Local

Appetite: The masterminds behind SF Chefs.Food.Wine

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By Virginia Miller of www.theperfectspotsf.com. See her previous installment of Appetite here.

Re-capping SF Chefs.Food.Wine.: In conversation with Andrew Freeman and Dominic Phillips, masterminds behind the event

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Andrew Freeman (left) & Kevin Westlye (bottom center) with the Mayor and friends Photo courtesy of Andrew Freeman & Co.

Imagine your favorite bartenders, chefs, and wineries under one massive tent in Union Square serving unlimited amounts of food and drink. Envision your favorite writers or TV personalities leading classes or cooking for a gala. Picture Grand Tastings where one never has to wait for a bite or a drink (a rarity, I know) and one can even talk to chefs, bartenders and winemakers while sampling their wares. Throw in evening parties (with DJs like Chef Hubert Keller) where music, food and drink flow into the night. Pack it all in to one weekend and you have an idea of what rollicking good time was had at SF Chefs.Food.Wine., which took place August 6-9.

Talking with the masterminds behind this event gave me a deeper appreciation for how smoothly this first year event ran. Without a clear vision, endless hours of planning and work by a team of dedicated experts, this would not have been the case. Two years in the making, SF Chefs.Food.Wine. was the first ever urban food and wine classic. Those who’ve been to other food and drink events know you often come away hungry from so-called "tastings", spending more time waiting for food to appear than eating it. Here, everyone stayed well fed, satiated and aglow. I talked to person after person who said they couldn’t wait to go again next year or that it was a better value than a number of cheaper (and less exciting) food events combined.

It takes a village to raise a child and a very strategic, well chosen village to create such a weekend. Kevin Westlye, the Executive Director of Golden Gate Restaurant Association (GGRA), has long had a vision for a major event showcasing San Francisco as the world class food and drink city it is. To execute this vision, he gathered together a team par excellence. Capturing the energy and scope of our region and our local talent, the event showcases the Bay Area’s key place in the culinary world while maintaining a conscious focus on giving back, both in its green approach and to the charities benefiting from all ticket sales (Project Open Hand, Meals on Wheels, Feeding America, and Golden Gate Restaurant Association Scholarship Foundation).

Andrew Freeman and Co., the PR firm handling marketing and programming for the entire weekend, is a passionate group of individuals who assembled a schedule of no less than the best. Andrew and his team built a multi-day program from the ground up… as each name was added, interest grew, until eventually there wasn’t room to hold them all. Classic TV personalities like Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook, cooked dinners and led sessions along with current big names from Top Chef (Jamie Lauren) and Top Chef Masters (Michael Chiarello and Hubert Keller). Led by authorities in each area, classes covered subjects as broad as mixology trends, sommelier secrets, sushi, chocolate, tomatoes and so on. Participants consistently commented on how smooth things ran and the camaraderie felt by all involved. Andrew said the phrase he heard most about the event was: "It’s about time".

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Dominic Phillips of Dominic Phillips Event Marketing. Photo by Justin Lewis

Dominic Phillips, of Dominic Phillips Event Marketing, took on the massive role of producing the event, handling logistics that could have easily gone so wrong without his hard-working team’s adept strategy. Dominic’s "ridiculous amount of planning" paid off with the use of 820 volunteers (‘compensated’ by being able to attend various sessions or tastings). A thoughtful layout placed tables at angles to keep the Grand Tasting tent feeling full but not crowded, spaced to avoid traffic jams or lines hovering for food (and thanks to the chefs, cooks and servers for keeping food fully supplied at all times!) His green approach was truly impressive with everything from the use of succulent plants rather than cut flowers, recycling all bottles and paper, donating wood signs to Habitat For Humanity and uneaten food to Food Runners following the event, with the goal of diverting at least 75% of the weekend’s waste from landfill.

In the capable hands of this stellar crew, an event that is a high price tag for some ($95-$150 for most events), ends up being well spent and worth saving up for. I’ve rarely seen a better one to splurge on, whether for an evening, day, or weekend. SF Chefs.Food.Wine. should easily gain its place among the great food and wine events in the nation, celebrating the Bay Area’s truly awesome culinary influence and community.

Somers Town

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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.

Liss Fain Dance Company

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PREVIEW In music, silence has a purpose similar to that of the negative space in sculpture: it heightens your awareness of the artist’s material. So perhaps for a choreographer as musically adventurous as Liss Fain, it should be no surprise that the two new works in her latest Yerba Buena Center for the Arts concert carry the word "silence" in them. Both pieces are American premieres. At the very least, the two works should offer different perspectives on the concept of stillness. For the first part of Out of the Silence, Fain again turns to the idiosyncratic Gyorgi Ligeti, whose music she used for 2004’s Unknown Land, also on this program. She supplements the Ligeti in Silence with music by the Argentinean Osvaldo Golijov, whose cultural roots are also in Eastern Europe. The second local premiere, 2002’s Towards the Good Silence (to Bruno Schulz), is a 20-minute duet for Ruth von Mengersen and choreographer Ryszard Kalinowski, both from Poland’s Lublin Dance Theatre. (Schulz, who died in 1942, was a solitary writer and graphic artist much admired in Poland). Fain met Kalinowski this summer while her company was touring Eastern Europe and found herself impressed "by his use of narrative as a springboard for physical theater." In her own work she tends toward the abstract and the cool and the incorporation of elegant visual designs. The weekend program is completed by Fain’s almost new Resolved, a rethinking of another Steve Reich score from last year.

LISS FAIN DANCE COMPANY Thurs/27–Sat/29, 8 p.m. $35. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Novellus Theater, 700 Howard, SF. (415) 978, 2787, www.ybca.org

Music listings

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Music listings are compiled by Paula Connelly and Cheryl Eddy. Since club life is unpredictable, it’s a good idea to call ahead to confirm bookings and hours. Prices are listed when provided to us. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 26

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Tia Carroll Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Carta, Shuteye Unison, Form and Fate Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $8.

Casy and Brian, Bad Friends, Dadfag, Ornithology Thee Parkside. 8pm, $7.

David Thorton Blues Band Rasselas Jazz. 8pm, free.

Dodos, Spencey Dude and the Doodles Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10.

Dredg, RX Bandits, As Tall As Lions Fillmore. 7:30pm, $20.

Funeral Pyre, Early Graves, Elitist, Cestus, DJ Rob Metal Annie’s Social Club. 8pm, $7.

Middle Distance Runner, Aushua Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Goh Nakamura, Tomo Nakayama, Odessa Chen Café du Nord. 8pm, $10.

100 Suns, Circle of Eyes Tyrant Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Phenomenal Handclap Band, Bart Davenport, Tempo No Temp Knockout. 9pm, $7.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Ben Marcato and the Mondo Combo Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

Cat’s Corner Savanna Jazz. 7pm, $5-10.

"Marcus Shelby Jazz Jam" Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Les Nubians Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $26.

Odes Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

Tin Cup Serenade Le Colonial, 20 Cosmo Place, SF; (415) 931-3600. 7pm, free.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Jon Bennett Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Gaucho, Michael Abraham Jazz Session Amnesia. 8pm, free.

Leigh Gregory Plough and Stars. 9pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Booty Call Q-Bar, 456 Castro; www.bootycallwednesdays.com. 9pm. Juanita Moore hosts this dance party, featuring DJ Robot Hustle.

Club Shutter Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Goth with DJs Omar, Nako, and Justin.

Hands Down! Bar on Church. 9pm, free. With DJs Claksaarb, Mykill, and guests spinning indie, electro, house, and bangers.

Jam Wednesday Infusion Lounge. 10pm, free. DJ Slick Dee.

Qoöl 111 Minna Gallery. 5-10pm, $5. Pan-techno lounge with DJs Spesh, Gil, Hyper D, and Jondi.

RedWine Social Dalva. 9pm-2am, free. DJ TophOne and guests spin outernational funk and get drunk.

Respect Wednesdays End Up. 10pm, $5. Rotating DJs Lonestar Sound, Young Fyah, Sake One, Serg, and more spinning reggae, dancehall, roots, lovers rock, and mash ups.

Synchronize Il Pirata, 2007 16th St.; (415) 626-2626. 10pm, free. Psychedelic dance music with DJs Helios, Gatto Matto, Psy Lotus, Intergalactoid, and guests.

THURSDAY 27

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Akron/Family, Howlin’ Rain Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10.

Shane Dwight Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Fresh and Onlys, Box Elders Knockout. 10pm.

Goddamn Gallows, Frankenstein L.I.V.S., Mutilators, Horror X Annie’s Social Club. 8pm, $7.

Have Heart, Ceremony, Cruel Hand, Shipwreck, Bitter End Thee Parkside. 8:30pm, $12.

20 Minute Loop, Famous, Billy and Dolly Café du Nord. 9pm, $10.

Rats, Back CCs, Pipsqueak Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

Sex Type Thing Red Devil Lounge. 9pm, $10.

"Weezer Tribute Show" Bottom of the Hill. 9pm, $10. With Trophy Fire, Judgement Day, Matches, and Silian Rail.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Al Coster Trio and jam Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5.

Beep! Trio Red Poppy Art House. 8pm, $10-15.

Nathan Clevanger Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:30pm, free.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 7:30pm, free.

Lloyd Gregory Shanghai 1930. 7pm.

Michael Gold Socha Café, 3235 Mission, SF; (415) 643-6848. 8:30pm, free.

Paul Kimura Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

Marlina Teich Trio Brickhouse, 426 Brannan, SF; (415) 820-1595. 7-10pm, free.

"New Frequencies @ YBCA: Musicians Respond to Wallworks" Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF; www.ybca.org. 6pm, free with gallery admission ($5-7). With Chris Brown/Mason Bates and David Arend Duo.

Les Nubians Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $26.

Stompy Jones Top of the Mark. 7:30pm, $10.

Tri-Cornered Tent Show, AnyWhen Ensemble Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market, SF; www.luggagestoregallery.org. 8pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Bluegrass and Old Time Jam Atlas Café. 8pm, free.

Dunes El Rio. 9:45pm, $5. A North African Dance Band.

Flamenco Thursday Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, 9:30; $12. With Carola Zertuche and Company.

"Roots and Ruckus" Hotel Utah. 8pm, $6. With Chloe Makes Music, Samuel Doores, Alynda Lee, Feral Foster, Willy Gantrim.

Tipsy House Plough and Stars. 9pm, free.

Trainwreck Riders, Kerosene Kondors, Autumn Sky Amnesia. 9pm, $8.

DANCE CLUBS

Afrolicious Elbo Room. 9:30pm, $5-6. DJs Pleasuremaker, Señor Oz, J Elrod, and B Lee spin Afrobeat, Tropicália, electro, samba, and funk.

Bingotopia Knockout. 7:30-9:30pm, free. Play for drinks, dignity, and dorky prizes with host Lady Stacy Pants.

Caribbean Connection Little Baobab, 3388 19th St; 643-3558. 10pm, $3. DJ Stevie B and guests spin reggae, soca, zouk, reggaetón, and more.

Drop the Pressure Underground SF. 6-10pm, free. Electro, house, and datafunk highlight this weekly happy hour.

Funky Rewind Skylark. 9pm, free. DJ Kung Fu Chris, MAKossa, and rotating guest DJs spin heavy funk breaks, early hip-hop, boogie, and classic Jamaican riddims.

Heat Icon Ultra Lounge. 10pm, free. Hip-hop, R&B, reggae, and soul.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Jorge Terez.

Koko Puffs Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 10pm, free. Dubby roots reggae and Jamaican funk from rotating DJs.

Mestiza Bollywood Café, 3376 19th St., SF; (415) 970-0362. 10pm, free. Showcasing progressive Latin and global beats with DJ Juan Data.

Popscene 330 Rich. 10pm, $10. Rotating DJs spinning indie, Britpop, electro, new wave, and post-punk.

Toppa Top Thursdays Club Six. 9pm, $5. Jah Warrior, Jah Yzer, I-Vier, and Irie Dole spin the reggae jams for your maximum irie-ness.

FRIDAY 28

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

ALO, Counter Clarkwise, Newfangled Wasteland Mezzanine. 10pm, $20.

Five Eyed Hand Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut, SF; www.theyankee.com. 10pm, $10.

Good Enough for Good Times Boom Boom Room. 10pm, $15.

*Hammers of Misfortune, Ludicra, Amber Asylum, DJ Rob Metal Great American Music Hall. 9pm, $14.

Insomniacs Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

DJ Lebowitz Madrone. 6-9pm, free.

Limbeck, Stitch Up, Mini Mansions Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $12.

LuckyIAm and Scarub with Conscious Souls, Xienhow, Enzyme Dynamite, Tantrum vs. Fredo Elbo Room. 10pm, $15.

Marilyn Manson Warfield. 9pm, $51.50-71.50.

Mayyors, Lamps, Christmas Island, Wounded Lion Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $8.

"Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival" Golden Gate Park, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. 1pm, $95-595. With Pearl Jam, Incubus, Thievery Corporation, Tom Jones, and more.

Joe Pernice, John Cunningham Café du Nord. 7:30pm, $15.

*Personal and the Pizzas, No Bunny, Ultra Twist, Pipsqueak Annie’s Social Club. 10pm, $7.

Street Sweeper Social Club Independent. 10pm, $25.

2Me Ireland’s 32. 10pm, $5.

Velvet Teen, Ghost, Drowning With Our Anchors, For.The.Win. Thee Parkside. 9pm, $10.

Yellow Dress, Foxtails Brigade Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. 8pm, $6.

Wave Array, Goodbye Nautilus Café du Nord. 10pm, $10.

BAY AREA

R. Kelly, Keyshia Cole, Plies, New Boyz, Dorrough Music Oracle Arena, 7000 Coliseum Wy, Oakl; www.ticketmaster.com. 7:30pm.

Turbonegra, Death Valley High, Distance From Shelter, Loudness of the Brethren Uptown. 9pm, $8.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Black Market Jazz Orchestra Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

Equinox Trio Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 8:30pm, free.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; 771-6800. 8pm, free.

Mint Condition Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $35.

Susanna Smith and band Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $8.

Terry Disley Experience Shanghai 1930. 7:30pm.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Seth Augustus Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:45pm, free.

Cuban Nights Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, 9:30; $15. With Fito Reinoso, and Eddie and Gabriel Navia, and utf8 dancing Buena Vista style.

Culann’s Hounds Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Rob Reich and Craig Ventresco Amnesia. 7pm, free.

Tippy Canoe SoCha Café, 3235 Mission, SF; (415) 643-6848. 8:30pm, free.

DANCE CLUBS

Activate! Lookout, 3600 16th St; (415) 431-0306. 9pm, $3. Face your demigods and demons at this Red Bull-fueled party.

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Zax, Zhaldee, and Nuxx.

Exhale, Fridays Project One Gallery, 251 Rhode Island; (415) 465-2129. 5pm, $5. Happy hour with art, fine food, and music with Vin Sol, King Most, DJ Centipede, and Shane King.

Fat Stack Fridays Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary, SF; (415) 885-4788. 10pm, free. With rotating DJs Romanowski, B-Love, Tomas, Toph One, and Vinnie Esparza.

Gay Asian Paradise Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 9pm, $8. Featuring two dance floors playing dance and hip hop, smoking patio, and 2 for 1 drinks before 10pm.

Go Bang! Deco SF, 510 Larkin St; (415) 346-2025. 10pm, $5. Recreating the diversity and freedom of the 70’s/ 80’s disco nightlife with DJs Eddy Bauer, Flight, Nicky B., Sergio and more.

High Times in Low Places Slim’s. 9pm, $20. With Opio and Pep Love, Aesop and Bicasso, DJ Fresh Cambo, Understudies, JB Nimble, Venture Capitalists, Poe Jangles and Ro Knew Influence, and DJ Ren the Vinyl Archaeologist.

Look Out Weekend Bambuddha Lounge. 4pm, free. Drink specials, food menu and resident DJs White Girl Lust, Swayzee, Philie Ocean, and more.

Loose Stud. 10pm-3am, $5. DJs Domino and Six spin electro and indie, with vintage porn visual projections to get you in the mood.

Lucky Road Amnesia. 9pm, $6-10. Balkan, Bangra, Latin, and Gypsy party with DJ Sister Kate.

M4M Fridays Underground SF. 10pm-2am. Joshua J and Frankie Sharp host this man-tastic party.

Mob Life Rock-It Room. 10pm, $15. With Yukmouth, Gr and Phee and Rhyson Hall, Hugh E MC, and more.

Punk Rock and Shlock Karaoke Annie’s Social Club. 9pm-2am, $5. Eileen and Jody bring you songs from multiple genres to butcher: punk, new wave, alternative, classic rock, and more.

Suite Jesus 111 Minna. 9pm, $20. Beats, dancehall, reggae and local art.

Teenage Dance Craze Party Knockout. 10pm, $3. Teen beat, twisters, and surf rock with DJs Sergio Iglesias, Russell Quann, and dX the Funky Gran Paw.

SATURDAY 29

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

GG Amos and the GG3 Riptide. 9pm, free.

Blue Sky Black Death, Boy Eats Drum Machine, Boy in Static Bottom of the Hill. 10pm, $10.

*Boxcar Saints, Kira Lynn Cain Make-Out Room. 7:30pm, $7.

*Calexico, Sergio Mendoza y La Orkesta Independent. 10pm, $25.

*Clipse Mighty. 8pm.

Quinn Deveaux Revolution Café, 3248 22nd St, SF; (415) 642-0474. 8:45pm, free.

Dirtbombs, Sermon, Ty Segall Rickshaw Stop. 10pm, $10.

Eric Friedmann and the Lucky Rubes, Highway Robbers, Small Change Romeos Hotel Utah. 9pm, $8.

Good Enough for Good Times Boom Boom Room. 10pm, $15.

Heavy Hindenberg, Mongoloid, Sex Presleys El Rio. 10pm, $7.

John Lee Hooker, Jr. Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $22.

Monsters of Accordion feat. Jason Webley, Stevhen Iancu, Mark Growden, Geoff Berner,

Eric Stern Slim’s. 8pm, $13.

Mt. Vicious, Ifihadahifi, Pegataur Hemlock Tavern. 9:30pm, $6.

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band Mezzanine. 10pm, $25.

Olehole, Anchor, Atom Age Thee Parkside. 9pm, $6.

"Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival" Golden Gate Park, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. Noon, $95-595. With Dave Matthews Band, Black Eyed Peas, Mars Volta, Jason Mraz, and more.

Rancho Deluxe, Cowlicks, 49 Special Café du Nord. 8pm, $15.

SF Blaze Crew Paradise Lounge. 10pm, $10-12.

Short Fuse, Deadringers, Tyrannosaurus Christ Thee Parkside. 3pm, free.

Slender, Trevor Childs and the Beholders, Corruptors Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, $7.

2Me Ireland’s 32. 10pm, $5.

BAY AREA

*Death Angel, Skinlab, Kaos Uptown. 9pm, $15.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Audium 9 1616 Bush, SF; (415) 771-1616. 8:30pm, $15.

Big B. and His Snakeoil Survivors Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa, SF; www.tuesdaynightjump.com. 8:30pm, $10.

"Bird and Beckett Bash" Miraloma Clubhouse, 350 O’Shaughnessy, SF; (415) 586-3733. 1pm, $10. With Jimmy Ryan Trio, 77 El Deora, Woe Legion, Chuck Peterson Quintet, Jonathan Richman, and more.

Pascal Bokar and band Savanna Jazz. 8pm, $5.

Eric Kurtzrock Trio Ana Mandara, Ghirardelli Square, 891 Beach, SF; (415) 771-6800. 8pm, free.

Jessica Johnson Shanghai 1930. 7:30pm.

Mint Condition Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8 and 10pm, $35.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark. 9pm, $10.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Candela Ramp Restaurant, 855 Terry Francois, SF; (415) 621-2378. 5pm.

Carnaval Del Sur Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 8pm, $12.

Jordan Carp Caffe Trieste, 1667 Market, SF; (415) 551-1000. 7:30pm, $10.

Toshio Hirano Rite Spot, 2099 Folsom, SF; www.ritespotcafe.net. 9pm, free.

Erston Pearcy Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Ashley Rains Plough and Stars. 9pm.

Sean Smith Socha Café, 3235 Mission, SF; (415) 643-6848. 8:30pm, free.

Wholphin DVD Release Party Amnesia. 9pm, $7-10. With live music performances by Jeff Manson and the Lonesome Heroes, and Wholphin DVD magazine screening.

DANCE CLUBS

Bar on Church 9pm. Rotating DJs Foxxee, Joseph Lee, Zhaldee, Mark Andrus, and Niuxx. Colombia y Panama Elbo Room. 10pm, $5. Cumbia and Latin with DJs Beto, Vinnie Esparza, and Vanka.

Debaser Knockout. 9pm-2am, $5. Hip-hop from the 90s with DJs Jamie Jams, Emdee, and Stab Master Arson.

HYP Club Eight, 1151 Folsom, SF; www.eightsf.com. 10pm, free. Gay and lesbian hip hop party, featuring DJs spinning the newest in the top 40s hip hop and hyphy.

Keys N Krates Club Six. 9pm, $10. With DJs Franchise, Sake1, and Double A spinning hip hop.

Knocked Up Knockout. 6-9pm, free. With DJ Touchy Feely.

Minimal Dose Jelly’s at Pier 50, 295 Francois, SF; (650) 533-9048. 10pm, $20. With a live performance by Seuil and DJs Alland Byallo, Clint Stewart, and J. Philip spinning techno and house.

TekAndHaus Anu, 43 6th St., SF; (415) 543-3505. 10pm, $5. With DJ Zenith and special guest Brett Johnson spinning house and techno.

Villainy DNA Lounge. 9pm, $10. DJs Party Ben, Tomas Diablo, Dangerous Dan, and Donimo spinning electro, dance, new wave, and indie.

SUNDAY 30

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Chris "Kid" Anderson Biscuits and Blues. 8pm, $15.

Alyse Black, Aly Tadros Retox Lounge. 8pm.

George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic Regency Ballroom. 9pm, $42.50.

Cuban Cowboys, Cordero, Carne Cruda Café du Nord. 7:30pm, $12.

Dungen, Woods, Kurt Vile Bottom of the Hill. 8pm, $14.

Gang Gang Dance, Ariel Pink, Amanda Blank Rickshaw Stop. 9pm, $10.

*"Grind for the Green" Yerba Buena Gardens, Fourth St at Mission; www.grindforthegreen.com. Noon-4pm, free. With Dead Prez, Mistah F.A.B., Fiyawata, and more.

"Indie Abundance Tour" El Rio. 1pm. With Chantelle Tibbs, Deborah Crooks, and Emily Bonn.

Mike Dillon’s GoGo Jungle Boom Boom Room. 10pm, $10.

Minus Five, Baseball Project and Steve Wynn IV Great American Music Hall. 8pm, $16.

*Os Mutantes, Extra Golden Independent. 9pm, $25.

"Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival" Golden Gate Park, SF; www.ticketmaster.com. Noon, $95-595. With Tenacious D, M.I.A., Ween, Modest Mouse, and more.

Space Waves, Dreamtiger, Heavy Water Experiments Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Lucid Lovers Harris’ Restaurant, 2100 Van Ness, SF; (415) 673-1888. 6:30pm.

Mint Condition Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $35.

Savanna Jazz Trio and jam Savanna Jazz. 7:30pm, $5.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Fiesta Andina! Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; (415) 646-0018. 7pm, $12. With Eddy Navia and Sukay.

Forro Brazuca Ramp Restaurant, 855 Terry Francois, SF; (415) 621-2378. 5pm.

Jack Gilder, Kevin Bemhagen, Richard Mandel, and friends Plough and Stars. 9pm, free.

Salsa Sunday El Rio. 4:15pm, $8. With Mazacote.

Uptones, Coup De Ska Amnesia. 8pm, $7-10.

DANCE CLUBS

DiscoFunk Mashups Cat Club. 10pm, free. House and 70’s music.

Dub Mission Elbo Room. 9pm, $6. Dub, roots, and classic dancehall with DJs Sep and guests Maga Bo and DJ Chicus.

45Club the Funky Side of Soul Knockout. 10pm, free. With dX the Funky Granpaw, Dirty Dishes, and English Steve.

Honey Soundsystem Paradise Lounge. 8pm-2am. "Dance floor for dancers – sound system for lovers." Got that?

Jock! Lookout, 3600 16th; 431-0306. 3pm, $2. This high-energy party raises money for LGBT sports teams.

Kick It Bar on Church. 9pm. Hip-hop with DJ Zax.

Religion Bar on Church. 3pm. With DJ Nikita.

Stag AsiaSF. 6pm, $5. Gay bachelor parties are the target demo of this weekly erotic tea dance.

MONDAY 31

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Quinn Deveaux and the Blut Beat Review, Con Brio, Dirty Boots El Rio. 8pm, $5.

Indianna Hale, Old Believers, Red River Hemlock Tavern. 7pm, $6.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Lavay Smith Trio Enrico’s, 504 Broadway, SF; www.enricossf.com. 7pm, free.

Quartet San Francisco Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $14.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Gino Napoli Simple Pleasures, 3434 Balboa, SF; (415) 387-4022. 8pm, free.

Paulo Presotto and the Ziriguidum Orkestra, Tribaletricos Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Black Gold Koko Cocktails, 1060 Geary; 885-4788. 10pm-2am, free. Senator Soul spins Detroit soul, Motown, New Orleans R&B, and more — all on 45!

Going Steady Dalva. 10pm, free. DJs Amy and Troy spinning 60’s girl groups, soul, garage, and more.

King of Beats Tunnel Top. 10pm. DJs J-Roca and Kool Karlo spinning reggae, electro, boogie, funk, 90’s hip hop, and more.

Krazy for Karaoke Happy Hour Goes All Night Knockout. 7pm-2am, free. With host Deadbeat.

Mainroom Mondays Annie’s Social Club. 9pm, free. Live the dream: karaoke on Annie’s stage and pretend you’re Jello Biafra.

Manic Mondays Bar on Church. 9pm. Drink 80-cent cosmos with Djs Mark Andrus and Dangerous Dan.

Monster Show Underground SF. 10pm, $5. Cookie Dough and DJ MC2 make Mondays worth dancing about, with a killer drag show at 11pm.

Network Mondays Azul Lounge, One Tillman Pl; www.inhousetalent.com. 9pm, $5. Hip-hop, R&B, and spoken word open mic, plus featured performers.

Punk Rock Sideshow Hemlock Tavern. 10pm, free. With DJ Tragic and Duchess of Hazard.

Spliff Sessions Tunnel Top. 10pm, free. DJs MAKossa, Kung Fu Chris, and C. Moore spin funk, soul, reggae, hip-hop, and psychedelia on vinyl.

TUESDAY 1

ROCK/BLUES/HIP-HOP

Bridge, Allofasudden Boom Boom Room. 9:30pm, $8.

Casualties, Krum Bums, Mouth Sewn Shut, Static Thought Thee Parkside. 8pm, $12.

DeatHat, Peculiar Pretzelmen, Corpus Callosum Hemlock Tavern. 9pm, $7.

Tim Easton, Brandi Shearer Café du Nord. 8pm, $12.

*MDC, Poison Control, Bum City Saints Knockout. 10pm, free.

Duke Robillard Biscuits and Blues. 8 and 10pm, $20.

Smile Brigade, Bunny Numpkins and the Kill Blow Up Reaction Kimo’s. 9pm.

JAZZ/NEW MUSIC

Dave Parker Quintet Rasselas Jazz. 8pm.

Everest Yoshi’s San Francisco. 8pm, $14.

Ricardo Scales Top of the Mark. 6:30pm, $5.

FOLK/WORLD/COUNTRY

Mucho Axe, Fogo Na Roupa Elbo Room. 9pm, $7.

DANCE CLUBS

Alcoholocaust Presents Argus Lounge. 9pm, free. With DJ What’s His Fuck, Taypoleon, and D-Runk.

Drunken Monkey Annie’s Social Club. 9pm-2am, free. Rock ‘n’ roll for inebriated primates like you.

Eclectic Company Skylark, 9pm, free. DJs Tones and Jaybee spin old school hip hop, bass, dub, glitch, and electro.

Rock Out Karaoke! Amnesia. 7:30pm. With Glenny Kravitz.

Womanizer Bar on Church. 9pm. With DJ Nuxx. *

Events listings

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Events listings are compiled by Paula Connelly. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

WEDNESDAY 26

Lincart Summer BBQ Lincart, One Otis, SF; RSVP to hope@lincart.com. 6pm, free. Celebrate Lincart’s new location (down the block from their old location) with a thought provoking group show, live flamenco dancers, and old fashioned BBQ on the roof deck.

Pecha Kucha Autodesk Gallery, 2nd floor, One Market, SF; pechakucha-sf.com. 7:30pm happy hour, 8:20pm presentations; $5 suggested donation. Meet designers from many creative fields, share ideas, and watch as 8 – 12 participants present 20 images of their work. This month’s theme is "substance."

THURSDAY 27

The Adderall Diaries Amnesia, 853 Valencia, SF; (415) 970-0012. 7pm; $20, includes copy of book. Author Stephen Elliott will read from his new book, The Adderall Diaries: A memoir of moods, masochism, and murder, with Tobias Wolff, Bucky Sinister and others.

12 Hot Dates, 1 Fun Night El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; www.bca12.com. 5:30pm, $20 suggested donation. Bid on potential dates with 12 smart, sexy, fun men and women of various ages, sexual orientations, and ethnic backgrounds. All proceeds benefit Breast Cancer Action.

FRIDAY 28

Art for AIDS Bonhams and Butterfields Auction House, 220 San Bruno, SF; artforaids.org. 5:30pm, silent auction, 6:45pm, live auction; $75 includes local food and wine. More than 135 modern and contemporary works of art will be auctioned off to benefit the UCSF AIDS Health Project.

SATURDAY 29

Commemorate Casper Banjo Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission, SF; (415) 643-2785. 3pm, free. Celebrate the life of Oakland artist Casper Banjo, who was tragically shot to death by a police officer last year while carrying a replica gun, with guest speakers and musical performances. Banjo’s work is currently on display as part of the MCCLA’s current exhibition 3 Worlds.

Save the Streets Summer Jam Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral, 245 Valencia, SF; (510) 888-9890. 8pm, $20. This event aims to help stop gun violence amongst Bay Area youth, featuring hip hop artist San Quinn and host KMEL’s Chuy Gomez. All proceeds go towards spinal chord research.

SUNDAY 30

Bride Mob ATA, 992 Valencia, SF; (415) 824-3890. 5:30pm, $5 suggested donation. Celebrate your inner bride with DJ Brawlio, a wedding party cover band, a bridal fashion show, raffle, and more at this event hosted by Saltwater, an local independent film production. After the party, the bride mob will descend on Valencia!

Plate to Plate Start and finish line at McCovey Cove, behind AT&T Park, across the Lefty O’Doul Bridge on Third St., SF; (415) 447-2316. 9am, $39 to register. This 5k run and walk starts at McCovey Cove, goes along the Embarcadero, across home plate in AT&T park, and back to McCovy cove. All proceeds to benefit Project Open Hand, which provides meals for people living with serious illnesses and seniors.

MONDAY 31

EAT 111 Minna, SF; eatat111minna.blogspot.com. 5pm, free admission to the grand opening with RSVP to eatat111minna@gmail.com. In the burgeoning tradition of guerilla gourmet dining, this new weekly event is a cross between dinner, happy hour, and a night club with $5-10 small plates, artwork, and live music.

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Newsom’s leak

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EDITORIAL At the heart of the conflict over Sup. David Campos’ recent sanctuary legislation is a basic issue of civil rights: Should a young San Francisco immigrant arrested by the local police be treated as innocent until proven guilty — or should that person face deportation, even if the arrest is bogus and no formal charges are ever filed?

All Campos wants to do is establish that an arrest is not a conviction — and, as anyone who works with youth or immigrants in the city knows, thousands of innocent people are picked up by the police every year, sometimes because of simple mistakes, more often because the local cops have a propensity to arrest young people of color in disproportionate numbers.

And under current city policy, anyone arrested on felony charges who lacks proper documentation can be turned over to federal immigration authorities. And even if the suspect turns out to be innocent, he or she can be deported. That’s not fair, not consistent with the city’s sanctuary policy — and, according to the ACLU, not legally defensible.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom, not content with arguing the merits of the legislation (a battle he would clearly lose), has taken the remarkable step of leaking to the San Francisco Chronicle a confidential opinion from City Attorney Dennis Herrera that warned of the potential legal downside of the Campos measure. The Chron quickly turned the memo into a front-page story, proclaiming that the legislation "would violate federal law and could doom [the city’s] entire sanctuary city policy." Newsom was quick to chime in: "The supervisors are putting at risk the entire Sanctuary City Ordinance, which we’ve worked hard to protect," the Chron quoted the mayor as saying.

For starters, that’s blowing the situation way, way out of proportion. Herrera’s office writes these memos all the time. Any piece of legislation that might have legal ramifications gets this sort of review — and in many, many cases, the supervisors and the mayor simply go ahead anyway. Two of Newsom’s biggest initiatives — same-sex marriage and the city’s health care law — involved serious legal issues, and it’s almost certain that Herrera formally warned the supervisors and the mayor that going ahead could lead to lawsuits. Newsom, properly, proceeded with the legally risky moves.

And while we haven’t seen Herrera’s memo, people familiar with it agree that it never said that the existing sanctuary law is at any real risk. Yes, some anti-immigrant group could sue the city over Campos’s bill. And yes, some court could conceivable invalidate not only this law but a lot of other city immigration policies. But nobody has ever successfully sued to overturn the current law, which has been in effect for almost 20 years.

Of course, there are, and will be, legal issues with the Campos bill. But now that the mayor has leaked the confidential memo laying out those concerns, any right-wing nut who does want to sue will have the ammunition prepared. And Newsom’s action makes the prospect of a suit — one that will cost the city a lot of money — far more likely.

In other words, the mayor has put his own city’s treasury at risk, possibly vioutf8g city law in the process, in order to undermine a piece of legislation that he doesn’t support. This has all the hallmarks of the mayor’s new gubernatorial campaign team, led by consultant Garry South, who is known for his vicious, scorched-earth battles. South, we suspect, advised Newsom that appearing soft on illegal immigrants would play poorly in the more conservative parts of the state — and that a tactic that puts his own city at risk was an appropriate way to respond.

And Newsom, to his immense discredit, went along.

This is a big deal, a sign that the mayor is putting his higher ambitions far ahead of his duty to San Francisco. "In my eight years in office, I saw hundreds of these memos," former Board President Aaron Peskin told us. "I saw plenty of material that I could have leaked that would have been useful to me politically. But all of us on the board, across the political spectrum, understood that you just don’t do that. Because if you do, it tears the government apart."

We’re journalists here, and we never support government secrecy. We have consistently defended reporters who publish leaked documents (and would do so here, too, despite our criticism of the way the Chron played this story). And there are times, many times, when it’s best for city attorneys and the officials who get their advice to let the public know what those memos say. We support whistleblowers and principled city employees and officials who defy the rules of secrecy and tell the public what’s really going on.

But Newsom was serving no grand public interest purpose here. He was simply using confidential legal advice to attempt to thwart a political opponent, for the purpose of promoting his own ambitions. That’s alarming. If Newsom wants to be taken seriously as a candidate for governor, he needs to demonstrate that he can stand up to his political advisors — and so far, he’s failing, miserably.

P.S.: Sup. John Avalos has asked the Ethics Commission and the city attorney to investigate the leak, which is fine — but this shouldn’t become an attack on the right of the press to publish confidential documents. None of the investigators should try to question the Chron reporters to seek the source of the leak — particularly since Newsom has as much as admitted, to the Guardian‘s Sarah Phelan, that he was the one who authorized his staff to hand out the memo. *

Too vital to fail

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OPINION The "too big to fail" rationale is a mystery to citizens forced to fund these billion-dollar ventures.

Suppose an entity is not too big but "too vital to fail"? Which power broker bestows standing to even ask for a bailout? I started thinking about "too vital to fail" when two seemingly unrelated incidents intersected in my consciousness, one a tragedy, the other simply heart-breaking.

The first incident happened in Oakland, eight blocks from where I teach journalism. A local editor was gunned down in a brazen daytime assassination. Chauncey Bailey was supposedly about to publish a story in the Oakland Post on the financial misdeeds of the local Your Black Muslim Bakery. Bay Area journalists (including the Guardian) formed the Chauncey Bailey Project, a group effort to dig up facts of the killing and keep the story prominent. Two years after Bailey’s slaying — with the shooter agreeing to testify against the man who ordered him to pull the trigger — the case is close to a trial date.

The second incident involved Daily Bread, a nonprofit for which I transported food each Tuesday from a Berkeley market to an AIDS center on Shattuck Avenue. In summer of 2008, the AIDS center closed, and reopened in new quarters on San Pablo Avenue in downtown Oakland.

The first day I delivered food I realized it was the old Black Muslim Bakery building, bought and renovated at huge expense by a local AIDS activist-philanthropist. Employees took pride in their new surroundings. Then came Tuesday, May 5. With my bags of food on the sidewalk, I tried the door and found the place locked up. "We’re closed," announced Peggy, executive director of Vital Life Services. "Today?" I asked. "For good," she replied. "Our funding is no longer there."

This was a staggering loss to the community, the clients, and the employees. We agreed to continue the battle for funds. I suggested renaming the building the Chauncey Bailey Center, to which Peggy readily agreed. It would be Bailey’s perfect legacy (not to mention the irony).

A week later the Oakland Tribune ran the center’s obit. I was amazed at just how vital this place was. "The nonprofit … provided critical support, case management, mental health counseling, hot meals, and much more in one location to low-income and homeless clients with HIV and AIDS," the article said. In fact, the center was saving Alameda County millions of dollars since it prevented AIDS- and HIV-infected people from going to a hospital emergency room, which cost the county $10,000 a day.

My first crack at fundraising led me to a celebratory video made when the center opened last September. Local politicians were on hand, smiling radiantly and welcoming this wonderful addition to the Golden Gate neighborhood. When the funding dried up, none of our "public servants" was to be seen. One more irony was noted in the Tribune article: the Congressional representative of the district, Barbara Lee, "has made the fight against AIDS one of her biggest issues."

I continue my battle for funding in these financially perilous times. Do I qualify as merely a citizen to get a hearing in Washington for a bailout? Will someone (or foundation) step forward and launch the Chauncey Bailey Center, a place "too vital to fail"?

(The center video and more can be seen at www.vitalcalifornia.org.)

Burt Dragin teaches journalism at Laney College in Oakland and is the author of Six to Five Against: A Gambler’s Odyssey. (bdragin@peralta.edu)

Editorial: Newsom’s leaked memo costs the city

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The mayor’s leaked memo puts the city treasury at risk, possibly violates the law, and promotes his gubernatorial ambitions at the expense of sound city policy

Click here to read Sarah Phelan’s story in this week’s Guardian titled, Restoring the sanctuary.

EDITORIAL At the heart of the conflict over Sup. David Campos’ recent sanctuary legislation is a basic issue of civil rights: Should a young San Francisco immigrant arrested by the local police be treated as innocent until proven guilty — or should that person face deportation, even if the arrest is bogus and no formal charges are ever filed?

All Campos wants to do is establish that an arrest is not a conviction — and, as anyone who works with youth or immigrants in the city knows, thousands of innocent people are picked up by the police every year, sometimes because of simple mistakes, more often because the local cops have a propensity to arrest young people of color in disproportionate numbers.

Pics: ‘The Art of Restraint’ at Femina Potens

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Text and photos by Ariel Soto

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A mix of rope, art, and champagne filled the tiny gallery at Femina Potens this weekend as part of an erotic bondage showcase called “The Art of Restraint.” Along the walls were provocative pieces by local artists and dotted amongst the guests were performers demonstrating different techniques in tying knots and self- suspension. But the most surprising element of the evening to me was the variety of voyeurs: there were the obviously well-experienced folks decked out in leather and fishnets, but then there was a sprinkling of suburban moms wearing three-quarter length khakis accompanied by their husbands. These spectators were also the ones wearing the “Do Not Photograph” stickers on their shirts, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one. Pretty kinky, right?

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Embattled Ethics Commission heroes

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By Steven T. Jones

Two of the best, most public-spirited individuals ever to serve the San Francisco Ethics Commission – former staffer and commissioner Joe Lynn and current staffer Oliver Luby – are each fighting serious battles.

Luby — a Lynn protégé who has fought persistent corruption and dysfunction within the department — has been hounded by Director John St. Croix and his lieutenant, Mabel Ng, and now faces a ridiculous investigation for daring to comment from his work computer on flaws in new state ethics rules.

His many progressive supporters and his union, SEIU Local 1021, have each formally protested what they see as illegal retaliation against a whistle-blower and the matter has been shopped out to Oakland’s Ethics chief Dan Purnell (who also did the 2004 investigation of Ng improperly ordering Luby to destroy a document showing a money laundering scheme by the Gavin Newsom for Mayor campaign, the very thing that Ethics is supposed to regulate).

Meanwhile, Lynn faces a far more consequential battle: he’s fighting for his life against leukemia and about to undergo another round of chemotherapy. Friends and supporters of Lynn – a true Ethics pioneer – plan to gather tomorrow at 1 p.m. at Tacqueria Reina at 1550 Howard to show their love and support. All are welcome.

Odynophagia’s ghastly retail accident, demolecularized

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By Marke B

Last week in the paper I wrote about outrageously contagious local tesseractic rapper Odynophagia — I love his killer live show and Social Masque album on his Millipede Handjob label. (The Alternative Tentacles of the ’10s?). Basically he’s a flesh alien, beaming up hyperreal art star Ryan Trecartin with a side of Dr. Octagon.

Odynophagia, “The Container is Pervasive” from Social Masque

Welp, just in time for our wobble-kneed Drug Issue, Odyn drops an exclusive freestyle just for us. Strap down your naked lunch and enjoy:

Note: Yo Marke, here’s a freestyle. Ya know freestyle in the purist OLD SCHOOL tradition. Which is: writing something over a period of 11 weeks. Focus grouping it, then having your stenographer earpierce buzz it when you battle Kool Herc. The rap’s about this retail accident demolecularizing my subjectivity, then me coming back as this ghastly thing assisted by lepers to turn YOU (the listener) into a infected prostitute mannequin that the male community will flock to (because you’re hot, and either gender, but really just cuz I dressed you pretty, and slathered on this hot lipgloss. Your lipgloss be poppin’)

Campos invites Newsom to support due process for all youth

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Text and images by Sarah Phelan

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Sup. David Campos addresses the crowd before introducing legislation to restore due process to undocumented youth.

Yesterday’s rally at City Hall in support of Sup. David Campos’ resolution to restore due process to immigrant youth was a who’s who of all the movers and shakers within the local immigrant reform community.

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Members of Mujeres Unidas y Activas led the crowd in chants of “Si se puede!”

Dozens of community groups, half a dozen supervisors, a representative for Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Mission High school teacher Derrylyn Tom,, Kate Kendall of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Patti Lee of the Public Defender’s office, Ana Perez of the Central American Resource Center, Lateefah Simon of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, Tim Paulson of the San Francisco Labor Council and Rev. Charles Kullmann of the SF Interfaith Coalition were in attendance, to name a few of the hundreds who showed up.

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Board President David Chiu told the crowd that the city needs to “strike the right balance” and ensure public safety and the rights of immigrants.

Noticeably absent were Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sups. Carmen Chu, Sean Elsbernd and Michela Alioto-Pier, none of whom have signed on in support of Campos’ resolution to date. And it seemed like a missed opportunity for Newsom, who needs all the support he can get if he is going to have a chance of winning the governor’s race.

Ana Perez of the Central American Resource Center told the crowd that soon after Newsom’s revised sanctuary policy was implemented last summer, 50 prominent Latino leaders sent Newsom a letter asking him to amend the policy so that immigrant youth would be guaranteed due process.

“California has always been a leader on social issues,” Perez said, as she thanked Campos and the seven other supervisors who are co-sponsoring his resolution to restore due process. ” We have been dismayed by San Francisco’s decision and its current policy which destroys families.”

Made in USA

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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.

This land is ‘Methland’

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DRUG LIT Books claiming to be about drugs in some way — whether nominally fiction or nonfiction — all run up against the same problem: pharmacodependency is already culture. Or, as the literary theorist and academic Avital Ronell puts it in her brilliant, uncategorizable tract, Crack Wars (University of Illinois Press, 1993), drugs articulate "a quiver between history and ontology."

Put another way, drugs aren’t everything, but rituals of self-maintenance and care, from vitamins to exercise and so on, are built on addictive structures. Isoutf8g a drug as a singularity — as Nick Reding only apparently does in Methland (Bloomsbury USA, 272 pages, $24.95), a sort of informal case study of the effects and causes of the meth epidemic in the Iowa town of Oelwein — is a dicey proposition. It calls for a kind of Puritan monomania that might capture some of the lucidity of being on drugs but does so at the price of insight, a deductive rather than inductive logic.

It’s easy to claim that drugs are culture if we limit ourselves to the black-light poster canon of drug lit from Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) to Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959) and Bret Easton Ellis’ coke-benumbed Less Than Zero (1985). In their time, those books appeared as threatening as their subject matter because they revealed associations between addiction and literature — a notion that seems rather quaint now. Nobody’s launching hysterical campaigns against toxic literature. Today, video games are the new objects of moral panic. Perhaps as books quietly got subsumed into the category of self-improvement, video games took on the cast of a potentially ruinous pursuit of unproductive labor.

In this context, meth is an oddly positioned drug: since its first large-scale use among soldiers on both sides during World War II, speed has been associated with hard work, endurance, and elevated mood over more abstract qualities. Whether prescribed for slimming down or perking up during its brief tenure as a licit drug, amphetamines have always tended to banal, everyday worry. As Reding writes in his book’s introduction, the U.S. meth epidemic is set apart not only because meth can be synthesized cheaply and discreetly at home, but because the drug’s main constituency is working-class, rural whites. Reding’s take on his subjects is compassionate but not treacly: a significant portion of the book links increased meth use with the effects of globalization upon the blue-collar job markets in small towns.

One of the Oelwein residents Reding profiles, a notorious crank addict named Roland Jarvis, went from earning $18 an hour with full union membership and benefits to $6.20 an hour without benefits or union membership after Gillette and later Tyson took over the company where he worked, Iowa Ham. Jarvis used meth to help pick up extra shifts even in the halcyon days of a livable wage, but it’s difficult to imagine how one could make do on $6.20 an hour without tweeking — Reding claims local meth production increased by 400 percent around the same time. Jarvis’ narrative arc culminates when his home explodes as he attempting to dismantle his basement meth lab. The descriptions that Reding shares — of how Jarvis’ skin proceeded to slough off in sheets, revealing the muscle below, for example — make for a kind of rural Grand Guignol, otherwise held in check by structural explanations.

The author gives the sense of a slightly distracted but pleasant dinner party host — wary of lingering on any subject too long, he returns cyclically to the nonaddicts who form the moral core of the story. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein’s high-strung general practitioner, and Nathan Lein, the assistant Fayette County prosecutor, are the book’s through-lines: their tentative redemption is the town’s, and the book’s conclusion plays out with a Midwestern brand of reticence. But Reding’s attempts to connect Oelwein’s story with his own family history cause the book to lose focus, particularly as it concludes. To his credit, this feels like the result of keeping an over-cautious distance from mom-baiting newsmagazine templates. Ironically, though, some of Methland‘s descriptions of meth-fueled psychosis — an elaborate fetish for enemas; frozen pigs in a blanket used as butt plugs — are far-out enough to be at home in the "Drugs" episode of Channel 4’s satirical documentary program Brass Eye.

Methland also tracks the paths of the meth trade, illustrating how early routes were established by out-migration from the corn belt to labor markets in Southern California, then were consolidated into an empire by Lori Arnold, and finally transformed into a decentralized system in which Mexican traffickers use illegal immigrants employed in the meatpacking industry as mules. By following both federal meth legislation and news coverage of the epidemic, Reding emphasizes meth’s functions and reputation within society. He links the drug to an incredible depression of wages and standard of living by corporations threatening to move operations offshore should they be forced to enact worker protections.

Meth is a drug with no celebrities, and Reding treats his subjects with respect, despite close calls with former addicts who play disc golf with him one minute and threaten his life the next. But even beyond a standard litany of reservations about nonfiction — that the author’s voice is too intrusive or not intrusive enough, that there are chunks of undigested research — Methland’s attempt to combine personal reflections on identity and place with an examination of the drug’s role in a small town’s economic struggles seems formally stale.

Perhaps this approach is more truthful, though: meth in Oelwein offers little in the way of rausch, which Ronell defines as the "ecstasy of intoxication," but can be everything when it comes to making do as agribusiness exerts its downward pressure on communities that had previously survived on small-scale farming and small business. Though he might not be able to keep his readers fully invested in his book’s characters, Reding illuminates how meth flows along the same lopsided trajectory of so-called development for which globalization is a handy catch-all. Meth lit is a distant prospect, and as Ronell reminds us with respect to crack, it’s because these drugs don’t have the veneer of moral defensibility. A writing more appropriate to the subject might put forth a louder call for justice for the future. Methland does an able job for now.

Mirant plant to close

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news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office struck a deal with Mirant Potrero LLC on Aug. 13 to shutter its polluting Potrero power plant no later than Dec. 31, 2010. The settlement agreement represents a major victory for San Francisco and the broad array of elected officials and environmental-justice advocates who’ve been railing against the hazardous byproducts of the 40-year-old fossil fuel-fired facility for years.

The agreement also requires Mirant to pay the city $1 million, which will be put toward addressing childhood asthma and supporting neighborhood beautification.

"It’s a great result for the city, but in particular for the southeast sector," said Herrera, who has opposed the plant since 1999. "A lot of folks deserve a lot of credit for this."

Residents living in southeast San Francisco and Bayview-Hunter’s Point, where asthma rates are higher than average, have borne the brunt of toxic emissions spewing from the plant’s brick smokestack nearly 24 hours a day.

"It’s been a long haul," Sup. Sophie Maxwell, who represents the neighborhoods adversely affected by the pollution, said at a press conference. "Our community [has] some of the highest rates of asthma, the highest rates of cancer. We have babies being born in this community every day — and so we cannot keep our eye off the prize."

Maxwell’s vow to continue pushing even with the signed agreement in hand may prove wise considering that the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) — a body that oversees the state’s power grid and determines capacity requirements — has yet to grant its blessing to the deal. Under the terms of the agreement, Mirant must declare to Cal-ISO that it will not continue operation beyond the shutdown date. The utility also agreed not to pursue renewal of its "reliability must-run" (RMR) contract with Cal-ISO, which has required the plant to run against the wishes of elected officials in San Francisco for years.

Cal-ISO left open the question of whether it would agree to release Mirant from the RMR requirement. "The ISO will continue to require local measures to be available at the level necessary to ensure that San Francisco reliability is consistent with that of other major metropolitan areas in California and the nation," spokesman Gregg Fishman noted in a statement.

The battle to shutter San Francisco’s dirty power plant might not be over — but for the first time Mirant will now be aligned with the city and at odds with Cal-ISO. "I’ve got to give credit where credit’s due," Herrera told the Guardian. "[Mirant] ultimately did step up here with the settlement and make an unprecedented commitment."

What’s in it for Mirant? The city attorney dropped a lawsuit against Mirant that sought compliance with codes requiring seismic upgrades to old brick buildings on the site. The city also will give priority to any redevelopment plans for the company-owned site.

Chip Little, a Mirant spokesperson, said the company doesn’t have a particular vision in mind. "At this time, we have no redevelopment plans for the site," he said. Mirant does have other projects in the works outside San Francisco, however. "We responded to a [request for offer] that PG&E issued last year for new capacity," Little told us. Mirant has applied for licenses to build a 930 MW natural gas-fired plant near Antioch, and a 550 MW natural gas-fired facility at the Pittsburg power plant site.

The TransBay Cable, an undersea power line that will transfer electricity from Pittsburg power sources to San Francisco, is expected to go live in March. The cable will negate the need for most of the electricity supplied by the 350 MW Potrero plant, but there will still be a 25 MW generation gap.

"That’s really a rather small amount," Ed Harrington, director of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, told reporters during the press conference. "We believe it could be met by underwriting other projects that PG&E is working on and by … cutting back when there’s a peak."

When a battle was waged last year over proposed construction of city-owned power plants to replace Mirant, many thought a solution that didn’t involve new in-city generation was impossible. One year later, this new accord with the City Attorney’s Office rests on the idea that shutting down Mirant with no new fossil fuel is not just possible, but within reach in the near future.

Cecile Lepage contributed to this report.

Chronic debate

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sarah@sfbg.com

For decades, proponents of marijuana reform have argued that cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol or cigarettes, has legitimate medical uses, and should be decriminalized on the grounds that prohibition doesn’t work.

In 1996, these arguments helped convince California voters to approve Proposition 215, which allows the use of marijuana for medical purposes. And in March, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signaled a major change in federal drug policy when he said that the Justice Department does not plan to prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries that operate legally under California law.

But the federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 controlled substance that has no medical value and a high abuse potential. As a result, cultivation, distribution, and sales of pot primarily occur on the black market, a shadowy mix of small-timers and powerful cartels.

Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) suggests that U.S. growers produced 22 million pounds of marijuana in 2006, worth $35.8 billion, and that California accounted for almost 39 percent of U.S. pot production.

Now, with California’s economy in the crapper, the state budget a mess, and federal judges ordering substantial reductions in California’s prison population, reform advocates are making an intriguing argument: if state or local governments legalize and tax even a fraction of marijuana sales in California, the state could see billions of dollars in new annual revenue and reduced enforcement costs.

Assembly Member Tom Ammiano recalls some laughter in February when he introduced Assembly Bill 390, state legislation to regulate marijuana much like alcohol. "But the budget fiasco has made some people who were dismissive take a harder look," Ammiano said.

A recent California Board of Equalization analysis of Ammiano’s bill estimates that if the state charged $50 per ounce, California would generate $1.4 billion in marijuana taxes annually.

Voters in Oakland also advanced the marijuana policy discussion last month when they approved a special tax on the city’s medical cannabis dispensaries. And in August, a three-judge federal court ruled that California must develop a plan to reduce its prison population by 44,000 over two years.

The public also seems to support making a change. In April, a Field Poll confirmed that for the first time a majority (56 percent) of California voters support legalizing pot.

Depite these advances, Ammiano says he wants to be strategic with his bill, gradually building support. "That’s why we made it a two-year bill," Ammiano said. His bill is scheduled for its first hearing at the Public Safety Committee, which Ammiano now chairs, by year’s end.

But some Bay Area activists aren’t waiting on Ammiano. Last month, Richard Lee, who operates four medical marijuana dispensaries in Oakland, filed initiative paperwork with the state and hopes to gather enough signatures to qualify a Tax Cannabis initiative in 2010.

Ammiano’s bill and Lee’s initiative allow recreational use of marijuana, penalize driving under the influence, and charge a $50 fee per ounce. But they differ around regulation and how to deal with the overarching problem of federal law. Ammiano’s legislation assumes a statewide system that mirrors the federal Department of Alcohol Beverage Control. Lee’s initiative leaves regulation to each county, similar to the patchwork approach to alcohol in other states.

Lee believes his initiative gives people more options. "We can’t order people to break federal law — that would be thrown out," Lee said. "Forty jurisdictions already permit medical marijuana cooperatives in California. So we already have that system, and we’ll follow that reality."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who authored San Francisco’s medical cannabis dispensary regulations, believes it’s important to lay the groundwork at the local level. He points to the relative lack of growth in new municipalities that allow medical dispensaries since voters approved Prop. 215, calling it evidence of pot-related NIMBYism.

"Everyone says they support it, but they don’t want it in their own backyards," said Mirkarimi, who wants San Francisco to become the first U.S. city to add marijuana to the list of medicines it dispenses. "But the city Attorney’s Office is shy about pushing this envelope."

Mirkarimi wants to follow Oakland’s example and add a gross receipts tax to medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco.

But the legalization push has its fervent critics. At a recent Commonwealth Club debate on the economics of marijuana, El Cerrito Police Chief Scott Kirkland, who led the charge to ban medical dispensaries in his city, tried to discredit arguments that legalization will save money.

"I’m very disappointed with the state," Kirkland said, claiming that the BOE’s analysis drew almost exclusively on the work of Jon Gettman, a former director of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

"We have to have statistics we can rely on," said Kirkland, who then cited the same BOE report — it estimates that pot prices will drop 50 percent and consumption will increase 40 percent — to support his contention that legalization will lead to increased substance abuse.

Kirkland also challenged the notion that Mexican drug cartels will leave once the pot business is legitimized and regulated. "They understand that the money involved is astronomical," he said. "It’s wishful thinking that if you legalize marijuana, all of a sudden the cartels go away."

He also disputed claims that legalization would help empty state prisons. "It’s very common for advocates to associate legalization with reducing the costs of incarceration, but it’s a fallacy," Kirkland said. "It’s very rarely that a person goes to prison for their original offense."

Kirkland topped off his attack by citing the state’s June 19 decision to add marijuana smoke to its Proposition 65 list of substances known to contain carcinogens.

But BOE spokesperson Anita Gore refuted claims that their analysis relied entirely on reform advocates’ research. "Being as this is an underground activity, the resources are limited," Gore said. "But our researchers and economists used econometric models that are generally accepted and looked at all the available resources, which included academic and law enforcement studies."

Gettmann told the Guardian he uses data from NSDUH, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Office of National Drug Control, and the Bureau of International Narcotics — sources the prohibitionists also draw on. He admits that it’s hard to quantify a black market.

"But it’s easy for anyone to understand basic regulatory economic theory," Getmann said. "Marijuana use produces costs for society, but is largely untaxed. So users and sellers reap benefits, while taxpayers bear the costs."

He believes many advantages of legalization are qualitative. "It’s a better regulatory system for financial and fiscal reasons and for restricting access on the part of teenagers," Gettman said.

Stephen Gutwillig, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, points to research by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, which found that arrest rates for everything in California have declined since 1990 — with the exception of low-level marijuana crimes. CJCJ’s research shows that rates for this group increased 127 percent since 1990, and 25 percent in the last two years.

"It’s a system run amok," Gutwillig said. He notes that of the 74,000 people arrested for marijuana-related offenses, 20,000 are youth. "The marijuana problem is increasingly becoming a mechanism for social control of young black and brown men in California."

"We feel that money is definitely a fine consideration," he continued. "But even if reguutf8g marijuana didn’t produce a dime, these punitive, wasteful laws must end."

Gutwillig’s group has estimated that legalization would save California’s state and local governments $259.7 million annually in court and incarceration costs alone, a figure DPA researcher Betty Lo Dolce said is very conservative.

"I don’t know if folks have a secondary offenses, so I don’t know if marijuana was legalized, if they wouldn’t be in state prison," Lo Dolce said. "Or conversely, if they may not have been arrested for drug-related crimes, but then those charges got dropped and they ended up inside because of secondary drug-related offense."

Bruce Mirken, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, believes that advocates of California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) should have to justify that the program does some good.

"The idea that enforcing prohibition and seizing 5.5 million plants last year would be less costly than legalizing is crazy," he said.

But what about the public health costs?

UCLA pulmonologist Dr. Donald Tashkin said that the state added marijuana smoke to its Prop. 65 list, based on finding carcinogens in that smoke. "But you cannot translate chemistry into chemical risk because you have to take into account potential opposing effects," Tashkin said.

His research has found no association between heavy marijuana use and increased risk of lung cancer and pulmonary disease. Conversely, he and Dr. Donald Abrams, a cancer researcher at UCSF, have found that THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, has an anti-tumor effect.

"The bottom line is that you cannot use pulmonary risk as a justification for not legalizing it," Tashkin said.

Dr. Igor Grant, director of medical cannabis research at UC San Diego, said the question around marijuana smoke is quantity. "It’s not like cigarettes," he said. "Most people don’t smoke 20 joints a day for 20 years. But even if it was declared safe for patients, you wouldn’t want parents filling the room with smoke."

James Gray, an Orange County judge and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, believes marijuana is here to stay. "Instead of moralizing and punishing people for failing on moral chastity grounds, let’s manage its use," Gray said. "If people are using it, they should be able to know what’s in it."

The most harmful thing about marijuana, Gray contends, is jail. "The remedy is far more dangerous than the disease itself," he said. "There are thousands of people in prison because they did nothing but smoke pot, and a dirty drug test was a violation of their parole…. But I understand that some people in law enforcement stand to lose a great deal, and that the Mexican cartels are going to invest a lot of money in Madison Avenue advertising."

Lee, too, acknowledges the opposition, but remains hopeful. "People are coming out of the closet," he said. "That’s what caused the gay rights movement to take off. It’s starting to happen around marijuana use."

Hines spy?

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By Rebecca Bowe

men in black.jpg

Here’s the latest twist in the fight over 113 Steuart Street, a shuttered two-story building on the city’s northern waterfront that high-profile developer Hines Interests wants to raze and replace with a tall, shiny green building called 110 The Embarcadero. A committee that’s pushing to landmark 113 Steuart is claiming that Hines has used “industrial espionage” to try and thwart their efforts.

On Aug. 4, a group called the 113 Steuart Street Landmark Committee — comprised of preservationists, historians and labor union members — held a meeting at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 34 Hall to chart their strategy for landmarking 113 Steuart, which would preclude demolition. The site is historically significant, committee members argue, because it served as the labor hall where International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) leader Harry Bridges and the Maritime Strike Committee organized the Waterfront Maritime Strike of 1934. (The ILA was the predecessor to the ILWU.)

The meeting attracted a newcomer. Committee members Ralph Schoenman and Bradley Wiedmaier told the Guardian that Daniel McGill introduced himself to the rest of the group as a “student of urban planning interested in the field” who professed a “deep interest” in the effort to preserve the building. Throughout the planning meeting, Wiedmaier said, McGill was “feverishly taking notes on everything anyone said.”

If McGill really was there as a Hines spy, we doubt he’d last a day as an FBI informant. As any good spy should know, giving your real name makes it much easier for your foes to denounce you as an infiltrator. Suspicions raised, Weidmaier consulted Google the next day and found McGill listed as an Assistant Project Manager at Hines Interests – the very development firm that aims to tear down 113 Steuart.

SF hotel workers rally against corporate cutbacks

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By Cecile Lepage and Megan Rawlins

“What do we want? Contract!
When do we want it? Now!”

It was to the beat of this straightforward chant that close to 1,700 hotel workers marched through downtown San Francisco on Friday, Aug. 14, the day their union contract officially expired. “Today, I’m here to fight for a fair new contract, said Elita Judge, a 10-year housekeeper at the Hotel Vitale. “We want to maintain the high quality health care that we’re enjoying right now.”

Friday’s parade was organized to send a message to the hotel management companies: Unite Here Local 2 union members – who make up 90 percent of the industry employees – are determined to uphold their living standards as negotiations for a new contract are launched.

Hotel workers strife returns to SF

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By Steven T. Jones
Gavin-Newsom-Picket27oct04.jpg
Image from SF Chronicle

San Francisco hotel workers plan to demonstrate in the streets tomorrow afternoon, the day that UNITE-HERE Local 2’s contracts with the major San Francisco hotels expire, launching what could well be another pitched labor battle with larger political implications.

In 2004, shortly after Gavin Newsom became mayor, a standoff between the union and the coalition of corporations that own the city’s biggest hotels resulted in strikes and lockouts that were San Francisco’s most significant labor fights of the new century. Newsom tried to mediate the conflict and when the hotels (which had back him for mayor) defied his demand to end the lockout, he walked the picket line with workers.

That moment and Newsom’s decision to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples that same year were arguably the high water marks for his standing with progressives. After that, he checked out, moved to the right, and began to pursue celebrity and the governor’s office.

Now, with hotels apparently using the economic downturn as an excuse to cut their workers’ numbers and benefits, the union gearing up for the fight of its life, and Newsom more focused on running for office than city business, this one might just get ugly. The fun begins at 4 p.m., near the Four Seasons Hotel, Market between 3rd and 4th streets.

Sonic Reducer Overage: Lil Wayne, Green Day, Down, and more

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Kimberly Chun

Les Paul, Rashied Ali – Big Daddy Death keeps claiming another one. Goddamnit. You can find me at the bar, buried in vodka tonics, till you finally find the strength to perk up, listen to Interstellar Space again, stroke your koa-wood SG, and contemplate all the live music, still kicking all around you.

Society of Rockets and Dominique Leone
The SF psychedelicists bang noggins with the congenial local, NorCal synthesist. Thurs/13, 9 p.m., $10. Café du Nord, 2170 Market, S.F. (415) 861-5016.

Solillquists of Sound
Me likee the bubbling, robo-futuristic beats of the Orlando, Fla., quartet’s new No More Heroes – and the live act is supposed to be pretty awesome, too. With 40Love and Zutra. Thurs/13, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455.

Moving backward

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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.

‘Can I buy your park?’

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sarah@sfbg.com

Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, recently donned his best suit and a sandwich-board saying "Can I buy your park?" then headed to some of the city’s most popular open spaces: Dolores Park, Golden Gate Park, Crissy Field, and Ocean Beach.

Bloom’s quest? Pose as a developer and videotape reactions to a fictitious proposal to sell 25 percent of the parks for housing, a ruse designed to illuminate how the city and its master developer, Lennar Corp., have never been nearly that honest about their plan to get the state to sell 25 percent of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area so Lennar can build luxury condos on prime waterfront parklands.

Predictably, responses to Bloom’s poll were mainly negative, occasionally violent. "A couple of people tried to clock me over the head," Bloom recalled. "They got aggressive. They said ‘You’re an asshole, man.’ But the predominant reaction was ‘I love my park.’ People asked, ‘Why do you want to sell them?’ They feel there’s not enough open space."

Perhaps the most chilling response came when Bloom told folks about the city’s actual plan to build condos at Candlestick Point SRA in the Bayview District. "Their response was, ‘Oh, it’s in the Bayview? Who cares?’" said Bloom, who fears that apparent indifference to the plight of the Bayview may explain why the city and Lennar see Candlestick Point SRA as a development opportunity.

Arc isn’t the only group accusing Lennar and the city of not properly informing the public that a vote for Proposition G, which was billed as the "clean-up the shipyard initiative" during the June 2008 election, was also a vote to push Senate Bill 792, state tidelands legislation that authorizes the Candlestick Point sell-off.

Introduced by State Sen. Mark Leno in February, SB 792 has since been amended and approved by the full Senate and is currently scheduled for a hearing by the Assembly Appropriations Committee Aug. 19. Passage by the committee is virtually certain, given that it only delays legislation based on fiscal impacts.

But even some Prop. G supporters, including Bloom, are now raising questions about the deal.

San Francisco’s Park, Recreation, and Open Space Advisory Committee (PROSAC) unanimously approved a resolution recommending that the city’s Recreation and Park Commission and the sponsor of SB 792 require both the city and Lennar to "provide detailed accounting of the park and open space acreage in the Candlestick Project." The committee asks that no net open space in the region be lost in the transfer.

PROSAC claims it was in the dark about the deal and asked those who pushed Prop. G to "provide documentation of when PROSAC and any other relevant advisory committees were informed of the intention to purchase state parkland for the Candlestick Project." So far Lennar and the city have pointed to conceptual maps and a couple of notices of public meetings as evidence that the public was adequately informed before voting.

But according to Bloom, who studies the maps and attends the meetings, "There really is not anything other than two graphics, neither of which call out the alteration to the park boundary. You’d really have to know what you were looking for. And why would the city’s own advisory committee be asking Lennar and the city for information if they were in fact told of this plan?"

Adding fuel to the fire is a July 21 resolution by Sups. Chris Daly and John Avalos, which argues that it should be official policy of San Francisco to oppose SB 792 in its current form and remind city lobbyist Lynn Suter "to accurately represent the City and County of San Francisco policy in Sacramento."

The resolution has been assigned to the board’s Land Use Committee and likely won’t be heard until September. It contends that SB 792 is "premature and preempts the process for public input and environmental assessment since the environmental impact reports for the proposed development on Candlestick Point and the Hunters Point Shipyard will not be released until the fall of 2009."

Noting that the state "purchased this beautiful waterfront parkland for $10 million in 1977," Daly and Avalos assert that "this land represents a valuable and irreplaceable asset to the state of California that should not be disposed of for private development."

The resolution notes that many people oppose the transfer "because of the impact of environmental racism caused by selling a clean park to a private developer for condominium construction denying Bayview Hunters Point residents equal access to healthy open space as is enjoyed by other neighborhoods in San Francisco."

As Daly told the Guardian, "Everyone wants the shipyard site cleaned up, development that works for the community, and real open space opportunities on the shoreline. And Prop. G was billed as doing this, which led to a division of people who believed Lennar and those who didn’t."

As a result, Daly said, people like Saul Bloom, who supported Prop. G, are coming out against SB 792. "So now, it seems, the skeptics are right," Daly said. "A lot of promises have been made. But unless you get them in writing, and have an insurance policy, Lennar is not delivering."

But Lennar Communities of California, the developer’s major political action committee, seems to be delivering when it comes to advocating for the park sell-off. In the second quarter of this year, Lennar more than doubled its spending on lobbying, including on SB 792. And Aug. 3, it alerted its Prop. G supporters that help is needed "passing SB 792 through the California State Legislature."

The e-mail blast claims that SB 792 is "straightforward and necessary legislation that reconfigures the state park boundaries at Candlestick Point and exchanges under-utilized land (most of it dirt, rubble, and a parking lot) for tens of millions of dollars of needed new improvements to the state park and a steady stream of dedicated funding to operate and maintain the improved park and open space."

But recently, there has been talk of an SB 792 compromise. According to insiders, the city and Lennar are willing to concede 20 acres of the contested 42-acres of park, although the developer insists it needs to build hundreds of condos (of which only 15 percent will be below market rate) on the 22 remaining acres of state park land if its entire 700-acre development is to pencil out.

Privately, environmental advocates say they may be unable to stop the land grab. And they worry that seven of the 20 acres Lennar is prepared to concede could be inundated by rising seas caused by global warming, as shown in a 2007 study by engineering firm Moffat & Nichol. It would be an ironic fate given Mayor Gavin Newsom’s July 30 announcement of a proposed United Nations center focused on climate change and green technology as part of Lennar’s project.

The Sierra Club opposes selling state parklands, building a bridge over Yosemite Slough, and capping a radiologically-affected dump on the shipyard’s Parcel E2. But the club does not oppose Lennar’s entire redevelopment plan. Arthur Feinstein, the group’s local representative, said, "We’re interested in saving as much land as possible. We are pushing to save the park’s grasslands. It’s existing habitat."

Noting that some amendments to SB 792 have been made, including removing proposed exchanges of parklands for shipyard land, Feinstein said that "there’s now a map that defines the project and no longer carries shipyard land."

Michael Cohen, Newsom’s chief economic adviser, said, "At Leno’s request, we’ve made amendments to address concerns, including taking steps to ensure there is no adverse impact on wildlife habitat."

Cohen called Newsom’s United Nations Climate Center "the perfect institution" for the entire redevelopment project, since it provides the shipyard with a green technology anchor. Cohen said he was unaware of the study showing the area could be flooded by global warming.

"But no one disagrees," Cohen continued, "that the state park will benefit from infrastructure and much needed capital for operations and maintenance."

Leno told the Guardian that his goal is to arrive at the best possible bill. "At the request of the opposition, we did amend the bill so that land at Hunters Point Shipyard won’t be part of any exchange," Leno said. "But it is conceivable that once the cleanup is completed, there could be a gift from the city to the State Parks Commission."

Leno said he hadn’t seen the flood map and joked, "If someone thinks they know exactly where the water is going to stop, they can place some bets now."

Assuming a more serious tone, Leno added that "the entire park system is under threat." He recalled how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed to eliminate all General Fund money for parks and said, "We fought back and were able to restore most of the money."

But with the state’s ongoing fiscal woes and political stalemate, "Anyone who believes CPRSA is going to be open and funded indefinitely is not thinking clearly … so this deal has the potential for being an opportunity for our taking responsibility for the future of our state park system."

As currently drafted, SB 792 provides millions for improvements and $700,000 annually for operations and maintenance, Leno explained. "So I’m trying to make a bad situation better in a way that brings along this bill’s opponents so that they see that they are being taken seriously."

Teh ghey

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SUPER EGO It’s been a coon’s age (is that racist?) since I lifted the bloody glitter-crusted rock of alternaqueer nightlife and peeped with prickled horror at the writhing wigged creatures of darkness beneath. There’s a lot going on this month, so buckle up your birdseed boobs and ride, baby, ride. But first, I’ve got to give a special screechy shout-out to Faux King Awesome and his filthy-excellent trash-club blog, www.dragslag.org. Check it, chicas, that child never sleeps.

HOMO A GO GO FESTIVAL

As Zombie Cher would say, "A-woooaaaah!" And then, "Brains." Four nights of edgy queer music, fashion, film, art, activism, and, yes, parties with more than 50 performers spread out across the city. Italo disco darlings Glass Candy swoop in to join noise-makers like Erase Errata, Katastrophe, Younger Lovers, Hunx and his Punx, Honey Soundsystem, Chelsea Starr, Girl in a Coma, and a spectacular buttload of others. Plus: old-school zine exhibitions, activist workshops, and plenty of classic homopunk/queercore/riot grrrl spirit in the air — so strap on your 16-holes and let’s get mish-moshed.

Thur/13-Sun/16, various times and locations, www.homoagogo.com

THE ROD

"Wet jock strap contest" — are any four words in the English language more titilutf8g besides "five-second rule, bitches"? Almost five years ago, DJ Bus Station John launched his bathhouse disco-drenched tribute to teasingly moistened fabric, bringing many a screw-worthy type through Deco’s doors to compete for $100. (Full dis-clothes-ure: I host the contest when I can remember what’s happening, and Hunky Beau recruits contestants with his "special talent.") All good things must come to a tight little hairy ass end, however, and with this final installment The Rod promises to go out with a sopping bang.

Fri/14, 10 p.m., $5. Deco, 510 Larkin, SF. www.decosf.com

SF GRAND VOGUE BALL

Chop, mop, fierce, and shade, Miss Realness. People have forever been talking about holding a grand vogue ball in San Francisco. Finally the money’s where the mouth is and the chin is on the floor, dropping for you as local houses compete each Friday until the final battle royale Sept. 11. Categories include: Face, Drama, Butch Boyz in Pumps, Look in the Book, Butch Queen Femme, and Old Way/New Way. Walk, work, walk — are there any more?

Fridays through Sept. 11, 8 p.m., free. Yerba Buena Center, 700 Howard, SF. groups.google.com/group/sfgrandvogueball

14TH SAN FRANCISCO DRAG KING CONTEST

It’s big time, y’all, for the sexy kings to come tearing out of the closet in their testosterone Testarossas — and my stubble is itching with adrenaline. For 14 years, Fudgie Frottage and company have brought out the munchable machos to stomp the boards in a quest for the spiky Mr. San Francisco Drag King crown. The talent numbers are uproarious, the crowd bursts with rare hotties, and all involved have a sweaty ball. The whole thing benefits P.A.W.S., so you know you’ll be riding that mustache for a very good cause besides your own.

Sat/15, 8 p.m., $15–$35. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF. www.sfdragkingcontest.com

HERR-A-CHICK

This raucous biweekly Wednesday rock ‘n’ roll lady night at the Eagle just got a reboot of sorts: felch whore Renttecca has climbed aboard Anna Conda’s wig and Juanita Fajita’s taco truck to join them in hosting live bands, drag disasters, and the occasional poetry interlude(!).

Wed/19 and every first and third Wednesday, 9 p.m., $5 (free in drag). Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., www.sfeagle.com

BJÖRK NIGHT

Oh, how I wish this event were called Björk Wars, and tranny Megabots had to trudge their four-story iridium stilettos across the frozen tundra, transforming with groans into stupendous radioactive igloos housing prancing bands of radical faeries and elfin gals fashioning their own soy jerky shoes. Well, instead we get Trannyshack arising from the grave to pay tribute to the Voltaic princess with stunning low-cost effects and volcanic performances. OK, then.

Fri/28, 10 p.m., $12. DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., SF.www.trannyshack.com

G’day sleaze!

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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.

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