Oil

Green city, part one: cut back cars

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EDITORIAL San Francisco needs a real green city agenda — not something that comes out of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s corrupt propaganda operation or from the timid folks in the Mayor’s Office but a comprehensive environmental plan for the next 10 years that aims at making San Francisco the nation’s number one city for green policy.

There’s no point in thinking small: this is the year for dramatic talk about real environmental action. And it doesn’t have to be overwhelmed by global problems; there’s so much to be done right here at home.

We will be laying out a much longer, more detailed platform over the next few months, but here’s one way to start:

San Francisco ought to commit to cutting car use in the city by at least 50 percent in the next five years.

How do you do that? By making cars unnecessary and slightly more expensive.

The nation’s addiction to oil didn’t come by accident. As Thomas Friedman wrote in the April 15 New York Times, then-president Dwight Eisenhower responded to the cold war in part by building the Interstate Highway System, which allowed the military to move people and weapons quickly — but also set the nation on a path to the car-driven development and land use that are now poisoning the environment and global politics. Turning that around requires tremendous dedication and political leadership, but San Francisco shouldn’t have to wait for the rest of the country.

A citywide auto-reduction plan would involve sweeping land-use changes. Some streets, such as Market, should be closed to cars entirely. Much downtown parking should be eliminated. More bike lanes and transit-only roads, more pedestrian-friendly shopping areas, and other measures of that sort would not only help discourage car use but also make the city a more livable place.

But there’s more: a city that discourages car use has to build housing for local workers — that means affordable housing for the city’s service-industry and public-sector workforce. All new housing needs to be evaluated on that basis: will people who work in San Francisco be able to live here — and avoid long commutes? Most housing currently in the planning pipeline utterly fails that test.

To make cars irrelevant, public transportation has to be vastly improved. As Sups. Chris Daly and Aaron Peskin point out in the Opinion on page 7, that means better management. But more than anything, it means money — big money. Muni fares ought to be reduced dramatically (or eliminated altogether) — but in exchange, Muni needs a dedicated funding source. A special fee on downtown businesses makes sense. A citywide transit assessment on property owners might be necessary.

It’s not fair to place a burdensome tax on cars that makes it possible only for the rich to drive — but simply restoring in San Francisco the vehicle fee Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wiped out would cover Muni’s deficit. Assemblymember Mark Leno is working on this, and it should be a top civic priority. So should pushing high-speed rail (see page 19), which would eliminate tens of thousands of car trips between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

There are lots of ways to approach this goal; the supervisors and the mayor just need to set it and enforce it. *

A law school of their own

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› culture@sfbg.com

In today’s "I’m gonna sue you" world, in which lawyers are called sharks (and often rightly so), getting a law degree from a school that offers the class "Education for a Just, Sacred and Sustainable World" might seem a little backward. However, since the ’70s a number of schools have been encouraging students to study law as a tool for practicing social advocacy — not just for lining corporate pockets (or their own).

One of the Bay Area’s banner examples is the New College of California, which — founded in 1975 out of the civil rights movement — has the oldest public interest law program in the country. But there are other stops for those with lawyerly aspirations. Golden Gate University not only offers certification in public interest law but also gives a number of incentives for students interested in helping local communities. UC Hastings College of the Law has the in-house Civil Justice Clinic, which gives students a chance to add an activist bent to their education. And most other nearby schools — from UC Berkeley’s School of Law to the University of San Francisco — now offer some kind of public interest law specialty.

So what are these programs like? Is this law lite?

Certainly not, Civil Justice Clinic director Mark Aaronson says. For example, clinic courses — which deal with employment law, housing law, and disability benefits among other areas of social interest — are very serious. In fact, students handle real cases and are advised by professional lawyers. As part of the course work in Aaronson’s Community Economic Development Clinic, students may survey community needs or translate court documents for neighborhood residents. The school is even more rigorous thanks to the fact that the yearlong program is limited to just eight students, giving them plenty of firsthand experience handling real-life legal situations. "Lawyers have to learn to lawyer in context, dealing with real problems as they occur — not just hypotheticals in a classroom," Aaronson says.

And UC Hastings’s dedication to this program goes beyond classes and course work. A number of student-led organizations offer a chance for community involvement: one group volunteers at outreach centers in SoMa along with UCSF medical students to provide medical care and legal advice to the underserved.

So where do graduates of these social justice law programs go? Some join private law firms, of course, or find government jobs serving communities in need. But others, such as Paul Hogarth, use their education to do something else entirely.

Hogarth is now the managing editor for BeyondChron.com, a daily news site produced by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic that tries to raise awareness about the Ellis Act and tenant housing rights. But first he attended Golden Gate University with help from its Public Interest Law Scholars Program, a scholarship fund that gives up to $15,000 in tuition aid and a $5,000 internship stipend to five students a year. He says the skills he gained at Golden Gate are integral to his job now.

"Sometimes I’ll write a story about a court case, and I’ll do a legal analysis of it," Hogarth says. "I also cover City Hall, and I can read legislation that’s going through and then say, ‘Well, this is what the law will do.’ "

Had Hogarth chosen to work for a nonprofit or as a public defender or prosecutor, he would’ve been eligible for a generous tuition repayment assistance grant from Golden Gate University.

It seems one of the greatest benefits of joining these programs, though, is being surrounded by like-minded people passionate about social change. For example, Antonia Jushasz, a teacher in the Activism and Social Change masters program at New College, spoke at a protest rally against the Iraqi Oil Law at Chevron Corp. headquarters March 19 with four of her students looking on — making up an impromptu class.

It’s not exactly what most of us think of when we imagine a law education. And graduates from these programs don’t exactly fit the stereotype of one of the world’s most hated professions. But it just proves as there’s more than one way to be a lawyer, there’s also more than one way to become one. So if you imagine your lawyer self as more of a dolphin (or an otter or maybe a sea lion) than a shark, don’t worry. There’s a place for you too. *

NEW COLLEGE OF CALIFORNIA

School of Law

50 Fell, SF

(415) 241-1300

www.newcollege.edu

GOLDEN GATE UNIVERSITY

536 Mission, SF

1-800-GGU-4YOU

www.ggu.edu

UC HASTINGS COLLEGE OF THE LAW

Civil Justice Clinic

100 McAllister, suite 300, SF

(415) 557-7887

www.uchasting.edu

UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL OF LAW

2130 Fulton, SF

(415) 422-6307

www.usfca.edu/law

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY SCHOOL OF LAW

Center for Social Justice

785 Simon Hall

Piedmont and Bancroft, Berk.

(510) 642-4474

www.law.berkeley.edu/cenpro/csj

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Open city

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› paulr@sfbg.com

There could hardly be a more welcoming name for a restaurant than aperto — "open" in Italian, and Aperto is an Italian restaurant — except, possibly, Welcome. The north face of Potrero Hill is home to lots of restaurants, but Welcome isn’t one of them, at least not yet. While we wait, we can wait at Aperto, which offers a handsome wooden bench outside the front door for the convenience of those whose tables aren’t yet available and are too weary to stand. Aperto is small, and it is busy, and everyone seems to know about it. This is fitting, because it’s been there since 1992 and over its 15 years of life has become the jewellike Italian restaurant every urban neighborhood should have at least one of.

For some or no reason, Aperto is a place I’d never been to until recently. Regular reports, most of them favorable, did reach me from friends who seemed to go all the time, and these debriefings perhaps soothed my curiosity. I had noticed that the restaurant, after reaching a crest of sorts in the mid-1990s as one of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s top 100 restaurants, seemed to have receded in later years from public awareness. This could be due to fatigue, but it is certainly not due to the focaccia, which flows from the open kitchen to the dining room in a steady stream and is just exemplary: soft (though with a hint of crust), warm, and gently scented with olive oil. It’s the bread equivalent of the perfect hotel pillow and is at least as good as the focaccia at Blue Plate. And that means it’s awesome.

When you are dishing out complementary focaccia of this quality and keeping water glasses full and prices modest for well-executed, lovable Italian dishes, you are likely to be a successful restaurant. Aperto isn’t up to anything radical; its look and food are classical and timeless, and the restaurant, as an experience, presents itself unobtrusively. It’s like a favorite coat, well made and warming, you might wrap around yourself on a chilly night.

Few cuisines can match the Italian for inventive frugality. Despite a public image of flamboyance, Italians tend not to waste food. Stale bread finds a home in panzanella or ribollita, while grape pomace (the mush left over from the wine crush) is fermented and distilled into grappa. (Then exported and resold to us at a tidy profit.) Because Aperto’s menu is pasta-rich and pasta is among the most flexible of starches, the restaurant’s recycling program uses it to impressive effect. One (chilly!) evening I found myself staring into a broad white bowl of papardelle ($13.50) sauced with a sugo of osso buco. Osso buco, also known as braised veal shank, is a tine-intensive production, not ordinarily to be undertaken just to come up with a pasta sauce. But, should there be surplus from the night before, the leftover meat makes a lovely pairing with pasta, rich and just hinting of the beefiness that makes veal so attractive. Throw in some spinach for color, add some grana shavings on top, and you have a dish of elegant simplicity.

Glancing slightly upmarket, we find striped sea bass ($17.75), coated with arugula pesto, roasted, then plopped into a beanbag chair of lemon mashed potatoes, with an encirclement of ratatouille and a hairpiece of microgreens. This was a handsomely composed, colorful plate of food whose lemon mashed potatoes actually carried a distinct whiff of the advertised ingredient and whose seafood star (as I learned ex post facto from Seafood Watch) is in the "best" category. I give Aperto a big gold star for this alone. If a smallish neighborhood restaurant can keep itself within the boundaries of sustainability without making a huge fuss or overcharging, then everybody can.

The restaurant doesn’t give short shrift to seasonality either. On one late-winter menu we found crab cakes ($9.75 for a crottin-shaped pair), presented on a bed of shaved fennel and radicchio, with pomegranate seeds scattered around the plate like rubies and squirts of spicy aioli atop the cakes themselves. The same menu yielded strands of fat spaghetti ($11.50) tossed with shelled fava beans, leeks, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese — a distinctively NorCal when-seasons-collide moment.

Given the limitless focaccia, which produces a filling effect similar to that of chips and salsa in Mexican restaurants, the first courses are in some danger of superfluousness. Among the best of the lot is the platter of oven-roasted mussels ($9.50), swimming in a buttery shellfish broth perfumed with fennel and garlic. The broth is nicely soppable with the accompanying spears of well-grilled levain (topped with the customary rouille), and when that was gone, we picked up the slack with focaccia.

Only the soups seemed flat: good, but a little slow out of bed in the morning. Lentil ($4.50) did feature shreds of crispy pancetta, but the floating chunks of celery seemed slightly clumsy, like flotsam after some sort of accident. And cream of roasted tomato ($5) was creamy — and cheesy! — but might have been made more interesting, visually, at least, by an addition as simple as minced parsley.

If the overhead chalkboard listing the day’s specials includes the mascarpone brownie ($6), you won’t be sorry if you ignore your diet and have it. Brownies sound juvenile, but this one isn’t; it’s marbled, moist, and just sweet enough, like homemade cake. Whipped cream? Yes, but not too much; same with the hot fudge sauce piped around the edges of the plate. The brownie might not be authentically Italian, but I suspect even a lot of authentic Italians would be open to its charms. *

APERTO

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.

1434 18th St., SF

(415) 252-1625

www.apertosf.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

FEAST: 6 green bars and bistros

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The road to hell is paved with recycled soda cans. I know you mean well, turning off the water while you brush your teeth and sorting your trash, but don’t you know it takes more than that now? We’re saving the world, yo, and boy, does it need saving. So what else can you do besides buy your toilet paper at Trader Joe’s? How about support green businesses — and green restaurants in particular? Because with all the day-to-day hard work and heartache it takes to run such a place, it ain’t easy being … well, you know. Luckily, the world has people like Ritu Primlani, founder and executive director of Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education. Thimmakka’s mission is to help restaurants conserve water and energy, prevent pollution, and minimize solid waste — and then reward them for their efforts by publicizing them as certified green businesses. And though some of the classic do-gooders are on the list — Chez Panisse and Café Gratitude among them — Thimmakka also makes a special effort to work with lesser-known, ethnic, and lower-brow venues. The following is a small set of Bay Area bars and clubs that have undergone Thimmakka’s greening program and come out a healthier shade of jade. For more, in the Bay and elsewhere, visit www.thimmakka.org. (Molly Freedenberg)

ELIXIR


Far from being your typical dive, this Mission saloon is all about going above and beyond. It organizes charity bartender nights, hosts meetings of green-leaning politicos, and impressed Thimmakka with its myriad of earth-friendly measures: using rechargeable batteries, ultralow-flush toilets and double-sided printers, reusing recycled content in construction materials and tabletop covers, and letting dry waste sit for a day or so (to save trash bags). Plus, there’s nothing like a good pour of Stella to help you forget for a moment that global warming is going to kill us all.

3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

TASTE OF THE HIMALAYAS


Wonder what Nepalese food is like? It’s a lot like Indian food but lighter, fluffier, and, in the case of this Marina eatery, greener. Though stark and a bit lonely during the day, this is the kind of place that could be cozy and festive when packed on a weekend night. And there’s every reason for it to be — the greens are surprisingly spicy, the garbanzo bean stew both sweet and savory, the naan so airy it’s positively gravity defying, and the service as friendly as friendly could be. Plus, it’s Thimmakka approved.

2420 Lombard, SF. (415) 674-9898, www.himalayanexp.com

RAMBLAS TAPAS BAR


Not just a home of tiny plates of food and large pitchers of sangria, Ramblas is also an exemplar of green goodness. It has discarded grease and oil picked up to be reused as biodiesel or soap. It donates electronic equipment. It uses a special vent that keeps grease away from the roof so it doesn’t wash into storm water. And all its chard and spinach are organic. Feel that high? It’s not just the fruity wine-and-spirits concoction you had with dinner. It’s the buzz of environmental righteousness.

557 Valencia, SF. (415) 565-0207, www.ramblastapas.com

BISTRO LIAISON


This Berkeley bistro stays true to the French tradition of well-portioned, perfectly seasoned, richly flavored delights. But it shucks the age-old restaurant convention of waste, waste, waste. Among its other envirofriendly accomplishments, Liaison manages to recycle and compost 80 percent of its solid waste. C’est responsable!

1849 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 849-2155, www.liaisonbistro.com

SAN MIGUEL


The shabby exterior and faded sign aren’t doing San Miguel any favors, but inside this Mission eatery is a kitschy, cozy, Disneyland-does-Guatemala affair with maps under glass on the tables, rows of Latin American tchotchkes hanging from the corrugated tin ceiling, and a soundtrack of music that can only be described as south of the border polka. And in addition to doing good for your taste buds (try the sour and savory salpicon), this place is doing good for the planet. It uses potpourri and a special degreaser instead of Pine-Sol and aerosols, it’s outfitted its bathrooms with special aerated taps, and it’s learned how to identify and repair leaks. So go ahead: have your camarones asados with a side of environmentalism.

3263 Mission, SF. (415) 641-5866, www.forored.com/sanmiguel

BLONDIE’S BAR AND NO GRILL


"Really? Blondie’s?" That’s the response I get when I tell people this Mission dance club is one of Thimmakka’s darlings — not because the walls are papered with Styrofoam and baby seal eyes or anything, but because the scene is so far from the hemp and hacky-sack culture usually associated with envirofriendliness. But it’s true. This bastion of Yelp.com ambivalence serves organic vodka, reduces paper waste by posting bulletins on a board rather than handing out individual letters or memos, conserves water with special dishwasher systems, and reduces chemical pollution by using a diluted pesticide that’s 200 times less toxic than Raid. Best of all, though, Blondie’s encourages people to get out of their cars by having parking for bikes — no big surprise if you know owner Nicole Dewald’s mother was a major player in getting bike lanes and one-lane streets in the city. "It’s their claim to fame," Primlani said.

540 Valencia, SF. (415) 864-2419, www.blondiesbar.com *

Bulgay-rian? Just hum along

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AZIS — the Bulgarian Romani chalga singer is delightfully gender-neutral (gender bothful?) — and recently was voted the 21st most important Bulgarian in history. YES. He also ran for Bulgarian parliament, but didn’t win enough votes to qualify for a seat. NO. Now, he’s become a YouTube phenomenon, especially among young gay bears and their admirers — or people who miss Marilyn Manson, worship Walter Mercado, are really into Turkish oil wrestling/ naked gymbunny construction workers, or just wish we had more awesome freaks in our US pop-culture roster. Where are our real freaks? Shaving your head? Please. Bulgaria’s beating us, bitches!

Watch the above clip (of AZIS’s mega-hit, No Kazvam ti stiga) … and disbelieve!

merc02.jpg

An Experiment: Hang up that Hangover

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By Molly Freedenberg

The jury’s out on what exactly causes a hangover. Some say it’s dehydration. Others claim there’s something in the alcohol itself that poisons you. I even had a nutritionist once tell me that it’s essentially a large-scale sugar crash (since alcohol is a sugar, it’s like eating nothing but Snickers bars for seven hours and then wondering why you feel like crap the next morning). I don’t know about any of those, but I’d like to add something to the list: our bi-annual FEAST supplement. That’s right. I’ve been editing this baby (to be published April 4) for almost a month now, and doing my job well (which translates into: eating and drinking as much as possible at as many places as possible) has meant waking up half that month’s mornings with a dry throat, fuzzy brain, rumbly tummy, and insatiable hunger for sleep.

After discussing this phenomenon with my coworkers, who I roped in to doing my “research” with me, I decided it was time to do a Guardian-wide experiment. In a building full of people who know how to play as hard as they work, someone must have the perfect hangover cure. And even if no one did, with drinkers this devoted, surely we’d have plenty of opportunities to test the snake oils we’ve all heard about but never tried (Almonds before drinking? Primrose oil? Lemon juice in black coffee? And strangest of all: running? Are you kidding me?).

And so.

Trojan war

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m in my first sexual relationship. There’s been a lot of lovely hand- and mouth-action, but no penis-vagina intercourse because I can’t maintain an erection with a condom on. She really wants genital intercourse; she’s very experienced and always had her best orgasms that way. She also says she’s never heard of this problem before — and my self-proclaimed sex expert friends concur. Am I really that unique in experiencing a complete loss of stimulation with a condom? And assuming that we don’t get married, my sex life looks pretty bleak if I can’t use condoms. Any ideas?

Love,

Can’t Feel a Thing

Dear Thing:

Well, sure. Don’t listen to your self-proclaimed sex expert friends, for one thing. I’m a self-proclaimed sex expert myself, and I’ve heard of your problem before. Of course I have. You may be an extreme case, but no, you’re not unique.

It’s true that this weird bit of wiring of yours is capable of dooming you to a life of sexual frustration or sexual diseases, depending. So, in escautf8g order of inconvenience, I offer some technical solutions: a small amount of lube inside the condom, thinner condoms, polyurethane (plastic) condoms, those odd big-head condoms which are supposed to flap and rub around your business end in a lubricious manner, or — I hesitate even to suggest this but it’s actually not that bad an idea — the female condom.

If you really can’t feel a damned thing through an ordinary rubber rubber, I have limited faith in the ability of a drop of lube or a different brand of condom to make the earth move for you, but it’s easy enough to try and shrug in a world-weary manner if it doesn’t work. The plastic options are a much better bet. They’re harder to find, though, so there’d be no running out to the corner store with your pants half fastened; you’d have to plan ahead. The Avanti polyurethane condom had a bad rap for a while but has been tested extensively and is actually just as safe as anything else. They really are a better aesthetic experience all round: they are thin and quick to transmit body heat; they don’t taste like a mouthful of steel-belted radial; and they’re safe to use with baby oil or WD-40 or whatever greases your boat. It’s not like you’d never know it’s there, mind you — it’s a condom, and they all suck — but there’s a chance you’d be able to find your dick in the dark while wearing one, which appears to be more than we can say about the latex ones.

I find myself hoping very hard that the Avanti works for you, because I really don’t want to have to recommend the female condom. It’s expensive, more elusive yet than plastic condoms, and, frankly, ridiculous. It’s as long as your forearm, resembles a jellyfish, makes a horrid sloshy crinkling noise (the Avanti does this too but more discreetly), and although it looks OK while your lady friend is supine, turn her prone or stand her up, and it will hang low and wobble to and fro and make you both giggle, if you’re inclined that way, or cry, if you’re not. It’s a terrible product, in short, except for one aspect, which is surely worthy of notice: it works. You’ll probably hate it, but then again, if it’s a choice between knowing that your penis is inside a vagina and "Vagina? What vagina?" maybe you won’t.

Try the other things first, though. None of them resemble an aquarium exhibit that happened to lodge itself, unbidden, up your girlfriend’s hoo-ha, and that’s always a plus if you ask me.

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

I had sex with a girl one time who has a regular other partner. We did it once using a condom, and I pulled out with the condom on, prior to ejacuutf8g away from her. Her other friend doesn’t use a condom and withdraws. She called me to say she was pregnant, and I freaked. She didn’t understand why, since she is certain it must be the other friend’s child because of their methods and regularity. I don’t ever want to have sex again, obviously, but do I have a reason to worry here? All of a sudden she is pregnant, and I just happened to be in the picture around the same time? I’m scared to death.

Love,

Shaking in My Tracks

Dear Tracks:

You’re only terrified because there has been in recent years, if not a literal conspiracy, then certainly a strong and concerted effort to hide the fact that condoms actually work pretty well. They do, and if you come in the condom while it isn’t even inside her, then it works really extraordinarily well. You have been misinformed! Now shake off the shackles of ignorance, and don’t ever let me hear you say you "don’t ever want to have sex again." Of course you do; just use a condom. Oh, and buy that other guy a beer and a subscription to Real Dad magazine. This is so not your problem.

Love,

Andrea

It’s time again for San Francisco Sex Information’s Spring Sex Educator Training. Sixty hours, all good stuff, no filler. Find out more and apply at www.sfsi.org.

Antiwar movement turns four

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By Amanda Witherell


› amanda@sfbg.com

The Iraq War turned four years old March 19, but so did the antiwar movement, and thousands of people marked the event with protests, rallies, and direct actions around the Bay Area.

The largest event was the March 18 march on Market Street, led by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition, one of more than 1,000 rallies around the country. The protesters marched under a "No Blood for Oil" banner, "Impeach" signs donated by Working Assets, and Whole Earth flags that fluttered in the westerly wind funneling down San Francisco’s main drag. The Chronicle estimated the crowd at 3,000; ANSWER claimed it was 40,000. We estimated the march at 10,000 strong.

Education seemed to be the point protesters were driving home, as if the knowledge of the war’s injustices would reverberate like the chanting voices against the walls of the Financial District and into the minds of the children who wandered through the crowds of thousands.

"Will this stop the war May First?" Glenn Borchardt asked. "No, but it will stop it some day."

Sandee Dickson, a retired teacher, was with about 50 other purple-shirted Democrats of Napa Valley and said she was protesting "to keep it on the front page."

"There are all sorts of people here, from all walks of life, sending the message that American people say, ‘No more war.’ "

More than 40 cops watched the chanting crowd from their post, leaning against the front of the Westfield shopping center, guarding the commerce. "A couple of years ago a couple windows got smashed," one of the police officers said to the Guardian. "I guess they’re pretty expensive."

The crowd was pretty tame, though, and there were no arrests. There seemed to be just as many baby strollers in the crowd as people marching alongside them. Balloons bounced from the wrists of children, and a Girl Scout was making a killing selling cookies off the back of her Radio Flyer wagon for $3.50 a box.

Captain Denis O’Leary from Southern Station said there were about 270 officers on patrol, plus additional platoons of traffic and tactical officers, prepared for violence he wasn’t really anticipating.

"They might get arrested," he said, gesturing to some anarchists waving red and black flags at the edge of Larkin Street. A cop in this city for 25 years, O’Leary has responded to many demonstrations of all sizes and flavors and thinks they’ve changed a lot over the years. He mentioned the 1989 protest outside the Westin St. Francis against the first President George Bush. "That was an angry tone, it was massive, and there were arrests."

When asked if he looks at the crowd and worries about the safety of all the children who could get caught up in a sudden action, he said, "Yes, because my daughter is out there." He said she’s 15.

Sue Martin was marching with her son, Sean Martin-Hamburger. For his first protest, the eight-year-old had made a colorful cardboard sign that read, "Have some peace in your heart." He was too shy to say much to us, but his mom was less reticent: "We’re demonstrating because we don’t want to see any more violence, anywhere actually."

Though it was Sean’s first march on Market, his mother has been protesting for 35 years and agreed the age range was one of the big differences, as was the energy. "It feels more creative and less angry, like we’re starting to embody the peace and not respond to the violence with violence. It doesn’t feel vengeful, but maybe I’m just getting older."

On March 19, there were some people willing to face off with the police at a die-in. Hundreds of protesters lay down on the sidewalks and in the streets of downtown San Francisco, representing the 3,200 American soldiers and the estimated 160,000 Iraqi civilians who have died in the past four years. A helicopter whirring overhead and the corpses under blood-spattered sheets gave the direct action an eerie Vietnam feel, but there seemed to be more cops than corpses. They got something to do when 57 protesters became the walking dead, rising up from the sidewalk and dying again in Market Street traffic, disrupting the flow of daily life and garnering some misdemeanor charges.

Across the bay, 14 people also prepared for arrests, locking themselves into a human chain across the entrance to Chevron’s corporate headquarters in San Ramon. For the third time in four years, more than 100 representatives from Bay Rising, US Labor Against War, Amazon Watch, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered to speak against the other axis of evil: oil, profits, and war.

"Under the new Iraqi Oil Law, Chevron is standing to directly benefit from a law that comes from Bush. Two-thirds of [Iraq] oil will be owned by foreign companies," Sam Edmondson of Bay Rising said. "The fear is that US troops will be used to secure that oil."

Back in San Francisco, in front of the office of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, "Stop Funding the War" called on the woman who controls the purse strings to tighten them.

A few hundred people gathered outside the Federal Building to hear veterans, mothers of soldiers, local progressives, and city officials, such as Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who’s authored local resolutions against the war.

"I think [Pelosi] should be lining up votes to cut off funding for the war," former supervisor and 2003 mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales said. "If they cut off money, there’d be an interesting crisis."

Former congressional candidate Krissy Keefer was there as well. When asked where she’d be if she’d been voted into Pelosi’s seat, she said, "I would be here to provide leadership to San Francisco. San Francisco is really, really important, and we need to constantly reinforce the position that we play. The middle-of-the-road position that Pelosi takes squashes the best intentions of the Democratic Party." *

Sam Devine and Sarah Phelan contributed to this story.

A half-century of lies

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View pictures of Leola King’s legendary Blue Mirror club here.

Leola King has lived your life, the lives of three friends and then some.

She’s traveled to Africa with the legendary entertainer, Josephine Baker. She’s featured jazz great Louis Armstrong at a popular Fillmore nightclub she helmed in the 1950s called the Blue Mirror, where she also once convinced a roomful of patrons to drink sweet champagne from the heel of her shoe.

She’s played host to the crusading television journalist Edward R. Murrow.

She’s even had a fling with championship boxer Joe Louis. From the ring at Madison Square Garden, he glanced toward her front-row seat, which she’d secured by chance during her first trip to New York, and had his lackeys retrieve her for a date afterward. Their rendezvous appeared as a gossip item in an Ohio paper and remains in its archives today.

Most of all, Leola King has come as close as anyone possibly can to experiencing bureaucratic hell on earth. For half a century, she’s been fighting with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which has taken four pieces of her property, wiped out a restaurant and two nightclubs she owned, and left her with a string of broken promises.

Her story is evidence that the ugly local chapter of Western Addition redevelopment history still isn’t over – and it’s a demonstration of why so many African Americans in this town will never trust the Redevelopment Agency.

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Beginning in the 1940s, King successfully operated a series of restaurants and nightclubs in the city, remarkable enough in an era that imposed a double-paned glass ceiling on black, female entrepreneurs.

“Back when I first moved onto Fillmore, it was very popular,” King told the Guardian. “Market Street didn’t have shit. They didn’t have traffic. They didn’t have nothing on Market Street.”

During the height of King’s accomplishments, the Redevelopment Agency infamously launched an ambitious project to clear out “blight” in the neighborhood. It was part of a nationwide urban-renewal trend, and while the project here still won’t be finished until 2009, it’s widely regarded as one of America’s worst urban-planning disasters.

In theory, Western Addition residents who were forced to give up their homes or businesses were given a “certificate of preference,” a promise that when the sometimes decaying buildings were turned to kindling and new ones built, the former occupants could return.

In practice, it didn’t work out that way. An estimated 5,500 certificates were issued to families and business owners shortly before the second phase of Western Addition redevelopment began in 1964. Some 5,000 families were dislodged and many of them fled to other sectors of the city (including Bayview-Hunter’s Point, which is today slated for its own redevelopment), or outside of the Bay Area completely.

Only a fraction of the certificates have benefited anyone. The agency has lost contact information for more than half of the holders, and redevelopment commissioners now openly admit the program is a joke.

“If we’re going to boast about being this diverse community in San Francisco, and we’re going to allow our African American population to become extinct, then how can we show our faces in government if we’re not really doing anything about it?” asked London Breed, a redevelopment commissioner appointed by Gavin Newsom in 2005. “And not just putting black people in low-income housing. There [are] a lot of middle-class African Americans all across America, specifically in the East Bay and in other places. Why do they choose to live in the East Bay over San Francisco?”

A renewed interest in the certificates by City Hall led to hearings this month, and District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has planned another for April.

King obtained two certificates, and attempts to later redeem them both devolved into costly legal wrangling with the agency that lasted more than two decades. She has never regained what she lost.

Leola King’s story is about more than certificates of preference. It’s a story about the troubling legacy of urban renewal.

King welcomes guests into her home on Eddy Street near Fillmore with ease. The living room in what is little more than a two-bedroom converted garage apartment swells unimaginably with antiques – three stuffed chairs with vinyl slips, crystal chandeliers, an ornate dining-room table, lamps, a fur throw.

She insists that she’s just 39 years old, but public records put her closer to 84.

When the Guardian first visited with her in person, she was dressed in black cotton leisure attire. Two chestnut braids cascaded from a gray Kangol-style cap, which she smoothed with her hands as they hugged a pair of light-skinned cherub cheeks.

King made her way west after spending her earliest years behind the barbed wire of a Cherokee reservation in Haskell, Ok. Her mother died when King was young, and her restless father had meandered off to Los Angeles. Her grandparents oversaw her adolescence before she trailed after her father to California, where he was establishing a chain of barbecue restaurants. She married a man at just 14, and a year later, she was a mother. Tony Tyler, her son, is a San Francisco tour guide today and remains a close confidant and business partner.

It was 1946 when she first landed in San Francisco and eventually started her own barbecue pit at 1601 Geary St., near Buchanan, historic building inspection records show. She called it Oklahoma King’s, and hungry San Franciscans were lured to the smell of exotic buffalo, deer and quail meats.

“That end of Fillmore was very popular all the way down until you got almost to Pacific [Avenue],” she said. “Heavily populated. There was at one time in that area of Fillmore over 100 bars alone. Lots of hamburger places. That’s where I had the barbecue pit.”

By 1949, however, Congress had made urban renewal federal law with the goal of leveling slums and deleting general “blight,” still the most popular and awkwardly defined threshold for determining where the government can clear homes and businesses using eminent domain.

The first redevelopment zone in the Western Addition, known as A-1, included Oklahoma King’s. She was paid approximately $25,000 for the property, but offered no relocation assistance or other compensation for the revenue she lost as a result of ceasing her day-to-day business.

Forging ahead, she opened in 1953 what became a hub of jazz and blues entertainment in the Fillmore, the Blue Mirror, at 935 Fillmore Street. The place was decorated with brass Greek figurines on the walls, a circular bar and velvet festoons. King spent a year hopping onto buses full of tourists and begging the driver to drop them by her nightclub for a drink. Before long, her brassy personality had attracted world-class performers, each of them adding electricity to the club’s reputation.

“She was the type of woman who knew how to handle people,” a Blue Mirror regular later said in the 2006 collection of Fillmore jazz-era photography, Harlem of the West. “She could talk to the pimps and hustlers. She didn’t play around, and they knew how to conduct themselves in her club.”

A musician who formerly worked there told the Guardian the Blue Mirror was one of the few places on Fillmore that actually provided live entertainment at that time. Bobbie Webb backed up B.B. King, Little Willie John, T-Bone Walker and others as a young saxophonist at the Blue Mirror with his band the Rhythm Rockers. He said the other establishments nearby on Fillmore were mostly bars except for headlining auditoriums where mainstream acts like James Brown and the Temptations performed. Smaller venues abounded up the street on Divisadero, he said, save mostly for King’s Blue Mirror and the Booker T. Washington Hotel.

“[King] didn’t only have a personality” said Webb, who now airs a show Tuesdays on 89.5 KPOO, “she was a beautiful lady. Personality just spoke for itself. All she had to do was stand there.”

But like virtually everyone in the neighborhood at that time, King rented the place where the Blue Mirror operated. Redevelopment again reached her business in the early 1960s. State booze enforcers, she says, claimed to have witnessed a bartender serving alcohol to a minor and her liquor license was taken away. When the Redevelopment Agency showed up shortly thereafter to sweep the block away, she was ejected without compensation because she wasn’t at that time technically in business.

Two more commercial and residential properties she owned on Post and Webster streets respectively were also eventually taken under redevelopment.

She pressed on, encouraged by Jewish business owners in the area she’d befriended, including liquor wholesaler Max Sobel and Fairmont Hotel operator Benjamin Swig.

“Whenever I’d lose something, they’d say, ‘Keep on moving. Don’t stop, because you’ll lose your customers. When you open back up, they won’t know who you are.’ They’re the ones who told me, ‘Go get another spot.'”

—————————-

By the time King began work on her third business in the Fillmore, urban renewal projects had wreaked havoc on minority communities across the nation, including neighborhoods in west-side Boston, downtown Atlanta, the celebrated 18th & Vine District of Kansas City and elsewhere.

King opened the Bird Cage Tavern at 1505 Fillmore St. in 1964 near O’Farrell complete with a jukebox, 30-foot mahogany bar, a piano and a gilded birdcage. Then-police chief Thomas J. Cahill tried to block her liquor-license renewal by complaining to the state about “winos” and “prostitutes” in the neighborhood, records show, but regulators dismissed the claims.

“We had viable businesses all around us,” King said. “I had one fellow I worked with a lot named Willie Jones. He was a blues singer. The interesting thing was, I had music in the daytime at the Bird Cage. I specialized in afternoon jazz.”

Despite a triumphant resettlement, nonetheless, the redevelopment agency arrived yet again and bought her building during the expansion of it’s A-2 redevelopment phase and served as landlord for the Bird Cage, a barber shop and a liquor store as it waited for another two years deciding what to do with the building.

On the agency’s watch, a fire broke out next door to the Bird Cage that led to water damage in her space. Federal Housing and Urban Development records show that no insurance claim was ever filed by the Redevelopment Agency. King says the agency removed some of the bar’s contents, mostly kitchen supplies, and made only stopgap repairs to the building anticipating that she would later be ousted anyway. The items they took, she says, were never returned.

The agency then evicted all of the building’s tenants in 1974. This time, King stood fast and had to be forced out by the sheriff. The agency promised relocation assistance, but those empty assurances became her biggest headache yet. In fact, she would spend the next 25 years quarreling with the agency over relocation terms.

King and the agency searched fruitlessly until 1977 for a suitable replacement building before King purchased her own out of desperation at 1081 Post St. She was then forced to begin another endurance test of working to actually extract money from the agency owed to her for properly outfitting the new building.

Meanwhile, the Bird Cage’s leftover furnishings – from oil paintings, rugs and curtains to an ice maker, wood shelving and an antique porcelain lamp – were destroyed when the agency amazingly chose to store them on an outdoor lot off Third Street during her move, a fact later confirmed by an agency employee in an affidavit.

“They moved it all out,” King said, “all these antiques and stuff, into this field where the weather ate it up.”

The agency’s initial response was to determine how it could best avoid legal liability. Redevelopment officials finally offered her about $100,000, which she needed desperately to keep things moving with the Bird Cage’s new location, but King insists today the materials were worth closer to $1 million.

As she was fighting to reopen her bar business, she attempted to redeem an earlier certificate of preference given to her when she’d lost a residential property on Webster Street to redevelopment. In 1983, she bought a condemned, 12-unit apartment building on Eddy Street hoping to rehabilitate it using a federally backed loan.

The deal only led to more trouble. The agency paid for its own roving security to patrol Western Addition properties it had purchased, and before 1431 Eddy St. was ever officially conveyed to King (as well as two other neighboring developers), thieves gutted the building of windows, doors, plumbing, light fixtures and other hardware. (Two buildings belonging to neighboring developers were also hit, and the agency addressed their losses the same way.)

Almost immediately, the agency told her she’d purchased the building “as is” and that they weren’t responsible for the break-in. But according to an internal 1983 memo marked “confidential,” later unearthed when friends of King submitted a records request to the agency, staffers clearly were concerned about the legal implications of offering one building for sale “as is” and actually providing another one on the date of delivery that had been thoroughly burglarized.

The memo shows that the possibility of a lawsuit was of greater concern to the agency than any obligation to compensate King for the lost hardware, regardless of whether proper security was the agency’s responsibility. Records show they did discuss a settlement of little more than $2,000, but King considered the stolen goods to be worth thousands of dollars more.

She managed to eventually finish the rehabilitation of her Eddy Street property after several years of work, and while she lives there today, time and angst took their toll. Each step of the transition to what she hoped would someday become her new bar, Goldie’s on Post Street, involved a seemingly endless round of yet more negotiations, letters, legal threats and bureaucratic backbiting before the agency would lift a finger and allocate money for contractors, necessary seismic upgrades, architects and equipment.

In 1997, then-Rep. Ron Dellums (now Oakland mayor) wrote a letter to top local HUD official Art Agnos (later a San Francisco mayor) on King’s behalf.

“On August 26, Ms. King met with a member of my staff and detailed issues surrounding a 25-year dispute she has attempted to resolve with HUD and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency,” Dellums wrote. “Your expeditious attention to this matter is [a] request, as Ms. King is elderly and experiencing health problems. The resolution to this issue would allow her to live the remainder of her life with some piece of mind.”

It was too late. The federally backed loans she’d received from HUD to rehab her Eddy Street property, from which the Redevelopment Agency strictly enforced repayment, fell into default. Loans leveraged against her other remaining properties began to slip, too, all while she fought with the forces of redevelopment to recreate what she had once proudly possessed.

King’s story may seem like an unfathomable streak of bad luck, but there’s a paper trail for all of it. And her battle, laid out in hundreds of pages of documents saved by King over several decades and reviewed by the Guardian, was ultimately unsuccessful..

By 1997, King was submerged in bankruptcy proceedings and would lose pretty much everything that she owned, including an Edwardian landmark home on Scott Street near Alamo Square where she’d lived for years (partially burned in a 1986 fire, believe it or not) and a residential building on Sutter Street.

Goldie’s was to be her final resting place, a roost from which she hoped to feature cabaret dancing, fresh crab at happy hour, a refined art deco aesthetic and live music performances. She lost that, too. Today, it’s Diva’s just off Polk Street.

Urban renewal won.

———————-

Hopeful press accounts lately foretell a jazz revival in the Fillmore District fueled by enterprising developers deft at financing lucrative redevelopment projects through tax incentives and low-interest loans half a century after the promise of “renewal,” now described euphemistically as “historic preservation.”

But with such a sordid history behind them, it’s no wonder residents of Bayview-Hunter’s Point, many of whom escaped Western Addition “renewal” in the first place, are leery of a pending years-long plan to redevelop nearly 1,500 acres in the southeast neighborhoods.

Bayview newspaper publisher Willie Ratcliff led a petition drive last year in an effort to put the plan before voters. Over 20,000 petition signatures were certified by elections officials, but City Attorney Dennis Herrera ruled the petitions were technically invalid because circulators hadn’t presented the full text of the redevelopment plan to signers. Redevelopment foes have since sued to have Herrera’s decision tossed.

“The misuse by these people is just unbelievable,” King said. “They were fighting me every inch.”

Thanks to Susan Bryan for joining the Guardian in reviewing hundreds of pages of public and personal records preserved in Leola King’s estate. Bryan is currently working with Monkey Paw Productions on a documentary about King’s life

No Oil War at Chevron’s Front Door

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Intern Sam Devine reports from Monday morning’s Chevron protest

At approximately 6:30 a.m. on March 19, 2007, the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War, nine activists locked themselves in a human chain across the main entrance to Chevron-Texaco’s corporate headquarters. They tied ropes and carabineers to their wrists. The carabineers where then attached to metal rods concealed inside empty oil drums and large red pipes, both covered with slogans. By 8:30, five more people had willingly joined the chain. They were all ready to get busted.

alizaa.jpg

This was the third protest at Chevron’s San Ramon since talk of Iraq began a little over 4 years ago. The demonstration, which forced employees to use a side entrance and fouled up traffic on Bollinger Canyon Road, was organized to protest of the new Iraqi Oil Law.

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Golden nugget

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› paulr@sfbg.com

New restaurants, like trees and kings, have a way of rising from the remains of fallen ones: the restaurant is dead, long live the restaurant. This only makes sense. In the typical hermit-crab situation, a kitchen of some kind is already in place, there might also be some serviceable tables and chairs, and the permit jabberwocky will be slightly less daunting. Easier all the way around.

But this is not the only means of passing fortune’s baton. Some neighborhoods — SoMa springs immediately to mind — are full of restaurants ensconced in spaces once given over to printing plants, warehouses, and other industrial concerns. I had never considered the possibility that someone might one day open a restaurant in an old hubcap emporium — I did not know there were such emporiums — and then, about a year ago, someone did. The restaurant is called Ziryab (named after a ninth-century Baghdadi who moved to Spain and won renown for his discernment in gastronomic matters), and it is to be found along Divisadero in the lower Haight, in a neighborhood still dotted with auto-body and radiator shops.

Given the building’s proletarian past, we might well expect more of a makeover than a fresh coat of paint and new tabletops. We might expect a little pizzazz, a little imagination. And our first glimpse of Ziryab is promising if not quite stunning: a smart golden facade, shining on the gray street front like a nugget in a turbid stream, with the restaurant’s name spelled out in striking, Arabic-styled letters. Just under and behind the facade lies a heated forecourt set with tables and forested with gas heaters. Divisadero is a little rough for the alfresco set, even in mild weather, so the semiwalledness of this garden is relieving.

We step inside and find … well, it’s not quite Vegas, but the interior designer clearly has visited that desert Shangri-la. The restaurant’s basic layout, narrow and deep, is like that of countless other places; there are a couple of tables set in the windows on either side of the door, while the swelling of the kitchen on the right creates a kind of narrows, as at Zinzino. But the Vegas effect has nothing to do with the floor plan and everything to do with the columns and arches of fake marble blocks, which give a faint sense of grotto and a much stronger sense of being in the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace. All that’s missing is the fake sky of perpetual evening overhead, filled with fake twinkling stars. Also the fancy shops. For some reason I find this kind of plastic fakery charming, perhaps because, like all kitsch, it’s knowing, and because it’s truly not bad-looking. You would never go so far as to suppose that you’d actually wandered into the sultan’s kitchens in the Topkapi Palace, but the thought might cross your mind.

Ziryab’s food comports with the faintly whimsical mood. The basic tenor of things is Middle Eastern (or Mediterranean if you prefer, or eastern Mediterranean), and this means such dishes as shawarma, kabob, dolma, hummus, and so forth: onetime exotica now well integrated into local practice. But there are also more involved and unusual dishes of a related provenance, as well as a few that have nothing to do with the Middle East at all.

In this last category I would put the house burger ($9), adding only that it was among the worst hamburgers I’ve ever eaten, notwithstanding the lovely fries (with their natural curl) and a thimble of Dijon aioli on the side. The patty of meat, though good-size, was cooked beyond well-done to a cinderblock condition, and even this merciless charring couldn’t conceal a certain gamy offness. I felt as if I’d wandered into the pages of Kitchen Confidential. "House"? I would lose that.

Apart from this blemish, we found everything else to be good or better. Lentil soup ($4) had a nice acid charge (from some red wine vinegar?), while paprika oil brought a bit of smoky counterpoint to a sensuously creamy Jerusalem artichoke soup ($5). Kefta kabob ($14) — ground veal and lamb, spiced and grilled — is a common entry on Middle Eastern menus around town, and it usually shows up in the form of meatballs or links. Ziryab’s presentation is quite a bit more stylish: the pieces of meat are given a cutlet shape, then nicely plated on a bed of couscous (or rice, your choice).

Another preparation almost universal in the eastern Mediterranean is the spinach phyllo pie the Greeks call spanikopita. Ziryab’s term is sambosik ($15), and while it includes spinach in a pastry crust, it adds mushrooms, almonds, and feta cheese for a subtle whirligig of flavors and textures.

Araies ($6), on the other hand, I’d never heard of. What turned up was a quartet of half moon–shaped breads heavily topped with spicy ground lamb and flecks of scallion and green bell pepper. It was as if we were eating some superconcentrate of a pizza so meaty even Round Table hasn’t come up with it yet.

My vote for best dish would go to the homemade roast beef sausage with braised white beans ($9). The sausage was perhaps less novel than advertised, the links notable mainly for their garter snake–like slenderness. But the beans, in a thick, rich sauce of tomato confit (dotted with quarters of well-stewed tomato), were really a solid winter stew and would have remained so even if there’d been no sausage.

Dessert? Why, warbat ($5), of course, cheese wrapped in sweet phyllo. Picture a fragment being thrown clear of a collision between a cheesecake and a calzone, and you’ll have some idea. The warbat isn’t huge, but it is shareable (with a spouse or whomever) and makes a nice cap to dinner. *

ZIRYAB

Continuous service: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., noon–midnight; Fri.–Sat., noon–1 a.m.

528 Divisadero, SF

(415) 269-5430

Beer and wine

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Antiwar protest events

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PROTEST EVENTS

FRIDAY, MARCH 16

Remembering Rachel Corrie


At this third annual memorial, celebrate the life of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old International Solidarity Movement volunteer who was killed by an Israeli soldier while nonviolently resisting the demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip.

7 p.m., $10–$20 suggested donation

Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts

1428 Alice, Oakl.

www.norcalism.org/events.htm

SATURDAY, MARCH 17

Starve War, Feed Peace


Participate in a march and rally sponsored by the Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center. The march goes through downtown Walnut Creek, and continues to Civic Park for a rally at noon with speakers and music.

11 a.m.

Walnut Creek BART station

200 Ygnacio Blvd., Walnut Creek

Civic Park

1375 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek

www.mtdpc.org

SUNDAY, MARCH 18

March and rally in San Francisco


Marchers will assemble at Justin Herman Plaza and go to the Civic Center.

Noon

Justin Herman Plaza

One Market, SF

(415) 821-6545, answer@actionsf.org, www.actionsf.org/#local4

MONDAY, MARCH 19

Protest, rally, and nonviolent direct action at Chevron headquarters


End Chevron’s oil crimes from Richmond to Iraq. It’s a short ride to the Chevron headquarters from the Walnut Creek BART station; take County Connection shuttle 121. Vans will be shuttling protesters too.

7–11 a.m.

Chevron headquarters

6001 Bollinger Canyon, San Ramon

www.MySpace.com/ProtestChevron

Stop Funding the War


Join us at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district office to urge her and her fellow representatives to deny the White House its war funding requests and to support HR 508, the Bring Our Troops Home and Sovereignty of Iraq Restoration Act.

Noon

San Francisco Federal Bldg.

450 Golden Gate, SF

www.stopfundingthewar.com/home

Die-in on Market Street


The protest is a die-in designed to highlight the war’s death toll by showing what the heart of San Francisco would look like strewn with dead bodies.

Noon

Meet-up points:

Spear and Market, SF

Montgomery and Market, SF

Powell and Market, SF

Market and Seventh St., SF

www.dieinmarch19.org, www.ActAgainstTorture.org *

Escautf8g the antiwar movement

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› news@sfbg.com

It was four years ago this March 19 that the United States invaded Iraq, triggering massive street protests in San Francisco and a widely criticized military occupation that has become one of the longest in US history.

The war has proved to be as bloody and shortsighted as its opponents always claimed it would be. More than 3,100 American soldiers have been killed, as have as many as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, with little hope of the violence abating anytime soon, despite President George W. Bush’s recent deployment of 21,500 more troops. The war has cost the United States about $400 billion so far, a price tag increasing by about $250 million every day of the occupation. And it has spurred anti-Americanism around the world.

Opinion polls show a strong majority in the United States favors immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a growing number of Democrats in Congress now appear to be moving in that direction. But antiwar activists are planning an escalation of their own, arguing that only through a ramped-up and more widely disseminated peace movement will this war come to an end.

To mark this inauspicious anniversary, United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest antiwar coalition, has issued a call for "a massive outpouring of opposition to the war in locally based, decentralized actions throughout the U.S." from March 17 to 19. It’s a clear departure from the peace movement’s norm of massive, centralized marches located in Washington, DC, New York, and San Francisco.

Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets of San Francisco on March 20, 2003, with more than 1,500 people arrested in civil disobedience actions that effectively shut down the city. Antiwar groups are still hoping for a big turnout in the city next week, even as they shift their strategy to include more of Middle America.

Instead of relying on charismatic visionaries, influential organizations, and hierarchical organizing in the big cities, the new strategy calls on citizens to take the initiative and organize — from Mobile, Ala., to Jonesboro, Ark., to Fayetteville, N.C. — and demonstrate a broad base of active opposition to the war.

"The resistance isn’t only in San Francisco," Jim Haber, a member of the steering committee for United for Peace and Justice Bay Area, told the Guardian. "Large demonstrations here get attributed to San Francisco being out of step with the rest of the country — although less so these days."

While it is important to have big showings, Haber said it’s also important to demonstrate that the opposition is widespread. "Rather than making people who want to protest come to us, we’re going to them — and they’re all over."

Several of the affinity groups that were instrumental in the shutdown of San Francisco four years ago are regrouping for a rally and nonviolent direct action at Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon.

"Four years ago we not only shut down San Francisco’s Financial District, we also shut down Chevron," Antonia Juhasz, one of the organizers and a Tarbell fellow with Oil Change International, told us. "Neither our message nor our tactics have changed."

The Iraqi parliament is set to pass a law that would transform Iraq’s nationalized oil system to a commercialized model, completely open to corporate pillaging, following the trail first blazed by the US-installed Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by L. Paul Bremer. "The law is the brainchild of the Bush administration," Juhasz said. "Now is a particularly critical time to expose the oil agenda behind the war."

David Solnit, a longtime organizer and member of the Bay Rising affinity group, told us, "This is a similarly strategic moment for the antiwar movement to escalate. Hopes of getting the Democrats to do anything are fading. It’s up to us, and folks are hungry for taking direct action."

Just about everyone organizing for March 17 to 19 agrees that relying on the congressional Democrats to bring the troops home is an abysmal plan.

"We’re telling people to stop looking up and start looking around," Ben Rosen, youth organizer and media coordinator with World Can’t Wait, told us. "There is no Democratic savior here."

World Can’t Wait has allied with the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) coalition to organize a massive march up Market Street to the Civic Center on March 18. ANSWER still favors centralized protests, including a massive march on the Pentagon.

"The real direction for this war is coming from the Pentagon," Richard Becker, ANSWER’s West Coast regional coordinator, told us. "A powerful march on the Pentagon would be the most significant thing that could happen right now."

Rosen agrees that centralized coordination is required to build a cohesive and powerful movement.

"They argue that marching in San Francisco is preaching to the choir," Rosen said. "But actually we’re setting an example for people in the middle of the country who look to San Francisco, New York, and DC as models."

Massive centralized marches have been the linchpin of this country’s peace movement, but many observers are questioning whether they are the most effective strategy.

"People say ‘the movement’s failed,’ " Becker said. "That’s an incorrect conclusion. Building a movement powerful enough to stop war when all the resources of the state are mobilized for it is very difficult."

Max Diorio, co–national coordinator of Not in Our Name, which has joined the ANSWER coalition organizing for March 18, agrees. "If San Francisco has a paltry march, what does that say about the rest of the country? It took 10 years from the first big mobilization against Vietnam to end that war. People are used to instant gratification in this country, but it takes a while. That’s why they call it a struggle."

On March 19 there will be a die-in on Market Street, also initiated by former members of Direct Action to Stop the War.

"The die-in will help to make personal the real cost of war in human lives," Suzanne Sam Joi, a coordinator for Codepink Bay Area, told us. "Too often we can forget that someone who was loved and treasured — a mother, a sister — their life has been destroyed."

In another national antiwar effort, UFPJ member group the Voices for Creative Nonviolence initiated the Occupation Project. Demonstrators have sat in at their legislators’ offices across the country, and 159 people have been arrested so far.

The shift in the UFPJ’s strategy — calling for decentralized, localized actions all over the country — is significant. Until Middle Americans stop looking east and west for models and start organizing themselves, their representatives can safely ignore calls to bring the troops home. *

Marisa Handler’s first book, Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist, chronicles her experiences in the global justice movement from Miami to Lima to Kathmandu.

Snake oil

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Thanks for answering my question about performance anxiety ["Spectator Pumps," 2/21/07]. We solved the problem on our own. My girlfriend recognized that it was a confidence issue, so she went to the local sex shop and purchased an herbal male performance pill. We were both skeptical, but it actually worked within an hour. We proceeded to have awesome marathon sex. I had random boners for the next 48 hours.

My confidence was back pretty much instantaneously. We’ve had a healthy sexual relationship since then. We get a pill every now and again for kicks, but they are thankfully mostly unnecessary.

Love,

The "Mind-Blowing Sex, Not the Good Kind" Guy

Dear Good Guy:

I am simultaneously happy that you’re happy and terribly sad that I ever read your follow-up letter. Why couldn’t you have solved your problem with therapy or toys or pharmaceuticals or threesomes or gender reassignment surgery or anything, really, other than Dr. Woody’s Hygienic Vega-Vital Specific Elixir? Now I have to burst your bubble, and you have no idea how much I don’t want to do that.

Actually, you got past whatever was blocking you and now know you’re capable of having mind-blowing sex, the good kind, not only with those bull-pucky pills but, more important, without them. You may be immune to bubble-bursting of any sort, which is great, however you got there. They’re just, ugh, fake sex pills. I can’t help imagining those creepy late-night pseudoceutical ads with the happy, happy wife with the unhinged jaw like an adder’s — and shuddering.

I have a story that is vaguely apropos if you’ll just bear with me. Until fairly recently, I was plagued by crippling phlebotophobia — merely thinking of blood draws turned me clammy and faint, and having one, well, I don’t know what having one would have done, since I never let those needle monkeys get within a hundred yards of me. Since I wouldn’t get a blood test, I couldn’t get any serious medical care, which was fine with me but irritating to my partner, who preferred to think I’d make a good-faith effort not to drop dead on him without warning. So I resolved to do something about it, and since a couple therapist friends had been taking EMDR training, I decided to do that.

EMDR stands for eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, a hypnosislike process that is supposed to heal posttraumatic stress and be useful for treating phobias, although there is no scientific basis for those claims. There are studies suggesting it works as well as any other therapy, but then there are also studies demonstrating that all therapy modes, semiscience and pseudoscience alike, work about equally well. The most likely explanation? Doing something helps. It doesn’t matter what you do, just do something, the more formal the something, the better. Paying for the something also helps, if you ask me, since most people believe, deep down, that something for nothing is worth what you paid for it.

I knew all this but was determined to do EMDR (it seemed preferable to talk therapy, because I hate talking about stuff). I tried not to think about it too much. I also took my copy of Skeptic magazine with the cover story called "EMDR: Just a Big Fat Fraud?" or close enough, and buried it under a pile of old shopping circulars for the duration. I knew what it would say, you see, and I knew it was true: EMDR is bunk. It was the bunk that seemed most convenient at the time, though, so I willed myself to let it work. It worked OK (I’ve had umpteen blood tests since), although I’m fairly convinced that slipping $150 through a slot in the therapist’s door every Wednesday at 3 p.m. would have worked equally well. Just do something.

"Just do something" also explains why some patients report an immediate improvement when they start antidepressants, even though the real effects may take as long as two weeks to kick in. There is also, more directly apropos here, the Viagra effect, whereby a filled prescription for magic beans reliably produces enormous, um, beanstalks, whether or not you ever open the bottle. You pointed out yourself that expecting to have disappointing, dysfunctional sex nearly guarantees that you will have it, so it shouldn’t surprise you that merely knowing there’s help available if you need it can be enough to break the cycle. If not taking a pill can fix you right up, it shouldn’t be news that taking one, even a pharmacologically inert one, can work even better.

There is one strange addendum to that, though, if you’ll stick with me: your snake oil pills may contain something besides snake oil, chalk, and blue dye number 26, and guess what that something might be? Consumer protection agencies both here and abroad have tested some alleged herbal supplements and found them to be adulterated with … sildenafil citrate. That’s Viagra to you, bub. You might be better off just getting the real thing. At least that way you’d know the dosage you’re not taking.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Steeped in controversy

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These days everyone is a gourmand, and caring about the earth is so cool it’s made even Al Gore popular. The time is ripe to give a fuck.

But all this focus on artisanal and organic products is complicated. What’s easiest for the consumer to understand isn’t always correct. Stickers can’t always be trusted. And — certified or not — nothing holds a candle to family tradition.

It’s true for tomatoes. It’s true for tangerines. And, according to Winnie Yu, director of Berkeley teahouse Teance, it’s especially true for tea.

That there is controversy or politics involved with tea is nothing new (Boston Tea Party, anyone?). But the most recent debates have centered around two primary issues: the practice of using lower quality teas in tea bags (versus loose leaves) and the consequences of labeling tea as organic.

But before we get into all that, first the basics.

CONFLICT BREWS


The beverage as we know it is said to have been discovered when tea leaves blew into the hot-water cup of early Chinese emperor Shen Nung. Cultivation started simply enough, under the fog on steep hills, where harvesters engaged in the art of fine plucking, or gently twisting the buds of Camellia sinensis at precisely the correct moment of the correct day. This knowledge was a biorhythm, pulsating in the bones, passed from one generation to the next.

But it wasn’t long before this Chinese medicinal crop changed everything. The British East India Co. — originally chartered for spice trade — spread opium through the region just to get its hands on the stuff. This bit of naughtiness made it the most powerful monopoly in the world, prompted wars, and left legions addicted to another intoxicating substance: tea.

Smuggling rings, high-society occasions, and ever-increasing taxes spiraled around the precious crop. The long journeys from China to Britain led to the glamour of clipper ship races, but below deck fighting the rats was another problem altogether. One piece of tea lore explains how cats were employed to catch the rats, and after an entire shipment of tea (already stale from the journey) was infused with cat piss, it was discovered that the pungent bergamot oil, popular at the time, masked this stench quite nicely. Earl Grey was born.

Next came Thomas Sullivan, New York tea merchant, good-time guy, and miser to the core, who decided to send some tea samples to faraway clients. Instead of packing his gifts in tins, as was common at the time, Mr. Tightwad decided to use some silk baggies he had lying around. The people who received these pouches assumed they were to dip them into boiling water and throw away the debris. Sullivan had unwittingly invented a no-mess solution to tea. The orders came pouring in. A few years later the Lipton tea bag was born.

BONES ABOUT BAGS


Eventually, it was learned that smaller pieces, or finings, brew more quickly than full leaves. But when leaves are broken into finings, the oils responsible for their taste evaporate. This leaves a bitterness that can only be countered with cream and sugar. And the tea farmers in China kept on keeping on, despite the series of near-triumphs, well-intentioned buffoonery, and colonial rebellion that resulted in the western side of the tea-drinking world forever asking, "One lump or two?"

According to tea connoisseurs, this is when the fine crop began its slide down the slippery slope into pure crap.

Far from an obsolete issue (or a localized one), bagged tea — both its quality and its form — has sparked a very modern worldwide debate.

In Sri Lanka as recently as Feb. 12, D.M. Jayaratne, newly appointed minister of plantation industries, instructed tea researchers and relevant authorities to investigate whether premium teas exported in bulk are being mixed with cheap tea.

And on the less quantifiable front, contemporary tea drinkers such as Yu consider bagged tea to have all the sophistication and allure of boxed wine. Properly enjoyed tea is not only an intoxicant but also an art. "It’s like music," Yu explains. "The notes have to be appreciated at their own time."

Tea bags pilfer quality by design, but something bigger may be lost between the staple and the tag: how about a bit of ceremony in a racing, relentless world?

"Tea is a spiritual product, as well as for consumption," says Yu, who has made it her mission to bring fine tea and tea education to the Bay Area. "It was a medicine for 2,000 years before it was a beverage."

Her Berkeley tearoom — a serene, beautiful environment flecked in copper and bamboo — allows you to connect with the leaves, the culture, the moment, and the community. "Drinking with 3,000 years of history, you don’t feel alone," Yu says.

THE ETHICS OF ORGANICS


Meanwhile, at the 40th annual World Ag Expo in the San Joaquin Valley in mid-February, cannons thundered, Rudolph Giuliani waxed poetic about alternative fuel, jets split seams into the sky, more than 100,000 people gathered from 57 nations, and a small group of farmers met to contemplate the agribusiness plunge into the emerging organic industry.

During a seminar with Ray Green, manager of the California Organic Program for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, these farmers had before them a daunting question: organic at what cost?

When it comes to tea, Yu has an answer. The cost is large: to consumers, who mistakenly think their certified-organic tea bag is superior to the noncertified (but tastier and ecofriendlier) independent variety, and to small farms, which have to compete with the certified giants.

Artisan tea shops such as Yu’s depend on strong bonds with small farmers. But most quality tea farms opt out of the bureaucratic mess of US Department of Agriculture organic certification because the fees are too high and the other costs are too great. For example, USDA certification can require land to lay barren for up to five years. According to Yu, it’s nonsense to ask a family farm to participate in such a thing. "These hillsides have had tea growing on them for hundreds of years," she says. "It is very precious to have a tea tree."

Many new farms are certified under European and Chinese regulations — which are both significantly stricter and cheaper than their United States counterpart — but still have to compete with big corporations willing to jump through the USDA hoops.

At his seminar Green said, "Some of the farmers that left conventional agriculture 10 years ago because they just couldn’t compete on economies of scale are now finding that the same companies they were in competition with 10 or 12 years ago are now competing against them in the organic sector."

Consumers want to choose certified products because they think they’re doing the right thing. But doing so doesn’t necessarily help anyone but the big corporations that can afford certification.

"Organic isn’t an issue if it’s always been organic," Yu says. "Fair trade is not an issue [for Teance] because we buy from family farms."

Yu works with family farms like the ones with representatives sifting through the advice and cautionary tales of the World Ag Expo, the farms wondering how to stay afloat in the wake of impossible competition. As their corporate counterparts lurk in low valleys, sifting the scraps of their mass harvest into nylon bags before slapping a USDA organic sticker on attractive packaging and trumpeting health consciousness to the uneducated consumer, the folks on the hill are still doing what they’ve always done.

It’s clear that as consumers become more informed, the demand for quality product increases. With this demand comes profit, red tape, and a departure from the salt-of-the-earth spirit that gave birth to the organic movement.

"The ritual is authentic, healthy, artful," Yu says. "You can’t find that in a tea bag."

So what is the San Francisco tea lover to do? At the very least, you can support your local gourmet tea peddlers. From Chez Panisse to El Farolito, the Bay Area is uniquely qualified to appreciate the culinary good stuff. We like it slow, whole, and artisanal, and fine teas deliver. *

TEANCE

1780 Fourth St., Berk.

(510) 524-2832

www.teance.com

FAR LEAVES TEA

2979 College, Berk.

(510) 665-9409

www.farleaves.com

IMPERIAL TEA COURT

1511 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 540-8888

1411 Powell, SF

(415) 788-6080

1 Ferry Bldg., SF

(415) 544-9830.

www.imperialtea.com

MODERN TEA

602 Hayes, SF

(415) 626-5406

www.moderntea.com

SAMOVAR

498 Sanchez, SF

(415) 626-4700

730 Howard, SF

(415) 227-9400

www.samovartea.com

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Ouroboros rising

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Never mind the ides of March, here comes year four of the Iraq War. Believe it or not, this whole illegal invasion-and-occupation business brought to you by the generally scary US government — that consortium of oil companies, political marionettes, neoconquerors, military wonks, and other capitalist heavies operating behind the flimflam of democracy and terror — is about to celebrate another birthday. (In various offstage boardrooms, we hear the muffled sound of champagne corks not so discreetly popping.)

It’s unclear how many people are still fooled by the flapdoodle spewing from the faces fronting for this enterprise. For most of us in the big Green Zone back home, questions about the Iraq War have moved decidedly into the cultural realm, where the conflict lingers and ferments like others before it in the atmosphere generated between the TV and the dinner table — or, more insidiously, in the mute wasteland of adolescent malaise, surrounded on all sides by a dysfunctional society in lofty denial of its serious penchant for destruction.

Although written in the aftermath of the Gulf War, that media-sanitized prequel to contemporary carnage, playwright Mickey Birnbaum’s Big Death and Little Death squarely occupies the latter territory. But suburban death metal–laced teenage angst is more than the terrain of Birnbaum’s sly and ferocious black comedy — now enjoying a feisty West Coast premiere by Crowded Fire — it’s a beachhead from which the play gleefully lays waste to the universe as a whole.

Birnbaum’s fully fledged two-act (originally intended as an opener for death metal bands) posits some distorted family values, amplified by the sublimated horrors of a world on fire. Its main characters are a brother and sister, Gary (Carter Chastain) and Kristi (Mandy Goldstone), two sympathetically screwed-up teenagers whose modest nuclear household (an evocative panorama of linoleum, Formica, and faded wallpaper in Chloe Short’s deceptively spare set design) is vaguely overseen by their father, a troubled Desert Storm vet (Lawrence Radecker). Since returning from the Gulf, Dad likes to take pictures of road accidents (your quiet, volatile type, in other words, wonderfully fashioned by Radecker as an opaque yet sympathetic psychopath in desert fatigues). Completing the picture for a time is Mom, or Dad’s unfaithful wife (Michele Levy), whose history of sexual indiscretion while her husband was off sauntering through hell comes tumbling out of her in a series of Tourette’s-like confessions.

In the role of a highly inadequate support circle are Gary’s friend Harley (Ben Freeman), an awkward adolescent with an ambivalent thing for his friend’s sister; Gary’s twisted guidance counselor, Miss Endor (Tonya Glanz), who invites him to a death metal concert before diving into a crank-fueled nihilist rant; and Gary’s inappropriate Uncle Jerry (Michael Barr), a Navy sailor who becomes even more inappropriate as the oxygen leaves the stranded sub from which he makes a farewell call.

When a litter of pups is carted off by a classic suburban tweaker (Barr) in exchange for a gun and a bag of drugs, one of the pups (Mick Mize, in a dog suit) is left behind somewhere to haunt the house and mind of the posttraumatic paterfamilias. This subplot is interspersed with scenes from a family car trip from hell and Kristi’s anorexic adolescent anguish as Gary ponders whether to go to city college or "destroy the universe." In the end, as the characters make love, war, art, and friends in no particular order, the second option looks increasingly enticing to our hero, if only to clear the way for something new.

Smartly staged by Sean Daniels (moonlighting from his position as associate artistic director at the California Shakespeare Theater), Big Death and Little Death speaks to this imploding universe loudly and affirmatively, forefingers and pinkies extended. In Birnbaum’s optimistic apocalypse, there’s a difference between the annihilation of the system and the creative destruction that envisions a new beginning on the horizon.

The umbilical link between big and little deaths brings to mind the Vietnam-era "little murders" in Jules Feiffer’s even more prescient black comedy of an American culture of self-destruction. One’s tempted to call Birnbaum’s play the Little Murders of our day.

But neither can really compete with the culture they so sharply critique nor prove as strange or fitting as the news of the dean of West Point ganging up with human rights activists, the FBI, and military in-terror-gators to chastise the creators of 24 for feeding US soldiers too many tantalizing torture techniques. Seems almost a chicken-and-egg problem at times, this relationship between big death in Iraq (and Afghanistan and beyond) and little death on the tube. It’s quite a food chain too, bringing to mind that serpent devouring its own tail. Come to think of it, Ouroboros would make an excellent name for a death metal band. *

BIG DEATH AND LITTLE DEATH

Through March 4

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.

Traveling Jewish Theatre

470 Florida, SF

(415) 439-2456

www.crowdedfire.org

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Mussel systems

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› paulr@sfbg.com

When last we looked in on Aqua, the prospect seemed rather marbly and banklike, and the menu included paella. Paella is not a dish you should order even at most Spanish restaurants, let alone at a high-end seafood house, but a member of my party went ahead and ordered it anyway — in the heedlessness of youth — and was afterwards disappointed. "What did you expect?" I asked, from the unassailable position of someone who’d opted for Pacific swordfish grilled in a sheath of prosciutto, the sort of dish you’d expect to find, and enjoy, at a place like Aqua. "I don’t know," was the glum rejoinder.

Years passed, youth faded, and we did not return. The meteoric George Morrone, who’d been in the kitchen when Aqua opened in 1991 and was the chef during our visit — which is what tells me it was in ’91 or ’92 — gave way after a few years to Michael Mina, who ran the show for more than a decade until he left to open his eponymous Union Square restaurant in 2004. His successor was Laurent Manrique, he of the recent foie gras kerfuffle. Manrique does offer foie gras on his Aqua menu, but the offer is a muted one: there is no foie gras cart plying the dining room (whose look, incidentally, seems to have been softened to tones of a summer twilight). There had been such a cart at Campton Place, Manrique’s previous gig. When the foie gras cart and the cheese cart were simultaneously at large in that rather snug dining room, one had a brief vision of dandified bumper cars.

You (which is to say, I) would not necessarily expect a chef renowned for his treatments of foie gras to be the ideal head of a kitchen largely devoted to the cooking of seafood. And yet if this is a paradox, it is a spectacularly successful one; for much (and maybe most) seafood needs a certain amount of dressing up to show well, and at Aqua, Manrique’s instinct for meatiness results in plates of fish neatly balanced between elegance and muscularity.

Part of the Manrique magic has to do with bold spicing. Ahi tuna tartare, for instance, has become something of a commonplace in the past decade. The fish’s reddish purple flesh looks a lot like beef and has its own sort of intensity. But the dish becomes special at Aqua when the cubes are mixed with Moroccan spices (these weren’t specified but had a currylike aura) and a quail egg yolk as a binding agent. (Aqua’s à la carte menu is, like the paella, a thing of the past; today you choose three courses for $72 or a more elaborate tasting menu, with optional wine pairings, for $109.) Across the table, meanwhile, a plate of albacore carpaccio — tissue-thin bolts of flesh looking almost like ice shavings — arrived under a colorful bloom of Fresno chile rings, slivers of daikon radish, and bits of fried shallot: springtime on the tundra.

A whiff of curry subtly recurred in the buttery chardonnay jus our server poured around a grilled filet of walu, one of those marvelously meaty white fish from the deep waters around the Hawaiian Islands. The fish wore a straw hat of pommes alumettes (crispy filaments of potato), while a few quartered baby artichokes lurked at the bottom of the plate. Even meatier was sturgeon, cooked en papillote (in a paper bag) and presented as three cylinders — a kind of faux roulade hedged with braised baby spinach and finished with a rich duck jus, also poured by the server from a small pitcher.

Even if you confine yourself to the more modest prix fixe — and we found three courses to be just the right amount of food — you will be given a few extra treats. There are the warm breads — olive, sourdough, multigrain — in constant circulation through the dining room. There is the amuse-bouche, for us a tripartite presentation on a handsome rack: a lemon oil–slicked sliver of Monterey Bay sardine on celery coins, a profound wild-mushroom soup capped with gratinlike pine-nut pesto, and a smoked-ahi croquette with a perfect and crispy golden crust, despite its fingernail size. And there are the postprandial petits fours, tiny tarts, macaroons, and meringues (including a purplish gray one of taro root) that reach the table as a final bit of punctuation (not counting the bill, of course), at the end of dessert.

You could, if you wanted, dispense with dessert and just double-dip from the list of first courses. But if you do need a sweet fix beyond and before the petits fours, Aqua’s choices won’t disappoint. For the most part they don’t sound spectacular, nor do they have much to do with the restaurant’s aqueous theme. But they are exemplars of their kind, among them the chocolate tart, like a round of bittersweet fudge nested in a butter crust and ringed by a salad of blood orange and mandarin segments, and the Meyer lemon soufflé, lanced with a spoonful of pomegranate seeds and redolent of the citrus’s unmistakable orangey acidity.

I was saddened to find both Maine skate and Atlantic cod on the menu. The latter, in particular, is a decimated species, as the British journalist Charles Clover indicated recently in his book The End of the Line; surely there is something comparable to be had from the better-managed and far nearer Pacific fisheries. For all the hullabaloo about Manrique and his beloved foie gras, no one has suggested that duck and geese are in danger of extinction. But he and Aqua, given their international stature, have a special role to play in ensuring that today’s seafood houses will have seafood to serve tomorrow. *

AQUA

Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Sun., 5:30–9:30 p.m.

252 California, SF

(415) 956-9662

www.aqua-sf.com/aqua

Full bar

Not noisy

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

>

Robe of glory

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"The Jim Kweskin Jug Band was sort of the first group of goofballs who didn’t wear uniforms, who didn’t have set patter. It was the acoustic precursor of the Grateful Dead," Geoff Muldaur says on the phone from Los Angeles. "Bob Weir got our first album and ran over to Jerry and said, ‘We’ve gotta form a jug band. You’ve gotta hear this shit!’ "

Before iTunes and Pandora.com, getting your hands on a new record was sometimes like receiving a password to a part of your spirit you didn’t know existed. Since Muldaur’s early days with Kweskin and blues integrator Paul Butterfield, his vocal chops have become legendary at the very least. "There are only three white blues singers," Richard Thompson once said. "Geoff Muldaur is at least two of them." Muldaur has been an equally powerful force in the interpretation and expansion of the American songbook.

On "Wait ‘Til I Put On My Robe," one of the most moving songs on Muldaur’s 2000 solo album, Password (Hightone), there is an immediate feeling of ascension as Muldaur’s sings, "Going up the river so chilly and cold / Chills the body but not the soul." The stunning arrangement of this traditional gospel tune comes from Clarence Clay and William Scott, two blind African American street musicians recorded in Philadelphia in 1961. It sounds like Muldaur’s back in ’61 joining in on what he describes as the "weird, modal, wonderful, jumping" harmonies.

Although he was an essential part of the exponential surge that happened in the folk and blues scene in the ’60s, Muldaur is still in awe of the musical movement. He assures me that no matter what I’ve heard about those times in Cambridge, Mass.; Woodstock, NY; San Francisco; and beyond, "it’s all true! When I was hanging out with Jim Kweskin, Fritz Richmond, Bill Keith, and Maria [Muldaur, his wife at the time], I just assumed that’s how life was and that we were just sort of good. But the combination of those people was unmatchable. Bill Keith left Bill Monroe to join the jug band. Maria was shocking — she was so good."

With the exceptions of a quickie gig at the Lincoln Center in 2001 and a tribute concert in Japan for Fritz Richmond after the king of the jug and washtub bass died in 2005, Muldaur and Kweskin haven’t had a chance to really sit down and play together for many years. Muldaur is as excited as anybody for their reunion at the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse. "Just playing with Kweskin, man — it’s magic," he says. "Look, I go to the gym so I can keep this shit up!"

Playing in Berkeley will be a metaphysical homecoming. Muldaur lived in Mill Valley from 1988 to ’89 and would sneak across the bridge to revisit places where he had jammed in the ’60s. "When [the Jim Kweskin Jug Band] came out to the West Coast at first, to LA, it was like oil and water," Muldaur says. "But when we came to San Francisco and Berkeley, we were right at home because there were already freaks like us. The jug band and the scene in Cambridge was very much like in Berkeley, but Berkeley stayed that way."

Terry Gilliam told Muldaur his crew members used to get on their knees every morning and pray to Muldaur’s version of "Brazil," which gave the 1985 film its name. "It represented this insane, wacky, other place in reality," Muldaur says. With a major jug band documentary and an immense CD set charting Muldaur’s influences in the works, that other place in reality will soon be here to stay. *

GEOFF MULDAUR

With Jim Kweskin

Fri/16, 8 p.m., $19.50

Freight and Salvage Coffee House

1111 Addison, Berk.

(510) 548-1761

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Attraction is hell

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REVIEW Rarely does ODC Theater pack them in the way it did Feb. 2 for SHIFT Physical Theater’s first full-evening piece, The Shape of Poison. Manuelito Biag has been making work for close to 10 years, but the buzz has really picked up since 2003, when he presented the anguished Giving Strength to this Fragile Tongue. With Poison, developed as an artist-in-residence project at ODC, he has created a work about the inarticulate, often unacknowledged forces that shape our realities. Watching the dancers in pursuit of endless and often turned-in-on-themselves encounters felt like looking for a cause in all those ruffles, vortices, and surges that continually disturb the ocean’s surface. Poison moves leisurely but doesn’t meander; for all its churning, at its core the piece is quiet and wistful.

Philippines-born and California-raised, Biag has described Poison as influenced by the yogic kleshas — corruptions of the mind that prevent enlightenment. It’s not necessary to know that Poison‘s three sections, which can stand independent of each other, explore three kleshas: ignorance, passion, and anger. It’s quite enough to realize that for each part the choreographer developed a highly charged, intensely physical language that he shaped into fluid, at-times soaring movements, which drop hints of narrative like beads of color into a pool of oil. As he did with Tongue, he turned to Jess Rowland for an inspired score, here partially performed live on piano.

The opening trio (Amy Foley, Damara Ganley, and Tessa Nebrida) began posed like statues facing different directions, until Ganley’s tiny tremor sent out enough waves to animate Foley and Nebrida. Even though each of them developed something of a personality — Foley’s lyric groundedness was particularly lovely — more than anything the dancers created a sense of space through which they were reaching for each other, at times tentatively, at times assertively. One had the feeling they were trying to pierce clouds or curtains that hid something. But whenever a connection or moment of clarity was made, it either evaporated or was cut off randomly. There was blindness to the way their hands reached out; touches became almost accidental. In a kneeling position, two dancers held hands and then simply dropped them. A cupped open hand welcomed another, but no emotional current flowed. Almost animal-like, the dancers nosed up to each other, aware of one another’s presence but rarely reutf8g.

The central duet for Biag and the resplendently fierce Erin Mei-Ling Stuart worked with material already explored in Tongue: the unspeakable tension in a relationship in which two individuals feed off each other’s heat. Here the two people were very much equals. Each emotional punch was matched by one of similar force; the two of them were always at a standoff, trapped with no end in sight. The heartbeat in Rowland’s score at times sounded like water torture as the pair watched wearily, waiting for the next explosion to hit. Biag had a stooped way of yanking his legs up — as if dragging them out of a swamp — and then ever so gently moving them like a tiger on the prowl that was truly terrifying. Though he designed wave after wave of full-bodied confrontations, one of the most telling came through his use of arms, which present very narrow points of contact. When the dancers stood face-to-face, forcing their stretched arms against each other, you could see the hell of this mutual repulsion and attraction. This duet is Poison‘s strongest component.

At this point, Biag has not quite mastered choreographing for his multicast group. In Poison‘s third section he looked at chaos and instability from a communal perspective. While he was wonderfully adept at designing fluid and formally inventive movements, the circle and diagonal lineups that he set in opposition to individual expressions of anger — tiny Tanya Bello was particularly fierce — didn’t quite add up. However, an excellent duet for Ganley and Noel Plemmons that peeled away from the ensemble brought on a finale that teetered between hope and despair. In the context of Naomi Lazard’s existential pessimism in her poem "Ordinance on Arrival" (read on tape), about a bleak world from which "there is no vehicle out," hands repeatedly planting seeds suggest futility. Yet the stricken Plemmons, after being brutally repulsed by Ganley, reached out his hand to receive a drop of saliva from each of the other dancers. Thus nourished, he veered toward a strong Ashley Taylor, who throughout seemed to function as a calm within the storm. Was he able to push through suffering into the light? It would be nice to think so. *

See you in Assisi

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Umbria is the center of Italy, pretty much, and that isn’t an easy thing to be. The country has an unconcentric shape, for one thing: a long, booted shank poised to kick a lumpy ball called Sicily, with aloof Sardinia looking on and a curious glanslike flaring in the north, where the peninsula’s long-ago collision with the rest of Europe raised the Alps. Italy is, like California, hot, snowy, mountainous, and flat; it is a land of butter, rice, pancetta, tomatoes, basil, and olive oil. It is close to Switzerland and Africa. It has islands, including Elba, the knob of rock where Napoleon was sent so he couldn’t make any more trouble. (Would today’s Elbans accept another failed warmonger, do you think? Guess who!) It is a lot to be the center of.

There is, then, something elementally Italian about Umbria, a hilly province quite near a pair of famous neighbors, Tuscany and Rome, and like and unlike them. It differs from them in the sense that, apart from the hill towns of Assisi (home of St. Francis) and Deruta (famous for hand-painted ceramics), it is less well-known, especially to tourists. But it resembles its neighbors not least in cuisine, at least if we are judging by the menu at Ristorante Umbria, opened nearly 11 years ago by the fabulously named Giulio Tempesta. Umbria brought regional Italian cooking to San Francisco well ahead of the current vogue.

If you like Italian food, and everybody seems to, you’ll love Umbrian food, at least as the kitchen at Umbria turns it out. And you will like it in a setting that feels as Italian as many places in Italy, a pastiche of exposed wood, terra-cotta tiles, trompe l’oeil, an old armoire, and good-looking service staff speaking spitfire Italian as they do their skillful dance among the tables. Those tables are crowded, especially at lunchtime, when the hungry include a microcosmic mix of today’s SoMa populations: people who work in the area; others who are staying at one or the other of the neighborhood’s many hotels, conventioneering at Moscone, or visiting the nearby museums; and city folk who have ventured downtown because Umbria is, frankly, worth the venture.

Just as Zuni is renowned for its roast chicken with bread salad — a dish halfway competent home cooks can make a run at — so Umbria is notable for its exquisite pastas, which are another staple of most of the good home cooks I know. My interest is particularly piqued when I find a menu with pasta sauces I’ve been making for years, and Umbria has three of them, right in a row: puttanesca (spicy Neapolitan tomato sauce with anchovies, capers, and black olives), amatriciana (classic Roman sauce of pancetta, onion, and tomato), and arabbiata ("enraged" — tomato sauce with plenty of garlic and chili flakes). Of the three, the amatriciana sauce is the one I make least often, in large part because I don’t keep the requisite pasta — bucatini (fat, hollow strands) — in regular stock, and so I lean toward it in restaurants, when I lean toward pasta at all.

Umbria’s version ($11.75) steps around the bucatini issue by using rigatoni, the stubby, hollow cylinders that look like miniatures of underground pipes. Rigatoni are too short to be easily manipulable by a fork; they have to be speared instead. But the sauce, thickly adhesive and deeply flavored, more than made up for the slight loss of convenience, and I was particularly pleased to find the shreds of pancetta had been precrisped, so that they retained some crunch even when simmered with the tomato and onion.

Lasagne al forno ($16.25) was as satisfying as it gets and served at just the right temperature — somewhere between tepid and warm — which reminds us that, until fairly recently, home ovens were rare in Italy, and dishes destined to be baked had to be taken to the village fornaio, then hurried home while still warm. Mezze maniche ($15.75) — a tubular pasta similar to penne — also got the baking treatment; the tubes were jumbled with rounds of spicy sausage and slices of wild mushroom in a tomato-cream sauce before being sealed under a broad cap of melted mozzarella. And oreccheti ($15.75) dodged a cliché bullet by being given an ensemble of diced chicken, strips of red and yellow bell pepper, and a heavy shower of chopped arugula instead of the usual sausage and broccoli rabe.

You are not required to eat pasta at Umbria, of course. You can have pizza; the margherita ($11) is quite good, though it is more a cheese pizza, with basil and tomato (the former a sprig, the latter a lone cherry tomato, halved) serving in an advisory capacity. For meat people: beef carpaccio is an appealing port of entry, the shavings of flesh heavily festooned with grated Parmesan and basil chiffonade. Polpette ($6.50 for five) — meatballs slightly smaller than golf balls — were marvelously moist and mild (because of veal?) in their bright tomato-cheese sauce, and the lamb burger ($13.75) was sensational, a tasty juice bomb served on a focaccia bun and in the company of the crusty roasted potato rounds that have been one of the restaurant’s specialties from the beginning.

Last, there is the matter of tiramisù ($6.50). As a rule I can do without, but I found myself in the company of an expert, a man who has spent some time looking into the matter. He poked and prodded at Umbria’s offering like a scientist trying to pry a DNA sample from some ancient specimen; finally, he lifted a chunk, watched some goo drip lasciviously to the plate below, and pronounced himself pleased.

"It’s not dripping wet," he said. "A good sign."

Elementary, my good sir! *

RISTORANTE UMBRIA

Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5:30–10:30 p.m. Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

198 Second St., SF

(415) 546-6985

www.ristoranteumbria.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

>

Virtual Newsom

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By Steven T. Jones
Mayor Gavin Newsom may be unwilling to appear in person before the Board of Supervisors, but he’s using his trip to the World Economic Forum to reach out to citizens of the virtual world Second Life. The cyber-Gavin gave a long but not terribly illuminating interview, although he did joke that we now have a virtual mayor “just in case the public gets fed up with the real me.” I listened for some of the “new ideas” he claimed he would bring back from the Swiss Alps, but instead it sounded like he developed some new sympathies for poor, misunderstood corporate titans, such as the oil executive who wants to save the world for his children. How touching.

Hot Green

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Kale: what is to be done? Yes, kale has its virtues: it’s good for us (as indicated by its dark green color), it presents a variety of interesting textures, it isn’t too expensive, and it turns up in winter, when our farmers markets are desolate. Still, kale is among the trickier leafy greens to handle. Its flavor — much stronger than that of chard — can put people off, and its texture — much tougher than that of spinach — can result in chewiness if the cook is in a hurry or hasn’t added enough liquid to soften it.

One decent treatment for kale begins with a diced onion and some diced bacon (I use turkey bacon), cooked in olive oil until soft and fragrant. In goes the chopped and still wet kale along with a pinch of salt, and the pot is then covered to promote a combination of steaming and braising. The finishing touch, to be added when the kale has achieved an acceptable degree of tenderness, is a splash or two of good red-wine vinegar, along with additional salt and pepper to taste.

This is a good dish, but I wouldn’t want it every night. A fine alternative is the Portuguese soup caldo verde ("hot green"), which is substantial enough to serve as a main course. Begin with some oil (or butter) heated in a soup pot; add a diced onion (with pinch of salt). When the onion has softened, throw in a clove or two of chopped garlic, stir, and let cook a minute or two. Add a link of spicy sausage (andouille, chorizo, linguica) in chunks; a couple of peeled, cubed potatoes; and four cups of water (or stock or a combination). Simmer, covered, until the potatoes are cooked, about 20 minutes. Puree. (You can do this in a blender or with an immersion wand.) Add a head of kale, cleaned and finely sliced, and another sausage link cut into rounds. Simmer about five minutes more, until the kale and sausage are cooked through. (If your sausage is precooked, you only care that it’s warmed through.) Balance the seasonings and serve. With some warm bread, a green salad, and a bottle of red wine, this makes a fortifying supper on a cold winter’s night. Also, you can warm your hands with the bowls — a nice extra if you happen to live in a badly insulated, freezing house. Anyone?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Bus lust

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What’s 40 feet long and 13 feet, 9 inches tall and fun all over? Sounding like a potentially lame "you’ve gotta be kidding me" joke and accelerating in Bay Area underground rockers’ imagination as a real alternative to your average bad show experience, John Benson’s converted Muni veggie-biodiesel bus is the latest in a bohemian nation’s short parade of party starters on wheels — driven by motorvators like the Merry Pranksters and Friends Forever in order to cavort, make art and sometimes community, and blow minds. Le difference is that this art ‘n’ good times vehicle is huge — able to fit an audience of 50 — and despite its whitewashed exterior, green.

Just join the scattered, happy misfits and in-the-knowsters wandering in from off the street on this particularly deserted stretch of the Mission-Potrero area Jan. 21. The bus is peacefully parked and perfectly inaudible beneath a pretzel of elevated freeway off-ramps, like the sweet overgrown offspring of Miss Open Road USA. Take a look under the hood as Benson — once in A Minor Forest and Hale Zukas and now with Evil Wikkid Warrior — opens up the works in the butt end of the bus with the cool little lookout tower on top. Two tanks hold the vegetable oil that primarily propels the bus and the diesel or biodiesel fuel that heats the radiator fluid, which keeps the vegetable oil liquid enough to course through the pipes. With a lot of help from friends, Benson spent only $300 to veggify the bus. And the beautiful part — especially to those in perpetually touring poverty-stricken bands who know what it’s like to spend all the money from a show on gas — is that he gets his fuel free from the pits of used grease behind truck stops and fast-food joints, which ordinarily pay people to take it away.

This is just the latest in a handful of vehicles Benson has vegged out (give or take a few fires caused to keep the vegetable oil flowing), including a Twin Towers dust–saturated ambulance retired after 9/11 service. In 2005, Hale Zukas ended up touring the country in the EMT vehicle alongside the mobile Friends Forever. "I really liked the whole paradigm shift of everything. People didn’t know what to expect," Benson recalls fondly. "We’d come in an ambulance, and everyone would say, ‘Someone got hurt!’ I was excited by the whole chaos and confusion and trickery, and you don’t have to rely on clubs or booking agents or soundmen." And of course there was that added sense of poetic justice, he adds, "driving it around on vegetable oil, the whole statement against the war for oil going on."

Inside the bus, far from maddened neighbors, the music goes on. Slight, skinny-mustached Carlos of Hepatitis C — in town from Bloomington, Ind., where Benson drove him around on his world-record bid to play the most shows in one day — is throwing the party. Living Hell, Ex-Pets, He-War, Noozzz, Erin Allen, and Russian Tsarlag are on the free-to-all, free-for-all bill, and Carlos runs down the street to the opposite street corner — the unofficial green room, where the bands and friends are milling — to tell them the first artist is starting. Backed by crunchy minimal beats, Sewn Leather is flailing around the small stage inside the bus, shouting, "Noise is dying, punk’s been dead, the only rock ‘n’ roll is in your head!" through a PA fed by a battery fueled by the bus’s solar panels. At one of Benson’s biggest events, which included Warhammer and Rubber-O-Cement among 13 bands, the overflow turned into a double Dutch jump-rope contest in the middle of the street. The vibe resembles a kid’s clubhouse taken to the next level — on the road and relatively off the grid.

"Another great thing about the bus is that during all that downtime usually spent staring out the window driving through Nebraska, you can actually plug in instruments. A full band can be playing in back like it’s a practice space," Benson says earlier over the phone of the bus that shall remain nameless (he likes the anonymity).

The all-ages club on wheels simply just "fell into my lap," he continued. "A retired Oakland cop was selling it, and I just saw it going by one day. It was a monstrosity."

The Oaktown police department had torn it up to convert it into a mobile police unit, he was told, and its last owner was going to remake it as a family RV. That intrepid soul was "so hilarious," Benson raves. "I was sold on it because of his personality. He was this 6-foot-7, really huge black guy with these huge hands — such a can-do person. He was sooo the antithesis of Burning Man, because my first reaction was ‘Oh, no, this is some big, gross Burning Man art-car thing.’ Being a retired cop, he said, ‘From driver’s seat back, it’s perfectly legal to rock out with your cock out’ — his exact words. ‘You can drink a fifth of JD and whatever,’ and he then did this funny little dance."

"It’s a surprising tidbit," Benson says. "You don’t have to have seat belts and can have open containers. And you can have a regular driver’s license. If the bus was any longer, you’d need a commercial license. It’s kind of shocking."

Shocking, especially when shortly after he finished converting the bus to use vegetable oil last summer, Benson took it on the road with a bunch of bands to the Freedom From Festival in Minneapolis, where they played before the Boredoms. Because of the bus’s height, they got stuck in an underpass in Chicago’s Wicker Park district. They also couldn’t get it into the Pennsylvania Turnpike and instead were forced to drive through the Poconos. "I got lost in a white-picket-fence neighborhood and was forced to turn around in this poor lady’s yard," Benson recollects. "She and her neighbors came running out, and she was, like, ‘What are you?!’ I was so busy trying to do a 20-point turn I could only yell, ‘We’re a bus!’ ‘What kind of bus are you?’ she yelled. And then someone in the bus jumped out and gave her a hug and said, ‘We’re a magic bus.’ "

You’ve gotta admit there’s a bit of magic going on when Sewn Leather finishes his riveting songs on dead lice, bad pickups, and the end of music genres and the kids pile out, over the oriental carpet cushioning on the floor, and share cookies and other comestibles outside. The cars rumble overhead, oblivious to this DIY snatch of culture-making quietly going about its beeswax. *

BUS SHOW

With the Fucking Ocean and other bands

Feb. 3, 8 p.m., free

Highway 24 overpass Shattuck and 55th St., Oakl.

followthatparade@yahoo.com

>

Control of resources

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Among the usual tidings of war and occupation, the recent holiday season brought news that hundreds of people had been burned alive in a pipeline explosion in Lagos, the commercial capital of Nigeria and its largest city. They were gathered around a section reportedly ruptured by a criminal gang of "bunkerers" siphoning petrol from the state-owned oil company prior to selling it on the black market.

In a cutting irony wasted on few in Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer (the fifth largest importer to the United States — and rising) has struggled for years with a serious fuel shortage. Within the crowded Abule Egba district of Lagos, where December’s horrible scene took place, low-paid workers and their families often forgo caution in the event of a pipeline rupturing to fill pails and cans with the desperately needed liquid, either for use in their own vehicles and home generators or for resale on the black market, where a small amount can equal several weeks’ wages.

To read the news reports on these accidents (if that’s the right term for such acts of desperation) is usually to miss much of the complex picture lying behind the scenes in Africa’s most populous and oil-rich country. The politics of oil in Nigeria reaches deep into an increasingly fractured society and far beyond its national borders.

Needless to say, it’s a lot for a lone actor-playwright to take on, even one playing multiple characters over the course of two hours. But young solo performer Dan Hoyle seems to thrive on such challenges. Developed with and directed by veteran solo performer Charlie Varon, Tings Dey Happen brings the 25-year-old Hoyle’s American theater audience a powerfully etched human-scale impression of the scope of oil politics in Nigeria as he discovered it during a 10-month trip in 2005 as a Fulbright scholar.

Without benefit of costume or scenery and with merely an atmospheric sound design (courtesy of David Hines) and some key lighting shifts (by Patti Meyer), Hoyle soon establishes his setting with a series of quick-change characterizations amid a bustling city street in Lagos. Affecting the pidgin English that is the lingua franca of Nigeria and smoothly transitioning through various postures and demeanors, Hoyle re-creates his reception as a white American sore thumb. From there we travel with him widely, from stops at the US Embassy and local bars frequented by expat oil workers to the network of swamps and streams in the delta known simply as "the creeks," the territory of dozens of militia groups at war with the state and one another for the liberation of the delta and a share of the oil money.

In all, Hoyle plays more than 20 characters based on people he met and interviewed. There’s also a friendly Nigerian stage manager who does not hesitate in taking exception to the character Dan’s sometimes overly downbeat treatment of the subject matter or spurring the crowd to let go of its Bay Area mind-set and try to adopt a more Nigerian one.

Hoyle also gained access to some highly placed people in Lagos. In addition to a somewhat unctuous US ambassador, for instance, Dan memorably meets the antigovernment rebel leader and Ijaw warlord Asari (a.k.a. Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, or Asari Dokubo), the Muslim militant whose forces have declared war on the Nigerian state and the oil companies who they (with justification) say have usurped and wreaked havoc on Ijaw land.

Throughout, Dan is glimpsed only in stories told by those he met. He’s the young white American who’s (remarkably) neither a Christian missionary nor a petrochemical engineer; who wants, crazily, to study oil politics (prompting one wag to advise him to practice ducking, as he’s sure to be shot at); who, to one local’s amazement and consternation, doesn’t know how to fix a computer.

Tings is a history lesson and a political lesson — even a geography lesson (the Niger Delta "is like your Mississippi Delta," the stage manager explains with knowing understatement, "but there are more guns"). But the show is also very much an entertainment and a display of performance prowess. Hoyle — whose first solo endeavor, Circumnavigator, was followed by Florida 2004: The Big Bummer, a report from a front line in the last presidential election — has made this multicharacter reportage-bricolage his forte, backing it with the limber facility of a physically disciplined actor and natural mimic.

There’s a certain admirable audacity in Hoyle’s Nigeria project, not just in his fearless reconnaissance of deeply troubled waters — especially among the battle-hardened rebels of the creeks — but in his willingness to boldly assume the voices and personae of ordinary Nigerians, to step inside their perspectives and encourage his American audiences to follow.

In what’s perhaps an overly eager attempt to please, however, his characters tend to be eccentrics. And in some cases the characterizations feel more put on, along the lines of caricature, than fully embodied. While invariably absorbing, the sum of these parts may also lend a skewed impression of the average Nigerian. There’s no mention, for example, of the nonviolent resistance led by women and student organizations against the exploitation of Nigerian people, land, and resources. (The only female character essayed in Tings is a sympathetically indignant prostitute.)

Moreover, the play’s two hours could stand trimming and focusing (a malaria-fueled fever dream in which Dan is visited by competing advice givers Graham Greene and Richard Pryor, for example, is only weakly funny and hence all the more tangential). These quibbles aside, Hoyle’s work brings a burgeoning talent to a still woefully neglected subject that, as presented here, is both absorbing in its dramatic complexity and urgent in its political import. *

TINGS DEY HAPPEN

Through Feb. 10

Thurs.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 5 p.m., $15–$22

Marsh

1062 Valencia, SF

(415) 826-5750

1-800-838-3006

www.themarsh.org

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