Presidio

Endorsement: Barry Hermanson

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Let’s not fool ourselves: Jackie Speier, the former state senator from San Mateo County, will be replacing the late Tom Lantos in Congress. The odds are pretty good that she’ll emerge with enough votes in the special election April 8 to take the seat immediately, and she’s bound to win the Democratic primary in June and get elected to a full term in November.

And that’s not a terrible thing. Speier’s an experienced legislator, was a solid advocate for consumers and for privacy rights in Sacramento, and is already better on the war than Lantos was. Speier told us that she favors immediate troop withdrawal, and that she would was unlikely to vote for any more appropriations for the war unless the money was earmarked for drawdown and withdrawal activities.

But on a lot of issues, she’s something of a disappointment to progressives in the district. She talks about single-payer health care, but wants to keep the private insurance companies in the picture and she talked a lot to us about forcing consumers to limit medical expenses to contain costs. She wasn’t willing to commit to seeking to overturn the privatization of the Presidio and she supports Don Fisher’s plans to build a private museum there. Although she wants to let the Bush tax cuts expire, she was very, very shaky about raising taxes on the very rich (even capital gains taxes). When we asked her what she would do about preventing the financial-services mess that created the home mortgage crisis, she only said she would be “more willing to support an increased regulatory environment than not.”

In other words, she’s promising to be a mainstream Democrat who’s unwilling to push the edge on a lot of issues that people in her district care about.

So, if only as a protest vote (and to remind Speier that she has to be accountable to the progressives) we’re backing Green Party candidate Barry Hermanson.

Hermanson, who for years ran a small business in town, talks openly not just about ending the war but about dramatically cutting defense spending, which, he points out, sucks up more than 60 percent of the entire federal discretionary budget. He’s for government-run single payer, for tighter regulation of the financial sector and for a massive public investment in infrastructure and green technology.

Michelle McMurry, who is running as a Democrat, is a physician, a smart and articulate person with a thoughtful approach to health care. We’d love to see her stay active in politics, but she needs a bit more seasoning before she’s ready for Congress.

So we’ll go with Hermanson in the April 8 special election.

Emeric Kalman, 1931-2008

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Emeric Kalman, a neighborhood activist well known for his decades-long work of bringing important issues concerning the city’s public services and infrastructure to officials at City Hall, died March 22, on his 77th birthday, after battling cancer for several months.

Trained as a mechanical engineer, Kalman fled communist Romania in 1968 with his wife, Valeria, settled in West Portal, and worked at Bechtel from 1970 to the late 1980s. After retiring, he used his considerable expertise and proficiency with highly technical documents to bring to light waste and inefficiency in numerous city departments.

"Emeric contributed his research, his knowledge from his engineering background, his sense of fiscal prudence and accountability, and his demand for transparency and sunshine to making the city a better place for its citizens," said Joan Girardot, head of the Marina Civic Improvement and Property Owners Association and a former president of the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods.

In 1997, Kalman and fellow watchdog Girardot brought an important story to the Guardian — one that was critical to understanding why the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) had failed to make regular repairs to the city’s vast water system, which flows from Yosemite to San Francisco. Kalman and Girardot discovered that by using an accounting trick to create an artificial yearly "surplus," the PUC had been transferring millions of dollars annually since 1979 to the city’s general fund — an amount adding up to half a billion dollars. Instead of going toward the care of the system, the money went to sparing officials the political difficulty of having to raise taxes after the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 drastically reduced municipal coffers. (see "The Water Bond-doggle," 8/27/97).

By that time, Kalman had established himself as a trusted source, having discovered numerous problems with the privatization of Presidio National Park and the San Francisco Zoo earlier in the 1990s. In fact, it was Kalman and Girardot who convinced city officials to force the zoo to at least list all of the facility’s assets before they handed it over to the private zoological society.

Tenacious in his activism, Kalman never walked away from an issue. For example, he joined Girardot and other activists in taking the Recreation and Park Department to task in 1997 when it voted to end all public review of how the zoo spent its annual multimillion-dollar grant from the city. (see "The Secret Zoo," 11/26/97). Since the late 1980s, he dedicated himself, along with Girardot, to the ongoing fight against the city’s neglect of regular repairs to the Marina Yacht Harbor and its overly expensive proposal to overhaul the facility, making it more suitable to the owners of high-end yachts and possible privatization — and likely destroying the use of an important public open space in the process. (see "Bay Watch," 2/28/01)

On March 17, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution commending Kalman for his "outstanding contributions to the community." Sponsored by District 7 Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, with whom Kalman had worked most recently in an unsuccessful fight against the PUC’s proposal to raise water rates, the resolution recognized both Kalman’s stubbornness as well as his gracious demeanor (it was not unusual for him to kiss the hands of female city clerks). "Emeric’s old world gentility and grace, combined with new world zeal for justice and fairness in government, made him a force to be reckoned with and a real asset to San Francisco," Elsbernd said. "He was, in a word, undaunted."

Kalman is survived by his son, Ronald; his ex-wife, Valeria; his sister, Judith Ertsey; his nephew, Robert; and his two grandnieces, Elianna and Roxanna — all residents of San Francisco. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made in Kalman’s name to the National Alliance for Mental Illness. A memorial service will be held April 2, 12:45 p.m., at the Hills of Eternity Cemetery Chapel, 1301 El Camino Real, Colma.

Savannah Blackwell is a former Guardian reporter.

Superlist: Hot shaves

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Oh, the beard. You’ve seen it all over the city on all kinds of faces. It’s both the Scandinavian overgrowth of a hipster on a fixie and the trimmed-up, yuppified smarm of the suit sitting next to you on the 47. The bald 43-year-old in the Ozzfest T-shirt: he wears the hell out of it in an attempt to distract attention from his retired scalp.

We love it. Eventually, though, it starts to itch or begins to rub your significant other the wrong way. Here’s your answer: ooh, the hot shave. Many barbers will tell you they no longer perform this time-consuming yet important service. But the following will gladly and skillfully remove your chinstrap and leave you feeling smooth again.

A shave is a bit pricier at the Art of Shaving (845 Market, SF; 415-541-9801, www.theartofshaving.com), located inside the Westfield Mall, than at a typical barber shop. Last shave starts at 8:30 p.m., so they’re great in a pinch.

Everything, including your shave, seems to cost $16 at Asano (3312 Sacramento, SF; 415-567-3335), an appointment-only hole in the wall off Presidio Ave. With only one or two chairs going at any given time in this tiny space, you’d better call ahead.

Say bye-bye in style to last year’s neck-beard trend at the Barber Lounge (854 Folsom, SF; 415-934-0411, www.barberlounge.com). With two barbers on deck, including San Francisco Barber College graduate Rick Cortezzo, this self-described "ultrahip" full-service salon in an artsy SoMa loft can provide all the requisite new-school pamper while giving you a hot-towel shave that would make Gramps proud.

Dwayne Robinson, founder and executive director of Bayview Barber College (4912 Third St., SF; 415-822-3300, www.bayviewbarbercollege.com), teaches his young pupils everything they need to know to pass the state exam, with a five-hour evaluation that includes a practical on the hot shave. On top of such fundamentals as foot position, lather control, the 14-stroke sequence, and the all-important hot-towel finish, Dwayne stresses the importance of a polished customer-service approach to all aspects of the barbering craft. You can come in and get a super-affordable shave from one of his students any time after 10 a.m., when class instruction ends. Stick around for the joke-cutting and some half-reliable dating tips.

Ask for Victor at Exchange (435 Pine, SF; 415-781-9658). He’s the only one who performs the hot shave at this classic establishment, which is built into the side of a downtown Pine Street slope. Barber rumor has it that Victor’s shaves are the best in the city, so it’s probably worth the wait.

Founders Kumi Walker and Sean Heywood designed MR. (560 Sacramento, SF; 415-291-8800, www.mrthebarbershop.com) as a high-end local service for the manly needs of Financial District execs and other fine gents. Featuring huge plasma TVs, a shoeshine bench, plush seating, and a full-service bar, MR. provides its clientele with all the trappings of an upscale lounge. Though one-off shave arrangements can be made, MR. also offers a monthly membership, at a steep price, in exchange for 24 hours’ worth of styling service.

Ask your Mission bartender, he’ll tell you that at Willy’s (3227 22nd St., SF; 415-826-2344) they still do things the old way: a close shave, a nice hot towel, and good conversation. Although Willy no longer runs the shop, this spot is a surefire bet, and walk-in friendly.

The newly remodeled space at Sunset Barber Service (1374 Ninth Ave., SF; 415-564-4744) feels like home, what with its hardwood floors, finished counters, warm color scheme, and "mature" reading material. Jay and his father have been running this neighborhood outlay for 40 years and have seen all the fads come and go: the Faux Manchu, the Lonely Mennonite, the Mandlebar, and let us all wistfully recall the Amorous Marine.

Freedom of Information: More sunshine — easily and at no cost

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› news@sfbg.com

Imagine sitting at home — or in your office, or in your favorite café — and listening in on what are now secret, backroom policy discussions and decisions in the San Francisco mayor’s office. Imagine having access to an immediate transcript of the talks. Imagine being able to read internal e-mail discussions among city staffers about issues that affect you — without ever filing a public records request. In fact, imagine never having to file another written request for public documents; imagine just going to a city Web site, entering a search term, and finding all of the records yourself.

Imagine filing a complaint with a city agency and tracking the issue, minute by minute, as it works its way through the system.

Imagine listening on your cell phone to any policy body as it meets in city hall.

All of this is possible, today. Much of it is not only consistent with but actually required by local law. And it won’t cost the city more than a modest amount of money.

Transparency is a common buzzword during this presidential campaign; the Barack Obama campaign has even issued a white paper describing policy and technological ways to embrace it. He’s talking about live Internet feeds of meetings about significant issues involving executive branch appointees as well as for those of regulatory departments (a program that would go far beyond what you see on C-SPAN).

So there’s no reason San Francisco can’t take the lead in using technology — generally simple, off the shelf, existing technology — to dramatically increase sunshine at City Hall and public participation in local government.

Proposition G, the city’s 1999 sunshine law, mandates that San Francisco use "all technological and economical means to ensure efficient, convenient and low cost access to public information on the Internet." Here are five easy ways to do that:

1. Fully adopt the voyeur concept for city meetings. This is the idea that the public should be able to observe and engage in government decision making — all government decision making.

All policy meetings in City Hall should at the very least be broadcast as audio on the Web and available via phone teleconference. In other words, the meetings should be streamed online, and that stream should be accessible by calling a free conference line. This is already standard practice in the business world and is working well for many investors in public companies that disclose financial information in compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission rules. It can be done for little or no cost with services like blogtalkradio.com, skype.com, freeconferencecalls.com, and webex.com.

Today only a limited number of public meetings are broadcast, mostly because the only outlet is SFG-TV and resources are limited. But audio streaming is a no-brainer — there’s no need for a staffer to control cameras, the microphones are already set up, and these days just about every room has a speakerphone.

Currently, the SFG-TV video coverage isn’t posted on the city’s Web site, sfgov.org, until two or three days after a meeting. That’s too long; the audio should be made immediately available online. And the Internet URL and dial-in options should be listed on the meeting agenda so that news media and citizen bloggers can instantly refer back to the URL with timecodes to point out specifics, and include them in their stories and blog postings.

With streaming, you can follow along in real time when you are stuck at home taking care of a sick relative, or at the office listening with headphones, or you are disabled and can’t cross town to attend in person.

The city already has a great contract for real time captioning — the text you see at the bottom of the screen for video. It’s not 100 percent accurate, but it’s pretty decent. That could be expanded to cover streaming audio, and the text could be computer translated (or translated by bilingual typists) into other common languages. The advantage of media integrated with RTC is that specialized search engines like blikx.com and everyzing.com can be used to find relevant phrases and begin playback directly at that spot. And transcriptions can be posted online in real time (somewhat like live blogging!) so that if you are late for a meeting you can quickly scan what has already transpired, and by the end of the meeting you will effectively have a draft of minutes. That saves a lot of staff time and provides an immeasurably more useful historic record.

Today, video recordings of city meetings can’t be downloaded — the only way to review it or post a clip to YouTube is to order a $10 DVD, which arrives a week after you send a check (and no, they don’t take PayPal). And while many other city meetings make audio recordings, you have to pay $1 for an audio tape and pick it up during business hours or pay more for postage. They all should be available as free podcasts.

The SFG-TV video shows more than just the speakers and officials; there are other angles, and they ought to be available too. It’s important to know who attended the meeting but never said anything, who greeted whom, and even who ignored whom.

2. Let the public do the broadcasting. All City Hall meeting rooms should provide wi-fi (and electrical outlets), and the system ought to have enough speed to allow bloggers or activists to upload high-quality video broadcasts of meetings that SFG-TV can’t afford to cover. It can be done using existing services like Justin.tv, Upstream.tv, and live.yahoo.com. This would also allow live blogging — and let people preparing to testify on an issue have access to the Web to do research on the spot. If the room had a projector and a screen, people who were unable to attend the meeting could still comment, either through video or just by posting text messages that the decision makers could read.

The audio broadcasting of meetings should be expanded to include all meetings between the mayor (or supervisors) and city staff. The law already requires public access to so-called passive meetings — those between the mayor or department heads and outside parties that influence city policy.

3. Make public most city emails and other documents as soon as they are produced.

San Francisco city employees produce thousands of records a day — e-mails, memos, reports, etc. — and the vast majority of them are and should be public record. But many are deleted and others never see the light of day. When a member of the public asks for all the records on a topic, just finding those documents can be a sizable task.

But it’s technologically simply to solve that problem: every time a city employee produces a document, the computer system should automatically send a back-up copy to a public web server. That way nothing would get lost or erased, and anyone looking for public information could simply go to that site and search for it him or herself.

For e-mails sent by city staff, one way might be to CC (carbon copy) an online message board (for example Google or Yahoo groups, which would be available at no cost to the city). Other approaches for instant messages, text messages and voicemails could be adopted as well. The Palo Alto City Council is already doing something like this for a narrow collection of e-mails (although not in real time).

We all know there are some city communications that must remain private or be redacted — for example Attorney Client discussions or human-resource conversations regarding personnel. But there are simply ways to make sure those stay confidential: one approach might simply have the user tick a flag or answer a Yes/No Possible Redaction popup when the message is sent. Certain employees — like the people who handle sensitive employee health records and certain litigators in the city attorney’s office — could have software that defaults to a confidential server.

The added advantage, of course, is that the computers could also make a record of the title and date of every confidential document — and that information could be made public. If a dispute arose over whether the city was improperly withholding records, the public would at least know that certain documents existed.

All city files could be stored on network drives (not on local drives) with one location for default public files that would not allow overwriting or deletions and would be mirrored to a Web server and another drive for the few that may require redaction first.

4. Save all the old records. After a very embarrassing lawsuit that is threatening the Missouri governor’s job, that state in January adopted an email retention system that preserves all email for at least seven years (based on federal requirements for financial records). And e-mail/instant message/text/fax retention systems are standard practice now in the financial industry (Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgment because the company failed to preserve e-mail).

In fact, we all know storage continues to get cheaper and smaller — so San Francisco should abolish any retention timeframes for electronic records and keep them all into the foreseeable future. The world-famous Internet Archive is right here in the Presidio: I suspect that group would love to archive all the city information, and keep it online, free and forever.

When paper documents are part of the public record, they should be scanned and converted to text and posted within two days. This would include discussions between staff and individual members of policy bodies and the creation of the draft agenda and supporting materials as they are obtained.

All these methods would significantly reduce the number of public records requests to the city staff and thus save the city money.

5. Make calendars public — and keep communications public. Mayor Gavin Newsom won’t provide detailed daily calendars — even after the fact, when there is no possible security reason for keeping his workday itinerary secret. All top officials should post their calendars on the web so the public can track what they are doing.

The city needs to adopt a global policy that city business should be performed on city devices (computers, email accounts, phones) whenever possible — and when city employees or officials use their own computers or hand-held communications tools, those should be forwarded immediately to the city system and made public.

San Francisco has one of the best local Sunshine laws in the country — and at a time when activists at every level are looking for ways to use technology to expand public access, the city should be in the forefront. All it takes is some political will.

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Here are some more ways that the city could use technology to improve public access:

1. Use a program like govtrack.us to follow legislative changes.

2. Explore ways to bring nonprofits that perform traditional government services under sunshine laws.

3. Significantly improve the city’s Crimestats system (more real-time allow alerts for crimes near you) – google mashup et al. See http://chicago.everyblock.com/crime/

4. Embrace e-rulemaking technology – similar to federal rulemaking use technology to get ideas online and generate more participation for those who can’t show up in a meeting.

5. Require the Police Department to issue press credentials to bloggers.

6. Fund a few open-government lawsuits to expand the boundaries on access to public records (the law provides for attorney’s fees if the suit is successful).

7. Require city agencies to post the method for obtaining public records online. Require posting of all negative determinations on home pages.

8. At budget time, mandate that each agency provide statistics as determined by SOTF on sunshine responsiveness.

9. Require an assessment of sunshine compliance as a mandatory item for all Financial/Management audits.

10. Televise SOTF and Ethics Commission formal hearings.

11. Require active Ethics investigative files to be open.

12. Embrace fully the much-improved but incomplete example of posting online all interactions as part of large contract negotiations – as was partially done with TechConnect.

13. Host accounts payable/receivables online with the scanned images of invoices paid.

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SCENE: Fresh Taps

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The year in drinking was tough on our collective livers but tremendous for our taste buds. More new drinking venues opened or reopened this year than we can track, so we’re studying the larger trends below and listing most of our favorites. (Camper English; www.alcademics.com)

Make mine wine


Soon, it seems, there’ll be as many wine bars in San Francisco as coffee shops. Most new wine bars are not bars at all, though — they’re either retail outlets with tasting bars inside or small-plates restaurants by another name.
District (216 Townsend, SF; www.districtsf.com), however, is a wine bar that really feels like a bar. Its high ceilings keep you from feeling penned in, despite the large downtown crowd inside. Other new wine bars of note: South Food and Wine Bar (330 Townsend, SF; www.southfwb.com) specializes in Australian and New Zealand wines; Bin 38 (3232 Scott, SF; www.bin38.com) focuses on New World wines and has an interesting beer selection; Terroir Natural Wine Merchant (1116 Folsom, SF; www.terroirsf.com) features biodynamic wines; and the Wine Bar (2032 Polk, SF; 415-931-4307) plays sports on big-screen TVs.

Happy ever after hours


Clubs and later-hour venues are opening earlier for increased happy hour drink sales — in effect becoming cocktail bars with club crowds. The result is more bars open more of the time, which is more of what we like.

The Ambassador (673 Geary, SF; www.ambassador415.com) is gorgeous and crowded — there’s a bouncer and a line to get in at night — but after work it’s a fine place to chill with friends. Jumbo club Temple (540 Howard, SF; www.templesf.com) lets you pork out on the dance floor; its restaurant, Prana, is open for dinner and drinks early in the evening. Swanky Vessel (85 Campton Place, SF; www.vesselsf.com) caters to people charging drinks to the corporate account. Matador (10 Sixth St., SF; 415-863-462) is the cleaner but still dark reincarnation of Arrow Bar. Harlot (46 Minna, SF; www.harlotsf.com) serves food from Salt House next door and has a naughty bordello theme, whereas Etiquette (1108 Market, SF; www.etiquettelounge.com) just serves cocktails and has a naughty Victorian theme.

Tipple with garnish


Some of the best drinking can be had at eateries — think of all of those kitchen-coddled fresh fruits and vegetables begging to be muddled into delicious drinks.

Jardinière’s J Lounge (300 Grove, SF; www.jardiniere.com), has capitalized on its presymphony crowd’s thirst with a neat drink program. Similarly, the downstairs lounge at Bacar (448 Brannan, SF; www.bacarsf.com) now pours cocktails and hosts live music on weekends. The Presidio Social Club (563 Ruger, SF; www.presidiosocialclub.com) serves a short list of tasty drinks from a very long bar. “Drink kitchen” Bar Johnny (2209 Polk, SF; www.barjohnny.com) is a restaurant serving well-made drinks under false pretenses. Enrico’s (504 Broadway, SF; www.enricossf.com) has reopened and now features live music acts and cutting-edge cocktails. Palmetto (2032 Union, SF; www.palmetto-sf.com) is receiving raves for its drink menu, as is Grand Pu Bah (88 Division, SF; www.grandpubahrestaurant.com), which can be a bit tricky to find but is well worth seeking out. Ducca (50 Third St., SF; www.duccasf.com), in the Westin St. Francis Hotel, has a large lounge and an outdoor fire pit.

High, not dry


Most venues that serve high-end cocktails also focus on other things — food in restaurants, say, or entertainment programming in nightclubs. Last year a small batch of fab cocktail-only bars sprung up around the city, and the word on the street is that in 2008 we’ll see more cocktail bars with fewer distractions.

Cantina (580 Sutter, SF; www.cantinasf.com) serves updated versions of Latin cocktails like Pisco Sours, margaritas, and caipirinhas — the best part is that they’re available by the pitcher. Usually the place has a heavy service industry presence, which means the relaxed crowd isn’t shoving up against the bar, desperately waving cash and cleavage. The Sir Francis Drake Hotel added a second bar this year: the tiny Bar Drake (450 Powell, SF; www.bardrake.com) in the lobby, with a cocktail menu created by the same person who did the list upstairs at the Starlight Room. In Oakland, art deco–themed Flora (1900 Telegraph, Oakl.; 510-286-0100) is getting so much attention for its 20-seat bar and its cocktail program — created by the bar manager of the Slanted Door — that we were surprised to learn it’s actually a restaurant.

We’re here, we’re beer …


For a while most beer-and-wine-only bars were selling soju and sake cocktails in an attempt to stay trendy. Now we’re seeing more beer-focused venues that build the concept around the brew, not the food.
Gestalt Haus (3159 16th St., SF; 415-560-0137) opened in the old Café la Onda space, moved the bar to the back, and put in a double-decker bike rack that lures fixie-riding Mission hipsters like a free Journey concert. The bar serves both meat and veggie sausages and offers its beer in giant liter mugs. Wunder Brewing Co. (1326 Ninth Ave., SF; www.wunderbeer.com) is a new brewpub that serves homemade beers in the former Eldo’s space in the Inner Sunset. La Trappe (800 Greenwich, SF; www.latrappesf.com) in North Beach is a restaurant with a Belgian beer focus, and the Trappist (460 Eighth St., Oakl.; www.thetrappist.com) is an East Bay spot with a similar concentration. Nickies (466 Haight, SF; www.nickies.com) has reopened with a polished look and a large beer selection, though it could go almost anywhere on this list, thanks to its food and nightlife programming.

Endangered species


It seems the least popular type of drinking establishment to open this year is the thing we used to know as a bar, which doesn’t serve food (or whose food only serves to keep you drinking) or have a dance floor, cocktail waitress, or bottle service reservation in sight — but there still exists that magic time called happy hour.

In this new topsy-turvy world a lack of luxurious amenities can be a selling point, as at 83 Proof (83 First St., SF; www.83proof.com), where the only there there is a whole bunch of early-to-mid-twentysomething people packing in after work to consume fair-priced drinks. Revolutionary! Broken Record (1166 Geneva, SF; 415-963-1713) is an Excelsior dive that lures in customers with drink tickets for free Pabst. No-frills Castro gay bar the Metro (2124 Market, SF; 415-703-9750) has moved into the former Expansion Bar space, while the old Metro space is now the no-frills Lookout (3600 16th St., SF; 415-703-9750). And Bender’s (806 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com) — which sounds like it could be a gay bar, but isn’t — has reopened after a long hiatus due to massive flaming (in a fire).

>>Back to winter Scene 2007

PG&E wins a big one!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

The email came in to me from a City Hall source during Tuesday’s meeting of the Board of Supervisors.

“Are you hearing the same thing I am about Daly possibly approving Sklar’s appointment? I can’t get my head around why he would do that, if the rumor is true.”

I sent a note back saying that our understanding at the Guardian was that there were seven solid votes against the mayor’s nomination of Richard Sklar and Ryan Brooks for reappointment to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, a longtime PG&E bastion in City Hall. The swing vote, I said, was Sup. Gerardo Sandoval, but he appeared to be resisting the massive pressure on him to vote for Sklar.

My source was right. Sup. Chris Daly did the ignominious thing and voted for Sklar and gave him the vote he needed to stay on the PUC, on a 7-4 vote. (It takes eight votes to reject a mayoral nomination.) Daly in the process did the following: (a) gave PG&E a major victory, (b) gave the mayor a major victory, (c) allowed Newsom’s campaign manager and key strategist, Eric Jaye, with PG&E as a major client, to claim a major victory, (d) helped assure the firing of PUC General Manager Susan Leal (Newsom had fired her earlier because, in the opinion of the Guardian and other public power supporters, she was making some baby steps toward public power), (e) helped assure that the PUC would most likely be a safe haven for PG&E for yet another few years.

And Daly did it without tipping his hand in advance and letting his public power and other supporters know what he was doing. Nor did he explain his vote at the meeting. Nor was he available after the vote to explain.
What happened? “He’s painfully qualified to serve on such a commission,” Newsom told Cecilia Vega, the Chronicle’s City Hall reporter, for her excellent story today. Sarah Phelan, the
Guardian reporter covering the meeting, tried in vain to get a comment from Daly and even went to his office after the meeting. No luck.

But Daly did post a comment on Steven T. Jones’ blog story in which Jones reported that Daly “flipped his vote” on Sklar and described it as a “surprising and inexplicable move.” Jones posted the item at 3:43 p.m. Tuesday.

Daly posted his comment 57 minutes later at 4:40 p.m.,. He wrote that he “never ‘flipped’ my vote on Sklar, because I never committed to vote against Sklar. I also didn’t cut a deal with any Sklar supporters–I quickly terminated the only call I received from a Skar supporter.

“Not that it wasn’t a very difficult vote, especially considering the company I had on the vote at the Board.

“I am strongly against the removal of Leal and the associated $400,000 payout and have expressed my concerns about the Mayor’s meddling in Commission affairs. When I brought this up, Skar admitted to me that he did not handle this well. But on other subjects, Sklar has shown independence from Newsom–most notably on the issue of the peaker plants and the Charter Amendment. I also believe Sklar when he says he’s not against public power.

“So here I am looking at a Commissioner that is clearly qualified and has shown some independence, but with whom I’ve disagreed on a number of issues. I just don’t think that rises to the level of meriting a rejection. That also doesn’t rise to the level of deserving an appointment if I was the appointing authority.”

C’mon, Chris. This is pretty lame stuff for a guy who likes to kick ass all around City Hall and the Hetch Hetchy watershed. You’ve been out there on a host of good issues over a long period of time, including public power and kicking PG&E out of City Hall. So what happened? (I’m sending this blog over to your office to give you a chance to answer.)

And so Daly joined the emerging PG&E Three on his vote: Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Sean Elsbernd, and Carmen Chu. And he rejected seven solid votes for public power and against PG&E by supervisors who deserve gold stars in their lapels: Sups. Aaron Peskin (who led the charge), Ross Mirkarimi (the cca and public power generalissimo), Tom Ammiano and Jake McGoldrick (all good on the issue), Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty (who came through nicely), and Sandoval, who did the right thing while having a lot to lose because he will be running for judge. He was told during the intense lobbying campaign, sometimes bluntly, sometimes obliquely, that he would get lots of support and money if he went for Sklar and lots of pain and punishment if he went against Sklar. Good going, Gerardo.

And Sklar? Well, he’s never shown us the slightest interest in pushing public power and taking on PG&E during his long PUC tenure and he wasn’t reappointed by the Mayor/Jaye/PG&E to suddenly turn state’s evidence on PG&E. If he were the statesman his supporters were portraying him to be, he would have turned down the appointment and made some helpful comments. Instead, he took the occasion, in his appearance before the board, to trash Leal and say, according to the Chronicle, “‘I supported Susan for mayor in 2003. She’s my friend,”” he said. “”But this is not the job for her.'”

The Chronicle neatly pointed out that, during the meeting, Sklar “declined to offer specifics about why he thinks Leal should go.” Note the Newsom/Sklar spending habits: If the board votes to terminate Leal’s contract next week, she stands to collect a severance package of more than $400,000.

The Chronicle also pointed out that Sklar had mounted a “vigorous campaign to keep his post on the commission by meeting with supervisors beforehand.” The story also said that Sklar had rounded up support from a batch of high profile politicians: former mayor Art Agnos and Willie Brown (both of whom operated as PG&E aliles during their reigns), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (a PG&E ally who negotiated the sellout Turlock/Modesto power contract that cost the city millions) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a PG&E ally who led the fight to help PG&E privatize the Presidio and turn the public power base over to PG&E’s private power. Like Sklar, none of them have taken on PG&E on much of anything ever.

Let’s have a show of hands on this one: how quickly will Sklar, with PG&E support and allies like these, put even a tiny pebble in the path of the PG&E steamroller on the PUC? I’ll keep you posted. B3

Click here for Steven T. Jones’ blog, Daly’s comment, and Kimo Crossman’s comments.

Read Kimo Crossman and Chris Daly’s full blog comments after the jump.

Gifts for good causes

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› molly@sfbg.com

Everyone loves the two-birds-with-one-stone approach to gift giving: a piece of furniture that covers both Mom and Dad, a pair of event tickets for your SO that means you get to go too, or the ever-popular this-item-is-so-big-it-covers-Christmas-and-your-birthday gift.

But in most cases, this gift-that-keeps-giving approach only benefits you and the giftee. How about letting one of the worthy organizations below in on some of the action? These gifts for good causes will benefit your loved ones and the planet, giving you the gift of a good conscience.

UNDER ONE ROOF


For everything from sleek kitchenware to funky, rainbow-themed holiday ornaments, this HIV/AIDS service provider has it covered with its "A Home for the Holidays" holiday store and event center, through Dec. 31.

2278 Market, SF. www.underoneroof.org

826 VALENCIA


Pirate gear from this Mission District store helps support mentorship programs in writing skills.

826 Valencia, SF. (415) 642-5905, www.826valencia.org

GOLDEN GATE NATIONAL PARKS CONSERVANCY


Books, art, toys, and games from the Crissy Field Warming Hut Bookstore and Café (Presidio Bldg. 983, SF; 415-561-3040), the Crissy Field Bookstore (603 Mason, SF; 415-561-7761), Alcatraz Island Bookstores (415-561-4922), and the Muir Woods Visitor Center (415-388-7368) all benefit the conservancy.

www.parksconservancy.org

CREATIVITY EXPLORED


When you choose the ceramic masks, tiles, handmade pillows, note cards, or other wares at the Creativity Explored Holiday Art Sale going on through Dec. 28, 50 percent of the proceeds go directly to the artist, while the rest helps maintain this nonprofit visual arts center for artists with developmental disabilities.

3245 16th St., SF. (415) 863-2108

ARC OF SAN FRANCISCO


DRAWBRIDGE


Buying ArcAngel holiday cards will benefit Arc of San Francisco, which serves, supports, and advocates for individuals with developmental disabilities. Or get individual cards or 10-packs from San Rafael’s Drawbridge, a program for homeless children. In both cases, the cards are designed by clients.

www.thearcofsanfrancisco.org

www.drawbridge.org

iGIVE


GREATERGOOD


Shopping online doesn’t disqualify you from do-gooding — even if you want to shop at major retailers. Before buying that radio from Best Buy or that towel set from Target, check online malls that donate a portion of proceeds to organizations like the March of Dimes and the Nature Conservancy (at no extra cost to you).

www.igive.com

www.greatergood.com

WORLD OF GOOD


You can also try the more direct approach at World of Good, a Berkeley organization that works with artisan cooperatives around the world to import high-quality goods, like fuzzy scarves from India and olive trays from Tanzania, while providing living wages, safe working conditions, and career stability to the artisans.

www.worldofgood.com

ORGANIC BOUQUETS


If you’re a sending-flowers kind of gifter, try Organic Bouquets, the Marin florist that not only sells and delivers organic flowers, plants, and chocolates online, by phone, and at Whole Foods Markets nationwide but also dedicates a percentage of its profits to charities like the Red Cross and the National Wildlife Federation.

1-877-899-2468, www.organicbouquet.com

FIFTY CROWS FOUNDATION


The purpose of this organization is to effect positive social change through documentary photography. Support it by gifting one of its prints.

49 Geary, Suite 225, SF. (415) 391-6300, www.fiftycrows.org

CASA BONAMPAK


This Mission fair-trade shop’s paper cutouts, party streamers, clothing, and Day of the Dead items are gorgeous — and proceeds support indigenous artisans from Chiapas and central Mexico.

3331 24th St., SF. 1-888-722-4264, www.casabonampak.com

Cindy Sheehan takes on Pelosi

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Cindy Sheehan, who turned the loss of her son Casey in Iraq into a major national antiwar campaign, became a lighting rod for right-wing attacks, then stepped down from her leadership role, exhausted and somewhat bitter, is back on the scene — and running for Congress in San Francisco.

She came by the Guardian office this week and talked at length about her new political challenge. She realizes it’s not going to be easy taking on Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, the head of the local Democratic Party power structure and a champion fundraiser with essentially unlimited access to cash. But while Pelosi has been building up her power base in Washington, she’s often forgotten her base back home — and I hope Sheehan can push her not only on the war but on the Presidio privatization and its impacts nationwide.

You can listen to the full interview below.


Presidio gets a Starbucks

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY First came the troubling mandate that the Presidio needed to break even financially, a new model for a national park area. Then came the Starbucks. That’s right: the Guardian has learned that a Starbucks will open next month in the Presidio’s Letterman Digital Arts Center, replacing locally owned Perk Presidio.

The new Starbucks — and all it represents — has raised the ire of both park and city activists. Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, based in Bend, Ore., is concerned that the Presidio’s self-funding requirement is a harbinger of things to come across federal land management agencies. He says other properties following the Presidio model include Fort Baker in Marin, Sandy Hook in New Jersey, Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico (Forest Service land), and Fort Monroe in Virginia.

"It brings the entire standard of our national park system down from a high pedestal to a pretty base commercial reality," Silver said. "I just look at the Presidio as the first in what I fear will be a long chain of national parks that move away from the model of a publicly funded public good to a privately funded, largely commercial extension of our commercial world that’s really not in any way what we associate with national parks."

City activists point to Proposition G, which passed by a healthy 16 percent margin in 2006, requiring formula retail stores to get conditional use authorization from the Planning Commission before opening in neighborhood commercial districts. Richmond District residents demonstrated the power of this legislation in September by blocking a Starbucks slated for Fifth Avenue and Geary.

Dean Preston, a neighborhood activist and attorney launching a statewide organization called Tenants Together, said, "The law specifically applies to neighborhood commercial districts, but I think those same people who live in neighborhood commercial districts are using the Presidio, which is here in their backyard. I think that whether or not [Letterman Digital Arts] is subject to local law on the issue, they should be taking into account that city sentiment when deciding what kind of businesses to lease there."

Raul Saavedra, leasing director for Letterman Digital Arts, told us he didn’t know about Prop. G but that the company is aware that some people have opinions about Starbucks. That’s why the LDA originally selected Perk Presidio for the space. "We wanted someone like that to be successful," Saavedra said. "And they weren’t, unfortunately."

So the LDA decided to look for a new vendor, considering sole proprietors and local and national chains. Saavedra said the smaller operators he considered had credit issues and concerns about making the location successful. He said the key factors in selecting Starbucks were its strong credit, good service, and solid sustainability program.

Dana Polk, the Presidio Trust’s senior adviser for government and media relations, said that as master tenant, the LDA is free to sublet that space to any company it chooses. Nevertheless, Saavedra indicated that the LDA anticipated possible concerns with choosing Starbucks: "We went to the trust before we signed the deal with Starbucks, because we knew that there would probably be some opinions. And at that time there was no problem."

This will not be the first national park area to host a Starbucks. That dubious honor goes to the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, which since October 2004 has housed a Starbucks as a subtenant of Kimpton Resorts in its Hazlett Warehouse, according to Shelley Niedernhofer, chief of administration and business services for the park.

However, National Park Service concessions program specialist manager Jo Pendry confirms that these Starbucks are the first examples of formula retail throughout the 391-site national park system.

Kim Winston, Starbucks manager of civic and community affairs for the western region, claimed that revenues from the Starbucks help fund National Parks Service operations, but Niedernhofer said of the Maritime Park, "We don’t receive any revenue directly from Starbucks." The Presidio arrangement will be similar.

But Preston isn’t mollified. He said, "To have a Starbucks go into the Presidio with no real public review right after a Starbucks is nearly unanimously blocked [by a Board of Supervisors’ vote] in the Inner Richmond does seem like a real contrast. The fact that there’s absolutely no public process for putting a Starbucks in such a visible spot is really a problem." *

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

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I don’t like the George Lucas building at the Presidio. I don’t like the idea of an 850,000-square-foot commercial office complex (with a Starbucks!) in a national park, and I don’t like the fact that Lucas got a $60 million tax break for locating in one of the most desirable locations on Earth. But at least the Star Wars man made some effort to ensure his $350 million headquarters looks a little bit like the historic buildings around it.

And by that standard, I really hate the plans for the new Don Fisher museum.

Fisher wants us all to think he’s a great guy because he’s going to spend his own money to build a grand hall to display his own modern art for all of his adoring subjects to see, and he’s hired a fancy architect to design it. But check out the drawings — the thing is an abomination. It looks like something an alien dropped out of another galaxy far, far away and into the parade grounds of an old military base. It has no context, no connection whatsoever to anything that’s already there. I’m sorry, but it’s ugly. Butt ugly.

And it really doesn’t belong in the Presidio.

Think about it for a second: This is a part of the city that has almost no public transportation. The old Sixth Army headquarters was never set up to handle hundreds of thousands of visitors (on the contrary: like most military bases, it was designed around security, with limited, narrow access gates that could be quickly closed down). The roads aren’t wide, the nearby city streets are already pretty crowded, and there isn’t a lot of parking.

So anything that brings large numbers of tourists in large numbers of cars to the center of the Presidio is going to be a problem. It’s nuts that the Presidio Trust is even considering this project — either the museum is going to be a waste of everyone’s time and money because it doesn’t attract visitors or it’s going to be a nightmare of traffic and crowds.

If the great Mr. Fisher wants to put his art on public view, he could offer to donate or loan it to the existing Museum of Modern Art, which is situated downtown, near tourist hotels and lots of transit. But he doesn’t want to do that; the way I’ve heard it, the MOMA folks weren’t quite ready to bow down and let Fisher run the place any damn way he wanted. So he took his art and walked away.

Since he’s worth more than a billion dollars, he could also buy an existing building near MOMA or buy a parking lot and build a museum, but Fisher wants to pollute the Presidio instead. And guess what? He thinks he’s going to get away with it.

See, he helped Rep. Nancy Pelosi create the privatized park, and he was one of the original trust members, and this is how the rich think: We took this land from the public. We’ll do with it exactly anything we please.

Pelosi made sure the San Francisco government has no direct say over this decision, but the supervisors should at least try to fight it. They should hold hearings on this, pass a resolution opposing it, call on Pelosi to oppose it (and blast her publicly if she won’t), refuse to provide municipal water and sewer service, refuse to make traffic improvements … and make it clear what this is: a billionaire’s attempt to stick it to the rest of us.

Art and History vie for Presidio spot

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History museum proposed by Presidio Historical Association

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Art museum proposed by Don Fisher

Last night at the Officer’s Club about 200 Marina residents gushed over Gap-founder Don Fisher’s plan to put a 100,000 square foot museum in the Presidio to house his art collection. For the most part they gave a demur nod to the Presidio Historical Association’s alternate proposal for a history museum. The two museums are vying for the same slice of real estate at the head of the Main Parade Ground, facing north toward the Bay where a bowling alley and tennis courts are currently located.

The historical association made a case for the site as a place where the history they’d be presenting actually went down, and said the grounds surrounding the museum would be a part of the museum itself. “The Main Post area is the most historically sensitive area,” said Gary Widman of the Historical Association. “It’s where San Francisco really started 1n 1776 and it’s an area that has buildings from almost every major period since that time.”

The only historical connection Mr. Fisher could come up with was the original plan for the Main Parade Ground, which called for a significant building at its head to anchor the site. He was firm in saying he could think of no other possible place for his museum. “This is the only location that works for us,” he said. “Nothing like that is available anywhere else in the Presidio.” In fact, he said he was planning on gifting his art to some other, already established museums until he was approached by the Presidio Trust, which suggested he consider building his own museum in the park instead.

Before the two plans were presented, Mayor Newsom offered some very diplomatic remarks suggesting a great compromise. “These don’t have to be competing projects,” he said, adding that he’d appointed a staff member (Kyri McClellan, 554-6123) to this project. “My office wants to participate in this process from the beginning.”

The plans agreed on one issue — parking would go underground. After that, they differ radically.

Modern art infiltrates Presidio

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This is what happens when you privatize a public asset. It’s hard to imagine that the spirit of the Presidio Trust Act would have allowed for this kind of new construction in a National Park, where the emphasis is supposed to be the preservation of the natural environment and historic uses of the 1,491 acres. Where does contemporary art owned by Gap founder Don Fisher fit into that mandate?

This new structure, to house Fisher’s private art collection, is slated for the Main Post, the historic parade ground of the old army base, where several stately brick buildings now sit empty. The Trust Act, under section104(c) does state that new construction in the park should be “limited to replacement of existing structures of similar size in existing areas of development.” Nothing on shoebox aesthetics there, and this new museum doesn’t offer a way to rehabilitate the aging structures that would surround it, which is part of the Trust’s Management Plan.

A meeting will be held tonight, 6:30 at the Officer’s Club in the Presidio, to discuss the Fishers’ proposal and a competing plan for a history museum from the Presidio Historical Association. At least their proposal actually has something to do with the park.

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL It’s time for San Francisco to declare war on privatization.

The local threat is very real: as we reported in last week’s special anniversary issue, Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration has moved to turn over a long list of city services — from housing for the mentally ill to the operation of the public golf courses — to the private sector. Should this happen, if history is any guide, the city would wind up losing millions, the quality of services would decline, and the economy would suffer as hundreds of well-paid, unionized employees lost their jobs.

Equally important, the public would lose control over the institutions that were and are created and run for its benefit.

Privatization is a recipe for corruption. There always has been and always will be some level of graft, corruption, and incompetence in government operations; there will always be the occasional city employee who sleeps on the job, fudges time cards, doesn’t do the job right, and somehow manages to avoid being fired. But that sort of small-time problem amounts to peanuts in comparison to what happens when large amounts of public money are turned over to the private sector.

Private companies are out to make profits — and for the most part they keep their finances secret. Many of the worst scandals in American history have involved kickbacks, backroom deals, and bribery aimed at sending taxpayer dollars into the coffers of big contractors, and these continue today. And the argument that the private sector is more efficient often turns out to be utterly false; the absolute worst waste of money in the nation’s health care system, for example, is the phenomenal overhead involved in private insurance plans. As much as 30¢ of every dollar spent on private-sector health care goes to administrative overhead and profit. The public Medicare system operates on about 5 percent overhead.

Of course, the public has no way of keeping track of where most of the private health care money goes; the insurance companies keep that information to themselves. So do most other private contractors that take public money. And even if you don’t like the way the system is managed, you don’t have much choice — insurance executives aren’t elected by anyone and aren’t accountable to the community.

San Francisco has a history of allowing private operators to take over public resources, and the results have been almost universally bad. One of the reasons the 1906 earthquake caused such devastation was that the private Spring Valley Water Co. — looking only for quick profits and not at long-term maintenance or service — failed to keep its pipes in good repair. When the city really needed water, to put out the postquake fires, it wasn’t available. That fiasco led city officials to develop a municipal water system, which now delivers some of the best, cleanest, and cheapest water in the country.

Of course, Congress gave San Francisco the right to build that water system, which uses a dam in Yosemite National Park, only on the condition that it also develop public electric power. Instead, in the greatest privatization scandal in the history of urban America, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wound up initially controlling much of the output of the dam, and it still controls the city’s electric grid. The result: some of the highest electric rates in the nation and terrible, unreliable service.

San Francisco officials led the way to the privatization of the Presidio, turning over a national park to an unaccountable quasi-private board that operates as a real estate developer. The results: A giant commercial office complex, built with a $60 million tax break. Plans for high-end condos. Traffic problems, neighborhood problems — and a stiff bill to the city’s taxpayers, who have to subsidize private businesses that operate in a federal enclave without paying local taxes.

And if Newsom has his way, the pattern will continue: the mayor’s signature project this past year, for example, has been an attempt to let a private company control the city’s broadband communications infrastructure. Tens of millions in city contracts go every year to private nonprofits that fight like hell to avoid sunshine and accountability.

Enough is enough — San Franciscans of every political stripe need to organize to fight back. This city needs a new political coalition, a campaign against privatization.

There are all sorts of specific policies and legislation that ought to be on the agenda. For starters, privatization expert Elliott Sclar, a Columbia University economist, argues that any private business that takes city money to provide public services ought to be required to abide by open-government laws. That means every scrap of information related to that contract — including financial projections, executive salaries, profit and loss statements, and operating overhead figures — would be public record. All meetings of boards, panels, or other policy-making entities involved in managing the contract would be open to the public. If a private business doesn’t want to abide by those rules, fine; it can stick to private-sector work and stop bidding on government contracts.

Beyond that, the city needs to set up a task force to look at every private contract San Francisco hands out and determine why the city isn’t doing the work itself. If selling electricity is so profitable (and it clearly is, or PG&E wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep its illegal monopoly), why can’t the city take over the job and bring in some revenue? If there’s money to be made building bus shelters and selling ads on them — and clearly there is, since Clear Channel Communications, a giant private company, went out of its way to get a contract with the city to do so — why can’t San Francisco make that money for the General Fund? If a private company can make money running the golf courses, why can’t the city?

Sure, there are times when it makes sense to bring in an outside contractor. We’d argue, for example, that the Board of Supervisors needs an independent budget analyst, not tied to City Hall, to monitor budgets and spending. But there are millions of dollars going out City Hall’s door every year to private outfits that aren’t accountable to the public. And there are millions of dollars that ought to be available for badly needed public services that the city is losing because some private operator is making a profit on public resources.

Organized labor has every reason to oppose privatization and ought to play a lead role in creating a new coalition. So should the public-power coalition and the folks who have been demanding sunshine for the nonprofits. But everyone who uses public services and pays taxes in San Francisco is affected when city money gets stolen, wasted, or diverted. It ought to be a broad-based coalition.

There’s an opportunity to turn things around here and make San Francisco the model city that it ought to be. There’s no time to waste.

41st Anniversary Special: The privatization of San Francisco

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

William M. Tweed was one of the greatest crooks in American political history, a notorious Tammany Hall boss in New York who managed in the course of just a few years, starting in 1870, to steal more than $75 million (the equivalent of more than $1 billion today) from the city coffers. The way he did it was simple. As Elliott Sclar, a Columbia economist and expert on privatization, notes, Tweed took advantage of the fact that much of the work of city government was contracted out to private companies. Boss Tweed controlled the contracts; the contractors overcharged the city by vast sums and kicked back the money to Tammany Hall.

This is a rather extreme example, but not, Sclar argues, an atypical one: the worst corruption scandals in American history usually involve private contractors and public money. In fact, he argues, privatization is almost by its nature a recipe for scandal and corruption.

Nothing in the public sector — no incompetence, no waste, no bureaucratic bungling — begins to compare with what happens when private operators get their hands on public money. And the cost of monitoring contracts, making sure contractors don’t cheat or steal, and forcing them to act in ways that reflect the public interest is so high that it dwarfs any savings that privatization seems to offer.

That’s the message of the Guardian‘s 41st anniversary issue.

It’s relatively easy to investigate government malfeasance. The records are public, the players are visible, and the laws are on the side of the citizens.

But when Bruce B. Brugmann started the Guardian in 1966 with his wife, Jean Dibble, he realized that the real scandals often took place outside City Hall. They involved the real powerful interests, the giant corporations and big businesses that were coming to dominate the city’s skyline and its political life. The details were secretive, the money hidden.

One of the first big stories the paper broke, in 1969, involved perhaps the greatest privatization scandal in urban history, the tale of how Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had stolen San Francisco’s municipal power, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The famous Abe Ruef municipal graft scandals of the early 20th century, the Guardian wrote, were "peanuts, birdseed compared to this."

When I first came to work here, in 1982, Brugmann used to tell me that daily papers, which loved to try to expose some poor soul who was collecting two welfare checks or a homeless person who was running a panhandling scam, were missing the point. "If you look hard enough, you can always find a small-time welfare cheat," he’d tell me. "We want to know about corporate welfare, about the big guys who are stealing the millions."

And there were plenty.

In his new book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (Knopf), Robert Reich, the economist and former secretary of labor, argues that during the cold war, when American politicians railed against the socialist model of economic planning, this country actually had a carefully planned economy. The planning wasn’t done by elected officials; it was done by a handful of oligarchic corporations and military contractors.

Modern San Francisco was born in that same cauldron. During World War II, captains of industry and military planners took control of the city’s economy, directing resources into the shipyards, collecting labor from around the country to build and repair Navy vessels, and making sure the region was doing its part to defeat the Axis powers. It worked — and when the war ended the generals went away, but the business leaders stayed and quietly, behind closed doors, created a master plan for San Francisco. Downtown would become a new Manhattan, with high-rise office buildings and white-collar jobs. The East Bay and the Peninsula would be suburbs, with a rail line (BART) carrying the workers to their desks. Private developers, working under the redevelopment aegis, demolished low-income neighborhoods to build a new convention center and hotels.

Nobody ever held a public hearing on the master plan. And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that San Franciscans figured out what was going on.

By 1971 the fight against Manhattanization began to dominate the Guardian‘s political coverage. It would play center stage in San Francisco politics for two more decades. The paper ran stories about high-rises and freeways and environmental impact reports, but the real issue was the privatization of the city’s planning process.

Ronald Reagan soared into the White House in 1980, rolling over a collapsing Jimmy Carter and a demoralized, moribund Democratic Party. Reagan and his backers had an agenda: to dismantle American government as we knew it, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society, to get the public sector out of the business of helping people and give the benefits to private business. "Government," Reagan announced, "isn’t the solution. Government is the problem."

The Guardian was firmly planted on the other side. We supported public power, public parks, public services, public accountability. We had no blinders about the flaws of government agencies — I spent much of my time in the early years writing about the mess that was Muni — but in the end we realized that at least the public sector carried the hope of reform. And we saw San Francisco as a beacon for the nation, a place where urban America could resist the Reagan doctrine.

Unfortunately, the mayor of San Francisco in the Reagan years might as well have been a Republican. Dianne Feinstein’s faith in the private sector rivaled that of the new president. She turned the city’s future over to the big real estate developers. She vetoed rent control and gave the landlords everything they wanted. And when the budget was tight, she ignored our demands that downtown pay its fair share and instead raised bus fares and cut library hours.

When gay men started dying of a strange new disease, there was no public money or service program to help them, from Washington DC or San Francisco. So the community was forced to build a private infrastructure to take care of people with AIDS — and years later, as Amanda Witherell notes in this issue, those private foundations became secretive and unaccountable.

In 1994 we got a tip that something funny was going on at the Presidio. The Sixth Army was leaving and turning perhaps the most valuable piece of urban real estate on Earth over to the National Park Service … in theory. In practice, we learned, some of the biggest corporations in town had come together with a different plan — to create a privatized park — and Rep. Nancy Pelosi was carrying their water. Every detail of the Presidio privatization made the front page of the Guardian — and still, the entire Democratic Party power structure (and much of the environmental movement) lined up behind Pelosi. Now we have a corporate park on public land, with that great pauper George Lucas winning a $60 million tax break to build a commercial office building in a national park.

And still, it continues.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, a rising star in the Democratic Party, who told us he’s no fan of privatization, demonstrated the opposite in one of his signature political campaigns this year: he tried (and is still trying) to turn over the city’s broadband infrastructure — something that will be as important in this century as highways and bridges were in the last — to a private company. That’s what the whole wi-fi deal (now on the ballot as Proposition J) is about; the city could easily and affordably create its own system to deliver cheap Internet access to every resident and business. Instead, Newsom wants the private sector to do the job.

The Department of Public Health is running public money through a private foundation in a truly shady deal. The mayor’s Connect programs operate as public-private partnerships. Newsom wants to privatize the city’s golf courses, and maybe Camp Mather. He’s prepared to give one of the worst corporations in the country — Clear Channel Communications — the right to build and sell ads on bus shelters (and nobody has ever explained to us why the city can’t do that job and keep all the revenue). Housing policy? That depends entirely on what the private sector wants — and when we challenged Newsom on that in a recent interview, he snidely proclaimed that the city simply has to follow the lead of the developers because "we don’t live in a socialist society."

This is not how the city of San Francisco ought to be behaving. Because when you give public land, public services, public institutions, and public planning initiatives to the private sector, you get high prices, backroom deals, secrecy, corruption — and a community that’s given up on the notion of government as part of the solution, not just part of the problem.

You start acting like the people who have been running Washington DC since 1980 — instead of promoting a city policy and culture that ought to be a loud, visible, proud, and shining example of a different kind of America.

Metro Kathmandu

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› paulr@sfbg.com

On the list of pleasures a restaurant can offer, let’s agree that unexpectedness sits pretty high. Scene: you are drifting along Divisadero in the lower Haight, a still-scruffy region filled with filling stations, along with cafes and liquor stores whose signage has faded. You are hungry and not feeling especially picky. You stop in front of a place that used to be a decent French bistro, Metro, and note that it is now called Metro Kathmandu. You wonder if it has become a French bistro serving Nepalese food, in some wrinkle of a twist of a trend. Stranger things have happened — they happen all the time. Clearly something has happened; change has come. You shrug your shoulders and, because you detect pangs amidships, you step inside, not supposing that when you emerge, an hour or so later, you will scarcely be able to remember how modest your expectations were as you went in, nor how wildly they were exceeded.

Metro Kathmandu opened over the summer under the auspices of Jacques Manuera, a name that gives us a clue as to why the place is so good so soon. For one of Manuera’s earlier ventures was Baker Street Bistro, an astounding little French jewel tucked into a side street near the Presidio’s Lombard Gate. Manuera knows how to run small restaurants to the highest standards, and with the help of a partner and co-owner, Roshan K, and a gifted chef, Bishnu Chaudhary, he has done it again, this time with a Himalayan accent.

The foods of Nepal aren’t completely exotic here. For the past several years, the adventurous have had a choice between Little Nepal, in Bernal Heights, and Taste of the Himalayas (which replaced a Tibetan restaurant, Lhasa Moon) on Lombard. Those places are good, in their way, but Metro Kathmandu is remarkable, bringing forth dish after splendid dish at low prices in an appealingly modern setting. My dinnertime confrere, never one for fatuous praise ("I don’t need to come back here!" is an oft-made comment), allowed that the restaurant is among the best he’s ever been in.

Well, what is the secret? Little touches, of course, combined with some subtle surprises. Because Nepal lies along the border between India and China, its cooking is Indochinese in the broadest sense, a blend of influences from these two huge neighbors. At a given moment, you could easily mistake chicken momos ($6) — steamed dumplings filled with chicken, garlic, and ginger — for Chinese pot stickers (except they’re not seared on the bottom), and the next moment you are dunking your momo into a chutney of sesame and tomato while daydreaming of the Taj Mahal.

That said, the food seems more Indian than anything else. The department of bread offers roti ($2) and buttery paratha ($3). The kitchen, having presented your table with a complimentary dish of pickled daikon radish, turns out a splendid, creamy dal ($3) in which the red Indian lentils are puréed into a thick, peach-colored sauce for the al dente cooking of dark green (possibly Puy) lentils. This is an unusual and elegant multilayering. Pakodas, or fritters — whether of shrimp ($7) or a vegetarian combination ($6) of baby spinach, onions, and cabbage — are made feather light, yet golden crisp, by a coating of garbanzo bean flour. And saag paneer ($7), spinach cooked in spices with cubes of fresh white cheese, is none the worse for having been enjoyed many times before.

Despite the preponderance of Indian and Chinese influences, the cooking occasionally ranges farther afield. We caught a hint of Thailand in the shrimp masala ($9), whose intensely flavorful sauce seemed to carry some of the thickness and sweetness of coconut milk. And the menu offers an array of kebabs, including a daily fish kebab ($8). One day’s fish was tilapia, which I found a little uninspiring, but at least the kitchen gave the flesh a good spicing up before grilling it, then plated the pieces with quartered tomato slices and long slivers of green bell pepper (though no skewers).

Two dishes were novel to me. The first was chana chatpat ($5), a chickpea salad that differed from its better-known near relation, chana masala, in dispensing with a curry sauce in favor of a toss in a lemon vinaigrette, along with tomato slices and rings of sweet onion. The second, lamb chhoila ($7) featured several kebablike chunks of boneless lamb meat, seared and tossed with a sharp-edged ensemble of ginger, garlic, and chile pepper.

Given the high style of the savory cooking and the handsome redo of the now vividly red dining room — modifications include an encircling belt of Swiss-cheese mirrors, black chairs in an updated taverna style, and clusters of fanciful light fixtures, like big parade balloons with their bottoms cut off — the dessert menu is perfunctory. We did, one evening, treat ourselves to a carrot-cardamom pudding ($5), a molded disk of seasoned, lightly sweetened carrot shreds. I wouldn’t put it on any best-dessert list, but it was unusual, not fattening, and better than the usual choices at such places.

The "metro" in Metro Kathmandu reminds us of the restaurant that once occupied the space, of course, but it also sends a subliminal signal of urbanity. Metro Kathmandu is in some sense an "ethnic" restaurant, and its cooking, while sophisticated and impeccable, is more conservative and traditional than was the case at, say, Tallula, which for a few brief but memorable years fused subcontinental and French themes in the Castro. At the same time, it is a date restaurant, full of style and atmosphere and suggestive energy. Now all you need is a date.

METRO KATHMANDU

Brunch: Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 6 p.m.–1 a.m.

311 Divisadero, SF

(415) 552-0903

www.metrokathmandu.com

Beer and wine

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Fall Arts: I screen, you screen

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› johnny@sfbg.com

"Switching Schools Sucks" Jesse Hawthorne Ficks serves up a triple dose of teen alienation: Pump Up the Volume, Footloose, and the Andrew Stevens–starring, Heathers-influenced Massacre at Central High.

Aug. 31. Castro Theatre (info below)

"Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany" Perhaps the most expansive retrospective of East German film in the United States, spanning from the early 1960s to 1990.

Sept. 1–Oct. 27. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

"Look Back at England: The British New Wave" Does kitchen-sink cinema deserve classic status? It would be great to witness Manny Farber (who wrote scathingly about Rita Tushingham and Tony Richardson) duke it out with Morrissey on the subject.

Sept. 2–Oct. 26. Pacific Film Archive (info below)

"Devotional Cinema: Films by Dorsky and Ozu" Nathaniel Dorsky shows two of his films and also talks about Late Spring, one of the Yasujiro Ozu films discussed in his insightful book that shares this program’s title.

Sept. 4. Pacific Film Archive

"Send Granny Back to Russia" The 1929 film My Grandmother is screened with Beth Custer’s score to raise funds for an upcoming trip on which Custer’s ensemble will perform the score in Russia and elsewhere.

Sept. 4. Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut, Berk. Also Sept. 5. Dolby Laboratories, 100 Potrero, SF. www.bethcuster.com

William Friedkin Series Someone I know who knows all the great actresses calls Ashley Judd’s performance in Bug a "tour de force." That film and others set the stage for more Friedkin freak-outs.

Sept. 4–6. Castro Theatre

"Helmut Käutner: Film Retrospective Part 2" The series continues with the post–World War II period of Käutner’s career, including a 1947 feature shot in Germany’s ruins and a 1954 film featuring a young Klaus Kinski (yes, he was young once).

Sept. 4–Oct. 9. Goethe-Institut, 530 Bush, SF. (415) 263-8760, www.goethe-sf.org

"Fearless Females: Three Films by Shyam Benegal" The director appears at screenings that highlight the feminist currents of his contributions to the Indian new wave of the ’70s.

Sept. 5–7. Pacific Film Archive

Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana Lars Laumann’s 16-minute video screens in a loop as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" exhibition.

Sept. 6–22. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Darwin Awards A new comedy by Finn Taylor focuses on death by stupidity.

Sept. 7. Roxie Film Center (info below)

"TILT" The Film Arts Foundation presents an evening of films from its media-education program, which works with schools.

Sept. 7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (info below)

Cruising The digital restoration of William Friedkin’s most controversial film finally hits the Castro Theatre, years after being revived from infamy at the Roxie Film Center.

Sept. 7–13. Castro Theatre

Imp of Satan Local queer horror midnight movie screens along with a live comedy drag show.

Sept. 8. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.synchromiumfims.com

"Tomu Uchida: Japanese Genre Master" An extensive series devoted to the undersung Japanese director, whose movies spanned five decades and even more genres, including comedies, samurai films, theatrical adaptations, and police flicks.

Sept. 8–29. Pacific Film Archive

9/11 Truth Film Festival Two days of films and discussions.

Sept. 10–11. Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand, Oakl. (510) 452-3556, www.renaissancerialto.com

Madcat Women’s International Film Festival Turning 11 this year, Ariella Ben-Dov’s festival includes a tribute to the life and work of Helen Hill and culls 98 films — 76 of them premieres — into 11 programs.

Sept. 11–26. Various venues, SF. (415) 436-9523, www.madcatfilmfestival.org

Super Sleazy ’70s Go-go Grindhouse Show Will "the Thrill" Viharo brings together Pam Grier in Black Mama, White Mama and live dancing by the Twilight Vixen Revue.

Sept. 13. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Honor of the Knights Along with recent works by José Luis Guerín, this idiosyncratic take on Don Quixote by Albert Serra is being heralded as a new highlight of Spanish cinema.

Sept. 13–16. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Role Reversal" Midnites for Maniacs strikes again, with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Yentl, and a film that can never be screened enough, The Legend of Billie Jean.

Sept. 14. Castro Theatre

The Warriors Walter Hill’s gang classic comes out to play.

Sept. 14–15. Red Vic Movie House, 1727 Haight, SF. (415) 668-3994, www.redvicmoviehouse.com

Film Night in the Park: Rebel Without a Cause Sal Mineo makes eyes at James Dean, and Natalie Wood weeps about her dad rubbing off her lips.

Sept. 15. Union Square, SF. (415) 453-4333, www.filmnight.org

Xperimental Eros PornOrchestra accompanies stag movies in a celebration for OCD’s latest DVD release.

Sept. 15. Other Cinema (info below)

Eros and Massacre Film on Film Foundation presents Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1970 film about anarchist Sakae Osugi.

Sept. 16. Pacific Film Archive

"It’s a Funny, Mad, Sad World: The Movies of George Kuchar" The man appears in person for a screening of five Kuchar classics spanning 15 years, selected by Edith Kramer.

Sept. 18. Pacific Film Archive

Orphans of Delirium What is paratheatre? Antero Alli and a 2004 video provide the answer.

Sept. 18. Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia, SF. (415) 824-3890, www.atasite.org

Midnites for Maniacs in 70mm All hail Jesse Hawthorne Ficks for bringing Tobe Hooper’s bodacious nude space vampire classic Lifeforce — one of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s favorite movies — back to the big screen. Even Planet of Blood‘s Florence Marly may have nothing on Mathilda May.

Sept. 21. Castro Theatre

Strange Culture The story of Steve Kurtz is discussed and reenacted in San Francisco filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s latest feature.

Sept. 21. Roxie Film Center

"Girls Will Be Boys" This series, curated by Kathy Geritz, includes Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich trouser classics, as well as Katherine Hepburn under the eye of Dorothy Arzner in Sylvia Scarlett.

Sept. 21–30. Pacific Film Archive

Amando a Maradona Soccer icon Diego Maradona gets the feature treatment.

Sept. 26. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck, Berk. (510)849-2568. www.utf8ofilmfestival.org

In Search of Mozart Phil Grabsky’s digiportrait of the composer works to counter the distortions of Amadeus and the elitism that sometimes hovers around Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s legacy.

Sept. 28–30. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Legendary Composer: Jerry Goldsmith" The salt and pepper to John Williams’s Hollywood sucrose gets a cinematic tribute, with screenings of classics such as Seconds, Poltergeist, and the film with perhaps his best scoring work, Chinatown.

Sept. 28–Oct. 4. Castro Theatre

DocFest It turns five this year, offering more than 20 films and videos, including the Nick Drake profile A Skin Too Few.

Sept. 28–Oct. 10. Roxie Film Center

Film Night in the Fog The increasingly popular Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance, this time at the Presidio.

Sept. 29. Main Post Theatre, 99 Moraga, SF. (415) 561-5500, www.sffs.org

"Red State Cinema" Joel Shepard curates a series devoted to rural visionaries, including Phil Chambliss and his folk-art videos set at a gravel pit and Spencer Williams and his 1941 Southern Baptist feature The Blood of Jesus.

October. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Olivier Assayas in Residence: Cahiers du Cinema Week" The Pacific Film Archive has screened early Assayas movies that didn’t get distribution, such as the Virginie Ledoyen showcase Cold Water. Now the director visits to show Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (think of Assayas’s Irma Vep, also screening) and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (think of his Demonlover), along with Assayas’s latest movie, Boarding Gate.

Oct. 4–11, Pacific Film Archive

Mill Valley Film Festival The biggest Bay Area film fest of the fall turns 30 this year, presenting more than 200 movies from more than 50 countries.

Oct. 4–14. Various venues. (415) 383-5256, www.mvff.org

Helvetica The typeface gets its very own movie.

Oct. 5–7. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Shock It to Me: Classic Horror Film Festival" Joe Dante will appear at this fest, which promises a dozen pre-Halloween shockers.

Oct. 5–7, Castro Theatre

"Zombie-rama" Thrillville unleashes Creature with the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau.

Oct. 11. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400. www.thrillville.net

"Joseph Cornell: Films" Without a doubt, this multiprogram series — in conjunction with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Cornell exhibition — is one of the most important Bay Area film events of the year.

Oct. 12–Dec. 14. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Wattis Theater, 151 Third St, SF. (415) 357-4000. www.sfmoma.org

"Expanded Cinema" Craig Baldwin, Kerry Laitala, Katherin McInnis, Stephen Parr, and Melinda Stone blast retinas with double-projector performance pieces.

Oct. 13. Other Cinema

"Celebrating Canyon: New Films" Under the SF Cimematheque rubric, Canyon Cinema’s Michelle Silva and Dominic Angerame put together a program of recent additions to the Canyon catalogue.

Oct. 14. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"Films by Bruce Conner" The long-awaited new Soul Stirrers short His Eye Is on the Sparrow kicks off an hour of Conner magic.

Oct. 16. Pacific Film Archive

Arab Film Festival The festival’s 11th year will bring 11 days and nights of movies, including a Tunisian doc about the making of Tarzan of the Arabs.

Oct. 18–28. Various venues, SF. (415) 564-1100, www.aff.org

"I Am Not a War Photographer" Brooklyn-based Lynn Sachs presents a night of short movies and spoken word.

Oct. 20. Other Cinema

"Experiments in High Definition" Voom HD works, including one by Jennifer Reeves, get an SF Cinematheque program.

Oct. 21. SF Art Institute, 800 Chestnut, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

"Walls of Sound: Projector Performances by Bruce McClure" Brooklyn artist McClure explores projection as performance in this kickoff event in SF Cinematheque’s "Live Cinema" series.

Oct. 24–25. Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon, SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

Smalltown Boys Arthur Russell documentarian Matt Wolf’s semifictive historical look at David Wojnarowicz loops as part of the "There Is Always a Machine Between Us" series.

Oct. 30–Nov. 17. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org

The Last Man on Earth Vincent Price fights zombies in this oft-pillaged 1964 US-Italian horror classic, soon to be re-created with Will Smith.

Oct. 31. Pacific Film Archive

"Día de los Muertos: Honorar las Almas de Cineastas de Avant-Garde Vanguarda" Canyon Cinema and SF Cinematheque founder Bruce Baillie shares some favorites from the Canyon vaults.

Nov. 1. Roxie Film Center. Also Nov. 2. Ninth Street Independent Film Center, 145 Ninth St., SF. (415) 552-1990, www.sfcinematheque.org

International Latino Film Festival One of three fests to turn 11 this fall.

Nov. 2–18. Various venues, SF. (415) 513-5308, www.utf8ofilmfestival.org.

"Science Is Fiction" Nope, not Jean Painléve — the histories of the Tesla coil, the blimp, and other phenomena hit the screen, thanks to cinematographer Lance Acord and others.

Nov. 3. Other Cinema

Shatfest Get your mind out of the toilet — it’s another Thrillville tribute to William Shatner, including a screening of Incubus.

Nov. 8. Parkway Speakeasy Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. (510) 814-2400, www.thrillville.net

Strain Andromeda The and Cinepolis, the Film Capitol Anne McGuire’s reedit of The Andromeda Strain isn’t exactly backward, but — thanks to Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays: Science Fiction and the Avant-Garde" series for SF Cinematheque — it is back. The series continues to beam as Ximena Cuevas’s metamontage attack on Hollywood shares a bill with Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99.

Nov. 8. Roxie Film Center

San Francisco International Animation Showcase A big premiere, some music vids, and a link to the famed Annecy animation fest are possibilities as the SF Film Society event turns two.

Nov. 8–11. Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center (promenade), SF. (415) 561-5500. www.sffs.org

"Celebrating Canyon: Pioneers of Bay Area Filmmaking" Bruce Baillie unpacks some Bay Area experimental cinema treasures from the ’40s and ’50s.

Nov. 11. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

My Favorite Things At last! Negativland premiere their first CD-DVD release.

Dec. 1. Other Cinema

"James Fotopoulos/Leah Gilliam" and "Victor Faccinto/James June Schneider" Fotopoulos has had some Bay Area attention before, but Gilliam’s Apeshit — a look at racial politics in Planet of the Apes — might be the highlight in this last evening of Ed Halter’s "Crazy Rays" series.

Dec. 13. Roxie Film Center *

CASTRO THEATRE

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

OTHER CINEMA

992 Valencia, SF

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2575 Bancroft Way, Berk.

(510) 642-5249

www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

ROXIE FILM CENTER

3317 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS

701 Mission, screening room, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.ybca.org

Bay Area fall fairs and festivals

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Summer may technically be on the outs, but don’t put away your baggies, huarache sandals, and that bushy, bushy blond hairdo just yet, all you Gidgets and Big Kahunas out there: it’s still Surfin’ USA in the Bay. Hell, summer doesn’t even start in San Francisco until September at the earliest. You can wax up the board and get busy, stuff the kidlets into the Woody, and hit one of the bevy of cool fiestas listed below, or maybe just lay out on a towel in Dolores Park, waiting for a wayward Lothario or Lothariette to rub cocoa butter on your fleshy hind regions. Ah, how good do we have it in the Sucka Free City?

AUG. 25

Jazzy Tomatoes Berkeley Farmers’ Market, Center at MLK Jr. Way, Berkeley; (510) 548-3333, www.ecologycenter.org. 10:30am-3pm. Free. This collaboration between the Downtown Berkeley Jazz Festival series and the Berkeley Farmers’ Market features the sounds of local mandolinist Mike Marshall and Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto, plus the flavors of Venus Restaurant’s Ann Murray.

AUG. 25-26

Bodega Seafood Art and Wine Festival Watts Ranch, 16855 Bodega Ave, Bodega; (707) 824-8717, www.winecountryfestivals.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $8-12. The sleepy village where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds hosts this celebration of the best beer, wine, and seafood California has to offer. Sip on a Cline Cellars pinot noir and enjoy albacore wrapped in bacon while taking in the sounds of Marcia Ball’s Texas-style roadhouse blues.

Golden Gate Renaissance Festival Speedway Meadow, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 354-1773, www.sffaire.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $5-15. Stilt walkers, fire-eaters, jesters, jousters, knights, peasant wenches, and Shakespeare fetishists abound in the fourth installment of this medieval fair. Amid the feasting and storytelling, you’ll get a chance to practice your chivalry and maybe ride a horse.

AUG. 26

Arab Cultural Festival County Fair Building, Ninth Ave and Lincoln, Golden Gate Park, SF; www.arabculturalcenter.org. 10am-7pm. $2-5. Hikayatna (Our stories) is the theme for this year’s Arab Cultural Festival, featuring a bazaar with jewelry, henna, and Arab cuisine, as well as assorted folk and contemporary musical performances.

Taste of Marin St. Vincent’s School for Boys, 1 St. Vincent Dr., San Rafael; (415) 663-9667, www.marinorganic.org. 4-10pm. $150. Dedicated to supporting and promoting the exquisite food that is grown and produced in Marin, this event features a silent auction, chances to meet the farmers and chefs, and an elaborate sit-down dinner. Soulstress Maria Muldaur provides the musical entertainment.

AUG. 31-SEPT. 2

Monterey Bay Reggae Fest Monterey County Fairgrounds, 2004 Fairground Road, Monterey; (831) 394-6534, www.mbayreggaefest.net. The sprawling Monterey County Fairgrounds plays host to this annual festival featuring the liveliest of modern reggae acts. Eek-a-Mouse, Mighty Diamonds, and you-know-who’s brother, Richard Marley Booker, are just a sample of this year’s lineup.

SEPT. 1-3

Art and Soul Oakland Frank Ogawa Plaza and City Center, 14th St. and Clay, Oakl; (510) 444-CITY, www.artandsouloakland.com. 11am-6pm. $5. The seventh incarnation of this annual downtown Oakland festival includes dance performances, lots of art to view and purchase, an expanded Family Fun Zone, and a notably eclectic musical lineup: big-name performers include Lucinda Williams, Against Me!, the Legendary Fillmore Slim, Johnny Rawls, and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.

Sausalito Art Festival Army Corps of Engineers-Bay Model Visitor Center and Marinship Park, Sausalito; (415) 331-3757, www.sausalitoartfestival.org. Check Web site for times. $5-20. The Sausalito waterfront will play host to hundreds of artists’ exhibits as well as family entertainment and top-notch live music from the likes of Jefferson Starship and the Marshall Tucker Band.

SEPT. 1-23

Free Shakespeare in the Park Presidio parade ground, SF; (415) 558-0888, www.sfshakes.org. Sat, 7:30pm; Sun and Labor Day, 2:30pm. Free. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream gets a brilliant rendition under the direction of Kenneth Kelleher on the outdoor stage. Families fostering budding lit and theater geeks should take note.

SEPT. 3

Cowgirlpalooza El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; (415) 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3-9pm. $10. This sure-to-be-twangy evening on El Rio’s patio features music by the most compellingly country-fried female musicians around, including Kitty Rose, Starlene, Axton Kincaid, Burning Embers, 77 El Deora, and Four Year Bender.

SEPT. 5-9

San Francisco Electronic Music Festival Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF; www.sfemf.org. 8:30pm. $12-16. The seventh in an annual series of weeklong electronica parties. Fred Frith, Annea Lockwood, Univac, and David Behrman round out this year’s lineup.

SEPT. 8

911 Power to the Peaceful Festival Speedway Meadows, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 865-2170, www.powertothepeaceful.org. 11am-5pm. Free. This event calling for international human rights and an end to bombing features art and cultural exhibits and a talk with Amy Goodman, as well as performances by Michael Franti, the Indigo Girls, and DJ Spooky.

SEPT. 8-9

Bay Area Pet Fair Marin Center, 10 Ave of the Flags, San Rafael; (415) 229-3174, www.bayareapetfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $5-7. This event does double duty as a celebration of companion animals and a venue for a massive pet adopt-athon, so bring the kids and the dog.

Brews on the Bay Jeremiah O’Brien, Pier 45, SF; www.sanfranciscobrewersguild.org. 12-4:30pm. $8-40. Beer tasting, live music, and food abound at the San Francisco Brewers Guild’s annual on-deck showcase.

Chocolate Festival Ghirardelli Square, 900 N Point, SF; www.ghirardellisq.com. 12-5pm. Free. An indisputably fun weekend at the square includes chocolate goodness from more than 30 restaurant and bakery booths, various activities for kids and families, and a hands-free Earthquake Sundae Eating Contest.

SEPT. 9

Solano Avenue Stroll Solano between San Pablo and the Alameda in Berkeley and Albany; (510) 527-5358, www.solanoavenueassn.org. 10am-6pm. Free. The long-running East Bay block party features a clown-themed parade, art cars, dunk tanks, and assorted artsy offerings of family fun, along with the requisite delicious food and musical entertainment.

SEPT. 15-16

Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival Old Mill Park, Mill Valley; (415) 381-8090, www.mvfaf.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm. $7. Dig this juried show featuring original fine art, including jewelry, woodwork, painting, ceramics, and clothing.

Wisdom Festival Fort Mason Center, SF. (415) 452-0369, www.wisdomfestival.com. Sat, 10am-8pm; Sun, 10am-7pm. $8-$55. This fest features interactive panels, workshops, symposiums, and lectures, all geared toward your inner Shirley MacLaine.

SEPT. 22-23

Autumn Moon Festival Grant between California and Broadway and Pacific between Stockton and Kearney, SF; (415) 982-6306, www.moonfestival.org. 11am-6pm. Free. At one of Chinatown’s biggest annual gatherings you can see an acrobatic troupe, martial artists, street vendors, and, of course, lots of moon cakes. I like the pineapple the best.

SEPT. 28-30

A Taste of Greece Annunciation Cathedral, 245 Valencia, SF; (415) 864-8000, www.sfgreekfoodfestival.org. Call or check Web site for time. $5. Annunciation Cathedral’s annual fundraising event is an all-out food festival where you can steep yourself in Greek dishes, wine tasting, and the sounds of Greek Compania.

SEPT. 29-30

World Veg Festival San Francisco County Fair Building, Ninth Avenue and Lincoln, Golden Gate Park, SF; (415) 273-5481. www.sfvs.org. 10am-6pm. $5. For those afraid of hamburgers, this event features speakers, live entertainment, and local cuisine of the meatless variety.

SEPT. 30

Folsom Street Fair Folsom between Seventh and 12th streets, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm. Free. The world’s largest leather gathering, coinciding with Leather Pride Week, features a new Leather Women’s Area along with myriad fetish and rubber booths. Musical performers include Ladytron and Imperial Teen, and comedian Julie Brown also will appear.

OCT. 3

Shuck and Swallow Oyster Challenge Ghirardelli Square, West Plaza, 900 North Point, SF; (415) 929-1730. 5pm. Free to watch, $25 per duo to enter. How many oysters can two people scarf down in 10 minutes? Find out as pairs compete at this most joyous of spectacles, then head to the oyster and wine pairing afterward at McCormick and Kuleto’s Seafood Restaurant, also in Ghirardelli Square.

OCT. 4-9

Fleet Week Various locations, SF; (650) 599-5057, www.fleetweek.us. Cries of “It’s a plane!” and “Now there’s a boat!” shall abound at San Francisco’s impressive annual gathering. Along with ship visits, there’ll be a big air show by the Blue Angels and the Viper West Coast Demonstration Team. And for the lonely among us, North Beach will be assholes and elbows with horny sailors and jarheads.

OCT. 4-14

Mill Valley Film Festival CinéArts at Sequoia, 25 Throckmorton, Mill Valley; 142 Throckmorton Theatre, 142 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley; Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (925) 866-9559, www.mvff.com. Check Web site for times and prices. Documentaries and features of both the independent and international persuasion get screen time at this festival, the goal of which is insight into the various cultures of filmmaking.

OCT. 5-6

San Francisco Zinefest CELLspace, 2050 Bryant, SF; (415) 750-0991, www.sfzinefest.com. Fri, 2-8pm; Sat, 11am-7pm. Free. Appreciate the continuing vitality of the DIY approach at this two-day event featuring workshops and more than 40 exhibitors.

OCT. 5-7

Berkeley Juggling and Unicycling Festival King Middle School, 1781 Rose, Berkeley; www.berkeleyjuggling.org. Fri, 5-10pm; Sat, 9am-10pm; Sun, 9am-5pm. Check Web site for prices. More balls than hands. More feet than wheels.

Pacific Pinball Exposition Marin County Civic Center Exhibition Hall, San Rafael; www.nbam.org/ppexpo. Fri 2-10pm; Sat-Sun, 10am-12am. $20-35. Focusing on vintage machines, this inaugural festival promises to extol all things pinball. I think you get in free if you’re a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who can play a mean pinball.

OCT. 6-13

Litquake Various locations, SF; www.litquake.org. San Francisco’s annual literary maelstrom naturally features Q&As and readings by a gazillion local authors, including Daniel Handler, Jane Smiley, Dave Eggers, and Ann Patchett. The gang is honoring local writer Armistead Maupin with a lifetime achievement award.

OCT. 11-14

Oktoberfest by the Bay Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF; www.oktoberfestbythebay.com. Check Web site for times. $25. One of the few places your lederhosen won’t look silly is the biggest Oktoberfest left of Berlin, where the Chico Bavarian Band will accompany German food and a whole lotta beer.<\!s>*

 

Oppose Don Fisher’s museum

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EDITORIAL Not long after the US Army announced it no longer needed the Presidio for a military base, a group of powerful San Francisco business leaders began eyeing what would become the first privatized national park in America. Among the businesses aiming to grab a piece of the immensely valuable real estate were Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Transamerica Corp.; among the individuals was the founder of the Gap, a Republican named Don Fisher.

Fisher helped then–US representative Nancy Pelosi pull off an astonishing feat: she took more than 1,200 acres of land earmarked by federal law as a national park and handed it over to real estate developers (see "Stolen Base," 5/8/96). Fisher, who became one of the first members of the private board that manages the Presidio, was around to help George Lucas build a massive business park on the site — and pick up a $60 million tax break in the process.

Now Fisher, who along with his billions has amassed a pretty impressive collection of contemporary art, wants to build a gigantic private museum right in the heart of the park, at the site of the old post. His plan would drop a 100,000-square-foot Battlestar Galactica on the old parade grounds, wiping out a sizable amount of open space. The museum would be on public land, but he’d run it himself, in his own way, with no public oversight.

This is a terrible idea, and San Franciscans ought to be up in arms about it.

According to reports in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fisher has been looking for some time for a way to display his art collection, and he has talked to people at the existing big museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the de Young. But those talks broke down — in part, we’re told by sources, because Fisher didn’t want the professional curators and museum directors calling any shots. He wanted complete control over the art — control over where it was hung, when it was displayed, who got to see it, etc. The folks who run those cultural institutions are too polite to say so in public, but they don’t generally go for that sort of demand. So Fisher did what billionaires around the country are starting to do: he decided to build his own museum.

That’s his right, of course, and if he’d sought a spot, say, South of Market near SFMOMA, it might not be a bad thing. But the Presidio is entirely the wrong place for this sort of institution.

For starters, there’s no easy way to get there. Transit to the main post at the Presidio is very limited — one Muni line, which runs infrequently. No BART, no light rail — nothing of the sort of access you would want for a major public attraction. Car access is through the crowded Marina neighborhood, and the museum would no doubt build a huge parking garage, meaning the park and the surrounding areas would be inundated with cars. That alone would be a violation of the spirit of all the nation’s parks, which are trying desperately to reduce the number of car visits. There are no other cultural attractions around, so visitor traffic to Fisher’s museum would have no spillover benefits for any other museums.

And he’s talking about a whopper of a structure. There’s no way to gently insert a building that big into the park; it can’t blend in with the existing structures or the natural scenery. It’s just going to stick out like a bloated, gangrenous sore thumb, ruining the view and the historical nature of the area.

The private Presidio Trust has sole discretion over the proposal, but city officials can speak up, loudly. The Board of Supervisors should pass a resolution opposing the museum, the arts community should demand that it be relocated, and the public at large ought to tell the trust and Fisher that his personal memorial edifice isn’t welcome in the park.*

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I’ve looked at all the grand designs for the tower that will pay for the new Transbay Terminal, and I’ve read the architectural critiques, and frankly, I’m sick of it all. The plans are all ugly, and they’re way out of scale for this city — but what really gets me is that this is how we’ve chosen to finance our civic infrastructure.

Why do we have to live with a giant high-rise office tower near the Transbay Terminal? Because if we don’t, there won’t be any money to build what should be the central transit link for the Bay Area, a landmark bus and train station on the scale (we’re told) of Grand Central in New York.

I’m not entirely in agreement with every decision that’s been made about the new terminal, but I do agree that it ought to be an essential part of the city’s future. As we shift away from the car and the freeway as the basic units of transportation in California — and we have no choice, we simply have to — a downtown center where trains and buses stop and people come and go will become what the Ferry Building was long, long ago. It will be the way people arrive in San Francisco. We need to make it work.

But the project will cost a lot of money, almost $1 billion — and nobody wants to pay higher taxes to fund this sort of thing. In fact, nobody in California wants to pay higher taxes for anything. So the folks at City Hall have decided that the only way we can have a new transit terminal is if we hock a piece of our city and our skyline to fund it. So we take some of the land on the terminal site and let a developer build a monstrosity of a high-rise on it — and that will bring in the money that we can’t get any other way.

It’s the same reason we have that god-awful Rincon Tower sticking its ugly head into the sky: the developer offered to pay for a fair amount of affordable housing and other community amenities that the taxpayers won’t fund because local government can’t raise taxes in California without reaching extraordinary lengths that are almost politically impossible. So here’s the deal: You want affordable housing? Give a big developer the rights to do something awful, and in exchange, we’ll get a few dollops of cash for civic needs.

Imagine for a moment what the state might look like if we’d had to cut this kind of deal to build the University of California system. You want nice colleges, with higher education available to every state resident who qualifies? OK — sell off the coast and let it become a giant Miami Beach. Or sell the Klamath, the Tuolumne, and a few other rivers to Disney for water parks. Or sell Muir Woods for condos. You don’t want to do that? Too bad — no world-class university system for your kids.

This is the devil’s bargain we have agreed to settle for in 2007. This is how we create public space, public facilities, public amenities. We save the Presidio by giving it to George Lucas. We create a wi-fi system by giving the broadband infrastructure to Google and EarthLink. We can’t do anything ourselves, as a community; all we can do is grab for the scraps the private sector will toss us.

My friends, this sucks. *

Carbon-neutral madness

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Are you carbon neutral yet? Al Gore says he is. The concert tours for the Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews, and other big acts say they are too. Indeed, going neutral is hot these days as, almost overnight, the fledgling market in carbon offsets has burgeoned into a multimillion-dollar industry.

The method is simple, at least in theory. For a fee, companies will balance, or offset, the greenhouse gases emitted by your car or home by spending money on climate-healing initiatives such as renewable energy, forestation projects, and capturing deleterious gases like methane from farms and landfills.

But the sheer number of offset firms out there is staggering, with hundreds of companies vying for your dollars. And as the industry has exploded in popularity, questions have arisen about its reliability and whether the millions of dollars being spent are really making it to worthwhile projects.

"It’s the Wild, Wild West out there with carbon offsetting," the Sierra Club’s Aaron Israel told the Guardian. "Until it becomes a truly functional market, it’s going to continue to be confusing to the consumer who really wants to do the right thing."

A San Francisco firm is looking to bring some accountability to the freewheeling new sector. Since California’s energy deregulation disaster, the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions has run the Green-e program, which oversees and authenticates energy companies that claim to produce renewable power. Starting this fall, the CRS’s Sarah Krasley told us, Green-e will police the carbon offset market as well and put its seal on worthy companies.

Green-e has already been certifying one method for slowing climate change for years: the sale of renewable energy certificates, or RECs. A local firm called 3 Degrees (formerly 3 Phases Energy) specializes in RECs, mainly for small and large businesses. With each one-megawatt-hour certificate its customers buy, the company helps wind, solar, and other renewable-energy producers compete with cheaper, fossil fuel–based sources of energy. As 3 Degrees’ Steve MacDougal explained, "Utilities purchase energy at a commodity price, the same price for coal as for renewables. RECs allow [green-power companies] to have a premium, which makes them more profitable."

While 3 Degrees deals primarily in RECs for business clients, two other local firms, TerraPass and LiveNeutral, peddle offsets for individuals. Since it opened shop just two years ago, the for-profit TerraPass has sold tens of thousands of "passes" on its Web site for car emissions, air travel, home electricity use, and even weddings. The average buyer spends "about $50," company founder Tom Arnold told us, with the money going to initiatives like wind farms in the Midwest and the capturing of greenhouse gas emissions from farms and landfills. About one-third of 3 Degrees’ outlays go to RECs.

LiveNeutral takes a different approach from TerraPass or any other company. Rather than spending money on individual projects or methods, the Presidio nonprofit buys and then permanently retires carbon offset credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange. "By purchasing these credits and then never reselling them," LiveNeutral executive director Jason Smith explained, "we drive up the price of the credits and encourage [big greenhouse gas emitters] to reduce." LiveNeutral sells a one-ton emissions reduction credit for $7.50, Smith said. Most customers use the company’s DriveNeutral program and purchase five credits to offset one year of driving. The firm also offers a FlyNeutral option for air travel.

But many critics have likened the offset business to medieval papal indulgences, with environmental sins like owning an inefficient vehicle or cranking up the thermostat absolved for the right price. Israel said the Sierra Club does not openly oppose the practice, but he is worried that offsets could become "a distraction for people…. It’s really the last thing you should do, not the first. First you should conserve and become more efficient, then you can see about offsetting what’s left."

For Arnold, TerraPass’s phenomenal success is not about exploiting guilt or bad behavior. Instead, he reasoned, it simply shows that people want to do all they can to make a difference. "Most of our users are already green," he said. "But we want to reach the people who are just now waking up to enormity of the problem too…. What our customers are saying is very American: ‘Let’s not wait for someone else to do it, let’s get something done ourselves.’ " *

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

San Francisco midnight movie memories (Extended mix)

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We recently put together a cover package on midnight movies. The midnight movie scene is thriving right now, but it also has a long history — in fact some credit SF as a, if not the, birthplace of the phenom. Below you’ll find a mix of direct quotes from local cinema lovers and excerpts from books that outlines what has happened when the clock strikes twelve in the Bay Area. Go ahead and add your stories and sources to this account!

GARY MEYER The Pagoda Palace, known as the Milano in the 30s and early 40s showed Italian movies at midnight prior to World War II.
CHRISTIAN BRUNO In the mid-’60s the Presidio hosted Underground Cinema 12, a package of late-night movies that might incorporate a little [George] Kuchar, a little Busby Berkeley, and a lot of porn posing as art. It was a traveling package of films that was curated by Mike Getz out of LA, but the Presidio put its own SF (which usually meant gay) stamp on things.

presidio.jpg

GEORGE KUCHAR I remember one midnight show at a theater on upper Fillmore St. It started about 2 hours late because of projection problems. The audience didn’t seem to care and the 16mm feature didn’t care about cohesiveness of plot or theme, so it was a fun, flabby twilight zone of black & white sequences of an occult nature that suited the creatures of the night. The darkness inside and outside the theater was unable to still their noisy appreciation to the avalanche of imagery that descended from the screen like a caffeinated surge of STARBUCK sludge. The movie kept everyone awake so I guess you can consider it a HIT for that un-Godly hour and a half!

Needed: a campaign against privatization

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EDITORIAL Of all the cities in the United States, San Francisco ought to be most aware of the perils of privatization. Much of the city burned down in 1906 in part because the private Spring Valley Water Co. hadn’t kept up its lines and thus was unable to provide enough water for firefighting. A few years later, in one of the greatest privatization scandals in American history, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. stole what was supposed to be the city’s publicly owned electricity, costing the local coffers untold hundreds of millions over the past 80 years.

This is a city that votes 80 percent Democratic and has always opposed the Ronald Reagan–George H.W. Bush–George W. Bush agenda. A large part of the local economy depends on public employment (the city, the state, the federal government, and the University of California are by far the largest employers in town, dwarfing any of the biggest private-sector companies).

And yet Mayor Gavin Newsom, who likes to say he’s a progressive, is pushing an astonishing package of privatization measures that would shift public property, resources, and infrastructure into the hands of for-profit businesses. He’s talking about privatizing the golf courses, some city parks, and even Camp Mather. He’s promoting a tidal-energy deal that would give PG&E control of the power generated in a public waterway. He hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the ongoing PG&E–Raker Act scandal. And he’s determined to hand over a key part of the city’s future infrastructure to Google and EarthLink (see Editor’s Notes, p. 1).

This nonsense has to stop.

It’s hard to fight privatization battle by battle. Every single effort is a tough campaign in itself; the companies that want to make money off San Francisco’s public assets typically have plenty of cash to throw around. They’re slick and sophisticated, hire good lobbyists, and generally get excellent press from the local dailies. And it works: even board president Aaron Peskin, who generally knows better, is now talking about accepting the private wi-fi deal.

So what this city needs is a unified, organized campaign against privatization.

When Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981, the single biggest item on the agenda of his political backers was an attack on the public sector. The way the right-wingers saw it, government took money from the rich and gave it to the less well-off. Government regulated business activity, costing major corporations a lot of money. Government — "the beast," they called it — had to be beaten back, demonized, and starved.

So the Reaganites used their top-rate public relations machine to make the public sector appear riddled with waste and fraud. They cut taxes, ran up record (for the time) deficits, and forced Congress to eliminate a lot of social programs. More and more of what the government once did was turned over to the private sector — the way the radical right liked it.

That political agenda still rules Washington, D.C., where even a fair amount of the war in Iraq has been privatized, turned over to contractors who are making huge profits while Iraqi and American kids die.

The attack on government has worked so well that even a very modest plan by Bill Clinton to create a national health care system was killed by the insurance industry.

But privatization doesn’t work. Private-sector companies and even nonprofits don’t have to comply with open-records laws and can spend money (including taxpayers’) with only limited accountability. Most private companies are about making money first and serving the public second; that means when private operators take over public services, the prices go up, worker pay goes down (and unions are often booted out), and the quality of the delivery tanks. Look at the real estate development nightmare that has become the privatized Presidio. Look at the disgrace and disaster that the privatized Edison School brought to the San Francisco Unified School District. Look at the glitzy café and the pricey parking lot that have replaced good animal care at the privatized San Francisco Zoo. Look at what has happened around the world when Bechtel Corp. has taken over public water systems — rates have gone up so high that some people can’t afford this basic life necessity.

Look what’s happened to the American health system. Look what’s happened in Iraq.

Government isn’t perfect, and the public sector has lot of management, efficiency, and accountability issues. But at least the public has some hope of correcting those problems. San Francisco ought to be a place where a major movement to take back the public sector is born and thrives.

Almost everyone in town ought to have an interest. Labor, obviously, opposes privatization. So should neighborhood advocates (who care about public parks and open space), environmentalists (because the entire notion of environmentalism depends on a healthy public sector), progressive community groups, and politicians. Even more conservative groups like the cops and firefighters ought to see the need to prevent their jobs from being outsourced to a private vendor.

A campaign against privatization could link wi-fi, PG&E, tidal power, and the golf courses. The campaign could force anyone running for office to address a no-privatization pledge. It could appear any time one of these rotten schemes pops up in town — and send a message that San Francisco doesn’t accept the economic agenda of the radical right.

Who’s going to call the first meeting? 2

Midnight movie memories

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CHRISTIAN BRUNO In the mid-’60s the Presidio hosted Underground Cinema 12, a package of late-night movies that might incorporate a little [George] Kuchar, a little Busby Berkeley, and a lot of porn posing as art. It was a traveling package of films that was curated by Mike Getz out of LA, but the Presidio put its own SF (which usually meant gay) stamp on things.

KAREN LARSEN Gosh, I remember going to see the Cockettes at the Palace in North Beach in the ’60s. And I remember going to a theater in Chinatown that was 99 cents and showed midnight movies.

MICHAEL WIESE (from "25 Great Reasons to Stay Up Late," by Jennifer M. Wood in MovieMaker): "[In 1968 Steven Arnold and I] were able to book the Palace Theater. At the premiere [of Arnold and Wiese’s Messages, Messages], 2,000 people showed up for a 20-minute, black-and-white film with no dialogue…. That was the real genesis of midnight movies."

MIDNIGHT MOVIES, by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Da Capo): "Despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s antihippie gibes, the city in which [Multiple Maniacs] enjoyed its greatest success was SF. Throughout the first half of 1971, it was the weekend midnight feature at the Palace, a movie house whose main attraction was the stage show performed by the Cockettes…. Divine was invited out for an appearance that April, and [John] Waters conducted a special live show. Introduced as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’ Divine sashayed out on the Palace stage in Multiple Maniacs costume, pushing a shopping cart filled with dead mackerels. In between ‘glamour fits,’ she heaved the fish into the audience, strobe-lit by the continual detonation of flash bulbs."

PETER MOORE We [the Roxie Cinema] were approached by Ben Barenholtz with Eraserhead in 1977 and showed it for years. Early in the run we brought David Lynch out, and I remember having lunch in a Tenderloin diner that completely charmed David. We also showed Pink Flamingos, The Honeymoon Killers, and Thundercrack! (of course). And we showed Forbidden Zone, but that was a case of trying too hard for cultness.

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, APRIL 1977 "Midnite Friday: Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! Midnite Saturday: Divine in Mondo Trasho."

ANITA MONGA Curt McDowell, the talented and charming underground (as we called them in those days) filmmaker, was a student of George Kuchar at the [SF] Art Institute, then his lover and collaborator on many films, including the infamous midnight favorite Thundercrack! Curt’s films were moving, confessional, ribald, and often absurd, with brilliant sound and picture, art direction, and original music on the teeniest of threadbare budgets. He was inventive to the bone.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "At the Strand in SF — where the performance group Double Feature would mime virtually the entire [Rocky Horror Picture Show] — pickaxes were brandished in the audience when Frank took after Eddie with one."

MARCUS HU I remember going with a bunch of high school classmates to the Strand Theatre in 1979 and seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and being completely mesmerized by the religious experience of being in a packed theater that was singing and performing in sync with the silver screen. It must have made an indelible mark on me, as I went to work for Mike Thomas, who ran the theater, and that pretty much defined my life!

MARC HUESTIS [Huestis’s Whatever Happened to Susan Jane premiered at midnight on Feb. 13, 1982, at the Castro Theatre to a wild, sold-out house replete with the crème de la crème of San Francisco’s ’80s new wave scene. Mel Novikoff, president of the Surf Theatre chain, gave Huestis a good deal on a fourwall as the fledgling director pushed popcorn at one of his theaters. However, legend says he was heard running out of Susan Jane screaming,] "They’ll go see this garbage, but they won’t come see the Truffaut at the Clay!"

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, AUG.–<\D>SEPT. 1982 "Saturday at midnight! Basket Case!"

SUSAN GERHARD I remember screenings of Todd Haynes’s amazing Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story at the Castro right when I first moved to SF, around 1988.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "[Otto Preminger’s] Skidoo … has slowly but surely been gaining a second life as a midnight feature — particularly in the SF Bay area, where the movie is set."

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, JULY–<\D>AUG., 1990 "Saturday midnights … Frank Henenlotter’s latest and possibly greatest grim sex and gore comedy, Frankenhooker!"

WILL "THE THRILL" VIHARO Thrillville began as a midnight series called the Midnight Lounge in April 1997 before switching to prime time — 9:15 p.m. — on Thursdays in January 1999. Around the same time the Werepad shared its vast film library with the public weekly — not at midnight, but they were definitely midnight movies.

PEACHES CHRIST The first Midnight Mass, featuring Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, took place on May 30, 1998.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS Midnites for Maniacs began at the Four Star on Aug. 2, 2003. The slumber party all-night triple feature — with free cereal at 4 a.m. — featured Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Pinball Summer, and Joysticks. The first Midnites for Maniacs event at the Castro took place on Jan. 27, 2006; it was a disco roller-skating triple feature: Roller Boogie, Xanadu, and Skatetown, USA. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Midnight Movie memories

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CHRISTIAN BRUNO In the mid-’60s the Presidio hosted Underground Cinema 12, a package of late-night movies that might incorporate a little [George] Kuchar, a little Busby Berkeley, and a lot of porn posing as art. It was a traveling package of films that was curated by Mike Getz out of LA, but the Presidio put its own SF (which usually meant gay) stamp on things.

KAREN LARSEN Gosh, I remember going to see the Cockettes at the Palace in North Beach in the ’60s. And I remember going to a theater in Chinatown that was 99 cents and showed midnight movies.

MICHAEL WIESE (from "25 Great Reasons to Stay Up Late," by Jennifer M. Wood in MovieMaker): "[In 1968 Steven Arnold and I] were able to book the Palace Theater. At the premiere [of Arnold and Wiese’s Messages, Messages], 2,000 people showed up for a 20-minute, black-and-white film with no dialogue…. That was the real genesis of midnight movies."

MIDNIGHT MOVIES, by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum (Da Capo): "Despite, or perhaps because of, the film’s antihippie gibes, the city in which [Multiple Maniacs] enjoyed its greatest success was SF. Throughout the first half of 1971, it was the weekend midnight feature at the Palace, a movie house whose main attraction was the stage show performed by the Cockettes…. Divine was invited out for an appearance that April, and [John] Waters conducted a special live show. Introduced as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’ Divine sashayed out on the Palace stage in Multiple Maniacs costume, pushing a shopping cart filled with dead mackerels. In between ‘glamour fits,’ she heaved the fish into the audience, strobe-lit by the continual detonation of flash bulbs."

PETER MOORE We [the Roxie Cinema] were approached by Ben Barenholtz with Eraserhead in 1977 and showed it for years. Early in the run we brought David Lynch out, and I remember having lunch in a Tenderloin diner that completely charmed David. We also showed Pink Flamingos, The Honeymoon Killers, and Thundercrack! (of course). And we showed Forbidden Zone, but that was a case of trying too hard for cultness.

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, APRIL 1977 "Midnite Friday: Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! Midnite Saturday: Divine in Mondo Trasho."

ANITA MONGA Curt McDowell, the talented and charming underground (as we called them in those days) filmmaker, was a student of George Kuchar at the [SF] Art Institute, then his lover and collaborator on many films, including the infamous midnight favorite Thundercrack! Curt’s films were moving, confessional, ribald, and often absurd, with brilliant sound and picture, art direction, and original music on the teeniest of threadbare budgets. He was inventive to the bone.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "At the Strand in SF — where the performance group Double Feature would mime virtually the entire [Rocky Horror Picture Show] — pickaxes were brandished in the audience when Frank took after Eddie with one."

MARCUS HU I remember going with a bunch of high school classmates to the Strand Theatre in 1979 and seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show and being completely mesmerized by the religious experience of being in a packed theater that was singing and performing in sync with the silver screen. It must have made an indelible mark on me, as I went to work for Mike Thomas, who ran the theater, and that pretty much defined my life!

MARC HUESTIS [Huestis’s Whatever Happened to Susan Jane premiered at midnight on Feb. 13, 1982, at the Castro Theatre to a wild, sold-out house replete with the crème de la crème of San Francisco’s ’80s new wave scene. Mel Novikoff, president of the Surf Theatre chain, gave Huestis a good deal on a fourwall as the fledgling director pushed popcorn at one of his theaters. However, legend says he was heard running out of Susan Jane screaming,] "They’ll go see this garbage, but they won’t come see the Truffaut at the Clay!"

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, AUG.–<\D>SEPT. 1982 "Saturday at midnight! Basket Case!"

SUSAN GERHARD I remember screenings of Todd Haynes’s amazing Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story at the Castro right when I first moved to SF, around 1988.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES "[Otto Preminger’s] Skidoo … has slowly but surely been gaining a second life as a midnight feature — particularly in the SF Bay area, where the movie is set."

ROXIE CINEMA CALENDAR, JULY–<\D>AUG., 1990 "Saturday midnights … Frank Henenlotter’s latest and possibly greatest grim sex and gore comedy, Frankenhooker!"

WILL "THE THRILL" VIHARO Thrillville began as a midnight series called the Midnight Lounge in April 1997 before switching to prime time — 9:15 p.m. — on Thursdays in January 1999. Around the same time the Werepad shared its vast film library with the public weekly — not at midnight, but they were definitely midnight movies.

PEACHES CHRIST The first Midnight Mass, featuring Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, took place on May 30, 1998.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS Midnites for Maniacs began at the Four Star on Aug. 2, 2003. The slumber party all-night triple feature — with free cereal at 4 a.m. — featured Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Pinball Summer, and Joysticks. The first Midnites for Maniacs event at the Castro took place on Jan. 27, 2006; it was a disco roller-skating triple feature: Roller Boogie, Xanadu, and Skatetown, USA.

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