News

Muni’s makeover

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY San Francisco’s streets are some of the most congested in the nation, our gasoline prices are reaching record highs, and parking is both scarce and expensive (particularly given the rising cost of parking tickets). But most drivers still haven’t been willing to switch to public transit, something that Muni officials hope to change with the help of a highly anticipated study that’s just been released.

The Transit Effectiveness Program (TEP) is a systemic proposal to make Muni faster and more attractive, mostly by focusing resources on the busiest routes. The study kicks off what could be a transformative year for the Municipal Transportation Agency, which got another $26 million annually through the passage of Proposition A in November 2007 and has been struggling for years to meet its on-time performance goals and win back lost riders.

It has been over two decades since Muni had its last major overhaul. The TEP boasts "hundreds of changes" in the works, from larger buses to route additions. The current draft of the proposal reflects 18 months of data collection on rider trends and community input. Officials found residents citywide were most concerned with reliability in the system.

"We have some schedules that are up to 10 minutes short of how long the line actually takes," said Julie Kirschbaum, program manager of the TEP. "We also need to reduce the number of breakdowns. We need more mechanics."

Data also showed 75 percent of Muni passengers board in the system’s 15 busiest corridors, which include the 49 Mission/Van Ness, 38 Geary, and 30 Stockton routes. TEP calls for increasing service on these corridors by 14 percent and cutting wait times to five minutes or less.

The study also proposed new routes to better reflect changing growth patterns and travel needs. For the first time, a bus would directly connect Potrero Hill with downtown. A new "downtown circulator" would loop Market Street on Columbus, Polk, and Folsom streets, replacing the 19 Polk and 12 Folsom. Some proposals would increase service between neighborhoods in the western and southern parts of the city as well as create better connections to BART and Caltrain for those who commute to or from the city.

University students and employees could also benefit from the TEP, as increased service to destinations such as San Francisco State University and University of San Francisco were high priorities for the project team. In order to maximize resources, some routes could be scaled back or removed, potentially making the walk to the bus stop a few blocks longer for some city residents. For example, in the Mission District, there is a proposal to fold the existing routes on Folsom and Bryant into a faster, higher-capacity route on Harrison. A proposal to end the 56 Rutland route would leave Visitation Valley even more isolated.

Once the TEP’s environmental impact report is complete sometime next year, there will be public hearings before the MTA board decides which recommendations to adopt. The Board of Supervisors could ultimately vote to overrule controversial route changes.

The TEP is one of many high profile green initiatives Mayor Gavin Newsom has rolled out, from a solar panel initiative he introduced with Assessor Phil Ting to the controversial appointment of Wade Crowfoot as the director of climate protection initiatives, whose salary is paid with MTA funds.

"The best thing we can do is get people out of single occupancy vehicles…. This mode shift is my primary goal," Crowfoot said at a Feb. 27 public information workshop, one of many planned throughout the coming months to educate and receive feedback from residents on the TEP.

Yet like many of Newsom’s splashier initiatives, the plan lacks clear funding sources and commitments. "There’s a whole capital piece to the TEP that’s been missing the whole time," Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City and a member of the TEP’s policy advisory board, told us. "Without this capital element, TEP won’t happen."

Many of the proposals could be covered by reallocating operational costs, yet some expensive projects remain without a clear source of financing. Despite the price tag, Radulovich said ambitious investments now could more than pay for themselves in the long run: "If you’re smart about how you spend money, you can use capital money to save money in operating costs down the line."

Prince Harry and the Bush twins

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The breaking news about 23-year-old Prince Harry secretly being deployed in Afghanistan as a battlefield air controller created a public sensation in Britain. It also resulted in the quick return home of the prince – third in line to the British throne – for security reasons.

The episode pointed to the British tradition of expecting the sons of British kings and queens to enter military service when their country is at war.

The same was true in the United States during World War II, when four of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s sons entered the armed forces, as did General Dwight Eisenhower’s son, John Eisenhower.

Since the expansion of the number of women in the military, what about George W. Bush’s daughters – Barbara and Jenna? Their father repeatedly describes the war in Iraq as crucially important to protect the United States and to spread democracy in the Middle East.

President Bush also repeatedly asserted that the losses of life and the costs of the Iraq war are “worth the sacrifice.” Whose sacrifice?

Certainly not that of the family in the White House. There have been no indications in this town of 24/7 gossip of either the parents urging or the daughters considering joining the armed forces.

Recently, a Midwestern mother, who lost her son in Iraq, declared, half weeping, “Why am I planning for a funeral when George W. Bush is planning for a wedding?”

Is this mother being unfair? Or is she reflecting a feeling that there is a double standard operating here?

There is a certain moral authority to governing — setting an example, sharing in the sacrifice initiated by the White House — that escapes both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Both were early draft dodgers who were gung-ho for the Vietnam war so long as someone else in their age group was doing the fighting. They both have children who have declined to serve during the Iraq war-occupation.

It would be a different question if the Bush and Cheney offspring had come out publicly against the war or were conscientious objectors. No signs of these positions thus far.

There is a simple safeguard regarding the decision to make war while leaving the younger adult sons and daughters of Congress and the White House enjoying civilian life as the casualties and illnesses of the “other Americans” keep mounting. Ask your member of Congress to introduce a one page bill that says the following: Whenever Congress and the White House take our country to war, all able-bodied military-age children of every member of Congress, the President and the Vice-President will be conscripted automatically into the armed forces.

When politicians’ children are required to go off to war, it tends to concentrate their minds toward waging peace.

Gonzalez joins Nader’s pursuit of infamy

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matt-cover.jpg
Our Nov. 19, 2003 cover story
It’s bad enough that Ralph Nader is running for president yet again, but whatever. He’s already ruined his once stellar reputation and nobody was going to take another sequel that seriously. Yet I’m truly saddened by today’s news that Matt Gonzalez has agreed to be Nader’s running mate and angry about Matt’s deceptive, preemptive effort (in a guest editorial in yesterday’s Beyond Chron) to knock Barack Obama down a few notches.

That seems to signal this independent, ego-driven campaign’s desire to once again paint the Democrats and Republicans with the same broad brush, denying the obvious difference between Obama and John McCain, as well as the need to be strategic in running for this high-profile office during such a divisive era. In doing so, they undermine the legitimate and desperately needed feeling of hope that Obama is inspiring, sowing cynicism and giving McCain a chance to win the White House.

Nader has always bristled at the “spoiler” label, saying he has a right to run and force a debate on his issues. That’s true. But when Gonzalez characterizes Obama’s campaign as, “one of accommodation and concession to the very political powers that we need to reign in and oppose if we are to make truly lasting advances,” it’s clear that they really aren’t aiming much higher than spoiler.

And if they help spoil an ascendant Obama campaign, they will do irreparable harm to the peace movement, the chance for fundamental change, efforts to bring together progressives and communities of color, people’s sense of hope, and to their own reputations.

Love and war

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Planet Mamet is normally a very manly-man’s world, where alpha males growl, snap, and try to steal one another’s bones. Women either similarly play rough or become obstacles to the overweening guy-versus-guy competition. Ergo, Boston Marriage is an anomaly: seldom staged since its 1999 premiere, this is a most atypical David Mamet play in that the characters are all female, the language florid, and the tone giddy — even, well, campy.

It probably seems more so than hitherto in John Fisher’s Theatre Rhinoceros staging. Mamet has certainly written other comedies: American Conservatory Theater’s recent revivals of Sexual Perversities in Chicago (1974), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988) highlighted their hilarity. But it is inherently cruel humor, the kind you know precedes some character’s genuine evisceration.

Boston Marriage is different — not kind, exactly (or at all), but larky and farcical rather than predatory. Even though it ends on the author’s frequent knife-twisting note of revealing just who’s conned who, this arch period fancy doesn’t have his usual hunt-or-be-hunted severity. It’s not out for blood — it’s just bitchy.

The 19th-century term Boston marriage referred to spinsters of means who chose to cohabit. For platonic companionship, society once politely presumed; because they’re muff-diving from the shores of Lesbos, we assume now. Alas, no Kinsey poll exists to reveal just how much either public myth translated into private practice. "Woman of fashion" Anna (a sublimely self-absorbed Trish Tillman) is thrilled to greet "you, my et cetera!" Claire (Alexandra Creighton), just back from an unexplained "prolonged absence." The latter is nonplussed to discover her housemate has redecorated their drawing room in flower-patterned rose chintz — Jon Wai-keung Lowe’s set design is vivid — but strangely neutral when Anna announces the home makeover was paid for by a wealthy male "protector" now keeping her as mistress.

Viewing this as a sacrifice she’s made to secure Claire’s and her material comfort, Anna is anything but neutral when her "dearest one" announces she too has news: she is in love, with a "young person" of the female persuasion. Sugar turns to spite in a blink, as Anna snipes, "I expect thanks — I get nothing but the tale of your new rutting!" — with worse soon to come from both sides. Compounding the offense, Claire has a favor to ask: the use of their house for a rendezvous with her chickadee this very afternoon. At first it seems Anna will allow that "vile assignation" over her dead body. But she’s not above negotiation, or trickery, or even voyeuristic curiosity. When the guest arrives, however, things take an unexpected turn that leaves both ladies frantic at the possibility of ruin.

Authorial inspiration flags a bit in the second half as the characters go off on too many conversational digressions and scheme their salvation in I Love Lucy terms. But Fisher’s honed staging and excellent cast (nicely clad in period frocks by Jeremy Cole) work agreeably throughout. Mamet pours on the antiquated phraseology ("You Visigoth!," "O land of Goshen!") but also indulges in some surprisingly crass (and funny) double entendres. There’s no end of hilarity in Anna’s abuse of maid Catherine (Pamela Davis, doing a neat parody of a classic stage type), at whom she spews endless anti-Irish condescension — never mind that the poor woman is Scottish.

Boston Marriage‘s characters may be far from three-dimensional, but they’re not supposed to be; they inhabit a universe as artificially stylized as that of the "lesbians" in Jean Genet’s plays (or Holly Hughes’s). Nor are they exercises in authorial misogyny: even operating in a more absurdist mode than usual, Mamet grants them the same steely wills, obstinate prejudices, emotional pressure points, and surprising resources as his most sharklike male combatants. Still, Anna and Claire need each other — the goal here isn’t power but love, however much power must be wielded to get it.

BOSTON MARRIAGE

Extended through March 9

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; $15–$35

Theatre Rhinoceros

2926 16th St., SF

(415) 552-4100, ext. 104

www.therhino.org

What a pain

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

In the process of starting to crawl out of my "I just had two babies! Leave me alone!" cocoon, I’ve been teaching some new workshops, one on what it’s really like to have twins, and one that I’m calling "Is There Sex after Motherhood?" — hoping the idea comes across even though motherhood is, technically, a lifelong venture ending in death, after which, one assumes, not so much sex. I debuted the sex one recently at the original "clean, well-lighted place for buying things to stick up your hoo-ha," Good Vibrations. There was a decent crowd, and everybody seemed to have a good time; and when we got to the Q&A, I was gratified by the number of questions. (That’s how you can tell if people were interested in your presentation, right? Not so interested = polite thanks and drifting away; interested = hang around asking questions until the management kicks you out.) There’s some serious sadness haunting the new and newish mothers though, so while it’s all good and fun to talk about how a simple blow job between child care tasks can save your marriage (ask me how!), some of the questions stayed with me after we’d cleared away the cookies and juice (yes, mothers are served toddler snacks, don’t ask me why) and gone home.

It’s surely true that during the first few years after having kids, your sex life tends to be … well, "lackluster" is a nice word, but I think "laughable" might be more accurate in a lot of cases. Some of the women at these events are really beating themselves up over it though, which I guess is expected and is why I’m talking about this stuff in the first place, but one of them really saddened me when she said, quite matter-of-factly, that intercourse was still quite uncomfortable for her several years later and she hadn’t mentioned this to her husband. "I think you need to communicate with your husband," the other speaker, a therapist, offered. "I think you should find out what hurts and make it stop hurting," I countered.

How many women, mothers or not, are having painful sex and just not mentioning it? The most common cause of uncomfortable insertive sex is nothing more complicated than a case of "not ready–itis" or lack of lubrication, but a Harvard study cited by the National Vulvodynia Association (see www.nva.org/media_corner/fact_sheet.html) estimates that 16 percent of women in the United States suffer from the chronic vulvar pain called vulvodynia or its subtype, vulvar vestibulitis, affecting just the opening to the vagina. That’s a lot of women! Most are young when it starts, and most can locate no particular event or infection that set it off, but the pain can be paralyzing (many describe it as feeling like acid was poured onto sensitive tissues, or "like knives"). So we have a mysterious etiology; a location in the parts that many women simply don’t mention in public, even if that public comprises their doctor, themselves, and nobody else; and an exclusively female population of sufferers; and what do we get? Predictably, silence, confusion, and shame. And while I have never been a big fan of men-versus-women jokes and somehow doubt that if men got pregnant, ma- or paternity leave really would be two years long with full pay (come on!), if men often had agonizing, unexplained pain in their manly man parts, surely they wouldn’t have been subjected to generations of doctors pronouncing it "all in your head."

The good news — there has to be some — is that vulvodynia is finally getting the research money and attention it deserves. Recent research (see www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/health/29brod.html?_r=1&ref=science) has turned up solid, quantifiable, and most important, curable causes of the pain: some women, the researchers found, had serious inflammation two cell layers deep that had not responded to steroids, a typical treatment. What’s even more interesting is that many of the women have a genetic abnormality — as I’m sure they could’ve guessed, considering the kind of hypersensitivity they’ve been putting up with — in which there are too many nerve fibers in the area, which produces a pain response to what in other women would just be normal sensation, like the pressure from your jeans against your crotch while seated. The linked article contains some success stories; the treatments (surgical or medical) are not perfect, but they have the potential to make life worth living again for some women who’ve been silently suffering, too embarrassed or too debilitated to say anything about it. That does count as good news, no?

I don’t really see a National Crotch Pain Month hitting the calendar anytime soon, but I do see this as the beginning of the end of one more way for women to suffer in silence and shame, so a cautious hooray for that.

Love,

Andrea

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

Beyond beds

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› news@sfbg.com

What do army barracks, prisons, hospitals, and dog pounds have in common? They all have minimum and legally enforceable standards of care, something absent in San Francisco’s homeless shelters. Legislation to fix that problem now appears to be shaping up as the latest political skirmish pitting fiscally conservative Mayor Gavin Newsom against progressives on the Board of Supervisors.

The Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee met Feb. 20 to hear testimony and discuss proposed legislation that seeks to impose basic requirements on city-funded shelters, improve complaint procedures, and allow fines for noncompliance (see "Setting Standards," 1/30/07).

Prior to the hearing, dozens of activists, city officials, and homeless people rallied on the steps of City Hall in support of the legislation, holding colorfully painted signs with references to some of the proposed requirements, including "nutritious meals," "clean sheets," and "8-hour-a-day sleep."

Marlon Mendieta, program director at the Dolores Street shelter, took to the podium to make his case for supporting the legislation: "It may seem strange that a service provider would be here to support legislation that will cost money and more time and more work — it’s easy though. It’s an issue of human rights."

The scene was just as lively inside as demonstrators and officials packed the board’s chambers. The committee — composed of Sups. Aaron Peskin, Bevan Dufty, and Tom Ammiano (sponsor of the ordinance) — took testimony, almost all of it urging the committee to pass the legislation on to the full Board of Supervisors for approval.

Dariush Kayhan, who has been on the job for six weeks as the mayor’s appointed homeless policy director, gave the only testimony urging the committee not to pass the legislation.

"This is the part where we have some concerns, the fiscal part," Kayhan said. "Give us more time, maybe we can plow some of these items — the ones we can agree on — into the existing contracts," he said, referring to the contracts awarded to nonprofit organizations who manage the city’s shelters.

While the city’s contracts with shelter providers do spell out many standards, a recent Guardian investigation (see "Shelter Shuffle," 2/12/08) and work by the Shelter Monitoring Committee, which developed the recommendations embodied in Ammiano’s legislation, found they are often ignored with no consequences. The Guardian also found that people are being turned away from the shelters every night despite vacancies.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, in a letter to supervisors obtained by the Guardian, voiced his concern with the fiscal impact of the legislation, citing a $2.4 million price tag, the high end of costs developed by the Budget Analyst’s Office, which said the legislation could cost $1.7 million or even less. Advocates of the legislation are confident they can bring its price down.

The $2.4 million estimate assumes a new security guard will be hired at each shelter to meet safety requirements. The legislation does not specifically mandate new personnel and many argue increased staff training and facility improvements could provide cheaper alternatives.

The Shelter Monitoring Committee, composed of mayoral and board appointees, estimates the cost will be closer to $1 million, which amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the city’s total projected deficit of $225 million.

"This is an investment in a population that has not been invested in in a long time," committee chair Quintin Mecke said at the hearing. "I don’t think there is any reason to wait to make sure people have access to toilet paper, have access to clean conditions, have access to ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] -compatible beds."

At Ammiano’s request, the committee decided to postpone the vote for two more weeks to try to work out differences with the Mayor’s Office, and set the next hearing for March 5. If the supervisors proceed without Newsom’s support and he ends up vetoing the legislation, it would take the vote of eight supervisors to override and implement the standards anyway.

Newsom and the board have been at odds over homelessness and other budget priorities. Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour drop-in shelter, is now caught in the middle of the political tug-of-war between budget cuts and shelter improvements. There is a provision within the standards of care legislation that mandates a 24-hour emergency drop-in center. At the time it was drafted, Buster’s Place filled this requirement.

However, due to the timing of the midyear budget cuts ordered by Newsom, the Department of Public Health cut off funding for Buster’s, effectively closing the center at the end of March (see "No Shelter from the Budget Storm," 2/20/08). It is now unclear how the requirement will be met if the legislation passes.

"We’re tired of having centers like Buster’s Place on the chopping block," Mecke told the Guardian. "It’s ludicrous to keep going in this cycle over and over again." Buster’s was slated to close six months ago but was rescued by a Board of Supervisors’ budget add-back, and a year before that, McMillan’s (another 24-hour center) was forced shut its doors.

The ordinance seems to challenge Newsom’s recent efforts to whittle back shelter services. It would allocate more funds to a department Newsom is trying to cut and assure the existence of an emergency 24-hour center, a clear departure from Newsom’s recent announcement that he wants to ultimately "get San Francisco out of the shelter business."

The most controversial requirement within the standards of care legislation seems to be its enforcement mechanism, calling for fines of $2,500 levied against the nonprofit service providers for noncompliance. While Kayhan voiced reservations about creating new staff positions to carry out enforcement, the SMC has insisted the fines are crucial and will only be used as a last resort.

"In 2004, the supervisors [created the] Shelter Monitoring Committee because contract compliance was not working," Mecke said. "If there are policies in theory, they should be legalized and should become mandates and be enforced."

Barbra Wismer, the medical director of Tom Waddell’s clinic, which frequently serves homeless men and women, urged attendees at the budget meeting to put politics aside and remember the importance of shelter standards, not just for the current homeless population, but for all San Francisco residents.

"If there was a natural disaster like an earthquake, or a fiscal disaster like increased foreclosures, and 1 to 2 percent of people — 14,000 in San Francisco — had to be put in emergency shelters," Wismer said, "we do not have any standards to protect them."

Building green in SF

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Wind turbines and solar panels may soon sprout on San Francisco rooftops as the city considers rival plans to implement mandatory green design standards for new residential and commercial buildings.

One ordinance proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Green Building Task Force would require new commercial construction of more than 5,000 square feet, residential buildings above 75 feet, and renovations to buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certified by 2012, the second-highest designation.

The U.S. Green Building Council developed the point-based LEED system based on numerous green factors. The lowest green standard is LEED Certified, followed by Silver, Gold, and Putf8um. The new Academy of Sciences building, with the country’s largest living roof, is LEED Putf8um.

Newsom’s legislation would start off by mandating requiring only the lowest standard, LEED Certified, which requires 26 points, and gradually move to LEED Gold by 2012. But Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has introduced an ordinance that would require the same buildings to immediately earn LEED Gold certification.

According to the LEED system, most existing buildings already have between 18 to 22 points, so Newsom’s proposed goal should be fairly easily attainable. A bike rack outside a building qualifies for 1 point. Proximity to mass transit gains another point, and Muni runs within two blocks of 90 percent of all San Francisco residences, according to the Municipal Transportation Agency.

At a green building standards workshop Feb. 20 at the San Francisco Green Party’s office, about 20 people voiced their concerns with the ordinances in front of three city commissioners.

"We need to correct the language to include all buildings," said panelist Patricia Gerber, a member of the city’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force. The San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis last year concluded both proposed ordinances would impact only 38 percent of the construction industry. "We should look to Europe for inspiration," Gerber recommended. "They have much stricter standards."

Some European nations started mandatory green construction in the mid-’90s, but critics say the United States has lagged.

"There are no minimum requirements on windows, insulation, and leaks," Gerber told the Guardian, describing the proposed ordinances. "LEED is a joke."

But Mark Westlund, spokesman for the Department of the Environment, defended Newsom’s longer LEED certification timeline. "We want to develop a green building plan that business can work with," he told us.

The Green Building Task Force claims that businesses need time to adjust to the higher costs associated with green materials, such as EnergyStar windows, can reduce heating costs by 30 to 40 percent. "They’re expensive because they’re used on a small scale. The minute they require it, it will become cheaper," John Rizzo, Green Party member and City College Trustee, told the audience. "It would be great if this could be done on a statewide level."

Panelists noted that green buildings save money in energy costs over the long run. Another criticism raised at the workshop was the Newsom plan’s loopholes. "Even if a project is approved green, it might not end up green," Gerber told us. If a construction company runs out of money for example, it can ask the planning director to waive LEED certification.

In addition, the event attendees questioned the credibility of the mayor’s Green Building Task Force, which does not include any environmentalists. Rather, it is composed of developers, financiers, architects, and engineers.

"We feel it represents a good variety of industry people, and so far we haven’t received any negative responses on the ordinance," Mark Palmer, San Francisco’s green building coordinator, told us.

Smaller residential buildings in San Francisco will not require LEED certification, but could be required to follow a GreenPoint scorecard developed by Berkeley nonprofit Build It Green.

Newsom’s ordinance will be presented March 19 at the Building Inspection Commission, which has already forwarded Peskin’s measure to he Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee. According to Peskin’s office, the two ordinances will likely be combined once supervisors decide which standard to seek.

The case closes

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I’ll start with a correction: I wrote last week that Cleveland and San Francisco were the only two cities where the chain that owns the SF Weekly faces direct competition from another alternative paper.

Actually, Village Voice Media, which used to be called New Times, owns the Seattle Weekly. The Stranger, owned by Tim Keck, competes directly against the Weekly.

And the LA Weekly, also a VVM paper, competes against the much smaller Los Angeles City Beat.

My point – and the point that we brought up in trial – was that VVM does very well in markets where there is no direct, head-to-head competition from another alternative paper of the same size and market share, but does badly when it faces real competition. I’m not the only one who thinks this; allow me to quote a Jan 27, 2003 filing by the U.S. Department of Justice, which had accused New Times and VVM, which were still separate companies, of conspiring to kill competition in two cities.

“In markets where they faced no direct alternative newsweekly competitor,” the federal complaint reads, “both defendants had double-digit annual profit margins. However, in Cleveland and Los Angeles … their profit margins were pinched.”

So I think that’s pretty clear.

The bigger story, of course, is that testimony ended today in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing case against the SF Weekly and its corporate parent. Judge Marla Miller has set closing arguments for Thursday morning. Then the case, which has been pending since 2004, will finally go to a jury.

The Weekly’s lawyers pulled a weird move at the very end of the trial, recalling Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann to the witness stand and asking him a question that had almost nothing to do with the issues at hand. Brugmann had testified early in the trial, and on cross-examination, he was asked if he knew that the San Francisco Chronicle had lost some $300 million over the past few years.

No, Bruce said; Hearst Corp, which owns the Chron, is a privately held corporation and nobody’s sure exactly what the numbers are.

This time around, Weekly lawyer H. Sinclair Kerr pulled out a Guardian story from a year ago that reported on court records showing a $330 million Chronicle loss. I guess the implication was the Bruce didn’t remember what was in his own paper (frankly, I didn’t remember the exact figure either; I review almost every one of the hundreds of news stories we run every year, but I can’t swear to recall every detail of every single one).

Bruce’s response: Sure, we reported on the best figures we could find. And the point was?

Of course, the Weekly is trying to argue that since some daily newspapers are losing money, it would be reasonable to expect any an alternative newspaper in San Francisco to lose money, too. And thus any financial hit the Guardian has taken over the past seven years is the fault of market conditions, not predatory pricing by a big Phoenix-based chain.

The final witness in the case – Bill Johnson, the publisher of the Palo Alto Weekly, called by the Guardian to rebut the Weekly’s financial experts – made a strong case that the whole “dailies-are-losing-money-so-the-weeklies-should-too” line of argument is deeply flawed.

Johnson, whose company also owns the Pacific Sun and four community papers, testified that “there are big differences between the way market forces have affected dailies and non-daily papers.”

He pointed out that dailies have been hit much harder by the Internet: Before sites like Craiglist emerged, a large percentage of the revenue of daily papers came from classified ads, most of which have moved to the web. Weeklies were never as dependent as classified, he said.

Perhaps more important, much of the information that readers used to get from their morning daily paper – national and international news – can now be found just as easily on the web.

But papers like the Guardian still offer unique local content that can’t be found anywhere else. “Local papers have this connection with their local audience,” he explained. In fact, he said, “most non-daily publishers I know have done very well” during the past seven years, the time period the lawsuit covers.

He explained that the Palo Alto Weekly saw its display-ad revenues drop in 2002, but quickly rebounded. The dot-com bust and 9/11 had an impact, of course, he said, but after a year or so, “we held our ground and regained ground.” That was also true of his other Bay Area papers, Johnson said.

Johnson also discussed the Weekly’s theory that the San Francisco market is so full of media that the two alternative papers aren’t direct competitors in their own market. “Those two papers are looking for the same audience,” he said.

Johnson, who sat through the testimony of Harvard economist Joseph Kalt, completely dismissed the eminent professor’s theory that it would be irrational for the Weekly to try to damage the Guardian through below-cost selling. If one paper has deeper pockets and can drop its prices, it will gain market share. The smaller competitor will be forced to lower its prices, and both papers will start to lose money. But the paper with greater resources can continue to grow, showing advertisers that it’s becoming dominant in the market, and the paper with no source of outside capital won’t be able to keep up.

“It happens all the time,” Johnson said.

Kerr objected, and Judge Miller ordered that last remark stricken from the record.

Glad to be unhappy

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Terence Davies is coming to town. For anyone who loves the cinema, this is news of paramount importance — and MGM-level musical magnitude. Davies is one of the greatest directors of the final quarter of the 20th century. He’s created at least two acknowledged classics, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The House of Mirth (2000), and I count his 1992 rendering of a movie-mad childhood, The Long Day Closes, as one of my all-time favorite films. In a single shot that passes across the floors of a family apartment, Davies captures the magic of nature mingling with artifice (a waterfall of raindrops, reflected from a window, passing over the leaf pattern of a carpet), then conveys the passage of time with a potency that never fails to bring a tear to my unsentimental eye.

Time, free-flowing through mental mazes of negative space that Manny Farber would have to admire, is at the center of Davies’s autobiographical work. He connects music with memory in a manner that yields greater returns each time one returns to his movies. At the Pacific Film Archive, he’ll appear at screenings of The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), Distant Voices, The Long Day Closes, and The Neon Bible (1995) and lead an audience through a shot-by-shot discussion of Distant Voices. In anticipation of this visit, I recently spoke with him on the phone.

SFBG It’s disheartening to read about the various funding problems you’ve been encountering over the past eight years.

TERENCE DAVIES We don’t have a cinema in this country — we just have an extension of television. You’ve got 25-year-olds who don’t know anything and think cinema started with [Quentin] Tarantino. We’re just little England. We’ve become virtually another state of America. In 20 years’ time, if we don’t watch it, we’ll be just like Hawaii, but without the decent weather.

SFBG Within British cinema, your films don’t fit into the contrasts that place David Lean–like literary adaptations or the documentary base of directors like Lindsay Anderson against more flamboyant directors such as Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell, and Joseph Losey. You have elements of all of the above: your work is autobiographical and learned, but it has also has a flamboyance I relate to, though it isn’t outrageous.

TD I suppose my influences were very simple: the British comedies from the period when I was growing up and American melodramas and musicals. I remember being taken by my two older sisters to see Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing [1955] or All That Heaven Allows [1955] and going by myself to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers [1954] or The Pajama Game [1957] and any comedy that attracted Margaret Rutherford and Alastair Sim.

My films are an amalgam of those things and of the fact that I was brought up Catholic. I was very devout until I was 22. What a waste that was!

Also, I was influenced by classical music, particularly [Jean] Sibelius and [Dmitry] Shostakovich and my beloved [Anton] Bruckner. And poetry. [My family] got our first television in 1961, and about two years later, over the course of four nights, Alec Guinness read [T.S. Eliot’s] entire Four Quartets from memory.

SFBG Your current documentary project, Of Time and the City, is about your hometown of Liverpool. I came across an interview from the era of Distant Voices, Still Lives in which you talk about its utter transformation and deterioration. That interview dates from almost 20 years ago. Have the changes continued?

TD Yes, inevitably. At the time I left, Liverpool was very down at heel. I left it at its worst. It’s getting better now, but there’s still an awful lot to be done. The evocation of war that Humphrey Jennings did in Listen to Britain [1942] I’m trying to do for Liverpool. I wanted to try and capture what it was like when I was growing up. Even I was shocked at some of the footage of the slums, which were some of the worst in Europe. I grew up in one, and when you grow up in one you don’t realize it, because everyone else is in the same boat. But seeing footage of it now, it’s absolutely appalling. When you think that in 1953 this massive amount of money was spent on the coronation of the present queen, it’s just obscene. They get away with it — it’s quite extraordinary. I’m very much a republican; I’m not a monarchist. When you juxtapose the coronation with the footage that we’ve found, it’s shocking.

SFBG Solitude and rich sensory experience are qualities at the core of your movies. Those qualities take on specific aspects in cinema — your use of darkness in relation to light is connected to, and even a few times directly about, the experience of being in a dark movie theater.

TD You have to see the films in the cinema. It’s lovely to see, say, Letter from an Unknown Woman [1948] on the telly, but if you see it projected, it’s even more ravishing. The only way to see a film is in the cinema — nowhere else.

SFBG I first saw my favorite of your films, The Long Day Closes, at the Castro Theatre here in San Francisco.

TD The Castro is a beautiful theater. But I remember that when I was there, two men were walking down the aisle and one asked, "What did you see last night?" The other said he’d seen the [Terence Davies] Trilogy. The first asked, "What did you think?" And the other said, "Not very good."

SFBG There’s no accounting for taste.

TD Another man said to me, "These films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis," which I thought was a wonderful insult — practically a compliment. Isn’t that fabulous?

CLOSELY WATCHED FILMS: TERENCE DAVIES

Feb. 20–27, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Citizens vs. spies

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A Bay Area man and a San Francisco nonprofit are at the center of an epic, ongoing battle over privacy rights involving all three branches of the United States government. The outcome may determine the lines between national security and personal liberties in the 21st century.

The story begins in December 2005, when the New York Times exposed the George W. Bush administration as having illegally eavesdropped on US residents without required court warrants. The next month a former AT&T technician in San Francisco came forward with information about how that company (and Verizon and MCI, it was later learned) was gathering Internet and phone data from its customers and illegally routing it to servers controlled by the National Security Agency.

Mark Klein saw that a splitter was diverting the normal information traffic of domestic customers to a secret room at the AT&T Folsom Street plant. He knew that NSA people were around the company’s buildings as early as 2002, and it didn’t take him long to figure out what was going on. "It was obviously some big government hush-hush thing," Klein told the Guardian in a phone interview.

Klein realized he was not in a position to do much at the time, so he "made a note and moved on," he said. He also came across company documents spelling out the technical details of the operation, which his "fortuitous knowledge" allowed him to understand and explain. Klein stowed them away and kept them when he retired in May 2004.

Klein contacted the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group, in January 2006 and became a key witness in a class action lawsuit filed by the organization on behalf of AT&T customers. Hepting v. AT&T was the first of nearly 40 cases filed by citizens in Northern California against telecommunications companies and the government. In June 2006 a federal judge denied a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of state-secrets privileges. The government and AT&T appealed the decision to the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco.

On August 15, 2007, EFF lawyers offered their opening arguments to a three-judge panel, urging it to allow AT&T customers to continue to fight against illegal spying on their Internet and telephone communications. In transcripts from this session, Judge Michael Hawkins surmises the matter: "As I understand, in this case what the plaintiffs are saying is that AT&T has provided telecommunications information about its subscribers to the government without a warrant."

This action runs afoul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established a special court to issue warrants for government surveillance and which set standards to prevent abuse, although the court has rarely refused to issue warrants, which could even be obtained retroactively for emergency situations.

The Bush administration has sought to revise FISA for the post–Sept. 11 world, and a major component of this overhaul would be immunity for telecommunication companies that have served as dragnet information collectors for years. Government and AT&T lawyers argued before the judges that the data collection was in the interest of national security and that the industry giants were acting in good faith, so they cannot be held liable.

Reiterating this position, company spokesperson Walt Sharp wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian, "AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security."

A decision in the case is still pending, and according to Rebecca Jeschke, media relations coordinator for the EFF, "We have no idea when they’ll have a ruling for us. Delays for a year are not uncommon."

Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to essentially legalize the actions of the Bush administration and the companies and is hashing out two conflicting piece of legislation. The Senate voted Feb. 12 to reject an effort to strip the immunity provisions from the FISA Amendments Act, opting to protect the companies from legal scrutiny.

The House of Representatives has its own surveillance measure, which would loosen up some FISA restrictions but not include the immunity provision. That legislation, House Resolution 3773, was passed in November 2007 by a 227–189 vote. The bills now head to a Senate-House conference committee, which will work out the discrepancies, if that’s possible. As Jeschke explained, "The two bills will become one law or no law."

Bush has repeatedly said he will veto any bill that does not include immunity, while hawks in Congress say national security will be compromised if the government has to gather information without corporate assistance. In a Feb. 15 press release, Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected this assertion: "[The president] knows our intelligence agencies will be able to do all the wiretapping they need to do to protect the nation…. [He] should now work in a cooperative way with Congress to pass a strong FISA modernization bill that protects our nation’s security and the Constitution."

Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill told the Guardian, "Her position is that we have to make sure that this is consistent with the Constitution…. She is not in favor of immunity."

HR 3773 is "far from perfect," according to the EFF Web site, but it "provides far more congressional and judicial oversight of the Executive Branch’s domestic spying than the FAA."

Klein, the former AT&T technician, whistle-blower, and key witness, also became an unpaid lobbyist for EFF when he traveled to Washington DC in November 2006. He described the experience as "very tiring, exhausting," and said that over the four days, "we were much more successful in media coverage, but in terms of Congress, it didn’t do very much."

He concluded our interview with some foreboding words based on his experience. "This is more than about another bill," he said. "This is about fundamental constitutional issues, and many people are unaware."

Money grows on trees

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GREEN CITY A lone fisher casts his line off the wooden dock of Candlestick Point, his favorite spot and one at risk of closure from state budget cuts.

"The tide is too low today to catch anything, but supposedly there’s halibut now after the rain," Ernesto Perez told the Guardian as he walked back to his car empty-handed, hoping to return later.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office has proposed closing 48 of the 278 state parks by July 2009 because of a projected $14.5 billion state deficit. A big chunk of that shortfall is from the car tax Schwarzenegger repealed when he took office, triggering threats to schools, parks, and social welfare programs.

The parks with the lowest revenue or highest maintenance costs were placed on the closure list. Nine Bay Area parks could be affected, ranging from the small Candlestick Point to Henry W. Coe State Park near San Jose, the largest in Northern California.

Although the state could save $13.3 million if the parks close, the governor hasn’t calculated how much would be lost in tax revenue from the businesses these parks sustain, nor does he seem interested in the intrinsic loss of valued public assets.

"Look at how important Hearst Castle is to the central coast’s economy," Roy Stearns, spokesperson for California State Parks, told the Guardian.

The agency was asked to reduce its 2008–09 budget by about 10 percent, achieved mostly through layoffs and closing parks. Rangers will provide rudimentary maintenance of the closed parks, mostly monitoring illegal campers and fires. The state does not know how much money it would need to reopen the parks or when such funds might become available.

"In essence the state is abandoning the parks," Barbara Hill, vice president of the California State Parks Foundation, told the Guardian. She fears poaching, arson, and illegal dumping will proliferate. "How will they be able to properly secure the borders?" she asked.

The CSPF, a nonprofit that helps to preserve state parks, recently secured $17 million to restore tidal marshes in Candlestick Point. If implemented, the project would create the largest contiguous wetland in the city. The plan is now on hold, forcing the area into further decay.

Nature lovers are not the only ones concerned about the state parks’ cuts. If the 48 parks do close, the expected 6.5 million person drop in visitors will certainly impact the revenues of cities, counties, and the state. According to the California Division of Tourism, 73 percent of visitors come to the state for leisure purposes, and each county earns about $1.5 billion per year from tourism.

"It’s a shame to close Candlestick. I don’t know how it will affect my business," Andy Hung, owner of 88 Fishing Tackle on San Bruno, told the Guardian. "Even now there aren’t enough public piers to fish from." If Candlestick closes, Hung believes fishers will migrate somewhere else.

Across the bay in Benicia, people are worried. The city’s main attraction, the Benicia Capitol State Historic Park, is on the parks closure list. "It’s our most significant building, and we’re lobbying so the final budget cut won’t include it," Amalia Lorentz, Benicia’s economic development manager, told the Guardian.

A 2001 study by the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo found that visitors to Morro Bay State Park contributed $15 million to the local economy over two years and were responsible for the creation of 364 jobs. Benicia has almost three times the population of Morro Bay. Although the Morro Bay park will remain open under the budget cut, eight other parks in the area will close.

Officials say they doubt higher entrance fees are the solution to saving the parks. "We’ve raised fees three times in the last seven years. They’re the highest in the nation, and we don’t want to price people out," Stearns said. Funds to the state park system have been slashed consistently since the 1980s, and parks have been relying more on entrance fees than state funding. Because of a 233 percent increase in day fees in the past six years, California park attendance has dropped by about nine million people, according to state park officials.

Several organizations, including the CSPF, are collecting signatures and donations to encourage Schwarzenegger and the legislature not to sacrifice California’s parks to political expediency.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

No shelter from the budget storm

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Arriving at the steps of Buster’s Place on a cold night is a familiar, comforting act for many of the city’s chronic homeless people. Or rather, it was until recently, when a sign was posted informing clients the facility will be closing its doors for the first time in almost a year.

Buster’s Place, the only centrally located 24-hour drop-in center in San Francisco, is on the chopping block to meet the demands of one of the city’s most drastic midyear budget cuts in recent history. The $1 million cut (roughly the one-year operating cost of Buster’s) is only a piece of the $9.25 million the city’s Department of Human Services must trim from its annual spending.

Buster’s has logged more than 34,000 visits from an estimated 700 clients in the past year. The center serves all walks of life, from lonely elders to those who cannot manage the complex shelter reservation system to newcomers who don’t know where to turn. While staff and resources are limited, Buster’s provides easy access to essential facilities like showers, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. It’s the stop of last resort, as I learned during my recent undercover investigation (see "Shelter Shuffle," 2/13/07, and "Search for Shelter," on the Guardian‘s SF blog).

"There’s a need for this place," Louis Ramon, who is the only case manager working at Buster’s and has been at the center since it opened, told the Guardian. "This is where the too sick, the too paranoid, the too mentally ill come who cannot be housed. Nobody is working with these clients — the really hardcore ones."

Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director for the Coalition on Homelessness, has been a leading advocate for 24-hour homeless centers and is pressuring city hall to reinstate funds to carry Buster’s through the end of the year.

"It’s frustrating when the mayor makes random and arbitrary decisions without consulting relevant community-based organizations or the homeless themselves," Friedenbach told us. "This is another attempt by the mayor to put a nail in the coffin of overnight shelters."

In a Feb. 14 press conference Mayor Gavin Newsom held with Dariush Kayhan, his newly appointed homeless czar, Newsom discussed plans to redesign the city’s shelter system, as well as the midyear budget cuts. "We’ve got a lot of resources that are being spent, but they could be spent more wisely by coordinating strategies," he said.

"With respect to 24-7 access, we’re going to have that with the [Mobile Assistance Patrol] vans, to ensure that people still have that. People can, in rare instances, come to the shelters directly if they’re in a dire emergency and access a bed if needed," Kayhan said. "And we also want to engage those folks because we don’t think sitting in chairs, around the clock, at night — and especially since a lot of those folks are seniors and disabled — that’s not a proper place to be."

Less than five months after it opened last year, Buster’s was slated to close during the regular fiscal-year budgeting last June. Homeless advocates came to Buster’s rescue and had the Board of Supervisors reinstate most of the funding for the center.

However, many homeless advocates and Department of Public Health officials are less optimistic about this round of budget reductions. For one thing, midyear cuts are generally more reactionary, made with little public deliberation, and made because the deficit is bigger than expected.

"This year is much different because the amount of money we need to cut is much more severe," said David Nakanishi, coordinator for community programs at the DPH and responsible for spearheading the planning of Buster’s Place. "Last year Buster’s was the only cut being made to homeless programs, so the community could rally around that one issue. The fiscal situation is much more dire this year. The supervisors will probably not reinstate the money."

Sup. Chris Daly, whose District 6 includes Buster’s Place, isn’t optimistic. "I will fight, but I won’t be successful," he told us, referring to his reduced power on the board after being removed as chair of the Budget Committee last year. "The cut list resembles very closely the list of board priorities from last year. The board cannot compel the mayor to spend."

Over the past year, Buster’s Place has had an uncertain future. The center was created after the temporary closing of the McMillan Drop-in Center, the city’s previous 24-hour drop-in center, at 39 Fell Street. Homeless-rights advocates campaigned for the creation of a 24-hour facility until Daly lobbied the DPH to keep an all-night drop-in center open. The city then contracted the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics to open Buster’s.

However, since the DPH established the center on a short timetable, it did not follow standard procedures for awarding the contract. The DPH is now going through a request-for-proposals process for a 24-hour drop-in center. Of course, if the midyear cuts are approved, this process will stop.

During a night at Buster’s, visitors can count on a few things: hard plastic chairs, restless sleep (if any), and good conversation with familiar faces. While Buster’s provides 24-hour shelter, it also serves as an important social hub for the homeless community. Elisa Frank, who handles shelter reservations through the city’s CHANGES system at the 150 Otis Street administrative office, sends up to 60 people per night to wait for beds at Buster’s.

"Buster’s is a community for a lot of people. They want supervision so they’re not just on the street doing dirt. Some people even have houses. Some who are in [single-room occupancies] and even some who just live alone come to Buster’s just for company," she told us.

One 31-year-old homeless client at Buster’s told us he has been in and out of shelters and illegal housing for most of his life. He has been staying at Buster’s occasionally over the past year and hopes to get his own apartment.

"When I don’t have a place to stay, I get suicidal," he told the Guardian on a chilly night outside Buster’s. "More people are going to die on the street if this place closes."

SPORTS: Scoring votes — the faceoff

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By A.J. Hayes

Turn on cable television or AM radio any afternoon and you might be hard-pressed to tell the difference between the sports and political news programming. Whether it’s ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption or Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, it seems as if everyone is yelling with the fervor and conviction of a roided-up high school P.E. teacher.

Some political shows (Hardball) have sports inspired names and another (Countdown) is hosted by Keith Olbermann, who cut his broadcasting teeth inventing new catch phrases to describe home runs and field goals.

So considering that politics and sports are both populated by the same types of egomaniacs, we’ve decided to wed the three top remaining Presidential candidates with the Bay Area sports figures that best fits their persona.

nelson1.jpg
McCain behind the straight talk?

John McCain and Don Nelson. Both the Warriors head coach and leading Republican nominee have seen great victories in their day, and have both have suffered their share of humility in their given professions. Though Nelson is one of the NBA’s all-time winning coaches, he’s never captured a NBA title and each coaching stop he’s has made has ended ignominiously, with invariably lawsuits flying after his departure.

In the dark with Susan Leal and PG&E

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small susan.jpg vs. pge.png
During last night’s City Desk News Hour, the Chronicle’s Marshall Kilduff, Cecelia Vega, Rachel Gordon, Marisa Lagos, and I were discussing SFPUC appointments and the ouster of manager Susan Leal — which I blamed at least in part on PG&E’s influence — when suddenly the power went out in the television studio. Wow, we joked, PG&E was really playing hardball now. The lights and cameras came back on after about 10 minutes and we finished the show, careful not to again anger those with power (well, OK, not really).

Yet the real news on the SFPUC/PG&E/Leal front was made on the second half of the show (which is actually taped earlier in the day, whereas our part is live) when host Barbara Taylor interviewed Leal, her first extended comments since she was inexplicably fired by Mayor Gavin Newsom and then hit by a car in front of City Hall. Leal said she was more shocked than anyone that she was sacked by Newsom — who, to her face, said she was doing a fine job — and she still doesn’t fully understand it. But she did lay out some possibilities, including her public power moves that upset PG&E and innovative green programs that upstaged the moribund Mayor’s Office.
If you have Comcast cable, check out the show on Channel 11 when it replays tonight and Sunday night, both at 8:30 p.m.

“What if she changed her name to Lenin?” Yoko Ono sues singer-songwriter Lennon Murphy for use of own name

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Lennon Murphy bares some, if not all.

Boy, I love Yoko Ono: I think the woman is a genius and at 70-something she still rocks it live. (Yep, I can hear the oodles of boomers booing as I type.) But the news discussed in the open letter below, issued on a press release from singer-songwriter Lennon Murphy’s people, is totally bizarre:

“Yesterday I received notice that Yoko Ono had filed a law suit against me, asking for a cancellation of the trademark that I own for the name “Lennon.” This could very well mean the career that I have worked so hard at, the one you all have believed in, may come to an end. I wanted to address the situation to all my fans because without you I am nothing and it’s not fair to everyone who has believed in my music not to be properly informed of this pure bullshit.

“When I first started playing music at 14, I was known for the most part as ‘The Lennon Murphy Band.’ Not a name I was very fond of, no one could ever agree on anything so it made sense. A few months later some of the shows started being marketed using my full name as well as some that just using ‘Lennon.’ There was never really any consistency but there was well enough to justify stating that ‘Lennon’ had been used in fact since 1997. When I signed with Arista Records in 2000 at the age of 18, a marketing decision was made to continue being known just as Lennon. In all honesty, I didn’t care. I was just happy to sign a record deal, make an album, and pay my bills.

Wherefore art thou, Romero?

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On returning to his independent filmmaking roots: When we made [1968’s Night of the Living Dead] we were just a bunch of young people in Pittsburgh. We had a commercial production company, so we had our own equipment, and we audaciously decided that we should go out and make a movie. So the first one was real guerrilla filmmaking — but actually the first five or six films that I made were completely independent. After Dawn of the Dead [1978] we hooked up with a distributor-production company, and they financed us to some bigger budgets. But even those films were independent. There was a period when I was courted by Hollywood and made a couple of studio pictures and was getting very discouraged. Finally, the last zombie film that I made, Land of the Dead [2005], was for Universal. And they really let me alone — they let me make that movie. But it was a grueling process. And I realized, "Man, this is all getting too big. It’s approaching Thunderdome here." I felt this incredible disconnect with the roots, with where it all came from. I really wanted to throttle down and back up and see if I had the energy and the chops to go do another really low-budget film. I needed to revitalize myself.

On the trend of movies using the self-filming technique: I haven’t seen Cloverfield. Redacted, I guess, was similar. Vantage Point I haven’t seen. I thought that we would be the originators of it, but now I guess I have to say we’re part of a trend. I think there’s some kind of collective subconscious — all the world has a camera these days. I think it’s rather obvious for fiction writers, filmmakers, whatever, to take note of that and use it. It’s pretty scary, this blogosphere — man, you just wonder who’s out there throwing up all these ideas.

On finding truth in the media, be it mainstream or underground: To me that’s the argument that’s central to [Diary of the Dead]. When there were three networks, sure, [the news] was all being managed and controlled and spun, no doubt. Now it’s completely unmanaged. And it’s not even necessarily all information — it’s opinions, viewpoints. Anybody could get on there with any kind of an idea and find followers. That’s what spooks me. What would you rather have: it being controlled but not be insightful, or would you rather have this chaos? And I don’t have the answer to that. I almost blame the public more than anybody else for being suckered into it and not bothering to do their own homework. People would rather have somebody tell them the way it is, and go along with it.

On the living dead: The zombies, to me, don’t represent anything except the disaster. They could be a hurricane. They could be an approaching asteroid. My stories have always been about the people and how they respond or fail to respond or respond improperly — and keep trying to preserve the world as they knew it instead of readjusting to whatever these changes are on the planet. The zombies are just zombies. They’re the reason that I can get these movies made. They’re the fun part of it! But to me, they don’t represent anything in particular.

Ecoerotic

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› molly@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY You may be the greenest, most permacultured locavore with a heart made of hemp. You tend your community garden on dates, travel only by biodiesel bus, and make your Christmas gifts from recycled materials rather than contribute to our culture’s overconsumption of resources. But chances are you haven’t thought about how your sex habits are affecting the planet — not to mention your partner. And what better time to think about it than the week of Valentine’s Day, the date when couples feel entitled to sex and singles are saddest about not having any? (Or is that the other way around?… But I digress.)

`Thing is, your favorite dildo may be releasing deadly toxins into the environment. Your discarded butt plug, so small and cute and seemingly innocent, may spend several centuries in a landfill before it degrades — if it ever does. Your vibrator could be the reason for someone else’s unnaturally tiny penis. Really.

The issue with sex toys — one of the more recent industries to be examined through a green lens — is twofold: disposal and toxicity.

The first is the easier, less contentious, and somewhat more obvious issue. Since we’re talking about a variety of objects often made of plastic, PVC, rubber, electronics, and other nonbiodegradable materials, it makes sense that concern has been raised about where sex toys end up and what happens to them when they get there. Just like water bottles and discarded train sets, sex toys made from these materials seem destined to last longer on the earth than any of us will — causing more pain in the long term than pleasure in the short term.

The second issue is whether sex toys are safe for humans, both those who use them and those who may be exposed to them through the environment. The concern here is phthalates, a variety of chemicals most commonly used to soften hard plastics but also found in cosmetics, food wraps, and a number of other ubiquitous consumer goods — and until recently, often used in plastic-based sex toys. There has been substantial research suggesting that phthalates — chemicals not naturally occurring in the human body — are present in 90 percent of Americans’ bodies. Furthermore, scientists believe phthalates can have a detrimental effect on male reproductive development.

"Severe interference can involve incomplete development of the penis, undescended testicles, decreased testosterone levels," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Guardian. "There can be lifelong consequences."

Are there counterarguments to all of these worries? Sure. For starters, there’s always the issue of how green to go. Should you worry more about your rubber dildo — which you may keep for 10 years — than about your plastic shower curtain, which you’ll throw in the landfill in three months? Or is this just the latest ecofriendly phase our culture (and media) is going through? And as for phthalates, there are lots of different kinds — and no one is exactly sure what they do or how they do it.

But if you’re anything like Coyote Days, buyer for Good Vibrations, you’ll figure safe is better than sorry. Days said the major sex toy retailer has decided to phase out products containing phthalates, just in case it turns out the chemicals really are as bad as scientists suspect. In particular, Days suggested replacement with silicone varieties, if you can afford them.

And if you’re worried about how well a sex toy will biodegrade, you can always opt for a metal, wood, or glass variety.

In fact, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can check out the P Aqua from Love Piece, a dildo made from seaweed and water that, while solid at room temperature, can be boiled to oblivion for Earth-friendly disposal. (Though the company asks you to notify it if the dildo has a sour odor. Ew.)

As for Good Vibrations’ future inventory? Day said, "We’re not quite at the seaweed and water level yet." Me either. But I’m hoping for a sushi restaurant tie-in when this thing gets big. Buy one California roll-in-the-hay, get one seaweed sex toy free? I like it.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Super lessons

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The Super Fat Tuesday presidential primary election in San Francisco was marked by some portentous trends and factors that could have a big impact on who becomes the Democratic Party nominee — and whether that person will be accepted as the people’s legitimate choice.

Consider the scene the night before the election. A small army of young people made its way up Market Street carrying signs and pamphlets supporting their candidate, Barack Obama, taking up positions outside Muni and BART stations and on high-profile corners to spread the message of change.

Meanwhile, inside the Ferry Building, Mayor Gavin Newsom and former president Bill Clinton convened one of several "town hall meetings" held simultaneously around the country to promote the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who checked in on a satellite feed.

Among the many luminaries on hand was State Sen. Carole Migden, a superdelegate (one of 71 from California) who has not yet pledged her support to either Clinton or Obama and who could ultimately play a huge role in determining the nominee. Migden made a show of exchanging pleasantries with the former president, warmly embracing him in front of a crowd of about 250 people and more than a dozen news cameras before taking a seat nearby.

But Election Day was for the regular citizens, and once their votes were counted and analyzed, a couple of things became clear. Clinton won California with the absentee ballots that she had been banking for weeks thanks to her deeply rooted campaign organization. Her margin of victory among early voters was about 20 percentage points.

Yet a late surge of support for Obama caused him to win at the polls on Election Day, leading to his outright victory in San Francisco by a margin of about 15,000 votes, or almost 8 percentage points. It was a symbolic victory for progressives on the Board of Supervisors, who backed Obama while Newsom campaigned heavily for Clinton (see "Who Wants Change?," 1/30/08).

Obama and Clinton were close enough in California and the rest of the Super Fat Tuesday states that they almost evenly split the pledged delegates (those apportioned based on the popular vote). But if present trends continue, even after Obama’s sweep of four states that voted the weekend after California, neither he nor Clinton will have captured the 2,025 delegates they need to secure the nomination before August, when the Democratic National Convention convenes in Denver.

That means the nomination could be decided by superdelegates such as Migden, a group comprising congresspeople and longtime Democratic Party activists, from party chair Art Torres down to those with key family connections, such as Christine Pelosi and Norma Torres.

And that could be a nightmare scenario for a party that hopes to unify behind a campaign to heal the country’s divisions.

Political analyst David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics in San Francisco, said this election was marked by a higher than expected turnout and more people than usual voting on Election Day rather than earlier. In San Francisco turnout was more than 60 percent, including an astounding 88.4 percent among Democrats.

"In the last couple weeks there was a strong get-out-the-vote push by Obama’s people," Latterman said during a postelection wrap-up at the downtown office of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), which he delivered along with campaign consultant Jim Stearns.

Latterman said that Obama surge, which drew out voters who were generally more progressive than average, may have been the margin that pushed Proposition A, the $185 million parks bond, to victory. It trailed among absentee voters but ended up less than five points above the 66.6 percent threshold it needed to pass.

"I don’t know if this would have passed or not if it had not been for the Obama push at the end," Latterman said.

Stearns agreed, saying, "In some ways, we should name every park in the city Obama Park."

At the measure’s election-night party at Boudin Bakery on Fisherman’s Wharf (where some of the bond money will renovate Pier 43), Yes on A campaign consultant Patrick Hannan told us he was worried as the initial results came in.

"That is a high threshold to hit," he said of the two-thirds approval requirement for bond measures.

But as the crowd nibbled on crab balls and sourdough bread, the results moved toward the more comfortable level of around 72 percent support, prompting great joyful whoops of victory.

Recreation and Park Department executive director Yomi Agunbiade acknowledged that the decision to place the measure on the February ballot rather than June’s was a leap of faith made in the hopes that the presidential election would cause a high turnout of Democrats.

"We’re excited," Agunbiade said at the party. "This was a hard-fought race that involved getting a lot of people out in the field and letting folks know what this was about — and we’re definitely riding the wave of high voter turnout."

The strong turnout helped Obama win half of the Bay Area counties, Sacramento, and much of the coast, including both the liberal north coast and the more conservative Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

But Clinton’s advantages of socking away early absentee votes and her popularity with certain identity groups — notably Latino, Asian, and LGBT — helped her win California.

Yet Obama’s appeal reaches beyond Democratic Party voters. He got some late support from prominent local Green Party leaders, even though their party’s candidates include former Georgia congressional representative Cynthia McKinney and maybe Ralph Nader (see "Life of the Party," 1/16/08).

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, a founder of the California Green Party who also worked on Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign, announced his endorsement of Obama at the candidate’s Super Fat Tuesday event at the Fairmont San Francisco. Mirkarimi also noted the support of Greens Mark Sanchez, president of the San Francisco Board of Education, and Jane Kim, the highest vote getter in the school board’s last race.

"I registered Green because I felt their values were closer to mine," Kim, who left the Democratic Party in 2004, later told the Guardian. "But I’ve always endorsed whoever I thought was the best candidate for any office…. I saw Obama as a candidate taking politics in a different direction that I hadn’t seen a national candidate take things before."

If Obama’s campaign can continue to develop as a growing movement running against the status quo, he could roll all the way into the White House. But it’s equally possible to imagine the Clintons using their deep connections with party elders to muscle the superdelegates into making Hillary the nominee.

Stearns said this scenario could hurt the party and the country: "I can’t imagine a worse outcome for the Democratic Party than to have Obama go into the convention ahead on delegates he’s won and have Hillary Clinton win on superdelegates."

Amanda Witherell and David Carini contributed to this report.

Sugar and spice

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In response to a recent column about quick reconstructive surgery for oversalted dishes (add some sugar!), a reader wrote with the news that it’s also possible to salvage dishes made inedible by too much chili heat. The procedure is simple: peel a raw potato, preferably a russet (starchy is better than waxy here), put it in the afflicted dish, and cook until it shows signs of disintegrating. Remove the still-whole spud, cross fingers, and serve.

Thanks to Gabriel Bereny for this intel, which apparently he got from his wife and her mother. My only question: where were you 23 years ago, when I was making so-called Chinese chili from a recipe in the Chicago Tribune, a reputable newspaper, and the directions called for a quarter cup of cayenne pepper, which did seem like quite a bit, but I put it in anyway because that’s what it said to do? The result was what I came to call, in later years — when time had softened the episode’s more severe edges — Chernobyl chili. I ate the Chernobyl chili, I suppose to prove that it could be eaten, but I glowed in the dark for days afterward. And that wasn’t the worst of it: for our guest, who scorched her lips with her first tentative taste, I whipped up some hasty pasta. I still have the Chinese chili recipe, but I have corrected what even my neophyte eye should have seen as an obvious typo; a quarter cup is now a quarter teaspoon. There is a meaningful difference.

Starch’s value as a culinary fire retardant extends beyond the potato. If you find you’ve taken a bit of something too incendiary for your comfort, you can find relief in plain starch: a mouthful of white rice, for instance, or unadorned bread. Boiled white rice is standard-issue with some of the world’s spicier cuisines, including those from India and Korea.

And a final word in defense of sugar as a savory player: add a pinch of it the next time you make a vinaigrette (I use the darkest brown sugar I can find) and note the pleasant balancing of salty, sour, and sweet. You can make a pretty good vinaigrette with some Dijon mustard, a quality vinegar (balsamic, red wine, rice), and some good extra-virgin olive oil, but good becomes great by adding just the tiniest hint of sweet.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Climate change teach-in

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY For Van Jones, going green is not just about buying a Prius, putting a solar panel on a vacation home, or purchasing groceries at Whole Foods, which he calls Whole Paycheck. It’s also about training former gangsters in green-collar jobs, equitably distributing toxic waste sites, and bringing organic produce into urban ghettos.

According to the Oakland activist, who cofounded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (see "Redefining Radicalism," 9/19/06), there is a serious social injustice on the horizon, and the fight against it may just be the next great political movement in the United States.

Speaking Jan. 30 at San Francisco State University’s teach-in on climate change, Jones called on students to be the next great generation by recognizing that the environmental crisis presents the biggest opportunity for poor people and minorities since the New Deal. Today it seems such grandiose statements calling an entire generation to action tend to lack an inspired audience. However, no one could deny Jones was onto something big after the packed crowd in Jack Adams Hall erupted in an ovation after his challenge to students to make history by addressing poverty and the environment together.

Green pathways out of poverty was just one topic discussed during the SFSU segment of "Focus the Nation" — billed as the nation’s largest-ever teach-in, with more than 1,500 schools and universities participating. The nationally coordinated event aimed to create one day of focused discussion on global warming solutions for the US. Throughout the day expert panels at SFSU discussed green efforts in their respective fields with an underlying message of public involvement.

Keynote speaker Michael Glantz of the National Center for Atmospheric Research jumped on the generational bandwagon, predicting the 21st century would be remembered as the climate century. However, Glantz stressed public pressure would be crucial, as lessons learned about the environment are generally not used during policy making. He cited detailed studies conducted in the early 1970s of melting arctic sea ice due to anthropogenic causes.

When asked how he would reply to arguments that humans aren’t causing climate change, Glantz noted the success of the environmental movement in marginalizing these beliefs: "I don’t think we need to spend time now dealing with the skeptics when Exxon and Shell are worried about global warming."

Faculty from the SFSU geography and geosciences departments presented new trends in climate change data and modeling, focusing on predictions for California. The panel reported the state’s average temperature is on the rise. Even with the best estimates for halting global warming, the Sierra Mountains are expected to lose 40 percent of their snowpack over the next 100 years. Agricultural production and quality in the Central Valley are also expected to decline, as some plants will not get the chill period they need.

Geography professor Andrew Oliphant worked with students to create a carbon footprint calculator for attendees to use throughout the day. Oliphant said the calculator was tailor-made specifically for the event so attendees could analyze their daily habits.

Students were also present throughout the event to answer questions on an informative poster display. The posters depicted breakdowns of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels in the Bay Area, and the formation of acid rain.

Erin Rodgers, an environmental advocate with the California Union of Concerned Scientists, discussed green policies at the state level. Rodgers focused on California’s groundbreaking initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a cut of about 30 percent from current levels.

Experts have established detailed plans on how to reach the target reduction, with a large focus on transportation, although the California Air Resources Board has yet to embrace a comprehensive plan that will get anywhere close to the goals it is charged with meeting.

Cal Broomhead, climate programs manager at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, spoke on local green efforts. He praised the city for keeping the same levels of greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 and its continued use of the "Fab 3" composting and recycling program.

Broomhead also stressed the importance of furthering environmental education efforts: "Through education we can get people to adopt pro-green technologies and behaviors. Once you have the last remaining stragglers, then you can require them to participate through law."

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

G-Spot: Everyone’s a wiener

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› marke@sfbg.com

You’d think that amid all of the bell tolling and hand-wringing about DIY online media proliferation, professionally produced gay porn would have gone the way of the floppy disk and dial-up modem long ago. (Remember waiting 20 minutes for free stud-muffin bitmaps to download, pixel by aching pixel, onto your 10-inch monitor? Ah, AOL blue balls. Whither the ’90s?)

But no – gay porn is the new fireplace. You can hardly turn around in most finer homo homes and gardens without some two-dimensional boy butter spattering your delicate cheekbones. Gooey! And every edgy hetero is at least partially versed in the extensive oeuvres of quasi-professional online sites like Bait Bus or His First Huge Cock, if only because sticky fingers often click too quickly on flickering banner ads.

Gay porn’s also big business, of course, and an especially homegrown one. Almost all of the most profitable studios are based in San Francisco – a rare case of several giants of an industry being located within mere blocks of one another. SoMa has become the Wall Street of Crisco.

The reasons behind this multimillions-generating clusterfuck are myriad: mainly, the local economic advantages, cultural environment, and plethora of scruffy multiculti boys (all the rage among a rapidly globalized audience) make SF a much more fertile gay porn hot spot than the traditionally down-and-dirty San Fernando Valley. Also, many big studios are the bastard children of SF’s Falcon Studios, the granddaddy purveyor of male video erotica headed by the late, irascible Chuck Holmes, for whom our groundbreaking Charles M. Holmes LGBT Community Center was affectionately named.

And it doesn’t hurt that Silicon Valley is a whip flick down the freeway. Gay porn studios have been aggressively savvy about riding the online wave to solvency, even if lately that’s meant a hilariously regrettable spate of behind-the-scenes blogs and vids that feature pec-implanted gym queens sashaying nude around Palm Springs pools and fussing over which pair of snakeskin trousers go with which Tony Lamas. Decisions.

Yet despite the buttloads of profit, cornered markets, community accolades, and extensive and rabid fan bases, gay porn studios – like cuddly-wuddly gay porn stars themselves – have massive inferiority complexes. They want recognition, dammit! Thus the annual Golden Globes of filmed homosexual obscenities, the GayVN Awards, presented by venerable gay porn insider news source GayVN (recent headline: "Jock Itch in the Can!"). Last year’s awards presentation at the Castro Theatre — open to the public – was a raucous, substar-studded affair featuring MC Kathy Griffin and more fashion nightmares than you could shake a spangled man boa at. This year’s awards show expands to the Giftcenter Pavilion – because, really, doesn’t this celebration require an entire pavilion? – and although no D-list host has been announced, fan tickets are being snatched up at a robo-thrusting pace.

A quick and gleeful scan gleans from among the 2008 nominees: Gaytanamo for Best Leather Video (when, oh when, will someone make Fahrenheit 9"x11"?); Tiger’s Eiffel Tower: Paris Is Mine!, Gunnery Sgt. McCool, and Rocks and Hard Places for Best Video; the mathematically challenging Bottom of the Ninth: Little Big League 3 for Best Direction, and, inevitably, Buckback Mountain (Best Specialty Release) and Bi Pole Her (Best Bisexual Video, duh). There are awards for Best Box Cover Concept, Best Music, and the always bracingly racist Best Ethnic-Themed Video: (Arabian Tales 1-2? Spilling the Tea? Queens Plaza Pickup 2, surprisingly not about migrant-worker prostitution? Only the judges can decide.

But most enticing of all, barring any prerecorded acceptance speeches — and despite the writer’s strike – there will be actual humans in attendance, the real faces behind the fornication, in all of their fleshy solidity, crossing their powder-encrusted pinkies and gazing hopefully, hazardously into the glare of their peers’ applause or opprobrium. The meltdowns will be spectacular!

GAYVN AWARDS

Feb. 16, 6 p.m., $100

Giftcenter Pavilion

888 Brannan, SF

(415) 861-7733

www.gayvnawards.com

G-Spot

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We’ve got the official word: the G-spot does exist. At least insofar as we’re talking about the Guardian‘s guide to sex, love, and romance. Turn the page for revelations from a newly knighted expert on women, scheduling tips from people who manage to please several partners at once, news from the world of gay porn, and plenty of advice about how and where to celebrate the National Day of Making Singles Feel Bad. Plus, we’ve got the results of our Sex Poll! It’s information that’s sweet, sexy, and, unlike the mysterious G-spot, doesn’t require a diagram to find. You’re welcome! And happy Valentine’s Day.
Love and lust,
Molly Freedenberg

>>Getting girls
What a supposed sex cult can teach you about women — and yourself
By Justin Juul

>>U R mine… and so are U
How the polyamorous celebrate Valentine’s Day
By Erikka Innes

>>Everyone’s a wiener
The GayVN Awards wrap the best gay dick in an envelope of surprise
By Marke B

>>Waiter, I’ll take the (status) check!
Valentine’s Day dinner ideas in sync with your situation
By Ailene Sankur

>>Don’t fear the jeweler
A Valentine’s Day shopping guide
By Candice Chan

>>Valentine’s Day events
Prom, poetry, and porn

>>Wine + chocolate = love
Valentine’s Day pairings
By Molly Freedenberg

>>Nookie by the numbers
The results of our 2008 Sex Poll

>>Take our Sex Poll, please!

All quiet at City Hall

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San Francisco City Hall — normally a beehive of activity on election nights — is nearly empty. One reporter (Rick Knee, stringing for AP), a couple of political junkies … and that’s about it. The Department of Elections doesn’t even have its usual display screen for election results.

Frankly, nobody’s paying attention to the local election. California’s a big deal tonigh, and the state primary is huge news; municipal elections are lost in the whirlwind. (Of course, let’s remember that the state’s delegate total, which is what really counts, will probably be split pretty close to even, whoever “wins” the state; Paul Hogarth has a good analysis here.

But there IS a local election, and there are results, and we can pretty much call the three ballot measures now.

Prop. A, the parks bond, needs 66 percent of the vote, and has 64.9 percent in the (generally conservative) absentees. That should pass. Prop. B, the police retirement plan, is a slam dunk and will probably get 70 percent of the vote. The rather wacky Prop. C, the Alcaraz “peace center,” is toast, with 73 percent voting no.

An interesting note the the local vote: Hillary Clinton’s absentee-vote effort had paid off, big time. 65,000 people voted absentee, and Clinton is ahead in those votes, 53-38. I think we’re going to see this statewide — Obama will probably win on election day, but Clinton has a huge bank of absentees that he will have to overcome.

The Coveted opens her closet

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No more coveting thy neighborhood blogger’s togs … now you can own ‘em. Jennine Tamm, the fabulous fashionista behind The Coveted blog, is leaving us – and not just San Francisco “us,” but America “us.” Yup, she’s packing up and following her Liebe to Deutschland, where she’s sure to add all sorts of cute vintage coats and plenty more gray shoes to her wardrobe. But first she’s got to pare down her impressive collection of wearables so she can pack ‘em all. Bad news for Ms. Tamm, but great news for the rest of us, who can purchase her barely-used hand-me-downs here.

corsetedbebedress.JPG

The starting bid for this Bebe silk corseted dress is $9.99. Which means you wouldn’t even be hearing about it if I could fit into an XS. Miss Tamm, Sie sind ein kleines Mädchen!

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