Oil Archives — Page 14 of 41 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Couscous with Al Qaeda

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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July 12, 2011

marke@sfbg.com

TRAVEL TALES Earlier this year, a wave of revolution swept the Arab world: Tunisia and Egypt deposed their dictators through popular protest, almost all of it nonviolent and nonsectarian, with similar uprisings — many still in progress — in pretty much every other country with a substantial Arab population. Democracy was the stated goal of many of these upheavals, and a newly technologized pan-Arab youth movement was leading the way to freedom via Facebook and Twitter, using social networking to undermine long-entrenched authoritarianism.

It was inspiring. It was exhilarating. It was absolutely delicious.

Pastry vendor, Marrakech. All photos by David Schnur

Hunky Beau and I wanted to taste the revolution. We planned a trip to check out Morocco — which, despite the nonviolent, populist Fevrier 20 movement, had so far escaped turmoil due to a popular and quick-footed king — and Tunisia, which was still dazed by its quick success and which we wanted to support with our meager tourist dollars and a show of good will. The outbreak of air bombing in Libya stymied any plans to expand our journey to Egypt, so we made do with more time in our Spanish travel base, Madrid, which underwent its own plaza-occupying convulsions while we were there, influenced by the Arab Spring.

Berber castle, Southern Morocco

Besides the energy, though, we sought the flavors. The scintillating temptation of Maghreb (North African) cuisine, a hybrid of zesty Mediterranean, formal French, savory Arabic, Spice Route African, and indigenous Berber flavors, was possibly a mirage in this globalized world of ours, but it seemed one worth chasing, preferably by camel, even if it came served on a pizza with a side of fries. Also I wanted to explore my Arab heritage a bit — I’m half-Lebanese, but as pretty much everyone we met in North Africa observed, I have “Berber face.” I’d eat my way to my roots!

Central roundabout, Douz, Tunisia

So off we headed in April and May, a newly gay-married, half-Arab virtual drag queen nightlife columnist and a punk-rock Jewish leather enthusiast, backpacks laden, travel sporks at the ready.

PIGEON PIE AND PISTACHIO JUICE

Fez, my friends, is magical chaos. You will hardly get a minute alone. The life of the justly famed souk (market) dominates this pale, sprawling adobe metropolis. You are here to buy things, and the citizens are going to use any means necessary to sell things to you. The labyrinthine souk itself befuddles and enchants: an ancient, arterial maze of sensory overload, jostling with polyglot shoppers, hard-haggling hawkers, dogged hustlers, shrieking children, braying mules, the odd scrawny chicken. No one wears fezzes. Intertwined roof slats suffuse the tiny passageways with idyllic light. Food stalls tower with rose hips, fig relish, lamb heads, preserved lemons, mint leaves for the ever-present national drink (syrup-sweet mint tea), and myriad pyramids of neon-tinted spices.

And always someone wanting to meet you, someone wanting to know where you’re from. “Ali Baba!” some would call me, referring to my beard. “Obama!” many would say admiringly, shining with African pride, on learning we were rare American visitors. And then, ugh, “Schwarzenegger!” when we mentioned California.

In the Fez souk

Morocco doesn’t have a native dining-out tradition, people eat big meals at home, so we had to hit up tourist restaurants for basic dishes like steaming heaps of vegetable couscous; bubbling, cumin-spiked lamb tajine; and the fabled kefta mkaouara, beef meatballs stewed with eggs and paprika. That was fine, these were good and everywhere. Street food was our real holy grail. Hunky Beau was observing Passover in the Sephardic kosher tradition, which meant avoiding most doughs, so he munched on a array of meaty kabobs. Moroccans will skewer and roast almost anything. Meanwhile, I went all in for a Fez specialty, bastilla (pigeon pie), snagged from a jolly vendor near the ATM at the Bab Boujeloud gate. The small, addictive, golden-baked phyllo triangles stuffed with squab, cinnamon, almonds, salt, and sugar steamed with savory sweetness. I ate, like, 10.

When the pandemonium became too much, we clung to thick, musky camel burgers on the roof of Cafe Clock, located in a medieval water clock tower; drank fortifying bowls of tomato lentil harira soup from the nice guy next to the garish Cremerie Disney Channel ice cream parlor; or rested in Place Baghdadi, a huge square surrounded by the old city’s crenellated walls, where the city’s mass of unemployed young men gathered in the evening to socialize and dig through a massive clothing swap. There we sipped tart glasses of radioactively chartreuse pistachio juice, purchased from a cart run by Fatal Tigers, the boisterous fan club of Fez’s champion soccer team, and discussed world affairs with the city’s male youth. (Morocco was packed with lively women who, apparently, were busy doing everything. We did eventually make a few female friends. however.)

A rare woman in Place Baghdadi

By the way, did I mention that young Arab people — and 65 percent of the Arab world is under 30 — are freaking gorgeous? Seriously, we’re about to see some major Arab children flooding our runways. But most of them are dressed in G-Star Raw knockoffs, which I guess is like Old Navy now in Europe? And who knew that those cute boys whispering “shooky” weren’t offering us hash at all, but blow jobs? Oh well.

Older Moroccan men gathered in the evening to play the backgammon-like shesh besh and talk politics at sidewalk cafes, like Salon de Thé Afaf, where we joined them for espresso with a side of water (cafe noir avec l’eau) a Fez staple, and nibbled on roasted chickpeas sprinkled with cumin, watching the hurly-burly street scene and Al Jazeera simultaneously in the fading pink light. No matter what was happening in other Arab countries — like satellite dishes and vehicular hubbub, Al Jazeera’s breathless revolution reporting was everywhere — young King Mohammed VI had so far managed to dodge the boot by immediately offering, and later following through on, constitutional reforms. Compared to everywhere else, this country of 32 million was almost too peaceful. Or so it seemed.

A BOWL OF SNAILS

It smelled like the sewers had been backing up all week by the time we entered Marrakech, so a gas explosion didn’t seem so entirely out of the question. We’d just come from the “Hollywood of Africa,” Ouarzazate, where Lawrence of Arabia and Gladiator were filmed. A fantastically diverse former caravan trade route outpost, Ouarzazate lay on the edge of the Sahara and was the gateway to the Draa Valley, studded with crumbling Berber warrior ksars (fortresses) from long ago. While there, we happened upon an enormous International Women’s Day celebration, bursting with brightly attired clans, ululations abounding. It was some fierce female power out there.

International Women’s Day, Ouarzazate, Morocco

And we had to check out one of North Africa’s top French-Berber restaurants, Relais Saint-Exupéry — named for The Little Prince author and storied desert aviator’s private runway — where, for about $30 we could pull out the stops with an eight-course formal diner Francais. Lapin and canard pate, balled melon pelted with pink peppercorns, a tangy, deep-red dromedaire avec sauce “Mali,” and a tiny chalice of Berber fig liquor were soon finished off, as was a yummy bottle of full-bodied 2002 Domaine du Sahari Guerrouane Rouge. That’s right, even in the Sahara I could sniff out wine.

In the Draa Valley

Les Jeunes Tinariwen de M’Habib performing in Ouarzazate

Now, unearthly, overcast, red-walled Marrakech thrummed with activity, masses of tourists pouring into the huge, famous Djemaa El Fna square. Djemaa is basically where all your Raiders of the Lost Ark fantasies of Morocco come to life — snake charmers, smoke-pouring food stalls, boisterous storytellers, scheming monkeys, even (yes!) elaborate drag shows. Except, of course, for all the cell phones, dreadlocked Spanish kids in genie pants, and tacky French families dressed in the worst cheap Quechua brand travel wear imaginable. Obviously, colonialism didn’t win.

The morning of April 28 we’d hunted in vain for bisara, a thick pea breakfast soup drizzled with green olive oil from Moulay Idriss, but had given up, grabbed a couple kaab el ghzal (“gazelle’s horns,” small croissants stuffed with almond paste) and decided to e-mail our folks.

We were in a nearby Internet cafe when the blast hit. The clock rocked against the wall: 10:56. A man in a hooded shepherd’s tunic at the terminal next door looked up at me, panicked, and then mimed ducking under his desk as a question. I wasn’t sure how to answer. When no immediate second blast came, we hurried out of the building. No source of the explosion could be found, but Hunky Beau and I both had the same thought: the square. We walked about 100 meters and rounded the corner into catastrophe.

It looked like the Cafe Argana, a large, terraced tourist favorite, where backpackers regularly stopped for ice cream sundaes, had folded in on itself. A man dressed in a tuxedo gestured like a mad maitre d’ from the collapsing second floor to the crowd below, most of which was covered with debris. We surged forward to see what we could do, but people were already hauling off bodies. I saw a frantically shaking, middle-aged white woman lifted in the air with no legs. A man’s bald head lay on a table, an arm (his?) had landed like a limp bird on a crumpled metal railing. Yellow tablecloths were used as stretchers, as shrouds. Finally, the ambulances came.

Stunned, we walked slowly from the square. Morocco was supposed to be safe! Rumors quickly spread. Someone was smoking by a gas canister. An oven had exploded. An old furnace burst. Polisario, the Western Saharan separatist group, had struck. The anti-monarchical Fevrier 20 movement had turned violent. Possibly Al Qaeda itself?

It kind of was. In the end, 17 people died, Moroccans as well as foreigners, including a 10-year-old girl. A man in his 20s named Adel Othmani is accused of dressing “like a Western hippie” with long hair and a guitar case, ordering an orange juice, and leaving behind a bomb that he later detonated with a cell phone. (The Fevrier 20 movement led a peace vigil the night of the bombings, at which people symbolically drank glasses of orange juice to protest terrorism.) Al Qaeda in the Western Maghreb officially denied involvement — though it supported the outcome — but it seems Othmani was a terrorism junkie, trying previously to get into Iraq and Chechnya, and the government claims that he bombed the Argana as a tribute to Al Qaeda. This was like his audition! What psychological madness can grip our world’s young. I had never been so close to pure evil.

The people of Marrakech are nothing if not resilient, though. A day later and it was almost as if nothing happened. Out came the snake charmers, out came the Quechua Frenchmen. (Al Qaeda is tired, anyway — the Arab Spring is mostly about the economy and internal reform, not religious war and anti-Westernism.) All the tourist restaurants and food stalls were closed in the square though. Since we were still in shock and hardly had any appetite, we took the opportunity to order some of the more adventurous things on offer in the market. A bowl of snails ladled by a handsome vendor held a surprisingly delicious broth (soup will always help) and the snails, extracted with a toothpick, were more chewy than slimy, like salty jerky.

And a shared ground beef heart sandwich, richer than anything, washed down with an avocado shake, even richer than that, helped calm our stomachs. Our thoughts, however, remained disquieted.

TUNA TUNISIENNE

OK, food. “Thank you Facebook” read graffiti in English on Avenue Bourguiba, Tunis’ main thoroughfare. “The women of Tunisia are and will remain free” read another in French. And another in Arabic: “Bourguiba is for the people,” referring to either the road itself or the beloved Westernizing dictator it was named after, who ruled before the dictator the people just kicked out.

Tunisia is regarded as the most educated country in North Africa — a program of free schooling proved deposed authoritarian Ben Ali’s undoing when students, frustrated by the lack of jobs, used their knowledge to organize and overthrow him. (We met a street hustler named Wassam, for example, who said he held degrees in art history, math, and textile design, because what else had there been for him to do except keep enrolling in school?) So if we felt intimidated that everyone in Morocco was expected to speak at least three languages fluently — French, Standad Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic — here was a whole country of people who could probably help build a superconductor.

Five months after the revolution, however, and the recession was still there. General disgruntlement was simmering again. Protesters, impatient for the July general elections (later postponed until October) were showing up on the ministry steps. The shine of the revolution appeared to be tarnishing. Still, everyone we met was so intensely proud of what they’d accomplished, positively giddy with their newfound freedom of speech. We had no problem making conversation. Any lingering bitterness about the Bush era seems to have been dispelled once President Obama signed on to NATO’s bombing campaign against Gadaffi. They hate Gadaffi.

Because of the recent clashes between protesters and police, however, the interim government had imposed a 9 p.m. curfew right when we arrived. That made it difficult to find dinner — northern Tunisians are European in their late eating habits — but everyone seemed to take it in stride. Cafes were bustling on the evening sidewalks beneath Tunis’ famous mid-20th-century architectural gems.

Plates came laden with Tunisian staples: creamy mechouia (eggplant salad), bread and dipping harissa (hot red pepper paste), young olives, salade Tunisienne (shredded tuna with olive oil and tomatoes), and slata (mixed salad). Our dinner experience — with alcohol! — at seafood paradise L’Orient included octopus steaks simmered in cumin sauce and a dazzling platter of fruits de mer. (Tunisia has 700 miles of glittering Mediterranean coastline, a seafood lover’s paradise.) A row of restaurants serving cuisine from the southern city of Sfax hooked us on salt-and-pepper fried fish over couscous and stewed rabbit with pequillo peppers. And, believe it or not, Tunisian sandwiches, stuffed with tuna, olives, harissa, and french fries, are bangin’.

A certain wide-eyed tension between the past and future could be felt everywhere in the white and turquoise city. Cell phone ads targeting gay men, however ambiguously, had started showing up, and gay groups were emerging from the shadows with blogs and Facebook pages. At the same time, some religious women were reembracing the head-covering hijab, banned since 1981. Hip-hop had fueled the revolution — the aggressive sounds of El General, DJ Costa, and Blid Boy blared next to those of classic divas like Fakhet Amina and Oum Kalthoum and more traditional raï singers. (And then there were the ethereally overamplified calls to prayer from the muezzins high atop their minarets, some of them divas in their own right, auditioning for Arabian Idol. You’ve never heard the Koran recited until you’ve heard it AutoTuned.)

Finally, there’s the Carthaginian connection, with breathtaking mosaics and legendary landmarks from the classical empire that rivaled Rome scattered everywhere. We could barely tear ourselves away from the great archaeological treasures of the Bardo Museum, located in an old harem, but we were eager to make our way to the south, where the revolution began, and where we heard the ojja (sausage stew) was piping hot.

More tasty camels, another brush with Al Qaeda, and an Englishwoman who said God told her to drive through Libya with a Jesus fish on her bumper: Read part two of this story here.

The toast of London

Andrew Lam

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July 12, 2011

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virginia@sfbg.com

>>View an extended version of this article at Virginia’s site, the Perfect Spot.

TRAVEL TALES Twenty-five bars, from Notting Hill to Hoxton. I did some serious exploring when I splashed down in London’s famed cocktail scene this June, from cutting-edge experimentation to dive-y comfort, legendary classics to just-opened destinations. I sipped with cocktail luminaries like Nick Strangeway, imbibed incognito at world famous haunts, and raised my glass at good old-fashioned pubs. Here are some of my experiences, served neat.

A SHOT OF INNOVATION

It’s true: there’s some cutting edge stuff going down in London Town. Among them, 69 Colebrooke Row is considered a standard of experimentation, if not mad science, with drinks pioneer Tony Conigliaro at the helm. A visit to its test lab, Drink Factory — “a collective of like-minded bartenders and artists” — was a revelation. There, unexpected flavors are subjected to rigorous R&D via a dazzling collection of lab equipment ranging from sous vide thermal immersion circulator to tube-tangled “vacuum machine.” (Press comparisons of Conigliaro to Willy Wonka have grown cliched but remain effective.).

Drink Factory rhubarb gimlet, post-centrifuge

By no means are Conigliaro and crew’s concoctions fussy. When you taste a rhubarb gimlet, for example, you get the pure tart of fresh rhubarb stalks, their essence extracted via centrifuge. This gimlet — among the best cocktails I encountered in London — may have had a complex origin but it contained a mere three ingredients: rhubarb, Beefeater gin, and a twist of grapefruit.

The Colebrooke crew recently took on the fabulous new Zetter Townhouse bar. They’ve created a cocktail menu of understated, intricate sips like the Flintlock: Beefeater gin, gunpowder tea tincture, sugar, Fernet Branca, and dandelion and burdock bitters. Zetter’s British drawing room, whimsically peppered with taxidermy (a full-sized kangaroo!), a gramophone, and mismatched furniture, complemented by a stately yet quirky basement gaming room, is among London’s nicest spots to linger over drinks.

Another standout was the spanking new Worship Street Whistling Shop. I chatted with bar manager Ryan Chetiyawardana, formerly of Bramble Bar in Edinburgh and 69 Colebrooke Row. Candlelight glowed warmly against dark wood fixtures and a classic organ with more than a hint of Victorian influence in the basement bar’s decor. Chetiyawardana showed us their Rotovap (for distilling at low temperatures) in a tiny, glass-walled “lab.” Here the Whistling Shop elves create bitters, tonics, and ingredients like “walnut ketchup” (port wine, green walnut, chocolate, saffron, and spice).

Wonders are many, from a house gin fizz using vanilla salt, orange bitters, extra virgin olive oil, and soda, to a conversation-starter called the (Substitute) Bosom Caresser, layered with baby formula milk (you heard right), Hennessy Fine de Cognac, dry Madeira, house grenadine, salt, and pepper bitters. A pricey Champagne gin fizz (80 pounds a bottle) takes No. 3 gin, lemon, and sugar, fermenting the ingredients with yeast via méthode champenoise, a classic process of secondary fermentation in the bottle. Elegant, integrated beauty.

Some of Whistling Shop’s profoundest joys came from a row of mini-casks behind the bar where an intriguing mix of ingredients are infused into a range of spirits. Though the barrel-aged cocktail craze has swept the world, I’ve yet to see this range at any one bar. WS2 “Whisky” ages Balvenie with beech, maple, and peat syrup in new oak. WS2 “Genever” captivates with Tanqueray gin, Caol Ila Scotch, green malt, and spices, aged in sherry oak. Wherever you turn at this bar, you’ll find the unusual, while the staff and vibe are comfortable, classy. Just the kind of place I’d love to have in my own city.

TRADITIONAL, WITH TWISTS

Smokin’: Hawksmoor’s julep and Tobacco Old Fashioned

Hawksmoor is the territory of visionary mixer Nick Strangeway, where friendly bartenders continue his tradition of well-crafted drinks. I was delighted to order from a menu loaded with classic juleps, cobblers, punches. St. Regis mint julep is a 1930s new Orleans recipe: rye whiskey and Cuban rum form the base, while homemade grenadine rounds it out. it comes, wonderfully, in a traditional julep cup (atypically caked in thick ice, however) with a vivid garnish of berries and mints, tasting like a proper southern julep. compared to other smoke-infused cocktails, I would have liked to taste more tobacco in the Hawksmoor’s tobacco old fashioned. But with rye and house tobacco bitters, the drink was still beautifully executed.

AND THEN … NOT SO MUCH

It’s incredible how many acclaimed London menus are still littered with flavored vodkas and fruity, chichi, or just plain played-out drinks. I witnessed entire groups of friends each with a mojito in hand in bars that carried extensive, fascinating menus.

The 1930s tunes and classy, basement vibe of Nightjar worked in terms of a speakeasy-themed bar. But clientele appeared to be not a day over 18, making the place feel like “kindergarten just let out,” as my companion the Renaissance Man said. Fine — but the flamboyantly garnished yet crappy-tasting drinks really sank the place. Despite a beautiful menu, “signature” cocktails tasted of juice (Pedro Pamaro) or smoky tea (Name of the Samurai) but not at all of alcohol. The only win was a surprisingly good canape platter. For a mere 6 pounds, one can get six tasty, generously-sized canapés until 2 or 3 a.m. This is significant when you realize how impossible it is to get even a bite to eat in London’s hippest neighborhoods after 11 p.m. (just try!)

POMP OVER TASTE

My expectations were high for my visit to the lauded Artesian Bar at the Langham Hotel. The gorgeous, airy room is illuminated with Asian-meets-French decor, romantic and intimate. An extensive menu hosts a brilliant flavor-profile map to help choose a cocktail to suit your mood. All seemed to confirm how special this place was. And then …

Yes, I was prepared for pricey cocktails (15 pounds) but not for the menu to read better than it tasted. The standout was Cask Mai Tai, a cask-aged Mai Tai, deeply spiced and autumnal, with tart lime and fresh mint. However, Silk Route, an intriguing milk punch of Batavia Arrack, Pimento Dram, and Elements 8 Platinum Rum was bland with a funky aftertaste. I yearned for its sun-dried roasted coconut and lime elements to shine through. Alexino sounded luscious: Ron Zacapa 23 Rum shaken with whipping cream, red bean paste, and aromatic spices. I tasted little red bean or spice, while the bean paste sat sludge-like at the bottom of the glass. Granted, red bean is not an easy ingredient to mix into a drink. But at roughly $25 a cocktail, each should be exemplary.

SOMETIMES CLASSIC IS BEST

I’ve saved one of the best for last: Duke’s. This elegant, small hotel bar is a temple to the martini. I could see why it was frequented by James Bond author Ian Fleming and other martini lovers over the years. I cannot recall a more perfect martini. Head barman Alessandro Palazzi is among the most delightful, consummate bartenders I’ve had the pleasure to be served by. As he wheeled out a trolley laden with olives, lemons, ice, and gorgeous barware, he immediately impressed with his expert gin knowledge.

Asking where we were from, he launched into a rapturous account of his love for San Francisco gins 209 and Junipero, saying he’s long been extolling the glories of Junipero. Well-versed and intimately acquainted with the best gins the world over, he dropped distiller names like “Arne” and “Fritz.”

I asked for London’s Sipsmith gin. Alessandro proceeded to bring out a sample of another locally-produced, small distiller Sacred so we could compare side-by-side. He mixed our martinis to icy perfection, gin’s bite tempered with the refreshing cool of dry vermouth and a hint of lemon. This tiny, quiet haven remains among my favorite memories of London, an impeccable martini immaculately served lingering in my mind.

Ariel Soto-Suver’s world of animals

Andrew Lam

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July 12, 2011

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Pygmy elephants, Kinabatangan River, Borneo, Malaysia, 2010. My husband Sam and I spent three days along this river, spotting hornbills and proboscis monkeys. On the last day, we came across a herd of these gentle mini-giants, who played along the shore of the river for almost an hour, just 10 feet from our boat. Sadly, they are very much in danger of disappearing — the exploding palm oil business is decimating their habitat.

Yellow-eyed penguin, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2010. Unlike most penguins, the yellow-eyed penguin is unique in its mating habits. It likes to nest in the woods, under trees, just like this fellow we found while hiking along the coast of New Zealand. Only a few thousand of these penguins remain, mostly due to excessive tree removal along the coast for pasture land.

Green sea turtle, North Shore, Oahu, Hawaii, 2010. My mom, a.k.a. Snorkel Mom, read that there was a tiny beach along the North Shore where giant green sea turtles like to chill. There’s no sign on the beach, but after several hairy U-turns we found the beach, and several gigantic turtles, lazing at sunset in the sand.

Monkey cat, Koh Libong, Thailand, 2008. After gorging on a huge pile of stir-fried noodles prepared by an elderly lady in a turban, we wandered around the small village in search of even more delicious local food. Instead, we came across this cool little customer. The special love child of one monkey and one cat? Probably.

Ghost Fleet wanderers

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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July 5, 2011

5

Scott Haefner, Stephen Freskos, and Jon Haeber aren’t the types to stand out in a crowd. Haefner is a web developer, Freskos supervises projects for an engineering firm, and Haeber has a desk job at a company that helps businesses hit high on Google — three straight-laced Bay Area professionals who blend readily into the corporate world.

But everyone’s got their thing — a way to break out of bounds, or scratch the itch of some incessant curiosity.

For these three friends in their late-20s to mid-30s, their thing entails prowling around in rundown deserted places by the light of the full moon, at times taking great pains to avert detection by security patrols. “We go into places that most people don’t go,” Haefner says. They’ve been traipsing into the unknown and documenting their discoveries together for years, motivated as much by art as adrenaline.

This past May, after weighing the consequences, they publicized one of their boldest excursions yet: Sneaking aboard the Mothball Fleet in Suisun Bay to spend entire weekends roaming the bowels of the mildewed vintage ships, while dodging the beams of patrol-boat searchlights.

Unlike many nocturnal wanderers magnetically drawn to abandoned spaces — squatters, taggers, or scrappers, for instance — they don’t break in, vandalize, or steal. Instead, they adopt the same sense of reverence in decaying, chemical-laden industrial places that conscientious hikers assume on backwoods trails. They shoot night photos with professional quality gear, occasionally using flashlights to achieve a technique called light painting.

Haefner, Freskos and Haeber consider themselves advanced practitioners in the art of urban exploration (a.k.a. urbex or UE), an underground activity that’s grown trendier as it draws in adventuresome novices. Now that they’ve publicized their caper aboard the Mothball Fleet, however, they’ve also come under the watchful eye of the feds.

EXPIRATION DATE

At first they thought it was a pipe dream. Doubting their ability to access the Mothball Fleet was saying a lot, considering they’d once snuck onto the Vandenberg Air Force Base and wandered amid abandoned missile silos, absorbing the gravity of the military history those Cold War artifacts represented. Another time they’d managed a nighttime excursion to Neverland Ranch, the famed private amusement park of the late Michael Jackson.

But the ghost ships moored at Suisun Bay seemed out of their league. The rows of hulking, government-owned vessels were locked up and berthed offshore, surrounded by a security headquarters and a shoreline barricade plastered with “No Trespassing” signs. Patrol boats equipped with searchlights circled the docks 24 hours a day, and the prospect of climbing aboard without being spotted seemed crazy.

But then they got word that the last of the aging ships would soon be towed away and destroyed. For Haeber, the history nut of the bunch, this changed everything. “It was about the urgency of making sure these ships were documented,” he explained. “Getting them in the current state that they’re in is so important.”

Alternatively known as the Mothball Fleet and the Ghost Fleet, the ships are part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, a collection of cargo ships, tankers, and military auxiliaries overseen by the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD). Created in 1946 to be ready for deployment in case a national emergency arose, the fleet consisted of 2,277 ships at its height in 1950, strategically stationed at eight anchorages nationwide. For most of the vessels, the call to service never came, and they declined into obsolescence. By April, the entire fleet had dwindled to just 178 ships, at dock in Suisun Bay; Fort Eustis, Va.; and Beaumont, Texas.

The ships that have been moored at Suisun Bay for decades have long since deteriorated, and now they’re being hauled off to the scrap yard bit by bit, though the spot will continue to serve as an anchorage for newer additions to the National Defense Reserve Fleet.

Some were constructed in the World War II era, while others date back to the 1960s and 1970s. While many are tankers or merchant vessels, there are also warships, relics of history deployed in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Operation Desert Storm.

Many of the roughly 70 dilapidated ships have become ecological hazards, leaching toxins and heavy metals into the tidal estuary, which flows into San Francisco Bay. The monumental task of removing and dismantling them began late last year, providing badly needed blue-collar jobs on Mare Island, in the economically depressed city of Vallejo.

By 2017, the last of the ghost ships will have met with torch cutters. At least one will be salvaged: the USS Iowa (BB-61) — a 1938 lead battleship that shuttled President Franklin D. Roosevelt to and from the Tehran Conference during World War II — will be donated and turned into a museum.

Aside from being scrapped, outmoded ships meet with a variety of fates. Some are donated for educational use while others are deliberately sunk to create artificial reefs. Still others are used for target practice in the Navy’s sink-at-sea live-fire training exercises program (SINKEX).

“We saw that these things were going to be gone,” Haefner said. “So we planned it out.”

Haeber examined satellite imagery on Google Earth. Freskos, who’d spent time at sea, studied the tidal patterns. The three scoured the Internet for online photos of the Ghost Fleet. They conducted a scouting mission with binoculars in hand, and gained a sense of when they could take advantage of windows of opportunity between the 30-minute patrol boat rounds.

Long before they even discovered a navigable slough that snaked through a marsh into Suisun Bay or spotted the Craigslist post advertising an inflatable raft for sale, Freskos went up to shoreline gate where the “No Trespassing” signs were posted. He peered through at the tantalizing rows of mothballed ships, and hollered as loud as he could. Nobody responded.

DECAYED TIME CAPSULES

After the months of planning left them confident that it was indeed possible to access the Mothball Fleet, the trio of photographers set out for their first visit, with about 700 pounds of gear in tow. They split the cost of a 12-foot inflatable Fish Hunter raft with a Minn Kota trolling motor. They carried the raft and their gear through a muddy expanse to a marshy spot where the low-profile craft could be set into a narrow slough, safely out of view.

“We always went on or exited at nighttime,” Haefner said. “We would go on nights near the full moon so we could take pictures. It makes it look even more ghostly.”

Their first target was Row F, a line of ships docked in a straight shot from where the slough filtered into the bay. They maneuvered down the narrow channel in their raft, dodging submerged obstacles along the way. Keeping tabs on the whereabouts of the security boat, they started rowing once they reached the open water, and managed to bridge the 800-foot distance to the first ship.

“Our plans were kept secret to all except our loved ones,” Haeber wrote in an online account of that first excursion. “Nobody, other than my girlfriend, knew exactly where I was that weekend. For all intents and purposes, I was on a fishing trip with some friends.”

“Keep Off” signs announcing an invisible 500-foot barrier that was not to be breached were affixed to the hull of every ship. The intruders maneuvered their raft between two Coast Guard cutters, Planetree and Iris, and tied up.

“It can be kind of a challenge getting on,” Haefner explained. “We’re risking ourselves, obviously, but we also brought a bunch of expensive camera gear.” He was the first one to climb aboard the Iris, reaching high to grab onto a bumper that he could then pull himself up on to gain access to the ship. While Freskos kept watch, Haeber handed the gear up to Haefner bit by bit. Once all three were aboard with their backpacks and camera equipment, they hauled up the raft and deflated it.

The Iris was commissioned in 1944. In 1970, it responded to the scene of an oil-rig fire in Galveston, Texas. In 1987, it assisted with cleanup operations in Prince William Sound after the Exxon-Valdez spill. It was decommissioned in 1995, so their entrance likely marked the first time anyone other than MARAD employees had been aboard in 16 years.

A handy feature of ghost ship exploration is that once aboard a ship, it’s possible to access any ship along the entire row, thanks to gangplanks connecting the vessels. So while many of the mothballed vessels were completely secured, there was always the chance that the next one down would have an unlocked entranceway. Part of the ethos of urban exploration is to avoid breaking anything, so they only accessed the interiors of unsecured ships. “They are fairly vigilant about keeping doors locked up tight,” Haefner said. “But there are just so many doors.”

Haeber found a single open door on the SS Exxon Gettysburg, a mammoth oil tanker constructed in 1957, and entered the ship alone, enthralled. The interior, he later wrote, smelled like a mix of mold, benzene, and soggy newspaper. He turned on his flashlight and began tiptoeing through the corridors and peering into the cabins. “They were like time capsules, untouched since the 1970s,” Haeber said.

“Some of the ships were 15 stories deep, like a maze,” Freskos said. “We’d get lost inside.” The trio split from Row F before sunrise and managed to get back to the slough without any mishaps, but they returned on a handful of other occasions with sleeping bags and enough food and water to last a weekend. On those subsequent journeys, they’d seek out places to sleep, often crashing in the once-luxurious captain’s quarters. They slept by day, so that entire nights could be devoted to wandering in awe of the decayed, post-apocalyptic industrial environs, shooting hundreds of photographs.

They visited rooms where crews once hung out playing board games, still littered with cigarettes. They photographed molded interiors, dark cavernous stairwells, engine parts, navigational equipment, and abandoned cabins with peeling wallpaper. “We found personal letters, cards, things people left,” Haefner said. “We were always looking for signs of life.” They wandered through mess halls, engine rooms, bathrooms, galleys, even chilling places with operating chairs and overhead spotlights. They climbed around on the decks in the open night air, wandering through derricks and cranes.

The old ships would make eerie creaking noises when the tide rushed in, and there was always that mild sensation that one experiences on a boat, of things not staying still. “It was like a cacophony of sound when the current was coming in,” Freskos recalled. Hawks, osprey, and owls nested aboard some of them, so the creaking noises were sometimes accompanied by screeching birds of prey.

“The place is steeped in history,” Freskos said. “I’d always think of what this room was used for, or what went on here, when people were experiencing the suffering, craziness, and nervousness of war.”

HIGHLIGHTS AND HAIR-RAISERS

A highlight of their journeys aboard the Mothball Fleet was stumbling across the sleek black Sea Shadow, a stealth ship, which was ensconced within a barge on Row G. Shrouded in secrecy, the angular vessel was developed by Lockheed for the U.S. Navy to test how low of a radar profile could be achieved, and it served as inspiration for a stealth ship featured in a James Bond film. According to the MARAD website, “Sea Shadow was constructed and tested under a high degree of secrecy; until the Navy made its existence public in 1993, all tests were conducted at night.” The ship entered the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet in September 2006.

They also found their way aboard the USS Iowa, which bears the distinction of being the only U.S. Navy warship ever outfitted with a bathtub, so FDR could have a soak while crossing the Atlantic. While they didn’t manage to go inside, an eerie photograph of three enormous guns on deck conveys the magnitude of the battleship.

One of Haeber’s most cherished discoveries was a three-story-tall mural he photographed inside the SS President Lincoln, an American President Lines ship constructed in San Francisco in 1961. An early version of a containerized cargo vessel, the Lincoln doubled as a cruise ship catering to a small number of elite passengers, and remnants of the elegant interior décor remained. The ship has since been hauled to the scrap yard.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing for the three urban explorers. Once they narrowly dodged a work crew aboard a ship — “but we saw or heard them before they saw us,” Haefner said. Another time, while paddling back to the slough, they discovered their raft was punctured and had to manually pump air into it as they traveled. Then, at the tail end of their final journey to the Ghost Fleet, they found themselves fully illuminated by the dreaded patrol-boat searchlight for a full 10 seconds. They froze, convinced they’d been caught. But nothing happened, so they powered up and rowed like hell to get back ashore, and never returned.

Of course, posting interior photographs of the Mothball Fleet all over the Internet and delivering a public slideshow about their sneak-aboard escapades has attracted the attention of the federal government. “The Department of Homeland Security has been looking into it,” said Haefner, who can tell by monitoring web traffic on his blog. “I know that they know.” He also noticed hits from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Justice, but so far, none have come knocking.

In response to a Guardian request for comment about the Mothball Fleet photographers, Kim Riddle, a spokesperson for MARAD, e-mailed an official statement. “We were aware of the intrusion,” she wrote. “We are concerned about the safety of individuals onboard our ships. This is a dangerous industrial site, and we take significant precautions for our own workers when they are onboard the fleet to make sure that areas are safe for them to enter. While trespassing on federal property, these photographers put themselves in a very dangerous position and could have been severely injured or killed from a fall or by entering an enclosed space that doesn’t have enough oxygen. Since learning of this incident, we took additional security steps, reviewed our procedures, and reinforced training with our employees to stop these kinds of intrusions.”

Freskos touched on the safety issue in an online discussion about the project. “There were many long discussions about oxygen-deprived spaces such as anchor chain lockers and ballast tanks,” he wrote. “There were contingency plans made for injuries. We carried a medical kit, we wore [life jackets], and took many other precautions.” He also responded to those who questioned the wisdom of publicizing their late-night excursions to the Mothball Fleet. “I think I speak for the three of us when I say that we are well aware of the consequences,” Freskos wrote. “But it’s a passion of ours, and it’s worth it.”

The photographers’ work can be viewed here, here, and here.

The nonconformist

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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July 5, 2011

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM Marxist, aesthete, padrone, Oscar winner, supreme screen sensualist — the list of contradictions goes on, onscreen as well as off, for Bernardo Bertolucci. Earlier this year he emerged from a long creative hibernation (attributable, it turns out, to back pain so severe it prevented any work) to accept an honorary Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival and begin work on his first film in nearly a decade, a claustrophobic drama about a withdrawn teen who secretly sequesters himself in the family basement. It will be filmed in 3-D — an idea so daft it just might prove brilliant.

Because, after all, it is lunacy and excess as well as intelligence, beauty, instinct, and so forth that have led Bertolucci to some of his most extraordinary as well as dubious achievements, nearly all of them debatable as falling into either category.

Now that he’s reaching a half-century spent in the director’s chair, it is clear what an unpredictable, erratic, even arbitrary career this has been; the line between the sublime and silly in his films is easily felt but almost impossible to define. What makes 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, for instance, a genuine fever dream of mad desire, while two later films equally about eros and yearning — 1996’s Stealing Beauty and 2003’s The Dreamers — are fussy, false, a little embarrassing? Trained as a poet (whatever that means), he surrenders to cinema time and again as someone intoxicated by images as he once was to words, taking each sustained impulse to its logical (or illogical) endpoint, whether to transcendence or off an artistic cliff.

The Pacific Film Archive’s summer retrospective “Bernardo Bertolucci: In Search of Mystery” provides an opportunity to weigh most of the exhilarating highs and a couple of the baffling lows in a wayward trajectory one hopes is nowhere near complete. (Only 71, he can surely spare us another three decades — look at Manoel de Oliveira, wildly prolific at 102, yet without a single film as memorable as a half-dozen or more of Bertolucci’s.) All 13 features will be offered in new prints, a big lure for a director whose best movies — particularly those shot by the incomparable cinematographer Vittorio Storaro — it would be criminal to view in any but the most pristine visual condition.

After a promising literary start as a teenager — his father, notably, was a well-regarded poet, art historian, and film critic — Bertolucci apprenticed to family friend Pier Paolo Pasolini on 1961’s Accattone!. When Pasolini moved on to another project, Bertolucci made his own directorial debut at age 21 with similarly gritty The Grim Reaper (1962). That tale of a prostitute’s murder, cowritten with Pasolini, as well as 1964’s Before the Revolution (a presumably somewhat autobiographical mélange about a young bourgeois torn between tentative radicalization and pleasures of the flesh as represented by Bertolucci’s then-wife Adriana Asti) reflected his heavy early influencing by the ebbing Italian neorealist movement and still-current French New Wave.

Inspired by Dostoyevsky, 1968’s Partner was a transitional work, straddling Godardian dialecticism and pure extravagance. When 1970’s Jorge Luis Borges-drawn puzzle The Spider’s Strategem found Bertolucci discovering his sumptuous mature style (as well as Storaro’s rapturous lighting and camera movement), Godard denounced him as a sellout. The international breakthrough was that same year’s The Conformist, a Moravia story about the individual surrender to fascism — passivity turning to criminality being a frequent Bertolucci subject — that somehow became a baroque tone poem of saturated color, hedonistic suggestion, and damp paranoia. It announced the arrival of a great artist, albeit one for whom style would always trump political content, and whose literary sources were often twisted nearly past recognition by his own overwhelming authorial stamp.

The 1970s were a dazzling high-wire decade for Bertolucci. Last Tango was an X-rated scandal and sensation, an experience so psychologically (and literally) naked for Marlon Brando that he didn’t speak to the director for years afterward. Bertolucci explained: “He felt that I stole something from him, that he didn’t know what he was doing … I like to have very famous, important actors because it is a challenge to find out what they are hiding.”) Its tale of two people with only compulsive coitus in common is still berserk, implausible, off-putting, and completely enveloping.

The epic, multinational cast (Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda, Burt Lancaster, even some Italians) 1900, a film originally over five hours long, offered the first half of Italy’s 20th century as a class struggle, as well as a conceptual one, between idealism and decadent pageantry — Pasolini wrestling with Luchino Visconti. Few knew what to make of the contrastingly intimate (yet, again, stylistically gaga) 1979 La Luna, an Oedipal drama based on a dream Bertolucci had about Maria Callas. Fervently loved by a slim cult following, it was otherwise so ridiculed and loathed that 32 years later 20th Century Fox still hasn’t coughed up a U.S. home-format release.

With the new decade, the limbs Bertolucci went out on became less reliably inspirational, perhaps partly because Storaro had developed conflicting allegiances to other directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Carlos Saura, Warren Beatty). Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981) is dispirited and dull. Little Buddha (1993) was a silly idea nonetheless spiked by enchanted storybook scenes with Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha — ludicrous-sounding stunt casting that is somehow perfect. Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers found this uneasily homophilic director reduced to ogling young bodies of both sexes like a dirty old professor.

On the other hand, 1990’s The Sheltering Sky was difficult, ravishing, another masterpiece if a great commercial disappointment. Another leap into exotica, 1987’s The Last Emperor had the opposite fate — winning all nine of its nominated Oscars in a slow year, a staggering spectacle widely admired yet loved by few (least of all the Chinese), elephantine yet wry, and closer to David Lean respectability than auteurist idiosyncrasy. Then after all this 1998’s Besieged, a tiny story of unrequited love and noble sacrifice shot with two actors and hand-held camera, felt rejuvenative — as if the increasingly burdened composer of massive symphonies had discovered the joy in a piano miniature.

The curio in the PFA’s series is 1967’s The Path of Oil — a three-part Italian documentary about petroleum production, apparently undertaken in a funk when two failed first features had temporarily reduced his career prospects. It’s handsome, if clearly less than a labor of love. But for the Bertolucci fetishist, no film is so impersonal or underwhelming (or on the other hand beloved) that it might not yet spring surprises, whether on a first viewing or an umpteenth.

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI: IN SEARCH OF MYSTERY

July 8–Aug. 18, $5.50–$9.50

Pacific Film Archive

2575 Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

bampfa.berkeley.edu

Appetite: 3 restaurants to watch

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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July 5, 2011

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Here are two new places that just opened, showing a lot of promise… and one that keeps getting better.

Sexy ’70s foodie lounge : CHAMBERS EAT+DRINK

The Phoenix Hotel has long exuded rock star hipness. Its prior restaurant was more bar than food destination… and it really wasn’t memorable on the drink front, though the mid-century motel poolside setting is special. The pool remains, now with cactus wall and bright orange chairs. Drinks, though decent, still aren’t worth a special trip, but the food is.

With chef Trevor Ogden behind brand new Chambers Eat+Drink inside the Phoenix, I had no doubt it would be good. Young and ambitious, he has impressed me from his days at Mission Beach Cafe. With a complete decor revamp, I am delighted to say there’s no atmosphere like it in SF. A sleek 1970s den lined with hundreds of records (yes, LPs), the place is outfitted in leather, plaid couches, quirky lamps, knick-knacks, themes varying between restaurant, lounge and pool.

The food keeps up. Shaved Spring Salad ($8) is a knock-out of asparagus, wild arugula, and sheep’s milk ricotta topped with shaved Summer squash and lightly fried mushrooms. In a saffron tarragon vinaigrette, it nods to the long days of Summer. Smoking Salmon ($12) arrives wrapped like a rose blossom over a mini-hearth, emitting smoke from roasting coals. A bowl of yuzu sake creme fraiche, chive oil and salmon caviar/roe complete the playful presentation.

In a city with no shortage of fine burgers, Ogden makes an utterly satisfying one ($12): Prather Ranch beef is pink and juicy topped with whole grain aioli, butter lettuce, heirloom tomato, and red onion so smoky it feels as if the burger was grilled by campfire. It comes with thyme-dusted Kennebec fries, while add-ons include crispy-braised pork belly ($3) or avocado ($2.50). There are a handful of entrees ranging $18-26, or one could go with a mix of small plates. PB & L.T. ($10) is essentially pork belly in rice paper wrap, layered with butter lettuce, heirloom tomato, house sambal (chili sauce), and champagne aioli. A fun way to eat belly, almost light yet satisfying. Cauliflower soubise soup ($7) was the only misstep for me – too salty: basil, dried olives, and pink peppercorn added nuance, but over-salting left the impression of being one note.

Ogden is also handling the desserts. They read better than they tasted in opening weeks… but there is promise here. A giant Manhattan creme brulee ($8) is rye bourbon creme brulee doused in macerated cherries and blood orange reduction with candied orange peel. To be fair, I’m not a big creme brulee fan so overall it came off too pudding-like, but high marks for the drink-as-dessert concept. Carrot Caraway Cake ($7) hit blessedly savory with caraway, Kaffir lime nectar and candied carrot tops. Dots of creme fraiche frosting didn’t seem enough to balance out the slight dryness of the cake.

I’m pleased to see a new addition with dramatic, unusual environs that is also for the gourmet. We don’t always do it up in the setting department in SF, preferring to (rightly) focus on the food first. But it doesn’t hurt to do both.

CHAMBERS EAT+DRINK 601 Eddy Street at Polk, 415-829-2316, www.chambers-sf.com

Louisiana Authenticity : BOXING ROOM , Hayes Valley (549 Irving Street, between 6th & 7th, 415-592-8174)

The new Boxing Room may not immediately recall Louisiana: exposed wood, modern chandeliers and an open space look like any typical current-day restaurant. But the food coming out of the kitchen from the hands of Chef Justin Simoneaux, a Southern Louisiana native, just begins to assuage my constant hunger for New Orleans.

First off, I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to see Creole cream cheese on his menu. I fill up on that silky, gently sweet goodness whenever I’m in Nola but had yet to see it here. Seems he couldn’t find it either so Simoneaux made his own. He’s currently serving it with a salad ($8) of mixed greens, strawberries, and spiced pecans.

Deep fried alligator with a Creole remoulade ($11) is about the freshest alligator I’ve tasted – even better than what I’ve had in Nola or Florida. He’s taken painstaking efforts to source the best possible ingredients and it shows: this alligator is more tender and flavorful than its fried status would suggest. Crawfish Étouffée ($13 small, $20 large) is a beloved dish served in varying styles, but often reminiscent of gumbo. Simoneaux’s roux base for the Étouffée is subtly sweet and savory. A beauty… but I could have used a little more crawfish.

Stuffed mirliton and eggplant ($17) is a superb vegetarian dish and maybe the most creative entree. Over a sweet, stewed tomato ratatouille, Grana Padano cheese accents a small, stuffed eggplant and larger mirliton, Southern Lousiana’s beloved vegetable (also known as chayote). Crispy Boudin Balls ($5) is delicious Cajun boudin sausage fried into breaded balls. Don’t miss the free starter of crackers with pimento cheese spread. I’ll take more pimento cheese, thanks. Bananas foster cake ($7) is a moist, dense take on one of Nola’s greatest desserts, served with a subtle bourbon ice cream.

There’s also oysters, fried chicken and red beans, beers on draft (a nice list ranging from Belgians to Louisiana beers), wines on tap, and plenty of bottles. Zydeco plays in the background. At least two waiters are from Louisiana – we sure enjoyed chatting ours up about the glories of food from that state. The only thing missing is a Mint Julep.

BOXING ROOM, Hayes Valley 549 Irving Street, between 6th & 7th streets, 415-592-8174, www.boxingroomsf.com

Daily-changing freshness: OUTERLANDS

Outerlands keeps getting better. Since chef Brett Cooper came on board and their liquor license came through, allowing for seasonal cocktails, it’s more of a destination than it was. I always liked the woodsy, narrow interior but found waits at brunch chaotic and the food all-around solid, if not noteworthy. There is now amped-up artistry, particularly in vegetarian dishes, distantly reminiscent of what one might see at Napa’s Ubuntu.

There are roughly only two $10 cocktails a night. Recently, I liked a Smash in a mason jar: Buffalo Trace bourbon, fresh peaches, lemon and rosemary. More refreshing than unforgettable, it was as garden-fresh as dinner was. Co-owner David Muller’s bartending background at places like Slanted Door clearly informs house-made ingredients and knowledgeable mix of ingredients, like an aperitif of Junipero gin, absinthe, Campari, fennel, sparkling wine.

Dinner highlights included baby carrots and leeks ($9) dotted with fennel, nettles and toasted almond breadcrumbs, and a plate of Mixed Beets ($8), juicy in red frill mustard and sherry, accented by dollops of the most divine, creamy house ricotta. Savory bread pudding ($9) is a puffy dream of their house bread baked with caramelized onions, chard, rosemary, crusted with Gruyere cheese.

Dessert ($7 each) was a mason jar filled with strawberry rhubarb parfait, creamy and fresh, but with barely a taste of rhubarb or fennel. More of both would have made for a superior dessert. More exciting, despite its straightforward sound, was a chocolate budino: lush dark chocolate, hazelnuts, graham cracker, toasted meringue, and thankfully plenty of salt to keep it savory.

Outerlands has evolved into something special by the beach, and a win for anyone who lives out that way.

OUTERLANDS, 4001 Judah Street at 45th Ave., 415-661-6140, www.outerlandssf.com

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(Summer!) Trash Lit: The Profession

Zelda Bronstein

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July 1, 2011

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By Steven Pressfield. Crown, 320 pages, $25

Wow, they still drink Rolling Rock in 2032. And they still use military laptops and handhelds and complain about bad TV reception. The web doesn’t seem to have advanced much, and people still rely on the Al Jazeera video feed to see what’s going on in the Middle East.

There’s a lot that’s jarring in The Profession, a military thriller set in the Middle East 20 years in the future. For one thing, the future looks a lot like today, except that there’s been a dirty bomb attack on Long Beach and the Chinese are starting to cash in their U.S. debt, putting the world economy into turmoil. (It takes China 20 years to figure that out? Damn.)
So it’s pretty bad sci-fi. But it’s not a bad adaptation of the Heart of Darkness/Apaocalypse Now myth of the powerful general who goes rogue with his loyal troops and tries to take over part of the world.

In this case, it’s the Middle East, where (again, bad sci-fi) they’ve just found some more really rich oil fields. And much of the military work of the major nations is done by mercenaries.

One of them is General James Salter, who got cashiered out of the Marine Corps for defying the president’s orders, but who has a MacArthur-like following in both the military and the civilian worlds. He’s a private soldier now, and he’s got this plan to take control of much of the world’s oil, and then return in triumph to Washington, where he can become president (oh, and marry the widow of the prez who cashiered him, who is also involved in this plot.

Our hero, Gilbert Gentilhomme (and what kind of name is that for an action hero?) is one of Salter’s best friends and loyalists, one of the few who can get close to the great man. And he knows he can’t let the general get away with his plan.

Lots of desert battles. Random brutality. International intrigue, of sorts. A bleak and dusty vision of the future — but one where there’s no climate change or peak oil. No sex (and how come none of this summer’s thrillers have any sex?). But not bad for a quick beach read.

Appetite: Time for tea

Andrew Lam

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June 29, 2011

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Ever a fan of a civilized (and delicious) respite for afternoon tea, here I present to you two divergent ways to raise your pinky in the city.

Kettle Whistle at Burritt Room: A gourmand’s pop-up tea

Currently scheduled to take place on the last Saturday of every month through October, Kettle Whistle launched its inaugural tea this past week in the spacious back room of Burritt Room’s turn-of-the-century-style bar, tucked upstairs in the Crescent Hotel.

The brainchild of pastry chef par excellence William Werner of Tell Tale Preserve Co. and tea mavens Lawrence Lai and Ann Lee of Naivetea, Kettle Whistle is essentially a pop-up high tea, one where ladies (and men) meet over crumpets and scones. But this is no typical tea.

At a pricey $55 per head, it’s even more costly than high tea at the stunning Palace Hotel — but Kettle Whistle has vastly superior food and drinks. Though dishes and tea pairings will rotate, you can be assured of three themed courses: savory bites, followed by scones and crumpets (the passion fruit olive oil curd on this tray will blow your mind — regular old lemon curd might never seem the same), ending with dessert. There’s even a take home bag of tea and a snack (mine came labeled “damn good granola,” a savory-sweet mix).

You’ll be full after three courses because the savory and dessert courses offer four to five different bites, each from Werner’s creative hand. An heirloom tomato sable on a homemade cracker with lemon and a strip of lardo iberico de Bellota was revelatory. Spheres of tomato and pig fat dissolved in my mouth like a dream I wish I could have over and over again. On the dessert platter, a chocolate and salted caramel fondant was silky save for a crispy strip of chocolate on top, enlivened with avocado and lime layers. I’d go back just to see what Werner will serve next.

Naivetea’s Taiwanese teas (a local Bay Area company run by Taiwan natives) are elegant, worthy companions — not overpowering nor overshadowed by any of the courses. My favorite was their award-winning (it recently took home first place at the North American Tea Championship) Dong Ding Oolong, a gentle beauty with backbone, whose toasted rice and caramel notes shine.

Kettle Whistle’s two July 23 seatings are already filling up, so I’d look into reserving a spot now. Dress up, wear a hat, and come hungry.

Through October. 417 Stockton, SF. (415) 400-0500, www.naivetea.com

Rose Tea: Casual tea cafe

Rose Tea, an open, airy new shop, is a peaceful respite off Irving Street that doubles as take-out cafe and flower shop. It’s only been open a few weeks, but my two visits there have been rewarded with herbal teas (I like the Fire on Ice: ginger and lime steeped with fresh mint leaves) served in a bottomless pot with a mini-French almond cake and jam for $6.50.

Sandwiches ($5.95-7.50) are made with care on rye bread with sides of fruit and nuts. I liked the chicken, apple, cream cheese, and raisins version, and the feta, avocado, and walnut with tomato and basil. Plates come finished with house macarons or baklava. With what appears to be Armenian and Greek roots (if the jams for sale are any indication), the cafe also offers Turkish coffee, an espresso bar, and spiced rose chai. It’s a welcome neighborhood spot for a pot of tea and a bite.

549 Irving, SF. (415) 592-8174, www.roseteasf.com

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Zero Zero

Andrew Lam

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June 28, 2011

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paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Our recent bout of pizza chic was bound to reach some sort of apex sooner or later, like all fevers, and it now appears to have done so at Zero Zero, the Bruce Hill endeavor that opened last summer in the old Azie space adjoining LuLu. The name refers to a vaunted Neapolitan flour used to make pizza dough, but it also seems to suggest the turn of the millennium, with its near-5,000 Nasdaq and the reinvention of SoMa as the urban version of Silicon Valley. If you’d gone to sleep about 10 years ago and were just now waking up, you probably wouldn’t think much had changed, except that pizza had become very grand indeed during your little nap.

As a pizza master, Hill has a formidable pedigree. He was the longtime chef at Oritalia, one of the city’s most interesting and innovative restaurants of the 1980s and 1990s before moving on to reinvigorate the cooking at both the Waterfront and Bix. The Zero Zero gamble is to open a pizzentric restaurant in the heart of the city’s new restaurantland instead of at its fringes, in the lower Haight (Ragazza), Dogpatch (Piccino), or Glen Park (Gialina). A major plus of the location is that a rich lode of clientele is near at hand; being upstairs at Zero Zero on a busy weekend night is a little like trying to work your way through the break room of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. Clearly pizza is familiar and reassuring to people who aren’t too many years past their college graduations and who are now living in SoMa’s innumerable new luxury lofts. But is pizza enough to carry a serious restaurant?

Hill has gracefully hedged his bets by laying out a menu that’s considerably broader and more sophisticated than a few tomato-red pies to be washed down with steinfuls of brew. The kitchen turns out an assortment of crudo, antipasti, and pasta plates to keep things interesting. And if you don’t want pizza at all, you can certainly get by — although you won’t find so much as a single conventional large dish. It’s little dishes, with or without pizza. Or bupkes.

We found the food beautifully conceived and presented, although several dishes struck me as being on the verge of too salty. This is odd, considering that so much restaurant food has struck me as underseasoned over the years. Whenever I come upon oversalted food in a restaurant, I find myself thinking of the young chefs-in-waiting who can often be seen in clusters on the sidewalks in front of culinary academies, puffing away at their ciggies. It is well known that smoking cigarettes dulls the sense of taste and affects the way a chef is seasoning things.

A crudo of California halibut flaps ($12.95) was presented on a narrow sushi platter, as if subtly to enhance our sense of its freshness. And it was glisteningly tender, its butteriness deepened by Fiordolio EVOO. But the promised “panzanella” was just golden-crisp croutons with salt sprinkled over the top. It is surprising how much damage even a little salt can do to delicate food. I also found too salty an otherwise marvelous salad of wild arugula ($9.50) with quarters of ultra-ripe yellow nectarine and marcona almonds. The greens, with their almost prickly freshness, could have been picked five minutes before. But the lemon vinaigrette tended toward briny. One dish we did find in good tune was expertly braised octopus ($13.95), cubed and tender and plated with Sicilian chickpea fritters that could have passed for polenta triangles, along with the wondrous weed purslane and an agrodolce (sweet-sour) sauce. There was an important clue in this dish — that saltiness is a relative phenomenon. It can be balanced.

The pizzas buck the local trend by using a slightly thicker, puffier crust. One nice feature of puffs: they blister well. Blisters suggest that the pie has been rushed to you straight from the oven, like a popover. The topping combinations are elegant and restrained; even a relatively lavish pie, the Fillmore ($15.95), with leeks, mozzarella, hen-of-the-wood mushrooms, garlic, thyme, and three cheeses (parmesan, pecorino, fontina), remained coherent, with fresh herb breath.

But Zero Zero’s best feature is probably its build-your-own-dessert option. You choose your base ($4), your ice cream ($4.95) — simple flavors but housemade — and your toppings ($1 each). Olive oil and sea salt are among them, but so is chocolate hazelnut crunch. Which would you rather have?

ZERO ZERO

Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30-10 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.

Lunch: Mon.–-Fri., noon–-2:30 p.m.

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

826 Folsom, SF

(415) 348-8800

www.zerozerosf.com

Full bar

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

No equality without economic equality

Andrew Lam

-

June 21, 2011

1

San Francisco’s queer movement isn’t what it used to be.

Even the Castro District — once the center of perpetual protests and street organizing, not to mention the Tom Ammiano write-in campaign — bears little resemblance to the neighborhood that used to be considered the gayest in the country. A recent Advocate survey didn’t even mention San Francisco in its list of 15 gayest cities.

These days, the Castro has a lot of empty storefronts — 27, according to activist/blogger Michael Petrelis, who counted them last month — and a conservative merchants group that calls the shots on such things as lowering the giant rainbow flag at Castro and Market streets: “yes” to the death of a gay cop, “no” to a slain black gay activist in Uganda (until pressure from activists forced them to fly it half-staff for an hour or so).

Continued gentrification of the Castro by the ever richer, combined with an economic recession whose burdens are shouldered by those with dwindling resources, has taken its toll. With outrageously high rents, the neighborhood is no longer a haven for queers from all over the country seeking refuge from homophobic environments. The new upscale — and more often straight than gay — resident of the ‘hood doesn’t have a clue that those refugees replenished the ranks of activists who, since the early 1970s, made the Castro the “gay mecca” and forged a radical politics that dominated the movement for a long time.

Queer politics these days is a constant tug-of-war between gay moderates who’ve gained a lot of power (not to mention high-paying jobs) in City Hall and progressives who want to change an agenda that pours millions into gay marriage but nothing into finding housing for the 40 percent of homeless youth who are queer, or jobs for the scores of transgender people who are without work or inadequately employed.

The heavily gay moderate group Plan C is pushing for upping the annual condo limit to allow more tenancies in common (TICs) to convert and thereby increase substantially in value. At the same time, queer progressives fight to retain 49 below-market-rate units at the proposed 55 Laguna Street development; keep Parkmerced from tearing down more than 1,500 rent-controlled units; and prevent the city from giving tax breaks to Twitter and other dot-com companies to encourage them to move into a downtown area the city considers blighted without any substantial proof that their free ride will benefit the city. It may well just push out more needy people.

While the conservative merchants group in the Castro endorses a measure that outlaws sitting or lying on sidewalks, progressives work with Dolores Street Community Services and the city’s Human Services Agency to set up an LGBT-friendly shelter for queers who experience homophobia in the city’s shelter system.

Even the city’s two leading queer Democratic clubs reflect the schizophrenic nature of queer politics: the Alice B. Toklas club backs moderate candidates and takes a more conservative stance on everything from tenants’ rights to affordable housing, while the Harvey Milk club supports a progressive agenda.

Meanwhile, the disparity between the haves and have-nots continues to grow. While the Castro may be dying as a gay mecca, the Tenderloin is still home sweet home to countless queers and transgender people who are left out of every bit of progress the community makes. Except for the elimination of don’t ask, don’t tell, which now gives poor and working-class queers the opportunity to better their lives by being fodder for the military’s latest wars for oil.

Universal healthcare or a living wage job would have been a better fit. There’s no equality like economic equality.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a 40-year veteran of the queer movement and a tenant advocate at Housing Rights Committee. He is editor of Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights).

Lust for Life: The true meaning of Gay Christmas

Andrew Lam

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June 21, 2011

22

Lust for Life: The true meaning of Gay Christmas

Yeah, Pride’s got its problems – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be epic

Every year without fail, my friends and I talk about how June is Gay Christmas in San Francisco. We pronounce it like it has to be capitalized and ends with an exclamation point. Sometimes I even sing the words a little — “Gaaay Christmas! La-la!” — like the holiday comes complete with its own carols.

Sometimes I say “Gay Christmas” with a hint of irony and sarcasm. I bitch every year about how the Pride parade in San Francisco has become a big corporate conglomeration (not unlike Actual Christmas, right?). I bitch about how Pride has become an expensive and boozy festival celebrating the worst, most consumerist, most assimilationist parts of queer culture. I bitch about how Pride is a festival that has amazing roots and history and import, but at least in San Francisco, it has lost its way. That Pride has morphed from being a glittering and debauched radical celebration of queer love and life into a hokey tourist trap designed to sell rainbow key chains and pink triangle tea towels.

The disgusting thing is that it is dangerous to hold a Pride festival in most parts of the world, even in other parts of the U.S. (have you seen what’s been happening in Texas lately, let alone in Uganda or Russia?). I’d like to think that when our brethren in other places are seriously RISKING MURDER to march down a city block and declare their queerness and gender variance, those of us in the privileged position of living in the queer Oz would be doing more to help them out. I’ve dedicated my life to queer activism, but I’m implicating myself here, too: not knowing how to help in situations that are so desperate and scary can feel hopeless and overwhelming, and the whole mess just ends up making me cynical about Pride in the Bay Area.

I will probably always be cynical about the big corporate festival on Sunday, but the rest of June in San Francisco is a privilege to experience, a wonder to behold if you chill out and count your blessings and get some perspective. So in that spirit, I wanna tell you about my best Pride – what Pride can be like when you’re inspired and enthused, when everything feels alive and shimmering.

Pride 2008 was my best Pride. I was 25 and newly, deeply, madly, stupidly in love. The kind of love that pumped my heart up so big I thought it was going to expand like a balloon and fill my entire ribcage. The kind of love where I threw all responsibility and caution to the wind.

I took the week off work to stay home and fuck my new long-distance girlfriend. I didn’t say that to my job, of course, I said “my girlfriend is visiting from Oregon for Pride,” but I’m fairly sure my supervisor knew what I’d be doing when I asked for the vacation time (it was a queer non-profit). Me and this girlfriend have since broken up (in classic dyke fashion, we’re friends and artistic collaborators now). But the memory of the Pride week we spent together still makes me grin.

We had eight days together, and we made the most of it. We rolled around in my bed, in alleyways, in parks. One night she threw me up against a fence by the UC Extension school at the bottom of Hayes Valley, slipped her hand up my skirt in full view of all those cars and pedestrians.

But eventually the San Francisco summer evening fog won out, and we made our way back to my apartment to warm up. Aside from public sex, we ventured out of my bed for the following: Take-out Thai food on my couch, pancakes at It’s Tops (the preciously tiny 1930s art-deco diner), a movie at Frameline, the last Queer Open Mic hosted by Cindy Emch, the Trans March, the Dyke March, and a porn shoot.

I’m amazed that she and I managed to get so much done, fucking as much as we did. For queer people in love during the gayest week of the year, we were extremely productive. Our productivity was probably bolstered by the fact that we didn’t sleep much. We’d crash out at five a.m. after having sex for hours, and then we were up again at 10, but we wouldn’t manage to actually remove ourselves from each other or my room till two in the afternoon. We’d roll out of my bed hungry and bleary-eyed, covered in the salt of each other’s come and sweat, utterly and deliriously fuck drunk.

So we’d shower together, lather up our hair and skin with her rose castile soap. Sometimes the smell of rosewater still makes me think of her. Then it would be time to put on sexy outfits and go off on another adventure.

It was a magic and manic way to spend Pride, getting lost in my best girl, my sweetest butch, the smartest kindest hottest person I’d ever met. (Falling in love makes me prone to hyperbole.) It makes me feel radiant, brilliant, witty, and drop-dead gorgeous, it makes me feel like I can change the world in one fell swoop.

And me and my girl, we were gonna start a revolution together. We shot a scene for her porn movie that week, the movie that would become Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project – which is actually a revolutionary project, the first and only film of it’s kind: a porn movie made by, for, and about trans women and their partners. I was fucking a total genius, and I was thrilled and proud to have her on my arm. “Yeah, that’s right!” I felt like shouting to every single passer-by, “My girlfriend is BAD ASS, and so am I!”

My girl bought me bondage rope the exact color of the magenta streaks in my hair. She’d picked it out for me before she came to San Francisco, carefully looking for just the right the color for me. That week was like waking up every morning and opening up a present. It was like Christmas, goddammit! Every day was an adventure! There was a hot girl in my bed! There were awesome friends to hang out with who told us what a cute couple we were! There was pad thai and French toast with nutella & bananas to eat! Fences to get thrown up against! Movies to see! Marches to march in! Porn to shoot! Spin the Bottle to be played in Dolores Park! Could life get more amazing?! I felt Crazy With Love!, like all my emotions had to be capitalized and end with an exclamation point. Suddenly Gay Christmas made a lot of sense.

That Saturday we marched in the first ever Femme Sharks and Sea Creature Allies contingent in the San Francisco Dyke March. Forty femmes paraded down 18th Street wearing hot pink fake-satin fins on their heads and backs, fins that were cobbled together with cotton balls and staples, precariously taped to us with Scotch tape or tied to us with yarn. People carried signs: “THE IMF CAN KISS MY DORSAL FIN!” “FEMME SHARKS CAN FUCK YOUR ASS AND CHANGE YOUR OIL!” We chanted: “FEMME SHARKS WANT JUSTICE – AND WE WANNA GET BANGED!” And when she and I got home, she tied me up with the magenta rope she’d bought just for me. Afterwards, we spooned and moped about the fact that she was leaving the next day.

Falling in love over Gay Christmas made the original intent of Pride feel real to me – the glitter, the fun, the exhausted exhilaration, and that feeling of being absolutely enthralled with how brilliant and awesome we are, how much we can accomplish as a community when we put our big, pumped-up, loved-up hearts to it.

So, reader, for this Gay Christmas, I wish that for you. I hope that you fall in love, and I don’t just mean with a sweetheart. I mean I hope that you feel love with your whole body and heart. Love a political movement, an art piece, yourself. Put on your best duds. Treat your lover or yourself to some rope, a cockring, a strap-on that matches your hair or your signature eyeshadow. Eat some chocolate-chip pancakes at an art deco diner and make sure to ask for extra whipped cream. Stay up till 5 in the morning having sex or masturbating. Above all, remember how fabulous and brave and bad-ass you are, and celebrate it.

Gina de Vries is a queer writer, performer, activist, writing instructor, cultural worker, and native San Franciscan. She has a long history doing political organizing and arts work within queer, trans and gender-variant, and sex worker communities, and has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms to the Ivy League. She’s currently pursuing her master in fiction writing at SF State, where she’s working on a book. Find out more at www.ginadevries.com and queershoulder.tumblr.com.

Pelosi says S-Comm is a waste of taxpayer dollars

Mary Magee

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June 10, 2011

19

Pelosi says S-Comm is a waste of taxpayer dollars

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called the fed’s troubled “Secure Communities” program a waste of money, as members of Congress held a press conference in Los Angeles to call for a suspension of the program. Illinois, New York and Massachusetts have already announced their withdrawal from S-Comm, following numerous reports that the program has led to non-criminal immigrants and even victims of domestic violence being caught up in the fed’s deportation dragnet, resulting in a chilling effect on community-police relations. And then there are the accusations that the feds engaged in systematic lying and dishonesty when it came to the question of whether states and municipalities can opt-out of the program. So, today Gov. Jerry Brown is being asked to end California’s participation, too.

Or as Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, put it, “What started as an effort to uncover the truth about S-Comm has evolved into a consensus view that the program should be scrapped all together. S-Comm has come to symbolize the President’s broken promises on immigration reform. The fact is that it has not yet been frozen is now being viewed as a betrayal and places the urgent need to end the program on the desk of our local officials. Our local officials were misled into the program and now is the time to lead us out. The tide is turning on the dangerous and dishonest ‘Secure Communities’ program. ICE has gotten into the snake oil business. It sold S-Comm to the American public under false pretenses. It makes communities less safe, it imperils civil rights, and it is poisoning political efforts to reform unjust immigration laws. Today, Rep. Becerra and the other Congresspeople said very clearly that this program has no place in California or anywhere in our democracy. We must prevent the Arizonification of our community whether it comes in the form of SB 1070 or S-Comm. There is an urgent need for California to do better for its residents and to suspend S-Comm immediately.”

Alerts

Maria Poblet

-

June 7, 2011

0

ALERTS

By Jackie Andrews

THURSDAY, JUNE 9

Reporting back from Cuba

Gloria la Riva, recent winner of the Friendship Medal by the Cuban Council of State, will update the public on the new Cuban economic policies, their impact on the country’s economy, and the Latin American struggle for liberation — often called the Bolivarian Revolution. Afterward, check out a special screening of South of the Border, Oliver Stone’s investigative documentary that exposes the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of Latin America in its demonization of the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

7–9 p.m., free

ANSWER Coalition

2969 Mission, SF

www.answersf.org

FRIDAY, JUNE 10

Protest nuclear power

It’s been almost three months since the earthquake in Japan and resulting Fukushima nuclear disaster, and many fear that California’s coast is similarly vulnerable. Rally against the corporations that influence the U.S. government in favor of nuclear industry despite its dangers to people and the environment. Demand that all U.S. power plants — funded by tax dollars — be shut down and help promote a cleaner public power.

3:30–5:30 p.m., free

The Consulate General of Japan

50 Fremont, SF

Facebook: No Nukes Action SF-Solidarity with 6.11 Action in Japan

SATURDAY, JUNE 11

World Naked Bike Ride

Ride your bike in the buff to express the public’s vulnerability to the social, economic, and environmental dangers caused by a global dependence on oil. A kind of naked Critical Mass, this fun, provocative bike ride will tour the city’s hot spots including Fisherman’s Wharf, the Marina, and Civic Center. All are welcome, so ride as you dare — bare or square — but don’t forget the sunscreen.

11 a.m., free

Justin Herman Plaza

Market and Embarcadero , SF

Facebook: World Naked Bike Ride-San Francisco

International Day of Solidarity

Enjoy an evening of solidarity and support for Marie Mason and Eric McDavid, two political prisoners sentenced for Earth Liberation Front-endorsed actions — what the feds call ecoterrorism. This event features a screening of If a Tree Falls: A Story Of the Earth Liberation Front, as well as information about the so-called “green scare,” or the recent wave of government repression meant to disrupt and discredit environmental activism.

7–9:30 p.m., $15

Women’s Building

3543 18th St., SF

www.june11.org

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

HANC gets a new eviction notice

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

-

June 1, 2011

33

The City and County of San Francisco voluntarily dismissed an eviction notice it had issued to the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center, but then the Recreation & Parks Department promptly sent a new one with a deadline of June 30.

The HANC recycling center and native plant nursery has continued operating in Golden Gate Park’s Kezar Triangle despite an effort initiated last year under former Mayor Gavin Newsom to evict the facility. The recycling center, which also offers compost for urban gardeners and a place to drop off used veggie oil, has been in Golden Gate Park for decades and has formed partnerships with community gardening projects throughout the city.

Rec & Park started making plans to replace it with a community garden last year amid concerns about “quality of life” issues. Some neighbors were bothered by recyclers filling up shopping carts with containers plucked from their sidewalk recycling bins, to trade in for small amounts of cash. Members of HANC, meanwhile, saw the eviction as political payback from Newsom, who encountered stiff opposition from the progressive neighborhood group when he led the charge to place San Francisco’s sit / lie ordinance on the ballot.

The request for dismissal, filed May 26 in San Francisco Superior Court and signed by Attorney David Ammons in the office of City Attorney Dennis Herrera, doesn’t provide a clear reason for the move. But Robert De Vries, HANC’s attorney, said the tactic was likely meant to avert legal entanglement by dissolving the first, and more legally problematic, attempt at eviction and replacing it with a new one that may be harder to challenge in court. In a letter to Rec & Park commissioners dated Dec. 2, 2010, De Vries wrote that the first eviction notice was illegal under the structure of the lease that HANC had signed with the city, and asserted that HANC could legally possess the property until June 30, 2011.

Because the dismissal of the first eviction was done “without prejudice,” there was nothing preventing Rec & Park from issuing a new eviction notice, which it did the same day. Rec & Park did not respond to an email seeking comment.

“Your attorney has argued in court that the notice was not effective to terminate the lease,” notes a May 26 letter from Rec & Park General Manager Phil Ginsburg. “While we continue to believe that we gave you more than adequate notice of the Lease termination and to disagree with the assertion that the Lease has continued on a year-to-year basis, to avoid that dispute, we are superseding the earlier notice with this one.”

HANC’s Jim Rhoads told the Guardian that he wasn’t very surprised by Rec & Park’s latest move. “We knew this would happen,” he said. “We’re going to meet with our lawyers, and decide on the legal front what we do next.”

De Vries said he could not discuss all the possible legal angles that HANC could use to try and fight the eviction, but he hinted that the eviction could be considered retaliatory. “This … termination was initiated under Newsom as payback for my client [for opposing] sit / lie,” he said.

Activists speak out at Chevron’s shareholder meeting

Sasha Cuttler

-

May 26, 2011

2

Activists speak out at Chevron’s shareholder meeting

Police and security guards were out in full force in San Ramon yesterday, (Wed/25) where activists and shareholders of Chevron’s valuable stock converged at the company’s annual shareholders meeting at its headquarters.

Inside, the meeting, Chevron Board Chairman John Watson touted the oil corporation’s “community engagement” and market growth. Outside, around 140 activists from all over the world held signs to the speedy traffic on Bollinger Canyon Way, beseeching the general public to understand the costs of Chevron’s high profits. Some even made it inside.

“Our people have been dying,” said Tom Evans of the Sugpiat People of the Alutitiq Tribe in the native village of Nanwalek, Alaska, choking back tears during the 45-minute Q&A session with Watson.

“You are all a bunch of liars and thieves,” said Rev. Kenneth Davis, a Richmond resident who was arrested last year at Chevron’s shareholders meeting in Houston, Texas. He claimed he could see Chevron’s refinery from a window in his home. “People are dying, you steal from all over the world and process it in Richmond,” he said.

“When will Chevron embody in its operations environmental and social justice?” Elias Isaac of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa asked the chairman.

After giving one of his canned responses of “we are a force for good everywhere we operate,” Watson conceded, “Perhaps it’s not enough, and we could always do more.”

Chevron just came out of a record-breaking year with $20 billion in profits, making it the largest corporation in California and the 11^th in the world, with expectations of more growth in the years to come. It has nine new exploration projects it hopes to start in the next decade that will make Poland, Romania, Western Australia, China and other countries a part of the at-risk catalog of nations where Chevron chooses to do business.

It has claimed over 14 million acres of land for “exploration activities.” It’s also planning the world’s largest carbon sequestration project in Australia on a nature reserve and turtle habitat. If all this information isn’t scary enough, Chevron also makes huge messes and ducks out of cleaning them up.

Recently, the corporation appealed a guilty verdict from an Ecuadorian court for $8.6 billion in damages because of massive environmental degradation. The 18-year lawsuit stems from the destruction and mismanagement of the diseased Amazonian land that Chevron acquired when it bought Texaco in 2001. Ecuadorian Servio Curipoma lost his mother due to Chevron’s toxic sludge and was present at the meeting with other indigenous community members pleading with Watson and Chevron’s shareholders to change its policies in Ecuador.

“Take it up with your government,” Watson said to the speakers. “Petroecuador has not been a good partner,” he added, passing the blame onto Ecuador’s state-owned oil company. Chevron execs decided that was a good time to roll a video about the lawsuit and smeared the plaintiff’s lawyer, Steven Donziger, showing outtakes of the documentary “Crude,” emails and other private meetings, displaying Donziger to be haughty about the case. As the film rolled, most of the stockholders applauded Chevron’s PR efforts.

Seven items on the meeting’s agenda pertained to stockholders’ proposals on various subjects, including hiring a third party director with environmental expertise, creating a human rights committee, and disclosing the guidelines for Chevron’s country selection. None of the stockholders proposals passed, including one on the controversial process of “fracking,” which extracts natural gas from rock, that obtained 41 percent of the preliminary votes.

Once the meeting ended, the activists in attendance were met with a hero’s welcome out on the streets. Gitz Crazyboy of the First Nation Dene/Pikini in Alberta, Canada told the crowd he didn’t buy Chevron’s excuses that they were just following government mandates.

“If that were true we wouldn’t be here right now,” he said.

Antonia Juhasz of Global Exchange and the co-editor of the recently released The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report, said that although Chevron wasn’t as responsive as they hoped it was a victory nonetheless for the protesters.

“What was spit back at us was spin,” she said to the crowd. “We didn’t hear a truly substantive response to the damning human rights abuses that Chevron has caused.”

The secret life of Michael Peevey

Maria Poblet

-

May 24, 2011

11

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Inside a legislative hearing room at the state capitol, things were beginning to get uncomfortable. Roughly five weeks had passed since a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. pipeline explosion killed eight and leveled an entire San Bruno neighborhood, and this California Senate committee hearing was an early attempt to get answers.

San Bruno residents who lost loved ones in the deadly explosion huddled in the front row, their eyes fixed on company representatives and agency bureaucrats as they spoke. At the back of the room, a band of immaculately dressed PG&E executives and utility lawyers sat clustered together.

Richard Clark, director of the consumer protection and safety division of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), fielded questions from visibly frustrated state legislators. Sen. Dean Florez (D-Shafter) wanted know why the CPUC hadn’t done anything when PG&E ignored an impaired section of the ruptured pipeline even after it was granted $5 million to fix it.

“Did the PUC do any accounting when you gave them $5 million?” Florez demanded. “Do we just give them money and cross our fingers and hope they fix it? Is that what we do? Until some terrible tragedy occurs?”

Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said the CPUC needed to step it up and start practicing serious hands-on oversight. He recalled a tragedy that occurred in 2008 when a gas leak in Rancho Cordova triggered a pipeline explosion, killing one person and injuring several others. Although an investigation determined that PG&E was at fault, the CPUC hadn’t yet gotten around to fining the company.

“We’ve got a pattern here,” Leno said. “And we’re not doing anything differently.”

Less than three weeks after CPUC staff members were grilled in Sacramento, Michael Peevey — president of the CPUC and the top energy official in the state — boarded an airplane for Madrid. He was embarking on a 12-day travel-study excursion, with stops in Sevilla and Barcelona, sponsored by the California Foundation on the Environment and the Economy (CFEE).

Peevey’s wife, California Sen. Carol Liu (D-Glendale), was along for the trip. So were two other state senators, several members of the state Assembly, CPUC commissioner Nancy Ryan, and a host of representatives from the energy industry. The group included executives from Chevron, Mirant (now GenOn, the owner of the Potrero power plant), Covanta Energy Corporation, Shell Energy North America, and engineering giant AECOM. High-ranking executives of the state’s investor-owned utilities also participated, including Fong Wan, the senior vice president of energy procurement for PG&E.

Although strict rules normally govern commissioners’ interactions with parties that have a financial stake in the outcomes of commission rulings, there wasn’t anything especially unusual about Peevey traveling internationally with a group that included representatives from the same companies his regulatory commission oversees. CFEE trips happen every year. The nonprofit has footed the bill to fly groups of regulators, legislators, and utility executives to prime vacation destinations like Italy, Brazil, and South Africa in recent years, excursions organizers say are critical for educating top-level stakeholders about worldwide best practices for sustainable systems. However, groups such as The Utility Reform Network (TURN) have decried CFEE trips as “lobbying junkets.”

As PG&E and the CPUC both work to win back the public’s confidence after their latest deadly failure, it’s worth analyzing whether their relationship — shaped by vacations together at exotic locales — has grown too cozy.

THE BUDDY SYSTEM

CFEE isn’t the only nonprofit that regularly flies Peevey overseas for green travel tours with high-ranking utility executives, and the 12 days he spent in Spain wasn’t the only time he spent away from official duties and in the company of the corporations his commission regulates.

These controversial getaways are just a small part of Peevey’s involvement with private-sector interests. He also chairs the board of a nonprofit investment fund created as part of a $30 million settlement agreement with PG&E. Called the California Clean Energy Fund, it funnels money into private venture-capital funds that invest in green start-ups, plus a few companies in the fossil-fuel sector.

While legislators have voiced frustration that lax CPUC oversight of PG&E on pipeline-safety issues opened the door to disaster in San Bruno, inside observers are critical of the outright favors Peevey has granted utilities, such as guaranteeing an unprecedented, higher-than-ever profit margin for PG&E as part of the company’s 2004 bankruptcy settlement.

The CPUC is set up to perform as a watchdog agency, yet social and professional ties running deep within California’s insular energy community mean regulators sometimes run in the same circles as the executives who answer to them, making for cozier relationships than the general public might anticipate. It’s an old-fashioned insider game that one longtime observer wryly characterizes as “the buddy system.” But the buddy system can bring consequences.

As the public face of the CPUC, Peevey repeatedly has been thrust into the spotlight. He has absorbed advocates’ concerns about pipeline safety, rising electricity rates, SmartMeters, missed targets for energy efficiency, and municipalities’ David-vs.-Goliath battles with PG&E to implement community choice aggregation (CCA), to name a few. He’s a magnet for public scrutiny while occupying the center seat at commission meetings, but Peevey’s behind-the-scenes engagements with private-sector organizations bent on shaping statewide energy policy demonstrate how power is wielded in California’s energy world, a system in which regulators seem to be partnering with utilities rather than policing them.

Based at Pier 35 in San Francisco, CFEE’s board of directors is composed of a small group of officers, plus a long list of members who hail from some of the most prominent businesses nationwide. Shell, Chevron, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, and PG&E all hold positions on CFEE’s membership board, and each entity chips in to fund the foundation’s activities and travel excursions.

The group also includes representatives from labor organizations like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and mainstream environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council. Among the emeritus members of CFEE’s governing board are some high-ranking figures, such as CIA director-turned-Pentagon boss Leon Panetta. CFEE received $45,000 in donations from PG&E in 2009 (the most recent year available) and was granted similar amounts in prior years.

CFEE spokesperson P.J. Johnston, the son of former state senator and CFEE officer Patrick Johnston and the press secretary under former Mayor Willie Brown, described the trips as valuable opportunities for top-level stakeholders to gain insight on best practices and engage in noncombative dialogue on key issues.

“The idea for us was that it made sense to have someplace where it was nonconfrontational to engage in policy, work-type discussions,” Johnston explained. He added that the trips are “all about policy, on the 30,000-foot level,” and emphasized that discussions aren’t about specific decisions pending before the CPUC.

Loretta Lynch, a former president of the CPUC who brought a reformist spirit to the agency and was never shy about rebuking utilities, is skeptical of CFEE’s stated program goals. When she was first appointed to the commission, Lynch said, CFEE contacted her to ask where she wanted to travel. If the trips are arranged to fly regulators to destinations they’ve been itching to visit, she reasoned, must-see green innovations probably aren’t dictating the itineraries. “To me,” Lynch said, “they don’t have anything to study in mind.”

“PARTYING WITH THE JUDGE”

The CFEE trip to Spain included a briefing on developing wind energy from AES, a company working on wind and solar development in California that also operates polluting, gas-fired power plants in Huntington Beach, Long Beach, and Redondo Beach. There was a round table on solar energy featuring a presentation from the Independent Energy Producers Association, a trade group that regularly files petitions and comments on CPUC proceedings. The trip included a tour of a desalination plant, a talk from the president of the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, and discussions about California’s energy market. Scheduled activities ended by midafternoon on some days, and the itinerary left a Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday in Sevilla wide open.

Asked to comment on concerns about inappropriate lobbying, Johnston said: “We’re not guarding against anyone’s potential behavior any more than we would be on the streets of Sacramento. We’re not setting ourselves up as the guardians. We’re not facilitating that, per se, either.” He added, “I realize there are critics of any kind of travel and any kind of commingling. But it is wise for us not to close our eyes to the rest of the world, and there’s not a great appetite for spending taxpayer money on these trips.”

Yet Lynch countered that there is an important distinction between the roles of Sacramento legislators and that of utility commissioners. “Regulators are not legislators,” Lynch said. “They’re more like judges. Their decisions have the power of a judge’s decision.” By inviting commissioners along on these lavish getaways, she said, “it’s as if you’re partying with the judge.”

Mindy Spatt, a spokesperson for TURN, echoed Lynch’s concerns. “These ostensibly educational trips are essentially lobbying junkets, where utilities … wine and dine legislators,” Spatt said. TURN raised the issue several years ago, she said, when Peevey joined a CFEE trip attended by a representative of Southern California Edison “just coincidentally at the exact same time that he was penning an alternate decision in Edison’s rate case.” She added: “In TURN’s perspective, the commissioners need to be more in touch with what actual utility customers are experiencing, rather than in touch with the top restaurants in Brazil.”

While Peevey is only one of a host of officials who attend CFEE trips, he has more than just a casual tie to the nonprofit. From 1973 to 1983, he served as president of the California Coalition for Environment and Economic Balance (CCEEB), an organization CFEE grew out of and whose membership shares some overlap with CFEE.

Based in San Francisco, CCEEB was founded by Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Gov. Jerry Brown’s father) in 1973. CCEEB backed a late-1970s proposal to construct a series of nuclear power plants along the California coastline. More recently, the group honored BP with a 2009 award for environmental education — shortly before the company and lax federal regulators were responsible for the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

A YEAR IN THE LIFE

Spain wasn’t the only country Peevey jetted off to with complimentary airfare in 2010. According to a Form 700 filing with the Fair Political Practices Commission, he also traveled to Germany from Aug. 1–5 for a sustainable energy study tour organized by the Energy Coalition. Joining that trip were representatives from investor-owned utilities PG&E, Southern California Edison, and Sempra, plus various city officials and energy experts from the Swedish Energy Agency.

The group stayed at the Radisson Blu Berlin Hotel, which is famous for its AquaDom. “Standing at 25 meters high, it is the world’s largest cylindrical aquarium containing 1 million liters of saltwater,” according to the hotel website. All Radisson Blu Berlin guests have free access to “the hotel’s well-being area,” called Splash, which features a pool, sauna, steam bath, and fitness room.

Based in Irvine, the Energy Coalition’s Board of Directors is chaired by Warren Mitchell, a retired chair of the Southern California Gas Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co.. Another director is a utility lawyer who also sits on the board of directors of the Northeast Gas Association, a consortium of natural gas companies in the northeastern U.S.

Founded in the late 1970s by John Phillips to get large businesses to reduce energy consumption in partnership with utilities, the Energy Coalition has arranged excursions for years to bring energy regulators, city officials, and utility executives to Sweden (where Phillips’ wife was born) to exchange ideas on energy issues. The nonprofit organizes an annual summit called the Aspen Accord, “an energy policy forum where cities, utilities, regulators, and end-users collaborate to identify problems and propose solutions to our most pressing energy issues,” according to a 2009 tax filing. While it used to be held in Aspen, Colo., the most recent Aspen Accord was held at San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis. Peevey gave introductory remarks, and the conference featured talks from PG&E, among others.

Craig Perkins, executive director, told the Guardian that the Aspen Accord and study trips are designed to create a venue for major stakeholders to arrive at outside-the-box solutions. “What we try to do is get everybody out of their comfort zone, if you will — that’s the best way to support more creative thinking,” he said. Official regulatory proceedings are “so rigidly legalistic and bureaucratic that it almost prevents any creative thought from happening,” he added. “We’re not in San Francisco, we’re not in Sacramento, we’re not in corporate offices — let’s just talk about these really big issues, and really big challenges.”

The Germany tour included meetings with the Berlin Energy Agency, talks about climate policy, and a tour of an eco-community in Freiburg. Perkins said utility companies must to pay their own way on the trips, but costs are covered for governmental officials.

An Energy Coalition tax filing reveals that board members receive a monthly retainer of $1,000, quarterly meeting fees of $1,000, plus $500 for each board committee meeting. Teleconferences also result in $500 meeting fees.

Several years ago, the Energy Coalition partnered with PG&E to create the Business Energy Coalition, which paid businesses including Bank of America and the Westin St. Francis $50 per KW of energy savings for banding together to reduce energy during peak load hours. According to a tax filing, total annual Energy Coalition revenue dropped from $10.7 million in 2008 to $3.75 million in 2009 “due to large revenue receipts for participant incentives” for the Business Energy Coalition program, as “revenues were used for direct pass-through payments to program participants and contractors.” In 2006, according to a CPUC filing, PG&E paid the Energy Coalition $227,373 for unspecified consulting services.

In addition to the $8,880 trip to Spain (comped), and the $6,583 trip to Germany last year (comped), Peevey’s 2010 disclosure form shows that he also went to Australia May 14-19 to participate in a conference hosted by the Sydney-based Total Environment Center called “Smart Metering to Empower the Smart Grid” ($12,577, comped). And while it doesn’t show up on his FPPC filing, an agenda for CFEE’s Energy Roundtable Summit from Dec. 9-10 at the Carneros Inn in Napa lists Peevey as a participant. A glance through past filings suggests that 2010 was no anomaly; it’s a typical year in the life of a jet-setting utilities regulator.

GREEN CAPITALISM

Peevey once served as president of the Southern California Edison, an investor-owned utility, and was president of NewEnergy, Inc., an electricity company that later was sold to Williams Energy. Yet his professional image is that of a forward-thinker on climate change. According to a bio on the CPUC website, he’s received awards for achievements on green and sustainable energy from various organizations throughout California.

In 2005, speaking in Berkeley at an annual conference for the California Climate Action Registry, Peevey touted a list of his accomplishments on sustainable energy. “My final example of PUC actions on climate change is related to PG&E‘s bankruptcy,“ he said. “When they emerged from bankruptcy last year, one of many conditions of our support for their reorganization plan was that they create a $30 million Clean Energy Fund, devoted to investing in California businesses developing and producing clean technologies.“

What Peevey didn‘t mention is that he chairs the board of directors of that fund. As a “nonprofit venture capital fund,“ the obscure, San Francisco-based CalCEF sounds like an oxymoron. Based on the terms of the PG&E bankruptcy settlement, it‘s governed by a nine-member board consisting of three CPUC appointees, three PG&E appointees, and the rest selected jointly by the CPUC and PG&E appointees. Other board members include past PG&E executives, a former member of the California Energy Commission, and a former chair of the board of governors of the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), the body that ensures statewide grid reliability and blocked the closure of the Mirant Potrero Power Plant for years.

The nonprofit’s stated mission is to catalyze clean energy investment to aid in the state’s transition away from fossil fuels. CalCEF president Dan Adler described it as a sort of seasoned guide for fledgling green companies that might otherwise fail to navigate the murky, complicated clean-energy sector. CalCEF is in a position to usher start-ups toward success with a combination of funding, networking, and insider wisdom on state energy policy.

Among the challenges that the clean-energy sector faces, Adler said, are the utilities themselves. “They are effectively monopoly, or oligopoly, controllers of the energy industry,” he said. “And they don’t like outside innovation coming and disrupting their work process or their relationship with their customers.”

CalCEF aims to guide the finance community “to be partners with what public policy is doing around clean tech and clean energy,” Adler went on. “There’s a tremendous amount of money to be made, but there’s also a lot of opportunity for money to be wasted. If you don’t have a private-sector investment community that understands these rules and can put their money alongside these rules in a collaborative framework, we’re very unlikely to achieve the really aggressive energy targets that California has set.”

Yet as one skeptical energy insider noted, “there are 15 to 20 other funds, with 10 times as much money, an hour south in the same field,” referring to the burgeoning clean-tech hub in Silicon Valley. It’s questionable whether the CPUC is actually fulfilling some dire need with CalCEF, this person said.

Lynch, not surprisingly, takes a dim view of CalCEF. The former CPUC president questions what business the CPUC has creating a private foundation to guide venture capital investment. “It is a fundamental distortion of the PUC’s authority,” she charged, “all in service of Peevey’s ambitions.”

Peevey’s economic disclosure showed that he holds more than $1 million in a private family trust, without disclosing whether private investments contributed to that fund.

Adler stressed that there is arms-length relationship between CalCEF board members and the companies that benefit from the fund’s investments. “Because we are a nonprofit, and because we have on our board members of the regulatory community, we recognized quickly that we can’t be making direct investments into companies,” said Adler, a former CPUC staff member who was highly regarded even by the critics of CalCEF. “So … we’ve picked the venture-capital funds that we wanted to partner with.”

CalCEF funnels its capital into three different for-profit investment firms, which in turn select the companies that will be included in CalCEF’s investment portfolio. Several directors of the partnering investment firms also sit on the boards of directors of the companies they invest in. The startups run the gamut, from carbon-offset outfits, to energy-efficient lighting manufacturers to solar and wind companies, to biofuels startups to various kinds of technology firms related to the smart grid.

But CalCEF has also poured money into companies that bolster the fossil-fuel industry. One of its first investments was CoalTek, a company developing technology for so-called “clean coal.” Asked to explain why, Adler told the Guardian, “We don’t have veto power on every deal that goes down.”

Adler said he personally believes that “there’s no such thing as clean coal,” but tempered this by adding, “there are some very smart people in our community who will tell you that there’s no future … without coal.”

Another CalCEF investment, DynaPump, is developing technology to make it more energy efficient to pump oil and gas. Asked about this decision, Adler responded: “I will say that when we were approached with this investment by the venture partner that ultimately undertook it, we had our misgivings. If you can save energy in the production of oil and gas, then you’re definitely making a contribution to overall energy efficiency.”

TAX-EXEMPT TESLA

There appear to be some closer-than-arms-length links between CalCEF board members and the investment fund’s beneficiaries. A bio for CalCEF director Nancy Pfund, for example, notes that in her capacity as manager of an outside investment fund, she had “worked closely” with Tesla Motors, a CalCEF investment. Tesla provided CalCEF’s first investment return earlier this year after Tesla went public. A principal of one of the investment firms that works with CalCEF, Stephen Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, holds Tesla shares in a personal trust, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tesla manufactures sleek, electric, zero-emission sports cars with prices in the six-figures, and it’s gearing up to roll out a model that will cost somewhere closer to $50,000. The company’s success was helped by a sales-and-use-tax exclusion granted by the state of California last year. Peevey had a hand in that, too. Few Californians may have heard of the California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority (CAEATFA), a state body within the Office of the Treasurer, which has the power to authorize sales-tax exclusions for companies that are developing alternative energy technologies. Peevey has a seat on it.

In October 2009, according to a CAEATFA document, Tesla was granted a sales tax exclusion from that financing authority. The sports car manufacturer had received a tax break of $3.3 million as of December 2010, and stands to gain a tax break as large as $29.1 million, depending on its property purchases. As a CAEATFA member, Peevey approved the deal by proxy.

A central question is whether the CalCEF dollars that benefited Tesla and other CalCEF portfolio investments were originally derived from PG&E shareholder profits or ratepayer funds. Adler was careful to note that the initial $30 million came from company shareholders, not PG&E customers. But Lynch pointed out that every dime in PG&E coffers originates with the millions of customers who pay utility bills.

Lynch noted another provision of the bankruptcy settlement agreement, which guarantees PG&E a minimum annual profit of 11.2 percent, catapulting it forever into a higher rate of return than the 8 percent to 11 percent profit traditionally granted by the CPUC in prior decades. “They’re manipulating how big this bucket is to siphon off funds into programs like CalCEF,” Lynch said. “It’s all to give Peevey and his friends access — and to greenwash what was a very stinky deal for the ratepayer.”

ELUSIVE CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE

In California, a national leader in addressing climate change, the stakes are high in the energy sector. The CPUC is tasked not only with shoring up transmission-pipeline safety to prevent another San Bruno disaster, but helping to chart a course away from reliance on fossil fuel-powered energy sources.

CFEE, the Energy Coalition, and CalCEF share a common thread — their missions relate to advancing the cause of a clean energy future in California. And while utility funding and partnership is evident in all three operations, the overarching goal is understood to be green.

But as Adler observed, the utilities themselves present one of the greatest obstacles to progress on a clean-energy transition. While California has increased renewable energy sources, it’s done a poor job at supplanting fossil fuel generation with green alternatives, in part because the CPUC has allowed for increasing fossil fuel power generation even as renewable energy expands. According to a listing on the California Energy Commission website, nine natural gas power plants have won approval statewide and are moving toward construction, while six new ones are under review.

The CalCEF approach to addressing climate change, rather than aggressively targeting polluting industries, is to encourage the fledgling green industry in hopes of facilitating success in partnership with the financial sector. In many cases, the backers of the clean-tech companies are the same players behind the big energy giants.

Environmental advocates are critical. “If anyone thinks the CPUC is set up to serve public interests, forget that,” says Al Weinrub, executive director of the Local Clean Energy Alliance, a group that organized against PG&E’s ill-fated Proposition 16 last year. “They never have and they never will.”

Weinrub said he viewed proponents of green energy as falling into two camps: Moneyed interests motivated by a growing new market sector, and activists motivated by environmental and social justice causes. Major green investment firms “want to de-carbonize capitalism,” he observed. “But everything else stays the same.”

Peevey is considered a major driver behind the state’s climate change legislation, and he’s highly regarded for his dedication to green energy. Yet as long as the interlocking dynamic between energy regulators and California’s largest utilities goes unchallenged, change will only come in a way that’s as comfortable, profitable, and manageable for the state’s top polluters as they wish. And in a state with an aging energy infrastructure that’s vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, that pace isn’t nearly quick enough.

Chevron’s critics gather before annual shareholder meeting

Sasha Cuttler

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May 24, 2011

2

Chevron’s critics gather before annual shareholder meeting

Chevron destroys everything, except profits. And by everything, we mean everything. The Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities? Check. The Boreal Forest in northern Canada and its indigenous communities? Check. The Niger Delta? Check. Indonesia, Texas, and Iraq? Check, check and check. And even San Francisco’s own neighbor, Richmond, the home of one of Chevron’s largest oil refineries in the world? A big, whopping check.

Not that oil companies taking the lives, resources, and spaces of millions of people is something to take lightly. In fact, the opposition to Chevron is strong and growing, with many people across a network of international communities planning to stand up at Chevron’s shareholder meeting tomorrow (Wed/25) in San Ramon to give faces and names to the enormous destruction the company caused, which coincides with the release of the 3^rd annual report on the company’s many misdeeds, The True Cost of Chevron.

At a press conference this morning (Tues/24) at a Chevron station in San Francisco, activists and representatives from places adversely affected by Chevron’s drilling, dumping, land grabbing, and environmental degradation told stories about losing mothers to cancer, women having miscarriages due to contaminated water, clear-cutting forests used by their ancestors for hunting and farming, and losing one’s sense of home.

“I have personally witnessed this devastation,” Servio Curipoma of the Amazon Defense Coalition in Ecuador said of Chevron’s operations within his country. “And I will fight to the bitter end and never give up,” he said after showing a photo of his mother who died of cancer. After an 18-year lawsuit by the people in Educator against the oil corporation, Chevron was found guilty of massive environmental crimes. But Chevron has yet to take note of its transgressions, and aggressively pursues communities at risk of complete disintegration.

Elias Isaac with the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa spoke about entire fishing communities in Angola going days without catches as they rely on the waters that Chevron polluted through its operations in the country. “The pollution is effecting livelihoods,” said Isaac. “And it’s getting worse.”

Communities for a Better Environment also understands the nefarious ways in which Chevron puts its stock above its virtue. For example, the company doesn’t pay taxes to extract oil from California. “They had the audacity to ask for an exemption from the law,” said Jessica Tovar of the Oakland based advocacy group. Recently Chevron’s Richmond refinery was denied the possibility to process dirtier, heavier crude oil only after opponents went to court to stop the proposal.

The bitter truth, said Antonia Juhasz of Global Exchange and the co-editor of alternative report, is that no matter where Chevron decides to set up shop, the stories are the same: corporate side-stepping of responsibilities to the community, polluted water, love ones lost, environmental disaster that cannot be undone.

Just like the exploitation Chevron is responsible for through its operations across the globe, its profits are also ever increasing. Last year the company made $20 billion in profits, bolstering its standing as the 11^th largest corporation in the world, and the largest in California.

In order to make a dent in its exploitative practices, members of different organizations will be voicing their opposition in Chevron’s shareholders meeting tomorrow, some through legal proxies of current shareholders.

There is a resolution activists hope will be discussed that will appoint a third party with expertise who will oversee operations to further prevent environmental disasters, said Mitchell Anderson, the Corporate Campaigns Director of Amazon Watch, which is based in San Francisco.

“We came to tell them that we disagree with their ads. It’s not a rosy image. It’s a lie,” said Juhasz. “Chevron knows how to do better but chooses to do worse.”

Editor’s notes

Maria Poblet

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May 24, 2011

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tredmond@sfbg.com

When Cornel West blasted President Obama May 16 in an interview with the website Truthdig, it set off a pretty wild debate on the left. For the most part, it’s been more heat than light (imagine that happening on the left!), but it raises a crucial question about the role progressives play in the Democratic Party — particularly in the 2012 election season.

The best analysis so far comes from Robert Cruikshank, who writes for the blog Calitics. In a May 23 piece, he noted that the right keeps winning battles because the conservatives know how to play coalition politics:

“Conservative communication discipline is enabled only by the fact that everyone in the coalition knows they will get something for their participation…. Everyone knows they will get their turn. Why would someone who is primarily motivated by a desire to outlaw abortion support an oil company that wants to drill offshore? Because the anti-choicers know that in a few weeks, the rest of the coalition will unite to defund Planned Parenthood. And a few weeks after that, everyone will come together to appease Wall Street and the billionaires by fighting Elizabeth Warren. And then they’ll all appease the U.S. Chamber by fighting to break a union.”

Not so with the Democratic Party under Obama. The Wall Street Democrats (the neoliberals, the DLC types, and the power-at-any-price folks) get their way all the time. And those us of who consider ourselves part of the economic left (also known as progressives) not only get thrown under the bus — we see our existing gains rolled back, in exchange for nothing.

Sure, we all agree on a lot of social issues. The neolibs and the progressives support abortion rights and gays in the military and, for the most part, same-sex marriage. We agree that evolution is science and creation is religion.

But on basic economic issues — who pays the taxes, who gets the money, military spending vs. education spending, radical inequality, concentration of wealth, corporate power — we might as well be on different political planets. And while we’re the most active, hard-working members of the Democratic coalition, we get completely ignored on national policy.

Obama ought to be worried — not just by West’s criticism (any president ought to expect some allies to be pissed off) but by the fact that he has created an unsustainable coalition. And some of the San Francisco politicians who call themselves progressives ought to be paying attention too: When your political partners get nothing, they eventually walk.

Alerts

Maria Poblet

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May 24, 2011

0

ALERTS

By Jackie Andrews

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25

The true cost of Chevron

Join the global resistance movement against Chevron’s callous methods of operation and confront the oil giant at its annual shareholders meeting. Representatives from communities that have suffered the dire impacts of the company’s reckless pursuit of profits will be on hand to testify, including Humberto Piaguaje of the Amazon Defense Coalition in Ecuador and Elias Isaac of the Open Society Initiative in Angola.

7–11 a.m., free

Chevron’s World Headquarters

6001 Bollinger Canyon Road., San Ramon

www.truecostofchevron.com

Fundraiser for at-risk youth

The John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes hosts this food truck fundraiser to support former foster youth in their pursuits of higher education. The event features tastings from favorite local food trucks, breweries, and wineries, as well as live music and a silent auction.

6–9 p.m., $150

Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason

Buchanan and Marina, SF

(415) 348-0011

www.brownpapertickets.com

www.johnburtonfoundation.org

FRIDAY, MAY 27

Critical Mass

Take part in this peaceful, leisurely bike parade that follows no set route and obeys no traffic laws or authorities except yielding to pedestrians and emergency vehicles.

6 p.m., free

Justin Herman Plaza

Market and Embarcadero, SF

Facebook: SF Critical Mass

SATURDAY, MAY 28

Sit-in against violence and intolerance

In response to the brutal beating of a transgendered woman in a Maryland McDonalds, where employees filmed and heckled the incident, demonstrations have been organized around the country. Attend this peaceful sit-in to help spread the message that the franchise needs to update its polices and employee training.

10 a.m.–1 p.m., free

McDonalds

5454 Mission, SF

inoculatedcityblog@gmail.com

SUNDAY, MAY 29

Library fundraiser

Help raise funds for the Niebyl-Proctor Library, whose goal is to preserve the history of radical politics, labor movements, and social struggles with a book sale featuring a good selection of novels, poetry, art, pamphlets, and books, including selected works by Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

10 a.m.–2 p.m., free

Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library 6501 Telegraph, Oakl.

(510) 595-7417

www.marxistlibr.org

TUESDAY, MAY 31

Talkin’ Trotsky

This is the first session of a 12-week course to discuss Leon Trotsky and the concept of “Permanent Revolution,” including workers’ power, internationalism, and social transformation.

7–-8:30 p.m., $2 suggested donation

New Valencia Hall 625 Larkin, No. 202, SF

415-864-1278

www.socialism.com

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Environmentalists rappel off Richmond Bridge to protest Chevron

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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May 23, 2011

4

This morning, May 23, activists from Amazon Watch and the Rainforest Action Network rappelled off the Richmond Bridge and unfurled a 50 foot banner which read: “Chevron Guilty: Clean Up Amazon.”

Anchored to the bridge deck, three brave souls dangled airborne above the bay alongside the banner, within view of an oil tanker. The banner drop was carried out to draw attention to Chevron’s environmental contamination in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfCtDl1Jf2A

In an historic court victory in Ecuador on Feb. 14, Chevron was found guilty of causing $18 billion worth of environmental damage to a Rhode Island-sized swath of the Amazon. The widespread soil and water contamination, caused by decades of toxic dumping by Texaco and Chevron, has been linked to high rates of cancer and birth defects. Amazon Watch has been campaigning to get Chevron to clean up the oil pollution for 18 years.

“Chevron has said they are going to appeal the decision,” noted Paul Paz y Miño, managing director of Amazon Watch. “They’ve said they’ll fight it till hell freezes over.” So activists are keeping the pressure on.

Chevron will hold its annual shareholder meeting on May 25 in San Ramon, and a coalition of environmental organizations are using the occasion to draw attention to environmental problems the company has caused worldwide.

Three community leaders from the impacted Ecuadorian region traveled to California to share their stories and join in protests outside the shareholders meeting.

Their personal stories are moving. Humberto Piaguaje is a leader of the indigenous Secoya people of Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest, whose numbers in that region have dwindled from thousands to just several hundred since Texaco arrived in the area nearly 50 years ago.

Carmen Zambrano moved to the Amazonian region affected by Chevron in 1984, and according to her bio, tells stories “of how the company told people that the crude was good for their health, and that the contaminated water was safe to bathe and wash in, to drink from. … Her own children are terminally ill and developmentally disabled. Her sister-in-law suffers from cancer; her brother-in-law has serious heart problems. Her neighbors have died and almost everyone she knows has skin ailments.”

Serbio Curipoma, a cacao farmer from the Orellana province of Ecuador, lost his parents and sister to cancer. According to his bio, “He realized six years ago that the house his family has lived in for 20 years had been built directly atop an unremediated covered oil pit; digging just a few meters into the earth reveals thick crude.”

The trio from Ecuador will be joined by leaders from Chevron-affected communities in Nigeria, Indonesia, Canada, Angola, and Alaska at a teach-in at Berkeley’s David Brower Center May 23 from 7 to 9 p.m. on “The True Cost of Chevron.”

Paz y Miño noted that Amazon Watch is hoping to amass 30,000 signatures for the 30,000 plaintiffs in the Chevron case in a petition the group plans to deliver to company shareholders and executives during the meeting. They are also hoping to raise funds to cover the cost of the delegation.

Appetite: Island bites, part four

Andrew Lam

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May 17, 2011

0

I spent some brilliant days — and the first three of five installations in my Hawaiian series — exploring Oahu. But based on what every traveler I’d ever met had told me, I knew it could only get better with Kauai. This time around, let’s talk the restaurant scene on Kauai – next time, I’ll feature its hotels and drink.

But first, the ugly: traffic jams are jarring shocks on the island’s east side near Lihue, particularly in Kapaa. One-lane roads at a dead stop along stetches of strip malls are downright irritating. I almost missed my flight home when it took one hour to go 10 miles from Kapaa to Lihue Airport (the day before the same route took 10 minutes).

But on the South and North shores there was little to no traffic. Even in Lihue, where the main airport is based, mountains and fields surround the tiny town. Kauai is imminently more laid back than the already relaxed Oahu — a distinction I savored, even if Honolulu is clearly the leader in food and dining.

A helicopter ride over the famed Napali Coast and around the entirety of Kauai is nothing short of magical. Though you will spend roughly $350 per person, it’s worth it. It cost $250 when we payed in cash at Inter-island Helicopters – whose friendly, fun staff and pilot gave us a wonderful, hour-long tour, just take note: those shiny, red copters on the website are not the ones we rode, ours was more like an old army helicopters, with open air, no doors — terrifying to take off in, but one quickly acclimates to the feeling.

You’ll need a helicopter ride to take in the Napali Coast, sans blisters

I can honestly say this was one of the best travel adventures of my life, and I’ve traveled to five continents. Views are breathtaking, yes, but getting up close and personal is the real thrill.

On a less windy day, our pilot flew close into craters and mountain niches, through the gorgeous Waimea Canyon, over blowholes and coffee plantations, and along the coastline. We covered the entire island, smelled rain from the highest peaks, and took in the pristine blue of the ocean.

Whatever you do on Kauai, do this. Next time I will try an ocean boat ride, the only other way to actually see the Napali Coast without hiking it (an arduous journey meant for the hardcore and even then, limited paths mean you can’t hike it in its entirety). I’m sure a boat ride can be full of thrills, but it can’t give the all-encompassing view of the entire island you can see via air.

But no matter how you see it, see Kauai at least once in your life. It’s incredible how a tiny island can enchant. Even for a big city girl like myself, Kauai had a way of wrapping my days up in its mellow spell.

CHEAP EATS

Mark’s Place, Lihue:

Mark’s Place musubi, for those who like their Hawaiian snacks authentic

My favorite plate lunch of the trip, Mark’s Place is a true local’s gem. It’s a clean hole-in-the-wall with creative daily specials and desserts and salads on top of traditional loco moco, beef stew, and chicken katsu.

Specials were not just ultra-fresh, they were gourmet. I loved a dish of blackened mahi mahi ($8.95) gently drizzled in a lilikoi (passion fruit) mustard sauce, served over quinoa and sauteed spinach. A green salad in papaya seed dressing accompanied the fish.

At that price, the dish was a steal, and you’d expect it to shine in any restaurant setting – only you order it as take-out in an industrial neighborhood frequented by blue collar workers, with whom you’ll be sharing one outdoor picnic table. Mark’s Place’s simple, fresh musubi ($2.25), particularly the teriyaki beef variety, makes a fine snack.

Kountry Kitchen, Kapaa:

Kountry Kitchen was my top breakfast on Kauai. Packed with locals, my eyes widened at the sight of what must have been the most massive pancakes I’ve seen (and I’ve had some gigantic ones). Good thing I saw them before ordering two — it’s a mere $6-8 for two pancakes, which could feed a few tourist between them.

Macadamia nut pancakes are a popular pick at Kountry Kitchen, but I couldn’t resist the day’s special: Elvis pancakes. Yes, this means peanut butter and bananas, the King’s beloved combo. Accompanied with awesome housemade coconut syrup, they were perfection.

Shrimp Station, Waimea:

If you’re going to Waimea, don’t miss this classic shrimp window with outdoor picnic tables, reminiscent of the shrimp trucks and window fronts on Oahu’s North Shore. Shrimp Station serves killer coconut shrimp, plus beer-battered, garlic, or sweet chili garlic.

A basket of coconut shrimp was juicy and savory with ginger-papaya tartar sauce. Our pace was slow while we lingered at the picnic tables in this sleepy little town. Quintessential southern Kauai.

Koloa Fish Market, Koloa:

An authentic, plate lunch take-out only shop, Koloa Fish Market is beloved in southern Kauai. It serves heaps of Kalua pork, lau lau (shredded pork wrapped in a taro leaf), and all kinds of poke, from raw ahi to octopus. Ordering food and taking it back to our Grand Hyatt porch with a bottle of wine was a pleasure.

Though cheap and plentiful, I found Koloa’s flavors not particularly impressive. I’m crazy about fish (raw, cooked, any which way), but this is no pristine poke experience. Fresh as it is, I find eating at similar hole-in-the-walls around Hawaii, authenticity seems to mean hunks of seafood drowning in oil — well-prepared but lacking that ultra-fresh, of-the-sea taste. I find plenty to love in local Hawaiian cooking, but personally find more flavor and finesse with raw fish in other culinary styles.

Salty, fall-apart pork (in lau lau or Kalua styles) was better than the seafood but not as satisfying for me as pulled pork barbecue from the South.

Papalani Gelato, Koloa:

It’s no Italian gelato or San Francisco ice cream (à la Humphry or Bi-Rite), but Papalani Gelato is organic, with straightforward island flavors like lilikoi, mango, papaya, and macadamia nut. It’s the go-to local ice cream shop (as opposed to sugary, lower quality cream at the shop a couple doors down – I tried both).

Mermaids Cafe, Kapaa:

Mermaids Cafe is about one thing: ahi nori wraps ($9.45). Basically a giant burrito made with a green tortilla with a layer of nori, or seawood, they come stuffed with seared ahi tuna tossed in wasabi cream, pickled ginger, and rice.

This hippie-spirited walk-up counter isn’t quite what I’d call gourmet – there is something slightly amateur about the food (are things cooked in burnt oil?) But the cafe does bring fresh, vegetarian-oriented food and hippie clientele to the island — and those factors hardly mask its Hawaiian spirit. Plus, you can fill up for $10.

MID-RANGE

22 North, Lihue:

Maybe the best meal I had in Kauai, and certainly the most creative, 22 North is on the grounds of Kilohana Plantation. Kilohana, if you squint past the touristy jewelry shops and such, is among the last remaining glimpses of the sugar glory days of Hawaii. The 1930s spirit prevails, lazy breezes blowing through the original house (where a few rooms still showcase ’30s decor), while whiffs of whole pig roasting underground in expectation of a luau intoxicate.

Tourist trappings aside, I enjoyed an hour and a half ride on the plantation’s 1939 Whitcomb diesel engine train, taking in 50 varieties of fruits and vegetables growing alongside the tracks that ran through the working farm. The best part was stopping to feed bread to a herd of pigs.

Afterwards, I sat in the courtyard of the plantation house for a meal at 22 North. Farm fresh is no exaggeration here — many ingredients come straight from the surrounding fields.

The playful, contemporary hand given to many a dish is reason enough to dine here. But 22 North’s cocktails were the best I had on Kauai. Intriguingly, one was unlike any other I’ve had before – a rare occurrence for me anywhere, much less in a region not known for cocktails. Blue Rhum ($8) impressed me with its light rum, home-grown Kilohana pineapple, lime, and a stunning frond of African blue basil – it was aromatic and sophisticated.

The rest were a mixed bag. The Paloma Fresca ($8) was unable to find a harmony between its tequila and grapefruit, but it benefited from local citrus and Kiawe honey. Fried Green Tomatoes ($11) gave a nod to the Southern United States with tomatoes from the farm encrusted in cornmeal, served with a romaine salad in a Maui onion buttermilk chive dressing.

22 North’s burger ($11) was satisfyingly juicy, made with local meat (rotates between beef, lamb, and veal). The cubano sandwich ($9) was pulled pork and house-cured ham laden with homemade pickles and mustard. The restaurant serve gougères ($5) made with fennel honey butter, baccala fritters ($7) with macadamia nut romesco, and sesame-crusted tuna ($28) poached in carrot, ginger, and white wine with a “forbidden rice cake.”

Dessert (all $8) is another highlight here. Local fruit pie benefits from even more home-grown produce, served warm, enclosed in a surprisingly French pie crust that was flaky and buttery, and topped with a scoop of Kauai’s own Lappert’s vanilla ice cream.

22 North has four different “adult floats” ($12) all made with ice cream and beer or spirits — oddly delightful. Though I’ve had beer floats before, I’ve never had one with the refreshing tang of the coconut porter float made with Maui Brewing Co. coconut porter and toasted coconut.

All around, this meal was the most uniquely satisfying of my Kauai visit, and the one that best represents local bounty.

EXPENSIVE

Tidepools, Koloa:

Tidepools at the otherworldly Grand Hyatt captures the magic of its setting in a Disneyland-esque way. It almost feels fake: tiki torches light up a lagoon as you dine under open-air, thatched-roof huts listening to frogs croak. Idyllic.

Certainly the menu reads old school – and there is a dated air about the place, but there are culinary surprises that hold the spell of the setting. It’s $32-55 for entrees and a more reasonable $9-15 for appetizers. You’re right: in the scheme of fine restaurants, it’s not worth that high price tag. But you’re in Kauai and this is one of the best meals you’ll have there, in an environment that helps that cost go down more easily.

Salads (like $9 Manoa lettuce with a creamy Maui onion-garlic dressing and shaved manchego cheese) and sashimi starters (like $15 ahi with Hawaiian hearts of palm and shiso leaf) are fresh and pleasing. Brandt Farms organic prime NY strip steak ($48) is shockingly juicy when cooked medium-rare, and packed with flavor. The other surprise is the crowd-pleasing macadamia nut mahi mahi ($32): lightly encrusted in nuts over coconut jasmine rice in a tropical rum buerre blanc. It tastes of Hawaii: redolent of the sea, gently sweet, with a nutty goodness.

— Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot

Into the Vortex, part one

Maria Poblet

-

May 10, 2011

0

arts@sfbg.com

For some the ’60s and ’70s never stopped swinging — even (or especially) if they were barely out of womb when all that decadence crashed into the anti-counterculture, pro-coke Reagan era.

For many years, one of SF’s greatest connoisseurs of retro sexual revolution kitsch and coolness has been Scott Moffett. For all we know, even as you read this he’s reclining on a fun fur rug, drinking Martini & Rossi on the rocks, reeking of Hai Karate, sandwiched by Barbarella and Pussy Galore.

In 1994 he and Jacques Boyreau cofounded the Werepad, a waaaaaay-south o’ Market psychedelic lounge that hosted parties and screened rare, frequently scratchy 16mm prints of movies with titles like Maryjane (1968), Island of the Bloody Plantation (1983), and William Shatner’s Mysteries of the Gods (1977). He also created the Cosmic Hex Archive (whose website lets you can download everything from 1966’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and 1976’s Shriek of the Mutilated to 1972’s Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny for a modest fee) to protect and show just such “forgotten works.” He’s collaborated on movies, books, and traveling exhibits, all reflecting the same groovy aesthetic.

The Werepad is now gone (as is Boyreau, to Portland, Ore.), but Moffett now runs its more compact successor not-so-far south of Market, the Vortex Room, and with Joe Niem programs its Thursday Film Cult nights.

The theme to the Vortex’s May schedule — sorry if you missed last week’s bill of Roger Corman’s 1959 beatnik parody Bucket of Blood and the astonishing 1969 Japanese portrait-of-a-crazed-artist erotic horror Blind Beast — is “Art, Obsession, and Film Cult.” The series unites a widely disparate slate dealing with art-making in one form or another, as inspired, manipulated, or rendered homicidal by sexuality and violence.

Thursday, May 12 there’s a double bill whose first half unusually (for the Vortex) reaches back to mainstream Hollywood’s “golden” era. German Expressionist master Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927; M., 1931), followed up 1944’s The Woman in the Window by regathering its stars on a new suspense melodrama: 1945’s Scarlet Street. The latter is crasser, pulpier, and driven by demure 1930s ingénue (and future Dark Shadows matron) Joan Bennett’s inspired vulgarity as Kitty “Lazy Legs” March, whose yea lazier boyfriend (Dan Duryea) proposes that she seduce an accountant and amateur painter (Edward G. Robinson) whom they both mistake for a wealthy artist. This lurid saga ends on an unusually bitter, ironic, haunted note for its time.

A greater discovery is Scarlet Street‘s Vortex cofeature. Scream Baby Scream (1969) is vintage psychedelic horror at its trippiest. This low-budget but pretty dang groovy artifact goes out of its way to be with-it: the cast wears ultra-mod fashions, the interiors are crammed with objets d’Op Art, the score is cool jazz-rock (dig those flute solos), and the dialogue is chock-full of Now Generation philosophizing (some rather grammatically-challenged, such as “I feel so strange — like a nightmare that I don’t want to think about”).

All of which doubles the fun in watching an otherwise (slightly better made) imitation of movies like Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1965 Color Me Blood Red. Written by future genre hero Larry Cohen, its young protagonists are four art-school students; hero Jason is practically cohabiting with girlfriend Janet, but she’s acting like maybe she Needs Some Space. (Of course, he’s also acting like a jealous jerk — it’s unclear whether the film is aware how clearly it reflects the none-too-feminist gender dynamics of mainstream hippiedom.)

Janet takes her art very seriously, attracting attention from a creepy established artist (Larry Swanson) famous for oil portraits of hideously distorted faces. Meanwhile, models, art students, and miscellaneous youth-on-the-beach keep “disappearing.”

You can guess what happens. But among Scream Baby Scream‘s many surprises are a long LSD trip sequence (protagonists go motorcycling on the highway! Feed baby elephants at the zoo! Imagine themselves as monkeys in a cage! Interpretive dance!), scenes at a psychedelic coffeehouse, a party setpiece with groovy band the Odyssey (plus go-go dancers and liquid light projections), and zombie ghouls on the loose.

There’s also nudity, pot smoking, and a lot of relationship arguments. The last half hour takes a weird left turn into Vincent Price terrain, complete with a gloomy old mansion, a mad-doctor flashback, and so forth. The movie was clearly intended for drive-ins at best, but it’s colorful, fast-paced, and ever so delightfully wrong. Directed by little remembered B-pic toiler Joseph Adler, it was an early big-screen writing credit for Cohen, showing signs of the perversity that would later result in 1973’s Black Caesar, 1974’s It’s Alive, 1976’s God Told Me To, and 1988’s Maniac Cop, to name a few.

Trash will spotlight the rest of the Vortex’s May schedule next week. A $5 donation gets you into these Thursday screenings. For that dough, you could buy half a ticket to Bridesmaids. Please don’t tell me that’s a tough decision. (Dennis Harvey)

ART, OBSESSION, AND FILM CULT

Scarlet Street, Thurs/12, 9 p.m.;

Scream Baby Scream, Thurs/12, 11 p.m., $5

Vortex Room

1082 Howard, SF

www.myspace.com/thevortexroom

The fun side of bikes

Maria Poblet

-

May 10, 2011

3

steve@sfbg.com

Paul Freedman, a.k.a. the Fossil Fool, is a singer-songwriter and builder of elaborate art bikes who lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. Since 2001, when he decided to apply his Harvard University education to building custom bikes, accessories, pedal-powered products, and mobile sound systems, Freedman created Fossil Fool and Rock the Bike to sell his creations and provide a platform for his performances and alternative transportation advocacy work.

But anyone who’s watched Freedman build and ride his creations — such as his latest, El Arbol, a 14-foot fiberglass tree built around a double-decker tall bike with elaborate generator, sound, and lighting systems and innovative landing gears — knows this is a serious labor of love by an individual at the forefront of Bay Area bike culture. We caught up with him recently to discuss his work and vision.

SFBG How did Rock the Bike start?

FOSSIL FUEL I was working at a shop in Berkeley and I decided to make my first bike music system, which I called Soul Cycles. So I had that other job at a bicycle nonprofit, which is cool, and that was the first impetus. I did two innovative things with my first bike music system: I put the controls on the handlebars, which I’d never seen anyone do, and I put speaker back-lighting to make the speakers look nice at night. I used a really nice CFL fluorescent lamp, and I started playing around with those and it looked great, so that was our first product for those first three or four years.

SFBG What was going on in the larger culture at the time that led you to believe your interest in bikes and technology was going to be fruitful or make an interesting statement?

FF I care deeply about biking and a lot of the people I was with did too, but I felt like the bicycle advocacy scene was not very effective when it came to actual outreach. I felt like the thing that had been really formative for me was this person-to-person interaction, in my case by hanging out with the guys who started Xtracycle, and going on quests to get ingredients for dinner and riding late at night with the music systems on the tour. I felt like those experiences were what made bicycling appealing, but the bike advocacy scene was using guilt trips and telling people you should ride a bike because you’re too fat and you should ride a bike because there’s too much traffic. And I felt like we needed to shift that mindset and really start focusing on the fun aspects of biking and the social aspects to grow the scene.

SFBG Do you feel like it has, and what effect do you think it had on those who weren’t already riding bikes?

FF I think it’s moving that direction. Even within traditional bike advocacy groups, those people are starting to really focus on their events and creating community, in a good way, and challenging themselves with doing so. And I think that’s really positive.

SFBG Your timing also dovetailed with heightened green awareness — with a push for renewable energy, concerns over peak oil, and things like that.

FF Yeah, I feel that transportation choices are the main thing people need to examine about their lives with respect to their impact on global warming. And that’s not just a feeling, that’s the consensus of the Union of Concerned Scientists. They say that if you want to have an impact on the planet, positive or negative, the first thing you should consider is your transportation habits. So that means flying, it means driving, and everything else. I don’t think it’s really beneficial to focus on what people need to do with a car, like they need to drop their kids off. It’s more important how people do the optional things with cars like the trips to Tahoe, and the flights to Mexico. It’s those optional things I want to focus on, which is why I’m so interested in Sunday Streets, which is like the antidote. It’s this thing you can do here, that you can walk and bike to, that’s as fun as driving to Tahoe.

SFBG Through your technology and design work, it also seems like you’re showing a broad range of what people can do on a bike, with lots of cargo or a whole performance stage setup. Do you think design is convincing people that bikes are more versatile that they thought they were?

FF Oh yeah, I think that would be a really beneficial outcome of this work. By riding through town with our music gear, of course people are going to look at that and think, oh yeah, I could probably go to Rainbow Grocery and buy a bunch of food for my household on a bike. So it would be a great outcome if people would make that connection.

SFBG Is there anything about San Francisco that makes people here more receptive to your message?

FF San Francisco is a very tight city geographically. It’s not like Phoenix. The blocks are pretty short here and the distances are pretty short here, and you can ride year-round here, which is not true in Boston where I grew up.

SFBG The focus on technology and design here also probably helps, right?

FF Oh, for sure. This is an awesome place to be prototyping and doing funky mechanical, electrical art. There’s a lot of support for it. There are places like Tap Plastics for learning about fiberglass. There are lots of electronics stores that serve the Silicon Valley tech developer communities. You can buy stuff there that’s helpful. You can learn about Arduino [an open source microprocessor] at Noisebridge. There are a lot of resources for doing interactive art here or for doing bicycle-related projects. There are a lot of welders here.

SFBG Where do you think we are on the arch with this stuff — the beginning, the middle? — in terms of gaining wider acceptance of biking as an imperative and an option for anyone?

FF I think there’s an important generational shift underway, and I don’t know whether it’s my focus on bikes that leads me to meet all these kinds of people, but it feels like I’m meeting more people these days that are going to pick their next city or their next neighborhood based on how it is to bike there. They’re bringing it up in conversation, it’s not me. So it seems like people are really considering what their daily life is going to be like and how the community feels, and biking is one of the symbols of a whole swath of other beneficial things. They know that if they see a bunch of bikes when they visit a place, then there’s probably a lot of other cool stuff like music, arts, farmers markets. Those kinds of things are sort of linked together, and the bike is the key indicator. So there’s been this generational change of thought. The idea that having a bigger, faster car is better, I just don’t think that’s popular with these people. They no longer believe it.

SFBG It’s having cooler bike.

FF It’s having cooler bike and being able to use it and not have to step into the stress of car culture if you can avoid it.

SFBG What’s your next step?

FF One of the really positive things for me has been the Rock the Bike community, with its roadies, performers, musicians — all types of people who are on our e-mail list. So I can just say, I need three roadies for a three-hour performance slot and there’s going to be a jam at the end, so bring your instruments. That’s an awesome thing and it’s just going to improve, so I think the community will grow as we continue do gigs where we have fun and the people have fun.

In terms of my own art, this tree [gesturing to his El Arbol bike] has been my focus for the last year or two, and it’s not done yet. It has to look undeniably like a tree. It looks like a tree, but with a light green bark that you really don’t see in nature, so that has to change. I want it to have brown bark, but I still want it to do beautiful things at night with translucency. And I want it to have a true canopy of leaves, so that when you’re far away from it at Sunday Streets and you’re wondering whether to go over there, you’ll see a tree. Not just a representation of a tree, but I want them to be like, how the hell did he ride a tree over here?

SFBG Why a tree?

FF I don’t know. You get these ideas, and you start drawing them and can’t shake them. There are all sorts of reasons why trees are interesting. They are gathering points.

SFBG And you’re doing some very innovative design work on this bike, such as the landing gear.

FF The roots. Yeah, that’s never been done before. Through the course of doing the project, people would send me tips and interesting things, and one guy sent me a link to a photo of tall bikes being used in Chicago in the early 1900s as gas lamp lighting tools, and they were very tall. I’d say 10 to 12 feet tall, and they were tandems, so there was a guy on top and a stoker on the bottom providing extra power, and they didn’t have landing gears. So they would ride from one lamp to another and hold the lamp as they refilled it. And I just love that story because if you were growing up in Chicago, and you saw these gas lamp people coming by in the early evening to turn the lights on, and if you were a little kid trying to fall asleep or whatever, that would have an indelible mark on your childhood, and that whimsical quality is what I’m going for. That should be part of what it’s like to grow up in the Mission District in 2011.

SFBG How does that fit into the other cultural stuff that you’re also bringing to the bike movement, the music you’re writing, design work, the style, and the events that you’re creating?

FF Sometimes I wish it wasn’t so multipronged. I would clearly be a better performer and musician if it was the only thing I did, so I apologize to all my fans for not putting 100 percent into the music. But I put 100 percent into the whole thing, including creating bikes and running Rock the Bike, which is a business.

SFBG But are you doing all these things because you find a synergy among them?

FF It’s the fullest expression of who I am.

SFBG Where do you see this headed? What will Rock the Bike be like five years from now?

FF I would like to see the quality of our entertainment offerings steadily improve to the point where people genuinely look forward to it, and not just to the gee-whiz aspect of look what they’re doing, but just for the feeling of being there. So I’d like to challenge ourselves with the quality of the music, how it is to be engaged in the setup process — because I think the setup is cool, with biking to the event and engaging in the transition to a spectacle, where every step along the way is part of the show. I like that idea. I’d like to challenge ourselves to be a carbon-free Cirque du Soleil, a show that is slamming entertainment and they bike there and pedal-power everything: the lighting, the sound, the transportation. And I want the performers to be just as good.

SFBG Are there people in other cities doing similar things?

FF The Bicycle Music Festival is spreading to other cities, which is cool. I think there are going to be over a dozen bicycle music festivals this summer. In terms of people doing really inspiring work with bike culture or this kind of mobile art, you definitely see some amazing things at Burning Man. That’s probably one of the best venues for this type of art. But I can’t think of another city where people are doing all of this. I’m part of a group on Flickr called Bicycle and Skater Sound Systems, and there’s nothing on that whole group that I see as being on this level. I don’t know why.

SFBG When you ride a cool custom bike down the street, the reactions it elicits from passersby is just so strong and happy. What is that about?

FF It’s a reaction to an expression of personal freedom. People light up when they see you expressing yourself, and a part of them thinks, oh yeah, that would be fun, I’d like to express myself. And there are just so many ways to express yourself and be human — and that’s something that we need to remind ourselves because, in many ways, our personal freedoms are declining and there’s more surveillance.

SFBG And people might take that spark and do any number of things with it.

FF One of the very cool things about bicycle art is that it’s mobile. So you ride your bike and you might turn heads a couple dozen times a day. I ride this tree, and if it’s in the full mode where it’s 14-feet tall and there’s music on, and I’m going from here to Golden Gate Park, I’d estimate that 500 people see it. There’s probably no other art form you can do that with. I can’t think of any other that’s like that. So it’s a really cool art form. Those people aren’t paying you, but you shared art with them, and it’s a good way to get exposure. It’s a great way for a lot of people to see your art.

SFBG With your mobile, pedal-powered stages, you’re also demonstrating green ways of powering even stationary art.

FF It is an interesting time for pedal power. I feel like there’s a turning point that’s maybe beginning in the field of events with how they’re powered. I think there are going to be a lot more people who are going to festivals in the coming years who are looking at the diesel generators and saying, ‘My summertime festival experience is being powered by diesel.’ And I think there are going to be a lot of people seeing that and wanting to do something else.

SFBG Have the technologies for how much juice you’re able to get out of pedal power been advancing since you’ve been working on it?

FF Yes, it’s truly impressive right now, particularly if you’re putting that juice into music because we have very efficient generators where there’s no friction interface anymore, nothing rolling on the tire, it’s all just ball bearings rolling on the hub. Then we put that power into these new modified amps, and they have a DC power supply now, as opposed to an AC power supply, so we don’t have to put the power into an inverter. So the net sum of that is one person can pedal-power dance music for 200 people, which is pretty amazing and inspiring.

SFBG And the battery technology is also improving, right?

FF Yeah, the batteries are what you use for the mobile rides, and that’s getting better. If you’ve been to a bike party, it’s just incredible how many good, loud sound systems there are right now. It’s a very kinetic art form, although I wish people would focus more on the visual aspects of their system, because I feel like there’s a trend to get big and loud fast. But I wish there were more people doing the work that Jay Brummel is doing, where he doesn’t just want to ride on a bicycle, so he turned his bike into a deer and he steers by holding the antlers.

SFBG But there has been some push-back from the police. Have you gotten many tickets?

FF Well, I got tickets for riding up high on this quadracycle. There is a law against riding tall bikes in California. It says you shouldn’t ride a bicycle in such as manner as to not be able to stop safely and put your foot down. Obviously you can’t put your foot down on a tall bike.

SFBG The fact that you have landing gears on your bike didn’t make a difference?

FF Well the officer didn’t take it seriously, but the court sided in my favor. The judge was flipping through photos of the landing gear the entire trial — he couldn’t stop flipping through them. And he asked, ‘How do you get on? Where do you step?’ So I was like, ‘Well, you step here, you step there, and you swing.’ It was pretty fun.

BICYCLE MUSIC FESTIVAL

Saturday, June 18

11 a.m.–10 p.m., free

Various locations, SF

www.rockthebike.com

www.fossilfool.com

Ideale

Maria Poblet

-

May 10, 2011

0

paulr@sfbg.com

Grant Street is so strongly associated with Chinatown that it’s easy to forget there’s a segment of it north of Columbus. There, running along the west shoulder of Telegraph Hill, it becomes a part of — and maybe the heart of — Little Italy. In its narrowness and festive congestion, the street does come to seem Roman, and, as in Rome, it has better restaurants than the bigger, gaudier boulevard nearby. American tourists in Rome, it is said, will not leave the well-lighted thoroughfares to investigate dimmer side streets, so those thoroughfares are where you’re most likely to find rip-off joints with “turistica” menus in English.

Our own Columbus Avenue, while splendid in its way, is a kind of Fisherman’s Wharf of Italian cooking, so it’s no surprise that a restaurant like Ideale would situate itself on nearby Grant, out of sight of the hoi polloi, who are attracted to neon and other manifestations of brightness the way moths are to porch lamps. Ideale, which opened in late in the 1990s, is the kind of place you would seek out if you were in Rome; it draws the locals, and it is a curious fact of even the most touristy neighborhoods that they’re filled with locals. Locals are the fourth dimension in such one-dimensional universes.

The restaurant is bigger than it appears, because its second dining room, in the adjoining storefront, is fully separated from the main one and the entryway. And (huzzah!) its walls are hung with splendid paintings, which we supposed to be oil on stretched canvas, with impasto visible even from distant tables, like the little nubs you see in linen. There are few spectacles more discouraging to me than bare restaurant walls. The sweeps of emptiness make me think of prison, or foreclosure.

Chef Maurizio Bruschi is said to have learned to cook from his grandmother, and his style accordingly emphasizes the Italian classics, at least as those are understood in this country. Your first clue about the cooking can be found in the house-baked bread, which in true Italian fashion we found to be adequately salted. Salt makes an enormous difference in most foods, but particularly in bread, which is almost impossible to season after the fact. And Italian chefs, in my experience, aren’t afraid to salt their food. We took Bruschi’s bread to be a good omen. (Is he any relation of Tedy Bruschi? Probably not.)

Good bread implies good pizza, and Ideale’s pies are intense. (Naples is said to be the birthplace of Italian pizza, but Roman pies are reliably sensational.) We were particularly smitten with the funghi e salsiccia version ($14), which combined a crispy thin crust, a judicious ladling of well-seasoned and garlicky tomato sauce, enough mozzarella to glue things together, and a tossing of mushroom slices and bits of sausage that didn’t taste overwhelmingly of fennel — a frequent fault of Italian-style sausage as made in this country, in my view.

We noticed several effusions of fresh arugula. One thatch appeared beside the eggplant parmigiana ($11), which was baked in a crock like a little lasagna — not remarkable, but any halfway decent handling of eggplant gets at least one gold star from me. More arugula turned up with the grilled local calamari ($12), mostly tubes, nicely charred but still tender and lemony.

Risotto alla pescatore has to be, at $17.75, one of the better buys on this or any comparable menu. For one thing, it was just choked with seafood, including black mussels, clams, calamari, and prawns. For another, the rice was cooked in flavorful liquid. The menu card mentioned pinot grigio and garlic, but I suspected the presence, too, of some kind of seafood stock, whether shrimp, clam, or fish. Makers of risotto tend to be obsessed with the complex mechanics, in particular the need to stir the rice constantly for 18 minutes, and to keep the stock at a simmer as you add it cupful by cupful, so you produce the characteristic creaminess. You can make perfectly creamy risotto with plain water, then tart it up Milanese-style with butter, pepper, and parmesan. But there is nothing like cooking rice, whether arborio or some other kind, in flavorful stock or broth, as here.

The flaps of veal in saltimbocca ($23) were generously overlaid with flaps of prosciutto,, whose saltiness helped balance the sauce, a frascati wine reduction infused with rosemary. Frascati is the wonderfully fruity white wine produced in Lazio, the region around Rome — highly drinkable, but if it isn’t on the wine list, having it as a sauce isn’t a bad fallback position. The plate was finished with coins of roasted potato and asparagus tips, the pinnacle of adequacy.

Dessert: how about profiteroles ($7)? With a twist: the pastry balls were filled with pastry cream, while the vanilla ice cream (as a scoop) had to wait outside. Lots of chocolate sauce. too, just the way Nonna used to do it.

IDEALE

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.;

Fri.–Sat., 5:30–11 p.m.; Sun., 5–10 p.m.

1315 Grant, SF

(415) 391-4129

www.idealerestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/DS/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible