Parking

Approve affordable housing — for youth

Andrew Lam
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Approve affordable housing — for youth

OPINION Booker T. Washington, born as a slave, risked his life to learn to read and write and went on to found Tuskegee University. At his core, he believed that economic independence and access to education were the keys to equality. He put it best when he said: “There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.”

Since 1919, the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center has worked to lift up San Franciscans of every background, with a particular focus on the African American community. To continue that vision, the center is embarking on a capital project that will provide 50 units of affordable housing to youth and families, along with new athletic and educational space.

The most critical part of the project is providing housing for transitional-age youth. Many of these young people age out of foster care with no family support, few job skills, and no chance to rent a market-rate apartment in this expensive city. The project represents a real commitment to these youth, who are overwhelmingly people of color. With affordable housing funding under threat at the federal and state levels, it’s essential that shovel-ready projects get the green light from City Hall.

That is why we were thrilled when Sups. Ross Mirkarimi, Eric Mar, and Mark Farrell introduced the necessary legislation to allow this project to move forward. Joining hundreds of community leaders, countless families, and prominent African Americans, these supervisors lent their support for a project that continues the ongoing fight for economic justice.

It’s also why we are concerned that a few neighbors are using their influence to push down on the hopes of San Francisco’s youth. Some neighbors have asked that we add additional parking, even though the site is just a few blocks from Geary Boulevard and most low-income youth don’t have cars. Others have suggested that we cut nine units to make the building shorter, even though San Francisco’s housing needs are so acute. As is often the case in San Francisco, those who support progressive values need to speak up to ensure that we can overcome this campaign of misinformation and fear.

On April 28, the Planning Commission will consider whether to certify the environmental impact report for this project, and whether to approve it. We are hopeful that progressive voices speak out so we can provide hope and a future to youth in our community. As Booker T. often said: “Success is to be measured not so much by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has overcome.” 

Julian Davis is president of the board and Patricia Scott is executive director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center, located at 800 Presidio Ave. The Planning Commission hearing is Thursday, April 28 at City Hall, Room 400.

 

It’s not so easy building green

Andrew Lam
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It’s not so easy building green

OPINION The Parkmerced project developers like to talk about how environmentally sound their plans are, but a harder look suggests otherwise.

At a March 29 hearing on the project, Green Pary member Eric Brooks presented graphic evidence of the environmental impacts of the destruction of the garden units and the landscape, and the proposed increase in parking on- site. As a transit-first city, it seems ludicrous to spend so much on below-grade parking. And regrading and replanting the entire site will allow toxins in the soil to become airborne.

Then there’s the question of whether the site is really “blighted,” as the developer claims — and whether so much housing needs to be torn down in the first place. Sup. Eric Mar questioned the issue of the deterioration of the existing units; he said he’d visited the site and noted that many units appear to be in fine shape.

I agree that the western side of town needs more density — but dumping that density disproportionately on one community seems to be a biased approach. Parkmerced is a renter community. Other areas dominated by homeowners seem to be off the table.

San Francisco should take a broader look at west-side zoning. That would include looking seriously at corridors with light-rail lines — Ocean Avenue, West Portal Avenue, Taraval Street, Geary Boulevard, Judah Street, and others — where some one-story buildings are far more deteriorated than the buildings at Parkmerced.

City officials should look at alternatives that allow other sites to be upzoned or allow owners to build on side sites. This would lessen the effects on one community by sharing the growing pains of a city limited on three sides by water.

We all want the projects, work, housing, jobs, and an expanded tax base for the city. But many of us question whether the current plan for Parkmerced does justice environmentally and sustainably when it ignores infill and preservation-based alternatives that could create more jobs and a better long-term green solution.

I have submitted a proposal to the Planning Commission that shows how to improve transit linkages, how infill housing can be done, and how the 11 towers at Parkmerced can be redesigned (the initial concept was to design new, pencil-thin replacement towers and structurally-reinforced new buildings). I suggest that more infill housing can be built by removing parking garages throughout the site — which would lessen displacement and allow a significant density increase.

Assurances by the developer should not placate the city or the supervisors. If the supervisors lean toward approval, they need to be reminded of the transit, sustainability, and open-space concerns of the project to ensure that the design is changed either through revisions of portions or the whole to make more clear the concerns that the project has been greenwashed to promote the developer’s interests.

Aaron Goodman is an architect and Bay Area native.

How to move 200,000 people around America’s Cup

Mary Magee
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How to move 200,000 people around America’s Cup

I’ve been wondering how the city plans to move the thousands of spectators expected to show up for a series of regattas in 2012 and 2013, leading up to and including the 34th America’s Cup Final.

And today I had a chance to start perusing the city’s draft People Plan which aims to move up to 200,000 residents and visitors daily to the city’s waterfront and is promising to be “the most transit, bicycle and pedestrian-friendly major sporting event in history.”

(Note to compulsive printers of online government documents: thanks to some nifty maps in this document, your printer may experience replication difficulties. For instance, I had to print everything but the maps on pages 13 and 14 of the document.)

Anyways, my preliminary review revealed that there is a special section in the draft dedicated to the “special transportation needs” of America’s Cup “participants” and that these participants include teams, event staff and, ta da!, accredited media.

“Special transportation needs for the ‘participant” group include but are not limited to staff access to race-related areas and other constricted waterfront areas,” states the plan. “These activities may require unique and frequent vehicle access to various sites.”

[Note to self: Remember to check out what is required to qualify as “accredited media” for a seat in one of the vehicles frequently accessing the area.]

Just kidding, and now, back to the needs of regular people who want to see the event.

“Part of the appeal that brought the Events to San Francisco Bay was the opportunity to create a new kind of viewing experience for the highest level of competitive sailing, with races held in close proximity to urban areas and accessible shoreline instead of open seas,” states the plan’s “Strategic Adaptability” section.

“The novelty of this concept creates excitement but it also creates uncertainty, in that there are few instructive examples of how spectators will choose to attend an America’s Cup Final-level sailing event in the middle of a weekend day, or how a large event in San Francisco Bay during a weekday will affect the ability of Bay Area residents to commute to work or their other daytime destinations,” the section notes.

{This sounds like the city is trying to figure out how many of us will choose to be anywhere but San Francisco on the weekends in question, how many of us who work in San Francisco are planning to play hookey to attend week day events, and how many will show up even if the Bay is swathed in fog.]

Un its draft plan,  the city promises  “to seed the strategies set forth in the People Plan with a measure of adaptability to allow for the strategic deployment of a finite amount of transportation resources across the spectrum of transportation demands associated with the Events in accordance with the expected demands of each day.”

Beyond that, the document is divided into three main parts. One itemizes likely destinations, the next describes transportation strategies to serve these key destinations, and the final section describes “additional considerations and strategies.”

To learn a) which race facilities, waterfront locations, and race viewing locations will be accessible to the public, b) which bus, rail, cable car, bike, automobile and ferry routes will be modified, and c) which parking and special locations will be added, be sure to check out the plan. And then eave your comments at the city’s feedback site here.

For, as the city’s website warns, “The early draft of the People Plan is the product of analysis by city and SFMTA staff, with early input from stakeholder groups. The draft People Plan announced today will also undergo significant and further revisions, following input from members of the public, advocates, city and agency staff, the environmental community and other stakeholders in the coming months. Final approval and consideration will occur following the completion of environmental review.”

In other words, review the documents now and speak your piece soon, otherwise your ideas won’t have any chance of making it into the final plan.

Or at Mayor Ed Lee put it in a press release, “We are moving rapidly to meet our commitments to host a spectacular 34th America’s Cup in 2013 and set a new standard for sustainable event-planning. The America’s Cup is a unique opportunity to leverage our region’s transportation resources and our enthusiasm to deliver the most transit, bicycle and pedestrian-friendly international major sporting event in history for residents and visitors alike.”

And here’s hoping that we will all be “moving rapidly” when the regatta finally rolls into town…

Roller derby: the San Francisco treat

Andrew Lam
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4

Drizzly March was a slow time for San Fran sports fans — the last Super Bowl Sunday pig-in-a-blanket put to bed a month before, the NBA trade deadline past and playoffs a distant dream; and today’s April 1 major league baseball opening games an agonizing countdown away. Short of swimming through the dreary rains to San Jose’s Shark Tank, what’s a rowdy, rooting beer-guzzler to do?

Heading to Golden Gate Park to cheer on some equally rowdy rollers might not be the first thought that comes to mind, but it’s exactly what thousands of die-hard derby-goers did on March 19, when the storied San Francisco Bay Bombers elbowed past the Brooklyn Red Devils in the American Roller Skating Derby league’s world championship game.

Some may not consider a wet night in a packed Kezar Pavilion to be a legit answer to the pro-sports dry spell. But the Bay Area-based ARSD league is serious about its professional status, taking pride in everything from the team uniforms to the traditional banked track – a far cry, if you please, from the fishnets and flat floors of newer leagues. 

Bombers’ general manager Jim Fitzpatrick, who skated for the team from 1977 to 1987, has now delivered his third straight league title since rejoining as GM in 2007 (the ARSD doesn’t hold its championship game every year). For his efforts, he’s received three straight general manager of the year awards. But for him, the real thrill is keeping banked track derby – and its SF history – alive. 

“As a little kid growing up in San Francisco roller derby was huge,” Fitzpatrick said. “Everyone watched the Bombers on TV, everyone knew them. I dreamed about playing for them in Kezar. Now, I want to honor the tradition of the old derby.”

The venerable “old derby” is rooted in19th century roller marathons that lasted for days, sometimes caused deaths, and, on the whole, managed to acquire a reputation as less-than-legitimate. The sport was popularized as a Depression-era divertissement by Chicagoan Leo Seltzer, who in 1935 built a banked track and took it on the road, dubbing it the Transcontinental Roller Derby. At each stop, skaters would circle the wooden ring as many as 57,000 times, simulating a days-long journey from New York to California, with lit-up placeholders marking teams’ make-believe progress across a billboard-sized map of the U.S.. 

Derby historians credit crowds’ hunger for blood (not that 57,000 laps would be tedious otherwise, Nascar notwithstanding) with the spectacle’s increasing focus on physical contact and frightening pile-ups. The endurance element gave way to a derby more similar to that of today, where a “jammer” on each team gains points by bumping, jumping and jostling past opposing teams’ “blockers.” 

In 1949, Seltzer created the National Roller Derby League to showcase the scintillating sport, which was poised to become a television sensation. Echoing his earlier pilgrim’s progress, he packed up the whole shebang and moved it first to Los Angeles and then to the Bay, where the 1954 formation of the San Francisco Bay Bombers created a lasting sports legacy with some of the game’s most enduring stars. (Bomber Joanie Weston was even reputed to be the era’s highest-paid female athlete.) 

The iconic Bombers were the epitome of the banked track derby that aficionados like Fitzpatrick remember watching on their family room TV sets as youths. Dozens of games a year were taped in Kezar Pavilion, adjacent to then-home of both the Oakland Raiders and the San Francisco 49ers. From there, KTVU broadcast Bombers’ games to hundreds of cities nationwide, making roller derby the Rice-a-Roni of sports, synonymous with San Francisco. 

Seltzer eventually transferred ownership to his son, Jerry, who would later recall the glory of San Francisco’s skating days, when Kezar regularly sold out. And just for an added taste of legitimacy: the Bombers shared locker rooms with their NFL stadium-mates. 

“There were no dressing rooms in Kezar Stadium,” the younger Seltzer wrote in a blog he kept, “so when the 49ers played a home game they used the tacky dressing rooms in the Pavilion. Sometimes there was virtually no overlap between the time the players left and our teams arrived, to really scummy and wet dressing rooms.” 

Fitzpatrick affirmed that the dressing rooms still exist today, though Kezar Stadium has been knocked down and rebuilt. Under the parking lot, connected to a tunnel that once funneled the teams out to a roaring crowd, the rooms are a kind of shrine to days-gone-by – days when the 49ers and the Raiders would lace up roller skates and join the Bombers on the banked track, sometimes indulging in a bit of competitive action off the football field.

“Of course,” Fitzpatrick said, “That was before the NFL took off and salaries skyrocketed.  Once that happened, the guys couldn’t afford to be fooling around.”

Though their fun ended, there was still plenty of thrill left on the banked track. The ‘60s marked the height of television popularity for the Bombers who, across the nation, were considered the team to beat.

Seltzer’s league folded in 1973, a disaster attributed to everything from the rising cost of fuel to the diversification of televised sports and events. Since then, leagues have appeared, disappeared, fractured and gone defunct, the sport’s popularity waxing and waning, the focus shifting between skill and sensation. 

“Other games and jams have come along,” Fitzpatrick explained, applying the term “silly stuff,” to a whole array of roller sports, from L.A.-based Roller Games to CBS’ over the top show Roller Jam. Fitzpatrick even alluded to “midgets on skates” – and while that might be happening somewhere out there, it doesn’t take tiny rollers to get folks to think of derby as sports entertainment: the WWE on wheels, with sexpot women in the starring roles. 

Mixed-gender for-profit leagues like the Bombers’ league ARSD leave off the false eyelashes, but fans still debate whether the scores – and punches – are fake.

According Fitzpatrick, the Bombers’ aggression is all real.

“It’s a competitive sport,” he said, “based on contact and maneuverability. It’s like when someone cuts you off on the road – like road rage, tempers flare.”

Fitzpatrick’s sincerity never falters, and it’s clear he’s proud of his skaters when he describes how player coach Richard Brown scored the last point of the 43-40 game despite sweltering heat, or when he hails rookie Crista Chua as the female standout who learned under fire and performed under pressure, despite the championship being only her second real game.

And for their part, the players are just as serious. Chua said she trains hard for the team, staying in shape with running, weights, extra skating practices, and yoga sessions to stay flexible. 

Despite the sensationalism, Fitzpatrick’s goal is to keep roller derby on track – and so far, his efforts have resulting in a sterling record. Will it ever be as good as lacing up the ol’ skates for a game of his own? According to Fitzpatrick, it’s even better.

“To see something completely disappear, and then to be able to carry on – I’m that much more grateful,” he said.

As for the future: “I want to keep on the path, looking ahead to great skating and great ability. There’s always going to be showmanship in every sport, but I want to honor the athleticism.”

 

Rent control is sticking point in Parkmerced debate

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Rent control is sticking point in Parkmerced debate

After a marathon debate at the March 29 Board of Supervisors meeting lasting several hours, a vote to certify the environmental impact report (EIR) for the masssive Parkmerced overhaul was pushed back until May 24.

Sup. David Campos raised concerns about the plan, saying the outstanding issue for him was questions surrounding whether a provision of the development agreement guaranteeing preservation of rent control could be enforced. He said he did not feel supervisors could rule on the EIR without having that issue settled. Campos made the motion to continue, which was seconded by Sup. Sean Elsbernd and agreed upon unanimously.

“I have to say that for me, there is still a question that remains that has to do with the potential loss of rent control housing,” Campos said. “I understand that there are differences of opinion with respect to that issue, but I am still puzzled as to whether or not we have all the information that needs to be had to make an informed decision here. I think that something as important as this project requires that we have as much information as we can.”

Elsbernd, whose District 7 includes Parkmerced, raised concerns about the impact to residents of living in a long-term construction zone, but he said he was convinced that the project could help improve public transit and serve to limit congrestion on the western side of the city. “It’s one step backward to get two steps forward,” he said of the increase in roughly 6,000 parking spaces that would go along with the project. “The west side is dramatically underserved when it comes to public transit, and it’s only going to improve with a project like this.”

But Campos, who sparred with Elsbernd at many turns throughout the lengthy discussion, said it was hard to see how traffic along 19th Avenue would improve with the addition of so many more cars. “You’re talking about 9,450 parking spaces, plus 1,681 street parking spaces, so the total number is 11,131. … So I’m trying to understand how such a significant increase will actually help congestion, which is what was said earlier. How’s that something that will actually make things better, not worse?”

Editor’s Notes

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

The San Francisco City Planning Department is revising its housing plan, and there’s a lot of indignation on the west side of town. See, the Housing Element of the city’s General Plan calls for a little bit of increased density in some of the neighborhoods that have fought density for years.

The unwritten law of San Francisco housing politics is that you don’t even talk about density west of 19th Avenue, and it’s pretty hard to talk about it anywhere beyond the western borders of Districts 3, 5, 8 and 11. So all the new housing gets pushed into the eastern neighborhoods — and all the rational planning people agree that the other side of town should absorb at least some of it. Density doesn’t always mean big, tall buildings, by the way — legalizing in-law units would create more housing, and more density, in single-family-home areas. But you run into the problem of everyone wanting a car — and turning garages into apartments means more cars fighting for that almighty parking space. Housing cars in this town sometimes seems more important than housing people.

So we’re going to hear some squawking — and a lot of it’s going to be misplaced. Because the real issue in the Housing Element isn’t density — it’s affordability.

The city acknowledges, in its own documents, that based on local needs, more than 60 percent of the new housing in the city has to be available at below-market-rate prices. The planners also admit they have no idea how to make that happen:

“The city will not likely see the development 31,000 new units, particularly its affordability goals of creating over 12,000 units affordable to low and very low income levels projected by the [city’s needs assessment] … [But] realizing the city’s housing targets requires tremendous public and private financing, [which] given the state and local economy and private finance conditions, is not likely to be available during the period of this Housing Element.”

Translation: we can’t afford to do what everyone agrees we have to do.

San Francisco city planning has been driven for decades by the needs of the private sector. It’s made good money for the developers (building housing in SF is still highly lucrative). But as public policy, the model has failed.

Until we set clear policies saying that the needs of local residents come first — and that high-end housing isn’t meeting those needs — we’re going to keep living with a serious disconnect.

The Parkmerced investors

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Parkmerced investors

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Parkmerced is one of the largest rental properties west of the Mississippi, and with more than 1,500 rent-controlled units, it’s an important piece of the city’s affordable-housing stock. Among the residents who live in the neighborhood-scale apartment complex are seniors, young families, and working-class San Franciscans, some of whom have called it home for decades.

A plan for an extraordinary overhaul of the property envisions tearing down the existing low-rise apartments and nearly tripling the number of units with a construction project that could take up to 30 years. On March 29, after Guardian press time, the Board of Supervisors was scheduled to vote on whether to uphold the plan’s environmental impact report (EIR), a key milestone of the approval process.

The Planning Commission voted 4-3 to certify the EIR, and if the board followed suit by rejecting four different appeals filed against it, Parkmerced would be on track to clear final approval sometime in May.

San Francisco Tomorrow was among the groups that filed appeals against the Parkmerced plan. “They want to destroy a neighborhood without sufficient justification or mitigation,” said Jennifer Clary, the group’s president, citing concerns about traffic congestion, loss of an historic landscape, and the destruction of rent-controlled housing.

Julian Lagos, a resident of 18 years, filed an appeal on behalf of the Coalition to Save Parkmerced. “It’s a very blue-collar community, and they want to replace it with wall-to-wall luxury high-rise condos,” said Lagos, who lives in a unit that would be targeted for demolition under the development plan. “I call it ground zero,” he said. “And I tell my neighbors, ‘You’re living at ground zero.’ “

Mayoral development advisor Michael Yarne noted that most points highlighted in the EIR appeals had already been addressed, except one charging that there hadn’t been adequate consideration over whether a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. gas pipeline running underground near Parkmerced could be jeopardized by construction activity. “The answer to that is, that’s a really good question for PG&E,” Yarne said. But he asserted that it wasn’t a project EIR issue.

Elected officials’ reactions to the overall plan were mixed. Lagos noted that campaign filings showed that Sups. Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd had accepted donations from people related to the project, and he predicted that Board of Supervisors President David Chiu would be a swing vote on the issue. Chiu spent several hours touring Parkmerced the Friday before the vote. He did not return Guardian calls seeking comment.

A development agreement between the city and the developer, Parkmerced Investors LLC, promises that existing tenants will keep their rent control at the same monthly rates — even after the apartments they now reside in are razed to make way for new residential towers.

Such a plan typically wouldn’t fly under state law because the Costa-Hawkins Act prohibits a city from imposing rent control on newly constructed housing. Yet city officials, with input from the City Attorney’s Office, say they’ve constructed this deal so that it falls within one of the exceptions written into the state law, offering a legal defense in the event of a court challenge and a guarantee against affordable housing loss.

“The development agreement is like a constitution for land use,” said Yarne. “You can’t get rid of it.” If the project changed hands or the developer went bankrupt, the new owner would be bound by the same terms, Yarne said.

However, Mitchell Omerberg of the Affordable Housing Alliance cautioned that he didn’t believe there was any guarantee that rent-control housing qualified as an exception under Costa-Hawkins. “Like parking a semitruck in a motorcycle space, it’s a poor fit and a risky bet — even before you consider the antipathy to rent control of the California courts,” Omerberg wrote in an argument against the plan.

Tenants advocacy groups have pointed to recent court decisions negating affordable-housing agreements in development projects, saying the legal precedent makes the Parkmerced pact vulnerable to a court challenge. In response, Yarne said those cases had strengthened the city’s legal strategy for formulating the agreement to guard against such a challenge. “This agreement is actually greatly improved because of those cases,” he said.

Nevertheless, there’s a clear financial incentive for the developer to strip away the rent-control unit replacement and other valuable community benefits it is required to deliver under the terms of its agreement with the city. An independent analysis of the project’s financial plan found that if Parkmerced Investors LLC adheres to all the terms of the agreement as planned, its financial rate of return would be less than ideal.

Drafted by consultant CB Richard Ellis (CBRE) to provide an objective financial picture for the city, the report found that the developer’s estimated 17.8 percent rate of return was “slightly below the threshold required to attract the necessary private investment” because investors aim for at least 20 percent in this market. “This means that, based on current and reasonably foreseeable short-term market conditions, the project may not be economically feasible,” the report noted. It added a disclaimer saying that cash flow from rent payments could offset that risk.

That lower rate of return isn’t a cause for concern, Yarne said, but rather a sign of the city’s negotiating prowess, since “we’ve gotten as much as we can in terms of public benefits. That 17.8 percent rate of return shows that we’re probably at the max.”

At the same time, the financial analysis showed that the developer’s prospects improved under hypothetical “tested scenarios” where the expensive community benefits promised in the development agreement weren’t a factor. As part of the analysis, CBRE looked at how the numbers would change if the developer decided to build new market-rate units instead of replacing all the existing rent-controlled units, and found it would fetch a 19 percent rate of return. In a scenario where it stripped out additional costs such as a community garden and new transit line, the rate of return would jump to an eye-catching 23 percent.

But those scenarios are just a hypothetical way to arrive at conclusions about a project’s value, said consultant Mary Smitheran, who drafted the report. “The development agreement specifies that those items need to be provided,” she said.

City officials have given the impression that they’re nailing down a set of requirements that the developer, or any future property owner, cannot get out of. But the people behind this project are some savvy Wall Street investors who are no strangers to controversy.

Fortress Investment Group, a New York City-based hedge fund and private equity firm with directors hailing from Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, gained a controlling interest in Parkmerced last year after Stellar Management couldn’t make the payment on its $550 million debt.

Stellar jointly purchased the property in 2005 with financial partner Rockpoint Group, setting up Parkmerced Investors LLC as the official ownership company. Stellar still manages the property, but Fortress has seized financial control. A recent report on the Commercial Real Estate Direct website noted that its $550 million debt had been modified recently with a five-year extension to 2016.

Fortress made headlines in 2009 after it stopped providing funds to Millennium Development Corp. for the Olympic Village project in Vancouver, British Columbia leaving the city on the hook for hundreds of millions to finish the job in time for the winter games. Meanwhile, Fortress CEO Daniel Mudd recently got formal notification from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) that he could potentially face civil action relating to his former job as CEO of Fannie Mae, the government-backed mortgage giant, for allegedly providing misleading information about subprime loans.

Stellar, a New York City company run by real-estate tycoon Larry Gluck, was profiled in a 2009 Mother Jones article about Riverton Homes, a 1,230-unit Manhattan rental housing project built in a similar style to Parkmerced, which Stellar purchased in 2005. Although Stellar assured residents that their affordable rental payments would remain unaffected, hidden from view was its business plan estimating that half the tenants would be paying almost triple the rental rates by 2011. Since rents couldn’t ultimately be raised high enough to cover the debt payments, the complex went into foreclosure — but Stellar was shielded against loss because, on paper, Riverton was owned by a separate LLC.

Linh Le, a 36-year resident of Parkmerced and former Chevron employee, wrote to the Board of Supervisors in advance of the March 29 hearing to warn of the financial troubles the investors had experienced before.

“This project reflects a pipe dream that was hatched during an era of reckless spending, fake prosperity, and seemingly limitless money that has since crashed and nearly destroyed America,” he wrote. “The business model that Parkmerced based this plan on has failed and nearly ruined their enterprise. That era is over and the world has changed.”

NY Export: Opus Jazz — where dancers get to be themselves

John Elberling
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0
NY Export: Opus Jazz — where dancers get to be themselves

The empty, Depression-era McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn was, until 2009, a hip venue packed with vibrant twenty-somethings for concerts and summer “pool parties” alike. It’s also appropriately the location for the opening dance scene in NY Export: Opus Jazz, a film celebrating youthful exuberance, during which, fresh-faced New York City Ballet members in sneakers and street clothes perform the original 1958 Jerome Robbins choreography from the ballet of the same name. Exuding vigor and cool, the film, conceived by New York City Ballet soloists Ellen Bar and Sean Suozzi, marks the first return of Robbins’ choreography to the streets of New York since West Side Story. NY Export: Opus Jazz made its San Francisco premiere on Fri./25 at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center as part of the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, directed by Greta Schoenberg.

During the first movement, a linked chain of dancers, captured from above, curves into a semi-circle on top of peeling painted swim lanes. The dancers sway, snap their fingers and throw high kicks under the arch of crumbling brick that frames the pool. The next movement of Robbins’ dance emerges when four men and the sizzling Georgina Pazcoguin tear into Richard Prince’s jazz score in an abandoned parking garage. Leaping to their stomachs and sliding on the cement, the men appear smaller than the statuesque female standing in the foreground of certain camera shots, adding to Pazcouguin’s powerful presence. Each dance scene alternates with footage of city life (traveling on a train, gathering at a diner), thus incorporating the soundscape of Manhattan’s taxis and horns.

Trailer for NY Export: Opus Jazz:

M

As the whole ensemble gathers at a school gym, sneakers squeak on the shellacked wood floor and dancers take turns curling their hands into fists and thrusting the pelvis. Arial shots capture the colorful formations as dancers weave between each other on the basketball court. Men playfully shimmy and quick flashes of partnering send dancers into the air. The performers get to be themselves in this film: both dancers and city dwellers, with Robbins’ still-relevant choreography as the vehicle for expressing youthful vibrancy.

Later, Craig Hall and Rachel Rutherford perform the seductive duet during sunset on Manhattan’s Highline, their tension-filled embrace revealing a sense of yearning. With all of the film’s dance set in abandoned surroundings, including the final movement performed onstage at an empty theater, NY Export: Opus Jazz suggests that the dancers truly perform for the joy of themselves and each other, rather than any outside audience. The resulting most ravishing spirit is addictive – that of being young and alive in the Big Apple.

NY Export: Opus Jazz is available for purchase at www.opusjazz.com.

 

Man w/ parking

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Man w/ parking

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

Really??? Really, Earl? Really? Do you really think the source of your romantical problems is lack of parking? If so, by buying a motorcycle, a car, and a parking space, won’t you be setting yourself up for the opposite sort of problem: too much love.

As it is, almost every straight lady in San Francisco wants a piece of you, except for most of them. Still, that’s a good 10 or 12 good women who don’t need no parking spots or a motorcycle helmet to come see you, see?

So … and don’t forget, exactly one year ago the other day I myself proposed marriage to you in this very column because I thought it would make good copy. My being the consummate journalist aside, did I care if you had a parking spot, or wheels of any kind? No. I live downstairs.

Granted, not all women live downstairs from you. I’m just saying. The other night Hedgehog and me went out dancing to Cajun music. Technically, she didn’t dance; she played the washboard, and I danced.

In short, we had the time of our lives and in the process got what would best be described as drunk. I invited the 87-year-old man I was dancing with to come home with us, just in case his last remaining unfulfilled fantasy was to watch two highly carnivorous wimmins in bed together, but he just wanted to keep dancing.

Hedgehog and me went to a grocery store across the street and we bought, among other things we might like to later lick off of each other’s bodies, a bottle of wine. Being already sloppy, as soon as we got outside the store, I accidentally dropped the bag with the wine bottle in it. Her graceful little flower, Hedgehog calls me, mostly for throwing silverware around restaurants. Now this.

She wanted to just leave it, which is kind of a uniquely New Orleans approach to problem-solving. I hailed a cart collector and showed him the mess we’d made so at least they could clean up the glass. “No problem,” he said. “Go get another bottle.”

Not thinking enough to leave the soggy plastic bag there, I dripped purple back into the store to customer service. They said, “No problem. Go get another bottle.”

Never even checked the receipt. Hedgehog could have gotten something twice as expensive, while I stood there bathing in fluorescence watching the mopper mop up my mess and thinking: “What a unique approach to public drunkenness.”

But she didn’t.

Yours,

Me

Dear Mrs. Butter,

That is great. Mod and Kat said you guys tried to go to the Brown Sugar Kitchen before, but could not get in. The thing being that it is always so crowded. We had to wait a little while at noonish on a Tuesday. But then we did get in and got to eat.

Kat had the chicken and waffles ($15), Mod had the BBQ pork sandwich ($9.50) and I got the blackened catfish ($15). We all got the biscuit made with bacon, although I do not remember it being bacony, but it was good.

Kat was very excited about some football league she’s joined and says she’s never looked more forward to getting slaughtered on the field. She says she plays with gals who have never played football before, and it is the most fun she has ever had.

Mod learned how to do some weirdo therapy that brought all my knotted synapse packages to the fore before the food came. It also made my eyes tired and got me interested in the sidestep, like in gym class.

Kat thought the waffles were a little less than substantial, but I found them to be light and delightful. The pork sandwich seemed delicious, but Mod ho-hummed it a little. And I found the catfish to be very subtle, and in need of hot-sauce. We all agreed, good. But maybe not worth the wait.

Yers,

Earl

BROWN SUGAR KITCHEN

Tue.–Sat. 7 a.m.–3 p.m.; Sun. 8 a.m.–3 p.m.

2534 Mandela, Oakl.

(510) 839-7685

MC/V

Beer and wine

Beadeviled

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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1
Beadeviled

CHEAP EATS Dear Earl Butter,

As it turns out, the whole purpose of Mardi Gras is to catch beads. There are also little plastic cups and stuff, but what I want is a football. I want to make a leaping spinning catch, like a halftime Frisbee dog, bring it on home, lay it at Coach’s feet, and pant.

Do you think she will pat me on the head?

Do you think she will let me play in the season opener (this weekend!) even though I’ve missed every single practice since training camp?

I don’t know.

She texted me yesterday to ask how my lesbianism was coming along. I said, We’re at a parade, recording the crowd and the sounds of feet, and taking pictures of the childerns. I said I was trying real hard to catch a football for her, but so far … beads.

She expressed her disbelief (which I share) that I was ever even thinking of France over Mardi Gras. Then she texted again and said, for clarification, "Boobies!!!!!"

I paraphrase. There might have only been four exclamation marks. The point is, Earl, that when people think of Mardi Gras, they think of tits. Well, I am here to tell you — you, Earl, of all people, because I know you are more interested in subtlety and nuance than most of my two lesbian friends — that this is about so much more than that.

For example: ass.

I’m kidding. I’ve been to four parades already and I’ve seen about as much skin as I would have seen if I went to church. Admittedly, I haven’t been hanging out in the French Canadian Quarter, let alone on Bourbon Street, which is what everyone associates with Mardi Gras, not to mention New Orleans. But that’s like thinking of San Francisco as Fisherman’s Wharf.

Which would be what? Ridiculous. Yes. So my own personal, privately-held, and highly journalistic insider’s impression of Mardi Gras so far is that it’s a family affair, featuring marching bands of pimply teenagers and cute-ass kids punctuated by horses, trucks, and tractor-pulled floats from which ridiculously attired adults shower the citizenry and streets of New Orleans with insanely cheap and even more insanely coveted toys and trinkets. You can imagine my joy!

Boobs be damned, Earl, I am catching Coach a football or my name ain’t whatever my name is.

Dear Li’l Sister,

That is great. Me and Diane went to Katana-Ya in downtown San Francisco after seeing the greatest western movie of all time. Diane called my tongue unsavory, which you would think would put me in a funk, but, I don’t know, I just blew it off somehow.

Which is kind of what happens in this western we seen. This guy kind of gets his tongue blew off. It’s an odd way to start an afternoon when you are going to write about food. But it is not too odd.

We both got ramen. Big bowls of delicious noodle soup with prizes, like pot stickers. Hers was vegetable with soba noodles ($11) and mine was the katanaya, which had fried chicken and pork and pot stickers (get to the pot stickers early or they get a little chewy) and corn and fried potatoes and seaweed and scallion and barbecued pork and boiled egg. That is a lot of prizes ($12.90).

We talked of how we were both going to find us mates. Her plan was, I forget. And my plan was to get a garage space in my building and then get a car and a motorcycle. I believe it is the parking inconvenience that has hindered me all these years.

We also had edamame.

And Diane had a lollipop, seeing that there was a bowl of them on the counter and they were free. That is supposed to be a good sign.

Yers,

Earl

Katana-Ya

Daily: 11:30 a.m.–1 a.m.

430 Geary, SF

(415)771-1280

MC/V

Beer and wine

Leather forever

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Leather forever

Every year since 1989, 25 movies are added to the National Film Registry, deemed worthy of preservation for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Their current number encompasses Eraserhead (1976) and Enter the Dragon (1973), the Zapruder and Hindenburg footage, The Muppet Movie (1979), “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger films, and This is Spinal Tap (1984) — as well as, you know, Citizen Kane (1941) and stuff. Which is to say, it is one of those ways in which democracy just kinda works.

However, even a list as diverse in age, genre, theme, and purpose as this one is capable of heinous omission, the kind that makes you question the whole system and wonder why somebody just doesn’t do something. You may not even want to continue here, because what you are about to read will infuriate you. It is this: there are 550 movies at present in the National Film Registry. And not one is Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986).

You could argue it is not there because the Library of Congress does not want future generations to know a truth that ugly — but then, how to explain the presence of Hoosiers (1986)? Simply, it is an injustice that can only have been orchestrated by evildoers who hate freedom. They do not want you to rock.

Fortunately here in San Francisco we know how to rock out — yes, frequently with our cocks out — and will be doing so particularly when the Found Footage Festival returns to the Red Vic. This is good news enough, but it is made extra-special because in addition to their debonair live commentary on the latest batch of mind-boggling VHS clips culled from garage sales and thrift stores, FFF curators Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett will be presenting a 25th-anniversary screening of Heavy Metal Parking Lot.

In 1986, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn had the extremely good idea of taking their camcorder to the late Capital Centre stadium in Landover, Md., before a Judas Priest concert and letting the fans outside just … be. The resulting anthropological study went viral in an analog era, spurring countless homages and imitations, eventually getting a theatrical release (opening for Chris Smith’s longer 2001 documentary Home Movie — much as Dokken opened for the Priest!) and, once a few music rights issues were ironed out, a deluxe DVD. Not afraid to milk it, the filmmakers later explored further vistas of hot pavement in Neil Diamond Parking Lot, Yanni Parking Lot, Michael Jackson Arraignment Parking Lot, Pro Wrestling Sidewalk, Science Fiction Convention Lawn, and so forth. Proving there is, perhaps, endless variety between groups of people who are exactly like each other.

Which in Heavy Metal‘s case means shirtless, drunk, mullet or teased-haired, and absolutely certain everything either sux (like Dokken) or rüles (duh). What really sucks, of course, is everything not metal, like the musical and societal blight known as “that punk shit.” With inimitable logic, one young buck opines “Madonna can go to hell. She’s a dick.” But he’s unusually verbose — most of the kids here stick to sentiments short enough they’ll have no trouble heaving them onto the cement a couple hours later.

The titanium-strength cluelessness on display is enhanced by one’s knowledge that this sea of fist-pumping testosterone was shortly about to worship the rare metal lead singer who not only looked like he’d stepped out of the Folsom Street Fair, but probably actually had. (Denial is the most powerful weed: even I was shocked along with the rest of a 1978 Queen concert’s Kalamazoo, Mich., audience when Freddie Mercury acted kinda … you know. I mean, who’d have guessed?)

Heavy Metal will just be only one of the many amazing artifacts excavated and edited for your edification by the Found Footage Fest dudes, who have been doing this for seven years now and might actually make money at it. Their current program of video oddities from the golden age of VHS includes montages devoted to ventriloquism instruction (oddly creepier even than the sex-hypnosis segment), real-life Elmer Fudds’ hunting calls, things strange even by public-access-channel standards, horrifyingly dull seminar speakers, and the inevitable vintage exercise-video grotesquerie.

Other highlights include a bit from How to Spot Counterfeit Beanie Babies (what Pruehler calls “this adorable crime”), the lowest of all Linda Blair career lows, and something called “Rent-A-Friend,” which stares into an existential void more terrifying even than Heavy Metal Parking Lot.

FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL

Fri/4–Sat/5, 7:15 and 9:15 p.m., $12

Red Vic

1727 Haight, SF

(415) 668-3994

www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Our Weekly Picks: March 2-8

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 2

MUSIC

Holcombe Waller

Six years after releasing Troubled Times, Holcombe Waller reemerges from a chrysalis of artistic incubation with Into the Dark Unknown — the album-length culmination of an eponymous theater piece. The butterfly is an apt metaphor for this sylph-like spirit, whose androgynous, four-octave voice and slight build match a melancholy limned by sharp, poetic imagery. Excepting an occasional lyric like “you are the unicorn,” Waller’s male-Sarah-McLaughlin meets-Sufjan-Stevens style is still somehow just the right side of soppy: intimate and delicate, sweeping and epic, his songs are sometimes musically and thematically intense and focused, sometimes just gossamer strings of notes. Waller wrote the score for David Weissman’s We Were Here and has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Doris Duke Charitable Trust — big, solid accomplishments that tether the ethereal artist to critical acclaim. (Emily Appelbaum)

8 p.m., $16

Swedish American Hall

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

www.cafedunord.com


THURSDAY 3

Dance

Merce Cunningham Dance Company

This is it: the last time to see the famed Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the Bay Area before it disbands this December. MCDC’s performances in Berkeley are part of “The Legacy Tour,” celebrating the work and life of the dance world giant. The work of the late Merce Cunningham, which includes collaborations with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and other major artists, is a meaty slice of dance history. Don’t miss this chance to see the carriers of Cunningham’s genius perform historic remountings Pond Way and Antic Meet, along with Sounddance and the Bay Area premiere of Roaratorio. (Julie Potter)

Thurs/3–Sat/5, 8 p.m., $22–$48

Zellerbach Hall

Bancroft at Telegraph, UC Berkeley, Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperfs.berkeley.edu


FILM

“The Lucky Monkey Bike Film Festival”

Bike enthusiasts everywhere, roll up your pant legs, put on your helmet, and ride to the inaugural day of this mini film festival inspired by Margret and H. A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, who escaped France on bikes during World War II. The fest kicks off with 1948 Italian neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief, with short films before and after. On the second day, watch 2003’s The Triplets of Belleville and 1979’s Breaking Away, plus more shorts. Free valet bike parking provided by the San Francisco Bike Coalition. (Jen Verzosa)

Thurs/3, 5 p.m.; Sun/6, 11 a.m., free with museum admission ($5–$10)

Contemporary Jewish Museum

736 Mission, SF

(415) 655-7800

www.thecjm.org

 

EVENT

“Natural Wonders: 59th Pacific Orchid Exposition”

Families can be quirky, crazy, and brutal. But nothing beats the Orchidaceae, the planet’s second-largest and most highly evolved plant fam. Some orchids mimic rotting flesh to attract carrion-eating flies that pollinate the flower as they breed on its thick, waxy petals. Another trickster species resembles a lady bee — complete with textures that stimulate male bee genitalia and emitting odors of horny females — on which real male bees futilely hump, getting the pollination job done once again. Other orchids have trap doors; some produce erotic oils for insects to perfume their own six-legged courtship; and one is the source of vanilla. See more than 150,000 of these sexy plants at the largest orchid show in the country. Bring a date! (Kat Renz)

Thurs/3, 6:30–10 p.m.; Fri/4, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.;

Sat/5, 9 a.m.–6 p.m.; Sun/6, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., $14–$40

Fort Mason Center

Marina at Laguna, SF

(415) 665-2468

www.orchidsanfrancisco.org


FRIDAY 4

DANCE

Stephen Petronio Company

The Stephen Petronio Company is one of the few modern dance ensembles (ODC is another) that still employs its dancers full time. But wow, does Petronio work them. He packs his choreography with high-velocity ideas that he then hurtles at us in dense, shifting combinations that can be exhausting to watch. Then again, that’s one of the reasons that Petronio’s choreography is so thrillingly alive. For his newest work, I Drink the Air Before Me — thank you Mr. Shakespeare — Petronio foregoes the mixed-program format for a single, full-evening piece. Music is by contemporary composer Nico Muhly; Petronio’s costume is by photographer Cindy Sherman. (Rita Felciano)

Fri/4–Sat/5, 8 p.m., $30–$50

Novellus Theater

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-ARTS

www.performances.org

 

MUSIC

Crystal Castles

Since 2005, producer and multiinstrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass — better known as the Canadian electro pop duo Crystal Castles — have stolen the hearts of hipsters everywhere. The band’s name is also the result of some good-natured theft: Kath took the name from She-Ra’s hideout in the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon spin-off. It’s also the name of an Atari video game, which is fitting given that part of its sound is generated by a keyboard modified with an Atari 5200 sound chip. Despite its copycat name, Crystal Castles’ low-res sound is a radically unique collision of experimental noise and pop. Renowned for its frenzied live shows, Crystal Castles’ 8-bit video game-like tunes will make you do the robot. (Verzosa)

With Suuns

9 p.m., $26–$28

Warfield

982 Market, SF

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

 

MUSIC

Drive-By Truckers

Now with 15 years under its belt, country rock outfit Drive-By Truckers is enjoying the most notable stretch of its career. A changing lineup has seen members come and go — most recently with the departure of group veteran, Jason Isbell — but the Truckers’ consistency has never wavered. The Big To-Do (2010), an album full of the band’s trademark tales of blue-collar malaise and sly humor, was its highest-charting yet and helped spotlight a band whose fanbase is quickly evolving beyond its tightly-knit core. Drive-By Truckers is known to thrive in the live setting, turning its (relatively) more compact album tracks into sprawling, three guitar jams full of Skynyrd-esque Southern rock. (Landon Moblad)

Fri/4-Sat/5, 9 p.m., $25

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.livenation.com

 

MUSIC

Free the Robots

The initial installment of the Low End Theory last month proved that the L.A. monthly beat showcase could work in SF, buoyed by residents Gaslamp Killer, Daddy Kev, Nobody, D-Styles, and Nocando. This time around, Flying Lotus is sure to draw a crowd — but also worth noticing is Free the Robots. Last year’s debut LP Ctrl Alt Delete was full of spaced-out jams, layered bass beats, and tight samples (check that sexy strut of Baris Manco’s “Lambaya Puf De” on “Turkish Voodoo.”) The groove on “Turbulance” will lift you, rock you back and forth, and make you play the air-Moog. (Ryan Prendiville)

With Matthewdavid, Dose One, and Shlohmo

10 p.m., $20

103 Harriet, SF

www.1015.com/onezerothree

 

DANCE

Devotion

In a return to the Bay Area, Sarah Michelson, who made her first work at ODC Theater 20 years ago as part of its long-running Pilot Program, brings Devotion, a collaboration with Richard Maxwell, artistic director of the New York City Players. Performed by Michelson’s dynamic dance company and Maxwell’s veteran actors, this narrative dance theater work entails extreme physical limits and experimental storytelling, and incorporates Philip Glass’ “Dance IX” — the same music Twyla Tharp used for her masterpiece In The Upper Room. Come see Michelson’s stark, simple, ironic work mix with Maxwell’s legendary voice. (Potter)

Fri/4–Sun/6, 8 p.m., $15–$18

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

(415) 863-9834

www.odctheater.org

 

SATURDAY 5

MUSIC

Too $hort

Though he’s been dabbling in Dirty South styles and collaborating with crunk mainstay Lil Jon since his 1999 comeback, it’s pretty impossible to associate Too $hort with anything other than West Coast hip-hop. The king of dirty rap broke out in 1988 with the release of Life Is … Too Short, which helped put Oakland on the scene and has since worked its way up to double platinum standing. A chance to hear his laid-back flow amid the tight bass lines and funk grooves of his live band is not to be missed. (Moblad)

8 and 10 p.m., $28

Yoshi’s San Francisco

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com/sanfrancisco

 

MONDAY 7

MUSIC

Diamond Rings

Canadian singer-songwriter John O’Regan (of the D’Urbervilles) reinvigorates a formula that’s classic, combining androgyny and pop music. Although Diamond Rings’ music borrows liberally from a range of influences (Do I hear strains of Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” in “Show Me Your Stuff”?) with personal lyrics and an affecting baritone voice, O’Regan’s sound manages to be distinct and to break through YouTube novelty act territory. Diamond Rings headlines with the louder-than-life guitar and drums duo P.S. I Love You, which absolutely destroyed my eardrums at the Hemlock earlier in the year. (Prendiville)

With P.S. I Love You, A B and the Sea

8 p.m., $12

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com


TUESDAY 8

FILM

Truck Farm

Sure, you want well-grown veggies — but you’re a staunch city-dweller, organic produce doesn’t make the food stamp budget, and the landlady ix-nayed a rooftop garden. In New York City, filmmakers Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney (who cocreated and appeared in 2007’s acc documentary King Corn) had similar issues. Until they realized their 1986 Dodge pickup held the 40-square-foot answer. The truck-bed-cum-garden-bed not only brings the farm to the city, it provides weekly food boxes to 20 families. Get the dirt at this outdoor screening of Truck Farm, a 50-minute doc the pair made about their program, accompanied by a discussion on urban farming (proceeds benefit Green Planet Films’ screening series). And will someone please ask how to replicate this without getting a stack of parking tickets? (Renz)

7 p.m., $20–$45

Unwind on Union

1875 Union, SF

www.truck-farm.com


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Is Adachi’s pension reform a Tea Party initiative?

Mary Magee
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54
Is Adachi’s pension reform a Tea Party initiative?

With all eyes on Wisconsin, local labor leaders are suggesting that Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s proposed retirement/health plan reforms are really Tea Party initiatives, even as Adachi threatens to place another Measure B-like initiative on the fall ballot if city leaders can’t agree on a fix for the city’s fiscal problems

Last fall, Adachi started a war with the local labor movement when he placed Measure B on the November ballot. Measure B proposed increasing employee contributions for retirement benefits, decreasing employer contributions for heath benefits for employees, retirees and their dependents, and changing rules for arbitration proceedings about city collective bargaining agreements,

Measure B ultimately failed, but not after both sides spent a ton of cash. And now labor is refusing to have Adachi sit in on their pension reform talks with Mayor Ed Lee, former SEIU President Andy Stern is describing the fight in Wisconsin as a ’15 state GOP Power grab,” and SEIU Local 1021 leader Gabriel Haaland is pointing to Wisconsin as a reason for excluding Adachi from pension reform talks

“Adachi’s obviously scapegoating a group that’s part of a national agenda,” Haaland said, noting that in the states where Republicans gained statehouse control in 2010, there’s talk about eliminating collective bargaining, and ending defined benefit plans and paycheck protection.

“The problem is that pension reform has been blowing on the anti-public sector worker winds that are blowing in Wisconsin and other states, whether progressives want to acknowledge it or not,” Haaland continued. “There is a reason that Adachi got so much money last year, and the corporate interests behind him are part of this effort to bash public sector workers.”

Prop. B’s campaign finance records show the campaign raised $1.125 million in 2010, and that the lion’s share came from wealthy individuals.

Billionaire venture capitalist, former Google board member and Obama supporter Michael Moritz gave $245,000. Author Harrier Heyman, Moritz’ wife, donated $172,500. financial analyst Richard Beleson donated $110,000. George Hume of Basic American Foods donated $50,000. Gov. Schwarzenegger’s former economic policy advisor David Crane gave $37,500. Philanthropist Warren Hellman donated $50,000. Republican investor Howard Leach, who co-hosted a Prop. B fundraiser with former Mayor Willie L. Brown, gave $25,000. Investor Joseph Tobin gave $15,750. Maverick Capital partner David Singer gave $15,000. JGE Capital Partners donated  $15,000; Bechtel owner  Stephen Bechtel Jr gave $10,000: Matthew Cohler, a general partner of Benchmark Capital, donated $10,000; the California Chamber of Commerce donated $5,000 and philanthropist Dede Wilsey gave $1,000.

But records also show that Measure B opponents, which included San Francisco Firefighters, SF Police Officers Association, SF First Responders, the California Nurses Association, United Educators, San Francisco Gardeners, San Francisco Teachers, Library Workers, laguna Honda Workers, donated over $1 million in their successful bid to squash Adachi’s reform. And that just about every elected Democrat, including Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, then mayor Gavin Newsom, Sheriff Mike Hennessey, and Board President David Chiu, came out against Adachi’s original plan.
 
Haaland acknowledged that the argument could be made that the progressives’ version of the hotel tax didn’t pass and less attention was paid to the district elections last fall, because labor focused primarily on defeating Adachi’s Measure B.

“But at the end of the day, we did get the real estate transfer tax and we defeated Measure B,” Haaland observed. “So, we need to keep fighting anti-worker pressure. It’s challenging times, but I feel like the connections need to be made.”

Adachi was swift to refute Haaland’s claim that his Measure B pension reform is and was a Tea Party initiative.
“What’s not been reported is the fact that there are all these people supporting pension reform who are progressive Democrats,” Adachi said, pointing to Moritz, Crane and former Board President and Green Party member Matt Gonzalez, who all supported Measure B last fall.

“You are talking about saving basic services and that’s a progressive cause,” Adachi continued. “You might argue that pension reform isn’t a progressive solution. But then you are saying that the needs of one group of workers are subservient to the needs of other workers. And even if you raised every tax in the city, you’d not be able to keep up with pension and healthcare costs.”

“Even if we could raise parking tickets to $200 a pop, and tax folks who make more than $100,000 a year, that still wouldn’t solve the problem, because the problem is so huge,” Adachi added. “When you look at this crisis, you can’t simply redbait and say, you are a Republican, or Sarah Palin. Matt Gonzales has always spoken for progressive values, but because he supports pension reform, he’s suddenly a member of the Tea Party? At a certain point, it begins to become absurd.”

Haaland countered that he’s  “challenged by the notion that thousands show up in Wisconsin to fight some of the same people behind Measure B, but our discourse has lowered to whether or not Jeff Adachi is a good guy.”

And Adachi expressed doubt that Mayor Ed Lee can come up with a suitable pension reform plan.

“I’ve heard Lee say there has to be a solution involving pension reform and underfunded healthcare benefits that would save $300 million to $400 million in annual savings, and that corresponds with the solution he needs to come up with to close the budget deficit,” Adachi said.

Adachi said that he has met with Lee on his own to discuss pension reform, but the new mayor did not list specifics.
“He didn’t tell me what his plan was,” Adachi said, “The Prop. B supporters have a plan, but Lee did not ask what that was. But he said he sincerely wants to solve that problem, and that his preference would be one ballot initiative that everyone would agree on. And I fully support a solution that is going to truly solve the problem. I’ve always believed it’s important for the public to understand the gravity of the situation. For too long, it’s been the elephant in the room and there hasn’t been enough public information.”

Adachi said he had a beef with the idea of “groups of labor unions holding meetings at City Hall and deciding who can participate.”

“It’s also troubling that there is no information publicly available about what the ideas on the table are, no explanation of how they got there, and no documenting of the extent of the problem,” Adachi continued. “And that’s what got us here in the first place: a lack of transparency, and voters being asked to weigh in without the full information.”

Adachi said he has an upcoming meeting with Lee, the Department of Human Resources and Sup. Sean Elsbernd about pension reform that is separate from the working group that includes labor and philanthropist Warren Hellmann.

And Elsbernd told the Guardian he believes the pension reform process would go smoother if Adachi were at the table.
“I have no problem with Jeff at the table, it makes sense to have him there to avoid two ballot measures,” Elsbernd said.

Elsbernd added that it was too early to cite numbers when it comes to talk of capping pensions.
“It’s a mistake to pick a number right now because you don’t know what it’s worth,” he said, noting that the pension reform working group has sent a bunch of different scenarios to retirement actuaries to crunch the numbers to see how much they would save the city.

“I can see a case being made for asking the highest paid city workers to contribute higher amounts for healthcare benefits,” Elsbernd said. “But I’m not sure that’s equitable on retirement benefits, though I could see a situation where safety pays more, regardless, because they have better pensions.”

Muni looks for money — but not downtown

Zelda Bronstein
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12
Muni looks for money — but not downtown

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is looking for new ways to bring in money, which is a fine thing. I think taxes for transportation make perfect sense. And while not everything in government gets better when you throw money at it, Muni generally does. Some of the ideas are pretty sound and take a progressive approach; it’s hard to argue against a vehicle impact fee, since private cars on the road increase traffic and slow down the buses. I’m all for higher parking rates, and an off-street commercial parking fee is a great idea (even though the Guardian, which owns a building that has a small parking lot, would have to pay the fee).


But the list is missing the most obvious and the most fair element: A special tax assessment for downtown commercial property. We know, because the city has done numerous reports on this, that office developers don’t pay anywhere near the real cost of providing Muni service to their buildings. We know that most of the Muni lines, and certainly the ones with the heaviest traffic, exist to take commuters downtown. We know that decent transit is critical to the success of the entire central office district.


So why is there nothing on this list to address that? Why not an annual fee per square foot of commercial office space in the area zoned C-3-0 (highrise offices)? That ought to be part of any Muni funding plan.


I tried to get the folks at Muni to respond to my question, but I haven’t heard back. I’ll update as soon as I do.

Dense in the west

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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9
Dense in the west

rebeccab@sfbg.com

A marathon special meeting of the San Francisco Planning Commission on Feb. 10 demonstrated a clear split over Parkmerced, a $1.2 billion private development project that will rebuild an entire existing neighborhood on the west side of San Francisco.

While some expressed strong enthusiasm for moving forward with the ambitious plan, many residents turned out to voice vehement opposition, citing concerns about traffic congestion, noise, dust, and the demolition of affordable apartments that some Parkmerced tenants have occupied for decades.

The votes to certify the project’s environmental analysis and send the plan onto the Board of Supervisors with a commission endorsement were split 4-3, with Commissioners Christina Olague, Hisashi Sugaya, and Kathrin Moore dissenting.

Those who voted no were appointees of the Board of Supervisors, while the four commissioners who voted in favor were appointees of former Mayor Gavin Newsom, suggesting a break along clear political lines. State Assemblymember Tom Ammiano also submitted a letter urging commissioners not to approve the project.

While Parkmerced Investors LLC, the project sponsor, eagerly awaits groundbreaking, spokesperson P.J. Johnston noted that they weren’t there yet. “First,” he said, “we have to break ground at the Board of Supervisors.”

 

IS IT GREEN?

The Parkmerced redesign has been touted as an ecological and sustainable beacon for urban development and, indeed, some features of the grand plan read as if they were plucked from a checklist from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green-neighborhood standards.

Walkable, bikeable streets with proximity to transit? Check. Water-efficient landscaping? Check. Energy-efficient dwellings? Check. Project sponsors claim that through dramatic reductions in per capita resource consumption, three times as many residents would consume the same amount of water and electricity as Parkmerced’s current population does today.

Johnston emphasized how adding new units to the west side of the city also helped contribute to “density equality,” since most new projects tend to be concentrated in the eastern neighborhoods.

Johnston was particularly jazzed about an innovative storm-water discharge system envisioned for the plan, which he described as a design that could “regenerate and repair the environment.” It would recirculate rainwater through a naturally filtrating system of ponds and bioswales to recharge Lake Merced, a water body that has been slowly shrinking due to being choked off from its natural watershed by a concrete urban barrier.

Green points might be awarded for plans for an on-site organic garden, but Commissioner Michael Antonini, who said he lives less than a mile from Parkmerced, cautioned that developers shouldn’t get too attached to that idea. After all, he said, many kinds of vegetables won’t thrive in that part of the city.

Meanwhile, the wholesale destruction of existing units is decidedly not eco-chic. The Green Building Council’s LEED neighborhood standards insist that “historic resource preservation and adaptive reuse” is always preferable in a green development — and that’s the point that Aaron Goodman, an architect who previously lived at Parkmerced, has been driving at for more than a year. Proponents maintain that Parkmerced’s wartime construction meant it was built with inferior materials, and that property owners have battled dry rot and other infrastructure problems.

Another not-so-green Parkmerced project feature has also raised eyebrows: parking. While proponents portray the redesign as a switch from a suburban, love-affair-with-the-automobile style to an enlightened departure from car-centrism, plans nonetheless include a parking space for every single unit.

That creates the potential for more than 6,000 new cars on the road in that area, and the 19th Avenue corridor is already notorious for traffic snarls. According to calculations by the Environmental Protection Agency, the typical American motorist generates more than five metric tons of carbon dioxide by driving in a given year.

 

REPLACING WHAT’S THERE

Before the Planning Commission meeting, residents from the Parkmerced Action Coalition — a relatively new residents’ group formed to oppose the redevelopment and a wholly different entity from the Parkmerced Residents’ Organization — made a public show of their dissatisfaction outside City Hall. Holding signs with slogans such as “Don’t Bulldoze Our Homes,” residents sang protest songs and chanted, “We are Parkmerced!”

With the dramatic makeover, Parkmerced would expand to around 8,900 units, tripling the number of residents who could be accommodated. Existing 1940’s-era garden apartments would be razed to make way for higher, denser housing. The plan comes at a time when neighboring San Francisco State University is undergoing its own phase of expansion.

“This project in its current state is a vision that is not in harmony with the people, place, or the environment,” charged Cathy Lentz, an organizer with the Parkmerced Action Coalition, in a vociferous plea to the commissioners. “It is a narrow vision, a corporate vision … a true vision would be inclusive of present dwellings, inclusive of animals, trees, and present environment.”

One resident lamented the pending loss of his garden courtyard, noting how much his children had enjoyed the green space growing up and listing the different kinds of birds that would surely be driven away by heavy-duty construction and tree removal. For many, the point was not so much what developers intended to build, but what would be lost to make way for it. One speaker dismissed the plan as “architectural clear-cutting.”

Commissioner Moore, an architect, sounded a similar note when she rejected the notion that the Parkmerced redevelopment should be hailed as infill, a desirable development concept that curbs sprawl by utilizing space efficiently. “Urban infill housing is defined as infill on vacant sites,” Moore said, “not sites that have become vacant by demolition.” She added that she believed the environmental impact review “fails to sufficiently examine why housing demolition is even necessary.”

In Moore’s view, “the only reasonable alternative is a significantly redesigned … project.”

 

WORKING-CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD

Unlike a luxury condominium development, the Parkmerced plan emphasizes built-in economic diversity — yet critics point out that as it stands, the housing complex is already inclusive of many lower-income, working-class residents.

The plan will incorporate several hundred below-market rate units, in accordance with the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance. Commissioner Antonini also emphasized the boost to city coffers from tax revenue associated with the project.

Meanwhile, questions are still arising on the issue of rent control. “We do not believe it is appropriate for the City and County of San Francisco to be displacing rent-controlled residents,” noted Michael Yarne, a mayoral development advisor. A binding agreement between Parkmerced Investors LLC and the city of San Francisco, which will be linked to the land, promises that new units will be made available to rent-controlled tenants at the same monthly rate they now pay, with rent control intact (See “Weighing a Landlord’s Promise,” Dec. 21, 2010).

Yet Polly Marshall, a commissioner on the San Francisco Rent Board, noted that she still didn’t believe tenant protections were adequate. She also spoke to the pitfalls of tearing down and redoing an entire neighborhood.

“The proposed Parkmerced development is the kind of development that I normally would support. It’s the kind of thing I work on in my profession,” noted Marshall, an attorney who has worked on redevelopment projects. “What’s different about this project is that it involves an existing community. It requires devastation of that community. It reminds me of the old-style redevelopment projects that went on in the Fillmore that destroyed existing neighborhoods. Look around that area now … there’s high density housing there, but that’s about all. The community — the networks of the people — was destroyed decades ago.”

Marshall took it a step further, offering her analysis on why Parkmerced was targeted. “It’s because it’s a working-class neighborhood of renters,” she said. “That’s why we’re going to destroy Parkmerced.”

Pizza Nostra

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Pizza Nostra

paulr@sfbg.com

DINE Nice — I speak of the French city, not the human quality, of which I must be one of life’s least accomplished practitioners — isn’t quite Italian, but it isn’t quite not, either. Like Alsace in the north — another locus of French pizza — it has been the subject of international contention for centuries. Maybe pizza helps settle nerves frayed by all this struggle, but whether it does or not, pizza served with a distinctly French flair (and often a pitcher of local rosé) is what you’ll find at the many outdoor cafes in the heart of Nice, just a few blocks from the beaches of the Cote d’Azur.

It’s what you’ll find, too, at Pizza Nostra, our own little slice of Nice — complete with outdoor tables! — at the north foot of Potrero Hill. The neighborhood will never be mistaken for the Cote d’Azur, and of course the weather here is considerably fouler, but there is something sublime about pizza — really a whole Italian menu, with many interesting small courses, salads, soups, and starters — served with Gallic style.

The restaurant opened some years ago, as Couleur Cafe, in a small shopping center with a parking lot and buildings of a shed-like, provisional quality, like a PX on Guam. It then became Pizza Nostra, changing hands last year from Jocelyn Bulow to Winona Matsuda. She hasn’t changed much, and maybe that’s because there isn’t much in need of change. Despite the faux-suburban setting, the interior has wonderful candlelit atmospherics under a high ceiling that melts into shadow. The service is impeccable. And the food travels well beyond the country of pizza; you could do quite nicely here without pizza at all. But the pizzas are lovely, and if you were stuck with just that, you’d be happy too.

But I do question the wisdom of bringing basket after basket of complimentary focaccia to people who are in all likelihood waiting for pizza. White flour in our diet is like atmospheric radiation left over from those 1950s tests in the South Pacific: insidious, omnipresent, unnoticed. I think this every time I go by Tartine Bakery and see people queuing like Soviet-era Muscovites. As Michael Pollan noted in his polemic In Defense of Food, white flour is so devoid of nutrition that even bugs don’t want it.

Having said that, I note that Pizza Nostra’s focaccia is addictive, with a pillow-like softness and bewitching olive-oil breath. If you can restrain yourself from gobbling it down straight, you will find it’s useful for dunking and sopping applications. We found its spear shape ideal for sticking into a bowl of mushroom-eggplant soup ($6) that was possibly the most gratifying use of eggplant I’ve ever come across. Its subtle, bitter bite was like a sheen around the earthy weight of the fungi.

The focaccia was also useful in wiping up the savory oil left on the plate after we’d demolished the halved brussels sprouts ($5), pan-roasted with fat chunks of pancetta. I would have let the sprouts cook through and caramelize a little more, but they were tender and flavorful nonetheless.

Sicilian-style tuna salad ($12) seemed like a close relative of salade niçoise, except without anchovies. But there was a wealth of halved pear tomatoes, pitted nicoise olives, and cannellini beans nested in a jumble of arugula and frisée, with the tuna arranged in a berm that partly enclosed the greens.

The pizzas are thin-crust, made (according to the menu) in the style of Recco, a town in the northern Italian region of Liguria, not far from Nice. The array of toppings is mostly conventional, although the kitchen does throw together various specials, including a pie ($16) topped with hot Italian sausage, red and yellow bell peppers, mushrooms, a red-onion confit, and broccoli florets — all of which runs against the basic article of American faith that more is better. Sometimes more isn’t better. Broccoli doesn’t translate well to pizza, and we found the red-onion jam to be jarringly sweet.

But — on the subject of sweets — the olive-oil cake ($6), a cupcake-like disk, was dense and moist. It could have stood without assistance from the large pat of limoncello gelato on the side, although the gelato was a nice touch.

PIZZA NOSTRA

Dinner: nightly, 5:30–10 p.m.

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

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., noon–3 p.m.

300 De Haro, SF

(415) 558-9493

www.pizzanostrasf.com

Beer and wine

AE/DC/MC/V

Not too noisy

Wheelchair acccesible

 

Our Weekly Picks: February 9-15

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 9

MUSIC

Turisas

I recently heard Turisas described as “Disney metal.” So before you run screaming in the other direction, hear me out when I claim that it was actually a compliment. Spearheaded by singer-founder Mathias “Warlord” Nygard, the band plays folk metal so lushly orchestrated that it sounds like a movie score, full of trumpet swells and epic organs. Onstage, it features an accordionist and a violinist; the latter is responsible for all the soloing that would traditionally be done on guitar. Turisas’ 2007 release The Varangian Way is an engrossing concept album whose eight tracks follow a group of Scandinavian travelers as they make their way across Russia by river and end up in Constantinople. New platter Stand Up and Fight is due Feb. 23, but you can get a sneak preview at the show. (Ben Richardson)

With Cradle of Filth, Nachtmystium, Daniel Lioneye

8 p.m., $27

Regency Ballroom

1300 Van Ness, SF

1-800-745-3000

www.theregencyballroom.com

 

DANCE

Eonnagata

Eonnagata comes with pretty impressive credentials, and promises to be unique. The work is a collaboration between maverick ballerina Sylvie Guillem, who has made waves ever since she dared to quit the Paris Opera Ballet to freelance; multi-whiz Canadian director Robert Lepage, whose Ex Machina company has redefined theater for the last 20 years; and dancer-choreographer Russell Maliphant, who mixes ballet with yoga and everything in between. The trio created and performs in a work that examines the in-between state of male-female sexual identity. Inspired by an 18th century French noble, spy, and diplomat who fluidly switched genders throughout his career, Eonnataga also acknowledges a debt to the onnagatas, the refined male actors in Kabuki who spent their careers playing female characters. (Rita Felciano)

Wed/9–Thurs/10, 8 p.m., $36–$72

Zellerbach Hall

Bancroft at Telegraph,

UC Berkeley, Berk.

(510) 642-9988

www.calperformances.org

 

EVENT

“How to Write A Dynamic Online Dating Profile”

You’ve been on blind dates. You’ve tried speed dating. You’ve even have had your mother set you up. But you still can’t find love? Turn to cyberspace. (Don’t be embarrassed. According to those Match.com ads, one out of five relationships now begin online.) Take it from Carol Renee, a self-proclaimed “logophile,” English teacher, and aspiring novelist who found the love of her life using the handle “Fearlessly Compassionate.” She’ll hold your hand during the daunting tasks of coming up with a tantalizing user name, writing an attention-grabbing headline, and composing a succinct and yet true-to-life bio in this “how-to” class. (Jen Verzosa)

6:15 p.m., free

San Francisco Public Main Library

Latino/Hispanic Community Room B

100 Larkin, SF

www.sfpl.org

 

THURSDAY 10

MUSIC

Ensiferum

The Finnish metallers in Ensiferum span many styles, taking the best of everything they encompass. From folk metal, they learned the power of haunting, infectious melody and atmospheric texture. From thrash, they got the exultation and catharsis of breakneck tempos and relentless picking. And from power metal, they got the gleeful, empowering satisfaction that comes from singing about dudes with swords. The recent infatuation with Pagan stylings among American metalheads has brought the band stateside numerous times now, and Ensiferum never disappoints. Having donned their warrior garb, the five Finns who make up the band don’t leave the stage until everyone and everything is vanquished. (Richardson)

With Finntroll, Rotten Sound, Barren Earth

7:30 p.m., $25

DNA Lounge

375 11th St., SF

415-626-2532

www.dnalounge.com

 

EVENT

“Lusty Trusty Ball SF”

Not on the guest list for the annual Manus-Salzman Valentine’s Day Ball? No matter. Your photo won’t be gracing the pages of the Nob Hill Gazette or SF Luxe this time next week, but as least you don’t have to worry about breaking out the black tie. At the less-costly-but-no-less-classy Lusty Trusty Ball, in exchange for forgoing the ice sculptures, posh catered nosh, and a live gingerbread boy to nibble candy off of (he was holdin’ it down for Hasbro’s Candy Land in keeping with last year’s Manus-Salzman theme, “The Game of Love”) you’ll enjoy DJs, VJs, and live groups galore. Plus, with punk rock cabaret from the Can-Cannibals, Circus Finelli’s all-female antics, and Red Hots Burlesque, you can have a hot night without the haut monde. (Emily Appelbaum)

8:30 p.m., $10–$20

Submission

2183 Mission, SF

(415) 425-6137

www.sf-submission.com

 

EVENT

“Oilpocalypse Now”

Last April’s Gulf Coast-ravaging oil spill may have slipped from the headlines, but the region is still struggling to recover. “Oilpocalypse Now” takes aim at the corporations that cause (and cover up) environmental disasters — indeed, the event is subtitled “Time for a 28th Amendment for the Separation of Corporation and State” — featuring a talk by Dr. Riki Ott, a community activist and marine biologist. Ott will present the documentary Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez (remember that one? Big Oil hopes you don’t!) Other speakers include Lisa Gautier, who helped organize the “hair boom” effort to soak up Gulf Coast oil; former Guardian columnist Summer Burkes, who witnessed the Louisiana devastation first-hand, and more. Proceeds benefit the Gulf Coast Fund, Ultimate Civics, and the Coastal Heritage Society of Louisiana. (Cheryl Eddy)

7 p.m., $10–$20

Grand Lake Theater

3200 Grand Lake, Oakl.

(510) 452-3556

www.summerburkes.wordpress.com

http://communitycurrency.org/node/63

 

FRIDAY 11

DANCE

“Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now”

For the next three weekends the “Black Choreographers Festival: Here and Now” throws the spotlight on the Bay Area’s African American voices. Now in its seventh year, the festival brings together professionals from a rainbow of perspectives on dance. If this were an ideal world, these choreographers would have their own companies and regular seasons. Some do — Raissa Simpson, Deborah Vaughan, Paco Gomes — but the festival offers all an opportunity to make themselves heard in the context of their colleagues. The Oakland lineup is different from the San Francisco one; the third weekend focuses on up-and-coming new talent. And as always, the youth ensembles at the family matinee will be a special high-energy treat. (Felciano)

Fri/11–Sat/12, 8 p.m.;

Sun/13, 4 p.m., $10–$20

Laney College

900 Fallon, Oakl.

Feb. 17–19, 8pm; Feb. 20, 7 p.m.

ODC Theater

3153 17th St., SF

Feb. 25–26, 8 p.m.; Feb. 27, 7 p.m.

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

1-888-819-9106

www.bcfhereandnow.com


PERFORMANCE

You’re Gonna Cry

Where better than 24th Street to watch a solo show about the real lives of Mission District residents at the height of gentrification? Touching on everyone from the techies and bohemians to the Latino locals and immigrants, HBO Def Poet and Youth Speaks cofounder Paul S. Flores performs his theatrical work about the human cost of gentrification in the neighborhood. In addition to masterful storytelling, get ready for a gangster puppet show and digital murals, illuminating the changes brought by the dot-com boom and bust, real estate bubble, immigration, and forced evictions. The Mission is loaded with characters and Flores’s dynamic fusion of urban culture and spoken word brings them all to life. (Julie Potter)

Fri/11–Sat/12, 8 p.m., $15

Dance Mission Theater

3316 24th St., SF

(415) 273-4633

www.dancemission.com

 

EVENT

California International Antiquarian Book Fair

Ever wonder what ephemera left by our generation will be pored over in a millennium or two? Parking slips, band posters, books like Lady Isabella’s Scandalous Marriage and 1001 Deductions and Tax Breaks, 2011? Whatever the items, they’ll surely be found at the 1000th annual California International Antiquarian Book Fair. The festival, now only in its 44th year, tempts bibliophiles with a menagerie of historical snippets and antique selections. The perusables include musical prints and manuscripts, rare codices, antique children’s literature, fine bindings, maps, trade books, miscellaneous historical scraps, and — vocabulary word — “incunabula,” which are books, pamphlets, or broadsheets printed (not handwritten) in Europe before 1501. A trove of timeworn tomes? Simply splendid! (Appelbaum)

Fri/11, 3–8 p.m.; Sat/12, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.;

Sun/13. 11 a.m.–5 p.m., $10–$15

Concourse Exhibition Center

635 Eighth St., SF

(415) 551-5190

www.labookfair.com


SATURDAY 12

DANCE

Company C Contemporary Ballet

With a sampling of contemporary ballet from choreographers active across North America and Europe, Company C’s mixed-bill winter program includes a premiere set to the music of Elvis Costello by Artistic Director Charles Anderson in collaboration with Benjamin Bowman (both formerly of the New York City Ballet), and another by Maurice Causey, a former principal of William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt. Also appearing from the diverse repertory of this vibrant company is Tovernon, a solo work by David Anderson, the father of Charles Anderson, and Daniel Ezralow’s Pulse, during which dancers take running starts to slide across stage wearing socks. (Potter)

Sat/12, 8 p.m.; Sun/13, 2 p.m., $18–$40

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.companycballet.org

 

EVENT

“Woo At The Zoo”

Want to make things a bit more “wild” this year for Valentine’s Day? Then head on over to the San Francisco Zoo for “Woo At The Zoo,” the annual event that’s become a favorite activity for amorous humans looking to learn a bit more about our animal pals’ own mating habits and sexual behaviors. Make plans soon with your sweetheart for this special multimedia event that also includes a romantic brunch or dinner, along with drinks. Admit it — you’re already humming the words to the Bloodhound Gang’s “Discovery Channel” song, aren’t you? “You and me baby we ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel!” (Sean McCourt)

Sat/12-Sun/13, 6 p.m.;

Also Sun/13, 11 a.m., $65–$75

San Francisco Zoo

One Zoo Road, SF

(415) 753-7080, ext. 7236

www.sfzoo.org

 

SUNDAY 13

MUSIC

High on Fire

How rad would it be to have an all-chick High on Fire tribute band called Pie on Fire? Though, yeah, that could go either way — hot cherry deliciousness or the evil feeling that makes your girlfriend chug sour pints of cranberry juice. And pulling off (literally) the shreddiness of Riffchild caliber is probably not gonna happen in this lifetime. In any case, join the real trio for a special one-off hometown show before they head out to tour New Zealand and beyond. An honorable way to ring in the annual holiday of love and lust, no? (Kat Renz)

8 p.m., $18

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

 

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Landmark to loudness

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Landmark to loudness

MUSIC Happy Sanchez’s office is above the cafe, by the entrance. There are only a couple of windows. One opens onto the parking lot, where a car alarm blares during our interview. The other is dark; below it are the building’s two hourly rehearsal rooms. Aside from the vibration of a double bass revving, we’re cut off from the activity going on at Secret Studios. As the owner, Happy makes up for this isolation with a wall of closed-circuit TVs showing the hallways and common areas tying the Studio’s 130 monthly rehearsal spaces together.

“Mostly it’s just about dealing with the headaches of running a business,” Sanchez says. The headaches, when your clients are all musicians, can be numerous. Bands arrive at 2 a.m., fresh from a gig, and decide to toss utility carts down the stairs. People try to smoke inside, piss in the parking lot, live in their units. Watch out for speed freaks. Make sure women aren’t being harassed. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the principal of the school,” Sanchez says.

Sometimes it’s just plain traumatic. “The one thing that upset me the most, this fucking guy was pissed at his girlfriend, took her cat, put it in the [rehearsal] room, and left it for weeks. Fucking poor cat was skin and bones by the time the girlfriend came and asked me to look for it. Most I’ve ever been upset at anyone. He was banned.”

“But most of the time people are pretty cool,” Sanchez is quick to add. “The people who are on the lease are level-headed. It’s always the friend or the guy that’s just hanging out that makes problems.” There is reason for me to doubt this statement, having just heard Sanchez tell another story about being held up at gunpoint by a rapper who wants his demo tape. But I’m still inclined to believe him, given the sheer number of clients he’s come in contact with in the 25 years since he took a job as a studio manager at Secret Studios, back when it was a small two-room operation.

At the time, Secret, like most of the studios in town, was about hourly rehearsal and recording space. The two units of Secret Studios were originally at Third St., before a mid-1980s move to 215 Napoleon St. in a building with lots of neighbors. “Mostly we did a lot of punk rock recordings, back in ’87,” Sanchez remembers. “This guy David [Pollack], who I later bought the studio from, at the time I was just working for him and he set me up with all these gigs.” They’d rent the place out for parties, for extra money. “Metallica rented it, back in the days when I guess they were big in Europe but they weren’t really that big, yet. Before the Black Album [1991’s Metallica] came out, when they blew up.”

Those involved in Secret during the Napoleon Street era attempted to confine major sessions to nighttime, but it eventually became clear — as the neighbors bitched — that a different location was needed. After the owner sold the business to Sanchez (“Basically, he gave it to me at minimal cost”), he was able to expand and then move into 50 units at the current location on 2200 Cesar Chavez St. The large warehouse with a single floor of small rooms was previously the sound stage for the talk radio TV drama Midnight Caller.

Sanchez credits some of his success to timing. “I got in at the right time. It’s just more expensive to build nowadays. People have tried to build big studios like this and it’s just not affordable anymore. They see it as easy money, but it’s not easy to pull off.”

One person who tried — and succeeded — was Greg Koch, who developed the nearly 180-unit Downtown Rehearsal in 1992. Earlier, Sanchez had passed on its Third Street location. “It was shady at night when most of my clients would be around,” he says. “That building was cheap, though. They couldn’t give it away.”

Downtown was a major competitor until the summer of 2000, when Koch attempted to evict all of his tenants without notice in an attempt to flip the property for a huge profit. In the process, he instigated a musical community revolt, resulting in a large cash settlement and the formation of a then-hopeful, now apparently stagnant nonprofit, SoundSafe. At the time of the turmoil, Secret Studios was still expanding to its current size of 130 units. “I basically opened my units and saw a huge influx of bands,” Sanchez says.

Sanchez has had many models for what Secret Studios should — and shouldn’t — be. He recalls that Francisco Studios, a Turk Street basement space, had a bathroom out of Trainspotting. He’s quick to admit that since he’s taken over the business, there have been mistakes and failures. A plan to start the International DJ Academy in the front offices of the building, with a partner who managed Invisibl Skratch Piklz, fizzled. “They never could quite get it off the ground,” he says. “It was a good concept, but I think they needed someone to run it as a business.” Along with a rap studio that was going at the time, the academy devolved into something that included a barber shop and a night club before Sanchez had to shut it down.

Which, technically, makes two rap studios Sanchez had to end. Back in the late 1980s, at Secret’s old location, there was a lot of money to be made from hip-hop. “These rappers were coming in and you could pretty much just charge them anything,” Sanchez says. “I think there was always the drug dealer in the background financing it. I swear, we had like three clients over time that got murdered. The first time it was kind of a shock. They found the guy in a trunk in Oakland. The second guy got murdered on the night of the earthquake in 1989. The scene just got too crazy. Gangster rap came out, and the whole vibe changed. It got really hardcore.” After a hold-up occurred at the studio and an expensive keyboard was stolen, Sanchez stepped away from the rap game in 1991.

Many artists have come through Secret Studios, but it’s not something Sanchez brags about. In part this stems from his respect for overall security, a high priority when theft is a concern. But it also has to do with his respect for confidentiality. The music business exposed him to a lot of drugs in the ’80s, and he himself struggled with addiction. From 1989 until 1992, he hosted a Narcotics Anonymous gathering — the Straight Edge Rockers meeting — in the studio on Sunday nights. “There were a couple people there that you would definitely know their names,” he says. “I’m actually thinking about getting it going again. It’s not as easy to pull off, but I always thought that meeting was so cool. There are a lot of people in the music industry that need that.”

Sanchez is desensitized to stardom. He’ll say that no one really big has ever been at Secret Studios, then rattle off a long list of names: the Dead Kennedys, Michael Franti, the Go-Gos, EPMD, Romeo Void, Chris Isaak, Mike Pistel, Toots Hibbert. Some of these connections are long relationships, some are incidental. MC Hammer rehearsed at Secret before he was big (but had the parachute pants). Gene Simmons came down in a limo.

Sanchez is happy with his success so far and grateful for the freedom to be a musician with a stable business. With another 10 years on the lease (which he hopes to extend to when his two-and-a-half-year-old son reaches adulthood), he’s satisfied with assuming a more administrative role at Secret. He does the books, handles the day-to-day issues, and makes his own music, composing for movies and television as the Latin Soul Syndicate.

For a lot less drama, Sanchez is a little less in the know about his clients and their role in the scene of the moment. A while ago, for example, he needed to contact a band about a bill. But the band was on tour, and he was referred to its business manager. He went online to look it up. He had no idea who the band was until he Googled “The Dodos” and a video popped up showing the band playing on The Late Show with David Letterman.

www.secretstudios.com

arts@sfbg.com

State of the weed

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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22
State of the weed

steve@sfbg.com

CANNABIS When we did our first Cannabis Issue a year ago, the Bay Area’s medical marijuana industry was booming, and there was high anticipation that California would soon legalize weed for everyone.

Proposition 19 divided even those who fully support decriminalizing cannabis — partly because the existing system was working so well in San Francisco and many other cities, so people were wary of an uncertain future — and voters rejected the measure in November.

But only the most dogmatic anti-drug warrior would take that vote as a repudiation of the wonder weed, because California’s love affair with its top crop today is stronger than ever. And the burgeoning industry that grows, processes, and delivers marijuana continues to expand rapidly amid a stagnating larger economy.

Three new high-end cannabis dispensaries have opened in San Francisco in the last six months, bringing to 25 the number of licensed clubs, and the selection and quality of indoor and outdoor buds, concentrates, and edibles has never been greater. The industry’s many opportunities are starting to attract top talent from unrelated sectors of the economy, such as Mark Williams and Nic duTemps.

Williams recently quit his job at Apple to start CloudNine, which is developing a high-quality portable vaporizer called Firefly that will be assembled here in San Francisco and released this summer. Unlike current vaporizers made of plastic that use butane heaters to release the cannabanoids from the weed without burning it, Firefly is made of metal and glass with customizable wood inlays, uses advanced batteries in its heating element, and will retail for about $300.

“I decided now is the time,” Williams, 42, said of his decision to leave the corporate cubicle world after 20 years. “The market is maturing and the users’ ability to make a discerning choice about how they’re going to take marijuana is maturing.”

DuTemps worked in public relations for many years and she also jumped ship to do something she loves a few years ago: landscaping backyard gardens. “But then the bottom fell out of the economy,” she said, and people growing marijuana were the only ones who still wanted her expertise.

Yet the supply of cannabis products had grown faster than the number of dispensaries and delivery outlets in recent years. “The clubs were becoming incredibly flooded,” duTemps said. “People have found themselves with copious amounts of product and nowhere to sell it.”

So she decided to marry her PR expertise with her cannabis connections and last month started Sweeter Made, a medical marijuana cooperative and delivery service that uses an old meter maid vehicle for deliveries. DuTemps said she loves “the secret thrill of delivering medical cannabis, hash, and edibles in something that used to give people parking tickets.”

They’re just a couple of the countless Bay Area residents involved in the pot business, an expanding and evolving sector of the economy that even cash-strapped government agencies are getting involved in.

Oakland city officials recently stepped back from their ambitious plan to permit large-scale pot farms in industrial warehouses, mostly because of legal concerns, but that city and Berkeley last year moved forward with plans to legitimize and tax the industry at a higher rate. And the big next step — full legalization of weed for even recreational users — is still lingering on the horizon.

Oaksterdam University founder Richard Lee, who bankrolled placing Prop. 19 on the ballot, has announced that he’ll try again on the November 2012 ballot. He told the Guardian that he’s currently developing his battle plan, consulting his allies, and determining what the measure will look like.

“We’re still doing research on what went right and what went wrong,” Lee told us. “There were lots of people who were for legalization that didn’t like the details [of Prop. 19].”

For example, the measure allowed counties to set different legal standards, potentially creating a logistical nightmare for distributing the product. Lee said the new measure will probably include statewide standards and some degree of local control, but he’s still working with groups ranging from the Drug Policy Alliance to the NAACP to develop it. Meanwhile, CaNORML, the state chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, will be gathering movement leaders together in Berkeley on Jan. 29 for a daylong conference titled “Marijuana Reform: Next Steps for California.”

While there are differing visions for where the movement is headed and over how hard and quickly to push for full legalization, it’s undeniable that the industry is thriving and here to stay.

Burn the Bay

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
Burn the Bay

Self-medicate and simmer? Hardly. A nice big toke deserves (another and) a trip out and about to see some of the Bay Area’s finest sites to be stoned in. Just don’t flash that bong around — we hear that shit’s still illegal (?). Here are the Guardian staff picks for places around town that your buzz will love.

 

GOOD MANG KOK BAKERY

Post-Mary munchies are no joking matter. Yeah, you laugh when your buddy eats sausages dipped in maple syrup, but when it’s your turn the joke’s on you. Fortunately, Good Mang Kok Bakery in Chinatown is there to get you through those funky hunger spells. It’s got it all: pork buns, shrimp dumplings, egg tarts, mochi, sesame balls, chow mein — more grease and sugar than you can shake a spliff at. The joint (ha!) smells like stoner heaven, but the best part about Good Mang Kok is that it won’t leave a dent in your wallet — three steamed pork buns cost only $1.50 and all the food a stoner can eat won’t ever cost more than a 10 spot. Peep the window sign that says “Dim Sum Nice Food” and you’ll know you’re at the right place.

1039 Stockton, SF. (415) 397-2688

 

KADAMPA BUDDHIST TEMPLE’S “MEDITATIONS ON WORLD PEACE”

It’s Sunday morning, you’re stoned, and your heart is full of love. Kumbaya friend, mosey down to the Mission’s Kadampa Buddhist Temple for its weekly group meditation on world peace — because we all know that war, violence, and suffering are huge mellow-harshers. Inside the small building you’ll find a meeting room lined with chairs, Buddhist art, and sculpture — take a seat and be on time. Class includes a guided prayer, a spiritual teaching (try not to space, because if you pay attention here you can learn a lot), and refreshments. Every level of experience is welcome and no stoner will be turned away for lack of funds.

Sundays, 10:30 a.m.–noon, $10 donation suggested. 3324 17th St., SF. (415) 503-1187, www.meditationinnortherncalifornia.org

 

REVOLUTION CAFE

We regard the Revolution Cafe as its own mythic country, one in which bearded men and dashing women from various cosmopolitan European, Latin-American, and African cities epically lounge, smoke from their spliffs still lingering in their leather jackets and hand-woven mountain sweaters. In this convivial company, there is no better vantage point to regard the Mission’s ragtag parade from behind the fog of (medicinal, surely) Humboldt fog, particularly with a glass of house red or cappuccino in hand. Languid inter-table conversation is a mandate on the Revolution porch — retreat inside to giggle at The Awl’s witticisms on your laptop or take in the piano-guitar duo occupying Rev’s tiny corner that is allotted to its live music offerings.

3248 22nd St., SF. (415) 642-0474

 

ZEUM

Who says you have to be a kid to get a kick out of this museum’s interactive art and technology exhibits? Twist one up and try your hand at photo manipulation, animation, and video-mixing geared toward the mini-mind. And while we’re feeding our heads here, why not go truly techno-psychedelic with the kids’ museum’s Z Dance — dance in front of a green screen and a computer will transfer your image to a trippy backdrop (see Jefferson Airplane’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour performance of “White Rabbit” for inspiration). For gizmo gear-heads to blasé Betties, some advice for truly groking the beauty of Zeum: nothing will awaken your childlike wonder like a little William’s Wonder.

221 Fourth St., SF. (415) 820-3320, www.zeum.org

 

SEWARD STREET SLIDES

In 1966, Seward Street minipark was the site of a neighborhood sit-in that saved the last remaining open space between Seward and Corwin streets from encroaching development. Honor the community protesters’ struggle in true ’60s spirit by lighting up, grabbing a cardboard box, and flying down the polished concrete flumes for freedom (you can also slide at the chutes in Children’s Playground and Bernal Heights). Getting blazed is a good way to mitigate small bruises and the burn of climbing to the top of the remarkably long chute. But if intoxication and high velocity isn’t your favorite mix, there are plenty of places to perch peacefully and watch the action.

Acme between Seward and Corwin, SF

 

BERKELEY BOWL

This locally-owned grocery chain is a stoner’s dream, whether you alight on the 40,000 square foot megastore or the sleek new western location complete with parking lot: an added convenience for pre-browse hot-boxing. From asparagus to zatar (a Lebanese spice related to mint), the Technicolor aisles tantalize tokers’ taste buds, and are the ideal playscape for customer antics — shopping cart drag races are not unheard of. Feeling peckish? Avoid being “that hippy” shoving patchouli-scented paws in the bulk bins. Try baking among the baked goods at the store café, where you’ll find plenty of fresh soups, sandwiches, and company to ponder universal truths with.

2020 Oregon, Berk. (510) 843-6929; 920 Heinz, Berk. (510) 898-9555, www.berkeleybowl.com

 

WESTFIELD MALL ESCALATORS

Try to accomplish anything at the Westfield Mall while sober and you will surely end up crying outside of Jamba Juice, then struggling for hours more just to find the first floor exit. A better way of approaching the shiny downtown consumerist behemoth is to get faded and ride the escalators for, like, a really long time. The inter-floor specimens at the Westfield are a sight to behold. Unlike boring linear escalators, these zigzag upward and downward in Escher-esque profundity, caged in the mall’s dome-like interior. Those seeking ascent or descent must navigate a loop of shiny retail spaces just to find their way to the next moving staircase. Keep your wits about you — if you know which way is up, you may just reach Century Theatres!

865 Market, SF. (415) 512-6776, www.westfield.com/sanfrancisco

 

AUDIUM

Seeing the sights while stoned is all well and good, but you can give your optic nerves the night off and still totally trip off of SF. The wonder that makes it all possible is the Audium, where synapse-stimulating sound sculptures are unleashed on listeners seated in a round auditorium that is darkened to blackness to further heighten the experience. This place was constructed to get you high off auditory fumes. Sayeth Stan Shaff, the composer who co-masterminded the Audium concept back in the 1950s: “As people walk into a work, they become part of its realization. From entrance to exit, Audium is a sound-space continuum.” Somehow we’ve made it through this entire paragraph without using the term “mind-blowing.” Shoulder pat.

Performances Fridays and Saturdays, 8:30 p.m. 1616 Bush, SF. (415) 771-1616, www.audium.org

 

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COAST GALLERY AT THE STEINHART AQUARIUM

Look, for those riding the green hornet, buzziness doesn’t get much better done than at the California Academy of Sciences. The Morrison Planetarium sends not just cosmic gas and glistening stars whirling around your dome, but protozoan tendrils and glimmering ambient sounds as well, as part of the current “Life” show. Iridescent butterflies flit unfettered about the Buckyball-like “Rainforests of the World” structure. And of course there’s Claude the preening albino alligator and a clownish troupe of cavorting penguins. But for sheer shivery loveliness, we like to slip into the basement for the Steinhart Aquarium’s gorgeously curated exhibits of regional undersea habitats. The Philippine Coral Reef wastes our retinas with its neon delights and the generalist Water Planet Galleries include infinite otherworldly species. But it’s the Northern California Coast Gallery that keeps us rooted in a meditative pose with its hypnotically undulating anemones and sensuously intertwined towers of opalescent kelp. Think about it. That’s, like, right off Ocean Beach, dude. Your pipe is your snorkel.

55 Music Concourse Dr., Golden Gate Park, www.calacademy.org

List assembled by Emily Appelbaum, Marke B., Caitlin Donohue, and Hannah Tepper.

Ting’s “knee-jerk car populism”

Sasha Cuttler
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31
Ting’s “knee-jerk car populism”

By Asaf Shalev

Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting’s campaign for mayor is trying to rile up San Francisco’s car drivers with a new petition called “San Francisco Parking Ticket Overload,” but it seems to be misrepresenting the situation to score election season points.

In the recent email launching the petition, Ting provoked drivers to help “tear up the unfair ticket plan” in order to prevent “turning the whole city into a ‘parking trap.’” Ting said he opposes the MTA’s plan to jack up the enforcement of parking restriction by dolling out more tickets, which was reported in C.W. Nevius’s column. But Ting’s email also made it sound as if parking fines were going up and the MTA was launching a new initiative targeting drivers.

MTA spokesperson Kristin Holland told us that it isn’t true the agency has any intention to increase the cost of parking fines. In response, Ting spokesperson Eric Jaye (who ran Gavin Newsom’s two mayoral campaign) told us, “We are taking [the MTA] at their word and we are very happy to hear that,” insisting the campaign honestly thought that rates were going up.

Tom Radulovich, a transportation policy expert who founded Livable City, called Ting’s messaging and the stance behind it “knee-jerk car populism” and a “saber-rattling election stunt.” He said Ting’s campaign is playing to the fears of drivers who are the more privileged commuters of the city, with most studies showing motorists don’t pay the full costs of their impact to society.

“Even if [Ting’s claim] was true, the premise that motorists have an undue burden is untrue,” Radulovich said. Even with increased enforcement, drivers can still avoid fines by obeying the laws whereas all Muni passengers have had to bear the brunt of higher fares, which doubled under Newsom’s tenure. “I’d like to see someone saying how transit passengers have an unfair deal,” Radulovich said.

Jaye takes a different tone than some of the campaign missives. According to Jaye, what Ting opposes is that the increase in tickets is not the result of policy or enforcement considerations but specifically meant to increase revenue for the city. “We are just trying to pursue a revenue generating policy that is a little more progressive,” Jaye said. Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond also recently made the point that parking tickets were meant primarily to keep cars flowing in urban areas and not as a revenue source, but he also noted that motorists don’t pay for their impacts and should pay far higher car taxes.

But Radulovich’s question is left unanswered: “Are any of the candidates going to talk about the plight of transit passengers?”

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