Occupy

Xbox activism

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The day after the last 2008 presidential debate, the stock market rollercoastered, however tenuously, to a high point, and oil prices plummeted. One would think those would be hopeful omens — on NPR, a woman interviewed on the street claimed lower gas prices were akin to a miracle. Yet the current ability to get the news the moment it happens — where would we be without e-alerts regarding daily Wall Street dramas? — has conditioned us to believe tomorrow might offer a radically different story. When OPEC calls an emergency meeting, and the US feds hold a global economic summit, who knows which side of the economic seesaw we’ll occupy at sunset?

Right now, you could say the economy is a form of conceptual art writ large, with real world implications. The numbers are based on shifts in mood and degrees of confidence, rather than anything you could really put your finger on (like cold hard cash). Apparently the idea that the earth’s thermostat is dialed up to a higher temperature is similarly conceptual. A surprising number of Americans — about 50 percent in a Pew Research Center poll taken last summer — believe there’s no such thing as global warming, and if there were, its causes cannot be scientifically determined. (Say bye-bye to the king penguin.)

Volatile situations have a way of generating free-floating cultural anxiety, and perhaps one of art’s jobs is to assuage it, or at least render it in unexpected terms and media. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s Internet-based game project Gas Zappers does both. Using a colorful cast of characters wrested from online news outlets, it maintains a brash, interactive appeal as it tackles the implications of global warning and shifty petroleum economies. An animated digital collage, it takes two forms — a single-channel digital video, and a series of interactive computer games that can be viewed and played on a large flat screen monitor. It’s also accessible online.

The most attractive aspect of Gas Zappers‘ video version is its amped-up lucidity. Hung may be trafficking in environmental activism, but his vision of green takes on the gloriously corrosive hue of antifreeze. The piece is rendered in a color scheme you could describe as a toxic chemical rainbow. Art with social intent is often deemed didactic, but Hung steers clear of such charges with unabashed satire that plays like John Heartfield — the master of Hitler-hating WWII photomontage — meets South Park on YouTube.

Gas Zappers‘ appeal stems partly from the zeal with which Hung tosses cultural and political references. A polar bear, cast from its frozen habitat, navigates through a global landscape of energy issues — and celebrity spokespeople. Leonardo DiCaprio’s there, as is George W. Bush (as a barbecue grillmaster) and Al Gore (in a polar bear costume accessorized with Nobel bling). Al gags the prez on a compact fluorescent bulb and then sits on his face, issuing a forceful invitation: "Try my greenhouse gas, sucker."

Hung, who studied at San Francisco State University and showed an equally brash Internet-critique piece in Bay Area Now 3, is an artist of our moment. With this project, he has devised perhaps the perfect, time-filling, politically astute work for Berkeley tree-sitters — and those of us who wish we had the time and gumption to get up off our asses and make a difference.

GAS ZAPPERS

Through Feb. 8, 2009

Berkeley Art Museum

2626 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-0808

www,bampfa.berkeley.edu

www.gaszappers.com

Kink dreams

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› molly@sfbg.com

When it comes to BDSM porn peddlers Kink.com, apparently size does matter. At least, that’s how it seems now that the steamy studio has purchased the 200,000-square-foot San Francisco Armory. Suddenly, everyone wants to know: What’s the carnal concern going to do with all that space?

The answers are more diverse and ambitious than one might expect — ranging from creating a racy reality show to starting a perfectly PG-13 public community center. And thanks to the lascivious and lucrative imagination of Kink.com founder Peter Acworth, it might all be possible.

CONCEPTION AND CONTROVERSY


Though Kink.com has been producing independent niche fetish sites like Hogtied.com, WiredPussy.com, and FuckingMachines.com for the Folsom Street Fair crowd for more than 10 years — first from Acworth’s rented Marina District apartment and then from the Porn Palace on Fifth and Mission streets — it wasn’t until Acworth purchased the historical landmark in the Mission District, and was met with opposition, that the provocative porn empire really made it onto the public’s radar screen.

The armory, which was a training ground for the National Guard prior to its decommissioning 30 years ago, has been the center of controversy before. But that was mostly in-fighting between potential developers. Stringent zoning requirements and necessary but cost-prohibitive renovations discouraged buyers, leaving the Moorish behemoth on 14th and Mission streets vacant and outside public scrutiny.

But everything changed when Acworth got involved. His intended commercial use, for shooting scenes for all of Kink’s Web sites, complied with planning codes. And he didn’t need to do expensive renovations before he could start using, and profiting from, the building: what could be more perfect for bondage shoots or movies about women fucking machines than dungeons in disrepair? The only thing more ideal than the structure itself, according to Acworth, was its location in the heart of America’s most fetish-friendly city. "You couldn’t have dreamt up a more perfect place than a castle in the middle of San Francisco," says Acworth, who purchased the armory for $14.5 million in 2007 and started operations in January of this year. "It’s like divine intervention."

Acworth had to contend with a different kind of intervention — from a neighborhood group called the Mission Armory Community Collective, which opposed Kink.com as a potential neighbor. Though careful not to condemn porn per se, the group said it feared that the company’s presence in an already troubled neighborhood would introduce more problems. Even the Mayor’s Office, potentially bending to pressure, issued the following statement: "While not wanting to be prudish, the fact that kink.com will be located in the proximity to a number of schools give [sic] us pause."

But the sale quietly went through, and even as protesters stood outside, Kink was already filming new scenes for its subscription sites. Since then, the protests have largely died down. As the company removed graffiti from the brick facade of the armory, fixed windows, and generally improved the appearance of its stretch of Mission Street, neighbors began stopping by to congratulate Acworth — or to ask for a tour. (Incidentally, the public is invited to tour the armory on second Fridays. E-mail info@kink.com for an appointment.)

On a September afternoon, the building — mostly nondescript from the sidewalk except for the castlelike rooftop — seems quiet and innocuous. Three boys skateboard on the steps outside, stopping to talk to a woman walking her dog. The only people entering the doors, which are always locked and manned by a security guard, look as though they could’ve been going to the grocery store or the gym, wearing shorts, T-shirts, and sandals. In fact, on first glance inside, the place is almost disappointingly tame.

Acworth himself hardly looks like a porn kingpin. He’s sweetly attractive in an unmenacing, mainstream way, with an easy smile and casual style. His office, a room near the entrance to the armory, is large and comfortable, but bears no hint of his livelihood save for one tasteful bondage statue. Next to his desk are water and food bowls for the armory’s two live-in cats: Rudy and Lala. His assistant, a young girl in a minidress, leggings, and hoop earrings, looks like she could be working at American Apparel. Even the desktop pattern on Acworth’s Dell computer screen is vanilla: rolling green hills beneath a blue, blue sky. This sense of normalcy seems to be Kink’s main point.

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Van Darkholme, Peter Acworth, and Princess Donna in the Armory boiler room. Photo by Pat Mazzera

Acworth remembers getting turned on as a child in England by scenes in movies where women were tied up — and wondering if this signaled violent tendencies within himself. It wasn’t until adolescence that he discovered the relief (and release) of bondage porn. At the same time, he was already a burgeoning entrepreneur, a child who grew vegetables behind his house and tried to sell them to his parents. By the time he read a magazine article about a man making millions from Internet porn, as a Wall Street–bound doctoral student in a Columbia University finance program, it seemed almost inevitable that Acworth would find a way to marry his two lifelong interests: bondage and business. When he founded Kink.com in 1997, the idea was not only to jump on the dot-com money train, but also to demystify and promote fetish porn as an acceptable form of sexual stimulation.

Now, each of Kink.com’s Web sites is geared toward a particular fetish, run by a Webmaster who’s not only an expert on that particular kink but also has an interest in it, just as Acworth started Hogtied.com, which features women tied up, and Fuckingmachines.com, which showcases women having sex with machinery, because that’s what turned him on. These Webmasters act as director, producer, human resources manager, and often participant as well as Web developer.

"It’s hard to guess what people want," he explains, pointing out that it’s easier to make what you know.

Which means models aren’t actors. Just as directors are expected to be interested in the fetish they’re promoting, so are participants expected to enjoy the scenes they’re in. This isn’t about fake-breasted women pretending to like a face full of come. In fact, Acworth has had trouble in the past working with models from Los Angeles, trying to get them not to act. Kink’s sites feature actual people enjoying a private play party that just happens to be taped. Videos are intimate, personal, and disarmingly real — models talk to each other before, during, and after their sessions, just the way they would in their own bedrooms. They’re encouraged to smile on camera. Whether it’s shocking a woman with electric instruments or forcing a man to eat from a dog bowl, you get the sense that these people would be playing out these scenarios anyway — Kink just provides a salary, benefits, and a really nice location.

THE KINK CASTLE


As for the building itself, Kink has just begun to scratch the surface of its possibilities. The first floor, perhaps the most institutional-looking of the four, houses offices for Acworth, the marketing team, the production team, and the break room, which features a pool table, a disco ball, an espresso machine, a drum set, and a DJ booth (all for parties as well as employee use). Directly opposite the front doors is the Drill Court, a monstrous space that looks something like an airplane hangar crossed with a European train station. This is the space Acworth hopes will become the Mission Armory Community Center (which would unintentionally bear the same acronym as one of the groups that protested Kink.com’s purchase of the armory), a public venue available for sporting events, educational seminars, film festivals, and someday maybe a Folsom Street Fair party. According to MACC coordinator David Klein, a developer who has no affiliation with Kink.com, that dream is a long way off — with plenty of renovations, public meetings, and applications standing between here and there. In the meantime, the Drill Court serves as an occasional event site (such as for the Mission Bazaar craft fair earlier this year) and an employee parking lot. Currently, the most public location is the Ultimate Surrender room, where small numbers of members are invited to sit in bleachers and watch women wrestle each other to the ground on large mats — the winner, of course, gets to fuck the loser.

The armory’s basement is by far the most interesting area. "It’s a wonderland of sets," says Acworth, and it’s hard to argue with him. Some rooms seem perfect as is, such as a former gymnasium whose floor has long since been removed to reveal gothic-looking structural planks punctuated by intimidating bolts. All it took was adding a platform in the center of the expansive room and a pulley above it to make it a perfect bondage set. Next door is an army-style communal bathroom, another favorite as-is set. Other rooms on this floor are a completely furnished 1970s New York loft; a padded cell with an observation room connected by a one-way mirror; a former hermetically sealed gunpowder room that’s been outfitted with all sorts of rings, hooks, and rope pulleys; an office connected by a cage to the "Gimp Room," where ceiling chains hang like some kind of Donkey Kong homage; a hallway storage room chock-full of expected (whips, chains, clamps) and unexpected (mops, long-handled brushes with hard bristles, small boxes with smaller holes in them) toys; the large prop room, where human-shaped cages, monstrous doghouses, and machines like the back breaker and water-torture wheel are kept; the laundry room, where shelves are lined with douches, enemas, latex gloves, and sanitized sex toys; and the former shooting range, which has a Pirates of the Caribbean feel, complete with a river running through it.

And that’s just the start of it. Just when you think every nook and cranny has been used — including an oddly shaped corner off the production gallery that looks like a 19th-century psychiatric ward — you’ll discover a hallway that’s virtually untouched. Hardly any construction has been done on the third or fourth floors, including the officers’ quarters, which occupy one turret. Even the roof, with its castle-y details and flags, seems like a perfect potential shooting location.

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Kink’s porn palace, the San Francisco Armory. Photo by Pat Mazzera

Kink already has plans for several new sets: the military clean room, a stark ’50s-era space, slated for FuckingMachines; an abandoned electrical equipment room for WiredPussy, where dead vintage electrical equipment will line the walls; an Alcatraz-esque prison gallery for BoundGods.com; and an expanded DeviceBondage.com room, which will be clad with cultured stone to look like the basement of an old castle.

Reps won’t say just how much it costs to maintain the armory or to shoot a scene, but Acworth told 7×7 magazine last year that profits were upward of $16 million. And spokesperson Thomas Roche says that the cost of a shoot, including sets, makeup, wardrobe, video and still photo staff, and editing, would be prohibitive if Kink weren’t doing lots of them. Luckily, the armory allows for a volume of shoots that makes it feasible — sometimes four or five in a single day. And it’s good variety for viewers too, who get used to seeing the same sets over and over in various porn films — even ones by different companies.

FLIRTING WITH THE FUTURE


Perhaps the most advantageous thing about moving into the armory, though, has been the increased possibilities for Kink’s growth. With so much space, an almost infinite number of sets can be created without tearing any old ones down. Since multiple shoots can go on at once, multiple sites can be developed and maintained. And buying the building has started attracting directors, models, and Web developers on a scale Acworth hasn’t seen before.

"It was initially difficult to find people," says Acworth, who conjectures that it’s not just the publicity from the building but also the exciting prospect of working there that’s turned the tide. "Now they’ve started to approach us."

One of those who approached Acworth was Van Darkholme, a Shibari rope bondage expert, a porn performer, and the proprietor of fetish film studio Muscle Bound Productions, who was living in LA. Darkholme saw an article about Acworth and the armory in a magazine and contacted him immediately, hoping to get involved. The Vietnam-born Darkholme, who seems almost starstruck by Acworth’s genius, was shocked not only to hear back from Acworth himself, but to be offered a job at the helm of Kink’s new gay bondage site: BoundGods.com.

"What Peter does is so avant-garde and so fresh, I just wanted to come in and mop the floor," says Darkholme, who moved to San Francisco in April and launched his new site Aug. 1.

Darkholme’s BoundGods takes Kink’s principles of intimate, conversational, playful, and mutually enjoyable interactions and applies them to his particular brand of gay sexuality: lean, muscled studs. In one video, a man is tied up in the army-style bathroom at the armory while another fucks him with a large black dildo. In a similar scene, anal beads are gradually pulled from the bound, naked man — much to both participants’ obvious pleasure (though interestingly, neither are hard). Darkholme makes appearances in many of the videos, often as the dominant character — a striking contrast to the camo-shorts-and-T-shirt-wearing, somewhat shy individual I interview at the armory.

He’s clearly proud of the product, not only because it’s well produced but also because there’s almost no competition in the gay market.

"I hate to generalize, but most of what I see out there falls into this trap of gay men putting on leather and grunting and groaning," says Darkholme. "It’s visual, but doesn’t have as much dialogue. What we do is very real and very intimate, with a realness in what they’re saying."

The site marks Kink’s first serious foray into the gay market — a step the company couldn’t quite take while limited by space and resources at the Porn Palace. But set builders are already hard at work constructing an Alcatraz-esque prison gallery for new Boundgods shoots. And the creation of a sub-brand, KinkMen.com, promises more gay-focused fetish sites to come. (Incidentally, Kink tried a gay site several years ago with Butt Machine Boys, which is still online at www.buttmachineboys.com but not listed on the main Web site. Acworth said the site never took off, partly because of lack of budget and partly because, unlike Darkholme, the director wasn’t speaking to his personal interests.)

For now, though, Darkholme has his hands full with BoundGods. His immediate goal is to find and train 12 new dommes for the Web site — a tougher feat than might be expected. "Femme dommes can dish it out and can really take it," he says. "There’s a small percentage of men that can do that." In fact, during some of his first shoots, filmed in Budapest, his bevy of gay models and porn stars were shocked when Darkholme finally opened up his bag of toys.

"They looked at me like the circus had come to town, or like I was going to make one of the Saw movies. Their hands were shaking," he says.

So when Kink sets up its demonstration booth at Folsom Street Fair (Sept. 28, www.folsomstreetfair.com), Darkholme will have two purposes: recruiting talent (both people he can train and experts who have something to teach him) and publicizing his new brand.

"I want to say, ‘We’re here, we’re queer, we want to be part of your community!’" he laughs.

But Darkholme won’t be alone at his booth. Among other popular Kink stars like Isis Love, new director Lochai, expert rigger Lew Rubens, and porn stars LaCherry Spice and Natassia Dream will be WiredPussy.com creator Princess Donna, who’s launching her new pet product, PublicDisgrace.com, next month. The site will feature blatant public bondage, punishment, erotic humiliation, and explicit sex between models and, potentially, passersby.

The veteran domme is filming most scenes in Europe, where attitudes (and therefore laws) about sex are more lax. In fact, while shooting a scene on a public street in Berlin, the crew was stopped by a couple of motorcycle cops who said only, "If you cause an accident, you’ll be liable," before going on their way. In the shoot, a half-naked girl is tied to a park bench, made to carry a dog bowl while on a leash, fondled by her female master, and fucked by a man.

"It’s the adrenaline rush of potentially getting caught," says Acworth, explaining the site’s appeal and recipe for success. The site will also feature a slew of new faces. Plus, it’s the perfect time of year to launch a new fetish site. "Sales pick up when the kids go back to school," Acworth says.

There also plenty of developments in the works that don’t follow the start-a-new-fetish-site model. For starters, Kink is moving to a Flash format, where the delay is only 2 seconds instead of 20. The new technology means that users can actively participate in scenes via chat rooms, where they can give instructions to dommes and watch their demands be carried out. Members of Kink.com can already do this on DeviceBondage.com, but Acworth hopes to switch to a per-minute billing system so even more viewers can participate. At the moment, the site is structured so you must be a member of a particular site in order to watch videos; Acworth would like to move to a single-sign-on system where you can join Kink.com and have access to any of its member sites.

Perhaps the most ambitious technological plan for Kink’s future, though, is the development of an online Web community that will be called Kinky.com. Following the Web 2.0 trend of user-based content, Kinky.com will allow members and models to maintain user profiles, interact with one another on message boards, blog, and even date. Yes, it’s a way to stay up-to-date with Internet trends and to provide an experience that pirated video sites can’t, but Acworth says it’s also a natural outgrowth of the kind of porn he creates.

"In contrast with straight porn, which people want to consume in private, this is a community people want to be a part of," he says.

Which leads us to the project closest to Acworth’s heart: the reality show.

THE REAL WORLD: KINK.COM


In the spirit of community and BDSM as a lifestyle, Acworth wants to transform the armory’s top floor into a series of Victorian/Georgian-inspired rooms where couples will live and fuck on camera 24-7. Participants will be given hierarchical positions — from maid to master of the house — and live according to the rules of domination and submission. Acworth’s already started designing the grand dining room, inspired by the sets in Remains of the Day, including candelabras, elaborate draperies, and, of course, a long, long table. "I consider it the pinnacle of where everything comes together," he says.

The dream is still at least a year off: he’ll have to figure out payment and subscription details, renovate the nearly untouched top floor, and recruit couples who want to live their kinks on camera. But he’s hoping he’ll soon have more time to devote to the project. With more than 100 employees and a huge building to maintain, Acworth’s role has shifted from almost entirely creative to almost entirely administrative. He misses the early days, when he found models on Craigslist, tied them up in his rented Marina apartment, interacted with them himself, and then posted the shoots. (You can still see these early shoots online.) Soon he’ll promote an employee to chief operating officer, which will allow him to back off the business side and devote himself to the reality show.

So did he ever imagine his little project would get so big? Absolutely not, Acworth says. If he’d had any inkling, he adds, "I would’ve been terrified." But it only seems natural that the little English boy who used to try to sell his parents’ own vegetables back to them would eventually have an eye for business — and that his interest in fetish porn would lead his business instincts here.

As for how his parents feel about his chosen profession, Acworth says they’re not exactly vocally supportive, but they don’t condemn him either. His mom, a sculptor, has started creating pieces that feature couples in coital or bondage positions, and may start to sell them on the site. His dad, a former Jesuit preacher, says only, "As long as no one’s getting hurt and there are no animals, I guess it’s all right."

Stiglitz: Learning the Lessons of Iraq

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Here is the first column in a series we will be running regularly from Project Syndicate. Project Syndicate, based in Prague, is an international association of newspapers devoted to bringing distinguished voices from across the world to local audiences everywhere, strengthening the independence of printed media in transition and developing countries and upgrading their journalistic, editorial, and business capacities. To learn more about Project Syndicate visit: www.project-syndicate.org

Learning the Lessons of Iraq

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

NEW YORK – The Iraq war has been replaced by the declining economy as the most important issue in America’s presidential election campaign, in part because Americans have come to believe that the tide has turned in Iraq: the troop “surge” has supposedly cowed the insurgents, bringing a decline in violence. The implications are clear: a show of power wins the day.

It is precisely this kind of macho reasoning that led America to war in Iraq in the first place. The war was meant to demonstrate the strategic power of military might. Instead, the war showed its limitations. Moreover, the war undermined America’s real source of power – its moral authority.

Recent events have reinforced the risks in the Bush administration’s approach. It was always clear that the timing of America’s departure from Iraq might not be its choice – unless it wanted to violate international law once again. Now, Iraq is demanding that American combat troops leave within twelve months, with all troops out in 2011.

To be sure, the reduction in violence is welcome, and the surge in troops may have played some role. Yet the level of violence, were it taking place anywhere else in the world, would make headlines; only in Iraq have we become so inured to violence that it is a good day if only 25 civilians get killed.

And the role of the troop surge in reducing violence in Iraq is not clear. Other factors were probably far more important, including buying off Sunni insurgents so that they fight with the United States against Al Qaeda. But that remains a dangerous strategy. The US should be working to create a strong, unified government, rather than strengthening sectarian militias. Now the Iraqi government has awakened to the dangers, and has begun arresting some of the leaders whom the American government has been supporting. The prospects of a stable future look increasingly dim.

That is the key point: the surge was supposed to provide space for a political settlement, which would provide the foundations of long-term stability. That political settlement has not occurred. So, as with the arguments used to justify the war, and the measures of its success, the rationale behind surge, too, keeps shifting.

Meanwhile, the military and economic opportunity costs of this misadventure become increasingly clear. Even if the US had achieved stability in Iraq, this would not have assured victory in the “war on terrorism,” let alone success in achieving broader strategic objectives. Things have not been going well in Afghanistan, to say the least, and Pakistan looks ever more unstable.

Moreover, most analysts agree that at least part of the rationale behind Russia’s invasion of Georgia, reigniting fears of a new Cold War, was its confidence that, with America’s armed forces pre-occupied with two failing wars (and badly depleted because of a policy of not replacing military resources as fast as they are used up), there was little America could do in response. Russia’s calculations proved correct.

Even the largest and richest country in the world has limited resources. The Iraq war has been financed entirely on credit; and partly because of that, the US national debt has increased by two-thirds in just eight years.

But things keep getting worse: the deficit for 2009 alone is expected to be more than a half-trillion dollars, excluding the costs of financial bail-outs and the second stimulus package that almost all economists now say is urgently needed. The war, and the way it has been conducted, has reduced America’s room for maneuver, and will almost surely deepen and prolong the economic downturn.

The belief that the surge was successful is especially dangerous because the Afghanistan war is going so poorly. America’s European allies are tiring of the endless battles and mounting casualties. Most European leaders are not as practiced in the art of deception as the Bush administration; they have greater difficulty hiding the numbers from their citizens.

The British, for example, are well aware of the problems that they repeatedly encountered in their imperial era in Afghanistan. America will, of course, continue to put pressure on its allies, but democracy has a way of limiting the effectiveness of such pressure. Popular opposition to the Iraq war made it impossible for Mexico and Chile to give into American pressure at the United Nations to endorse the invasion; the citizens of these countries were proven right.

But back in America, the belief that the surge “worked” is now leading many to argue that more troops are needed in Afghanistan. True, the war in Iraq distracted America’s attention from Afghanistan. But the failures in Iraq are a matter of strategy, not troop strength. It is time for America, and Europe, to learn the lessons of Iraq – or, rather, relearn the lessons of virtually every country that tries to occupy another and determine its future.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University, and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
www.project-syndicate.org

Zen and the art of extreme-metal maintenance

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Meshuggah’s obZen (Nuclear Blast) is not the first example of a quality album with dismal cover art. On the other hand, it’s not that easy to think of really, er, great examples. Mott the Hoople’s Brain Capers (Atlantic, 1971), Humble Pie’s Smokin’ (A&M, 1972), and the Rolling Stones’ Black and Blue (Rolling Stones/Virgin, 1976) come to mind, but I’m not sure if these are actually good albums or just guilty pleasures. There’s also Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune (Columbia, 1976) and Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill (MCA, 1972) — slightly more reputable records, but like the others above, they’re subject to the "Hey, it was the ’70s" defense.

Sweden’s Meshuggah occupy a whole ‘nother realm of music — modern extreme metal, generally speaking — which means I should be comparing them to their peers, not a bunch of musty classic rock acts. However, over my years of following this genre, I’ve become so desensitized to foul cover art that it seldom fazes me anymore. Skeletons being crucified on inverted crosses? Helpless, bloody victims with various orifices sewn shut? You try not to pay too much attention to it.

ObZen takes the good album–bad cover discrepancy to a new level, though. On their cover, a computer-generated image of a naked, three-armed, blood-covered mandroid sits in the lotus position, engaged in a solemn act of meditation. Apparently, it’s tied in with the title’s "obscene zen" pun. Whatever the case, it’s not good. Not good at all. The only reason I bother poking fun is because the music itself is pretty amazing.

Granted, the members of Meshuggah have been churning out this sort of sandblasting tech-metal for more than a decade, but obZen includes some of their most creative, demented riffing in years. They’re the rare extreme metal band whose sound is immediately recognizable: pick a song, any song, and you can tell it’s them within a few seconds — though it’s much harder to figure out exactly which song you’re hearing. This is partly because their music never changes all that much — externally, at least — but also because it’s so distinctive and idiosyncratic.

Meshuggah established their sound on 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve and 1998’s Chaosphere (both Nuclear Blast), and it’s essentially an industrial-tinged mutation of the tight, mechanical thrash metal of early ’90s Sepultura or pre-Black Album Metallica. While most of the far-out happenings in ’90s metal came from the seedier realms of black metal, death metal, and grindcore, Meshuggah continued as one of the few bands doing anything groundbreaking with this sort of weightlifter-metal template. In other words, they didn’t have any close peers when they emerged as a noteworthy group, and despite influencing a wide variety of metal, prog, and experimental acts in the years since, there’s no one who sounds quite like them.

They’re not without their metal-band trappings, although these don’t involve Satanism or bad horror-flick imagery. Instead, there is a sort of dystopian sci-fi thread running through much of their work, something they share with predecessors like Voivod and Fear Factory. I don’t know anyone who is specifically attracted to Meshuggah based on that aspect of their aesthetic, just as I don’t know anyone who listens to the band because of vocalist Jens Kidman, whose monochromatic bark is certainly an acquired taste.

Rather, Meshuggah’s appeal is all about "that thing" they do with their guitars and drums. It’s very specific: jackhammer drums and hiccuping guitar riffs wind around one another in an intricate fashion, with the drums and guitars usually playing in different time signatures and constantly turning around on one another. Their tracks are often more like études, which deal with complex polyrhythms, than a song with anything resembling a verse-chorus-verse form.

It would all be hopelessly nerdy if it wasn’t so darn heavy and impossibly well-executed. Perhaps, like the unfortunate dude on the cover, some of the members of Meshuggah have three arms. Listeners might find the band’s music tedious and one-dimensional, and indeed, sometimes it is. Then again, there’s often a fine line between hypnotic and monotonous. With obZen, Meshuggah are mostly on the right side of that line, even if their visual sensibilities leave much to be desired.

MESHUGGAH

With Ministry and Hemlock

Tue/1–April 2, 8 p.m., $38.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.ticketmaster.com

Dress sharp

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REVIEW Don’t tell anyone, but I have a secret fetish. Nothing turns me on like a new pair of shoes, and few bring me to shoegasm like sexy stilettos. So I put on my favorite pair of Gucci patent-leather tuxedo shoes and headed down to Stiletto, clubutante Parker Day’s arty party at Asia SF, in search of the perfect footwear.

Day named the night after the seductive heels, but it also alludes to the discreetly slim knife — both of which are deadly in the hands of the Pam Anderson B-movie character Barb Wire. "It’s sharp and it’s sexy," Day said. "It gets to the point." But it was The Warriors, a 1979 cult classic about New York City street gangs at war, that set the theme for that night’s party. As footage from the film was projected onto a side wall, the music morphed genres, from hip-hop and hit pop to electronic and indie-rock remixes for an audience as diverse as The Warriors‘s cast — and equally reminiscent of the early-’80s Big Apple. Fab Five Freddy, Blondie, and Madonna occupy the same turf without incident.

The crowd’s footwear was just as varied, but cowboy boots and Converse All-Stars were the most heavily represented in The Warriors–inspired fashion show. Taking cues from the movie, models worked leather vests and gunmetal belts into fierce ensembles, which they paraded down the runway like gangsters. A bit later, audience members were able to participate in a Warriors–themed costume contest. Not to ruffle anyone’s fab feathers, but I think my own shoes were the ultimate winners.

STILETTO

Third Friday of the month, 10 p.m.–3 a.m., $8

Asia SF

201 Ninth St, SF

http://www.myspace.com/stilettosf

Initials B.B.

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› johnny@sfbg.com

REVIEW A few months ago, at a bookstore in another city, I came across a few copies of the ’60s arts and literature journal Kulchur. Scanning them, I discovered that the Bay Area poet Bill Berkson had contributed some film essays and that his writings on cinema were followed an issue or two later by reviews from a fledgling critic named Pauline Kael. The presence of Berkson’s and Kael’s movie notes in Kulchur reflects a time when the boundary between making art and writing about it wasn’t so fixed. Here was Kael, a friend of the poet Robert Duncan, making her first published sojourns into criticism (which were eventually reprinted in I Lost It at the Movies [Little, Brown, 1965]), while Berkson was trying out an essayistic voice that is more vivid and vibrant today, as evidenced by the seven (lucky) pieces in Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981–2006 (Cuneiform Press).

Cinema lights up the poetry of Berkson’s friend and mentor Frank O’Hara, so it is slightly less of a surprise, though no less of a pleasure, when Berkson — in the midst of a Sudden Address essay about the painter Philip Guston — turns a brief mention of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan into a brief blast of instantly classic film criticism. "It’s as if [Jean-Luc] Godard’s movies had predicted the space of" the assassination footage, Berkson remarks. This comment, while not a direct observation about a particular Godard film, captures — and more important, opens up — the cramped, antic, and absurdly violent energy of Godard’s new wave heyday as well as any of Kael’s great celebrations of the director.

Movies are a tangential subject at most in Sudden Address: Berkson might love Louise Brooks almost as much as O’Hara adored James Dean, but the cast that parades through these pieces is more likely to range from Gertrude Stein and Dante to a number of Berkson’s New York school or new realist peers and then back to Dante (in relation to Kenneth Koch) and Stein again. These artists and writers, harmonizing motifs within the overall text, occupy a living history quite different from the cold terminology of the academy and much contemporary art criticism. Attuned to the poet’s flair for "observation for observation’s sake" rather than dedicated to the tedious assemblage of "frames of judgment," Berkson claims that "pleasure in writing criticism is often connected with the surprise of vernacular…. Most critics are Philistines in the sense that they ignore the cardinal rule of art practice, which is never to give the game away."

It would be a matter of hinting, and not one of giving the game away, to suggest that Berkson’s passionate engagement with the kinship between poetry and painting — a passion that rules Sudden Address‘s first piece and gradually possesses its last one — might have a role in the rise of the Mission school and other painterly Bay Area inspirations of recent years. Certainly a number of musicians and visual artists have looked to Berkson’s onetime home of Bolinas as a source of sustenance, albeit temporarily. Born from teaching gigs and lectures at the San Francisco Art Institute and elsewhere, the oratorical style of this book remains energetic throughout. Berkson’s roving intelligence stops to enjoy the infant nature of Italian phonetics and puzzles over the sublime. It tellingly notes that Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire "were the two most-photographed nineteenth-century writers" and places painter-poet Joe Brainard and critic Clement Greenberg at the intersection of Hans Hoffman’s paintings in order to take on Greenberg’s famous good-or-bad mode of attack. It also takes issue with former fellow "poet who also writes about art" Peter Schjeldahl’s gradual abandonment of poetry.

Sudden Address‘s cool enthusiasm sometimes gives way to a passion even more at odds with what Berkson deems "the glacial moraine" of postmodernism. Composed in memory of Berkson’s feelings for O’Hara’s poem "In Memory of My Feelings," the 2006 piece "Frank O’Hara at 30" overcomes the assumed importance and first-name logrolling of many New York school–style remembrances. It exemplifies Berkson’s ability to make one style of criticism function as a rich libretto surrounding the aria that is a particular poem or painting. Virgil Thomson attested that when faced with a choice between work, friendship, and passionate love, finding two out of three ain’t bad. But Berkson wants to have all three. At its best, Sudden Address embodies that possibility.

Shut down the zoo

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OPINION In San Francisco’s June 1997 special election, the swells convinced the voters to float $48 million in bonds to build a "world-class" zoo, which would entail largely privatizing a public institution, leaving the city on the hook for liabilities while giving a private nonprofit the benefits.

The initiative passed — you can’t get warmer or fuzzier than a tiger or a koala — and the San Francisco Zoo, relinquished to the tutelage of corporate fixer Jim Lazarus, was largely gifted as another privatized party space for the rich.

The case might be made that zoos can serve as genetic incubators in the face of widespread habitat destruction. But the city’s precautionary principle, like the Hippocratic oath, should prevail on us to do no harm in seeking to prevent extinction.

The record of the privatized Zoo has hardly been a story of precaution:

•In 2000, two already sick koalas were kidnapped from the Zoo and not returned for two days.

•A 12-year-old Siberian tiger, Emily, died in October 2004. Tatiana was just murdered at age four. Siberian tigers generally live to be 24 years old in captivity.

•Two elands, majestic African antelope, were introduced improperly into close quarters with an already resident eland at the Zoo, which led to a spate of deadly eland-on-eland violence and the deaths of the two newcomers.

•Apparently, shoddy attention to detail hastened the demise of Puddles the hippopotamus in May 2007. Hippos, like African elephants, thrive in nature preserves located in their native tropical habitat.

If zoos are to be a successful component of protecting endangered species, it’s paramount that their conditions not kill the specimens. Perhaps an affiliation with a major research institution is required to ensure that professionalism is the order of the day to ward against what appears to be amateur hour at the zoo.

It’s one thing for the swells to occupy public spaces such as the de Young Museum, City Hall, and the San Francisco Public Library as edifications to their egos — only fellow humans are inconvenienced. But for the rich to wrap themselves in the distinction of being movers and shakers in the San Francisco Zoological Society and wring glee from the glow of imprisoning animals in inhospitable conditions is truly pathological.

The Zoo should be closed, its animals sent to facilities capable of caring for them, and the land used for affordable housing. The city should replace the Zoo with an academic partnership with legitimate wildlife sanctuaries around the world to subsidize conservation, produce video footage of animals in their natural habitats, and arrange trips to see wild animals in the wild for San Francisco youths who otherwise could not afford it.

That would be a true 21st-century, world-class approach to bringing the wonder of exotic animals to San Franciscans.

Marc Salomon

Marc Salomon is a member of the SF Green Party County Council.

Airlines demand corporate welfare

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› news@sfbg.com

The major airlines that serve the Bay Area, with the help of the Hotel Council of San Francisco, are trying to get out of paying millions of dollars in taxes to the city by claiming the right to use a law that was designed to help San Francisco’s poorest residents. And they’re threatening to prevent their employees from staying in the city if the Board of Supervisors doesn’t acquiesce to the corporate welfare demand.

At issue is the city’s 14 percent Transient Occupancy Tax, which is paid by hotel guests. It is the third-largest source of local tax revenue, after property taxes and payroll taxes, bringing in $177 million in the last fiscal year. The only major exemption from the tax is for permanent hotel residents, generally those on the brink of homelessness who live in the run-down single-room-occupancy hotels for months or even years on end.

Major airlines house hundreds of their employees in San Francisco’s hotels each night. They are arguing that because of past court rulings on corporate personhood — in which judges have deemed that corporations have the same rights as individuals — the airlines should be exempt from paying the tax when they rent blocks of rooms for their employees.

The airlines, in collusion with some hotels in the city, have long used the exemption to avoid paying taxes on many of the rooms they rent (about two-thirds, according to the Hotel Council, which translates into millions in lost city revenue every year). A few years ago city officials told the corporations that the exemption didn’t apply to them and that they should be paying the tax.

Enacted in 1960, the Permanent Resident Exclusion exempts from the tax individuals who occupy or have the right to occupy the same hotel room for at least 30 consecutive days. “We looked at the legislative history, and it was clearly put there to help formerly homeless people,” Treasurer José Cisneros told the Guardian. “The city has always said that 30 consecutive one-night stays are not the same as a 30-night stay by an individual.”

The hotels and airlines challenged that interpretation and had their case thrown out of court. So now they’ve turned to the Board of Supervisors in the hope that they can win this chunk of corporate welfare by using threats of an economic exodus.

 

CORPORATE SHAKEDOWN

In October 2004, American Airlines and the San Francisco Hilton filed a lawsuit against the city arguing that airline crew members staying in San Francisco hotels qualified for an exemption from the hotel tax. The lawsuit was dismissed in May 2006 without going to trial, with Superior Court Judge James Warren ruling that the plaintiffs “did not assert and did not present any evidence that any particular room at the Hilton was continuously registered to American Airlines for more than 30 days.”

To clarify any ambiguity in the law, Cisneros in May issued an interpretation stating, “Although an agreement between a person and a hotel may require that the person pay the hotel for a minimum number of ‘guaranteed’ daily reservations for the person’s employees over a period of time longer than 30 days, such an agreement does not create any permanent resident exemption for any guest rooms unless the above criteria are satisfied,” referring to criteria that include “a person is a registered hotel guest” and “that person or any of that person’s employees continuously occupy or have the right to occupy the same room for 30 days or more.”

Yet now, at the request of Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, the Board of Supervisors’ Government Oversight and Auditing Committee has scheduled a Nov. 19 hearing for the purpose of “explor[ing] the unintended consequences of this decision, including the loss of revenue to the City when the airlines inevitably move their crews to another location in the Bay Area where room rates are more competitive.”

That implied threat comes from Hotel Council executive director Patricia Breslin, who paints a doomsday scenario if the airlines have to pay the hotel tax on every room they rent. Breslin warns that if the Board of Supervisors does not offer concessions to the airline industry, it could bring about an “economic tsunami” that would hit hotels, restaurants, and city government.

Airline employees occupy an average of 1,050 hotel rooms per night in San Francisco, according to Smith Travel Research, an information and data provider for the lodging industry. Given that the tax is collected by the hotels, Cisneros doesn’t have data on how much the airlines should be paying the city. But assuming the airlines negotiate rates of about $100 per night, that would translate into more than $5 million per year.

“We pushed so hard to get them to pay it that they sued us,” Cisneros told us.

Breslin said the airlines have been paying about $1.7 million per year in hotel taxes and that sales taxes generated by airline employees bring another $1.4 million into the city, all money that would be lost if the airlines go elsewhere. She said the airlines have threatened to begin putting their employees in hotels in Peninsula cities near the airport, like Burlingame, San Mateo, and even San Jose, to cut costs. Already Mexicana Airlines has stopped using San Francisco’s hotels for its employees. Other airlines, such as Virgin Atlantic, United, Cathay Pacific, and Lufthansa, have threatened to follow suit.

Breslin said hotels would be forced to lay off cleaners, servers, and other low-income workers due to the loss of business that would accompany the exodus of airline employees. San Francisco, she argues, would “lose a significant revenue stream” if the airlines lose their appeal.

“It will change the economics of San Francisco,” she told us. “This is not a frivolous issue.”

 

CALLING THEIR BLUFF

Granting the exemption would cost the city millions of dollars, but that isn’t the only reason being offered for opposing the gambit. Some city officials simply don’t believe the airlines — or their employees, most of whom are union members, many of whom have contracts specifying their accommodations be in urban centers — will abandon San Francisco.

Sup. Chris Daly, who is on the Oversight and Auditing Committee, is against granting the exemption to the airlines. “They blow smoke all the time,” he told us, referring to major industries such as the hotel and airline industries. “That’s how they get away with not paying taxes.”

Cisneros argues the airlines’ threat to move their employees into suburban hotels isn’t logical, noting that San Francisco hotel rooms are already far more expensive than their suburban counterparts — with or without the hotel tax — and the airlines have always chosen to keep their employees here anyway.

“I just don’t think the threat is realistic at all,” Cisneros said. “If they were basing their decision on which hotels are cheapest, they would have never been staying in San Francisco.”

Recently compiled data and trends in tourism and hotel occupancy rates also suggest that Breslin’s warning of a crippling economic backlash are unfounded. According to an August article in the San Francisco Business Times by Ryan Tate, “Next year promises to be by far the most robust for leisure and business travel in San Francisco since the dot-com boom.”

He continues, “Convention business will reach more than 900,000 hotel rooms in 2008, well above the 740,000 room nights booked by conventions in 2007.” The San Francisco Convention and Visitors Bureau forecasts that overall tourism will top 16 million visitors next year and that visitor spending will exceed last year’s record $7.8 billion.

The taxes the city collects from hotels go toward funding a wide range of public services. Some of the money is earmarked for the Convention and Visitors Bureau and for maintaining convention facilities. Some funds are allocated for low-income housing and rent supplements. The War Memorial Department, the Asian Art Museum, and the Arts Commission all receive funding through the hotel tax as well, with excess dollars poured into the city’s General Fund.

San Francisco’s tourism industry is the city’s largest industry and its second-largest employer, after the city and county government. “You want to make sure your number one industry is protected,” Breslin told us.

Yet the policy that she’s asking the city to enact runs counter to the policies in other major cities, including those thought to be less politically progressive than San Francisco. In Los Angeles, for example, only individuals can be granted exemptions from paying the hotel tax. In Chicago the exemption is even stricter and only applies to people who use hotel rooms as their domicile.

Redevelopment’s new face

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› sarah@sfbg.com

City Hall’s cavernous marble corridors echoed Aug. 14 with the footsteps of a band of sharply dressed African Americans, many of them ministers and all of them come to voice support for Fred Blackwell’s appointment as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency.

Blackwell, who has a master’s degree in city planning from UC Berkeley and has been working for the Mayor’s Office of Community Development since 2005, most recently as director, won’t be the first African American to occupy the agency’s top post.

But Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to nominate Blackwell was seen by many as a hopeful sign that the agency might proactively address problems that have torn apart the Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point community in the past year and continue to dog the agency in the Western Addition.

These concerns include the suspicion that Newsom’s plan to fold Candlestick Point into the already controversial Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project is less about wooing the 49ers to stay and more about jumping into bed with Lennar Corp., a deep-pocketed and politically connected development company (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07).

The deal gives Lennar the right to develop 6,500 new housing units and take over the cleanup of Hunters Point Shipyard — a move mayoral candidate Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai described as "the dirty transfer of the shipyard" (see "And They’re Off," 8/15/07).

A growing body of Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point residents has asked the city to temporarily shut down construction at the shipyard’s Parcel A because of concerns about the toxic dust being kicked up (see "Dust Devils," 8/1/07).

And then there’s lingering ill will from the 1960s, when redevelopment caused the massive displacement of African Americans from the Western Addition.

So will Blackwell be able to solve the agency’s deep-rooted problems? Newsom described Blackwell as "an outstanding choice" when nominating him Aug. 10, while agency commission president Rich Peterson called Blackwell "smart, of high integrity, well known by community leaders, and familiar with the unique opportunities as well as important lessons learned of redevelopment in the city."

But while commissioner Francee Covington declared that "a new day is dawning at the agency" shortly before the commission voted 7–<\d>0 to appoint Blackwell, the African American community still has its concerns.

Minister Christopher Muhammad, who has led the voicing of concerns about the Parcel A dust, was proud to see an African American in a position of leadership. "But we are still going to hold your feet to the fire," he said. "Redevelopment is not just about the redevelopment of physical structures but [also] about the redevelopment of human beings."

Noting that Blackwell is a 1991 graduate of Morehouse College, Rev. Amos Brown said, "I find no fault in this man, and you will not find any either in terms of fitness for this office," while local resident Randall Evans voiced his belief that "the only folks gonna take care of black people’s business are black folks."

Activist-journalist Ace Washington observed that Blackwell is "coming into a very hot seat. He needs some ice cubes to sit down. Only time will tell if he stands by his convictions. It doesn’t matter if the director is black, Latino, Asian, or white. All of us here are saying, ‘Ah, a breath of fresh air.’<\!s>"

Rev. Arnold Townsend said, "We trust the resources are there to help community — and not to tell the community what to do. Because until that dynamic changes, it won’t matter who is executive director."

Blackwell conceded that he had misgivings about heading an agency founded in 1948 to remove blight, a mission that many say has been tainted by racism since its inception. "I admit I was not leaping and jumping when my name first surfaced, but I look forward to working with you all," Blackwell told the commission.

Blackwell later told the Guardian he hopes "to foster a sense of equity and opportunity and a broader vision of community development."

"The legacy of redevelopment and urban renewal is not a good one," he said. "The residue is still there, but trust is only built through action."

Describing the Western Addition and Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point as "two bookends in terms of redevelopment," Blackwell said he hopes "to close out the agency’s relationship with the Western Addition and make sure responsibility is transferred seamlessly to the appropriate agencies."

As for Bayview–<\d>Hunters Point, "we should take stock of what we should and should not do, get on the right track, and create opportunities for people who live there," he said.

But Sumchai wants to put the agency under the control of the Board of Supervisors: "You could appoint Jesus of Nazareth and still have problems as long as the agency is locked into its current structure."

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi says putting an African American at the head of the Redevelopment Agency "makes a lot of sense, considering the egregious and negative impact the agency has had on the African American community…. But no matter how well-liked Fred Blackwell is, that does not compensate for the deficiencies of the Redevelopment Agency’s aims and competence."<\!s>*

Tamale soup

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Some week for the chicken farmer. Starts out in the city, my hand in a late-night pot of boiling water, fussing with unthawable frozen tamales, and ends in moonlight in the woods, digging a very sober hole for a very dead chicken.

Foxes have found me.

In other news, there’s a spot on the back of humans, below the neck, below the first few vertebrae, between shoulder blades, the soft, special niceness of which will haunt me now for the rest of my life. I woke up one week ago with my nose there, and I nuzzled and kissed and breathed in the catastrophic smell of someone else for a change. It was way too early to even wonder where I was.

I was in a strange bed, with an even stranger stranger, whose waking words were, "Don’t write about the tamales."

Still in that same sweet spot, I had no intention of ever leaving, let alone writing about tamales. I smiled and spoke into it. I said, "Okay." I was thinking that there would be more meals together, more sober ones, with every chance in the world for redemption and reduction sauces. No need to dwell on drunken, emergency snack-food soup.

Oof. This is going to make a weird country song. My new best friend is the bottle. But it ain’t me doing the drinking. It’s everyone else in the world, and it will be interesting to see how many times out of 10 they already have a girlfriend. They’re in love. Why one would want to drink enough to forget that spectacular fact, even for one night, both baffles and thrills me. And that’s why you will find me now in bars.

In search of temporary sweet spots between shoulder blades.

Neither forgetter nor forgettee, I’ll be the designated driver. You’ll invite me in. Whether you have a long-distance lover or nothing but dead and doomed chickens to occupy your mind, a body gets tired of sleeping alone. I know that, and I know things happen in bars that have absolutely no relevance in the world outside bars. No problem.

If it hurts a little, so does life. A lot! Like one minute you’ve got your eyes closed and headphones on and telephone ringer off, and you’re recording your heart out into a microphone, imagining a small cult following, and the next minute, click track marching in place behind you, you’re chasing a fox through blackberry bramble, tripping over tree trash.

It did let go of the chicken, and my farmerly diligence was rewarded by getting to lie in the dirt and watch my penultimate hen die a slow, useless death. This took days. I’m hungry and scratched, and I need a bath.

In retrospect, I should have Dr. K’d her immediately. But retrospect is easy. She wasn’t bleeding and didn’t look broken. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but it’s hard to tell with chickens — unlike chicken farmers, who put it in the newspaper.

My new favorite chicken, by virtue of being the last one standing, was my least favorite only yesterday. It’s the egg eater. Chickens are intensely social animals. They go around together, they have their pecking order, and at night they line up on the roost, all tight and snuggly, for warmth. Or, for all we know, for love, comfort, reassurance …

Teeth hurt. Thorns hurt. Biting into a dumpling full of scalding pork juice hurts. I didn’t do this, by the way. I’m a patient and paid professional Shanghai dumpling eater. It happened to a personal friend of mine, in Millbrae. She grew up there and still knows where to go.

The Shanghai Dumpling Shop, for example, rocks — even the things we got that weren’t dumplings, and weren’t pork buns, and weren’t "lion head" meatballs. I’m thinking of the "bean curd sheets" with spinach. It was like fettuccini, and it was miraculously, meatlessly delicious.

Wednesday we went. Lunch time, and it was like an oasis, a rest stop, a catchy chorus or bridge. We all need little islands of sanity (or, in other words, rivulets of warm pork juice on the tongue) in the middle of our crazy work weeks full of chasing foxes, being foxy, and digging deep holes in the moon.

I have one last, live chicken to be with, and I’m going back outside now to be with her. Sorry I wrote about the tamales. *

SHANGHAI DUMPLING SHOP

Mon.–Fri., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.–9 p.m.; Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–3 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.–9 p.m.

455 Broadway, Millbrae

(650) 697-0682

MC/V

Beer

Wheelchair accessible

Suburban stasis

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Colma is not Daly City. Apparently I’m the only San Franciscan who’s failed to comprehend the pronounced distinctions between these neighboring municipalities, outside the selection of merch at their respective Target stores. Daly City has Serramonte Center and the rows of houses made famous by Malvina Reynolds’s anthem to architectural sameness, "Little Boxes" (the song that opens Showtime’s fabulous stoned-in-suburbia sitcom, Weeds). Colma’s got car lots and a few square blocks of single-family dwellings, enough for the approximately 2,000 residents who live surrounded by a whopping 17 graveyards, most catering to specific ethnicities, if not deceased pets. According to the Colma civic Web site, the price of an average home here is a grounding $280,000. Necropolis is too harsh a word — there’s something truly adorable about a town whose official motto is "It’s great to be alive in Colma."

I learned this on a drive through the town with Richard Wong, the director of the wonderfully assured Colma: The Musical, a film that uses this unlikely and oddly ordinary community as a font of artistic inspiration. For Wong, who grew up in San Francisco, the burg recalls childhood trips to Toys "R" Us after visiting family tombstones at the Chinese cemetery. He brings me to the surprisingly expansive Colma Historical Association, a museum charting the town’s lore with binders on each of the memorial parks. Then we coast through the self-contained pocket of homes and the location where Rodel, one of the three restless, fresh high school grad protagonists of the film, fictionally resided. Wong notices a bit of improvement to the place — new brick-patterned siding spruces up the garage — and a couple of houses under construction at the end of the block. Other than that, nothing’s changed, he says.

"One of the inspirations for the film came from the idea of a small town — one that doesn’t really change much — next to one of the most progressive cities in the world," Wong remarks. "Colma is almost exactly the same as it was when the houses were first built."

Colma is a character in the movie — a collaboration with Wong’s college pal H.P. Mendoza, who wrote the script and songs and capably plays Rodel — whose opening musical number, "Colma Stays," is a peppy celebration of suburban stasis. It takes Wong’s expert use of split screen to enliven the carless boulevards and the encroaching sense of teenage ennui. (Befitting its location, Colma: The Musical does wonders with its garage-sale budget and rumpus-room laptop audio- and video-editing marathons.) Billy, another of the main characters, points to a rare new feature on the landscape: a just-built police station. It’s difficult to imagine the crimes the cops must contend with.

The film, however, vividly illustrates how three Colma youths occupy themselves: crashing generic college parties, working at the mall, and hitting the bars with fake IDs. (Wong had to excise a drug-use reference — another stereotypical suburban teen activity — in order to gain permission to shoot a moody musical number in the Italian cemetery.) The fog that envelopes Colma serves as an almost too-perfect metaphor for the insularity of dead-end streets, which engender the claustrophobia of neighborhood inertia in the characters. "There’s no conflict in their lives, and that’s the problem," Wong explains. "They just don’t have that much going on." With nothing to do, people can get bitter — or they get out. The two guys manage that — Rodel, shunned by his family because he’s queer, heads to New York to pursue his dream of being in the musical theater, while Billy, an aspiring actor, packs his car to move to San Francisco. Their female cohort Maribel, the tart character who holds them together, plans to stay — though her motivations are self-deprecatingly ambiguous.

There is a genre of suburban films that usually involves teen suicide, superdepressed moms, or scary skeletons in the linen closet. If this were a Larry Clark film, the kids would be shooting up or shooting themselves. If it were a John Hughes picture, there’d be prom-related antics in the McMansion. In Colma, they sing their suburban sorrows. Wong suggests his film might be a regional music-theater production of a suburban drama, and it’s a wacky idea that’s far more satisfying than you might expect.

Mendoza, in a phone conversation, admits that he prefers films that have some empathy for tract-house dwellers. He feels that Napoleon Dynamite sneers at its characters. "I did not want that for this. I find Colma endearing," he says. "This is not an indictment — it is a locale. We’re just portraying these kids saying it’s boring." Mendoza lived in Colma during his high school years, moving there after growing up in the Mission. "At that time, all the Filipino families moved to Daly City so their kids could go to Westmoor High."

While it finds comedy in the notion of living in a generically small locale, the film exudes an affably focused sense of place. Mendoza tells me that his best friend in high school cited a particular Colma cul-de-sac as his favorite place because it had a great view of the mall. He reveals his own beloved spot, an underpass at the intersection of an up-and-coming Filipino street and a dicey neighborhood. On the sloped, stagelike hill, Mendoza and his pals would have water-balloon fights and — "This is so gay," he warns — reenact scenes from Little Shop of Horrors. Given his movie, that makes wonderful sense.

The image also fits the satisfying, hometown-boys-make-good narrative of the film’s critical success. Since Colma: The Musical scored on the festival circuit, Wong has hooked up with the more seasoned director Wayne Wang, with whom he’s currently working. Future collaborations with Mendoza are imminent, including a Colma sequel: Serramonte: The Musical. That narrative will follow, in song, Maribel’s future in retail. As a career path, that may seem like a dead end, but for Wong and Mendoza, creating a movie about it affirms that their little town of graveyards is ripe with artistic joie de vivre.

Holdin’ the weight of the Bay

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Still looks like slavery

But it’s the black legacy

Mistah FAB, "100 Bars"

One night last September, I hitch a ride with G-Stack of the Delinquents and Dotrix of Tha Mekanix to Dem Hoodstarz’s album release party in San Francisco. As we park outside the club, Mistah FAB rolls up with a modest posse. In contrast to his usual iced-out Technicolor clubwear, the man also known as Fabby Davis Jr. is low-key, dressed all in black, a pair of designer stunna shades supplying the main clue to his identity. He hops in Stack’s car to hear a newly laid track for the latter’s upcoming Purple Hood, then we set out for the club, a less than half block journey whose distance is lengthened interminably by a series of well-wishers and business consultations. It’s like following two CEOs across the floor of the stock exchange: Stack is on two cell phones, trying to shake hands with someone. FAB, meanwhile, handles minor transactions, poses for a photo, and takes a call, all while briefing me on the deal he had just signed with Atlantic Records for Da Yellow Bus Rydah, the much-anticipated follow-up to his 2005 disc, Son of a Pimp (Thizz Ent.).

Near the door, a man takes FAB aside. "FAB, you gotta do something about the violence," he says, meaning specifically the 141 homicides in Oakland in 2006 under former mayor and present attorney general Jerry Brown. FAB nods at what is clearly an unreasonable request, albeit one that reflects the disproportionate political burden borne by black entertainers in America. No one would turn to, say, Justin Timberlake to stop violence. Then again, I imagine no one asks Keak Da Sneak either. FAB’s position, in other words, is unique.

Though he made his early reputation as a freestyle battle rhymer and owes his success to hyphy hits like "Super Sic Wit It," FAB’s lyrics seldom stray into gangsta or pimp terrain — the title of his last album is simply literal. Yet he can get down on a track with the most thugged-out MCs. Aside from the giants Too $hort and E-40 and on par with the perpetually hot Keak, FAB is the rapper all Bay Area rappers want on their albums, because he has the biggest buzz on the radio and in the streets. His popularity gives him influence, but FAB commands respect in the hood because he’s from the hood: his compass-based hit "N.E.W. Oakland" was the first major rap recognition of his native North Oakland as a hood. This rapport with the alienated and isolated ghetto youth who constitute hyphy’s core audience separates him from the vast majority of MCs to whom the label "conscious" may be applied.

"You go up to someone in the hood and be, like, ‘Dick Cheney had a heart attack,’ they be, like, ‘Who the fuck is Dick Cheney?’" FAB says later. "But you tell him, ‘Jay-Z donated a million dollars to improve water in Africa,’ they be, like, ‘For real?’ That’s something of their world. Being a Bay Area artist, I’m of their world. So you have the opportunity to teach without them knowing."

"People who have influence," FAB continues, "have an obligation to tell people, ‘Preserve life. Save lives. Help lives.’ But it’s hard to reach people if you’re not giving them something they relate to. The hyphy movement is something they relate to. Hyphy gets you in the door, to open their ears to what I’m saying. It’s up to them to digest it."

That night at the club, FAB exerts his influence. When things get salty between security and Dem Hoodstarz’s East Palo Alto associates, the group calls FAB to the stage to perform their collaboration "Ugh." Things chill out. FAB issues an impromptu plea against violence and murders. These are problems no single person can solve, but FAB is doing his part. Yet by the show’s finale — the "Getz Ya Grown Man On" remix, on which he has a verse — Fabby Davis has left the building. Being Mistah FAB, I realize, can be exhausting.

FOLLOW THE YELLOW BUS ROAD


Mistah FAB’s deal with Atlantic is a landmark in a scene long neglected by the majors. Along with Clyde Carson’s signing with Capitol, FAB’s arrangement — including distribution for his Faeva Afta Entertainment — is the first serious acknowledgment of the renaissance Bay Area rap has undergone in the past three years. Unlike E-40, a regional star who’d already achieved putf8um sales on Jive before his push last year by Warner Bros., FAB’s an unknown quantity outside the Bay. And in contrast to Frontline or the Federation — whose deals came through the respective backing of nationally known producers E-A-Ski and Rick Rock — FAB is the first evidence for a new generation of local rappers that enough talent and dedication can get you signed. It’s another weight on the shoulders of the man born Stanley Cox Jr.

"Lots of people are putting their hopes into the album," he acknowledges. "They’re, like, ‘I hope FAB do it, because it’ll kick in the door for all of us.’ I realized when I was creating this album it’s not just something I want to do. It’s something my whole region depends on."

Da Yellow Bus Rydah‘s journey has been anything but smooth, however. Bottom line: Atlantic has postponed the album’s tentatively scheduled spring release, due to controversy surrounding the Ghostbusters-themed advance single, "Ghost Ride It." A tribute to the hood-invented practice of throwing your car in neutral as you walk alongside and steer, "Ghost Ride It" was generating a buzz through its a video on YouTube and the minor-league MTVs when a Dec. 29, 2006, Associated Press story ("Hip-Hop Car Stunt Leaves 2 Dead") linked the song with a pair of unrelated deaths: Davender Gulley, 18, of Stockton, who "died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV," and an unnamed "36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car [who] fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada’s first ghost riding fatality." While the scant details obscure whether these incidents stemmed from ghost riding or more traditional automotive horseplay, Fox News’s Hannity and Colmes found the trend alarming enough to call FAB on the carpet in January.

"You understand that a lot of kids look up to you?" Sean Hannity accused rather than asked FAB. "They sing your songs. They dress like you. They talk like you — they wanna be you!" Aside from displaying an oversimplified sense of the relationship between artist and audience, Hannity’s remark reveals a comic lack of familiarity with hip-hop and their guest in particular: what part of "Super Sic Wit It" do you sing? Moreover, while rap fans undoubtedly draw from the same well of slang, the idea that they all talk the same — or even like FAB, for that matter — is a stereotype.

"I don’t think they expected me to be so articulate," FAB recalls with a laugh. Yet among MCs, FAB is singular interview subject. While he has a clear sense of his talent and importance, he’s more apt to discuss his personal relationship with God or how his lonely childhood as a latchkey kid inspired him to create rather than brag about how real he is. His power to articulate the struggle of urban youth — to explain the rage that motivates, say, ghost riding — is the very reason he’s often labeled the spokesperson for a hyphy movement otherwise devoted to "going dumb."

Hannity treated FAB like he’s dumb, but FAB turned the tables. Hannity’s denunciation of his effect on the "kids" prompted the rapper to question whether his influence rightly extends to a Canadian 11 years his senior, which Hannity countered by accusing FAB of wanting as much "money and controversy" as he can get. When FAB speculated on the influence of turning on the TV and seeing 3,000 soldiers die in Iraq, Alan Colmes was sent in as a balm, ending the segment.

"Both those people were adults," FAB says later of the ghost-riding deaths. "I feel bad for the families, but at the end of the day, an adult has to take responsibility for his actions."

GHOSTBUSTED


The next pothole for Yellow Bus was a late March cease and desist letter from Columbia Pictures for copyright infringement in the "Ghost Ride It" video — just as it was about to debut on MTV’s 106 and Park. "We had permission [to use the Ghostbusters van] from the man who built it and owns it," FAB explains. "But Columbia owns the logo." The video was immediately pulled from all media outlets, impairing Atlantic’s ability to market the single nationally. As a result, the Yellow Bus has been parked. The official explanation, from Atlantic VP Mike Carin, is that the label is focusing on FAB’s "artistic development." Despite the inevitable rumor that the rapper was dropped, Carin confirms that "the deal is still in place."

Still, such delays have silenced many MCs’ buzz: witness how the delay of Raekwon’s album on Aftermath has converted excitement into skepticism, or how the Team’s World Premiere (Moedoe/Koch, 2006) dropped too long after its singles had peaked, leading to lower-than-expected sales. Fortunately, the structure of FAB’s distribution deal allows him an unusual degree of freedom.

"They were willing to sacrifice certain things," he says of his initial decision to sign with Atlantic among competing offers. "They allowed me to do what I want to do — if I want to drop an independent album, I can."

ENTER DA BAYDESTRIAN


This flexibility has allowed the prolific FAB to immediately walk out another new album, Da Baydestrian, on May 15, through SMC/Fontana. Although, according to SMC cofounder Will Bronson, Atlantic has options to include as many as five of its songs on Yellow Bus, Baydestrian is an otherwise distinct project intended to satisfy the demand for a follow-up to Son of a Pimp. FAB’s also preparing a series of summer releases, including a second installment of the all-freestyle Tonite Show with DJ Fresh. (Fresh, incidentally, edited FAB’s 2005 DVD, The Freestyle King, now packaged with Baydestrian as a bonus.) With Beeda Weeda and J-Stalin, representing the East and West respectively, FAB’s formed the multihood group N.E.W. Oakland, whose mixtape is nearing completion. Prince of Da Bay (In Yo Face/Hooker Boy Filmz), a documentary on FAB by local hip-hop director Dame Hooker, should be out by press time, while FAB’s next DVD, Shoobalaboobie TV, is in the works.

"You do what you have to do to keep the buzz going," FAB says. "Also sales — on the independent level, your numbers are what’s important [to major labels]." Da Baydestrian thus has Atlantic’s blessing, but its commercial success will determine the fate of his deal.

Yet the need to appeal to the marketplace hasn’t inhibited FAB’s creativity, and Da Baydestrian refuses to play it safe. Rather than exploit the hyphy sound he helped establish, FAB only sprinkles it in, most obviously on the remix of the Traxamillion-produced "Sideshow" and the opening title track, one of six bangers produced by FAB protégé Rob-E. The young Martinez-born producer proves his versatility on tracks like the triumphant "Get This Together" and the melancholy "Life on Track," featuring Faeva Afta vocalist J-Nash, whose Hyphy Love drops in August. Another four productions by Son of a Pimp collaborator Genessee contribute to Baydestrian‘s in-house feel even as the family breaks new ground: "Can’t Wait," say, evokes Andre 3000’s explorations of go-go, filtered through FAB’s hyphy sensibility, while "Shorty Tryin’ 2 Get By" is a contemporary "Keep Ya Head Up" spiced with Bay Area R&B. The album is refreshingly free of skits, and guest stars are kept to a minimum, but Too $hort blesses the disc three times, an unambiguous stamp of approval from Bay rap’s founder.

What makes Da Baydestrian one of the most extraordinary albums since hyphy’s inception, however, is its social consciousness. "Deepest Thoughts," for example, hits out at President George W. Bush, but even more pointedly at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for expanding the prison system instead of aiding the poor. The Sean T–produced "Crack Baby Anthem" addresses teen dope dealers, seeking to uplift without castigating or glorifying their activities — for the nonghetto audience, the song connects the dots between poverty, crime, and the present political climate. FAB describes his approach as "hip-hyphy," presenting an alternative to hip-hop fans who consider hyphy juvenile or incomprehensible. Granted, the disc’s school bus and helmet imagery — referring to the hyphy concept of acting "retarded" — is hardly p.c. Nonetheless, FAB’s lunchbox-wielding Baydestrian is a welcome change from the exaltation of guns and dope adorning your average rap album.

"In no way am I trying to say I’m like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X," FAB explains. "But I realized I could create nonsense and seem to support ignorance, or I can get people to start looking at the reality of it, and the reality of it is that young blacks are dying, not only in the Bay; they’re dying everywhere. We’ve been raised in a warlike civilization. We’ve been brainwashed to accept war as the proper thing to do when things don’t go right."

"Tupac [Shakur] said it himself," FAB concludes. "He said, ‘I’m not going to be the one to change the world. But I guarantee I’ll plant a seed in the mind of someone who does.’ We’re all the Tupac generation. Pac was hyphy."

While I don’t think it’s my place to declare FAB the next Tupac, I can’t fail to be struck by his invocation of the Bay Area icon. On a superficial level, of course, with all his non-thugged-out, cartoonish imagery, FAB is nothing like Pac, just as the hyphy movement differs from the Bay’s mid-’90s sound. Yet locally, if not nationally, the two rappers occupy the same position on the map of hip-hop: like Pac, FAB has cred with nearly everyone, he has a positive message within an utterly street aesthetic, and he makes tunes everyone wants to hear. No rapper has embodied all three attributes since Pac, and that combination makes FAB extraordinary. *

Tow-away zones that lie

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> news@sfbg.com

Parking a car is notoriously difficult in San Francisco, where you can be towed for blocking a driveway, occupying a bus zone, failing to move your vehicle at certain times of the day, or being in a posted construction zone.

But many of those construction zone tow-away signs may be fake, a problem that the city does little to enforce and the public has a hard time discerning.

Contractors sometimes simply purchase a sign for $2 and post it without the legal right to do so. Often it’s an innocent error by out-of-town contractors who don’t know to apply for a street space parking permit. Other times it can be an interim step by contractors waiting for the right to reserve a spot outside their job site or by contractors who never met with a Department of Public Works inspector to determine the hours and scope of their parking needs.

Theoretically, parkers are free to ignore these fake signs. But it’s hard for the public to tell a fake sign from a real one unless they contact the city. And who does that while hunting for a parking space?

The streets are considered part of the public’s right-of-way. In addition to a construction permit, a street space permit is necessary if contractors will block the right-of-way, although underground services such as utility companies remain exempt.

The DPW issued 9,020 street space permits in 2006, according to spokesperson Christine Falvey. That year 93 citations were issued to property owners whose contractors did not have valid street space permits; all of those citations were prompted by citizen complaints.

"Street space violations are not proactive, they are reactive," said Dan McKenna, deputy manager of the DPW’s Bureau of Street Use and Mapping, which handles these permits and violations.

In other words, a construction zone tow-away sign will never be challenged if the public does not ask the DPW or the Department of Building Inspection, which has its own street space permit desk, to go out and validate it.

That’s what happened at the corner of Haight and Shrader streets last October when Service Concrete of Daly City got a valid permit for street space and sidewalk repair but failed to meet with a DPW inspector. Contractors often want to claim more spaces, for more hours, than what the inspectors may ultimately be willing to approve.

Service Concrete never scheduled a meeting with the department, nor did it register the times of enforcement. Therefore, it never had a legal right to tow anyone or reserve those parking spots, according to DPW deputy manager John Kwong.

"They never contacted the department to schedule a meeting for the street space occupancy," Kwong said. "Therefore, the street space permit is not considered valid. They’re not supposed to occupy." But they did, and the job was completed with at least four parking meters marked for tow-away.

A call to the phone number on the permit resulted in the contractor telling the Guardian, "I don’t remember. Even if you tell me, I won’t remember. I can’t comment on anything on this."

In April, the NEQE construction company received a building permit for a seismic retrofit at 240 Golden Gate Ave. It requested a street space permit May 11 and immediately posted no-parking signs. However, it did not have a site inspection, and the actual street space permit wasn’t issued until May 26, according to Nick Elsner, senior plan checker with the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping.

The initial tow-away signs were for seven days a week, 24 hours a day until November, although the permit on file said the contractor needed the space from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays. The contractor eventually received 60 linear feet for three parking spaces for the limited time frame.

"They didn’t put it in the computer," a representative of NEQE told us. "What happened on the job site, we put up the sign for the parking permit. And then they give us notice. And I had to go back to the city because the parking department is different from the city. We showed all the documents, and it was fine."

Neither Service Concrete nor NEQE were cited for improper postings of their tow-away signs. Most violators are never cited. Elsner told us it is obvious that contractors often ignore the law, which, if violated, carries a penalty of up to $1,000 per day.

"When we learn about a tow zone without a permit, we go out and enforce the law," he said. "But we only have four inspectors."

At the height of summer last year, when construction was in full swing, there was a three-week backlog for the verification process, according to Elsner.

Getting street space used to be automatic, until the Board of Supervisors amended Section 724 of the Public Works Code in 2002. Before, the price of a building permit determined the length of time contractors could usurp parking spaces.

"In the past the street space durations, the amount of time you were given for a building space, was directly related to the cost of your project," Elsner said. "If you had a $40 million project, you got four years’ parking. So if you finished in three years, you had a year of free parking. The Board of Supervisors looked at this and decided there was something wrong. Now permits are issued on a monthly basis, six-month maximum. You pay per 20 linear feet, basically one parking space, $82.08."

Elsner said the public cannot tell simply by reading a sign whether it has been legally posted. "They may have filled the sign out correctly, but that doesn’t mean they have a permit," he said. The revised ordinance requires temporary tow-away signs to have the permit number on them in addition to the contractor’s name and phone number. But some contractors don’t bother to apply.

"Our biggest problem we have is with roofers," Elsner observed. "They get a permit to do a roof and say they don’t need a street space. What do you mean you don’t need a street space permit? Either the building has a huge setback or they intend to fly in by helicopter."

Elsner said the street space ordinance has no set hours or days a contractor may use a street space. "That is worked out with the inspector," he said. "If they are not working, their parking should be for public use."

He said he warns contractors that they are responsible for affixing the signs so they aren’t torn down. If there is no sign, the Department of Parking and Traffic is not obliged to tow.

Every day a new list of valid permits is sent to the DPT tow desk. However, some contractors have learned it is cheaper and easier to buy a few paper signs, fill them out, and tape them up rather than get a valid street permit. A sign costs $1.99 at White Cap Industries, a construction supply company.

Cheryl Duperrault is one of the street improvement inspectors at the Bureau of Street Use and Mapping who respond to public complaints. Of the 93 citations issued in 2006, she wrote 32, nearly a third. Duperrault said she cited contractors who simply posted a fake tow-away sign and never sought a permit.

"That has happened," she said. "I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more than it does. It’s easy to tell whether or not the street space permit is valid because they should have a big white placard visible from the street. It gives the information of the permit." *

The DPW offers a free brochure that describes the process of applying for street and sidewalk permits. The brochure is available at its offices on Stevenson Street or by fax or mail. A permit is required when anyone intends to block the public right-of-way "to construct, improve, excavate, occupy, and/or perform work." There is a hotline (415-554-5810) to see if there is a permit on file. The Bureau of Street Use and Mapping will respond if the public questions a temporary tow-away sign.

On point

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> sarah@sfbg.com

April has been an exceptionally busy month for the artists at the Hunters Point Shipyard. In addition to dusting off work spaces in preparation for the upcoming Spring Open Studio, the 300-member colony is scrambling to track the implications of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ever-shifting effort to keep the 49ers in town, particularly as it affects the artists who have rented space at the base for 30 years.

Newsom’s latest proposal involves building a football stadium in the shipyard rather than at Candlestick Point. That’s likely to displace a group that claims to be the largest colony of artists in the nation – unless the mayor can find a place for them in his hasty plans.

"Hellzapoppin’" is how shipyard artist Marc Ellen Hamel described the recent flurry of redevelopment-related meetings. Newsom says he needs to fast-track the transfer of the shipyard from the Navy to the city if he is to meet the 49ers’ deadline for being in a new stadium by 2012.

The blitz was triggered by the 49ers’ announcement in December 2006 that they were considering a move to Santa Clara – which team officials in part blamed on Newsom’s inattention – leading some Bayview-Hunters Point residents to complain that they’re paying the price for the administration’s fumble. Newsom has proposed folding Candlestick Point and the shipyard into a giant 2,000-acre redevelopment project – to be managed by the Lennar Corp., whose profits are nose-diving and which is being sued for alleged whistle-blower retaliation in connection with its failure to control toxic asbestos dust at the site.

"Newsom’s latest plan confirms his critics’ worst fears that this is a bait and switch," said builder Brian O’Flynn, who was part of last year’s referendum drive to put the city’s previous Bayview-Hunters Point redevelopment plan on the ballot and this year’s lawsuit to force a vote. "This latest plan is about political coverage for the mayor in an election year."

His group, Defend BVHP Committee, was already concerned about Newsom’s role in thwarting a vote on the old plan and has even more concerns about the new plan. "If the 49ers leave and the stadium plan is off the table, then Newsom’s latest proposal will make way for more condos for Lennar," O’Flynn told the Guardian.

Matt Dorsey of the City Attorney’s Office said that regardless of whether the city was right to strike down the referendum – as he maintains state case law required – the new plan will get more scrutiny. The Board of Supervisors voted in February to support Newsom’s approach to the shipyard but stipulated that the terms of any such transfer "require approval by the Recreation and Park Commission, the Board of Supervisors, and such other possible approvals, including voter approval."

The artists’ colony is waiting to learn the specifics of Lennar’s redevelopment proposal, which talks of creating "permanent space for the artists at Hunters Point Shipyard," along with new waterfront parks, 8,500 units of housing, and job-generating development. So far, Michael Cohen of the Mayor’s Office and Lennar’s Kofi Bonner are only shopping around what they call a "conceptual framework," which vaguely describes the parameters for merging the yard and Candlestick Point.

The city has promised to replace all existing low-income housing at the Alice Griffith projects and to phase in new units carefully so as not to displace current residents. The artists have not received such promises. They don’t know if they’ll end up paying double the price for half the space they currently occupy, which amounts to 248,400 square feet, according to building 101 artist David Trachtenberg.

But with Lennar announcing a two-year planning goal and talking about an arts-themed development, the colony is formuutf8g its own ideas about how such a plan could work.

"The shipyard is almost like an artists’ retreat," Estelle Akamine told us, as five colleagues spoke passionately about the light, desolation, and poppies that attract artists to the base.

"But it didn’t always feel like a retreat," recalled Akamine, who has rented at the shipyard for 18 years. "There was a lot of trauma in the 1980s when we thought that the USS Missouri was going to be home-ported here. So we’re very skeptical of plans. We were born out of politics."

The Mayor’s Office claims the city is working to expedite the cleanup and transfer of the shipyard not only to adhere to the 49ers’ timeline but also to "allow us to move forward with community benefits like parks, affordable housing, and jobs for the Bayview." Trachtenberg believes the mayor has a strong interest in keeping artists at the yard too.

Newsom promotes his proposal as a way to create jobs and revitalize the BVHP economy. Akamine said, "Artists are the tip of the iceberg. We’re the visible part of a huge, largely hidden industry." Recalling how artists in SoMa fell victim to the dot-com boom at the end of the ’90s, Akamine hopes such displaced organizations will be able to relocate to the shipyard.

"Why can’t we have galleries and suppliers down here too?" she asked.

April Hankins, who rents a studio in building 117, wants to see "performance space for productions, community theater and music, and touring groups. We are discussing space for classes. Ideally, it could make San Francisco a destination for the arts."

Dimitri Kourouniotis, who rents in building 116, is stoic about the inconvenience he’s already endured, thanks to the Navy’s radiological remediation on Parcel B, where his studio is situated.

"We have already had to leave temporarily," said Kourouniotis, explaining how a three-week project to remove radiological contamination from sewers and pipes ended up taking five months and left six buildings without running water or plumbing.

Hamel, who’s rented a studio in building 101 for 15 years, wants people to know that there’s "nothing wrong" with the artists at the shipyard. "We’re not contaminated, and none of the artists have had problems with illness from possible toxic elements," she says, while Hankins compares artists to the athletes that Newsom is apparently scrambling so hard to keep.

"Both need an arena in which to exhibit increasing skill," Hankins says. "An artist’s work and an athlete’s performance is their gift to their audience. In showing patronage, ball games with high ticket prices are attended; art is collected. In communities and teams, both nourish the culture of the city for which they perform. It would be a great loss to the Bay Area to have the shipyard artist community become a redevelopment casualty." *

Spring Open Studio runs April 28-29, 11 a.m.-6 p.m., at the Hunters Point Shipyard. For more information, go to www.springopenstudio.com.

Take 50

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TAKE 50: SF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

THURS/26

*Golden Door (Emanuele Crialese, Italy/France, 2006). Epic in scope, playful in its stylistic shifts and tonal splices, and sumptuous in its painterly framing and use of light, Golden Door looks on an age-old American saga – an immigrant family’s crossing from the Old World to the new – with startlingly fresh, impassioned eyes. Director Emanuele Crialese (Respiro) turns his sometimes wry, sometimes tender focus on a band of illiterate Sicilian peasants drawn from their dirt-poor village by pre-Photoshop pictures of giant chickens and trees laden with enormous gold coins. Led by an intrepid yet ignorant patriarch (Respiro‘s Vincenzo Amato) and a comical spiritual fixer of a grandmother (Aurora Quattrocchi), the group is joined in steerage by a cryptic gentlewoman (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Ellis Island and its proto-eugenic experiments await – along with dream sequences that fluidly transmit the otherworldly magic of the villagers’ forthcoming American mystery tour. (Kimberly Chun)

7 p.m., Castro. Opening night film and party at City Hall, $85-$125

FRI/27

Black Sheep (Jonathan King, New Zealand, 2006). Something is going baaaaaad in Lord of the Rings country. The usual science experiment-gone-wrong results in the usual creature rampage, as sheep go George Romero on humans at a rural New Zealand ranch. This jolly, diverting, ultimately too-silly horror comedy from neophyte writer-director Jonathan King is duly funny. Still, it overstays its one-joke welcome by a bleat or three. (Dennis Harvey)

10:45 p.m., Kabuki

*A Few Days Later … (Niki Karimi, Iran, 2006). Already a star from her appearances in Tahmineh Milani’s overwrought – but much beloved – melodramas, Iranian actress Niki Karimi looked to the grand master, Abbas Kiarostami, for directing inspiration. In this, her second feature, she beautifully captures a specific brand of avoidance and understatement. She plays Shahrzad, a mousy graphic designer who becomes distracted at work. At home her answering machine constantly squawks about her family’s health and well-being, and her annoying neighbor (Behzad Dorani, from Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us) keeps parking his giant SUV in her space. To her credit, Karimi never shows the expected hospital scenes, tearful good-byes, or tense confrontations that seem to be looming. Instead, she retreats inside the character’s head and brings the film to a stunningly private conclusion. (Jeffrey M. Anderson)

7:15 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/29, 12:15 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/30, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki

Murch (David and Edie Ichioka, England/US, 2006). Codirector Edie Ichioka is a disciple of legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), so you know this doc will be nothing less than a glowing portrait. But instead of a simple glorification, it is more an embellished interview (complete with jump cuts during the talking head portions), with Murch using an astounding array of metaphors – besides the obvious "editing is like putting together a puzzle," he also works in painters, sock puppets, kidney transplants, and dream therapy, among others – to explain his approach to his craft. As Murch proves, a talented editor can make a good film great and a great film a masterpiece; it all comes down to an intangible combination of technical skill, sense of rhythm, and artistic instinct. (Cheryl Eddy)

9 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Sun/29, 4:15 p.m., Castro; Tues/1, 1 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3:30 p.m., PFA

*Slumming (Michael Glawogger, Austria/Switzerland, 2006). Two arrogant yuppie pranksters (August Diehl and Michael Ostrowski) cruise around verbally pigeonholing others, making playthings of them. Meanwhile, a drunken, derelict poet (Paulus Manker) wanders the streets alternately cajoling and ranting at people. When the pranksters find the poet passed out on a bus station bench, they decide to transport him to a similar spot across the border, without a passport. Director Michael Glawogger (Workingman’s Death) and cowriter Barbara Albert achieve a pleasurable quirky quality with their black comedy, carefully guiding it between the precious and the preachy; they sometimes amusingly present a joke’s payoff before the setup. The film passes easily between immaculate cafes and slush-covered highways, but at its center is Manker’s wonderfully cantankerous performance. (Anderson)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Sat/28, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 8:30 p.m., SFMOMA; May 7, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

SAT/28

*All in This Tea (Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, US, 2006). Tea still has an effete connotation in this country, but David Lee Hoffman is an adventurer of the old order. An unabashed partisan of the fair drink, he regularly travels to China to ferret out farmers and distributors, sampling and savoring the Old World leaves. His dedication is total; we’re hardly surprised when Werner Herzog drops by Hoffman’s Marin home for a spot of tea, because the director is a connoisseur of aficionados, explorers, and cranks. Hoffman is capably eccentric but also unassuming, making All in This Tea a friendly primer. Codirectors Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht bring their usual ethnographic grace to this 10-years-in-the-making project. (Goldberg)

1:30 p.m., PFA. Also Sun/29, 4:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*At the Edge: New Experimental Cinema (various). Experimental showcases are always an Achilles heel for film festivals big on narrative. They’re often shoehorned with tepid concessions to so-called innovation, although sometimes they yield moments of genuine surprise. This showcase has a bit of both. Paul Clipson’s Super 8 trip of blurred urban lightscapes looks through Stan Brakhage’s kaleidoscope but can’t see beyond it. On the other hand, the sleep of reason produces monsters (slavery, social Darwinism) and some beautiful animation in Atlantis Unbound, in which Lori Hiris morphs her black-and-white charcoal sketches – evoking the mystical art of William Blake or Austin Osman Spare – of 19th-century scientists into slaves, merfolk, and other beings from beyond the pale of the Enlightenment. The banality of evil is also evoked in Xavier Lukomski’s static shots of the serene Drina River Bridge, where, as the voice-over informs us, Bosnians dredged up the victims of genocide. When viewed through a long shot, the horrors of history become more pronounced, given their calm surroundings. (Matt Sussman)

8:30 p.m., PFA. Also Tues/1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki

*Carved Out of Pavement: The Work of Rob Nilsson On the brink of 70, longtime SF filmmaker Rob Nilsson is astonishingly prolific. No less than four work-in-progress features will be excerpted in this tribute program, including some from the nearly completed "9@Night" series of interwoven fictions made with the Tenderloin Action Group. For all his invention and industry in production, Nilsson hasn’t exactly worked overtime getting his movies seen – except at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where you can count on one or two premiering each fall. The MVFF is copresenting this special show, which will have the filmmaker reviewing a career that stretches back to the mid-’70s SF CineAction collective and 1979’s Cannes Camera d’Or-winning Northern Lights, as well as discussing latter-day digital projects with numerous current collaborators, also present. Excerpts from "9@Night" will also be projected on the SFIFF’s Justin Herman Plaza outdoor screen May 1 to 3. (Harvey)

7 p.m., Kabuki

Fabricating Tom Ze (Decio Matos Jr., Brazil, 2006). Though typically grouped with the explosive Brazilian Tropicalismo movement, Tom Ze has always been too much of an eccentric to fall properly into line. It’s a point made abundantly clear in Fabricating Tom Ze (I still haven’t figured out the title), a generally awestruck doc that makes up for its thin content with plenty of Ze’s indefatigable, abundant speech. Between the interruptions, self-mythologizing, and creative suggestions for the film’s director (all of which Decio Matos Jr. takes), Ze spills over with quixotic, brilliant epigrams on creativity and authenticity. "I have to make a small invention every time I have an idea worthy of becoming music," he reports – as if there were any doubting his inventiveness. (Goldberg)

1 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Tues/1, 8;30 p.m., El Rio; May 6, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 9, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

*Hana (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan, 2006). Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gentle deconstruction of that venerable institution of Japanese film the samurai movie isn’t too much of a departure from his previous features. Hana also focuses on the small, unexpected sense of community that arises out of idiosyncratic responses to tragedy or, in this case, the public’s hunger for it. It’s 1702, and like other underemployed samurai during peacetime, Sozaemon Aoki (Okada Junichi) is restless, as is the general population, which gorges itself on violent revenge plays and romanticized notions of honor. The pensive Sozaemon is bent on carrying out his duty to avenge his father’s death, even if he seems more at home tutoring the kids in the hardscrabble but lively tenement where he lives. His neighbors, who initially tease him about his lack of guts, eventually rally round his failures – and their own lowly status – and celebrate the humble resolve. To paraphrase resident dimwit Mago (Kimura Yuichi), when life gives you shit, make rice cakes. (Sussman)

4:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m.; and May 5, 5:45 p.m., PFA

*The Island (Pavel Lounguine, Russia, 2006). Not to be confused with Michael Bay’s jiggly, blow-’em-up, organ-harvesting gesture toward Logan’s Run. If Andrei Tarkovsky’s movies were lit by God, then The Island sets God to work creating an austere black-and-white landscape of unforgiving snow, rocky shores, hills of coal, and blighted driftwood. By all appearances a mad monk but in this reality a truth-talking, faith-healing saint of sorts, Father Anatoly is doing penance on the island for a wartime act that most reasonable deities would excuse. No such luck for this Russian Orthodox overseer – wearisome monastery politics and the teary negotiations of the sick and injured occupy the sooty savant in this elegantly wrought parable, which puts cheesy stateside Biblesploitation big-budgeters such as The Reckoning to shame. (Chun)

4:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki

Once (John Carney, Ireland, 2006). A genuine sleeper at Sundance, this small Irish indie charmer will be spoiled only if you swallow all advance hype about its purported brilliance. Sometimes nice is quite enough. Real-life singer-songwriters Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova play struggling Dublin musicians, one a native busker still living above Da’s vacuum repair shop, the other a Czech emigre supporting her family by selling flowers on the street. Their slow-burning romance is more musical than carnal, climaxing in a studio recording session. Writer-director John Carney’s film manages to play like a full-blown musical without anyone ever bursting into song. Instead, the appealing original folk rock tunes played and sound-tracked here come off as vivid commentary on a platonic (yet frissony) central relationship. (Harvey)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 6, 9:30 p.m., Clay

Protagonist (Jessica Yu, US, 2006). Jessica Yu, the Oscar-winning director of the 1996 short documentary Breathing Lessons (she also made 2004’s In the Realms of the Unreal, a haunting look at outsider artist Henry Darger), returns with Protagonist, an initially confusing but ultimately fascinating doc about four men who couldn’t be more dissimilar on the surface. How can the themes of classical Greek tragedy link a Mexican bank robber, a German terrorist, a reluctantly gay Christian, and an aggro martial artist? Yu uses puppet interludes, revealing interviews, and a keen eye for detail as she traces their shared stages of provocation, rage, doubt, catharsis, and so on – proving the journey of an antihero has little to do with setting, be it ancient or modern. (Eddy)

6:15 p.m., SFMOMA. Also Mon/30, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; Tues/1, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki

*Strange Culture (Lynn Hershman Leeson, US, 2006). The duly strange, as yet unresolved case of SUNY Buffalo art professor Steve Kurtz has spurred local filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s best feature to date, a documentary-dramatization hybrid. With the man himself still legally restrained from discussing his circumstances, Thomas Jay Ryan plays Kurtz, who as a founding member of the multimedia Critical Art Ensemble had long made work focusing on social justice issues and the intersection between science and government. To create an exhibition on biotechnology, he acquired for carefully safety-measured display some bacteria samples readily available online. When wife of 27 years Hope (played by Tilda Swinton) unexpectedly died of heart failure in her sleep, emergency medical personnel grew suspicious of these unusual art supplies. Soon FBI personnel evicted the distraught widower from his home, quarantined the entire block, and accused him of possessing bioterrorist weapons of mass destruction during an incredibly cloddish investigation. Kurtz’s real-life colleagues and friends were interviewed in a free-ranging yet pointed feature whose actors also step out of character to articulate their concern about the government’s post-9/11 crackdown on dissent, even the rarefied gallery kind. (Harvey)

6 p.m., Castro. Also May 4, 8: 45 p.m., SFMOMA; May 8, 7 p.m., PFA

SUN/29

The End and the Beginning (Eduardo Coutinho, Brazil, 2006). Picking a small town at random and making a film about its residents can be brave filmmaking. It can also be plain lazy, as is the case with Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s directionless profile of rural Aracas, in the state of Paraiba. Unsurprisingly, people being people, he finds great interview subjects, but he doesn’t bother to connect them to one another or to the town. Only their highly region-specific Catholicism provides any unifying thread. And though Coutinho’s not exactly condescending (beyond some slight Kids Say the Darndest Things baiting of his loonier interviewees), there’s an unspoken mandate to keep things simple: his response to one woman’s enticing hint at her failed law practice is to ask about her sewing. (Jason Shamai)

7:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also Tues/1, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*Singapore Dreaming (Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh, Singapore, 2006). With their second feature, Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh have their hearts in the right place while their eyes are on the prize of capturing a postcolonial city-state clutching at the global economy. The gently humorous, humanist realism of Edward Yang comes to mind while watching this husband-and-wife directorial team’s warm, witty depiction of the everyday lives of a working-class Singapore family who live, dream, bicker in pidgin English and Mandarin, and inhale vast quantities of herbal tea in their high-rise project. Pops buys lottery tickets, hoping to move into a slick new condo. Back from his studies in the States, the pampered son is discovering that in go-go Singapore his degree isn’t quite as covetable as it once was, and the beleaguered daughter is in her final trimester, coping with a demanding yuppie boss and a slacker hubby who yearns to be in a carefree rock band and pees in his father-in-law’s elevator. When disaster strikes, no one is thinking about the matriarch, whose only seeming desire is to properly feed and water her brood, but she ends up providing some unexpected feminist substance, rather than sustenance, under the movie’s wise gaze. (Chun)

8:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 4, 1 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3 p.m., Kabuki

12 Labors (Ricardo Elias, Brazil, 2006). Part Black Orpheus, part 400 Blows, 12 Labors is a Brazilian feature that revisits the myth of Hercules through the story of a motorcycle messenger’s rehabilitation. A kid from a rough part of Sao Paulo, Heracles gets out of juvie and tries to start a new life. To land a job as a motorcycle messenger, he has a trial day with (you guessed it) a dozen jobs to complete. An artist who never knew his father, he also writes origin stories in comic book form, which mystify his coworkers. Though Heracles’s experiences seem tinted with divinity, he inspires worry on the part of the viewer. Since all good myths have moral purpose, this one finally addresses the very current social issue of juvenile delinquency and rehabilitation in urban Brazil. (Sara Schieron)

9:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also Mon/30, 7 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 9:15 p.m., Aquarius

MON/30

*Broken English (Zoe Cassavetes, USA, 2006). "I don’t think Hollywood knows what to do with me," Parker Posey recently opined, despite having a prominent role in Superman Returns. Fortunately for us, Amerindie cinema does still know what to do with her. The SFIFF is hosting a double bill of the pushing-40 actor’s latest, reprising the title figure in Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool sequel Fay Grim and starring in Zoe Cassavetes’s feature debut. Posey is perfect as director-scenarist Cassavetes’s superficially cheery but highly insecure NYC hotelier. Some may think this low-key seriocomedy paces pat single-gal-searching paths – from Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City – but in its thoughtful nature and serious treatment of a clinical-depression interlude it roams well outside stock terrain. Even if the fade-out waxes a tad improbably happily-ever-after, Posey’s nuanced performance will make you root for it. (Harvey)

6:30 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 2 p.m., Kabuki

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, USA/Germany, 2006). A decade ago Hal Hartley made his best movie, the practically epic – by this miniaturist’s standards – Henry Fool. By most estimates it’s been downhill ever since. They love him in France – but perhaps he should never have left Long Island. So it was heartening news to hear he was returning to the world of Henry Fool, better still to know the sequel would revolve around the title character’s scrappy, vulnerable abandoned wife, Fay, who provided one of Parker Posey’s finest hours. She’s still good here, natch, but Fay Grim is all over the map – literally. The convoluted story line journeys from a mild farcical take on espionage thrillers to a murkily serious commentary on world politics. It’s watchable, but once again one gets the sense that with Hartley, the wider his focus, the blurrier it gets. (Harvey)

9:15 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 3, 9:10 p.m., PFA

TUES/1

Congorama (Philippe Falardeau, Canada/Belgium/France, 2006). Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau’s story of a revolutionary electric car and a sticky-fingered inventor is part of that ever-widening army of films that plant fairly obvious and poorly integrated details into the first act so that later, when the story is retold from another perspective, they reappear with more context to click Aha!-ingly into place. Though some of the big, unwieldy reveals are a lot of fun in a Lost sort of way, they distract from the more prosaic but more satisfying concerns of the film’s smartly drawn characters. The inventor, for instance, is a not particularly likable person who still has a believably loving, humor-filled relationship with his family. Now talk about a novel concept! (Shamai)

6 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 2, 9:15 p.m., PFA; May 6, 6:30 p.m., Aquarius

Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais, France/Italy, 2006). Alain Resnais’s 17th feature is dreamy and sometimes enchanting, though it doesn’t warrant comparison to the knife-sharp moral plays made during his prime, such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Adapted from a play by Alain Ayckbourn (the two previously collaborated on Smoking and No Smoking), Private Fears in Public Places weaves the love(less) stories of a half dozen Parisians; plotlines intersect, but in light brushes rather than the solemn collisions of Babel and Crash). The artifice Resnais imposes on his film is poetic in miniature – the camera, for example, periodically floats above the set, filming actors as if they were in a dollhouse – but the sum total is stultifying, unhinging an already-adrift narration and making Private Fears in Public Places seem needlessly opaque. (Goldberg)

7 p.m., PFA. Also May 3, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 7, 4 p.m., Kabuki

*Rocket Science (Jeffrey Blitz, USA, 2006). Promising to be the next best coming-of-age cultie with its sure-handed, sharp performances and Freaks and Geeks-like sobriety, Rocket Science finds new agony and indie rock-laced ecstasy in one miserable adolescent’s progress. Or to be specific, one stuttering, 98-pound weakling’s marked, often laugh-out-loud funny lack of progress. The high school years for Hal Hefner (compulsively watchable frail cutie-pie Reece Thompson) seem to be going from bad to sexy once he gets recruited for the school debate team by scarily driven, Tracy Flick-esque champ Ginny (Anna Kendrick). But his travails never quite end even as he attempts to extract nerd revenge and literally find his voice, accompanied by vintage Violent Femmes and hand-clapping quirk pop by Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide. Tapping memories connected to a speech impediment, Spellbound codirector Jeffrey Blitz turns tongue-tied prince Hal’s articulation struggles into the perfect metaphor for every awkward teen’s gropes toward individuation. (Chun)

4 p.m., Kabuki. Also May 4, 6:15 p.m., Clay

Still evolving

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The human race either sinks or swims. That’s evolution as Charles Darwin first saw it. But flippers and a seal pelt, that’s pure Kurt Vonnegut. The novelist plays God like no other, wresting the species from its self-destruction, then sending it on its wobbly way with a childlike capacity for invention and a wry if discontented grasp of human folly. That’s Galápagos, anyway, his 1985 best-seller in which evolution saves humankind from its big and mischievous brains by sending it back to the sea. And although the transition from page to stage is probably as slippery as that first fin step on dry land, Vonnegut fans (a species unto themselves) will no doubt flock to see the book’s adaptation in the world premiere of Galáp, by San Francisco’s Boxcar Theatre.

In a year that found the young company variously pitched in the sand at Baker Beach and careening onboard the Mexican Bus’s rolling party platform, it hardly surprises one to see the itinerant Boxcar pulling into the Cadillac Building at 1000 Van Ness to occupy the vacated offices of an online shoe company as it brings its inaugural season (aptly titled "Journeys") to a close. And indeed, a better-sounding setting for a play inspired by a Vonnegut story is hard to imagine.

Artistic director Nick A. Olivero wants to make the most of it too. His imaginative, kinetic staging contains continual surprises, aided by the aquatic and exotic atmosphere summoned through Lisa Lutkenhouse’s resourceful costumes, Norm Munoz’s puppets, and David Sophia Siegel’s jaunty original score. The room itself is divided into several stages, more or less enveloping the audience in the play’s fractured story line, which looks back one million years through the eyes of a ghost (Josh Truett) at the troubled but pivotal year of 1986 as several hapless tourists aboard "the nature cruise of the century" to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands become the progenitors of the next wave in human evolution.

The six-member cast cycles through a number of characters, sometimes sharing duties in a single role. If the hardworking cast begins to win us over, it also never masters the rigors of the material or Vonnegut’s satirical style. Poor sight lines, moreover, make some scenes impossible to view from certain seats. Boxcar’s ambitious closer is a mixed bag, in other words, but like Vonnegut’s relentless survivors, the company shows it can adapt. (Robert Avila)

GAL&AACUTE;P

Through April 27

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $12–$28

AMC Cadillac Bldg.

1000 Van Ness, SF

(415) 776-1747

www.boxcartheatre.org

>

Innervisions

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but cinema’s eternal enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard did direct Contempt, Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine-Feminine, Two or Three Things I Know about Her, and Weekend (and a few others too) in the four years leading up to the political explosions of 1968. These trenchant, tenacious films are as good a record as any we have of an era when light-speed changes in culture and politics only seemed to make history grind to a halt. Each represents a blast of here-and-now consciousness.

Given the feverish tenor of this output, the relative quietude of 1967’s Two or Three Things I Know about Her (playing at the Castro Theatre in a striking new 35mm print from Rialto Pictures) comes as something of a surprise 40 years on. Sandwiched between the hyperventiutf8g back-and-forth of Masculine-Feminine and Weekend ‘s apocalyptic moan, the film is the eye of the storm of Godard’s ’60s, that crucial moment between impact and explosion. The director supposedly got the idea for Two or Three Things from reading a news piece on the phenomenon of middle-class Parisian women working as prostitutes to pay for their bourgeois accoutrement. This loaded role comes to life in Juliette, introduced to us twice, via a typically Brechtian flourish, as both character and actress (Marina Vlady).

Her life’s arrangement is not a story so much as a situation for Godard, and correspondingly, the film isn’t a narrative but rather a study. The Summer of Love notwithstanding, Two or Three Things isn’t concerned with Juliette’s sexuality (any sensuousness is incidental to Raoul Coutard’s color-mad cinematography) or psychology (something that Godard never has much use for, especially when it comes to his female characters); a poster for Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu is the only evidence of female suffering here. For Godard, prostitution is simply an apt metaphor for the dreary life of the new, amorphous Paris to which the "her" of the title refers: the Paris of the outer rings, then being settled by a disassociated middle class and recently set ablaze by more indignant communities.

So then, will the real belle du jour please stand up? It’s Juliette who tends to occupy the frame, sleepwalking through boutiques and barren apartment spaces (like Woody Allen’s, Godard’s film style often seems a matter of real estate), but Two or Three Things‘ most intimate presence isn’t visualized at all. Throughout the film Godard himself interrupts with a whispered, reflective voice-over: an existential director’s commentary track 30 years before DVD technology made this kind of authorial expressivity standard-issue.

No one Godard film is any more "Godard" than another, though Two or Three Things does feel unusually direct in its peripatetic meditations. Conversations, when they occur, are still tête-à-tête volleys (talk never flows with Godard), but more often than not it seems the characters are simply verbalizing their own reveries on life in the pseudocity. The maestro reserves the most powerfully searching musings for his own voice: in particular, the famous "clouds in my coffee" sequence, in which he parses the irresolvable tension between "crushing" objectivity and "isoutf8g" subjectivity amid extreme, lyrical close-ups of a coffee’s swirl, bubbles bursting and shades swallowed by the closeness of his voice.

As with most things Godard, there are multiple meanings to this series of shots, which simultaneously emphasize existential dread and a remarkable capacity for abstraction. It’s direct contact with an imagination on fire, reveling in the difference between thought and expression. Of course, a film built entirely on asides — in addition to Godard’s and Juliette’s reflections, we get many landscapes surveying Paris under construction and the usual café dialogues — is as likely to be a soporific as a revelation; reverie and sleepiness are frequent bedfellows in the movie theater and never more so than here. Certainly, Two or Three Things lacks the pop frisson of Masculine-Feminine or Weekend, but it’s also, in many ways, a more palatable work — not least of all for a toning down of the toxic sexism that mars Godard’s best, angriest work.

Two or Three Things will always be thought of as a stepping stone, though the film’s beauty lies in its singularity. In another, less famous but no less profound voice-over sequence, Godard contemplates the nature of his representations of reality ("Should I have talked about Juliette or the leaves?") while Juliette has her car washed. As the car (lollipop red, of course) shuttles from station to station, so too does Godard’s mind lurch from idea to idea before settling on an underlying truth: the necessity for an indefatigable "passion for expression." The world can be anything he wishes to make it. It’s a beautiful, surprisingly hopeful idea, and for a moment all that followed Two or Three Things slips away, leaving us only this unwieldy, pregnant now. *

TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER

March 30–April 5

Mon.–Wed. and Fri.–Sun., 7 and 9 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat.–Sun., 1, 3, and 5 p.m.), $6–$9

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

>

Superlist No. 826: Alcohol rehab

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› superlists@sfbg.com

Drinking is a fun, legal, and socially acceptable form of recreation … until things get ugly. For some people, rehab serves as an alibi for all the embarrassing and damaging mistakes they made while loaded. But many, for whatever reason, really are caught in the grip of a life-threatening addiction and feel like there’s no way out. Being broke — whether you’re homeless and panhandling or working part-time in a café and barely making the rent — certainly doesn’t make getting sober easier. It’s not like you can just dial Mimi Silbert at the Delancey Street Foundation or check into the Betty Ford Center, chill with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears for 28 days, and then pay the clinic 20 grand on your way out. It takes persistence to find low-cost recovery programs, but you can locate the help you need in San Francisco.

True, the bureaucracy is vast and probably intimidating for someone who is facing the shaking, the anxiety, and the possible seizures and pink elephant sightings that come with detoxification. Your next step, after admitting your problem, should be to call Ozanam Detox (1175 Howard, SF. 415-864-3057, www.svdp-sf.org/ozanam.htm), which operates several four- to 72-hour detox centers and only requests a $10 donation. If you don’t need immediate care, call the Treatment Access Program of San Francisco (1-800-750-2727). It can help you find your way to a subsidized, low-cost residential program treating people with alcohol dependency. Most programs are free to those on welfare and less than $600 for those who aren’t. Participants get three meals a day and lots of counseling.

The Asian American Residential Recovery Center (2024 Hayes, SF. 415-541-9404, www.aars-inc.org) has 24 beds for its six-month to one-year program, and the cost is negotiable.

Baker Places (600 Townsend, suite 200E, SF. 415-864-1515, www.bakerplaces.org) has 90 beds for its 60-day program. It also offers a separate 21-day medical detox program that accommodates 28 people.

The extensive and free program for rehabilitation at the Delancey Street Foundation (600 Embarcadero, SF. 415-957-9800, www.eisenhowerfoundation.org) lasts about two years and includes job training and education. The facility usually only accepts applicants who can’t find help anywhere else, such as those who have been in jail or have a history of violence.

Freedom from Alcohol and Drugs (1362 and 1366 48th Ave., SF. 415-665-8077) has 40 beds for men and currently has a couple vacancies. The six-month program ranges from free to $500. You must be clean for three days before entering.

Friendship House Association of American Indians (56 Julian, SF. 415-865-0964, www.friendshiphousesf.org) has 80 beds for men and women and a program specifically for women with children.

Run by Community Awareness and Treatment Services (CATS), Golden Gate for Seniors (637 S. Van Ness, SF. 415-626-7553, www.careforhomeless.org/services/ggate.html) has 16 beds for men and four beds for women. There may be a waiting list, and you must be clean for three days, but no one is turned away due to lack of funds. Its facilities are not wheelchair accessible.

The Good Shepherd Gracenter (1310 Bacon, SF. 415-337-1938, www.gsgracenter.org) has a six-month program for women. Currently, there isn’t a waiting list to occupy one of its 13 beds.

The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic Drop-in Center (211 13th St., SF. 415-746-1915, www.hafci.org) is open 24 hours and can find you immediate help. The clinic also operates three residential centers, which can accommodate more than 50 people together. No one is turned away due to lack of funds.

Jelani (1601 Quesada, SF. 415-822-5977, www.jelanisf.org) specializes in family care. It has 40 beds for adults and 46 for children, and you don’t have to detox someplace else first. The program lasts six to nine months, and there’s currently no waiting list.

Of the nine locations the Latino Commission (301 Grant, suite 301, South SF. 650-244-1444) runs, two are in San Francisco. There is usually a waiting list, and the program can last anywhere from three months to a year.

Also run by CATS, the McMillan Drop-in Center (39 Fell, SF. 415-241-1180) is open 24 hours and can find you immediate care at many facilities.

The Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center (1275 Harrison, SF. 415-503-3000, www.tsagoldenstate.org) has 21 beds for women, 40 beds for men, and another 18 beds just for veterans. Programs range from one to two years; the cost is free to less than $600. The waiting period is usually about three weeks.

The Walden House (1885 Mission, SF. 415-554-1131, www.waldenhouse.org) has 220 beds. The cost ranges from free to $73 per day. The program’s average length is 94 days but can go up to a year. It currently has a two-month waiting list. *

Chasing my stolen bicycle

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› news@sfbg.com

I stalked across the parking lot of the Mission District’s Best Buy. Like the hordes of people that streamed into the store, I was there to do a little shopping, but it wasn’t for a flat-screen TV or an iPod. I was in the market for a stolen bike.

I bypassed the aisles of buzzing electronics and headed around the back of the store to a trash-strewn alley. It was empty except for a beat-up white van with its side door ajar. I took a nervous breath and knocked on the side.

A blond man in a sweat-stained undershirt threw open the door to reveal what looked like an upended Tour de France chase car: piles of tire rims, gears, and bike frames were scattered everywhere. The powerful stink of unwashed bodies stung my nostrils. A man in a tracksuit slumbered on a seat. The blond man looked sleepy and annoyed but waited for me to speak.

My $600 bike was stolen — the third in five years — from my Mission garage the night before, and it’s here I was told by a bike messenger that I might find it. These guys were rumored to be bike thieves operating in the Mission.

"Hey man, have you seen a black and gray Fuji Touring?" I asked, employing a euphemism.

"No, we don’t steal bikes," the man said, catching my drift. "We collect bikes off the street, repair them, and then sell them. We’re like independent businessmen."

Interesting way of putting it, I thought, as I glanced at the "businessman" slumbering on a van seat. I glanced around the van half expecting to see my Fuji, but it wasn’t there, so I left.

As I trudged home I stewed. I had lost more than $1,000 worth of bikes in San Francisco. Bike theft is a virtual right of passage for most cyclists in the city, and the city’s thieves seem to operate with ninjalike stealth and efficiency. One cyclist told me how a thief stole his locked ride while he picked up a burrito from a taquería. He wasn’t away from the bike for more than five minutes.

The city’s thieves have even won a silver medal for their efforts: in 2006 the lockmaker Kryptonite ranked San Francisco as the nation’s second worst city for bike theft, behind New York.

Gradually, my anger hardened into resolve, or more precisely, a mission. It would be virtually impossible, but I would set out to find my bike. The thought that my life would mirror the plot of a Pee-wee Herman movie was more than a little amusing, but I had a job to do.

In my months-long quest I crisscrossed the city, chasing down Dickensian thieves, exploring the city’s largest open-air market for stolen goods, and finally landing in the surprising place where hundreds of stolen bikes — perhaps yours — end up. Unwittingly, I pedaled right into San Francisco’s underworld.

THE GURUS OF GREASE


Bike theft may seem like petty street crime, but it’s actually a humming illegal industry. Consider this: thieves steal nearly $50 million worth of bikes each year in the United States, far outstripping the take of bank robbers, according to the FBI. And in San Francisco’s rich bicycling culture, thieves have found a gold mine. About 1,000 bikes are reported stolen in the city each year, but the police say the actual number is probably closer to 2,000 or 3,000, since most people don’t file reports.

"It’s rampant," Sgt. Joe McCloskey of the San Francisco Police Department told the Guardian.

I sought out McCloskey, the SFPD’s resident expert on bike theft, and another man, Victor Veysey, to give me a wider view of San Francisco’s world of bike thieves and possibly a lead on where I might find my bike. Several cyclists had recommended Veysey, saying he could provide a "street level" view of bike theft.

Veysey is the Yoda of San Francisco’s bike world. For more than a decade, the 39-year-old has worked on and off as a bike messenger, mechanic, and member of the city’s Bike Advisory Committee. He also ran the Bike Hut, which teaches at-risk youth how to repair bikes. And he’s in a band that plays a tune called "Schwinn Cruiser."

Despite their different perspectives (the city’s police and biking communities are not the best of friends), McCloskey and Veysey painted remarkably similar pictures of San Francisco’s black market for bikes.

In the wide world of illegal activity, bike thievery seems to occupy a criminal sweet spot. It is a relatively painless crime to commit, and city officials do little to stop it. As McCloskey readily admitted, bike theft is not a priority for law enforcement, which he said has its hands full with more serious crimes.

"We make it easy for them," McCloskey said of bike thieves. "The DA doesn’t do tough prosecutions. All the thieves we’ve busted have got probation. They treat it like a petty crime."

Debbie Mesloh, a spokesperson for District Attorney Kamala Harris, said most bike thieves are not prosecuted, but that’s because they are juveniles or they qualify for the city’s pretrial diversion program. The diversion program offers counseling in lieu of prosecution for first-time nonviolent offenders. Bike thieves qualify for it if they steal a bike worth $400 or less. Mesloh said the District Attorney’s Office prosecutes felony bike thefts, but it doesn’t get very many of those cases.

"The DA takes all cases of theft seriously," Mesloh wrote in an e-mail.

As for the police, McCloskey was equally blunt. "You can’t take six people off a murder to investigate a bike theft. [Bike theft investigations] are not an everyday thing. No one is full-time on bike theft. As far as going out on stings and operations, I haven’t heard of one in the last year. Bike theft has gone to the bottom of the list."

McCloskey’s comments were particularly interesting in light of the conversation I had with Veysey, whom I met at the Bike Hut, an off-kilter wood shack near AT&T Park that appears as if it might collapse under the weight of the bicycle parts hanging on its walls. Veysey has a loose blond ponytail and greasy hands. He wields a wrench and apocalyptic environmental rhetoric equally well.

"Bikes are one of the four commodities of the street — cash, drugs, sex, and bikes," Veysey told me. "You can virtually exchange one for another."

Veysey believes bike thefts are helping prop up the local drug market. It sounds far-fetched, but it’s a notion McCloskey and other bike theft experts echoed. The National Bike Registry, a company that runs the nation’s largest database for stolen bikes, says on its Web site, "Within the drug trade, stolen bicycles are so common they can almost be used as currency." Veysey believes the police could actually take a bite out of crime in general by making bike theft a bigger priority in the city.

Perhaps bikes are so ubiquitous in the drug trade because they are so easy to steal. McCloskey and Veysey said thieves often employ bolt cutters to snap cable locks or a certain brand of foreign car jack to defeat some U-locks. The jack slips between the arms of the U-lock and, as it is cranked open, pushes the arms apart until the lock breaks. A bike-lock maker later showed me a video demonstrating the technique. It took a man posing as a thief less than six seconds to do in the U-lock.

As with any other trade, McCloskey and Veysey said there is a hierarchy in the world of San Francisco bike thieves. At the bottom, drug addicts (like the one Veysey believes stole my bike) engage in crimes of opportunity: snatching single bikes. At a more sophisticated level, McCloskey said, a small number of thieves target high-end bikes, which can top $5,000 apiece. In 2005 police busted a bike thief who was specifically targeting Pacific Heights because of its expensive bikes. The thief said he wore natty golf shirts and khaki pants to blend into the neighborhood.

The Internet has revolutionized bike theft, just as it has done for dating, porn, and cat videos. McCloskey said thieves regularly fence bikes on eBay and Craigslist. In August 2004 police busted a thief after a Richmond District man discovered his bike for sale on eBay. Police discovered more than 20 auctions for stolen bikes in the man’s eBay account and an additional 20 stolen bikes in a storage space and at his residence.

When bikes aren’t sold outright, they are stripped, or in street vernacular, chopped, and sold piece by piece or combined with the parts of other bikes, Veysey said. He said people occasionally showed up at the Bike Hut trying to sell him these Frankenstein bikes. But by and large, McCloskey and Veysey said, bike stores are not involved in fencing stolen bikes. However, McCloskey said bikes stolen in the city often are recovered at flea markets around the Bay Area. He believes thieves ship them out of the city to decrease the chance of being caught. The National Bike Registry reports bikes are often moved to other cities or even other states for sale.

The idea of Frankenstein bikes was intriguing, so I told Veysey I was going to look into it. He suggested I make a stop first: Carl’s Jr. near the Civic Center. I was slightly perplexed by his suggestion, but I agreed to check it out.

FAST FOOD, HOT BIKES


"Welcome to the San Francisco Zoo — the human version," said Dalibor Lawrence, a homeless man whose last two teeth acted as goalposts for his flitting tongue. His description of the place was brutally apt: a homeless man banged on one of those green public toilets, shouting obscenities; a woman washed her clothes in a fountain; and several crackheads lounged on a wall with vacant stares.

I was at the corner of Seventh and Market streets. City Hall’s stately gold dome rose a short distance away, but here a whole different San Francisco thrived. Men slowly circulated around the stretch of concrete that abuts UN Plaza. Every so often one would furtively pull out a laptop, a brand new pair of sneakers, or even — improbably enough — bagged collard greens to try to sell to someone hustling by.

Seventh and Market is where the city’s underground economy bubbles to the surface. It’s a Wal-Mart of stolen goods — nearly anything can be bought or, as I would soon find out, stolen to order. McCloskey estimated as many as three in seven bikes stolen in San Francisco end up here. The police periodically conduct stings in the area, but the scene seemed to continue unabated.

I made my way to the front of the Carl’s Jr. that overlooks an entrance to the Civic Center BART station. I didn’t know what to expect or do, so I apprehensively approached three men who were lounging against the side of the restaurant — they clearly weren’t there for lunch. I asked them if they knew where I could get a bike. To my surprise, the man in the center rattled off a menu.

"I’ve got a really nice $5,300 road bike I will sell you for $1,000. I’ve got another for $500 and two Bianchis for $150 each," he said.

I told him the prices he listed seemed too good to be true and asked him if the bikes were stolen. People gave them to him, he explained dubiously, because they owed him money. I asked him about my Fuji, but he said he didn’t have it.

I walked around until I bumped into a woman who called herself Marina. She had a hollow look in her eyes, but I told her my story, and she seemed sympathetic. She sealed a hand-rolled cigarette with a lick, lit it, and made the following proposition: "I have a couple of friends that will steal to order — bicycles, cosmetics, whatever — give me a couple of days, and I will set something up."

I politely declined. McCloskey said steal-to-order rings are a common criminal racket in the city. Police have busted thieves with shopping lists for everything from Victoria’s Secret underwear to the antiallergy drug Claritin. In one case, McCloskey said, police traced a ring smuggling goods to Mexico.

A short time later a man rode through the plaza on a beat-up yellow Schwinn. He tried to sell the 12-speed to another man, so I approached him and asked how much he wanted for it. He told me $20. With a modest amount of bargaining, I got him down to $5 before telling him I wasn’t interested.

Just before I left, two police officers on a beat patrol walked through the plaza. Sales stopped briefly. As soon as the officers passed out of earshot, a man came up to me. "Flashlights," he said, "real cheap."

INSIDE A CHOP SHOP


After striking out at Seventh and Market, I figured it was time to investigate the chop shops Veysey mentioned. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC) reports bicycle chop shops operate all over the city. Thieves strip bikes because the parts (unlike the frames) don’t have serial numbers and can’t be traced as stolen once they are removed from a bike. The parts can be sold individually or put on another stolen bike to disguise it, hence the Frankenstein bikes that show up at the Bike Hut.

When Veysey told me about bicycle chop shops, I pictured something from a ’70s cop movie — a warehouse in an industrial district populated with burly men wielding blowtorches. But the trail led me somewhere else entirely: Golden Gate Park.

SFBC officials said they had received reports from a gardener about chop shops in the park. When I called Maggie Cleveland, a Recreation and Park Department employee responsible for cleaning up the park, she said they do exist and would show me what she thought was one if I threw on a pair of gloves, grabbed a trash bag, and joined one of her cleanup crews. I agreed.

Shortly before 8 a.m. on a foggy, chilly morning, the crew and I picked up mechanical grabbers and industrial-size trash bags and then climbed a steep hill near 25th Avenue and Fulton Street on the Richmond District side of the park. We plunged into a large camp in the middle of a hollowed-out grove of acacia bushes.

The camp looked like a sidewalk after an eviction. Books and papers vomited from the mouth of a tent. Rain-soaked junk littered the camp, including a golf bag filled with oars, an algebra textbook, a telescope, and a portable toilet. A hypodermic needle stuck in a stump like a dart and a gaudy brass chandelier swung from a branch. Amid the clutter was one constant: bicycles and their parts.

A half dozen bikes leaned against bushes in various states of repair. There were piles of tires and gears scattered around. The noise of the crew had awoken the residents of the camp. A man and two women sprung up and immediately tried to grab things as the crew stuffed the contents of the camp into trash bags. They grew more and more agitated as two dozen bags were filled.

Cleveland said the group may have been operating a chop shop, but she didn’t have definitive proof, so they were let go with camping citations. I asked one of the campers if their bikes were stolen.

"We find this stuff in the trash. There’s an economy here. We exchange stuff for other stuff," he said.

Cleveland said the camp was typical of what the crews find around the park. One of the most notorious campers goes by the name Bicycle Robert. Cleveland said park officials have found a handful of his camps over the past couple years. One contained more than two dozen bikes, but Robert himself has never turned up.

Occasionally, cyclists will get lucky and find their bikes at a chop shop. Max Chen was eating dinner in North Beach one night when his Xtracycle, a bicycle with an elongated back for supporting saddlebags, was stolen. Chen didn’t hold out much hope of getting it back, but he put up flyers around the neighborhood anyway.

The next day Chen got a call from a friend who said he saw a portion of the distinctive bike behind the Safeway at Potrero and 16th streets. Chen went down to the spot and found a group of guys with an RV, a handful of bicycles, and a pile of bike parts. His bike was there — sort of.

"The frame was in one place, and the pedals were on another bike. Other parts were on other bikes. I pointed to all the stuff that was mine and had them strip it. My frame had already been painted silver," Chen told me.

Not surprisingly, one of the men said he had bought Chen’s bike from someone in the Civic Center. Chen just wanted his bike back, so he forked over $60. The guys handed him a pile of parts in return.

WHERE BIKES GO TO DIE


A few days after the trip to Golden Gate Park, I finally got around to doing what I should have done when my bike was stolen: file a police report. Frankly, I waited because I held out little hope the police would be of any help.

It’s true few people get their bikes back through the police, but that’s in part because most people don’t try. In fact, the police are sitting on a cache of stolen bikes so big that it dwarfs the stock of any bike store in the city.

SFPD Lt. Tom Feney agreed to show it to me, so I trekked out to Hunters Point. The police stolen property room is located in an anonymous-looking warehouse in the Naval Shipyard. Feney ushered me through a metal door to the warehouse and then swept his hand through the air as if pointing out a beautiful panorama.

"There it is," he said.

Behind a 10-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire, row upon row of bikes stretched along the floor of the warehouse. There were children’s bikes with hot pink paint, $2,000 road bikes, and everything in between. In all, the police had about 500 stolen bikes in the warehouse. The bikes are found abandoned on the street, recovered from stings on drug houses, and removed from bike thieves when they are busted. Many of the bikes aren’t stolen — they’ve been confiscated during arrests or are evidence in various cases. The department can’t return the stolen bikes because the owners haven’t reported them stolen. After holding them for 18 months, the police donate the bikes to charity.

I intently scanned up and down the rows looking for my bike. I didn’t see it. My last, best chance for finding it had disappeared. My heart dropped knowing my Fuji Touring was gone. Feney ushered me out the door, and I began the long, slow walk back to the bus stop.

The most frustrating part is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Police and bicycle groups said there are some simple steps city officials could take to cut down on bike theft, but the issue has long slipped through the cracks.

Officer Romeo de la Vega, who works the SFPD’s Fencing Unit, said he proposed a bike registration system a few months ago, but it was shot down by the police brass. De la Vega said he was told there simply weren’t enough officers available to staff the system. Under his plan cyclists would register their bike serial numbers with police. In return the cyclists would get a permanent decal to place on their bikes. De la Vega said this would discourage thieves from stealing bikes since it would be clear they were registered, and it would speed bike returns.

With police officials claiming there are few resources to combat bike theft, it seems logical they might reach out to the community for help. But officials with the SFBC report just the opposite.

"In the past we’ve tried to connect with the police to jointly tackle the problem, but we haven’t had much luck. We don’t even know who is handling bike thefts," Andy Thornley, the SFBC program director, said.

Thornley said the coalition is willing to use its membership to help police identify chop shops and fencing rings around the city. He said the police need to do a better job of going after the larger players in the bike theft world and the District Attorney’s Office needs to take a tougher stance on prosecution.

Ultimately, Thornley said, enforcement is not the key to reducing bike theft. He said the city must make it easier for cyclists to park their bikes safely. The coalition is crafting legislation that would require all commercial buildings to allow cyclists to bring their bikes inside — something many currently prohibit. The coalition would also like to see bike parking lots spring up around the city, with attendants to monitor them.

Supervisor Chris Daly, who is an avid cyclist and has had six bikes stolen, said he is willing to help.

"It’s clear we are not doing very much," Daly said. "I think if there were a push from bicyclists to do a better job, I would certainly work toward making theft more of a priority." *

Brutal fucking movie

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A corpse is a corpse, of course, of course. And no one can talk to a corpse, of course. Unless, of course, that corpse is brought to you by the famous Mr. David Lynch. In this case the corpse gets up and shuffles away, walking the earth like something out of a Samuel Beckett play directed by George Romero.

My thirty-three-year practice of the Transcendental Meditation program has been central to my work in film and painting and to all areas of my life.

"Are you looking for an opening?" Look over here, if you dare, and make your entrée through a tableau of rabbit-headed domesticity complete with sitcom-style applause and a laugh track inserted at decidedly odd moments. Entrances and exits are everything in Inland Empire, which takes place in a universe so slippery your front door may no longer open into your living room but rather into a dark alleyway — and your identity might change if you step through.

So in July 1973 I went to the TM Center in Los Angeles and met an instructor, and I liked her. She looked like Doris Day.

"You have a new role to play?" Yes, you do, at the place where evil was born; your creepy new neighbor is more than happy to warn you of your imminent danger even as you stride around the ornate mansion that you and your violently jealous husband occupy. No matter, though. That new role is your big break, and your star turn in On High in Blue Tomorrows could mean you’ve finally stepped over the threshold into that magical land "where stars and dreams come true." Not coincidentally, it’s also where evil was born — and where hammy Southern accents go to die.

I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks.

Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 fantasy is Lynch’s almost three-hour New Nightmare, both a film and a studio lot overrun with elliptical numerical references: stages 4, 5, 6, 32, and 35; page 57. Where are we? Hollywood or Poland? And what time is it exactly? Is it 9:45 or just after midnight? Is it real time or remembered time, those two warring temporal spaces at the core of so many film noirs? Douglas Sirk–ian blue tomorrows are always just out of reach, but this is a rare instance in which the answer It’s only a movie isn’t very comforting — both viewers and characters seem trapped in a hellish real or imagined world that Lynch himself can’t or won’t explain. One thing is for certain: if you’re running along the Walk of Fame, it’s safe to say you’re in danger.

It’s so magical — I don’t know why — to go into a theater and have the lights go down. It’s very quiet, and then the curtains start to open. Maybe they’re red. And you go into a world…. It’s best on a big screen. That’s the way to go into a world.

Oh yes, Inland Empire was shot entirely on digital video. And it’s not that fancy-shmancy digital either. No, it’s crap digital. But it’s glorious crap — at once making the horror more potently ugly and profane and lending it the quality of gauzy impressionism. By the 4,000th squashed close-up of Laura Dern’s twisted face, you’re thinking there’s nothing so grotesque as a degraded image — see YouTube, tweaked-out coverage of the Iraq War. Then Lynch’s digital expressionism rallies, the incandescent flares of pixilated light at the twilight’s last gleaming. Everything is illuminated unless it’s not. A cut is not a cut but rather a buzzing lightbulb; a long shot is not a long shot but instead a menacing corridor.

I love Los Angeles.

Delivering her lines like a long-lost relative of Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man and lensed and styled to look like a cross between Jane Wyman and an evil squirrel, Grace Zabriskie plays the ultimate nosy neighbor — one who inaugurates this pleasure and boredom zone by opening a window into the leading lady’s future. Her director has a digital-video eye for combinations of lemon and gray as well as cheap Pepto-Bismol pinks and barf tones — he can make a palatial mansion look as grim as Eraserhead‘s dead living room. This is a movie about the horror of set design, the terror of lamps. Lynch can’t help but look for and stare down the rabbit hole, that spot where it’s hard to disappear, that place just down the way, the space that’s tucked back, difficult to see from the road — the lost highway that connects to the dark hallway and the innumerable nooks and crannies of negative space. As always, he fixates on the sinister brutality in pop’s lexicon; this time, instead of candy-colored clowns tiptoeing into bedrooms, it’s hearts wrapped up in clover.

It was the light that brought everybody to LA to make films in the early days. It’s still a beautiful place.

Is Inland Empire really The Passion of Laura Dern? Yes, this is Dern’s movie, her face being cut up in nearly every scene ("brutal fucking murder," as one character puts it), and Laura, what do you make of it? Are you in there? A spotlight trained on you, long and lean, running horizontally through the night in silent slow-motion, then toward the camera, then fast, then screaming like Rita Hayworth in the mirrors at the end of The Lady from Shanghai, but for three hours. Come back, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney and Mary Pickford, Judy Garland and Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Fontaine and Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe: Lynch wants to make you stars again! A coast-to-coast search will soon be under way for the shot-for-shot remake of Inland Empire.

And sometimes things happen on the set that make you start dreaming.

No doubt, as the fate-strapped actress Nikki Grace, Dern makes an exquisite corpse. Oh, wait — she’s actually Susan Blue, Nikki’s alter ego and the character she plays in her latest film, a Southern potboiler that also stars Devon Berk (Justin Theroux) as Billy Side. Susan wanders through her fever dream screaming desperately for Billy, who always seems to be around the next darkly lit corner but rarely materializes. As the giant talking bunnies say, it all has "something to do with the telling of time." Of course, Nikki and Susan might have just fused into some kind of Lynchian-Freudian beast. The infamous Lynch psychofugue. It’s an assumption borne out by a third Dern personality, a ball-busting broad with a mysterious bruise on her lower lip who permanently totes a rusty screwdriver.

What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh.

Dern’s performance is like a disco ball in a hall of mirrors; it’s rarely clear which character she’s playing, but she’s never less than entirely committed. One minute she’s a kittenish starlet, long legs stretched out across a sun-drenched gazebo. The next she’s a haggard has-been with a busted lip, climbing a set of dingy steps into a dark office, where she tells the man seated there — who is he exactly? And who’s he talking to on the phone? — about how she once thwarted a rapist by plucking out one of his eyeballs.

I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal?

"Hey — look at me and tell me if you’ve known me before." This line repeats throughout Inland Empire, and yeah — there’s definitely David Lynch déjà vu at work here: Mulholland Drive‘s twisted Tinseltown, Twin Peaks‘ slutty-girl world, Blue Velvet‘s dark suburbia, Wild at Heart‘s seedy glamour and endless Dern worship. Plus the inevitably singular moments: Where, before or since, has a splattered bottle of ketchup foreshadowed a murder? Committed on the exact square foot of cement that encases Dorothy Lamour’s Hollywood Boulevard star?

I love seeing people come out of darkness.

Just as it’s tempting to view Mulholland Drive‘s semiuseless dude passages as a simple opportunity for Lynch to spank Quentin Tarantino, this time around his humane take on Eastern Europe might be a genial yet hostile retort to Eli Roth. The director himself won’t say anything about his movies or their influences — he’ll never fess up that Mulholland Drive is essentially Carnival of Souls moved from Salt Lake City to showbiz central, even if one of Inland Empire‘s most terrifying moments echoes the zombies-running-at-the-camera shock tactics of Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult classic. (The scariest Dern close-up adds more voltage to the peak jolt of Takeshi Shimizu’s video version of Ju-on, which goes to show, what comes around goes around.) Inland Empire‘s new capitalist whores might be talking with or back to the ones in Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever and Ilya Khrjanovsky’s 4, a recent movie with an amazing sound design overrun by Lynchian subsonic rumbles.

Fellini had me sit down. He was in a little wheelchair between two beds, and he took my hand, and we sat and talked for half an hour…. That was Friday night, and Sunday he went into a coma and never came out.

Inland Empire is more than long enough to have some dodgy or cringeworthy moments, which include a fair amount of bad acting by models, the jarring soundtrack misfire — rare for Lynch — of Beck’s "Black Tambourine," and a final lip sync of Nina Simone’s "Sinnerman." No one can double for the late Dr. Simone! But Dern, her dirty strands of hair looking like facial wrinkles and bruises, can double over endlessly. By the time she’s on Hollywood Boulevard, caught between a young female junkie and a homeless untouchable calmly discussing how to get the bus to Pomona, she’s suffered a shattering fall from the confines of her lavish, hermetically sealed estate in the recesses of the Inland Empire (both the one in her zip code and the one in her mind).

I went to a psychiatrist once.

"You gotta swing your hips, now. Come on, baby. Jump up. Jump back. Well, now, I think you’ve got the knack. Now that you can do it, let’s make a chain, now. (Come on baby, do the Loco-motion.) A chug-a chug-a motion like a railroad train, now. (Come on baby, do the Loco-motion.) Do it nice and easy, now, don’t lose control: a little bit of rhythm and a lot of soul. So come on, come on, do the Loco-motion with me."

So I say: Peace to all of you. *

All the sentences in italics are from Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, by David Lynch (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006).

INLAND EMPIRE

Opens Fri/9

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www.inlandempirecinema.com

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Kirby Dominant

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KIRBY DOMINANT

Starr: The Contemplations of a Dominator

(Rapitalism)

In a moment when Bay Area hip-hop is synonymous with hyphy in most people’s minds, it’s radio-shock savvy of Kirby Dominant to throw down a solo effort that follows no trends while his Niggaz and White Girlz project with Chris Sinister continues to generate word of mouth. Though its cover art features the same fuchsia hues of Niggaz and White Girlz — according to the man himself, fuchsia is the current signature color of the Rapitalism label — there is no denying that Starr: The Contemplations of a Dominator finds its creator on what he’s described as "some Jack Pollock shit," throwing different ideas and sounds at your head and seeing what sticks.

The first thing that does is the leadoff track, "Shenanigans," on which Dominator taps into an Irish atmosphere derived from time spent in Saskatchewan — but make no mistake, the guitar riff–driven result is no Leprechaun in the Hood pure silliness, and he steps far outside any record collection you’d find in a house of pain. Tapping into various space scientist and chemist cadences (much like Kool Keith in Dr. Octagon mode) to formulate what he deems musical style number 1,576,384,979, Dominant mocks faux producers with no range and knowledge, informing them that "Gil Evans would stab your ass with a toothbrush."

From there he journeys through the warm soul of the title track, lowering a voice that can be as mischievous as early Q-Tip in order to target MCs with no vocabulary whose rhymes are "fermentin’ like orange juice in prison." Going "solo like a nigga at the rodeo," he moves through "Come Outside" to a rock jam coda and then pays tribute to homegirl Joni Mitchell during "The Power of Stephen Padmore’s Shirt." On "So Right" he even gets so loose mentally that he turns instrumental, collaborating with Roy Hargrove to create a trumpet-inflected epic. In the near future Dominant plans to spread the new wave thuggin’ gospel further with Bloody Tuxedos, and he’s even venturing into classical music with Ensemble Mik Nawooj. Starr proves his wild wordplay can comfortably occupy and redesign any space between those wildly different zones.

A sound proposition

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There are huge, expensive, city-sponsored monuments to the arts lined up on Van Ness Avenue, opposite City Hall, and I’ve seen some of the best music in the world performed there.
The formidable San Francisco Symphony took a run at Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Davies Symphony Hall years back — a feat not dissimilar to juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle along a plank over a pit of alligators — and pulled it off with both precision and gusto. And more recently, the San Francisco Opera made me, a lifelong doubter of wobbly-voiced wailing, an instant convert. The occasion was a spectacular staging of Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s great tragedy of miscarried justice as hauntingly rendered by Benjamin Britten.
The opera and the symphony — though deriving much of their revenue from foundations, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales — also enjoy considerable subsidization from government. According to the SF Symphony’s IRS Form 990, it received almost $800,000 in government grants in 2005 alone.
These subsidies are good, but there needs to be a lot more of them — and they need to serve all citizens of San Francisco much more effectively. It could not be said, for example, that a typical Friday night at the SF Opera is either affordable or appealing to a significant portion of the city’s residents.
And it’s certainly not true that there isn’t enough music and art in San Francisco for all its citizens. This place is bursting at the seams with creativity. You could put on a live performance by a local band or DJ crew in Justin Herman Plaza each week for a solid year and not run out of talent.
In fact, that’s not a bad idea! Why not, as a matter of city policy, support the staging of one free, live, outdoor musical performance per week year-round? We can keep it cheap. Once you bring things inside, it gets a bit expensive, stops being DIY, and starts meaning forms, insurance, and union-scale wages — all substantial barriers to entry for your local experimental jazz combo. The space would, in fact, have to be donated — not impossible, but not always likely.
So outdoors it is. Rain or shine. Bring your own PA. Do your own flyering. According to Sandy Lee of the Parks and Recreation Department, the nonprofit rate for using any outdoor musical facility is $500 for as many as 1,000 people. If you want to do one show weekly for a year, that’s $26,000 total. I’ll wager that San Francisco’s major arts funders could easily cover that annual fee through a matching grant program paid directly to Rec and Parks.
That’s a bump on a log in the world of arts funding, and such an arrangement isn’t unprecedented. San Francisco’s Hotel Tax Fund picks up the user fee for the Golden Gate Park Band, which has a regular Sunday gig April through October in the unremodeled band shell in the newly remodeled Music Concourse.
So we’re certain just about everyone will agree that more free live music outdoors would also be pretty much awesome. Now we get to program 52 weeks of free live music in San Francisco. Booking, or perhaps curating is a better term, would be done democratically, ethically, and, of course, pro bono by volunteers called up from the performance and presentation community. Local venue and club bookers, noncommercial and — ulp! — pirate radio DJs, festival programmers, musicologists, and the like. Remember, we have 52 weeks to fill, so there’s room for everyone.
At this point it’s clear that there would be hang-ups to unhang. There would be the danger of favoritism and payola in the booking — underpaid musicians and bookers are often hungry and desperate. There would definitely be aesthetic disagreements. Where, for example, will the punk and metal bands play? The thumping DJ crews? Lee noted that the department is “very sensitive” to NIMBYs opposed to amplified music.
Nevertheless, she said, the city is full of outdoor venues for amplified music, all available for the $500 nonprofit use fee. These include McLaren Park, the Civic Center, Mission Dolores Park, Union Square, Justin Herman Plaza, the Marina Green, and Washington Square. In Golden Gate Park the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has sprawled magnificently across the Speedway, Marx, and Lindley meadows; both Reggae and Opera in the Park regularly occupy Sharon Meadow; and the band shell, a.k.a. Spreckel’s Temple of Music, is also back in action after being closed for three years during the de Young reconstruction.
“The band shell is open to any group that wants to perform there,” Lee said, and that’s a great place to start.
Get city backing for a pilot program and set up a spring-to-fall season similar to that of the Golden Gate Park Band, whose musicians are volunteers. Shoot for radical diversity in the booking to get a true cross section of the city’s ethnic, cultural, contemporary, and historic musical palette. Schedule performances opportunistically: during lunch hours downtown, at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday in the park. Stage local music showcases on weekends or holidays for full afternoons of free music. Pick the lively bands for fog season so folks have a reason to jump around. Switch venues each week to keep the NIMBYs off balance. And remember that commercial radio stations would have to pay the commercial user fee of $5,000 if they want to get in on the game. This will keep things focused on the grassroots.
We must create an expectation for this kind of low-cost local arts subsidy. It’s true that music and culture thrive like weeds in the cracked cement of oppression. But keep in mind that $26,000 for a year of venue-user fees for local music is 3.25 percent of the symphony’s government subsidy. The city can take an unprecedented step in support of genuinely accessible, relevant arts programming. At a time of gutted arts funding around California and the nation, San Francisco could set an example for pragmatic, affordable, nonelitist, human-scale public arts for the entire community.
The only thing stopping us is cultural elitism, NIMBYs, and acres of bureaucracy. Piece o’ cake! SFBG
JOSH WILSON’S TOP 10
•Project Soundwave’s experimental, participatory music showcase
•Godwaffle Noise Pancakes at ArtSF and beyond
•Resipiscent Records release party, Hotel Utah, Oct. 20
•Sumatran Folk Cinema and Ghosts of Isan, presented by Sublime Frequencies at Artists’ Television Access, July 14
•William Parker Quartet, Yoshi’s, May 24. Jazz wants to be free!
•Experimental music showcases staged weekly at 21Grand
•Deerhoof! Castro Theatre, April 27
•Gong Family Unconvention, the Melkweg, Amsterdam, Nov. 3–<\d>5, featuring Steve Hillage playing his first rock guitar solo since 1979, Acid Mothers Temple with the Ruins guesting on drum ’n’ bass, and local guitar superstar Josh Pollock invoking the spirit of Sonny Sharrock with Daevid Allen’s University of Errors (a truly explosive combo including ex-local DJ Michael Clare)
•Hawkwind, the same weekend as the Gong Uncon, in nearby Haarlem, full on with alien dancers, lasers in the stage fog, and Dave Brock announcing the encore: “If fuckin’ Lemmy kin play ‘Silver Machine,’ we kin fuckin’ play ‘Motörhead’!”
•Noncorporate radio in San Francisco: KUSF, KPOO, Western Addition Radio, Pirate Cat

Campus crush

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› news@sfbg.com
It’s easy to forget about the Villas Parkmerced.
Nestled in the foggiest, most sedate corner of San Francisco, the 62-year-old planned community feels like a slice of suburbia for seniors and families.
“There’s grass. There’s trees. There’s traffic circles where the cars can’t speed too damn much and knock off the pedestrians,” says 82-year-old Robert Pender, a tenant since 1967. “It’s forgettable suburbia in urban San Francisco.”
But the peace has been shattered recently by word that San Francisco State University is laying plans to transform its campus into a smaller version of UC Berkeley — with little apparent concern for its neighbors just across the street.
The SFSU administration has been busy at work for the past year on a new campus master plan. University officials say the body of college-bound students in California is steadily increasing and a campus overhaul is needed to accommodate that growth by 2020.
The proposed expansion calls for a conversion of many of the two-story buildings on campus to four- or five-story structures, as well as the construction of new buildings for academic, housing, and cultural purposes. A new 250-room hotel at 19th Avenue and Buckingham, a new creative arts facility, and a new gym are also on the table.
The project’s chief architect, James Stickley, told the Guardian that the master plan is about making SFSU “efficient as an urban campus” and transforming its character from a commuter campus to a destination community. In 15 years, he said, university officials expect to have 25,000 full-time students at the university (an increase of 5,000 students), many of them living on campus and taking advantage of new amenities and commercial ventures within university borders.
It’s an ambitious vision that aims to attract more students and accomplished professors to the SFSU campus. Which is great news for just about everyone — except the tenants of the 3,400-unit Villas Parkmerced, who allege not only that they were forgotten during the university planning process but also that their neighborhood is now coming under attack.
“I would love to see SFSU come out as a premier university and to have a really strong image,” said Adriana Torres, a current Parkmerced tenant and former SFSU student. She was speaking at a meeting held Oct. 24 to assess the environmental impacts of the university’s proposed master plan. “But you are not taking into consideration us, the people who live next to the students,” Torres continued. “I think what this plan is doing is, in building your image, it’s eroding ours.”
The meeting was hosted by campus planner Richard Macias and was attended by more than 70 disgruntled Parkmerced residents.
One major area of contention is the university’s proposal for Holloway Avenue, which separates much of the Parkmerced community from SFSU. The university intends to transform Holloway into what Stickley called “a campus street,” with around-the-clock commercial stores at street level and student housing above, something akin to Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. The university already owns much of the residential property on the south side of Holloway.
But Parkmerced tenants still occupy about 70 percent of that housing, and in their minds, plans for the gradual conversion of that property “for University uses as current occupants vacate their units,” as a university notice put it, sounds a lot like a friendly eviction letter.
“I have lived in Parkmerced all my life,” Healeani Ting said at the Oct. 24 meeting. “My grandmother died here. My mother died here. I intend to die here. Would you have me living in a relocation camp for the homeless in Fresno?”
Parkmerced tenants also assert that SFSU has drastically underestimated the impact of 5,000 additional students on the neighborhood.
Parking — no surprise — is the biggest issue. The university notes in a preliminary environmental review document that “the bulk of the University’s parking needs is met through the multistory parking garage east of Maloney Field” and therefore it won’t be adding any additional parking spots to accommodate 5,000 more students. Parkmerced tenants maintain their parking situation is already a nightmare, thanks to students snatching up spots in their community.
“If you think that you’re going to confine the garbage, the noise, the disruption to all the residents by keeping everyone along Holloway, you’re wrong,” Michelle Miller, a resident of Parkmerced and the head of a local organization called Neighborhood Watch, said at the Oct. 24 meeting. “They filter out. They all want cars. If you keep your parking flat, that’s not going to work.”
University spokesperson Ellen Griffin told the Guardian that SFSU is interested in fostering a “collegial relationship” with Parkmerced tenants and the university will be taking their complaints seriously. University officials met with Parkmerced tenants Nov. 9 to discuss some of their objections. According to Parkmerced Residents’ Organization board member Arne Larson, the university said it would consider moving graduate students and professors to Holloway instead of pursuing the campus street idea.
Of course, SFSU doesn’t have to do any of that. As a state entity, the university has the authority to create and adopt its own plans without involving the San Francisco Planning Department.
The university is preparing an environmental impact report — but no matter what the document says, the project can move forward without city review or approval.
Sarah Dennis, a senior planner with the Planning Department, told us her agency is concerned with the project on two counts: first, the campus street proposal threatens to drain 945 units from the city’s already vulnerable rental housing stock; and second, the overarching plan endangers the basic historic and cultural resources of the city. The Villas Parkmerced is one of only four urban master plan communities in the country.
“We’re hoping that they’ll follow the good-neighbor policy and that we’ll have the opportunity to get involved,” Dennis said. “But again, that’s all up to them.”
District 7 supervisor Sean Elsbernd said that he too is concerned with the SFSU master plan.
“At this point [the university is] at least recognizing this is going to have a massive impact,” Elsbernd told the Guardian, referring to the SFSU environmental impact report that is under way. “But we can guess what’s going to be in that EIR when it’s finally published: ‘Oh look, they say there won’t be much of an impact.’ That’s when the real fight happens.” SFBG

Mood elevation

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› paulr@sfbg.com
Among proper names that suggest height or loftiness, few have a grander pedigree than Ararat, the moniker of the mountain or mountain range where, according to the book of Genesis, Noah’s ark was supposed to have made landfall after riding out the flood. Today’s Mount Ararat, a volcano rising nearly 17,000 feet above sea level, lies in northeastern Turkey, near that country’s borders with Iran and Armenia. Perhaps Noah and his menagerie washed up there, perhaps not; biblical scholars seem to love a good controversy, and various contrarian speculations bring the ark to ground on this or that mountaintop in Iran.
Whatever. While we wait for intrepid researchers to sort it all out with their satellite photos and expeditions and deconstructions of scripture, we can enjoy ourselves at Ararat, a Mediterranean tapas place opened by Koch Salgut in March at a Castro location not quite 17,000 feet above sea level but far enough above the street — 18th Street, if it matters, and for the people watchers among us it does — to provide a definite aerie experience. For a number of years the space housed North Beach expatriate la Mooné, and while that restaurant didn’t set any longevity records in the Castro, it did survive long enough in its comfy second-story digs to suggest that lack of a street-level presence isn’t necessarily fatal — not, at least, in a location with as much foot traffic as you find at 18th Street and Castro. Look for the sidewalk placard and the broad white staircase in need of a paint job and you are there, in a dining room the shape of a fat L with a groined ceiling and surveillance-friendly windows.
The chef, Caskun Bektas, has cooked in Istanbul, so there is a definite Turkish-metropolitan spin to the food. He turns out some dishes you aren’t likely to come across anywhere else, but even the more usual “Mediterranean” stuff confirms the sharp rise in Castro cooking standards in recent years. Despite the many distractions of the neighborhood’s street theater, people expect better food and know what to look for — and at Ararat, they are getting it.
Oddly, the one item on the menu we weren’t enthusiastic about is the first one listed and bears a distinctively Turkish name. It is ezme ($7), a mushy blend of barbecued eggplant, tomatoes, lemon juice, garlic, and roasted red bell peppers. We found it to be a little bitter, which is hardly an unfamiliar issue when dealing with eggplant.
But … the rest of the tapas (“mezes” is the authentic term) ranged from good to superb. (You can get a mixed platterful with warm pita triangles for $13; individually, they are all in the $5 to $7 range.) Falafel, tabbouleh, dolma, and hummus were all as expected, while the savory pastries — flutes of whole-wheat filo dough filled with feta cheese and herbs and crisped in oil — were like something from a Pepperidge Farm package and seemed to expand the field of possibilities for a cuisine that has come to occupy a spot in this country much like the one Mexican food held a generation ago. Restaurants serving the foods of the eastern Mediterranean have proliferated in recent years, and more and more people like the food and are comfortable ordering it, at least if they stay within the well-lit bounds of the familiar: dolma, shawarma, and falafel, nothing weird or unpronounceable, please.
Speaking of which: I have never had a preparation quite like Bektas’s signature dish, beyti kebab ($16). I have eaten and loved kebabs of various kinds, of course, and I like lavash (the Syrian flatbread), so I expected I would like “lavash rolls filled with delicate ground sirloin served with garlic flavored yogurt and marinara.” And I did. But I did not expect the beauty of the form. The lavash had been rolled around the meat like a wrapper — the meat wasn’t ground, incidentally, but it was surpassingly tender: filet mignon? — and then the package had been cut into thin coins that fanned out nicely on the plate. It was a little like a miniature beef Wellington, with yogurt instead of mushroom sauce.
The kitchen’s other savory showstopper is a shrimp casserole ($8), a crock of prawns swimming in a thick tomato sauce with bits of green bell pepper, caramelized onions, and mushrooms under a cap of melted mozzarella. This dish seemed more Provençal than Turkish, but it disappeared so fast it was hard to be sure. Running respectable races in the same heat were kakavia ($10), a stew of salmon, clams, mussels, shrimp, and scallops in a watery pepper-paprika broth, and kalamarika ($8), batter-fried calamari accompanied by batter-fried slices of lemon and potato, which were hard to tell apart without biting into them.
Also respectable, if not quite memorable, were a braised lamb shank ($18) served with couscous and an herbed tomato-Chianti sauce and mercimek kofte ($6), a hummus relative with red lentils substituted for chickpeas. Weaker — in fact disappointing — was the Ararat salad, a fey compilation of mixed greens, dried apricots, and walnuts, with a crotton of fried goat cheese on top. The promised balsamic vinaigrette was undetectable. Were we being set up for dessert?
If so, we must be grateful, for the dessert menu too includes a sublime dish: the nightingale’s nest ($5), a coil of baklava filled with lavender honey and finished with whipped cream and scatterings of crushed pistachios. Baklava so often flirts with being a cliché, like flan, but in imaginative and conscientious hands it can sing a lovely song, an ethereal melody from on high. SFBG
ARARAT
Dinner: Mon.–Fri., 4–11 p.m.
Continuous service: Sat.–Sun., 11 a.m.–11 p.m.
4072 18th St., SF
(415) 252-9325
www.ararat-tapas.com
Full bar
Somewhat noisy
AE/MC/V
Not wheelchair accessible

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