Review

Mayor’s power plant plan flawed

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by Amanda Witherell

Or, as Sup. Aaron Peskin put it one point during the dramatic Wed. Oct. 22 Land Use and Economic Development committee hearing, “The only thing holding this proposal together is the staple in the upper left hand corner.”

Under discussion was Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to retrofit 32-year-old Mirant Potrero power plant Units 4,5, and 6 to run on natural gas rather than diesel and be 97.5 percent cleaner than current operations – a retrofit and emissions reduction that’s never been accomplished and might be impossible, according to testimony from industry experts called in by committee chair Sup. Sophie Maxwell.

The plan arose in June, after a May 23 tête-à-tête between Newsom and seven Pacific Gas & Electric executives just as the Board of Supervisors was preparing to vote on a plan to construct a new power plant to replace Mirant and meet state energy requirements. PG&E opposed the new plant (referred to as the “CTs”) as it would have been owned by the city, eroding the utility company’s control of local energy resources. Prior to the May meeting, Newsom had been part of a coalition of city officials, which included city attorney Dennis Herrera and Supes. Maxwell and Peskin, who supported the new plant and had been fostering it forward for several years as a way to close down Mirant’s more polluting operations. Newsom pushed for support of retrofitting Mirant instead, billing it as a cheaper alternative that could be just as clean as the new city-owned combustion turbine facility that had been proposed.

But the results of a July feasibility study [PDF], completed by CH2M Hill and currently part of the SFPUC’s negotiations with Mirant, had Peskin comparing the idea to retrofitting a 1974 Chevy rather than going for a new Toyota Prius.

A score of issues came up as the study was discussed during what proved to be a very revealing hearing. They include an assumption of reduced air emissions for the retrofit based on reduced runtimes for a plant that the city has sued in the past for operating more than it was legally permitted, a possible ducking of CEQA environmental review, a lack of established regulatory oversight of the plant, an emissions control system that “predicts” rather than actually measures pollution, an understated project cost of $78,730,000 and the fact that executives from energy companies that routinely bid on such retrofit projects testified that they wouldn’t go anywhere near this one.

Ritual de lo non-habitual

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Since rituals necessitate a community of believers, presenting one for an audience in a theater runs the risk of becoming a mere item of cultural consumption. Yet, on Oct. 16, master drummer-vocalist-dancer Dohee Lee went beyond expectations. Her oddly named Flux succeeded best in its most ritualistic elements — the moments when it called up soul-wrenching memory, pain, and reconciliation.

The title refers to the ever-changing aspects of all creation. That’s a cliché and doesn’t tell us much about the nature of this, at times, powerful work of dance theater created by the Korean-born Lee and a slew of excellent collaborators. Foremost among them are the musicians of Asian Improv Arts: Francis Wong; Tatsu Aoki, who also created one of Flux‘s films; Jason Lewis; and Jonathan Chen. They are master performers. And as a result of their efforts — along with Lee’s — Flux‘s seamless unity of dance and music made for an exceedingly rare experience. The only other dancer besides Lee was the very capable Sherwood Chen. Relegated for the most part to subsidiary roles, he was, however, underused.

Using the I-Ching as a shaping device and philosophical tool, Lee divided the evocative Flux into nine sections, helpfully explained in the program insert. The work started on a dreamy note and moved through historical sequences to the climactic dramatization focusing on the memory of Lee’s grandmother. The piece wound down to a peaceful, even joyously embracing close with the traditional passing of the Banyayoungsun, the ship that connects the living with ancestors.

Deann Borshay Liem’s excellent appropriations of historic Korean films included sepia-colored portraits of ordinary men and women in addition to haunting sequences of refugees, corpses, and iconic symbols. Combined with Aoki’s more abstract images — water, fire, wind, a ravine — which set the context for the individual sections, Flux captured the experiences of a specific people while placing them in a universal context of human experience. Less effectively, the program notes to the "Fire=Trade" sequence seemed a little naïve in the way it commemorated only the unequal trade treaties "between the US and Korea from 1850 to the present." It’s not as if Asian nations and European powers were entirely innocent when it came to Korea’s woes.

As a performer, Lee is a wonder of versatility and strength. In "Water," she commenced the refugee’s journey by stepping gingerly into the sea, her feet floating and blindly attempting to find firmer ground — her only guide a fan-shaped wooden rattle. In "Thunder," she played a battery of Korean drums with an increasingly furious intensity as we stared at those all-too-familiar images of terrorized faces and rows of bodies, victims of war. In the somewhat prolonged finale, a bouncy, almost jazz-like freedom propelled Lee into a rollicking celebration of hope.

Lee’s duets and the choreography for Chen, in contrast, looked uncertain. They spoke of what may be inexperience choreographing for other dancers. Yet as a soloist, Lee is outstanding. The "Mountain" section was an astounding tour de force that started on a rather low-key interchange between a child and her grandmother, then swelled into something approaching the demonic. The program notes explained that the old woman was recalling her experience during the Korean War, and that the style evokes Korean opera.

The moment was as dramatically powerful as anything in Puccini — and those vocalists don’t dance. Though performed in Korean and therefore verbally unintelligible to many in the audience, the trajectory of this tale of pain and fury was crystal clear. Bent over and dragging a drum behind her, Lee gradually straightened and then whipped herself into shamanistic ecstasy. In the end, standing on her drum, she returned to her guise as a fragile human being. It was the closest thing to a ritual that you are likely to see onstage. *

Surrealism’s island

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>a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Since his death in 1966, André Breton has received more than his fair share of knocks. I’ve heard both critics and poets call him "fascist," though if pressed, they can only cite Breton’s sometimes dogmatic leadership of the surrealist movement. Such loose talk is tiresome and ahistorical. A staunch Communist, Breton was nonetheless the first to denounce the totalitarian Stalin when the rest of the French Left turned a blind eye. He never went for Mao like the Tel Quel crowd. As leader of a left-wing movement opposed to Hitler, he was on the Nazis’ Parisian to-do list, and he only narrowly avoided arrest by Vichy authorities in Marseille, escaping to America aided by the efforts of Varian Fry (a sort of Schindler for lefty artists). Breton’s even occasionally criticized for fleeing the Nazis — as if it contradicted his principles — though his accusers tend to lead safe, academic lives. As we see in Martinique: Snake Charmer (University of Texas Press, 96 pages, $19.95), a chronicle of Breton’s stopover between Marseille and NYC, exile’s no picnic.

Breton had his flaws, of course, notably sexism and homophobia, yet even these were complicated, given the number of women and gays within the surrealist group. Most of his positions were politically progressive, particularly his anti-colonialism and anti-racism. Where much of the modernist avant-garde (Pound, Eliot, Marinetti, etc.) was avowedly racist, surrealism was the only movement that welcomed black artists as colleagues and innovators. In Martinique, in reference to the poet Aimé Césaire (who died only a few months ago, at 94), Breton writes: "It is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today is capable of handling it

. . . who is the one guiding us today into the unexplored." (Similarly, Breton would declare the Haitian Magloire Saint-Aude the most important surrealist poet of the post-war period.) Where more sympathetic artists like the Cubists exoticized Africans, Breton identifies with Césaire, "unable to distinguish his will from my own." This might seem naïve in today’s political climate, yet the testimonials by the Martinican and Haitian writers who met Breton in the ’40s — translated in Michael Richardson’s 1996 book Refusal of the Shadow — suggest the feeling was mutual. Maybe it’s not so naïve, for surrealism stretches the limits of the possible.

Like many surrealist books, Martinique is a hybrid work, alternating between "lyrical language" and "the language of simple information," reflecting "intolerable malaise on the one hand and radiance on the other." That Breton could still pursue the poetic marvelous under such trying conditions — on arrival, he’s thrown into a concentration by the pro-Vichy regime and, once freed, is constantly shadowed by police — is extraordinary. He was fascinated by Martinique’s natural beauty, celebrating, for example, the effect of rainfall on the island in surrealist terms: "If the light is the least bit veiled, all the sky’s water pierces its canopy, from a rigging of vertigo, water continually shakes itself, tuning its tall green-copper organ pipes." Not even the uncertainty of his fate could stop Breton’s imagination.

This edition of Martinique — the first in English — is not without drawbacks, the most egregious being the poor reproductions of André Masson’s drawings, seemingly scanned from the French edition. But the translation is admirable. In a society which falsely imagines itself "post-racial," Martinique is essential reading. *

Never grow up

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REVIEW Azazel Jacobs’ portrait of the artist as a regressive thumb-sucker is a welcome antidote to Hollywood’s inane home-for-the-holidays pictures. Jacobs’ counterculture parents, the experimental filmmaker Ken and his painter wife Flo, were sporting enough to play Ma and Dad to Mikey (Matt Boren). The slouchy 30-something purposefully misses his flight back to wife and baby in New York, and lands back in the family nest in a deep funk. Momma’s Man‘s delicious comedy derives from Mikey’s fruitless conquests of the past: playing through a notebook’s worth of high school breakup songs, reading comic books, and, memorably, propping up in bed with his parents to watch Monsieur Verdoux (1947). The mother-son bond veers toward Portnoy’s Complaint territory when Momma Flo won’t stop asking if Mikey needs anything from the other side of a bathroom door, but elsewhere her gentle prodding strikes just the right homey notes. And after Mikey uses his parents’ aging as a cover for his own semi-consciousness, her final, wordless embrace of her son is enough to make you want to call home. Momma’s Man is a bleary-eyed nostalgia trip, mindful of the precarious limbo of post-adolescent reflexivity. As Mikey spins out in his black hole of comfort and culture, it becomes clear that Momma’s Man is a goodbye not just to childhood, but to the last echoes of bohemian New York. 

MOMMA’S MAN opens Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters.

Missing pieces

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NEWS/REVIEW At this point, any review of Gallery 16’s fifteenth anniversary show "These Are the People in Your Neighborhood" must revolve around its missing pieces. On the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 15, two paintings by Margaret Kilgallen were stolen. Of the 68 works on display, they were among only a handful not for sale. When one takes the exhibition’s layout into consideration, it appears that Untitled and Easy — a pair of small enamel-on-wood works that Kilgallen had given to gallery owner Griff Williams — were part of a behind-your-back theft.

Rough ironies are left in their wake. The first is the friendly title of the exhibition itself. "Please stop stealing the stemware," asks one page of Tucker Nichols’ line-drawing zine Fifteen Yrs Give or Take: A Commemorative Guide to Gallery 16. "One bad day in like 15 years," says another. With a show by Lydia Fong reaching the end of its run in San Francisco, and Barry McGee (whose work has also been stolen: check out a Luggage Store interview in an old issue of ANP Quarterly) one of the main focuses of a recent Artforum issue dedicated to "Art and its Markets," the Kilgallen theft is a high-priced mystery.

What remains at Gallery 16? For starters, I like: Michelle Grabner’s update of op art’s love affair with the circle; Gay Outlaw giving form to inversion with uncharacteristically Mission-like materials; a number of unassumingly beautiful watercolors by Cliff Hengst; Jim Isermann’s brash ’90s version of the understated loom pieces Ruth Laskey is making today; Alice Shaw’s hypnotic lenticular photos; Lauren Davies’ Dirtballs with Snow (a deal at $350 each); the Jerome Caja-eseque shrinky dink humor of Andrew Romanoff’s Ipod Sucks Brain Out; and Alex Zecca’s and Wayne Smith’s amazing ink-on-paper screens or patterns.

Regarding the Kilgallen pieces, here’s a message from Gallery 16’s Vanessa Blaikie and Griff Williams: "There is very little of Margaret’s original work out there for sale, if any, and so we are asking that everyone please keep their eyes and ears open with respect to these two works. Should they resurface for sale, or should you see these in a private residence, we ask that you please contact us immediately. Any information would be much appreciated."

THESE ARE THE PEOPLE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD Through Nov. 7. Mon.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., SF. (415) 626-7495, www.gallery16.com

The Infinite Operation Iraqi Freedom

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REVIEW It has been seven years since W. launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, and in that time enough documentaries about the war have been made to warrant a Wikipedia page on the subgenre. From its explosive opening sequence, in which an Iraqi village endures a surprise attack from insurgents, Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’ documentary Full Battle Rattle could be placed alongside Gunner Palace (2004) or The Ground Truth (2006) as another vérité-style portrait of daily life "on the ground." It’s when the smoke clears and an ice cream truck pulls up that we realize something’s amiss. This isn’t Iraq, but Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, and what we’ve just seen is part of a three-week long, intensive simulation meant to prepare US soldiers for conditions overseas.

Gerber and Moss follow one unit, led by the even-handed Col. McLaughlin, through the entirety of a training session as they attempt to win the hearts and cooperation of the fractious village of Medina Wasl. The villagers are actual Iraqi refugees, who despite their Shia, Sunni, and Christian backgrounds, have formed a genuine communal bond. As the deputy mayor, who used to be a Baghdad playboy in the ’70s, says: "I can’t even tell my wife, but after three years this feels more like home." The insurgents, on the other hand, are played by fellow American soldiers, and contribute to some of the most surreal moments in the film when they speak of taking out McLaughlin’s unit with unrestrained glee. The topsy-turvy world of Fort Irwin is further underscored by a commanding officer’s seemingly-contradictory comment that he hopes "the soldiers get lost in the reality of the simulation." Indeed, Gerber and Moss happen upon some unexpectedly candid moments amid all the play-acting: the tears shed at a mock funeral service for "fallen" comrades are real. Unfortunately, reality truly hits when the soldiers have to board an Iraq-bound plane at the end of the training. For some it will be a return trip. In the strange feedback loop between Iraq and the Iraq of Fort Irwin, Full Battle Rattle captures the seeming endlessness of the war.

FULL BATTLE RATTLE Fri/17, 7:30 p.m., $12.50. Premiere Theatre, Letterman Digital Arts Center, Presidio, SF. www.sffs.org

Endorsements 2008: San Francisco measures

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SAN FRANCISCO MEASURES

Proposition A

San Francisco General Hospital bonds

YES, YES, YES


This critically needed $887 million bond would be used to rebuild the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, which is currently not up to seismic safety codes. If the hospital isn’t brought into seismic compliance by 2013, the state has threatened to shut it down.

Proposition A has the support of just about everyone in town: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, all four state legislators from San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom, former mayors Willie Brown and Frank Jordan, all 11 supervisors, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Service Employees International Union, Local 1021 … the list goes on and on.

And for good reason: SF General is not only the hospital of last resort for many San Franciscans and the linchpin of the entire Healthy San Francisco system. It’s also the only trauma center in the area. Without SF General, trauma patients would have to travel to Palo Alto for the nearest available facility.

Just about the only opposition is coming from the Coalition for Better Housing. This deep-pocketed landlord group is threatening to sink the hospital bond unless it gets concessions on Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier’s legislation that would allow landlords to pass the costs of the $4 billion rebuild of the city’s Hetch Hetchy water, sewage, and power system through to their tenants.

These deplorable tactics should make voters, most of whom are tenants, even more determined to see Prop. A pass. Vote yes.

Proposition B

Affordable housing fund

YES, YES, YES


Housing isn’t just the most contentious issue in San Francisco; it’s the defining issue, the one that will determine whether the city of tomorrow bears any resemblance to the city of today.

San Francisco is on the brink of becoming a city of the rich and only the rich, a bedroom community for Silicon Valley and an urban nest for wealthy retirees. Some 90 percent of current city residents can’t afford the cost of a median-priced house, and working-class people are getting displaced by the day. Tenants are thrown out when their rent-controlled apartments are converted to condos. Young families find they can’t rent or buy a place with enough room for kids and are forced to move to the far suburbs. Seniors and people on fixed incomes find there are virtually no housing choices for them in the market, and many wind up on the streets. Small businesses suffer because their employees can’t afford to live here; the environment suffers because so many San Francisco workers must commute long distances to find affordable housing.

And meanwhile, the city continues to allow developers to build million-dollar condos for the rich.

Proposition B alone won’t solve the problem, but it would be a major first step. The measure would set aside a small percentage of the city’s property-tax revenue — enough to generate about $33 million a year — for affordable housing. It would set a baseline appropriation to defend the money the city currently spends on housing. It would expire in 15 years.

Given the state of the city’s housing crisis, $33 million is a fairly modest sum — but with a guaranteed funding stream, the city can seek matching federal and state funds and leverage that over 15 years into billions of dollars to build housing for everyone from very low-income people to middle-class families.

Prop. B doesn’t raise taxes, and if the two revenue measures on the ballot, Propositions N and Q, pass, there will be more than enough money to fund it without any impact on city services.

The mayor and some other conservative critics say that set-asides such as this one cripple the ability of elected officials to make tough budget choices. But money for affordable housing isn’t a choice anymore in San Francisco; it’s a necessity. If the city can’t take dramatic steps to retain its lower-income and working-class residents, the city as we know it will cease to exist. A city of the rich is not only an appalling concept; it’s simply unsustainable.

The private market alone can’t solve San Francisco’s housing crisis. Vote yes on B.

Proposition C

Ban city employees from commissions

NO


Proposition C would prohibit city employees from serving on boards and commissions. Sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, it seems to make logical sense — why should a city department head, for example, sit on a policy panel that oversees city departments?

But the flaw in Prop. C is that it excludes all city employees, not just senior managers. We see no reason why, for example, a frontline city gardener or nurse should be barred from ever serving on a board or commission. We’re opposing this now, but we urge the supervisors to come back with a new version that applies only to employees who are exempt from civil service — that is, managers and political appointees.

Proposition D

Financing Pier 70 waterfront district

YES


Pier 70 was once the launching pad for America’s imperial ambitions in the Pacific, but it’s sadly fallen into disrepair, like most Port of San Francisco property. The site’s historic significance and potential for economic development (think Monterey’s Cannery Row) have led port officials and all 11 members of the Board of Supervisors to put forward this proposal to prime the pump with a public infrastructure investment that would be paid back with interest.

The measure would authorize the Board of Supervisors to enter into long-term leases consistent with the forthcoming land use and fiscal plans for the site, and to front the money for development of roads and waterfront parks, refurbishing Union Iron Works, and other infrastructure work, all of which would be paid back through tax revenue generated by development of the dormant site. It’s a good deal. Vote yes.

Proposition E

Recall reform

YES


The recall is an important tool that dates back to the state’s progressive era, but San Francisco’s low signature threshold for removing an officeholder makes it subject to abuse. That’s why the Guardian called for this reform ("Reform the Recall," 6/13/07) last year when downtown interests were funding simultaneous recall efforts (promoted by single-issue interest groups) against three progressive supervisors: Jake McGoldrick, Aaron Peskin, and Chris Daly. The efforts weren’t successful, but they diverted time and energy away from the important work of running the city.

This measure would bring the City Charter into conformity with state law, raising the signature threshold from 10 percent of registered voters to 20 percent in most supervisorial districts, and leaving it at 10 percent for citywide office. The sliding-scale state standard is what most California counties use, offering citizens a way to remove unaccountable representatives without letting a fringe-group recall be used as an extortive threat against elected officials who make difficult decisions that don’t please everyone.

Proposition F

Mayoral election in even-numbered years

YES


This one’s a close call, and there are good arguments on both sides. Sponsored by Sup. Jake McGoldrick, Proposition F would move mayoral elections to the same year as presidential elections. The pros: Increased turnout, which tends to favor progressive candidates, and some savings to the city from the elimination of an off-year election. The cons: The mayor’s race might be eclipsed by the presidential campaigns. In a city where the major daily paper and TV stations have a hard time covering local elections in the best of times, the public could miss out on any real scrutiny of mayoral candidates.

Here’s what convinced us: San Francisco hasn’t elected a true progressive mayor in decades. The system we have isn’t working; it’s worth trying something else.

Proposition G

Retirement system credit for unpaid parental leave

YES


Proposition G brings equity to city employees who started families before July 1, 2003. Currently this group is unable to benefit from a 2002 charter amendment that provides city employees with paid parental leave. Prop. G gives these parents the opportunity to buy back unpaid parental leave and earn retirement credits for that period.

Critics charge that Prop. G changes the underlying premise of the city’s retirement plan and that this attempt to cure a perceived disparity creates a precedent whereby voters could be asked to remedy disparities anytime benefit changes are made. They claim that there are no guarantees Prop. G won’t end up costing the taxpayers money.

But Prop. G, which is supported by the San Francisco Democratic and Republican Parties, the Chamber of Commerce, SEIU Local 1021, the Police Officers Association, and San Francisco Firefighters 798, simply allows city workers to buy back at their own expense some of their missed retirement benefits, thereby creating a fiscally responsible solution to an oversight in the 2003 charter amendment.

Proposition H

Clean Energy Act

YES, YES, YES


Proposition H is long, long overdue. This charter amendment would require the city to study how to efficiently and affordably achieve 51 percent renewable energy by 2017, scaled up to 100 percent by 2040. Should the study find that a publicly owned utility infrastructure would be most effective, it would allow the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) to issue revenue bonds, with approval from the Board of Supervisors, to purchase the necessary lines, poles, and power-generation facilities. The measure includes a green jobs initiative and safeguards benefits and retirement packages for employees who leave Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to work for the SFPUC.

PG&E hates this because it could put the giant private company out of business in San Francisco, and the company has already spent millions of dollars spreading false information about the measure. PG&E says the proposal would cost $4 billion and raise electric bills by $400 a year for residents, but there’s no verifiable proof that these figures are accurate. An analysis done by the Guardian (see "Cleaner and Cheaper," 9/10/08) shows that rates could actually be reduced and the city would still generate excess revenue.

PG&E has also spun issuing revenue bonds without a vote of the people as a bad thing — it’s not. Other city departments already issue revenue bonds without a vote. The solvency of revenue bonds is based on a guaranteed revenue stream — that is, the city would pay back the bonds with the money it makes selling electricity. There’s no cost and no risk to the taxpayers. In fact, unless the city can prove that enough money would be generated to cover the cost of the bond plus interest, the bond won’t fly with investors.

At a time when utility companies are clinging to old technologies or hoping for pie-in-the-sky solutions like "clean coal," this measure is desperately needed and would set a precedent for the country. Environmental leaders like Bill McKibben and Van Jones, who both endorsed the bill, are watching San Francisco closely on this. Prop. H has been endorsed by 8 of the 11 supervisors, Assemblymembers Mark Leno and Fiona Ma, state senator Carole Migden, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, SEIU Local 1021, the Sierra Club, Senior Action Network, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, and the San Francisco Tenants Union, among many others.

The bulk of the opposition comes from PG&E, which is entirely funding the No on H campaign and paid for 22 of 30 ballot arguments against it. The company also has given money, in one way or another, to all the public officials who oppose this measure, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, and Sean Elsbernd.

Prop. H pits a utility that can’t meet the state’s modest renewable-energy goals and runs a nuclear power plant against every environmental group and leader in town. Vote yes.

Proposition I

Independent ratepayer advocate

NO


At face value, this measure isn’t bad, but it’s superfluous. It’s a charter amendment that would establish an independent ratepayer advocate, appointed by the city administrator and tasked with advising the SFPUC on all things related to utility rates and revenue. Passing Prop. H would do that too.

Proposition I was put on the ballot by Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier as a way to save face after her ardent opposition to the city’s plan to build two peaker power plants, in which she made impassioned pleas for more renewable energy and more energy oversight. (She opposes Prop. H, which would create both.) During the debate over the peaker power plants, Alioto-Pier introduced a variety of bills, including this one. There isn’t any visible campaign or opposition to it, but there’s no need for it. Vote yes on H, and no on I.

Proposition J

Historic preservation commission

YES


There’s something in this measure for everyone to like, both the developers who seek to alter historic buildings and the preservationists who often oppose them. It adopts the best practices of other major US cities and updates 40-year-old rules that govern the Landmark Preservation Advisory Board.

Proposition J, sponsored by Sup. Aaron Peskin, would replace that nine-member board with a seven-member commission that would have a bit more authority and whose members would be preservation experts appointed by the mayor, approved by the board, and serving fixed terms to avoid political pressures. It would set review standards that vary by project type, allowing streamlined staff-level approval for small projects and direct appeals to the Board of Supervisors for big, controversial proposals.

This was a collaborative proposal with buy-in from all stakeholders, and it’s formally opposed only by the Small Property Owners of San Francisco, an extremist property rights group. Vote yes.

Proposition K

Decriminalizing sex work

YES


We’re not big fans of vice laws; generally speaking, we’ve always believed that drugs, gambling, and prostitution ought to be legalized, tightly regulated, and heavily taxed. Proposition K doesn’t go that far — all it does is make enforcement of the prostitution laws a low priority for the San Francisco Police Department. It would effectively cut off funding for prostitution busts — but would require the cops to pursue cases involving violent crime against sex workers.

The opponents of this measure talk about women who are coerced into sex work, particularly immigrants who are smuggled into the country and forced into the trade. That’s a serious problem in San Francisco. But the sex workers who put this measure on the ballot argue that taking the profession out of the shadows would actually help the police crack down on sex trafficking.

In fact, a significant part of the crime problem created by sex work involves crimes against the workers — violent and abusive pimps, atrocious working conditions, thefts and beatings by johns who face no consequences because the sex workers face arrest if they go to the police.

The current system clearly isn’t working. Vote yes on K.

Proposition L

Funding the Community Justice Center

NO


This measure is an unnecessary and wasteful political gimmick by Mayor Newsom and his downtown allies. Newsom has long pushed the Community Justice Center (CJC) as a panacea for quality-of-life crimes in the Tenderloin and surrounding areas, where the new court would ostensibly offer defendants immediate access to social service programs in lieu of incarceration. Some members of the Board of Supervisors resisted the idea, noting that it singles out poor people and that the services it purports to offer have been decimated by budget shortfalls. Nonetheless, after restoring deep cuts in services proposed by the mayor, the board decided to go ahead and fund the CJC.

But the mayor needed an issue to grandstand on this election, so he placed this measure on the ballot. All Proposition L would do is fund the center at $2.75 million for its first year of operations, rather than the approved $2.62 million. We’d prefer to see all that money go to social services rather than an unnecessary new courtroom, but it doesn’t — the court is already funded. In the meantime, Prop. L would lock in CJC program details and prevent problems from being fixed by administrators or supervisors once the program is up and running. Even if you like the CJC, there’s no reason to make it inflexible simply so Newsom can keep ownership of it. Vote no.

Proposition M

Tenants’ rights

YES


Proposition M would amend the city’s rent-control law to prohibit landlords from harassing tenants. It would allow tenants to seek rent reductions if they’re being harassed.

Proponents — including the SF Tenants Union, the Housing Rights Committee, St. Peter’s Housing Committee, the Community Tenants Association, the Affordable Housing Alliance, the Eviction Defense Collaborative, and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic — argue that affordable, rent-controlled housing is being lost because landlords are allowed to drive long-term tenants from their rent-controlled homes. Citing the antics of one of San Francisco’s biggest landlords, CitiApartments, the tenant activists complain about repeated invasions of privacy, constant buyout offers, and baseless bogus eviction notices.

Because no language currently exists in the rent ordinance to define and protect tenants from harassment, landlords with well-documented histories of abuse have been able to act with impunity. Vote Yes on M.

Proposition N

Real property transfer tax

YES, YES, YES


Prop. N is one of a pair of measures designed to close loopholes in the city tax code and bring some badly needed new revenue into San Francisco’s coffers. The proposal, by Sup. Aaron Peskin, would increase to 1.5 percent the transfer tax on the sale of property worth more than $5 million. It would generate about $30 million a year.

Prop. N would mostly affect large commercial property sales; although San Francisco housing is expensive, very few homes sell for $5 million (and the people buying and selling the handful of ultra-luxury residences can well afford the extra tax). It’s a progressive tax — the impact will fall overwhelmingly on very wealthy people and big business — and this change is long overdue. Vote yes.

Proposition O

Emergency response fee

YES, YES, YES


With dozens of state and local measures on the ballot this year, Proposition O is not getting much notice — but it’s a big deal. If it doesn’t pass, the city could lose more than $80 million a year. With the economy tanking and the city already running structural deficits and cutting essential services, that kind of hit to the budget would be catastrophic. That’s why the mayor, all 11 supervisors, and both the Republican and Democratic Parties support Prop. O.

The text of the measure is confusing and difficult to penetrate because it deals mainly with legal semantics. It’s on the ballot because of arcane legal issues that might make it hard for the city to enforce an existing fee in the future.

But here’s the bottom line: Prop. O would not raise taxes or increase the fees most people already pay. It would simply replace what was a modest "fee" of a couple of bucks a month to fund 911 services with an identical "tax" for the same amount, while also updating the technical definition of what constitutes a phone line from a now defunct 1970s-era statute. The only people who might wind up paying any new costs are commercial users of voice-over-internet services.

It’s very simple. If Prop. O passes, the vast majority of us won’t pay anything extra and the city won’t have to make $80 to $85 million more in cuts to things like health care, crime prevention, and street maintenance. That sounds like a pretty good deal to us. Vote yes.

Proposition P

Transportation Authority changes

NO, NO, NO


Mayor Gavin Newsom is hoping voters will be fooled by his argument that Proposition P, which would change the size and composition of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, would lead to more efficiency and accountability.

But as Prop. P’s opponents — including all 11 supervisors, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, and the Sierra Club — point out, the measure would put billions of taxpayer dollars in the hands of political appointees, thus removing independent oversight of local transportation projects.

The Board of Supervisors, which currently serves as the governing body of the small but powerful, voter-created Transportation Authority, has done a good job of acting as a watchdog for local sales-tax revenues earmarked for transportation projects and administering state and federal transportation funding for new projects. The way things stand, the mayor effectively controls Muni, and the board effectively controls the Transportation Authority, providing a tried and tested system of checks and balances that gives all 11 districts equal representation. There is no good reason to upset this apple cart. Vote No on P.

Proposition Q

Modifying the payroll tax

YES, YES, YES


Proposition Q would close a major loophole that allows big law firms, architecture firms, medical partnerships, and other lucrative outfits to avoid paying the city’s main business tax. San Francisco collects money from businesses largely through a 1.5 percent tax on payroll. It’s not a perfect system, and we’d like to see a more progressive tax (why should big and small companies pay the same percentage tax?). But even the current system has a giant problem that costs the city millions of dollars a year.

The law applies to the money companies pay their employees. But in a fair number of professional operations, the highest-paid people are considered "partners" and their income is considered profit-sharing, not pay. So the city’s biggest law firms, where partners take home hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in compensation, pay no city tax on that money.

Prop. Q would close that loophole and treat partnership income as taxable payroll. It would also exempt small businesses (with payrolls of less than $250,000 a year) from any tax at all.

The proposal would bring at least $10 million a year into the city and stop certain types of businesses from ducking their share of the tax burden. Vote yes.

Proposition R

Naming sewage plant after Bush

NO


This one has tremendous emotional and humor appeal. It would officially rename the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant the George W. Bush Sewage Plant. That would put San Francisco in the position of creating the first official memorial to the worst president of our time — and his name would be on a sewage plant.

The problem — not to be killjoys — is that sewage treatment is actually a pretty important environmental concern, and the Oceanside plant is a pretty good sewage treatment plant. It’s insulting to the plant, and the people who work there, to put the name of an environmental villain on the door.

Let’s name something awful after Bush. Vote no on Prop. R.

Proposition S

Budget set-aside policy

NO


This measure is yet another meaningless gimmick that has more to do with Mayor Newsom’s political ambitions than good governance.

For the record, we generally don’t like budget set-aside measures, which can unnecessarily encumber financial planning and restrict elected officials from setting budget priorities. But in this no-new-taxes political era, set-asides are sometimes the only way to guarantee that important priorities get funding from the static revenue pool. Newsom agrees — and has supported set-asides for schools, libraries, and other popular priorities.

Now he claims to want to rein that in, although all this measure would do is state whether a proposal identifies a funding source or violates a couple of other unenforceable standards. Vote no.

Proposition T

Free and low-cost substance abuse treatment

YES


Proposition T would require the Department of Public Health (DPH) to make medical and residential substance abuse treatment available for low-income and homeless people who request it. DPH already offers treatment and does it well, but there’s a wait list 500 people long — and when addicts finally admit they need help and show up for treatment, the last thing the city should do is send them away and make them wait.

Prop. T would expand the program to fill that unmet need. The controller estimates an annual cost to the General Fund of $7 million to $13 million, but proponents say the upfront cost would lead to significant savings later. For every dollar spent on treatment, the city saves as much as $13 because clinical treatment for addictive disorders is cheaper than visits to the emergency room, where many low-income and homeless people end up when their untreated problems reach critical levels.

This ordinance was put on the ballot by Sups. Daly, McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, and Peskin, and has no visible opposition, although some proponents frame it as a way to achieve what the Community Justice Center only promises. Vote yes.

Proposition U

Defunding the Iraq War

YES


Proposition U is a declaration of policy designed to send a message to the city’s congressional representatives that San Francisco disproves of any further funding of the war in Iraq, excepting whatever money is required to bring the troops home safely.

The progressive block of supervisors put this on the ballot, and according to their proponent argument in the Voter Information Pamphlet, the Iraq War has cost California $68 billion and San Francisco $1.8 billion. The Republican Party is the lone voice against this measure. Vote yes.

Proposition V

Bringing back JROTC

NO, NO, NO


The San Francisco school board last year voted to end its Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, which was the right move. A military-recruitment program — and make no mistake, that’s exactly what JROTC is — has no place in the San Francisco public schools. The board could have done a better job finding a replacement program, but there are plenty of options out there.

In the meantime, a group of JROTC backers placed Proposition V on the ballot.

The measure would have no legal authority; it would just be a statement of policy. Supporters say they hope it will pressure the school board to restore the program. In reality, this is a downtown- and Republican-led effort to hurt progressive candidates in swing districts where JROTC might be popular. Vote no.

>>More Endorsements 2008

McShhhhh!

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REVIEW Whether you admired his fierce intelligence or considered him a negative influence on the young, you have to admit that David Foster Wallace was one of the few contemporary writers who managed to pin down and unpack questions of writerly narcissism and grasp their implications. The McSweeney’s brand owes its greatest debt to Wallace. Young librarian Scott Douglas’s bildungsromanesque Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian (Da Capo Press, 352 pages, $25) would not exist without his influence: it’s an outgrowth of Douglas’s column for the McSweeney’s Web site, and it embodies what younger writers find so seductive in Wallace’s digressive, footnote-heavy writing style.

Quiet, Please chronicles Douglas’s experiences working in an Anaheim public library, a site in the shadow of Disneyland. Once you set aside the obligatory librarian jokes, this setting promises the kind of collisions absent from corporate offices: it’s a place where wastrel romance novels live feet away from Gravity’s Rainbow, where the very old and very young bide their time, in the mystery stacks and on the Internet, respectively. Douglas’s book isn’t particularly descriptive, though, and despite being a kind of memoir, its autobiography is fuzzy. Its confusion about genre is where the conversion from the Web to the page becomes a problem. Douglas fractures the surface of his story, but his attempts to make the tangents cohere often prevent the book from finding a consistent pace. The thin narrative thread that follows Douglas from library page to accredited librarian gets snowed under by unnecessary footnotes and what he deems "short pointless interludes" — factoids intended to break up the monotony of, er, paying attention. The mildly condescending, conversational tone of these commercial breaks highlights Douglas’s ambivalence toward writing the book: a perceived need to convince the reader that he or she is getting more than just a Web-groomed, self-reflexive story battles with the author’s own doubts about a lack of content. Those doubts largely turn out to be valid.

For a long time, I thought a career as a librarian was a foregone conclusion: during high school I was a regular at San Jose’s Almaden Branch Library, a suburban place not unlike the library in the book, and without that formative experience I wouldn’t have found out about Emil Nolde or Paul Klee or Kurt Vonnegut or T.S. Eliot when I needed them. The lack of any real emotional connection to libraries or convincing description of them as portals to different, better worlds are two things that keep Quiet, Please from gaining real relevance beyond its narrow scope. Douglas’s attempts to get at something bigger than the boredom of work (and his attempts to capture that boredom) suffer from a lack of convincing detail. The author’s frequent digressions — he spends a grip of pages early on pontificating about the impact of 9/11 — often come off as obligatory rather than the byproduct of an extremely curious mind.

But where Quiet, Please suffers most is in its self-policed tone. Douglas, one imagines, has deep pockets full of stories about eccentric library regulars, but they’re painted with all the imaginative gusto of a term paper on deadline and hastily capped with showy compassion. The book also clearly positions itself, in part, as a satirical bureaucratic romp, but his toughest critique involves describing the head of his library science program as a "bitch." Online, Douglas’s column had a certain charm; on paper, it’s simply a matter of dull obligation for the author, to say nothing of the reader. *

Let them eat rock

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REVIEW The prologue and opening salvo in playwright-director Steve Morgan Haskell’s spirited, fitfully inspired rock parable All You Can Eat — an offbeat, down-tempo call to arms — has a French accent, wielded by a woman named Camille de Tocqueville (a coolly assured Michelle Haner). A writer on a Jean Baudrillard–like quest for the quintessence of America — America the dream, the disease, the drug, the doom — Camille needed, she tells us, to get herself an American rock star, the cowboy icon of this decadent age of imperial decline. And she found one in Alexander Vanderbilt (a languidly potent Brian Livingston), an evocatively named, Jim Morrison–esque lead vocalist of the long-defunct band All You Can Eat, whose four members are about to reunite for a comeback tour after seven years apart. The math eventually becomes significant, too, since 2008 minus seven leaves us hovering around the smoldering fall of ’01.

Now, the idea of being criticized by a French person is supposed to be inherently provocative to great swaths of freedom-fry–loving Americans — if maybe not so many Bay Area denizens. But having the great-great-great-grandniece of Alexis de Tocqueville firing both barrels at us — a live babe clutched, with European nonchalance, to her breast — sets up a particularly intriguing series of associations that go well beyond mere cheek or caricature. The group’s name, after all, employs durable pop irony to flag a consumerist ethos that, in this context, functions as a latter-day democratic equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s dictum by inadvertently helping to kick off an apocalypse with the Dubya-like injunction to shop and devour your way to freedom and security. Revolution, it seems, is English for la plus ça change.

Collaborating productively with the sharp physical theater style of San Francisco’s foolsFURY, Haskell unfurls the combo’s story obliquely, in some shimmering dialogue and a music- and movement-fueled patchwork of disjointed, time-tripping scenes, prodded and punctuated by guitarist Tracy Walsh, stage left. The paint-dribbled set proffers three large semi-abstract canvases by artist Matt Sesow — crazed portraiture for an age inclined less to the revolutionary romanticism of a Delacroix than the bastard offspring of Francis Bacon and Ralph Steadman.

In their personal foibles, triumphs, and entanglements; their outsize ambitions; their seemingly omnipotent but ultimately caged energies; Vanderbilt and colleagues Gregory Ford (Ryan O’Donnell) and Banafrit Nut (Nora El Samahy), together with their manager (Deborah Eliezer) and one fiery and ominous groupie (Csilla Horvath), become the prism for a larger social crisis. Although the play’s expression may lack the dramatic girth Haskell sets out for, its dimensions are often smartly suggested. Moreover, All You Can Eat‘s significance won’t be lost on anyone in this crystalline moment of truth between Wall Street, Washington, DC, and the abused inheritors of democracy in America. *

ALL YOU CAN EAT

Through Sat/11

Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; $15–$30

Traveling Jewish Theatre

470 Florida, SF

www.foolsfury.org

Married in Massachusetts

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REVIEW Mike Roth and John Henning’s engrossing documentary chronicles the public firestorm that ensued after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex wedlock in 2003. A state constitutional amendment (loudly supported by Gov. Mitt Romney) was promptly drafted to ban it. When election time rolled around the next fall — after several months of marriage ceremonies — candidates’ stance on the issue was make-or-break for many citizens. (Beliefs are held so strongly that when one conservative family ultimately doesn’t see things going as they hoped, they plan to move out of the state.) The directors mix fly-on-the-wall reportage with vividly etched portraits of individuals, from senators to poignantly hopeful gay couples and activists on both sides of the fence. While things do inevitably get nasty, it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that at least some of the "one man, one woman" types met here come off as earnestly misguided rather than flat-out bigoted and vindictive. Though the film’s events may seem like pretty old news now, it excitingly captures the high emotions around a battle that continues to be fought, as an interviewee says, "one state at a time."

SAVING MARRIAGE opens Fri/10 in Bay Area theaters.

Obliterating the dollar

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REVIEW Andrew Schoultz is prescient. A week or two before Wall Street and Washington were forced to admit they’d obliterated the US economy, he unveiled new work that literally slices and blows up the dollar bill. In his A Litany of Defense and a Liturgy of Power (Come) from the Palm of His Hand, shards of the pyramid, all-seeing eye, and other mint-y green fixtures slice through the air alongside similar fragments of currency from other countries. These literal markers of economic chaos add yet more kinetic distress signals to the meta-intersections of iconic bird flocks, medieval warhorses, and whirlpools in Schoultz’s already claustrophobic vision. A hand-rendered George Washington stares blankly from the center of one relatively quiet piece, unaware that his image needs to be multiplied 700 billion times to begin to balance a different George’s checkbook.

"In Gods We Trust" finds Schoultz adding flagrant emphasis to his political content — most of his titles are declarative mouthfuls. Conversely, he veers away from wall murals into mixed-media pieces that only might be more market friendly. He braids collage elements into drawings and paintings. He’s also constructed a centerpiece installation that presents scales of justice set catastrophically awry. Subtlety isn’t on the agenda, and maybe it shouldn’t be. After all, Schoultz’s timing couldn’t be more right.

The visual impact of the work in Schoultz’s first major SF solo show in four years is best experienced one piece at a time, and at close range. Obsessive-compulsive repetition is a chief facet of some of the best San Francisco paintings and drawings of the past decade, and Schoultz, who has lived here around that long, is a standout representative of the practice. But unlike OCD peers’ veerings toward op art or pointillist tactics, his graffiti or mural aesthetic doesn’t always fit into a frame — it can seem murky from afar. This isn’t a matter of scale — in fact, my favorite pieces in "In God We Trust" are small ones — as much as perspective. I like Schoultz’s art most when I’m close enough to stare into the eye of the storm, or, in Sinking Slaveship, the blue (as opposed to black) hole.

ANDREW SCHOULTZ: IN GODS WE TRUST Through Oct. 25. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Marx and Zavaterro, 77 Geary, second floor, SF. (415) 627-9111, www.marxzav.com

Raging hormones

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REVIEW Romeo and Juliet — the ballet, not the play — is not exactly known for its wit. Prokofiev’s heavy-handed use of thematic material at times makes Wagner sound frivolous. But leave it to Mark Morris to turn ballet’s most beloved 20th-century tragedy into a fairy tale whose comedic overtones are difficult to miss. Does the piece — which was given its West Coast premiere by Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall Sept. 25 — work? Up to a point it does, because Morris set clearly defined parameters and shaped his take accordingly. At the end, however, the choreographer falls flat on his face.

Morris’ Romeo and Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare is the result of musicologist Simon Morrison’s discovery of the composer’s original manuscript in Russia. It doesn’t include a balcony scene, nor do the lovers die. The most welcome revelation is that the music was not designed to hit you over the head. The orchestration is thinner, shading its colors instead of splashing them on.

When tackling the largely unchanged libretto, Morris decided to keep the story at arm’s length. His characters are not quite flesh-and-blood people. The dancers inhabit their roles against the backdrop of a story we already know well. And they do it superbly. In many ways, Morris is playing a game with us. It’s witty, fun, and distanced.

The minute the work opens and we see the good citizens with their wooden swords, you know that this is make-believe. There is no conflict between these families: everybody, including the parents, is immature. Hormones rage. Stuff happens. The whole society is kept together by Escalus (a fabulously effective Joe Bowie) who prowls the town like a playground supervisor.

Morris’ handling of the crowd scenes works. He treats them like accidental encounters, akin to neighborhood gossip that swells then recedes. It’s one way of dealing with Prokofiev’s propensity for repetition. The ballroom scene’s formality resembles early Martha Graham with Romeo posturing like a pouting teenager. In a nod to the famous pillow dance, Morris includes a parlor game involving a cushion.

He explores a similar thematic development in the market scenes. A hop and turn motive spools the citizens on stage as if they were coming off a conveyor belt. As for the love story, Morris makes it into a puppy love that unexpectedly grows into something the kids can no longer handle. Noah Vinson’s Romeo is splendid, tender and ready to jump out of his skin from sheer happiness. Maile Okamura’s Juliet evolves nicely into take-charge maturity.

In the end, Morris’ Romeo falls apart. The divertissements in the bedroom look like caricatures, as do Romeo’s and the Friar’s ex machina appearances. Morris’ imagination fails him badly as he transports the lovers into a literally star-crossed universe. The choreographer prides himself on using every note of a composer’s music, but perhaps that’s not always such a hot idea.

Do look back

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REVIEW By now, the Italian American mean streets of New York — that colorful bustle of energies shadowed so enticingly by the wickedly romantic lives of entrepreneurial mafiosi — are an immovable fixture on the post-Scorsese, post-Sopranos landscape of cultural memory. So much so that, in its more run-of-the-mill versions, this world strikes the outsider as virtual at best: no more than a manufactured dreamscape. But authenticity is hard to fake. And with Chazz Palminteri, you can’t help feeling one degree from the real thing.

This sensation is all the more impressive given that the actor-playwright’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story has a highly cinematic flavor and arc that on reflection seems maybe a bit too picaresque and neat, pitching his boyhood self between two competing father figures and two intimately entwined but distinct paths. Not to mention that it comes projected from a big Broadway-style stage, amid a set that looks like its serviceable sections. The head-on slice of a two-story apartment building and the street lamp announcing the intersection of 187th Street and Belmont Avenue might all have been borrowed from a backlot in Burbank, suggesting something like Sesame Street for wise guys.

But if these sound like reservations, they’re not. The revival tour of Palminteri’s A Bronx Tale, courtesy of Best of Broadway, is a vital and greatly entertaining piece of work, driven by a tour-de-force solo performance that must be every bit as deft as it was nearly 20 years ago off-Broadway, before it was transposed to the screen, with Palminteri starring opposite Robert De Niro. In fine trim, the now-50-something Palminteri holds Golden Gate Theatre’s ample stage effortlessly for the 90 riveting minutes of director Jerry Zaks’ razor-sharp production. Moreover, Palminteri’s playful, inextinguishable exuberance throughout suggests this is no mere attempt to cash in on an old hit, but rather a deep-seated desire to consider afresh a treasured patch of hallowed ground.

That patch — 187th and Belmont in the Bronx of the 1960s — comes initially bounded by the actor-memoirist’s nine-year-old stoop-bound world of baseball, pasta sauce, and corner doo-wop crooning. Until one day, that is, when little Cologio Palminteri’s refusal to rat out the perpetrator of a murder that unfolds a few steps from his house brings him under the paternal wing of the neighborhood’s rising mob boss, Sonny — setting up a conflict internal and external between Sonny and the boy’s upright bus driver father, Lorenzo. After leaping ahead to his 17th year, the focus shifts somewhat to a budding interracial romance between Cologio and a neighborhood girl, as well as a test of trust between the young man and his adopted gangster father figure. But the pace never flags.

In Palminteri’s expert quick-change characterizations, the story brims with an assortment of suitably outsize personalities carefully, lovingly etched by human idiosyncrasies, foibles, doubts, and contradictions. No doubt one sees here the hand of devilishly charming storytelling, but beneath the theatrical/cinematic veneer is an authenticity of place and passion that reaches to the bone.

A BRONX TALE

Through Oct 19

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m., $40–$85

Golden Gate Theatre

1 Taylor, SF

www.shnsf.com

Will SF’s healthcare ordinance go to Supreme Court?

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The Ninth Circuit’s decision to uphold San Francisco’s Health Care Security Ordinance got everyone wondering if the Golden Gate Restaurant Association will take the matter all the way to the Supreme Court.

GGRA’s executive director Kevin Westly told me they might, or they might ask the Ninth Circuit to do an en banque review, instead, which involves all eleven Ninth Circuit judges.

“Healthy San Francisco is a good program and employer spending mandates are a separate issue,” Westly said, repeating a position that Mayor Gavin Newsom used to share, back when Sup. Tom Ammiano, who authored this trailbreaking legislation, was trying to explain that it’s not fiscally possible to provide uninsured residents with free access to the City’s health clinics without the employer mandate , since the mandate generates the funding for the free access program.

Newsom eventually climbed on board, ( “kicking and screaming” as Ammiano recently recalled), but GGRA continues to hold that the mandate is a major fiscal and administrative burden that employers shouldn’t bear. GGRA makes that argument based on their interpretation of Congress’s intent in 1974, when it passed ERISA.

No Seth Rogen

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REVIEW Two young family-hungry couples, one unassuming victim of the staff Christmas party, and a lonely alky wife and mom-bonking boy-next-door all find themselves variously knocked up, around, and for a loop by the reproductive process in Imaginative Productions’ stage adaptation of its 2006 independent film, "conceived" and directed by Tonya Foster. And reproduction really is a process containing as much social baggage as genetic code in these predicaments which, while ranging from the urban banal to the tragically suburban, are all pretty much as thematically familiar as familial.

Unfortunately, the relatively slim potential in this otherwise pregnant theme is rarely pursued with much vigor or insight, as the multicharacter storyline meanders away from its subjects in seeming perplexity as to what to do with them. Further muting things is a muffled soundscape that sounds like unintended lobby noise. The more workable areas of drama and comedy, meanwhile, suffer from uneven performances and static direction — although, ironically, a visit by single preggy waitress Anna (a relatively strong and sympathetic Quinne Brown) to an actors workshop-cum-support group — led by a deeply histrionic drama instructor (a vibrant Erin Coker) — arrives as one of the more unexpected and apt scenes.

KNOCKED UP Through Oct. 18. Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m., $23–$25. Studio 300 Theatre, 442 Post, SF. 1-888-410-8355, www.imaginativeproductions.com

Wipin’ up the competition

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REVIEW Little man fights big business — you’ve seen this story before. But that doesn’t mean it’s not effective when done right. There may be a formula to Flash of Genius, but in this case it works. Greg Kinnear stars as real-life inventor Bob Kearns, who developed electronic intermittent windshield wipers. (You’re probably not all that impressed, but just try driving through a storm without them.) After Ford Motor Company steals and markets his idea, Kearns spends the next 12 years fighting for recognition. That long trudge through bureaucracy is portrayed as brave, yes, but also endlessly frustrating. In fact, the success of Flash of Genius relies on its ability to inflict some ambiguity on a cliché-ridden genre. Even lawyers who say things like "I believe in what I do; I believe in a little thing called justice," get fed up with Kearns’ unflinching idealism. He may be the Mr. Smith of car parts, but he’s also a stubborn pain in the ass. His wife moves on, his kids grow resentful, and the "Is it all worth it?" question lingers throughout. It’s no wonder the film ends not with life-affirming sunlight but a torrential downpour: for an underdog story, it’s kind of depressing.

FLASH OF GENIUS opens Fri/3 in Bay Area theaters.

Vacancy and claustrophobia

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REVIEW Matthias Hoch’s disconcerting skill as a photographer is connected to a pair of paradoxes. His close-ups of the byproducts of "moderne" European cities and suburbs, from geometric ceilings to business parks, feel like panoramas. In his wider shots — of large concrete grids, or one otherwise "perfect" building’s sad slant — claustrophobia and a sense of vacancy commingle. The German artist’s new work on display at Rena Bransten Gallery focuses on Almere and Rotterdam, cities in the Netherlands that don’t have the touristy resonance of Amsterdam or the Hague.

I wonder what Carl Jung would have said about modernity’s strange architectural sprawl. Are we growing a new set of archetypes? Hoch’s latest photographs provide one answer: a sense that nothing has changed. Rotterdam #20 and #24 (both 2007) are like an overmanicured zen garden in a bad dream. The bent green lighting in Almere #11 (2007) recalls the tarot suit of Swords, representative of overthinking. If you stare long enough, the fluttering white shape on what looks like fake grass in Rotterdam #26 (2007) becomes the foot of a Buddhist statue, about to lift.

Almere #1, Almere #2 brings together two engrossing short videos. In the second, the thick black pipes of a parking structure are as lively as the worm-things in 1990’s Tremors. In the first, the shifting textures of light in reflective/refractive glass become a wide-sweeping eternal dawn. Like Hoch’s photographs, these videos are ultimately pictures of good-byes. When I left the show, I could hear one of my personal favorites — Lou Reed and John Cale’s melancholic adios to Andy Warhol, "Hello, It’s Me" — in my head. I couldn’t help thinking that Hoch’s timely pictures would have looked great in even bigger prints on the walls of the once silver, now defunct Factory.

MATTHIAS HOCH: NEW WORK Through Oct. 11. Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Rena Bransten Gallery, 77 Geary St, SF. (415) 982-3292, www.renabranstengallery.com

Nefertiti Jones back from the Slow Club!

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

I was elbowing my way past the bar last night at a Guardian party at the Elbo Room. Suddenly, an apparition suddenly appeared out of the crowd and declared loudly:

“Why haven’t you put my picture on the front page of the Guardian?”

She was a striking woman, flailing her arms, and it took me a moment to figure out who it was.

She was Nefertiti Jones, the female singer and banjo player I had wrangled with many years ago at the Slow Club on Hampshire Street.

Nefertiti was a waitress and a singer in those days when we had our offices at 520 Hampshire Street. My office was right above the bar of the Slow Club and, when the club had entertainment, I got the full blast upstairs.

In fact, when I was on the phone, people remarked that I must be in a cabaret somewhere.

Finally, I got annoyed and complained to the owner of the club. In no time, the apparition that was Nefertiti came charging into my office, demanding to know why I was trying to shut down her singing career and demanding that I stop making complaints about her.

I took one look at Nefertiti and decided I didn’t want to wrangle with her. But I told her I would stop complaining on one condition: that she would let me know when she was on stage so I could go down and listen to her like a normal Slow Club gentleman. I did, we became good friends, and I was sad when she went off to New York one day.

Well, she was back, in full plumage, bristling with stories about her success as a singer and entrepreneur in New York. And she said she was performing later in the evening at the Hotel Utah.

So I asked Mary Samson, a friend of hers from Slow Club days, to catch the show and write up a review.

NefJones.jpg

Nefertiti Jones Back from the Slow Club!

The very talented Nefertiti Jones was in town last night for a short set at Hotel Utah. An iconic San Francisco pop songstress who worked below the old Bay Guardian building at the Slow Club as a waitress, Nef, as she is known to her fans, frequently played Café DuNord and the Elbo Room.

She was an opening act at the Fillmore before returning back to her hometown of New York City over seven years ago. Nef is in town for a few days and graced the stage at Hotel Utah last night where she brought down the house with familiar songs from her San Francisco days as well as new ones from her recent album. With a raw acoustic version of her regular band, last night’s set featured two guitars and a drummer on Hotel Utah’s intimate stage. Fans went down memory lane when Nef opened her set with “Got my Gun” an older original tune that had fans singing along with every word. She had the audience on its feet with ”Blink”; a beautiful rock song off her album “Life is Perfect” .

Nef had a huge fan base last night, including a crowd of X- Slow Club staff, and many others who have followed her career throughout the years. Someone even shouted to her between songs “MOVE BACK !” Nef currently plays with Jimi Bones, her husband of two years and you can hear her music and read more about her at: http://www.myspace.com/jonesbonesband

Viva Nef-Star!

Besides Nefertiti’s music career, she and her husband Jimi own Jonesbones Productions, a full service music studio and production company. Nef and Jimi have written and recorded songs for many emerging young artists as well as their own album “Life is Perfect”. They are at work on their second album to be released fall of 2008.

Nefertiti is currently creating a music program at the Founding Center, (NYC’s largest and most respected social service agencies) in conjuction with Gibson Guitars. Nef has freelanced as a casting director of the past 5 years in New York and specializes in “real people casting” ; she is gifted at finding the right people in the clubs and on the streets of New York.

Nefertiti also works as an actor and has been featured in five national television commercials.

http://www.jonesbonesproductions.com

‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed”s Haden Blackman untethered

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forceimage.jpg

By Ben Richardson

While attending the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed launch event at the Harrison Street Best Buy on Sept. 15, I got a chance to part the ranks of cosplayers in Storm Trooper armor and ask project lead Haden Blackman a few questions about his game.

He provided interesting insights into the process of game design and all its challenges, joys, and complications, especially those peculiar to a studio like Lucasarts that is just one branch of the Star Wars entertainment empire. Though he was unwilling to admit that the game’s shoddy force grip targeting was a problem for all gamers, not just the “hardcore” among us (I complained about it in my review), he spoke convincingly about his desire to make the game accessible to players of all demographics and inclinations.

SFBG: In the speech you gave earlier up on the stage, you made it sound like this was an idea that you’ve had for a long, long time. When a game first comes together, when it first germinates, is it a story idea that leads a game to be constructed around it, or are there game elements or things you want to do that in turn birth a story?

As the world turns

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW American Conservatory Theater’s season opener marks the 40-year anniversary of 1968 with the well-timed if less than well-executed Bay Area premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, which from the dual vantage points of Prague and Cambridge traces revolutionary politics and counterculture between 1968’s Prague Spring and 1989’s Velvet Revolution.

Stoppard’s latest but not greatest is almost a 20th-century coda to his grand three-part saga of 19th-century revolutionaries, The Coast of Utopia, building on the famed playwright’s ongoing interest in politics, media, culture, private vs. public life, and the motor of social change. But it’s also, by his account, a more personal play he’d long been considering, based partly on his own history as a Czech World War II refugee who settled happily into English life at a tender age.

Rock ‘n’ Roll‘s protagonist — and Stoppard’s stand-in — is Jan (a genial Manoel Felciano), a visiting exchange student at Cambridge. Within the familial embrace of hardheaded, hard-line Communist don Max (Jack Willis) and his wife, cancer-racked classics scholar Eleanor (René Augesen), Jan revels wholeheartedly in English life and ’60s counterculture — particularly its music. For Jan — whose LP collection is like a precious extension of his own person — tracks from the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and the Doors are the stuff of revelation and ecstatic community. But unlike the playwright — and despite his antipathy to stifling Soviet bloc authoritarianism — Jan returns home to Prague in 1968 after Soviet tanks roll in.

The rest of the play cuts back and forth as life goes on, with Max twice fatefully visiting an increasingly cornered Jan in the interim. In Cambridge, the seeds of the ’60s blossom in ways bleak and hopeful, shadowed by the gentle but tragic presence (offstage) of original Pink Floyd frontperson and madcap Cambridge denizen Syd Barrett, here a Pan-like figure inspiring the protective devotion of Max and Eleanor’s flower child daughter, Esmé (Summer Serafin and René Augesen), and later Esmé’s own radical teenage offspring, Alice (Serafin). In Prague, meanwhile, Jan and friends negotiate two distinct realms of opposition: the embattled dissident movement headed by Václav Havel and others, and a countercultural rock underground of disaffected youth that, despite its so-called apolitical stance, is inherently political and threatening to a totalitarian regime bent on monopolizing the social sphere.

Despite a critical edge — brought out, for example, in Max’s admirable rant against the compromises of a supposedly free press — Jan’s and the play’s embrace of Western liberalism casts a vague "end of ideology" tone, as if Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that "there is no alternative" was correct, however crude and ruthless the messenger. But the real problem with the play is its lack of sustained tension. Helmed by artistic director Carey Perloff, the production pursues an impressive visual dimension but often falls dramatically flat. Rare exceptions include a scene in Cambridge in which Max’s crude materialism — and cruder clinging to his CP card and shopworn shibboleths — runs up against the most personal of rebukes: his beloved wife’s diseased, disintegrating body, which she movingly denies can encompass her identity and humanity. Company member Augesen does fine work here, as well as in the role of grown-up daughter Esmé. By contrast, the normally brilliant Willis feels miscast as Max. He’s just not a very convincing Englishman, and the attempt is both disappointing and distracting. Sturdy work from regulars Anthony Fusco, Jud Williford, and Delia MacDougall can’t fully alleviate the overall lethargy.

A damp firecracker of a ’68 tribute, in other words, but the real show is turning out to be in the streets anyway, as the increasingly tumultuous anniversary year rocks and rolls ominously along.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Through Oct. 12

Tues.–Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 1 and 7 p.m., $20–<\d>$82

American Conservatory Theater

415 Geary, SF

(415) 749-2228

www.act-sf.org

Hang on

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REVIEW Sometimes dance is so dense, so fast-paced, or so convoluted you can’t grasp what the heck the choreographer had in mind. So you throw in the towel and go along for the ride. Such was the case with the Sept. 18 performance by Robert Moses’ Kin at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The clearest of the three pieces on view, Approaching Thought, showcased most cogently why Moses’ reputation has been growing by leaps and bounds: he creates intriguing ensemble opportunities for individually strong performers. If steroid-pumped dancing shaped into formal cohesion is your cup of chai, Moses is your man. In Thought, Moses first introduced three couples individually, then let them loose into a hurricane of flips, kicks, hops, and rebounding meltdowns. They watched each other or provided backup as if in a ballet — or a rock concert. Newcomers Caitlin Kolb impressed with her integration of gymnastics into dance; Brendan Barthel, with his attack and the softest of feline jumps.

The world premiere, Toward September, could be considered the son of Thought. With nine dancers, volatile connections became more fleeting, but the web they spun was also messier. Circle, line, and star patterns periodically linked the dancers. In the second half, something like lyricism lit up a duet between Kolb and Barthel. But at a half-hour, September couldn’t sustain itself, not even with this talented group. Jokes Like That Can Get You Killed was too subtle for its own good. Dealing with the slippery topic of appropriate and inappropriate language — it’s a Stanford commission — the work was overloaded with visual, aural, and movement information. But Austin Forbord’s visuals — consisting of bobbing heads of every persuasion — were fun.

Moses collaged the program’s music primarily from online sources — which must have felt like browsing a candy shop. But the choreographer grabbed too much and made it into far too little.

Preacherless choir

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› superego@sfbg.com

REVIEW What’s wrong with anger? Nothing — it’s a perfectly cromulent human emotion. But it sure makes for awful poetry, especially if it’s poured undiluted by humor, hope, or reflection into the "frail vessel" of verse, like hydrochloric acid into Tupperware. The poem may be true, the poem may be honest — but honey, the fumes’ll kill ya. I’ll happily read another righteous anti-Dubya rant, but it better at least make me laugh, dammit.

Which is why I approach a contemporary book like State of the Union: 50 Political Poems (Wave Books) with antsy trepidation. Current events are poetry’s bait and bane — who will write the great 9/11 poem, the great Iraq Occupation poem, the great Bush empire poem? Who cares but the poet who wants to be "great"? Life’s too short for speculative canonical teleology, let alone its correct pronunciation. And then there’s the anger thing. Poems are intrinsically liberal (anybody got a good anti-abortion aubade or Turd Blossom terza rima?). And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past few years, it’s that liberals can certainly sputter with outrage. Besides, what poem isn’t political, anyway? Even a Hallmark card’s sappy innards are mawkish missiles aimed for Granny’s good graces.

So hurray for the folks at Wave Books, whose broadminded selections in State, chosen after an open call for submissions, satisfy the need for like-minded connection but don’t stint on the wry entertainment, subtle engagement, or lyrical expression. Included are some comforting big names (John Ashbery, James Tate, Michael Palmer) as well as many lesser-known but perhaps more appropriate ones. I was tickled to read new shit from Matthew Rohrer, whose electric-fork-filled debut, 1991’s A Hummock in the Malookas (W.W. Norton), still weakens my knees, and Guardian contributor Garrett Caples, whose lethally crisp contribution here, For Thom Gunn, links the great local poet’s sad, meth-addled demise to our political system’s own: "Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake." No slouching toward either Bethlehem or Gomorrah there. Also great is Tao Lin’s stickily perverse "room night," which intrudes on fragments of airy philosophical rumination with obsessive cravings for 80-cent sesame bagels smeared with peanut butter and "beautiful music created by depressed vegans."

Yes, the greatest political hits of the past eight years are here, Guantánamo and all. Lucille Clifton’s quite-famous "september song: a poem in 7 days" is the ultimate "what were you doing when the towers fell" diary, transported somehow into political heresy by her insistent invocations of "apples and honey / apples and honey." Rohrer’s "Elementary Science for Dick Cheney" and Anselm Berrigan’s "The Autobiography of Donald Rumsfeld" uproariously take those curs on directly, while Dan Bogan’s "A Citizen" is a vertiginous inventory of the twilit ironies common to "great" empires. ("There were the usual cabals / careers to be made among court intrigues / as the wheels of dynasty ground slowly through a calendar of ceremonies.")

And my favorite entry in the volume is, indeed, a rant — "Dear Mister President There Was Egg Shell under Your Desk Last Night in My Dream!" by CAConrad — one of those rambling, touching run-ons that never stops for punctuation and shouts, "HEY we’re all going to be dead in a hundred years so let’s shift the pace let’s forget about war let’s pass a Let’s Get Naked and Crazy Holiday" and then proceeds to offer the president "a good massage maybe we could go to the creek and paint secret mud symbols on our naked bodies like I used to do with my first boyfriend what happens after that will be fine you’ll see." The poem offers love, not clogged indignation.

Road trip: Iraq

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REVIEW Given the subject matter — soldiers returning home from Iraq — it should come as no surprise that the title The Lucky Ones is more than a little ironic. But things here aren’t quite so cut-and-dry. Despite its focus, the film maintains a stubborn refusal to get too bogged down in the melancholy or the politics; it’s a serious drama that’s often very funny and mostly lighthearted. At the movie’s center are three soldiers — Cheever (Tim Robbins), Colee (Rachel McAdams), and TK (Michael Peña). Accidentally thrust together, they embark on an unscheduled road trip, each with a separate mission. Cheever is trying to put his life back together; Colee wants to meet the parents of her late boyfriend; and TK hopes to restore function to his penis, which was wounded by shrapnel. Seriously. Though not the most conventional Iraq war story, the road movie formula is routine and elements of the plot feel somewhat stale. What elevates The Lucky Ones is a trio of memorable performances. Rachel McAdams is particularly impressive as Colee, delivering a complex portrayal of a woman ranting about the "lake of fire" one minute and raving about vibrators the next. She reflects the film’s strongest assets: finding the humor in tragedy and sighting the mundane in the unreal.

THE LUCKY ONES opens Fri/26 in Bay Area theaters.

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