Local Archives — Page 247 of 294 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

SFIFF: Critic’s choice

April 23, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

SFIFF J. Hoberman — trenchant weekly critic, book author, programmer, teacher — is celebrating his 30th year at the Village Voice, an unheard-of stretch for a film writer. (Pauline Kael’s famous tenure at the New Yorker lasted 23 years.) Freshly garlanded with a three-week program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an Anthology Film Archive screening of his early forays in experimental filmmaking, Hoberman continues his prize tour with this year’s Mel Novikoff Award.

The recent programs at BAM and Anthology highlight attributes that made Hoberman an essential buttress against the sycophantic rivalries flowing from Kael’s 1960s showdowns with Andrew Sarris. Over the phone from his New York office, Hoberman told me about his early days at the Voice: "I created a beat of things the other critics weren’t particularly interested in, and that took in a lot of stuff. Originally they had brought me on to write about avant-garde and experimental film, but pretty soon I was writing about documentary, animation, revival series, foreign films that weren’t from France … all kinds of things."

Hoberman’s BAM program was accordingly unwieldy, covering Andrei Rublev (1969) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Ernie Gehr and Martin Scorsese. Cinephilia Hoberman-style seems to be everywhere at once, encompassing Looney Tunes, No Wave New York, Jeanne Dielman (1975) and Yiddish cinema. It’s eclecticism with a program, matched by a willingness to chase the rabbit down its hole — but never at the expense of analytical rigor.

Although Hoberman is a professed admirer of the puzzling jazz in Manny Farber’s criticism, his prose is solidly explicatory and instructive. He knows how to open a discussion: "In its tireless attempts to mean everything to everyone and empirical willingness to try anything once, the American culture industry intermittently generates its own precursors, parallels, and analogues to local or European avant-gardism." He’s an apt profiler: "Pain and Fear — and the convulsive desire for public recognition — are Scorsese’s meat." And he’s not afraid to take a stand, as with a recent rave for David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007): "From Videodrome (1983) through A History of Violence (2005), neither Scorsese nor Spielberg, and not even David Lynch, has enjoyed a comparable run."

He’s also an accomplished facilitator of Jean-Luc Godard’s idea that the history of cinema is synchronous with the history of the 20th century. We can count on Hoberman to connect Terror’s Advocate (2007) with La Chinoise (1967), to draw a line from a prescient film like A Face in the Crowd (1957) to Watergate and Nashville (1975). When his interests come together — as with an appreciation of Southland Tales‘ (2007) avant-gardism, midnight movie appeal, and socio-political currency — sparks still fly. Talking about an upcoming "prequel" he’s penning to his 2005 decoupage of ’60s cinema, The Dream Life (New Press), Hoberman muses, "I think that now, or at least since [Ronald] Reagan, it’s sort of customary to see movies as political scenarios." To the extent that this is true, Hoberman is due significant credit — his meditations on that movie-land president, for one, are as adroit as that of any policy wonk.

Historical markers notwithstanding, Hoberman’s film selection for his special night is likely the most unabashedly sensuous movie not starring Asia Argento to play this year’s festival. Spanish director José Luis Guerín described In the City of Sylvia (2007) as a "simple" film at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival, and it certainly does offer a distilled vision of cinematic paradise: gazing and grazing faces, old Strasbourg, and a slow stitch of sound and image.

Our inlet to Sylvia is a whiskered young man, haunting the city at a dreamy remove. He sits in an outdoor café with his notebook, sketching the faces of radiant women while Guerín orchestrates fractal cutting, multilevel staging of faces, and intricately gradated sound design into a sun-dappled symphony. After changing seats, the dreamer recognizes a woman sitting behind a pane of glass. She leaves and he follows, locked in an ambiguous reverie inscribed with resonant detail and sweet ambiguity.

Sylvia fulfills the cinephile’s dream of disembodiment. "It’s a narrative that comes organically from the fact of making the movie rather than dramatizing a story situation," Hoberman opines. "There’s a real love of cinema, the process of it." Each of the film’s handful of extended passages is distinct in its precise design, but this blissful lucidity Hoberman describes is Sylvia‘s central melody and romance.

Late in Guerín’s film, after a yearning bar scene set to Blondie’s "Heart of Glass," the young man sits at a tram stop, considering the waiting women and rushing window reflections for some clue as to his own loss. In a virtuosic eliding glimpse of a passing bus, Guerín dissolves the sounds and images of shots already superimposed by the panes of glass. A quick succession of several more multi-tiered, unexpectedly conversant portraits of women ("Elles," the dreamer notes in his book) finally lands on a mesmerizing rear-angle of a woman’s hair blowing wildly in the wind. The young man can’t put pencil to paper. He’s as enamored as we are with this siren song from what the director calls "the continent of cinema," a place J. Hoberman knows all too well.

AN EVENING WITH J. HOBERMAN (includes screening of In the City of Sylvia), Sun/27, 6 p.m., Sundance Kabuki

IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA Tues/29, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki

>SFBG goes to SFIFF 51: our deluxe guide

L’Ardoise

April 23, 2008

› paulr@sfbg.com

The French love their chalk, and no wonder. Chalk makes possible some of France’s most prized wines, from the sparkling cuvées of Champagne to the wonderful, minerally whites of the Loire Valley. It’s also useful for writing on chalkboards, which tend to be ubiquitous in French restaurants and on sidewalk sandwich boards outside of same. One of the great pleasures of Paris is scanning these boards while strolling the city, pondering the plats du jour and formules as mealtime approaches.

The French word for "chalkboard" — actually, "the chalkboard" — is l’ardoise, and, in a slight slap of irony, there is no sandwich-style chalkboard on the sidewalk in front of L’Ardoise, which opened late in the winter in the old Los Flamingos space in Duboce Triangle. There are no sandwiches on the menu either, for that matter, which isn’t surprising since the restaurant only serves dinner. There is, however, a sizable chalkboard inside, hanging on a wall not quite opposite the bar. The board lists the day’s specials, and if it’s too awkward to crane your neck so you can read it, you can count on your server to report its offerings with efficiency.

The cheerful starkness of Los Flamingos has given way to the look of a fin de siècle literary salon. The floors are covered in claret-and-gold floral carpeting; the walls are a throbbing red, and the furnishings emphasize dark wood. It would not be difficult to imagine Proust in the next room, scribbling away. Of course, there is no next room. There’s just the kitchen, presided over by Thierry Clement, whose pedigree includes a recent stint at the enduringly fine Fringale. If his first menus at L’Ardoise are more neighborhoody than Fringale’s — which is, after all, a city-center restaurant with a broad and venerable reputation — they do as ably answer the urge to eat.

L’Ardoise, then, is the comfy local bistro this arboreal part of town has been waiting for. Its obvious near relations are Le Zinc (in Noe Valley), Le P’tit Laurent (in Glen Park), and Zazie (in Cole Valley), and it certainly matches up well against any of them. It helps that bistro cooking is a well-established culinary genre, and Clement knows the drill. But I did wonder why there was no pot of Dijon mustard to accompany the otherwise appealing, if mainstream, charcuterie plate ($9): an array of two squares of pâté (one made with liver), a shower of oily, garlicky saucisson coins, and a jumble of green and black olives, cornichons, and caperberries. The lack of mustard wasn’t fatal, but it was noticeable.

Better was a shallow bowl of tiger-prawn ravioli ($10) in an herbed cream sauce. Cream can be a silent killer, like being smothered by soft white pillows, but here the prawns were big, sweet, and juicy enough to assert themselves through both the butterfat and the free-form drapings of pasta.

Seafood gratin ($19) was very much like a seafood stew or even a bouillabaise, only less moist. The oblong serving crock swelled with sea scallops, prawns, halibut cubes, and diced potatoes, all of them toe-deep in a broth of white wine and herbs enlivened by a broad anise hint of Pernod (or some other kind of pastis). A sprinkling of bread crumbs had been baked on top for the gratin effect. What gave pause wasn’t the dryness but the undersalting; Chief Many Phones had to apply several jolts from the table shaker to revive the patient.

Steak frites is a bistro standard, but Clement’s kitchen isn’t above having some fun with it. The steak here turned out to be a chunk of seared Black Angus filet mignon ($27), plated with a heap of confit potatoes (basically homemade chips), a woodpile of steamed green beans (too broad to be proper haricots verts, so Blue Lake, perhaps), and some nicely dressed mésclun. Despite the reassuring nomenclature, I had doubts about the beef before it arrived; "filet mignon" is a grand name but often dry and tasteless in fact. Not this time.

Our side order of sautéed spinach ($5) reached the table in a miniature Le Creuset crock, red enamel on cast iron, complete with top: a nifty flourish in the manner of Fleur de Lys, and the spinach was well-seasoned, although whenever you’re eating low-fat spinach you can’t help but think wistfully about the times you’ve eaten creamed spinach.

Pears: as much as I like them fresh (at least if they’re crisp), I am left disappointed by most pear desserts. Pears poached in red wine? Pass. I would rather have a glass of Poire William (the pear eau de vie), or, better, armagnac. But L’Ardoise’s kitchen has come up with a splendid use for the pear: It’s the star of a tarte tatin ($7), a disk about the size one of those single-serve cheesecakes, with the pear slices caramelized to a voluptuous amber. They’re neatly arranged atop (or, originally, underneath, since tartes tatins are baked pastry side up, then inverted for serving) a layer of pastry we found to be undistinguished even beyond its thinness. Pastry should be flaky, not tough. But at least there wasn’t much of it, and the pears were absolutely winning.

L’Ardoise doesn’t seem to have suffered from the lack of sidewalk sandwich boards. The place is already jammed in the evenings, with well-dressed groups of thirty- and fortysomethings waiting just inside the door for tables. The door has an annoying way of flopping open, so if you’re averse to drafts, ask for a table well inside. It’s nice and toasty under the chalkboard.

L’ARDOISE

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

151 Noe, SF

(415) 437-2600

www.lardoisesf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DISC/MC/V

Muffled loudness

Wheelchair accessible

Online writing is real

April 23, 2008

› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION It’s been years since I’ve taught a writing class, and during those years writing has changed completely. Back in the 1990s, I taught writing at UC Berkeley using books and movies. My students would read the books to get a sense of how writing worked, and watch the movies to have something to write about. They got what you might call multimedia input (books, movies) but there was only one possible kind of output: linear narratives written on sheets of paper.

When I taught writing for the past couple of weeks at the Kearny Street Project’s Intergenerational Writers Lab, I couldn’t imagine teaching writing using books and linear narratives. I taught writing by showing my students how different software applications could help them structure their writing.

Together they built a wiki, a type of Web site that many people can edit at the same time. Wikis, it turns out, are ideal for exquisite corpses, tales begun by one person and finished by several others. One writer stops, and next one jumps right onto the Web page and continues the story.

Then I made them all join Twitter, a social network I’ve written about before that lets you to post messages to your friends only if they are 140 characters long or less. You have to communicate succinctly, but engagingly enough to keep people reading. After the whole class had been twittering to one another for a week, we read a chunk of our twitter stream out loud. It sounded like a strange but compelling play, with each of us voicing our own (short) thoughts, sometimes chatting back and forth to each other, and developing odd, poignant themes as time went on.

My students didn’t think it was odd to be writing with Web tools. What was unusual to them, I think, was that I referred to the kind of writing that they do all the time as "publishing."

"Writing online isn’t publishing; it’s posting," one said. Other students said you couldn’t really publish fiction online because everyone would assume it was real. At the same time, they felt like nothing online was "real." It wasn’t solid, like a book with your name on the spine. I know what they mean. Although most of my publishing is done online, I still write for print publications. But I do so because I see no distinction between online and print: I like publications that exist in both forms; therefore I write for both.

To me, there is one great distinction between print and Internet publishing, and that is storage. Where should I publish if I want people to be able to read what I’ve said after I die? Books are excellent because they have an interface that holds up easily over time: you open the book and read it. You don’t need a particular software program or operating system to make the file open.

But books can be burned. All copies of a book can be wiped out by one crappy political regime bent on censorship. Online it’s much more difficult to burn a book. Just try deleting a book or movie or sound file you want suppressed. Ten copies pop up elsewhere. Then 10,000 copies. And they’re stored on servers all over the world, in countries where your shock troops can’t reach, in high school kids’ closets where even their parents can’t reach.

Sure the oil reserves will run dry, or an electromagnetic pulse could wipe all of Google’s server farms clean. Then you’d want those books as backups. But I don’t think electricity itself is something we’ll ever lose as a civilization. There are just too many ways to make it: water, air, sun, the motion of your legs as you ride a bicycle — all can be converted into enough energy to boot up a laptop and read what’s been written there.

I guess what I’m saying is that whether you choose print or digital,
odds are pretty much even on whether your words will survive over time. But in the present day? If you want to be sure your words won’t be suppressed by some local oppressive regime — like your nation, your family, or your employer? In that case, the Internet is the best way to publish.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who thinks the .txt format might be almost as portable as the paper book format.

Peaker plan afloat

April 23, 2008

› amanda@sfbg.com

A proposal to build two natural gas–fired power plants is still floating through the city’s planning process, set for approval by the Board of Supervisors as soon as May, but no one seems truly comfortable with the deal.

"It’s not my first choice or my second choice, but it’s the choice I have," Board president Aaron Peskin told the Guardian. The choice seems to be either the city builds newer, potentially cleaner power plants — known as "peakers" because they would be used mainly during times of peak energy demand — or does nothing to shut down the super-polluting Mirant Potrero power plant.

The combination gas- and diesel-burning power plant spews a cocktail of toxins from its stack every year and draws 226 million gallons of water a day from the bay to cool its generators yet it’s mandated by the state to keep operating. The discharge flows back into the bay significantly altered, with microorganisms and fish larvae replaced by mercury, dioxins, and PCBs.

The California Independent System Operator (CAL-ISO), the state agency that oversees electricity reliability, said it would break the Mirant contract if the peakers came online. The city-owned plants would use recycled water and more up-to-date air quality controls, making for cleaner facilities at the two proposed sites — the airport and the intersection of 25th and Maryland in the Bayview.

They also would be city-operated, giving a little more leg to the local public power movement. But they still burn fossil fuel, and at a time when the climate is in crisis and natural gas prices are only rising, many say this isn’t the direction a trend-setting city like San Francisco should be heading.

"This isn’t the progressive way to go," said Sup. Chris Daly. "We need to be more forcefully installing renewables that are municipally owned."

Daly, along with supervisors Ross Mirkarimi and Michela Alioto-Pier and the city’s current power provider Pacific Gas and Electric Co., have lined up against building the peakers in what Mirkarimi calls an "unholy alliance."

PG&E, lobbying under the guise of the "Close It! Coalition," states that the peakers "further San Francisco’s reliance on fossil fuels and add to global warming." The $12 billion utility company currently gets 40 percent of its power the same way and is in the process of constructing several similar plants throughout the state. Nevertheless, the company has submitted detailed proposals to the city and state outlining demand response measures and transmission upgrades that would mitigate the need for more energy.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and City Attorney Dennis Herrera support building the peakers in order to close the Mirant plant, and Sups. Sophie Maxwell, Bevan Dufty, and Jake McGoldrick are carrying the legislation that would seal the contract with Cleveland, Ohio-based Industrial Construction Company to start the $252 million project.

That legislation points out that Mirant’s water permit is set to expire Dec. 31, and the Regional Water Quality Board has indicated it has no plans to renew it unless Mirant upgrades to best practices. This has been suggested as an alternative way to close the plant. When asked whether Cal-ISO’s reliability demands trump the Water Board’s requirements, Cal-ISO’s Gregg Fishman wrote in an e-mail, "What happens if the Potrero unit’s water permits expire? Simply put — we’re not sure."

Beyond that, a number of questions remain: Should the requirement for a full feasibility study for city contracts more than $25 million really have been waived for this project? Is it fair to put the new power plant in the neighborhood that has always endured the lion’s share of the city’s pollution? What if they were on movable barges instead? And has the city been forceful enough with CAL-ISO when it comes to planning the city’s energy future?

Alioto-Pier has introduced two resolutions addressing a couple of these issues. One calls for a straight-up feasibility study — which supporters of the peakers have waived. "The city has a policy of conducting a full fiscal analysis of capital projects over $25 million," Alioto-Pier said in a press release. "This should be no exception." Her other resolution asks for an independent analysis of the whole thing and a revised 2008 Energy Action Plan for the city.

For several years, Cal-ISO has said Mirant could stop operating if San Francisco can provide an alternate "firm" power source in its Energy Action Plan. In 2004, San Francisco’s Public Utilities Commission proffered the peakers, and that became the city’s power plan before adopting the CCA (community choice aggregation) plan for the city to develop an energy portfolio of at least 51 percent renewables.

Though the SFPUC has continuously asked Cal-ISO if the 2004 Action Plan is still the way to go now that the Trans Bay Cable and other line improvements have come into play, Josh Arce, a lawyer for Brightline Defense, which sued to stop the peaker plan, says they’ve been framing the question all wrong: "The PUC has essentially been saying, ‘Does the Action Plan include all four combustion turbines?’ And Cal-ISO has said, ‘Yes, it includes all four.’ Instead, the PUC needs to come up with a new Action Plan and give it to Cal-ISO and say we’re doing this instead."

Alioto-Pier’s resolution, if passed, could prompt a fresh response from Cal-ISO about what the city really needs — one, two, or three peakers, or maybe none at all. Maxwell’s resolution includes a caveat that the city must determine if needs could be met by building smaller plants with fewer than the four turbines currently proposed.

Peskin, who chairs the city’s Government Audit and Oversight Committee and will hear both Alioto-Pier resolutions on May 5, as well as the Maxwell plan to move to build the peakers, told us, "This is one of the toughest decisions that’s been before me in the eight years that I’ve been on the Board of Supervisors."

No one, it seems, really wants to build two fossil fuel–burning power plants on San Francisco soil. But what if they weren’t on our soil? What if they were floating on barges?

Another resolution pending in the Land Use Committee, brought by Mirkarimi, proposes putting the two power plants on barges, which could be moored alongside the city when needed and dispatched elsewhere when they’re not. What if, a few years from now, citizens are able to cut down their power needs, CCA brings more renewables online, and the city finds it no longer needs the 200 megawatts generated by natural gas power plants?

Proponents say it’s an option worth considering if the city really intends to eventually close the plants. Dismantling a facility if the city decides to sell leaches away 20 to 30 percent of its overall cost. But if it’s on a barge, the natural gas, electricity, and mooring lines are simply cast off. A barge would be steadier in an earthquake and continue to float if the sea level rises — a climate change scenario that could swamp both current bayside power plant sites. Barges also can be dispatched to emergencies, leased down the river to other cities in the Bay Area, or sold for a profit. They’ve been in use around the world since the 1940s and have been called a more regional approach to energy planning.

"It’s 145 MW of portable energy," said Rick Galbreath, Mirkarimi’s aide. "You can pull it up, plug it in, and you’re on the grid. It’s really a dynamic solution."

Paul Fenn, the brain behind the city’s CCA plan, points out that if CAL-ISO still insists the peakers are needed now but not in the future, a power barge is the kind of flexible solution that could pay off in the long run. "It’s making a temporary measure for an urgent situation," he said, adding that such a temporary solution should reflect the city’s long-term goals. "If the city is planning to replace them with renewables, it’s important to get the city to make that commitment. This is one of those strategic decisions that’s going to impact the future."

The San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission generally opposes building anything in the bay if it can be built on land first. "The proponents would have to do an analysis and convince our commission that this is really a good idea for the region," said Will Travis, a BCDC spokesperson.

But Dave Nickerson, owner of Houston-based Power Barge Corporation, said he’s looked at the city’s peaker plans and thinks it would cost about $100 million to build a three-CT barge. "We would probably build the plant here and ship it up," he said, pointing out that the city’s turbines are already in storage down in Texas and it’s cheaper to build it in a shipyard. To claims of environmental degradation, he says, "It would have the environmental footprint of a state of the art land-based plant."

He also pointed out that there’s a scarcity of these particular turbines now, which are worth about $1 million more every year. This year it’s around $16.5 million apiece, with $18 million as the projected 2008 price.

Emma Lierley contributed to this story.

Promises and reality

April 23, 2008

› sarah@sfbg.com

The Lennar-financed "Yes on G" fliers jammed into mailboxes all across San Francisco this month depict a dark-skinned family strolling along a shoreline trail against a backdrop of blue sky, grassy parkland, a smattering of low-rise buildings, and the vague hint of a nearly transparent high-rise condo tower in the corner.

"After 34 years of neglect, it’s time to clean up the Shipyard for tomorrow," states one flier, which promises to create up to 10,000 new homes, "with as many as 25 percent being entry-level affordable units"; 300 acres of new parks; and 8,000 permanent jobs in the city’s sun-soaked southeast sector.

Add to that the green tech research park, a new 49ers stadium, a permanent home for shipyard artists, and a total rebuild of the dilapidated Alice Griffith public housing project, and the whole project looks and sounds simply idyllic. But as with many big-money political campaigns, the reality is quite different from the sales pitch.

What Proposition G’s glossy fliers don’t tell you is that this initiative would make it possible for a controversial Florida-based megadeveloper to build luxury condos on a California state park, take over federal responsibility for the cleanup of toxic sites, construct a bridge over a slough restoration project, and build a new road so Candlestick Point residents won’t have to venture into the Bayview District.

Nor do these shiny images reveal that Prop. G is actually vaguely-worded, open-ended legislation whose final terms won’t be driven by the jobs, housing, or open-space needs of the low-income and predominantly African American Bayview-Hunters Point community, but by the bottom line of the financially troubled Lennar.

And nowhere does it mention that Lennar already broke trust with the BVHP, failing to control asbestos at its Parcel A shipyard development and reneging on promises to build needed rental units at its Parcel A 1,500-unit condo complex (see "Question of intent," 11/28/07).

The campaign is supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and District 10 Sup. Sophie Maxwell, as well as the Republican and the Democratic parties of San Francisco. But it is funded almost exclusively by Lennar Homes, a statewide independent expenditure committee that typically pours cash into conservative causes like fighting tax hikes and environmental regulations.

In the past six months, Lennar Homes has thrown down more than $1 million to hire Newsom’s chief political strategist, Eric Jaye, and a full spectrum of top lawyers and consultants, from generally progressive campaign manager Jim Stearns to high-powered spinmeister Sam Singer, who recently ran the smear campaign blaming the victims of a fatal Christmas Day tiger attack at the San Francisco Zoo.

Together, this political dream team cooked up what it hopes will be an unstoppable campaign full of catchy slogans and irresistible images, distributed by a deep-pocketed corporation that stands to make many millions of dollars off the deal.

But the question for voters is whether this project is good for San Francisco — particularly for residents of the southeast who have been subjected to generations worth of broken promises — or whether it amounts to a risky giveaway of the city’s final frontier for new development.

Standing in front of the Lennar bandwagon is a coalition of community, environmental, and housing activists who this spring launched a last minute, volunteer-based signature-gathering drive that successfully became Proposition F. It would require that 50 percent of the housing built in the BVHP/Candlestick Point project be affordable to those making less than the area median income of $68,000 for a family of four.

Critics such as Lennar executive Kofi Bonner and Michael Cohen of the mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development have called Prop. F a "poison pill" that would doom the Lennar project. But its supporters say the massive scope and vague wording of Prop. G would have exacerbated the city’s affordable housing shortfalls.

Prop. F is endorsed by the Sierra Club, People Organized to Win Employment Rights, the League of Conservation Voters, the Chinese Progressive Association, St. Peter’s Housing Committee, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, the Grace Tabernacle Community Church, Green Action, Nation of Islam Bay Area, the African Orthodox Church, Jim Queen, and Supervisor Chris Daly.

Cohen criticized the coalition for failing to study whether the 50 percent affordability threshold is feasible. But the fact is that neither measure has been exposed to the same rigors that a measure going through the normal city approval process would undergo. Nonetheless, the Guardian unearthed an evaluation on the impact of Prop. F that Lennar consultant CB Richard Ellis prepared for the mayor’s office.

The document, which contains data not included in the Prop. G ballot initiative, helps illuminate the financial assumptions that underpin the public-private partnership the city is contemputf8g with Lennar, ostensibly in an effort to win community benefits for the BVHP.

CBRE’s analysis states that Lennar’s Prop. G calls for "slightly over 9,500 units," with nearly 2,400 affordable units (12 percent at 80 percent of area median income and 8 percent at 50 percent AMI), and with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency "utilizing additional funding to drive these affordability levels even lower."

Noting that Prop. G. yields a "minimally acceptable return" of 17 to 18 percent in profit, CBRE estimates that Prop. F would means "a loss of $500 million in land sales revenue" thanks to the loss of 2,400 market-rate units from the equation. With subsidies of $125,000 allegedly needed to complete each affordable unit, CBRE predicts there would be a further cost of "$300 million to $400 million" to develop the 2,400 additional units of affordable housing prescribed under Prop. F.

Factoring in an additional $500 million loss in tax increments and Mello-Roos bond financing money, CBRE concludes, "the overall impact from [the Prop. F initiative] is a $1.1 to $1.2 billion loss of project revenues … the very same revenues necessary to fund infrastructure and community improvements."

Yet critics of the Lennar project say that just because it pencils out for the developer doesn’t mean it’s good for the community, which would be fundamentally and permanently changed by a project of this magnitude. Coleman’s Advocates’ organizing director Tom Jackson told us his group decided to oppose Prop. G "because we looked at who is living in Bayview-Hunters Point and their income levels.

"Our primary concern isn’t Lennar’s bottom line," Jackson continued. "Could Prop. F cut into Lennar’s profit margin? Yes, absolutely. But our primary concern is the people who already live in the Bayview."

Data from the 2000 US census shows that BVHP has the highest percentage of African Americans compared to the rest of the city — and that African Americans are three times more likely to leave San Francisco than other ethnic groups, a displacement that critics of the Lennar project say it would exacerbate.

The Bayview also has the third-highest population of children, at a time when San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any major US city and is struggling to both maintain enrollment and keep its schools open. Add to that the emergence of Latino and Chinese immigrant populations in the Bayview, and Jackson says its clear that it’s the city’s last affordable frontier for low-income folks.

The problem gets even more pronounced when one delves into the definition of the word "affordable" and applies it to the socioeconomic status of southeast San Francisco.

In white households, the annual median income was $65,000 in 2000, compared to $29,000 in black households — with black per capita income at $15,000 and with 14 percent of BVHP residents earning even less than $15,000.

The average two-bedroom apartment rents in San Francisco for $1,821, meaning households need an annual AMI of $74,000 to stay in the game. The average condo sells for $700,000, which means that households need $143,000 per year to even enter the market.

In other words, there’s a strong case for building higher percentages of affordable housing in BVHP (where 94 percent of residents are minorities and 21 percent experience significant poverty) than in most other parts of San Francisco. Yet the needs of southeastern residents appear to be clashing with the area’s potential to become the city’s epicenter for new construction.

San Francisco Republican Party chair Howard Epstein told the Guardian that his group opposed Prop. F, believing it will kill all BVHP redevelopment, and supported Prop. G, believing that it has been in the making for a decade and to have been "vetted up and down."

While a BVHP redevelopment plan has been in the works for a decade, the vaguely defined conceptual framework that helped give birth to Prop. G this year was first discussed in public only last year. In reality, it was hastily cobbled together in the wake of the 49ers surprise November 2006 news that it was rejecting Lennar’s plan to build a new stadium at Monster Park and considering moving to Santa Clara.

As the door slammed shut on one opportunity, Lennar tried to swing open another. As an embarrassed Newsom joined forces with Feinstein to find a last-ditch solution to keep the 49ers in town, Lennar suggested a new stadium on the Hunters Point Shipyard, surrounded by a dual use parking lot perfect for tailgating and lots of new housing on Candlestick Point to pay for it all.

There was just one problem: part of the land around the stadium at Candlestick is a state park. Hence the need for Prop. G, which seeks to authorize this land swap along with a repeal of bonds authorized in 1997 for a stadium rebuild. As Cohen told the Guardian, "The only legal reason we are going to the voters is Monster Park."

As it happens, voters still won’t know whether the 49ers are staying or leaving when they vote on Props. F and G this June, since the team is waiting until November to find out if Santa Clara County voters will support the financing of a new 49er stadium near Great America.

Either way, Patrick Rump of Literacy for Environmental Justice has serious environmental concerns about Prop. G’s proposed land swap.

"Lennar’s schematic, which builds a bridge over the Yosemite Slough, would destroy a major restoration effort we’re in the process of embarking on with the state Parks [and Recreation Department]," Rump said. "The integrity of the state park would easily be compromised, because of extra people and roads. And a lot of the proposed replacement parks, the pocket parks … don’t provide adequate habitat."

Rump also expressed doubts about the wisdom of trading parcels of state park for land on the shipyard, especially Parcel E-2, which contains the landfill. Overall, Rump said, "We think Lennar and the city need to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more environmentally sound."

John Rizzo of the Sierra Club believes Prop. G does nothing to clean up the shipyard — which city officials are seeking to take over before the federal government finishes its cleanup work — and notes that the initiative is full of vague and noncommittal words like "encourages" that make it unclear what benefits city residents will actually receive.

"Prop. G’s supporters are pushing the misleading notion that if we don’t give away all this land — including a state park — to Lennar, then we won’t get any money for the cleanup," Rizzo said. "But you don’t build first and then get federal dollars for clean up! That’s a really backwards statement."

The "Yes on G" campaign claims its initiative will create "thousands of construction jobs," "offer a new economic engine for the Bayview," and "provide new momentum to win additional federal help to clean up the toxins on the shipyard."

Michael Theriault, head of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades, said his union endorsed the measure and has an agreement with Lennar to have "hire goals," with priority given to union contracts in three local zip codes: 94107, 94124, and 94134.

"There will be a great many construction jobs," Theriault said, though he was less sure about Prop. G’s promise of "8,000 permanent jobs following the completion of the project."

"We endorsed primarily from the jobs aspect," Theriault said. The question of whether the project helps the cleanup effort or turns it into a rush job is also an open question. Even the San Francisco Chronicle, in a January editorial, criticized Newsom, Feinstein, and Pelosi for neglecting the cleanup until "when it seemed likely that the city was about to lose the 49ers."

All three denounced the Chronicle‘s claims, but the truth is that the lion’s share of the $82 million federal allocation would be dedicated to cleaning the 27-acre footprint proposed for the stadium. Meanwhile, the US Navy says it needs at least $500 million to clean the entire shipyard.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi said the city should wait for a full cleanup and criticized the Prop. G plan to simply cap contaminated areas on the shipyard, rather than excavate and remove the toxins from the site.

"That’s like putting a sarcophagus over a toxic wasteland," Mirkarimi told us. "It would be San Francisco’s version of a concrete bunker around Chernobyl."

Cohen of the Mayor’s Office downplays the contamination at the site, telling us that on a scale of one to 10 among the nation’s contaminated Superfund sites, the shipyard "is a three." He said, "the city would assume responsibility for completing the remaining environmental remediation, which would be financed through the Navy."

But those who have watched the city and Lennar bungle development of the asbestos-laden Parcel A (see The corporation that ate San Francisco, 3/14/07) don’t have much confidence in their ability to safely manage a much larger project.

"Who is going to take the liability for any shoddy work and negligence once the project is completed?" Mirkarimi asked.

Lennar has yet to settle with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District over asbestos dust violations at Parcel A, which could add up to $28 million in fines, and investors have been asking questions about the corporation’s mortgage lending operations as the company’s stock value and bond rating have plummeted.

To secure its numerous San Francisco investments, including projects at Hunters and Candlestick points and Treasure Island, Lennar recently got letters of intent from Scala Real Estate Partners, an Irvine-based investment and development group.

Founded by former executives of the Perot Group’s real estate division, Scala plans to invest up to $200 million — and have equal ownership interests — in the projects, which could total at least 17,000 housing units, 700,000 square feet of retail and entertainment, 350 acres of open space, and a new football stadium if the 49ers decide to stay.

Bonner said that, if completed, the agreement satisfies a city requirement that Lennar secure a partner with the financial wherewithal to ensure the estimated $1.4 billion Candlestick Point project moves forward even if the company’s current problems worsen.

Meanwhile, Cohen has cast the vagaries of Prop. G as a positive, referring to its spreadsheet as "a living document, a moving target." Cohen pointed out that if Lennar had to buy the BVHP land, they’d get it with only a 15 percent affordable housing requirement.

"Our objective is to drive the land value to zero by imposing upon the developer as great a burden as possible," Cohen said. "This developer had to invest $500 million of cash, plus financing, and is required to pay for affordable housing, parks, jobs, etc. — the core benefits — without any risk to the city."

But Cohen said the Prop. F alternative means "nothing will be built — until F is repealed." He also refutes claims that without the 49ers stadium, 50 percent affordability is doable.

"Prop G makes it easier to make public funds available by repealing the Prop D bond measure," Cohen explained. "But Prop. G also provides that there will be no general fund financial backing for the stadium, and that the tax increments generated by the development will be used for affordable housing, jobs, and parks."

But for Lennar critics like the Rev. Christopher Mohammad, who has battled the company since the Islamic school he runs was subjected to toxic dust, even the most ambitious promises won’t overcome his distrust for the entity at the center of Prop. G: Lennar.

In a fiery recent sermon at the Grace Tabernacle Community Church, Mohammad recalled the political will that enabled the building of BART in the 1970s. "But when it comes to poor people, you can’t build 50 percent affordable. That will kill the deal," Mohammad observed.

"Lennar is getting 700 prime waterfront acres for free, and then there’ll be tax increment dollars they’ll tap into for the rebuild," he continued. "But you mean you can’t take some of those millions, after all the damages you’ve done? It would be a way to correct the wrong."

1,001 cookbooks you must spatter before you die

April 22, 2008

› paul@sfbg.com

Not that there’s anything wrong with pornography, but does everything have to be pornography now? Was a law passed in the dead of night, like a Congressional pay raise? In pondering undue pornography, I don’t mean to indict certain of our favorite Web sites (exemption granted!) or gay newspaper ads for auto repair in which a cute shirtless mechanic smiles insinuatingly while holding a big wrench — silly but harmless, and one turns the page to the cosmetic dentistry ad with the shirtless boy holding a big toothbrush. I do mean, at the moment, cookbooks, which over the past 10 or 15 years have gone from being rather austere and text-heavy tomes full of learning and encouragement to lurid encyclopedias of full-color photographs whose subjects are sprawled and splayed in poses worthy of Hustler or Drummer.

Are these objets d’titillation meant to be used or ogled? On my shelves sit a battered battery of old-timers, including The Fanny Farmer Cookbook (1979), The New York Times Cookbook (1961), and The New Joy of Cooking (1997) — the last a revised classic published barely more than a decade ago. All are rich in fine recipes, and I know this because many of their pages are stained and spattered: evidence that I use them often. The pages open automatically to recipes I’ve consulted before and will doubtless consult again.

None of these worthy volumes have much by way of illustration beyond the occasional charcoal sketch. This has never been an issue. It’s possible that a voluptuous photograph of a lemon tart will fill you with a desire to make said tart by using the recipe on the preceding page, but it’s also possible that the photo will fill you with frustration and embarrassment when your own tart turns out to be not quite so photogenic as the one in the book. You might even decline to make the tart again. It’s important to believe that when you make a recipe and the result is acceptable, you’ve done it the way the recipe writer meant you to.

There is a lovely photograph of a lemon tart in Gerald Hirigoyen’s Bistro (Sunset Books, 1995), one of the dozen or so cookbooks by local chefs I use all the time despite the overwhelmingly sensual photography that fills them. My lemon tarts never look quite as fancy as the one in Hirigoyen’s book, mainly because I skip the step that involves candying very thin slices of lemon and baking them into the center of the tart as decoration. But my lemon-tart-for-dummies version tastes good and is easier and less messy to make — and guests never decline leftover pieces to take home for breakfast. Hirigoyen, incidentally, who grew up in French Basque country, is the founder of Fringale (which he’s no longer involved with) and Pipérade, which began its life in the mid-1990s as Pastis.

Of the many esteemed local chefs who publish cookbooks, I esteem none higher than Joyce Goldstein, whose recipes use straightforward techniques, don’t rely too heavily on odd ingredients, and always work. For the home cook, her only peer is the late Pierre Franey, who wrote the "60-Minute Gourmet" column for the New York Times for years and turned those many columns into a pair of sublime cookbooks, The Sixty Minute Gourmet and Cuisine Rapide (both Times Books; 2000, 1989). My copies of Franey have the hors de combat look of soldiers’ boots after a long tour at the front. And while they probably wouldn’t command much in the used-book market, their condition does tell the discerning eye that they’re probably well worth having.

Due to an administrative error, I never acquired a copy of Goldstein’s first and probably best-known cookbook, The Mediterranean Kitchen (1989), which she published while running her famous and wonderful Barbary Coast restaurant, Square One. I rely, instead, on her Back to Square One (Morrow, 1992) and have made her versions of Mexican cauliflower soup and spicy Indian lentils from that book so often that I no longer need to consult the recipes. The soup recipe, in particular, is quintessential Goldstein: a brief list of easy-to-get ingredients, a few steps briskly described, and a beguiling result that’s more than the sum of its parts.

If you just can’t face cauliflower and you have stale bread in the house — onions too — try Goldstein’s recipe for Italian onion soup with bread and sage, from Kitchen Conversations (Morrow, 1996). This simple soup resembles its more famous French cousin — onions caramelized in butter, sage, melted cheese on top — and is yet another example of Italian cleverness about not wasting food, in this case stale bread. (Hint: the soup is mighty fine when made strictly according to the recipe, but it’s a little richer if you use beef stock instead of plain water.)

My copy of the original Greens cookbook, The Greens Cookbook (Bantam, 1987), is more than 20 years old now and has spatters even on the frontispiece. Inexplicable. The book’s author is Deborah Madison, who will be recalled by those with elephant memories as the restaurant’s first chef when it opened in 1979. The book was my first vegetarian cookbook, and it still has a favorite-blanket aura in that respect. But the recipe I still use over and over is the one for bread — focaccia, to be precise. The would-be baker of bread in this cold city is beset by terrors and frustrations, mainly having to do with the lack of the fabled "warm, draft-free place" bread dough must be placed in if it’s to rise properly. But Greens’ focaccia is hardiness itself: it rises even in gray winter, it’s soft, it takes dimpling beautifully, it bakes quickly, pops right out of the pan when done, and everybody loves it no matter what you put on top.

Cindy Pawlcyn has launched some of the Bay Area’s most beloved and durable restaurants (including Fog City Diner and Mustards Grill), but lately she’s been revealing herself to be an excellent recipe writer for the home cook. My copy of her Big Small Plates (Ten Speed, 2006) has a big spatter on the gougères page and another on the papas bravas page. Gougères are tasty little cheese puffs and are, with some champagne, a wonderful treat to serve guests before dinner, at least if you serve them warm, but their glory is of the brief, summer-in-Antarctica variety, and they cool all too quickly to forgettability. The papas bravas (paprika-scented Spanish-style potatoes), though less finger-friendly, are a little more forgiving; they cool along a gentler arc and are still perfectly fine even when approaching room temperature.

For meat cookery, I rely on Bruce Aidell’s The Complete Meat Cookbook (Houghton Mifflin, 1998). It manages to be both authoritative and friendly, it’s full of wonderful recipes that aren’t complicated (including bulletproof versions of the venerable Tuscan pork roast called arista and charcoal-grilled Florentine beef). Even in years gone by, when I cooked a lot more meat than I do now, I never felt the need to seek out guidance elsewhere. It’s as canonical as a cookbook can be.

Cookbook canons tend to be narrow, in part because of personal taste and because shelf space is limited, but occasionally a new entrant does join the elect. One such recent addition, for me, is The Spanish Table Cookbook (The Spanish Table, 2005) by Steve Winston, who not coincidentally is one of the owners of The Spanish Table in Berkeley, a rich resource not only for seekers after pimentón and piquillo peppers but paella pans and cazuelas. The book itself, with its simple black-and-white sketches, is a refreshing throwback to pre-porn days. It is also full of wisdom and tips about Iberian cooking, which, having never found a popular Anglophone exponent as French cuisine did in Julia Child, remains faintly exotic in this country. Naturally the book gives several good paella recipes, including one with prawns, chickpeas, and ñora peppers, as well as several interpretations of the pasta brought to Iberia by the Arabs and known to the Spanish as fideo. The paella-like dish made with this pasta (if you can find it, and you can find it at The Spanish Table) is called fideuá.

No discussion of cookbooks would be complete without mention of at least one volume consecrated to dessert. For me that volume is Emily Luchetti’s Four Star Desserts (HarperCollins, 1996), the title referring to her long run as pastry chef at Stars. (She’s had a comparable run at Farallon.) My copy: gravely spattered. Many are the times I’ve made the bitter-orange crèmes caramels (though often not with bitter orange but some other interesting citrus), not to mention the banana tarte tatin and Key lime pie. Although the book features a fair amount of vivid photography, the recipes I like the most and use most often do not include photographs. For a more sweeping compendium of Luchetti recipes, there’s Classic Stars Desserts (Chronicle Books, 2007), a kind of greatest-hits album that includes the secrets of Stareos, the famous Stars cookies. A discreet aside here to you inveterate porndogs: Stareos and other cookies can be eaten with one hand. *

6 African feasts

April 22, 2008

If there’s one thing I learned while traveling in Africa, it’s that you can never predict the sublime. With little to guide you except your nose and your gut, eating "out" usually means perching on the side of the road in front of an unprepossessing stall and entrusting your appetite’s fate to the dish of the day. Luckily it seems there’s no end to the possibilities created from a handful of humble ingredients — tomatoes, onions, legumes, and yams — and the deft talents of a multitude of unsung culinary geniuses. Even luckier, in San Francisco, traveling gastronomically around an entire continent is as easy as hopping the bus to the next neighborhood, proving that even local travel can broaden one’s horizons — not to mention waistline.

TAJINE

Ever the sentimentalist, I have been known to wax nostalgic about Tajine’s former gritty Jones Street location, which was so tiny it only had two or three tables and a bustling to-go trade among the city’s taxi drivers. But because I consciously strive to embrace change (no, really!), I am able to appreciate their newer, bigger, and admittedly more expensive Polk Gulch location. Though its menu includes kebab plates, flaky bastilles (savory phyllo dough pastries), and an array of salads, it’s the hearty, meaty, one-pot stews (tajines) that really get my tastebuds tingling.

1338 Polk, SF, (415) 440-1718, www.tajinerestaurant.com

BISSAP BAOBAB/LITTLE BAOBAB

From the national dish of Senegal (thiebou djen, a tilapia-based stew, served with red rice) to the regional specialties of yapou khar (a melt-in-your-mouth lamb dish from the city of Thiès) and yassa chicken from Casamance, Bissap Baobab dishes up pan-Senegalese cuisine with friendly flair. The not-to-be missed drinks, mixed with bissap (hibiscus), ginger, and tamarind juices inspire smooth (and otherwise) moves on the dance floor of Little Baobab once the tables have been pushed away and the rotating lineup of DJs comes out to play at 10 p.m.

2323 Mission, SF. (415) 826-9287

3388 19th St., SF. (415) 643-3558

www.bissapbaobab.com

AXUM CAFÉ

The axis of the San Francisco Ethiopian restaurant "scene" for many years, Axum Café serves a fine, spicy kifto (Ethiopia’s version of steak tartare), tender lamb tibsie, and an array of vegetarian options that would make even a diehard carnivore’s mouth water. Tucked behind an unpretentious facade on Haight Street, what Axum might lack in slickster glamour it more than makes up for with its solid menu and neighborhood-friendly prices. Plus, you can mistake their injera for a tablecloth — it’s that big (though much tastier).

698 Haight, SF. (415) 252-7912, www.axumcafe.com

A TASTE OF AFRICA

If you’ve come down, as I’ve been known to, with a persistent craving for fufu and egusi soup, you’ll be relieved to know that your hankering can be satisfied at A Taste of Africa without having to jump on the next plane to West Africa. This cheerful Cameroonian establishment also serves steamed corn koki (call ahead for availability) and a variety of savory vegetable dishes and meat stews. For an even more accurate taste of Africa, their food truck at the Ashby BART flea market definitely reminds me of the open air food stalls where I sampled so many of these dishes the first time around.

3015 Shattuck and Ashby BART station, Berk. (510) 981-1939

NEW ERITREA RESTAURANT

Though the cuisines are virtually identical, you don’t want to confuse Eritrea for Ethiopia in polite company. Still, for those who love their Ethiopian restaurant experiences, the drill at New Eritrea Restaurant will be familiar. Receive platters of flavorful food, plunge in sans silverware, and chase with copious amounts of Harar beer or steamed milk with honey. For the frugal and adventurous alike, they offer the familiar vegetarian sampler platter and a less usual meat one, plus three varieties of sambusas (stuffed East African fritters).

907 Irving, SF. (415) 691-1288

TROPICAL PARADISE

I love eating out in Berkeley period. You never have to stand in hipster hell waiting for admittance to food heaven, even on weekends. And for my money, as far as heavenly goes, you can’t beat the Ghanaian grub at Tropical Paradise. Try the tastiest fried plantains in the Bay, served piping hot alongside delicately seasoned black-eyed peas — a deceptively simple dish known as Red Red. The ubiquitous fermented corn dumplings (kenkey), hearty waachi, and a blood-warming "light" soup with fufu and generous portions of goat, chicken, or salmon bring Ghana to life in your mouth — especially when pleasantly washed down with a spicy sweet blend of fruit and ginger.

2021 University Avenue, Berkeley, (510) 665-4380 *

Mercury Interactive CFO indicted

April 22, 2008

In January of 2007, we brought you the story of a Silicone Valley company called Mercury Interactive, which was trying to bar media access to a detailed civil court complaint filed by shareholders against the company.

Mercury Interactive for months has been waste deep in the stock options backdating scandal, defined in the simplest terms possible as a version of card counting in which corporate executives can maximize their personal compensation by finding a date on the calender at which their stock was valued the lowest. That way, they can both buy the stock from the company at a fire sale price and then sell it when the company’s performing well, which results in a huge windfall profit. Another comparison might be knowing winning lottery numbers in advance.

Details of the scheme allegedly perpetrated by Mercury Interactive execs appeared in the civil complaint and it named names, so defense attorneys tried to keep them sealed off from the press. But local and national news outlets — including the Chronicle, a San Francisco legal newspaper and other business news services — sued to open them up. The Wall Street Journal ended up getting a hold of the documents before the drama could really play out in court.

A year-and-a-half later, Mercury Interactive CFO Sharlene Abrams has been indicted by federal prosecutors for tax evasion and aiding in the preparation of false tax returns. She’s looking at 11 years in prison and $750,000 in fines if proved guilty. It’s the first case in Northern California where someone’s been charged with criminal tax violations from the backdating scandal. Hewlett-Packard bought Mercury in July 2006. More details after the jump.

Gray Area Gallery 2.0

April 21, 2008

By Vanessa Carr

Aaron Koblin’s Ten Thousand Cents

It’s hard to believe that San Francisco, the very birthplace of Web 2.0, has lacked a gallery space dedicated to new interactive media arts – until now.

Tomorrow, Gray Area Gallery, whose space closed last year, celebrates the launch of what is, in effect, its 2.0 rebirth – Gray Area Beacon (GAB) – which claims to be the first San Francisco gallery space to focus exclusively on the intersection of art and technology.

“This is the moment in time for the Bay Area to celebrate and appreciate technology-based art,” said GAB co-founder Josette Melchor. “[GAB] is trying to provide a home for exhibits, ideas, and interaction.”

GAB’s launch party on Tuesday, 4/22, coincides with the first day of the Web 2.0 Expo and features four pieces by local artist Aaron Koblin in his first ever San Francisco show.

Aaron Kiblin’s New York Talk Exchange

Recently featured in Wired Magazine and the New York MoMA, Koblin’s work creates visualizations of large datasets and human systems that explore some very Web 2.0 themes:digital labor marketplaces, online collaborations, and global communications.

“I thought [Koblin] was perfect because of [his] Sheep Market and Ten Thousand Cents pieces,” Melchor told the Guardian. “He’s used online means to get people to collaborate to create a large scale installation.”

Koblin’s Sheep Market features 10,000 sheep drawn by online “workers” from around world, each of whom were paid two cents to draw “a sheep facing left” using the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace.

Similarly, Ten Thousand Cents, Koblin’s collaboration with artist Takashi Kawashima, is a digital representation of a one-hundred dollar bill made up of one thousand tiny squares reproduced by anonymous online laborers who worked without knowledge of the overall picture. Each worker was paid one penny for his or her work, which amounted to $100 in total.

Leno on Newsom’s budget cuts

April 16, 2008

Assemblymember Mark Leno, who is challenging state Sen. Carole Migden in the June primary, responded this afternoon to our editorial on Newsom’s budget cuts.

Migden responded earlier today.

Here’s Leno’s statement:

Dear Bay Guardian Editors,

You are absolutely right to assert that the Federal Government has turned its back on urban America and the Governor’s repeal of the Vehicle License Fee (VLF) has left our City in extremely challenged fiscal health. I agree with you, Tim, that new revenue is needed for the City. Current state law gives local government few options.

For that reason I have and am presently authoring legislation to bring more local control to our revenue streams, so that we can guarantee that San Francisco’s budget is not balanced on the backs of those who can least afford it.

In 2005, I authored AB 799, co-sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, SF Labor Council, Board of Supervisors and the Mayor, which would have allowed San Francisco voters to restore their own VLF which would have brought approximately 70 million new dollars to San Francisco. Unfortunately the Governor vetoed the bill.

I brought the bill back in 2007 as AB 1590. Unfortunately, it got held up in the Senate. I am working with all four co-sponsors to shake it loose this year.

Back in 2003, when cities and counties were faced with huge cuts, I authored AB 1690 to bring more revenue to the local level. The measure would have allowed voters to decide to levy a local income tax, which could have eased our way and pre-empted painful cuts to our local budget. That measure, though passed through the Assembly, was also held up in the Senate.

The Mayor and Board of Supervisors have a great challenge on their hands. The fiscal crisis we face is nothing short of tragic. I will continue to use my voice to argue that the cuts considered must be equitable, and those with the least should suffer the least.

I continue to argue that we have a revenue problem, not a spending problem. To forestall mean spirited cuts, we need to be as creative as possible to create new revenue streams. Otherwise, we will be continually faced with Sophie’s Choices.

Sincerely,
Mark Leno

And thanks to Mark for sending that, and for pushing for state legislation that would give cities more ways to raise revenue. I have always been impressed by his willingness to do that and his creative approaches.

I will note, for the record, that Leno declined to say anything critical of Gavin Newsom and his budget decisions.

Moth Bills, Moth Balls

April 16, 2008

The Assembly Agriculture Committee passed two pieces of legislation today authored by Assemblymember John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) and related to the Light Brown Apple Moth controversy.

“We need to back up and walk through each outstanding issue in a science-based, clear way using neutral third party experts,” said Laird, who has been dealing with the LBAM furor since last summer, and has one of the best website’s in terms of tracking the progression of arguments and lawsuits related to the moth.

So, just what will Laird’s legislation do?

ACR 117, an Assembly Concurrent Resolution, calls on the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Department of Pesticide Regulation, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and other relevant state departments to address unresolved health, scientific and efficacy issues surrounding the CDFA’s Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM )eradication plans.

The resolution passed 5-3, and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

“It is the responsibility of our government to demonstrate its LBAM actions are necessary and do not compromise human or environmental health,” said Mr. Laird. “It isn’t the responsibility of the people to demonstrate the reverse.”

For each invasive on the list, the department would prepare a written assessment on the most appropriate method of eradication. If pesticides were to be used, the assessment would have to discuss application methods, the chemistry of the pesticide and its inert ingredients, impacts on public health and the environment. If a pest was found, the department would have to notify various local agencies, hold public hearings, and comply with other requirements. The bill passed by a vote of 8-0 and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

“The California Food & Agriculture’s Light Brown Apple Moth program has led to more contacts with my office than any single issue during my time in Sacramento,” said Laird. “Clearly, the state was not adequately prepared for LBAM. This bill aims to put in place a pest planning process that prevents the kind of public fear and confusion we’ve experienced with LBAM.”

Whether any of these efforts will succeed in derailing the feds’ trade agreement-driven plan to spray for the moth this summer in Santa Cruz, Monterey and the BAy Area counties remains to be seen.

Bill Maxfield

Director of Communications

Assemblymember John Laird

831-596-0910 Mobile

831-425-1503 Santa Cruz

916-319-2027 Sacramento

“Public confidence is at issue,” said Assemblymember Laird, who has been living through the ongoing LBAM spraying nightmare since last summer, when the feds announced they were spraying Laiird’s hometown, “We need to back up and walk through each outstanding issue in a science-based, clear way using neutral third party experts.”

ACR 117, an Assembly Concurrent Resolution that calls on the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), the Department of Pesticide Regulation, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment and other relevant state departments to address unresolved health, scientific and efficacy issues surrounding the CDFA’s Light Brown Apple Moth (LBAM )eradication plans. The resolution passed by a vote of 5-3 and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

“As stated in the resolution, it is the responsibility of our government to demonstrate its LBAM actions are necessary and do not compromise human or environmental health,” said Mr. Laird. “It isn’t the responsibility of the people to demonstrate the reverse.”

AB 2763, the Invasive Pest Planning Act of 2008 – would require the CDFA to create a list of invasive animals, plants, and insects that have a reasonable likelihood of entering California for which an eradication program might be appropriate. For each invasive on the list, the department would prepare a written assessment on the most appropriate method of eradication. If pesticides were to be used, the assessment would have to discuss application methods, the chemistry of the pesticide and its inert ingredients, impacts on public health and the environment. If a pest was found, the department would have to notify various local agencies, hold public hearings, and comply with other requirements. The bill passed by a vote of 8-0 and next heads to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

“The California Food & Agriculture’s Light Brown Apple Moth program has led to more contacts with my office than any single issue during my time in Sacramento,” said Mr. Laird. “Clearly, the state was not adequately prepared for LBAM. This bill aims to put in place a pest planning process that prevents the kind of public fear and confusion we’ve experienced with LBAM.”

For more information on the Light Brown Apple Moth issue—including key documents, correspondence, news and other information, visit Assemblymember Laird’s LBAM resource page: http://democrats.assembly.ca.gov/members/a27/moth.htm

###

Bill Maxfield

Director of Communications

Assemblymember John Laird

831-596-0910 Mobile

831-425-1503 Santa Cruz

916-319-2027 Sacramento

Guide to greener living

April 16, 2008

Click here for even more green businesses and services, including Green Citizen, Green Zebra, PLANTSF and more!

ERECYCLE CAMPAIGN

Want to obey the bumper stickers and kill your television? That’s OK. But be careful where you bury it. TVs, as well as computers, DVD players, and all kinds of electronics, have no business in landfills. They’re made of plenty of metal which can be recycled, along with plenty of chemicals that are hazardous to the public. The eRecycle campaign, sponsored by the California Integrated Waste Management Board, maintains a Web site of local pickup and drop-off services for your e-waste — and thankfully, just in time for the high-def TV changeover in 2009.

www.erecycle.org

ECO HOME IMPROVEMENT

Want a greener home from the ground up? This is your one-stop shop. From flooring and cabinets to decor and lighting, everything here is natural, sustainable, and eco-friendly.

2617-2619 San Pablo, Berk. (510) 644-3500, www.ecohomeimprovement.com

DR. NAMRATA PATEL

Finding the right dentist is tough. But Dr. Namrata Patel makes your decision easier with her new LEED-certified (that’s Leadership in Energy Efficiency and Design) office. Patel uses nontoxic products — keeping PVC, formaldehyde, and chlorine out of everything from floors to cabinetry. She’s careful about reducing waste. She uses minimal radiation and a special filtration system for dealing with mercury fillings. Even her office furnishings are made with recycled materials. And yes, she accepts insurance!

360 Post, Suite 704, SF. (415) 433-0119, www.sfgreendentist.com

SAN FRANCISCO GREEN BUSINESS PROJECT

Want to make sure your favorite restaurant or preferred electrician uses green practices? This online resource will point you toward businesses in SF, from bars to baby clothes retailers, who are committed to the environment.

www.sfenvironment.com/greenbiz

LUSCIOUS GARAGE

The actual act of driving isn’t the only reason having a car is hard on the environment. Maintaining it is too. But Luscious Garage is trying to help on both accounts. This woman-owned and operated facility specializes in hybrids, and runs the whole business as sustainably as possible, from the machine shop to the office. And for these luscious ladies, sustainably goes beyond chemicals and objects — they also sustain their community by hosting classes and a hybrid car club in their beautiful facility.

459 Clementina, SF. (415) 875-9030, www.lusciousgarage.com

PAT’S GARAGE

Like Luscious Garage’s brother, Pat’s also focuses on environmentally friendly business practices. Bring your Honda, Acura, or Subaru for services you can feel good about. Or, if you have a hybrid, you can work with Pat’s partners, Green Gears, to upgrade your hybrid with plug-in capabilities. Bonus? They offer free car classes for women.

1090 26th St., SF. (415) 647-4500, www.patsgarage.com, www.greengears.com

KEETSA

This SF-based business wants you to rest easy with their eco-friendly mattresses. With recycled steel in the coils, bamboo and unbleached natural cotton for fabrics, nonchemical odor-controlling and antibacterial treatments, and ingenious use of scrap memory foam bits, every mattress is as kind to the earth as it is to your body. Keetsa further reduces its carbon footprint with its innovative mattress compression technique, allowing for easier and more efficient transport. But are they good mattresses? They must be. After less than a year in business, they’re already opening a store in Fairfield.

271 Ninth St., SF. (415) 252-1575, www.keetsa.com

ECOHAUL

Just bought a new Keetsa and want to get rid of your tired old Sealy? Don’t just throw it in the trash. If you don’t live on one of those SF streets where a stranger will pick up your stuff from the sidewalk within an hour, call San Rafael–based Ecohaul. This nationwide service will pick up your furniture, appliances, yard waste, and just about anything else you can think of. Then they’ll reuse, recycle, and repurpose everything they can, diverting as much from the landfill as possible.

1-800-ecohaul, www.ecohaul.com

THE ORCHARD GARDEN HOTEL

You’ve greened up your home, so why not find an eco-friendly home away from home? The Orchard Garden was the third hotel in the United States to be given LEED certification for its key card energy control system (SF’s first — it’s based on the European model), organic bath products, natural materials, and general commitment to sustainability. Also check out its sister hotel, the Orchard, on Union.

466 Bush, SF. (415) 399-9807, www.theorchardgardenhotel.com

EPI CENTER MEDSPA

Ten years ago, Epi Center was the first spa in the country to combine traditional spa treatments and medical procedures. Now it celebrates its anniversary with a new innovation: the ecomedspa. This LEED-certified arm of the original spa combines regular procedures with organic treatments in a healthy environment, all according to the principles of William McDonough’s "Cradle to Cradle."

450 Sutter, SF. (415) 362-4754, www.skinrejuv.com

NEPALESE PAPER

Based in Penngrove, this company imports handmade Nepali paper made from bark of a white shrub called lokta, which regrows after pruning. Not only does this mean no trees are cut down, it also means employment for many women in Kathmandu Valley and financial support for village regions of Nepal. Plus, the paper’s gorgeous. Order online, or find it at Stylo, Autumn Express, Kinokuniya Stationery and Gifts, or San Francisco State University.

(707) 665-9055, www.nepalesepaper.com

MORE DIRT

Make a fashion statement with these simple, 100-percent organic T-shirts by Heidi Quante. The shirts, which are brown with white lettering saying "More Dirt" on the front are meant to capture attention and send people to Quante’s Web site, which shows people how to combat global warming through planting trees, establishing community gardens, and using permaculture techniques. Inks are made without PVC or phthalates, and shirts come in sizes for men, women, and babies.

www.moredirt.org

A. MACIEL PRINTING

Family owned and operated since 1984, A. Maciel specializes in recycled and tree-free papers as well as soy-based inks. What’s even better? The shop is completely wind-powered. Though the print shop is capable of doing corporate jobs, A. Maciel caters to nonprofits and community groups like the American Land Conservancy, Forest Ethics, and Greenpeace. They’re also part of Northern California Media Workers/Typographical Union. Sure beats Kinko’s.

50 Mendell, Unit #5, SF. (415) 648-3553, www.amacielprinting

TRANSPORTEDSF

All aboard the ecobus! This organization takes Das Frachtgut, the veggie oil–fueled bus Jens-Peter Jungclaussen uses as a mobile classroom, on an ecofriendly party tour. Movie nights are all about watching modern classics and then doing some kind of relevant outdoor activity (e.g., see The Big Lebowski, then bowl outside). Dance nights turn the bus into a mobile DJ booth and an instant, impromptu club. It’s fun, safe (no drunk driving, kids!), and above all, Earth friendly.

www.transportedsf.com

The seeds of health

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April 16, 2008
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› culture@sfbg.com

One warm winter day at Ruus Elementary in south Hayward, Chef Tiffany sweeps a roomful of second-graders into their only cooking class of the year. Before long, they’re shouting out the names of body parts that benefit from fresh veggies: "Eyes!" "Teeth!" "Heart!" And even if Swiss chard elicits a wary silence, the kids already know spinach from bok choy, and Chef Tiffany, known to adults as Tiffany Chenoweth, smoothly transitions from her talking points about leafy greens into the hands-on section of the class (after delivering a squirt of antibacterial gel onto the palms of each child). Meanwhile, out past the bustling blacktop, garden instructor Rachel Harris walks an ethnically diverse group of third graders through the concept of soil enrichment. They reluctantly tear down a lush patch of fava beans that reaches over their heads, pretending to pull nitrogen out of the air (hands up!) and deposit it into the soil to benefit spring crops (hands down!). This is school garden time.

If there’s a downside to teaching children how to nurture a green, nutritious school garden, it’s hard to fathom. The list of touted benefits is lengthy: students reap fresh air and physical exercise, hands-on participation, awareness of the natural environment, so called "school bonding," and an unprecedented taste for raw spinach. For school faculty, there are welcome breaks in the classroom regimen, an engaging outlet for unruly pupils, and a bridge to involvement with volunteers in the community. And parents get to share skills and experience, from farm expertise to carpentry, that once felt irrelevant to an academic setting.

But in an educational realm where standards reign supreme, the benefits of gardens can be tough to quantify. In promotional literature, the Network for a Healthy California, a funder of Hayward Unified School District’s program, stresses connections that reflect common sense, like the idea that making fresh vegetables readily accessible to low-income families will reduce the growing rate of obesity. But the future of garden instruction in the long term, when inroads against sprawling ills like obesity might become broadly measurable, is unpredictable when grants and appropriations change from year to year. Even in the Bay Area, where strawberry patches and kale flourish beside asphalt schoolyards, garden educators continually scramble to afford basic supplies, sometimes spending more time cultivating donors than mulching vegetables.

That’s how it often feels to Miriam Feiner, program director for the Willie Brown Jr. Academy Garden. "We’re pretty much our own two-person nonprofit," Feiner says of herself and assistant Joti Levy at an Arbor Day work party on March 8, where dozens of native seedlings — coffeeberry, sticky monkey flower, and other species attractive to bees — awaited planting on a weedy slope.

The duo’s fundraising efforts have been rewarded with sizable grants from SF Environment’s Environmental Justice Grant Program and Alec Shaw of the Shaw Fund, as well as partnerships with San Francisco Beautiful and Friends of the Urban Forest.

Even more rewarding though, Feiner says, weekly garden-based classes at Willie Brown have students literally begging for kale. But she concedes that ultimately the current model, which is based on constant fundraising, is "not sustainable."

Difficulties in funding aside, people like Abby Jaramillo, the youthful director of San Francisco nonprofit Urban Sprouts, will gladly explain why it’s important to find a way to sustain such programs. When Jaramillo and her team took over the Excelsior Garden, shared by the June Jordan School for Equity and Excelsior Middle School, she said she was "up to her armpits in fennel."

But the overgrown herbs weren’t the only sign of disrepair. "It was a struggling middle school desperately in need of something that would make the students have a stake," she said. Describing the community’s "food environment," a term of art in nutrition education, she listed liquor store fare and junk food as the most prevalent options. Five years and six new school gardens later, Jaramillo thinks school administrators and teachers are genuinely on board with Urban Sprouts, whose mission is to serve low-income youth in San Francisco. "When the kids come outside; they are leaders, teaching each other how to plant," she says. "We need to make the garden a core, that will remain here and make a difference."

Whether that happens depends on whether garden education becomes institutionalized, not just a supplemental benefit reliant on the assiduousness of leaders like Jaramillo and Feiner. "My dream," Jaramillo says, "is that it would be like gym." That is to say, an expected feature of the precollege landscape. I asked her if there were models for this kind of integration. She, and everyone else I spoke with, pointed to the Edible Schoolyard, the celebrated collaboration between local-food pioneer Alice Waters and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. At the Schoolyard, a beneficiary of the Chez Panisse foundation, the perpetual cycle of seasons meshes with the academic year as rising eighth graders ceremonially plant corn for incoming sixth graders to harvest in the fall, suggesting a garden practice that is truly rooted in the school experience.

According to the San Francisco Unified School District, out of 104 K-12 school sites in the city, 36 maintain "green schoolyards," with 45 new gardens planned over the next four years. Statewide, $10.8 million from Sacramento was awarded in the form of California Instructional School Garden Program grants in October. It’s not nearly enough to fulfill the California Department of Education’s stated goal of "a garden in every school." But as Jordan students prepare to sow enough lettuce to provide the entire school with a lunch salad for one day, Jaramillo is hopeful that showing even a small percentage of kids where food comes from will have a lasting effect, with lessons about healthy eating rippling out through them to their families and into the community.

With the infrastructure of garden education still in its founding stages, assessing its efficacy poses a conundrum. The kind of life-changing transformations that green schoolyard proponents hope for might not be apparent in the short term, while slashed budgets threaten to endanger the longevity of even the most lovingly planted plots. Still, educators like Harris aren’t daunted by the relative nonstandardization of their field. She’s seen the results first-hand — like the student at a Hayward school barbecue who traded a Butterfinger for a second helping of grilled zucchini. After our interview, as Harris left the grocery store where she’ll teach her class to distinguish between processed and fresh food, a Ruus student in pigtails greeted her excitedly. "Miss Rachel!" she cried, throwing her head back with a wide grin. "I like garden!"

CO2 stew

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April 15, 2008
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER It’s not easy being green, music lover. Because I’ve tried to shove my big fat cultural consumption hoof into a smaller carbon footprint, but I can’t dance around the numbers.

I’ve ponied up the green stuff for nonprofits, come correct at the composting and recycling bins, and threatened to finally get the crusty Schwinn into shape despite the near-death horror stories from bike messenger chums back in the day. But what can a music-gobbling gal do when faced with the hard if rough facts spat out by, for instance, the free online Carbon Footprint Calculator? After selecting "I often go out to places like movies, bars, and restaurants," I watched my print soar to Bigfoot proportions — thanks to my nightlife habit I supposedly generate around the US average of 11 tons of CO2 per person — rather than the mere 8.5 tons if I indulged in only "zero carbon activities, e.g. walk and cycle." Even if this out-late culcha vulcha flies on zero-emission wings to each show, I’m still feeding a machine that will prove the undoing of the planet, since the Calculator estimates that hard-partying humanoids need to reduce their CO2 production to 2 tons to combat climate change. We won’t even get into the acres of paper, publications, and CDs surrounding this red-faced, would-be greenster. I’m downloading as fast as I can, but I wonder whether my hard drive can keep up: hells, even MP3s — and the studios and servers that eke them out — add to my huge, honking footprint. Must I resign myself to daytime acoustic throw-downs within a walkable radius from my berth? Can I get a hand-crank laptop? Just how green can my music get?

Well, it does my eco good to know that a local venue like the Greek Theatre has gone green all year round: Another Planet has offset an entire season’s 113 tons of CO2 emissions; composted over two tons of cups, plates, and utensils; used recycled paper and soy-based ink on all their printed materials; and offered a $1 opt-in to ticket-buyers to offset their environmental impact. I can feel my tonnage shrinking just staring at the numbers. And while gatherings such as last year’s Treasure Island Music Festival sported zero-emission shuttles and biodiesel generators and this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will team with Amtrak to provide a free train that will move campers from Los Angeles’ Union Station to Empire Polo Field sans smog-spewing traffic jams, artists like José González have embarked on green tours, adding 50 cents to tickets to support nonprofits. Yet such efforts might prove more consciousness-raising than anything else, González concedes: "For me, playing mostly solo and touring with a small crew, I feel like the actual cut down on emissions is marginal comparing it to major artists, so it’s more about the symbolic value of it, and the ripple effect it might bring."

Still, CO2 spendthrifts like me need a swift kick in our waste-line. Lining up to deliver are such music-fueled events as the free South Lake Tahoe Earth Day Festival April 19 and the Digital Be-In 16 April 25 at Temple nightclub, organized by the Cyberset label with an "ecocity" theme aimed at sustainable communities. Green practices, Be-In founder Michael Gosney says, "may not be huge in of themselves, but they set an example for communities to take these practices back into their own lives." One such community-oriented musician is String Cheese Incident mandolin player Michael Kang, who’ll perform at the Digital Be-In and appear with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks at the free Green Apple Festival concert April 20 in Golden Gate Park.

Organizing seven other free outdoor Earth Day shows throughout the country on April 20 as well as assorted San Francisco shows that weekend, the Green Apple Festival is going further to educate artists and venues — the usual suspects that inspire me to make my carbon footprint that much bigger — by distributing to participating performers and clubs helpful Music Matters artist and venue riders: the former encourages artists to make composting, recycling, and offsets a requirement of performances; the latter suggesting that nightspots consider reusable stainless-steel bottles of water and donating organic, local, fair-trade and/or in-season food leftovers to local food banks or shelters.

But how green are the sounds? Musicians like Brett Dennen, who also performs at SF’s Green Apple event, may have grown up recycling and composting, but he confesses that environmentalism has never spurred him to craft a tune: "Things as big as global warming have never moved me to write about it, even though I’m doing what I can." And Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett, who plays April 17 at the Design Center Concourse, may describe himself as a "recycling animal — I love it! I go through trash at other people’s houses!", yet even he was unable to push the rest of the his group to make their latest CD, Under the Blacklight (Warner Bros., 2007) carbon neutral.

So maybe it comes down to supporting those leafy green rooms, forests, and grasslands we otherwise take for granted. Parks are the spark for ex–Rum Diary member Jon Fee’s Parks and Records green label in Fairfax, which wears its love of albums on its hand-printed, all-recycled-content sleeves and plans to donate a percentage of all its low-priced CD sales to arboreal-minded groups like Friends of the Urban Forest. Fee and his spouse Mimi aren’t claiming to have all the answers in terms of running a low-carbon-footprint imprint, but they are pragmatic ("In order to support bands, labels need to give them something they can sell to get gas money," Fee says) and know their love of the outdoors segues with many musicians. "You develop that camping mentality from touring," he offers. "You’re not showering, and you’re hanging out for long periods of time. Everyone loves to be outside." That’s the notion even those too cheap to buy offsets can connect with — until the weird weather is at their doorstep.

Not for locals only

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April 15, 2008
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Botticellis stick to the coast like gulls. Until recently, they all lived a few blocks from the ocean in an Outer Richmond flat, but drummer Zach Ehrlich decided to move into a beachfront apartment so he could have easier access to the surf. Before moving, he used a telescope pointed out his window to check for waves at Ocean Beach, but he gave that up after realizing the overall creepiness of the set-up, and he never could get to the beach in time to catch the waves he saw from his window.

Earlier this month, the band performed at Aqua Surf Shop on Haight Street. Beside surfboards propped against the walls and surf videos playing in the background, the Botticellis delivered a short set, bundled in sweatshirts and jackets against a door open to the San Francisco night. Afterward two men from the small crowd approached lead vocalist Alexi Glickman and said, "Dude, your music totally made us wanna surf." To Glickman, this was the ultimate compliment.

Their very name originates in surf culture — a botticelli is a tightly wound wave distinctive to the Southern California coast — but don’t assume the group is just a Beach Boys rip-off. While the Botticellis borrow from those hitmakers as much as any jangly indie-pop band does, their lyrics never come close to those of blatantly beach-themed tunes. The Botticellis are classier than that.

Glickman and Ehrlich grew up together in the Los Angeles area, where they developed a shared enthusiasm for music and surfing. They both began training in the Suzuki violin method in kindergarten, and have performed in original rock bands since age eight: first as an instrumental duo called Powerstrike, a recording of which Glickman says "sounds like Sleater-Kinney before Sleater-Kinney."

Now, almost two decades later, the pair is climbing toward indie stardom with their friends and fellow surfers Burton Li, Ian Nanson, and Blythe Foster as the Botticellis. Their new album, Old Home Movies, will be officially released next month on Antenna Farm Records. Local fans have a chance to grab an advance copy at their release party April 18.

Although they’ve begun headlining at SF’s larger clubs, they say they still prefer the lower-key atmosphere of spots like Aqua Surf. For these performances, the outfit brings their own sound system and mixes the vocals high to their soft-pop liking. "Every venue that we go to, we try to explain," Glickman said. "Usually people are totally unreceptive and say ‘Fuck you! Don’t tell me how to do my job!’ — which is probably why we like doing these house shows and small shows because we don’t have to go through some fucking huge PA system." With the vocals mixed down and the bass and drums cranked up, they metamorphose from a detailed, modern evocation of a ’60s pop group into a blaring indie-rock combo.

The Botticellis made a conscious decision to refine their sound: two years ago, they were a rock band with a self-released, self-titled EP showcasing guitar-driven power-pop. The transformation didn’t come easily. Some songs have been reworked and rerecorded multiple times before making it onto Old Home Movies. Seven of the new disc’s 10 tracks were laid to tape at Tiny Telephone in SF, and from the start, their goal was to re-create the crackly feel of a vinyl LP. They even toyed with the idea of releasing the recording on cassette before a quick survey of friends found that none of their pals owned a tape player.

"We were listening to Big Star records and Big Star side-project records, like Chris Bell," said Glickman. "We tried to get that sort of chewy analog mid-fi feeling." To round out that sound, the Botticellis sought out Matt Cunitz of SF’s Vintage Keyboard Repair for unusual instruments: Mellotron, folding pump organ, Minimoog, bassoon, and toy piano can all be heard at some point in the recording, beneath the fuzzy, light guitars. While Blythe Foster does not perform live with the band — she usually puts her voice toward work as an actress in local theater — the addition of her winsome vocals alongside the three male singers is nothing short of captivating.

The resulting Old Home Movies fully realizes the Botticellis attempts to bring wonder to the simplicity of California pop. And with summer coming, now is their chance to shine. One listen to Old Home Movies transports the listener back to a time when the state was known for cheerful sounds that matched clear skies. Still, the Botticellis aren’t deluding themselves. San Franciscans know that California isn’t all sun and fun, and the group’s nostalgic, delicate numbers match the melancholy nature that a July day in the Bay often holds. *

THE BOTTICELLIS

With Papercuts and the Mantles

Fri/18, 9 p.m., $10

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

Going back

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April 15, 2008
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Pay no attention to the feathered and paisleyed, freaked-out and gentled-up flower child batting his bejeweled lashes behind the ruby velvet curtain. Despite the neo-glam-hippie network enmeshing his label, the Devendra Banhart– and Andy Cabic–owned Gnomonsong, and the narcotic dream-folk wafting around his San Francisco indie pop project Papercuts, songwriter-producer Jason Quever would never call himself a hippie, though heaven knows he’s tried to be one. "I have too much anxiety to be a hippie," the thoughtful Quever free-associates as he settles into his Excelsior District digs, now that his springtime rambling — spent performing with and opening for Beach House on their recent national tour — is done.

"There was a moment when I was younger when I thought maybe that’s what I am," the 32-year-old continues, sounding a wee bit wistful. "But no, I’m not very free. I have to be moving and wearing shoes — I’m just not relaxed enough to be groovy with anything. I have too much inner turmoil to pull that off, and bummer hippies are the worst — so negative."

He knows of what he speaks, as the child of "burnout hippies" who retreated to Humboldt County ("Yeah, it was funny. To get away from drugs, they lived on a Christian commune"). And though he’s always admired genuinely, "extremely relaxed" folks, Quever, by his own admission, only gets truly blissed out while writing songs.

The music making started at 5, when Quever and his friends wrote their first song: a video game ode titled "Dragon Slayer." "I still remember banging on an LP cover with chopsticks," he recalls. Songwriting became an anchor of sorts when he bought a four-track at age 15, following a summer spent adrift and alone after his mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm.

Still, the past — and sounds redolent of tube amps, ’60s pop, magnetic tape, and a certain exquisite melancholy ornamented with chapel chimes, shivering strings, arpeggiated guitars, and thumping toms — pulls him back, although Quever appears to have built a kind of community around his current home studio, unofficially dubbed Pan American Recording "just to make it sound classy." There he’s tracked or mixed such local players as Vetiver, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, the Skygreen Leopards, the Finches, the Moore Brothers, and Still Flyin’ — artists, Quever says, who "can handle analog recording and don’t need editing, and people who are into that sound too. People who want perfection — I can’t give them that."

Quever sounds a little dejected, much as he did while discussing reviews of Papercuts’ most recent full-length, Can’t Go Back (Gnomonsong, 2007), and writers’ focus on a perceived ’60s-vintage sound. But the singer-songwriter just as quickly cheers up: "That’s the fun thing about analog — it automatically weeds out a lot of people I don’t want to deal with. Most people who come over are relaxed and just want to have fun. The OCD obsessives just can’t obsess about it, and I do. When I mixed my last record, I obsessed over it the way you shouldn’t with analog."

Quever will have to see what the future holds now that he’s back home and writing songs, after his April 18 show at Cafe Du Nord with Papercuts’ current lineup, which includes filmmaker David Enos and Lazarus’ Kelly Nyland and Trevor Montgomery. Taking a cue from the title of Can’t Go Back, he knows there’s nowhere to venture but forward. "I’m just keeping out of jail," Quever says cheerfully — so every day, he agrees, is a success.

For more on the Papercuts’ April 18 show, see "Not for Locals Only," page 30.

Dark days

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April 15, 2008
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› amanda@sfbg.com

› sarah@sfbg.com

Like a lot of San Franciscans, John Murphy wants to put solar panels on his roof. He’s worried about the environment, but it’s also about money: “I want it to pay for all my electricity,” he said one recent evening as we chatted in front of his house.

Murphy pays top dollar for power from Pacific Gas and Electric Co., every month hitting the highest tier of energy use and getting spanked 34 cents a kilowatt hour for it. He’s tried to cut costs by switching to energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs with motion sensors — with little incentive from PG&E’s billing department.

Murphy thought installing solar panels would be worth the up-front cost, especially if federal and state rebates made it more feasible. His roof — sturdy and pitched toward the south, unshaded by trees or other buildings, and located in the fogless hollow of the Mission District — seemed perfectly suited for solar energy.

So last fall he invited a representative from a local solar installation company to the house for a free consultation. He was told his roof could only fit a 2.8 kilowatt system, which would cover about 60 percent of his energy needs — and cost about $25,000.

Murphy is apoplectic about the results. “What’s 60 percent? That’s like going out with her for three-quarters of the night. I want to take her home,” he said.

While the federal incentive shaves $2,000 off the cost, the state rebate program — in place since January 2007 — is a set allocation that declines over time: the later you apply, the less you get. Today Murphy can get about $1.90 per watt back from the state, whereas at the start of the program it was $2.50 per watt. To him, the upfront costs are still too steep and the results won’t cover his monthly PG&E bill.

“The snake oil salesmen of yesterday are the solar panel installers of today,” Murphy said.

But Murphy still wants to install panels — and he’s not alone. The desire for clean, green energy runs deeply through San Francisco and the state as a whole. After the launch of the California Solar Initiative, the number of solar megawatts, represented by applications to the state, doubled what they’d been over the last 26 years. Almost 90 percent of the installations were on homes, indicating that citizens are jumping at the chance to decrease their carbon output.

Yet in San Francisco, where environmental sentiment and high energy costs ought to be driving a major solar boom, there’s very little action.

Back in 2000, then-mayor Willie Brown announced a citywide goal of 10,000 solar roofs by 2010. That would add up to a lowly 5 percent of the 200,000 property lots within the city of San Francisco.

But even that weak goal seems beyond reach: it’s now 2008, and the number of solar roofs in San Francisco stands at a grand total of 618 installations by the end of 2007. In terms of kilowatts per capita, the city ranks last in the Bay Area. The city’s total electricity demand runs about 950 megawatts; only 5 megawatts is currently supplied by solar.

WHAT’S WRONG?

Well, it’s not the weather. While heavy cloud cover can hinder panels, fog permits enough ambient light to keep panels productive. San Francisco’s thermostat isn’t much of a factor either — panels prefer cooler temperate zones, not blazing desert heat.

It’s also not for a lack of political ideas — Mayor Gavin Newsom is pushing a major solar proposal and several others are floating around, too.

But Newsom is clashing with the supervisors over the philosophy and direction of his plan. It’s complicated, but in essence, the mayor and Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting put together a task force that included representatives of solar installers and PG&E — but nobody from the environmental community and no public-power supporters.

The plan they hatched gives cash incentives to private property owners, takes money away from city-owned solar installments, and does nothing to help the city’s move to public power.

While all this plays out, the solar panels so many San Franciscans want aren’t getting installed.

SUN AND SUBSIDY

What makes solar work, according to local solar activists, is a combination of sun and subsidies. “Almost every area in the United States has better sun exposure than Germany, and Germany is leading the solar market worldwide today,” said Lyndon Rive, CEO of Solar City, a Foster City-based solar installer.

The price per kilowatt hour, with current state and federal subsides, is about 13 cents for solar, just two cents more than PG&E’s base rate for energy produced mostly by nuclear power and natural gas.

Still, the average installation for the average home hovers between $20,000 and $30,000. For many, that kind of cash isn’t available.

“The biggest reason for lack of adoption [of solar energy] is that the cost to install in San Francisco is higher than neighboring cities,” Rive said. It’s about 10 percent more than the rest of the Bay Area, according to a December 2007 report of the San Francisco Solar Task Force.

Why? According to Rive, system sizes are smaller. Solar City’s average Bay Area customer buys a 4.4 kilowatt system, but the average San Franciscan — with a smaller house and smaller roof — usually gets a 3.1 kilowatt installation. The smaller the system, the more the markup for retailers amortizing certain fixed costs such as material and labor. On top of that, San Francisco’s old Victorians can have issues — weak rafters need reinforcement; steep roofs require more scaffolding; wires and conduits have to cover longer distances. It adds up.

“There’s an extra cost to doing business in San Francisco,” said Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar and a member of the SF Solar Task Force. “I can expect $100 in parking tickets for every job I do.”

That was the motivation for Ting to establish the Solar Task Force in 2007, with the goal of creating financial incentives, including loans and rebates, to bring down the costs of San Francisco solar. The 11-member task force came up with an ambitious program that involved a one-stop shop for permits, a plan to give property owners as much as $5,000 in cash subsidies, and a system to lend money to homeowners who can’t afford the up-front costs.

The task force said installing 55 megawatts of solar would combat global warming, improve air quality by reducing pollution caused by electricity generation, and add 1,800 green collar jobs to the local economy.

The streamlined permit program is in place. None of the rest has happened.

THE MAYOR’S MONEY

The first obstacle was the loan fund. Newsom and Ting wanted to take $50 million currently sitting unspent in a bond fund for seismic upgrades on local buildings. Sup. Jake McGoldrick wanted to know why the money wasn’t being used to upgrade low-income housing; the city attorney wasn’t sure seismic safety money could be redirected to solar loans.

Then Newsom decided to take $3 million from the Mayor’s Energy Conservation Fund to pay for the first round of rebates. Over the next 10 years, that could add up to $50 million. McGoldrick balked again. That money, he said, was supposed to be used on public facilities (like solar panels at Moscone Center and Muni facilities and new refrigerators for public housing projects). Why should it be diverted to private property owners?

There’s a larger issue behind all this: should the city be using scarce resources to help the private sector — or devoting its money to city-owned electricity generation? “In 10 years, there could be $50 million in the fund,” McGoldrick said. “That’s a lot of money, and it’s power the city could own.”

Sup. Chris Daly agrees. “I would support this program if we were running out of municipal [solar] projects,” he said. “But we’re not.”

In addition, the progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, who have all advocated a citywide sustainable energy policy known as community choice aggregation, or CCA, weren’t represented on the Solar Task Force.

The fund Newsom wanted to tap for his project is also the source of funding for the community choice aggregation program, which the progressive supervisors see as the city’s energy plan, which in turn constitutes a far more comprehensive response to climate change, with a goal of relying on 51 percent renewable energy by 2017.

Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working on a loan program that would allow residents to borrow money from the city for renewable energy and efficiency upgrades for their homes and pay it back at a relatively low interest rate folded into their monthly tax bills. (See “Solar Solutions,” 11/14/07.) Sandoval’s plan would enable loans of $20,000 to $40,000 at 3 percent interest to people who voluntarily put solar on their homes.

The city of Berkeley is pursuing a similar plan. But the task force never consulted Sandoval — in fact, he told us that he had no idea Ting’s task force was meeting until a few months ago.

The supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee is slated to review Newsom’s plan April 16.

Solar installers aren’t happy about the delays: “I’m on the disappointed receiving end of that start and stop,” Cinnamon said.

While city officials duke out where the money should come from and who gets it, San Franciscans interested in purchasing panels are left in limbo. Jennifer Jachym, a sales rep from Solar City who used to handle residential contracts in San Francisco, said, “I have worked all over the Bay Area and I’d have to say it seems that the delta between interest and actual purchase is highest here.

“It was hard to get people to pull the trigger,” she continued. “What the San Francisco incentive program basically did was bring the cost incentives here to where they are everywhere else.”

The holdup has dispirited customers and solar companies. Cinnamon said he wasted 10,000 advertising door hangers because of the delay. Solar City also put on hold a handshake deal with the Port of San Francisco to rent a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in the Bayview District for a solar training academy that could turn out 20 new workers a month.

“As a San Francisco resident, I really want to see it happen there, but as a business, I have to think about it differently,” said Peter Rive, chief operating officer of the company. “Almost every city in the Bay Area is aggressively trying to get us to build a training academy in their city.”

TENANTS AND LANDLORDS

Another reason we don’t see more panels on San Francisco roofs is that most San Franciscans are renting and have no control over their roofs. “The landlord doesn’t care. They don’t pay the electric bill,” Cinnamon said. When asked if there were any inroads to be made there, he said, “Nope. That’s not a market I see at all.”

In spite of that, solar companies still are eager to do business here, which means there’s either enough of a market — or enough of a markup.

Rive wouldn’t tell us their exact markup for panels, but said, “The average solar company adds 15 to 25 percent gross margin to the installation. Our gross margin is in line with that.”

Rive’s company has another option for cash-poor San Franciscans, a new “solar lease.” In this scenario, Solar City owns the panels and leases them to homeowners for 15 years. The property owner pays a low up-front cost of a couple of thousand dollars and a monthly lease fee that increases 3.5 percent per year.

For Murphy, the price would be $2,754 down and $88 a month. The panels would still cover only 64 percent of his energy needs, so he would owe PG&E about $70 a month. Because he would be using less energy, PG&E would charge a lower rate, which is something Solar City typically tries to achieve with a solar system.

However, people can’t make money off their solar systems. “People ask about it all the time,” Jachym said. “Especially people in San Francisco. They say ‘I have a house in Sonoma with tons of space. Can I put panels there and offset my energy here?'”

The answer, unfortunately, is no, which means San Franciscans have no incentive to put up more panels than they need and recoup their costs by selling the energy to the grid. Unlike Germany, for example, where people are paid for the excess solar energy they make, California’s net metering laws favor utility companies. If you make more power than you use, you’re donating it to the grid. PG&E sells it to someone else.

If the law was changed — which could be a feature of CCA — citizens could help the city generate more solar energy to sell to customers who don’t have panels, helping the city to meet its overall goal of 51 percent renewable by 2017.

Under Solar City’s lease program, the company gets the federal and state rebates. If Murphy leased for 15 years he’d have an option to buy the used panels, upgrade to new ones, and end or continue the lease. If San Francisco launches the incentive program, the $3,000 from the city could cover the up-front cost and he could get the whole thing rolling for almost no cash. It sounds like a sweet deal.

Except it’s not going to work. Solar City only leases systems of 3.2 kilowatts or more, and only 2.8 could be squeezed onto Murphy’s roof. “I think it’s Murphy’s Law,” Jachym says wryly. “If you have a house that wants solar, a whole row of houses on the street nearby are better suited for it.”

She says the 3.2 cutoff has to do with the company’s bottom line. “If it’s any less than 3.2 the company is losing money.” Ironically, she tells me, “the average system size in San Francisco is even smaller” — usually less than 3.1. Solar City has set the bar high in a place where many people like Murphy are prevented from leasing.

He tells us he isn’t interested in a lease anyway: “I don’t own that.” He’s now more interested in a do-it-yourself situation and wishes the city would put some energy toward that. “If they were serious they would have a city solar store,” he said, imagining a kind of Home Depot for solar, where one could buy panels and wiring, talk with advisors, contract with installers, or just fill out the necessary paperwork for the rebates.

Some people are going ahead anyway, without city support. Nan Foster, a San Francisco homeowner now installing photovoltaic panels and solar water heating, says her middle-class family borrowed money to do these projects, “because we want to do the right thing about the environment and reduce our carbon footprint. It would be a great help to get these rebates from the city.

“The public money for the project would increase the spending of individuals to install solar — so the public funds would leverage much more investment in solar on the part of individuals and businesses,” Foster argued.

There’s another approach that isn’t on the table yet. Eric Brooks, cofounder of the Community Choice Energy Alliance, told us that the city, through CCA, could buy its own panels to place on private homes and businesses, giving those homes and businesses a way to go solar — free.

“Clearly there would be a much higher demand for free solar panels over discounted ones that are still very expensive,” he said. “And because the panels would be owned by the city, all of the savings and revenue could be put right back into building more renewables and efficiency projects, instead of going into the pockets of private property owners.”

Proponents of the mayor’s plan argue that the city can build more solar panels — faster — by diverting public funds to the private sector. “While on its face this is technically true, it is actually a dead-end path,” Brooks said. “Yes, a little more solar would be built a little more quickly. However, once those private panels are built the city will get nothing from them.”

Full disclosure: Murphy is Amanda Witherell’s landlord.

Sheik it

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April 15, 2008
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How much hot queer Arab on the dance floor can you handle? If you’re dating me, it better be a lot.

Others can test their capacity for swivel-hipped, uluutf8g cuties this Saturday at what more sensationalist club critics might dub a "Battle of the Belly Dancers." Two gay-oriented Middle Eastern–themed parties, Bibi and Club La Zeez, butt bejeweled foreheads in different venues — on the first night of Passover, no less. But that’s a different geopolitical kettle of couscous.

Hitting up both events would be ideal, since each is put on by folks of SWANA (Southwest Asian–Northern African) descent; pumps out zills-tinkling contemporary and traditional Persian, Arabic, Latin, and South Asian floor bangers; and serves an underrepresented audience hungry for connection in these unfashionably volatile times. If you are forced to choose, I recommend Bibi. La Zeez, a monthly launched in March at Club Eight by Los Angeles playwright Saleem, is good fun but gives off a touristy vibe — "Magic Carpet" lounge, really? It also caters to a mostly mainstream gay male crowd and uses the word exotic in its press materials. Tacky.

Bibi, on the other many-ringed hand, is a quarterly charitable grassroots affair that has delighted queers of all genders for a year now and is hosted by local playboys Rostam and J. Maximilian. This time around, the party’s at Six and called Bibi Chic, so dress yourself fancy and free. Proceeds go to six queer Middle Eastern foundations, including Iraqi LGBT; IRQO in Iran; and Beirut’s fabulous new LGBT center, Helem. DJs Emancipacion, Masood, and Josh Cheon will throw down beats and performance artist Cherry Gallete and belly dancer Amira will dazzle the crowd.

And what about us queer Arab Americans who’ll be sitting down to Passover seder that evening with our gorgeous Jewish boyfriends? "Both of you come afterward! Bring cookies!" Rostam entreated me over the phone. "There’s room on our dance floor for everyone."

BIBI CHIC

Sat/19, 10 p.m., $15.

Six

60 Sixth St., SF

(415) 863-1221

www.clubsix1.com, www.myspace.com/bibisf

CLUB LA ZEEZ

Sat/19, 9 p.m.–2 a.m., $12–$15

Club Eight

1151 Folsom, SF

(415) 431-1151

www.eightsf.com

The SEIU strikes back

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April 15, 2008
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› jesse@sfbg.com

The Rhode Island Street headquarters for Local 1021 of the giant Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had several surprise visitors April 14. First, International President Andy Stern arrived from Washington DC to speak with the local’s executive board.

Then, after word of Stern’s last minute appearance got out, a group of 20 activists from Oakland–based SEIU affiliate United Healthcare Workers West (UHW) attempted to enter the building and confront Stern about what they perceive to be his anti-democratic administration. They were barred from the meeting. When the Guardian attempted to gain entrance, we were twice escorted to the exit by 1021 staffers. A source inside the union said Stern left through a back door during lunchtime.

Stern’s visit and the dissidents’ foiled attempt to meet him reflect the high level of tension inside SEIU these days. As it prepares to vote on several democratic reform measures at a convention in early June, internal fault lines have split the 1.9 million-member union.

As we reported last week ("Hard Labor," 4/9/08) Stern loyalists have pushed the boundaries of union rules, and perhaps even federal law, to beat back the slate of reforms championed by UHW’s dissident leader, Sal Rosselli.

Now, in response to our reporting and to Rosselli’s movement, leaders inside the labor giant apparently have gone into full damage-control mode.

In fact, an election committee that appears to have been hand-picked by Local 1021’s president already rejected an internal complaint about the election process — and critics are calling foul.

WHO’S A MEMBER?

Two weeks ago, the Guardian reported on a controversial batch of e-mails among SEIU officials. Calling themselves the "salsa team," high-level union staffers — including Damita Davis-Howard, whom Stern appointed as president of 1021, as well as Josie Mooney, a Stern assistant — swapped campaign strategy and exchanged anti-Rosselli talking points during an election to select delegates to the upcoming convention.

On April 4, more than a dozen union members lodged a formal complaint with the organization’s local election committee. The complaint charged that the salsa team’s missives broke union rules against staff involvement in elections. Soon afterward, lawyers representing Rosselli’s union filed suit against Stern and the SEIU — alleging, among other things, that SEIU "officers, employees, and allies" interfered with delegate elections in violation of federal labor law.

While the lawsuit will not see a courtroom for some time, it didn’t take long for the union committee to rule against the members’ complaint. In a memo dated the following Monday, April 7, and obtained by the Guardian, the nine-member body reported to the union’s International Secretary-Treasurer that "the staff (directors and others) named in the challenge are members of Local 1021 and therefore have the same right as all other members" to participate in the election.

The distinction is key: union rules strictly forbid paid staffers from interfering in elections by members. And supporters of union democracy insist that a central tenet of their movement are the notions that staffers work for the membership — and that the members, not the staff, determine union policy (See Opinion, page 7).

The outcome is important not only to the union but to progressive politics in San Francisco. Local 1021 (and Local 790, the San Francisco chapter that predates it) has played a major role in supporting progressive causes and candidates.

The committee’s ruling, and the speed with which it reached its decision, outraged many inside the union. A number of 1021 staffers who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal called the memo "bullshit" when asked to comment.

Union member Maria Guillen, one of the members who signed the complaint, told us that the salsa team’s actions and their exoneration by the election committee "go against the spirit of union democracy." Guillen went on to challenge the assertion that union staff, especially top management like Mooney and Davis-Howard, have the same rights as rank and file members when it comes to campaigning in union elections.

"None of the executive board members I’ve spoken to can recall voting on that. Who had the authority to permit that? … To think that folks with all the resources and all the connections are working against us, it breaks my heart."

The makeup of the committee also raises conflict of interest issues.

According to the provisional bylaws for Local 1021, which were enacted after it was formed in early 2007 by merging 10 separate Northern California locals, 1021’s appointed president Damita Davis-Howard has control "in creating committees and naming members to such committees." Several sources inside the union told us she used this power to select the members of the election committee that apparently ruled on whether she herself broke union rules.

Davis-Howard did not return calls for comment and our attempts to reach committee chair Cassandra Burdick through staff at Local 1021 were unsuccessful.

SEIU international spokesperson Andy McDonald could not confirm whether Davis-Howard had in fact named the election committee members to their positions

ROUGH STUFF

In another indication of just how radioactive SEIU’s internal dissension has become, numerous Democratic politicians and party officials in California recently received a letter signed by five presidents of SEIU locals around the state, including Davis-Howard. The letter, obtained by the Guardian and dated April 2 — the day after we broke the salsa team story — seeks to reassure party members that the union will clean its own house. It also appears to warn the state’s political leaders not to choose sides between Rosselli and Stern.

With millions of dollars in its coffers, SEIU is a prime source of campaign cash for politicians.

"We have a democratic process for resolving our internal differences," the letter reads. "In fact, our members will debate and set the course of our union at our convention in June. We hope that you will respect the right of our members to decide for themselves the direction of their union and avoid involvement in our internal affairs."

SEIU’s alleged hardball tactics have extended beyond its internal conflict in recent weeks. The union has been feuding with the California Nurses Association over allegations that the nurses’ union has been attempting to woo SEIU members into switching to the competing union.

Last week, several CNA board members in Southern California claimed that SEIU staffers showed up at their doors and confronted them. SEIU confirmed that it’s sending people to CNA members’ houses, but said there was no intimidation. And last weekend, a large crowd of SEIU members allegedly stormed a convention in Michigan put on by the magazine Labor Notes. A press release from CNA claimed several people were injured and that numerous CNA officials had to flee "out the back of the hall for their safety."

SEIU’s Lynda Tran confirmed that "things got a little rough" when a group of SEIU members and staff attempted to confront a CNA official. "Folks from both sides got injured," she added.

Labor activist and author Herman Benson, of the Association for Union Democracy in New York, told the Guardian that the divisions within SEIU, and its conflicts with other unions, are nothing new in the labor movement. For nearly as long as unions have existed, he said, power struggles have taken place among union brass. "Any incumbency has enormous weapons at its disposal."

Benson praised Stern for his efforts in recruiting new members for SEIU. As the rest of organized labor has continued to decline in America, Stern’s shop has brought in nearly 1 million new members. But Benson took issue with what he perceived as intolerance for dissent within his ranks.

"Stern has a vision of an almost militarized bureaucratic labor movement … but if you can’t have criticism before your international convention, when can you have it?"

Bumping and thriving

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April 15, 2008
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Crazy be the knowledge of self." If you’re into conscious hip-hop, you might expect such an interpersonal refrain as this intro to Black Spade’s "Good Crazy" on his intricately self-produced debut, To Serve with Love, out last month on Om Hip Hop, an imprint of San Francisco’s Om Records. Still, there’s something new going on here, something hot that snags your mind and your kicks and refuses to let go.

Maybe it’s Spade’s technique. The rapper otherwise known as Veto Money easily shifts between samples from every genre imaginable, funked-out click tracks, alien blips reminiscent of delightfully geeky hip-hop producers such as Styrofoam, and choruses that sound like he’s singing to you personally. His tight flows simulate a head bobbing up and down and grinning by pushing syllables into full beats, with rhymes and emphases hitting on downbeats instead of more typical upbeat syncopation.

Or maybe it’s just a simple sense of freedom. Remember when freedom was fun? Om Hip Hop is doing for the experimental hip-hop community what they’ve become known for worldwide in the electronic music world: finding talented musicians who could be superstars but are more interested in the music than in superficial fame, connecting them with other mavericks, and giving them free reign to rock the house. It’s the hip-hop version of what the Los Angeles CityBeat has dubbed Om’s effective "anti-superstar-DJ music policy."

"I’ve never worked on a project I didn’t believe in 100 percent," said Jonathan McDonald, speaking in Om’s SoMa headquarters, surrounded by countless promo discs and magazines. McDonald, who started out as an intern at Om while he was working as the hip-hop buyer at Amoeba Music, is now in charge of A&R and publicity for Om Hip Hop. He was psyched two years ago when Om founder Chris Smith decided to create and devote resources to the new imprint. Hip-hop was integral to Smith’s original vision for Om in 1995, said McDonald. "But when dance culture really took off in the city, Om followed," he said. The phenomenal success of Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz Vol. 1 (1996) — still Om’s bestselling record — outplayed early hip-hop projects such as People Under the Stairs.

With a stage name that plays on race, death, and the name of a ’70s New York street gang, Black Spade easily shifts between social critique ("Head Busters fightin’ security at the Mono / Should I sell dope or slave at McDonald’s?") and romanticism ("Excuse me miss, I know we’re fighting / But what is that smell? It’s so exciting"). Yet another Om Hip Hop artist, Crown City Rockers’ Raashan Ahmad, who now resides in Oakland, expands this sense of storytelling on The Push, which will be out in May. Considering everything from his mother’s battle with cancer to the birth of his son, Ahmad’s liquid lyricism takes us on a striking emotional ride, with stops for inspiration ("The linguist synonymous with soul power") and praise ("Hip-hop saved my life"). "I wanted to show all sides of hip-hop — and all sides of me," said Ahmad, on the phone from Los Angeles. By offering unprecedented support, Om let him create an album that even shows his "insecurities," he said. "Everything they said they’d do, they’ve done. They gave me complete creative freedom."

In June, Om will release the One’s Superpsychosexy. McDonald hopes that the Spade and Ahmad discs will help prep listeners for the Charlotte, N.C., artist’s "left field" sound, which includes hypnotic production and elastic, naughty-and-nice soul vocals. The One, né Geoffrey Edwards, would probably think of this pre-exposure as foreplay. "Superpsychosexy is music to make babies to. No, scratch that — it’s music to practice making babies to!" he said with a laugh, on the phone from his home. The One’s father is a minister. From a young age, his family was encouraged to create on multiple instruments, and on tracks such as "Drippin," and "Milkshake Thick," he summons some very hot demons.

The mixture of local and global artists has played a major role in Om Records’ success. Their Bay Area talent includes Zeph and Azeem; Zion I and the Grouch; and J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, which has a new full-length coming later this year. Om has also formed a partnership with imeem, a San Francisco social networking site based around music, which McDonald believes will be a "driving force in new media."

It’s a perfect match. Om Hip Hop is all about community and shows no signs of slowing down. Colossus’s West Oaktown (2005), the first Om Hip Hop release, presented original funky tracks alongside hip-hop remixes, so you could feel the DJ at work. Om’s "Spring Sessions" show at the Mezzanine is bound to see some healthy human remixing, live and in the house. *

BLACK SPADE

With Supreme Beings of Leisure, Turntables on the Hudson, Samantha James, and J Boogie’s Dubtronic Science

Fri/18, 10 p.m., $15

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

Nickels and dimes

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April 15, 2008
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We get a lot of press releases announcing that San Francisco has made it to the top of another "greenest" list. Popular Science named SF the second-greenest city in the nation last February. Sustainlane.com called this place the second-greenest city in 2006. Reader’s Digest added honors for the fifth-cleanest city in 2005, the same year San Francisco hosted the UN’s World Environment Day.

The city’s ban on plastic grocery bags is spreading, and last year Mayor Gavin Newsom won a Green Cross Award from Global Green USA alongside Irmelin DiCaprio, the mother of film star Leonardo DiCaprio.

But none of that adds up to what the city really needs: cash.

Then the US Department of Energy in late March designated three more California cities — Sacramento, San Jose, and Santa Rosa — as new "Solar American Cities" — and this award came with money attached. And the DOE has dough: the agency requested $25 billion from Congress this year.

The solar grant was worth $2.4 million. The money was divided among 12 cities nationwide, leaving each municipality with just $200,000. And that was supposed to cover a two-year period.

Berkeley, San Francisco, and San Diego made the "Solar American Cities" list in 2007. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment received the money, and a conciliatory Johanna Partin, the renewable energy program manager there, said it was the only grant from Bush’s Solar America Initiative her office had actually applied for.

San Francisco at least will able to use the money to help the owners of large buildings assess what it would take to install solar technology. We’ve already digitally mapped the city’s grandest roofs.

Margie Bates, a project manager for the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program in Golden, Colo., told us that the grant includes $200,000 in additional credit for hiring local experts to advise building owners on the technology or retain the expertise of DOE officials themselves.

"The funding is allowing us to do some pieces of our solar program that we didn’t otherwise have funding for. So in that sense it’s good," she said. "But, you know, $200,000 over two years is not a lot of money."

What union democracy means

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April 15, 2008
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OPINION The troubles in the Service Employees International Union, and within SEIU Local 1021 in San Francisco, share a similar theme. How much do individual locals direct their work in the face of the international’s set agenda? And more important, how do union members themselves direct the vision, use of resources, and work of both their local and international union? What is union democracy and how is it made real?

Active members in Local 1021 learned a painful lesson recently when we discovered that senior 1021 staff ran a clandestine campaign during a member election to choose delegates to SEIU’s quadrennial convention this June. These same senior staff demanded that their junior staff remain completely neutral and uninvolved in the election.

A key tenet of union democracy is recognition by all parties that the union staffers work for the members, whose dues pay for their salaries and benefits, their offices, and the programs run by the union.

Local 1021’s governing bodies were appointed by Andy Stern, president of the international, at the time of the merger of 10 locals into one. Next year, Local 1021 holds its first officer and executive board elections. It is essential that we lay out bylaws and an election process guaranteeing that the direction of our local union will be led by its members.

We are at a vital juncture. Do we allow the programs and process to be driven by the international, Stern, and his loyalist staff — or do we assert ourselves as members, examine the issues for ourselves, and choose how we prioritize the work to be done?

At stake is not just the true empowerment of our union, but its credibility. We demand a sense of fair play from the employers we bargain with and consistently take a hard line against managerial favoritism.

In practically every contract campaign, there is a battle over the definition of our union and our very identity. We put forth photographs of our members, use their quotes in the press, and otherwise say to the public, the press, and elected officials that “these people are the union — the nurses, transit workers, librarians, road crews and others who serve our community.”

Meanwhile, management — as well as anti-union lobbies, officials, and think tanks — speak in more pejorative terms of “union bosses” and “big labor,” conjuring images of bureaucrats who cut deals, make the real decisions, and are disconnected from their rank-and-file membership.

It is critical that we don’t prove our opponents right. If the boss-like behavior of our leaders and the manner in which they govern this union promotes double standards, favoritism, and a lack of local autonomy, we only make it easier for anti-union forces to drive a wedge between our members and their union.

Nobody has more at stake in SEIU than the members who pay the bills and whose wages, benefits, and working conditions are being negotiated. Without the international showing respect for local autonomy or democratic empowerment at the local and worksite levels, we cannot hope for existing members to feel like stakeholders in their union, or to inspire prospective members to join us in the future.

Mary C. Magee and Roxanne Sanchez

Mary C. Magee, RN, works at San Francisco General Hospital. Roxanne Sanchez works for Bay Area Rapid Transit. They are members of SEIU Local 1021.

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