone likes to get paid for their work."

Though some say the worst is over, others like Cothran say that they’ve entered a period of uncertainty. Many brace themselves to receive fewer grants in the next year, especially from institutions like Grants for the Arts, which help cover operation costs for many theaters.

On June 3, a letter from the Grants for the Arts told recipients to expect a 20 percent reduction in award money. Although final awards won’t be announced until mid-August, the letter advised companies to be prudent while planning their 2009-10 budget. "Everyone is on pins and needles waiting for the news," Cothran said. "It’s likely that awards will be reduced or that we won’t get anything at all."

At Z Studio Space, Steindler isn’t taking anything for granted. The three white boards that hang by her desk are nearly full with the names of different grants she’ll be applying for in the next few months. "I write grants all year long. The difference this year is that I am just writing a lot more now than I ever did."

She admits this has been a trying time for the industry, though she is not surprised that many of her colleagues are still expecting surpluses at the end of their fiscal year. "We’re artists — we’re a smart group of people," she said. "We’ve just tightened, tightened, tightened. And who knows? Maybe we just caught it in time."

In Mexico, the Dinosaurs return

July 14, 2009

By John Ross

MEXICO CITY (July 16th) — Nine years ago, on a sultry July morning, Mexicans woke up and discovered to their great amazement that the Dinosaur that had hunkered down at the foot of their beds for 71 years was gone. This July 6th, when Mexicans rose in the morning, the Dinosaur was back.

In the famous short poem by Augusto Monterroso, the Dinosaur is the PRI — the Institutional Revolutionary Party — once the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe that controlled the destiny of Mexicans from the cradle to the grave for seven interminable decades until it was dislodged from power by the right-wing PAN party in the July 2000 presidential elections. In its unslakable thirst for power, the PRI committed unspeakable crimes against the Mexican peoples, stealing elections from the most humble city hall to the presidential palace, jailing and torturing and executing those who stood in its way, and emptying out public treasuries in an unmatched kleptocracy that was a legend throughout Latin America, “the perfect dictatorship” Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once dubbed it (for which the PRI had him tossed out of the country).

“Have we Mexicans lost our memories and our minds?” asks Sylvia Insulza from behind the counter of her newspaper dispensary in the old quarter of the capital. Tears of frustration crystallize in the corners of her eyes.

The depth and breadth of the PRI victory July 5th is nothing short of stunning. From a distant third-place finish in the 2006 presidential fiasco in which the rightist PAN stole the election from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and his left-wing PRD party by .57% of the popular vote, the PRI (“proven experience and a new attitude” is its current campaign slogan) took 37% of the total ballots cast, nearly doubling its votes three years back, and taking control of congress for the first time since 1997. The once-upon-a-time ruling party’s alliance with the so-called Mexican Green Environmental Party (PVEM – see sidebar below “The Green PRI”) will give it 259 seats out of 500 in the lower house, an absolute majority. In nine out of 31 states, the PRI won every office up for grabs — federal congressional representatives, local congresses, and municipal officials, a “carro completo” or “full car” in the Institutionals’ curious lexicon.

The Dinosaurs also proved triumphant in five out of six governors’ races, winning two statehouses in which the PAN had resided for 12 years. Only in the northern border state of Sonora, where the PRI governor was seen as complicit in the tragic incineration of 48 babies in a Hermosillo day care center a month before the election, was the PAN able to squeeze out a victory in an election in which the PAN and PRI candidates were cousins.

Moreover, the PRI won cities like Naucalpan, an upper middle class Mexico City suburb the right-wingers have controlled since the 1980s, and the nation’s second city, Guadalajara, which the PAN has owned since 1995. In alliance with the Mexican Green Environmental Party, the PRI won its first elected office in Mexico City since 1994. Although the left PRD maintains control of the nation’s capital, the Party of the Aztec Sun does so by a greatly reduced margin. Whereas the PRD registered 51% of the vote in Mexico City in 2006, three years later it weighs in with just 29%.

But Sylvia’s tears of frustration may soon dry. Whether the Dinosaurs are really back or just staying overnight (in Jurassic time) is not yet clear. Mid-term elections are referendums on the sitting president and his administration’s management of the country and July 5th represented a crushing vote of no confidence in Felipe Calderon on whose watch the economy has tumbled into freefall — “growth” in 2009 will measure a negative 8%, the worst slide since the Great Depression of 1929-32. Calderon, who campaigned as the “President of Employment,” has presided over the loss of 2,000,000 jobs. The president’s ill-advised war on the drug cartels has soaked the country in blood — more than 12,000 lives have been lost — and fueled corruption and human rights abuses on the part of the military and the police. Calderon’s panic-driven handling of this spring’s Swine Flu “PAN-demic” kicked the bricks out from under the tourist industry, the nation’s third-largest source of dollars, and his arrogant imposition of candidates in the July 5th vote-taking angered and turned many in his own party against him.

The nativists are restless

June 30, 2009

news@sfbg.com

The comments sections of the Guardian‘s Politics blog and the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate Web site have been lit up over the past week with angry (and sometimes overtly racist) denunciations of Latino immigrants, triggered by the latest Chronicle stories challenging San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies and by Guardian revelations that Chronicle writer Jaxon Van Derkeken accepted an award and substantial cash payment from a controversial nativist group.

While Van Derbeken, two Chronicle editors interviewed by the Guardian, and other critics of San Francisco’s longstanding policy of not notifying federal authorities about the arrests of undocumented immigrants have denied trying to stir up nativist furor, the tone and content of many of these comments seems to indicate they’ve done exactly that.

The saga began June 19 when we published “Chronicle accepts award and cash from anti-immigrant group” on our Politics blog. The story began: “San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken recently accepted an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies — which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda — for his controversial articles on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policies.

“CIS paid for Van Derbeken to accept the award at the National Press Club and conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders to introduce him earlier this month, an appearance they used to make derogatory comments about San Francisco, its values, and local immigrant rights activists, while saying little to rebuke the group for stirring up hateful nativist furor around what has become perhaps the country’s most divisive issue.”

Van Derbeken would only address the issue by e-mail, sending us two terse replies to our inquiry and refusing to answer most of our questions, including much how cash he received for a prize that we discovered paid $1,000 in 2001 (the complete e-mail exchange is include in our post).

“No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs,” was Van Derbeken’s most substantive comment, although he refused to offer an opinion on CIS or the SPLC report, which he didn’t read until after accepting the award. “I haven’t drawn any conclusions about it.”

CIS executive director Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal (2008, Sentinel), responded to our inquires with an e-mail blaming the “jihad against dissent from the elite consensus for open borders” and referring to a column he wrote for National Review Online criticizing SPLC’s fundraising.

But in the past, Krikorian has called for the federal government to cut off funding to San Francisco and even prosecute local elected officials, writing in his CIS blog, “Local neutrality on immigration is no longer possible. Every jurisdiction in the country has a choice to make: Either buttress federal efforts at immigration control or subvert them. San Francisco has chosen the second option. It should now learn the consequences.”

We did phone interviews with Van Derbeken’s editors, Managing Editor Steve Proctor and Assistant Managing Editor Ken Conner, who both defended the stories and the decision to accept the award. Neither would reveal how much cash was involved, and neither would admit that it represented validating a group that recently has been vying for mainstream legitimacy.

“All issues have proponents and opponents,” Proctor told us, equating the award to those given for education and legal affairs reporting and denying that the immigration issue is more divisive and controversial. “At the end of the day, it isn’t about this group but about Jaxon’s stories,” Conner told us.

Those stories continued in high-profile fashion a few days later as Van Derbeken essentially rewrote a June 21 Los Angeles Times scoop about how San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris allowed a half-dozen undocumented immigrants to enroll in a rehabilitation program rather than turning them over to the feds. The details became front-page lead news stories in the Chronicle on June 22 and 23.

Local immigrant rights activists criticized the Chronicle stories and the paper’s decision to accept the CIS award and money.

“When I read these kind of stories that lead us down a dark path and play on people’s fears and paint immigrants with a broad brush — as a threat, as criminals, as dangerous to the community — I do think that there are anti-immigrant nativist centers egging on reporters like Jaxon down this dark path by giving him cash awards,” Phil Hwang, a staff attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told us. “It’s part of the strategy these anti-immigrant groups are employing. It’s why they created this award. And if you look at who founded CIS and their vision, it’s clear that they believe America is under threat from non-white immigrants,”

Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus, whom Van Derbeken mentioned by name in his CIS award speech, said she is worried this latest round would weaken Harris’ support for Sanctuary City policies. That’s what happened to Mayor Gavin Newsom last fall, when Van Derbeken wrote the stories CIS honored.

“I’d hate to see another series of anti-immigrant scapegoating being used to make hasty policy decisions that violate the rights of immigrants, tear apart families, and increase the state of terror in immigrant communities,” Chan told us.

Harris, who is running for state attorney general, defended her decision to let undocumented immigrants complete the Back on Track program after their presence was brought to her attention, but has since changed the policy to bar them from enrolling. “No innovative initiative will ever be created without some unanticipated flaws to be fixed along the way, but this must not stop us from tackling tough problems with smart solutions,” she said in a prepared statement.

“These are tough economic times,” Hwang added. “People are very nervous about their jobs. And that is often when the [anti-immigrant] rhetoric ramps up.”

The Chronicle writer and editors and Krikorian stopped responding to Guardian inquiries. But the blogs were lit up with comments — hundreds of them from around the country at the bottom of Van Derbeken’s latest stories — that had some disturbing themes, accusations, and suggestions. They indicate that the radical nativists are using this issue — and the Chron‘s spin on it — to promote a dangerous agenda.

Here’s a small sampling:

•<\!s> “Illegal aliens are like a plague.”

•<\!s> “Kick out all Illegals, return the city to its rightful owners”

•<\!s> “For God’s sake, STOP pandering to the ILLEGAL ALIENS and get rid of them!”

•<\!s> “Anyone caught crossing the border illegally should be shot as a spy.”

•<\!s> “The border ought to be land mined.”

•<\!s> “What is this sham that diversity is great? It is tearing this country apart.”

Such sentiments — which we usually counter on the Guardian Politics blog — were met with silence by Van Derbeken.

Harris, Newsom duck on immigration

June 30, 2009

EDITORIAL So let’s get this straight.

Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, has set up a laudable program called Back on Track that offers counseling and job training for first-time drug offenders who otherwise would be clogging up the local jail.

A handful of the people who went into the program were undocumented immigrants. Some completed the program successfully and were allowed to graduate.

This is a problem?

Apparently so — because between them the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner have devoted at least five major stories, one horrible column and at least one editorial to exposing the fact that some people who otherwise would have been jailed and deported for minor nonviolent crimes have been allowed to stay in the country, with new skills that might help them find jobs that don’t involve selling drugs on the street.

And Harris, who is running for state attorney general, is scrambling to cover herself, announcing that undocumented immigrants will no longer be allowed to go through the program. In other words, to get rehabilitation instead of jail time in San Francisco, you now have to submit proof of citizenship.

There’s a whole lot wrong with this picture. The critics attacking Harris claim that undocumented immigrants don’t deserve job training since they can’t work in this country legally anyway. That’s just silly — tens of thousands of immigrants who lack legal documentation are working in San Francisco right now, and tens of thousands will continue to work in San Francisco. And they’re generally a productive part of the economy and community. These immigrants already face barriers to attending college. The only thing that denying first-offenders job training does is increase the chance they will return to crime.

Yes, the L.A. Times was able to find one person enrolled in the program who went out and committed robbery and assault. He was the only one of seven undocumented people in the program who had legal problems while attending. The others were allowed to graduate, had their criminal records erased, and, given the overall results of the program, were far less likely than people who had served jail time to re-offend.

Unfortunately, the daily newspaper stories are just the latest attack on San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policy, which is supposed to bar local law enforcement from turning people over to federal immigration authorities. Mayor Gavin Newsom has backed away from the sanctuary policy — and now Harris is backing away, too.

The district attorney says that allowing undocumented immigrants into her program was a mistake, and that it’s been "fixed." That’s the wrong approach. Prisons and county jails in California are jammed beyond capacity. The cost of incarcerating all those people is staggering and helping to bankrupt the state. And the threat of deportation has created a climate of terror and desperation in immigrant communities, where families are being ripped apart and lives shattered by overzealous federal agents.

And the weak responses by San Francisco city officials are just empowering the radical nativists, who want to blame all of society’s problems on immigrants.

Harris did nothing wrong and has no need to apologize or change her program. Job training as an alternative to jail is good public policy — for citizens and noncitizens. She and Mayor Newsom ought to be defending the Sanctuary City laws instead of running away from them. If this is what it takes to seek statewide office, the mayor and district attorney would better serve their constituents by staying at home. *

Intelligent design

June 24, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

The first world is so jammed with manufactured stuff we can’t perceive most of it — even the stuff we buy rapidly and take for granted, to be replaced by each next-model thingy. This process is now our economy’s bedrock, as was underlined when the government’s first order of business after 9/11 was to encourage partying like it’s $19.99 via those "America: Open for Business" signs with Old Glory as shopping bag. Yet the economy and consumerism’s ever-more-tangible impact on our planet seem to scream, "Shop less!"

Durability vs. disposability and perennial style vs. trendiness are conflicting impulses on both sides of the buyer/seller equation. In theory we might all agree everything we buy should be functional, sturdy, and attractive enough to keep until it gives out. But this flies in the face of nearly all marketplace logic, and purchaser desire. The whole idea is to generate decisions made on what you want, not what you need. Better still if that line blurs.

The New York Times’ "Consumed" columnist Rob Walker describes this drive as one for "the ‘New Now,’ a ‘New Next’" in Objectified, the latest documentary by Gary Hustwit. Like his Helvetica (2007), which looked at the stealthily enormous role of typeface in our lives, Objectified is more an appreciation than a critique of something utterly ubiquitous in this case product design — and a few stellar personalities behind it.

Hustwit isn’t interested in history or the full range of design as much as celebrating those idiosyncratic individuals whose design imprint falls within the ongoing tradition of 20th-century modernism, with its clean lines, minimal detailing, and whiff of yesteryear’s sci-fi future. "Good design is as little design as possible" insists retired innovator Dieter Rams of German home appliance giant Braun. Many of the film’s interviewees — mostly designers well-known within the industry by name or firm (IDEO, Smart) — muse on products rooted in the post-analog "connected world." With an item’s inner workings now reduced to the microchip’s all-powerful DNA, there’s little need for form to resemble function anymore; practically everything can be some sort of smooth, small, amorphous blob or plane.

Still, as Objectified emphasizes in Helvetica‘s same alert, amused, admiring way, the best designers don’t aim for depersonalizing aesthetic perfection (let alone garish flamboyance). Instead, their goal is honing every manufactured object we require or enjoy so it makes the world a mite more user-friendly. There’s an ingratiating segment here observing just how much thought goes into Smart’s creating garden-shear handles even an arthritic could love. Elsewhere, one colorful industry type rails that there’s simply no excuse for bad design anymore. Yet another GPS no one can figure out should occasion "riots in the streets," he says.

Objectified‘s primary images of rhyming-row merch in consumerist temples (IKEA, Target, etc.) are "globalization" personified. Yet as one person mercifully mentions here, that neverending parade of stuff only reaches a lucky 10 percent or so. Since the other 90 percent aspire toward disposable income and luxury goods, our insatiable minority now ponders how to tell them it’s all been a horrible mistake.

The designers here are aware of, yet somewhat flummoxed by, that crisis: It’s the very nature of their jobs that "most of what you design ends up in a landfill." It will fall to a different documentary to chronicle how product design adopts new agendas of quasi-permanence, successive useage, and biodegradability. When and if that truly happens, Objectified might turn into beautiful detritus, an artifact from a vanished age of elegant waste.

OBJECTIFIED

Wed/24-Sun/28, 1, 3, 5 p.m.

(also Wed/24-Sat/27, 7 and 9 p.m. ), $8–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org

No surrender, no retreat

June 23, 2009

rebeccab@sfbg.com

The dueling budget rallies that preceded the June 16 Board of Supervisors hearing on the city’s spending priorities officially ended the conciliatory approach offered by Mayor Gavin Newsom — a rhetorical political gambit that the Mayor’s Office never really put into practice.

The emotionally charged police and fire workers’ rally — where Police Officers Association President Gary Delagnes riled up the crowd by ridiculing supervisors as "idiots" and "carpetbaggers" — featured Newsom as the guest of honor at an event overseen by Eric Jaye, the political consultant running both the firefighters’ union budget offensive and Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign.

On a stage lined with American flags and burly public safety workers, Newsom condemned the progressive supervisor’s proposal to amend his budget over a blaring sound system. "They’re asking us to retreat," Newsom said, in full battle cry mode, "and we’re not going to do that."

Across the street, city employees from the Department of Public Health held a competing rally, flying a banner that read "No Cuts to Vital Services!" It was painfully obvious that in a squabble between city employees, the mayor was positioning himself on the side of well-paid, powerful union members who got raises instead of layoffs, rather than the public health workers and advocates for the poor whom Newsom’s budget cut the deepest.

But before progressive supervisors challenged Newsom’s proposed budget — which ignored the supervisors’ stated priorities, despite Newsom’s December pledge to work closely with the board on it — the rhetoric was quite different. "We work through our differences and ultimately try to look at the budget as apolitically as possible," Newsom said during a June 1 event unveiling his budget. "It’ll only happen by working together."

Six months earlier, when the mayor made a rare appearance at a Board of Supervisors meeting to announce the unprecedented budget shortfall of more than $500 million, he adopted a similar tone. "We have the capacity, the ingenuity and the spirit to solve this," Newsom told the board in December. "It’s going to take all of us working together. It’s in that spirit that I am here."

The mayor’s proposed budget has spurred outrage from poor people and progressive supervisors, who charge that his decision to cut critical services while simultaneously bolstering funding to the police and fire departments is morally repugnant.

Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, and David Chiu responded by passing an amendment in committee to slash $82 million from the public-safety budget in order to restore some of the cuts to public health and social services. After that move, the spirit of "working together" quickly eroded, and seemed to be replaced by the bare knuckles politics of fear and division.

After the rallies, which even spilled indoors and devolved into shouting matches between the two camps, supervisors finally got to work on the budget. And they didn’t ask Newsom to retreat, they just asked him to listen and work with them.

The $82 million dent in the public-safety budget was described as a symbolic gesture to get the mayor to take progressive concerns seriously. "For many of us, it was the only way we felt we could have a seat at the table — a seat that was real, where the discussion was going to be meaningful," Campos said.

"I do not think that this budget is bilateral. It is a unilateral budget," Chiu noted at a Budget and Finance Committee meeting.

This year’s budget battle is especially intense because of the unprecedented size of the deficit, as well as the dire economic conditions facing many San Franciscans. California’s unemployment rate climbed to 11.5 percent in May, and stood at an only slightly less miserable 9.1 percent in San Francisco, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.

Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of San Franciscans in need of emergency food assistance, homeless services, and help with other basic necessities has spiked. Everyone seems to be feeling the pinch, but for the least fortunate, falling on hard times can mean relying on city-funded services for survival.

Against this dismal backdrop, big questions are emerging about the role of government. "The city’s budget," City Attorney Dennis Herrera noted at a recent hearing, "is correctly called the city’s most meaningful policy document. More than any other piece of legislation, it sets out the priorities that tangibly express the values of the City and County of San Francisco."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi took this idea even farther at the budget hearing. "Aside from the politicking and any of the hyperbole, we [have to] do the best we possibly can for all the people of San Francisco," he said. "But in particular, the vulnerable classes, because what is also at stake is … the key question: Who’s this city for? And who gets to live here over the next 10 to 20 years, considering how cost-prohibitive it is to be in San Francisco?"

The budget battle is shaping up around some fundamental questions: is this budget going to protect the politically powerful while ignoring the thousands who are in danger of slipping through the cracks? Or will everyone be asked to make sacrifices to preserve the city’s safety net? And as these difficult decisions are hashed out, is the mayor going to sit down with the board to seek common ground?

A board hearing on the cuts to health services — which state law requires cities to hold when those cuts are deep — illustrated the divide with hours of testimony from the city’s most disadvantaged residents: those with mental health problems, seniors, SRO tenants, AIDS patients, and others.

"If we make the wrong decisions, it will mean that our homeless folks will be in ever-increasing numbers on the street. It means that folks with HIV will not receive the care they need. It will mean that kids will not have the after-school programs they need during their critical years. It will mean that our tenants will continue to live in substandard housing," Chiu summarized the testimony.

Avalos, the Budget Committee chair who has led the fight to alter Newsom’s budget priorities, has said repeatedly that cutting critical services does not work in San Francisco. And even as he proposed the amendment, he expressed a desire to reach a solution that everyone, not just progressives, would find palatable.

"We want to talk directly to the mayor, to have him meet us half-way, about how we can share the pain in this budget to ensure that we have a balance in equity on how we run the city government," Avalos noted as his committee began its detailed, tedious work on the budget. "We can do that across the hall here at City Hall, and we can do it across every district in San Francisco."

The Board approved the interim budget that more evenly shared the budget pain on a 7-3 vote, with Sups. Bevan Dufty, Carmen Chu, and Michela Alioto-Pier dissenting (Sup. Sean Elsbernd was absent because his wife was giving birth to their first child, but was also likely to dissent).

If Newsom chooses to veto the interim budget or the permanent one next month — which the board would need eight votes to override — San Francisco could be in for a protracted budget standoff, the least "apolitical" of all options. But for now, the political theater is yielding to the detailed, difficult work of the Budget and Finance Committee.

Progressive members of the committee have already signaled their intention to scrutinize city jobs with salaries of $100,000 or positions in each department that deal with public relations.

Among those highlighted in a budget analysts’ report is Newsom’s public relations team, a fleet of five helmed by a Director of Communications Nate Ballard, who pulls down $141,700 a year. Yet when the Guardian and others seek information from the office — for this story and many others — we are often stonewalled, ignored, or insulted.

During the budget hearings, the disproportionately high number of positions with six-figure salaries in the city’s police and fire departments also came under scrutiny. "What has worked in a lot of other agencies is you have employees who care deeply enough about the City and County of San Francisco that they are willing to give back in terms of salaries," Campos commented to Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White during a budget hearing, referring to firefighters’ refusal to forgo raises.

Another looming question is whether new revenue measures will be included as part of the solution. While progressive supervisors continue to call for tax measures as a way to stave off the worst cuts to critical services, Newsom proudly proclaimed his budget’s lack of new taxes.

A press release posted on Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign Web site suggests that since raising revenues doesn’t fit with his bid for governor, it’s not likely to be entertained as a possibility. "Mayor Newsom crafted a balanced budget on time," a press release notes, "without any new general tax increases, without reducing public safety services."

It’s a stand that’s certain to yield more political clashes down the line.

"I don’t see how we can get out of this budget without bringing additional revenue into the system," Campos noted at the committee hearing. "Once people learn about the situation we are facing, they will understand the need for the city and county as a whole to contribute."

Jane of the Jungle: Donkey shows, tapir dongs, stoned chimps

June 22, 2009

SFBG’s Justin Juul asks zookeeper Jane Tollini — former penguin keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, and originator of the annual “Woo at the Zoo” tour — about life, love, and sex in the animal kingdom. Read part one here.

Part Two: Donkey Shows — not as cool as they sound

SFBG: So! The real reason I’m here is to find out about donkey shows. I’ve been hearing about them my whole life, but I’ve never actually met a person who’s seen one. Have you?
Tollini: Yeah, they exist. And yes, I’ve seen one. It was horrible and extremely gross. I was drunk and stoned down in Mexico. Not sure why I wanted to see it, but hey, you’re only young once, right?

SFBG: Have you seen any other cross-species interaction? Chicken fucking, goat licking…anything like that?
Tollini: Oh yes, lots! There was this girl – I’m not gonna say here name, but she worked in the primate division — who just loved her apes to death. And we were just positive that she was getting down with them. She would bend over and give them a show in front of everyone and then she would stay late most days doing god knows what in the pens. Also, I have friends who have dogs and I’ve heard plenty of stories about canines sucking their masters off. The thing about the donkey show is that donkeys have pretty sizable dicks so a woman would have to be good and prepared, if you know what I mean. The show I saw looked pretty painful… but, well, you could tell she’d done it before. I also saw a pretty weird thing go down with an orangutan and a couple of cute college girls once. That was weird.

SFBG: Please go on.
Tollini: Well, a few years ago, a couple of girls from UC Davis decided to collaborate on a thesis statement about orangutan reproduction. Obviously, they were gonna need some sperm, so they contacted The Sacramento Zoo. The zoo was cool about it and gave the girls permission to use one of their older orangutans, but also said that it might be hard because there were no female orangutans hanging around that weren’t already pregnant at that specific point in time. Also, this orangutan had arthritis so he couldn’t masturbate very well. You can imagine what happened after that.

SFBG: The girls found a different project?
Tollini: Ha! No, the girls spent four months giving hand jobs to a grizzly old orangutan.

Will downtown go after IRV?

June 19, 2009

By Tim Redmond

Interesting meeting at the Chamber of Commerce office yesterday. In attendance, I’m told by a good source, were Chamber CEO Steve Falk, Senior Vice President Jim Lazarus, Nathan Nayman from the Committee on JOBS, Pamela Brewster, vice-president for government affairs at Charles Schwab, Wade Rose, vice president at Catholic Healthcare West, and some other downtown types.

Among the topics: A campaign to repeal the city’s Ranked-Choice Voting system.

Downtown has never liked RCV, also known as Instant Runoff Voting. The Chamber and Committee on JOBS folks also dislike the fact that they’ve gotten their butts kicked in the past few supervisorial elections — and instead of finding better candidates, or recognizing that the electorate really isn’t interested in a pro-corporate Republican-style agenda, they’ve decided to go after “the system.”

I couldn’t reach Falk today, but Lazarus called me back. He said the Chamber had polled this year on both district elections and IRV, and found (no surprise) that the public loves district elections, and that trying to return to a citywide system was a nonstarter. And while support for IRV was also strong, the voters, according to the Chamber poll, would be willing to consider direct runoffs between the top two finishers if the voting were all done by mail.

That, presumably, would keep the cost down and the turnout up.

“The Chamber has always been in favor of direct runoffs,” Lazarus told me. That allows the top two candidates to directly address their differences on the issues. With multiple candidates in the race, the issues aren’t well defined.”

Steve Hill, who works at the New America Foundation and was one of the architects of IRV in San Francisco, pointed out that direct runoffs have been tried in San Francisco. “That what we used to have,” he told me. “And we saw regular attack ads and nasty campaigning. The Ethics Commission found a four-fold increase in independent expenditures during direct runoffs.”

In other words, direct runoffs allow groups like the Chamber and its allies to dump huge amounts of money into negative campaigns in a short election period. “Getting rid of IRV is a vote to empower special interests,” Hill said.

Lazarus told me he’s not sure what the next steps would be, and whether the Chamber would push a Charter Amendment campaign to repeal IRV. “We’ve talked about it,” he said. “That’s all.”

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