Review Archives — Page 55 of 61 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Nuclear greenwashing

May 29, 2007

› amanda@sfbg.com

Patrick Moore’s presentation isn’t as slick as Al Gore’s. The slides he shows lack a certain visual panache and don’t compare to the ones in An Inconvenient Truth. Moore himself seems a little frumpy, particularly as he peers out across the audience recently gathered in the Warnors Theatre in Fresno.

But attendees paid $20 to hear the former Greenpeace leader extol the benefits of nuclear energy as a clean, safe, reliable, economic, and — perhaps most important to the current political and media focus on global warming — emissions-free source of power.

It’s hard to imagine Moore at the helm of an inflatable boat steering into the line of a whaling ship’s fire, but that iconic Greenpeace image is exactly what he wants you to associate with him. The Vancouver, British Columbia, native is quick to tell you he’s a former leader of one of the most effective international activist organizations ever. But he said he’s older now and wants to be for things instead of against them.

What’s Moore for? Warding off the warming of the world. What does he think will do it? More nuclear power plants.

If there’s any great and unifying issue thrumming through the national psyche, defying political party lines and flooding the media filters these days, it’s global warming. While leaders argue left and right about nearly every issue that comes before them, there is at least consensus that something must be done about climate change.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped on that bandwagon last September when he signed into law Assembly Bill 32, mandating a 25 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020.

Thirty-one states recently agreed to join a voluntary greenhouse gas emissions registry similar to California’s, 10 northeastern states are creating a cap-and-trade market, and already half the country has laws requiring that a certain percentage of local power portfolios come from renewable energy.

The alternative-energy troops who’ve long been waiting in the trenches have stepped up to fight, armed with the tools they’ve been honing for years: solar panels, wind turbines, tidal power, and biofuels. They say new options and innovations abound for weaning the country off its fossil fuel habit.

But there are already critics who say those approaches aren’t going to be enough — and that we need to go nuclear against this planetary threat. And now they have some unlikely new allies.

Maybe you’ve seen the headlines touting the new nuclear push, running in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and all the daily syndicates. They all claim the same questionable facts: Nuclear power is clean and emissions free. It’s safe, reliable, and cost-effective. It isn’t contributing to global warming — and these days even the environmentalists like it.

James Lovelock, the renowned Gaia theorist, thinks nuclear energy will be essential to power the developing world. On a Sept. 13, 2006, airing of KQED’s Forum, he told host Michael Krasny, "I would welcome high-level nuclear waste in my backyard."

During the hour-long program he said the dangers of radiation were exaggerated; there wasn’t that much waste generated; and in order to mitigate the increasing effects of climate change, we should "look at nuclear as a kind of medicine we have to take."

Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, thinks nothing is more doomsday than global warming and told the Guardian he advised Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to start touting nuclear power as a solution.

"The nuclear industry needs a new green generation," he told us. "My fellow environmentalists ought to be grateful to the nuclear industry for supplying 20 percent of our electricity."

And then there’s Moore, the 15-year Greenpeace veteran who once put his body in the way of a seal hunter’s club and wrote in an April 16, 2006, Washington Post op-ed, "My views have changed and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

"Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely."

The bio for the Post piece identifies Moore as cochair of "a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports the use of nuclear energy."

It’s one of the few articles that make such a disclosure, although more probably should. A survey by Diane Farsetta, a senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, came across 302 recent articles mentioning Moore and nuclear power as a possible option for mitigating the effects of global warming.

Only 37 — a mere 12 percent — said he’s being paid to support nuclear power by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), a national organization of pro-nuke industries that’s hired Moore to front its nuclear renaissance.

Only the Columbia Journalism Review has drawn the further connection that Hill and Knowlton has been paid $8 million to help the NEI spread the word that the nukies have the silver bullet for solving global warming.

Hill and Knowlton knows a little something about pushing dangerous products. The company created the tobacco industry’s decades-long disinformation campaign about the effects of smoking. Veterans of that campaign then helped ExxonMobil try to bury the truth about global warming.

Before laughing these folks out of the reactor room, consider this: Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, who’ve been against nukes in the past, are now suggesting nuclear energy needs to be considered in light of global warming.

Al Gore and Hillary Clinton have also made similar recent murmurings. Of all the major 2008 presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have offered up energy plans that don’t include more nukes.

Eight states are working on pro-nuclear legislation, and although a bill to lift the moratorium on new plants in California was shot down in the Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources, its sponsor, Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine), told us he intends to introduce it again and again until it passes.

In the meantime a private group of Fresno investors has signed a letter of intent with a nuclear power company to put a 1,600-megawatt nuclear plant in the San Joaquin Valley. So far the only thing stopping the group is the state’s 30-year-old moratorium, which says no new nuclear power plants may be built in California until a permanent solution to the waste is established. The investors are already working on a November 2008 ballot measure to end the ban and allow new nuclear plants.

A new nuclear plant hasn’t been built in the United States since 1978, when concerns about safety, cost, and the long-term waste management challenge (nuclear rods will still be deadly hundreds of thousands of years from now) overwhelmed the industry.

But if there were ever an opportunity for a nuclear renaissance, the threat of climate change has created one. And the poster child is Moore, a relatively innocuous Greenpeace exile who’s traveling around the country with a B-movie version of Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, speaking to communities and drumming up what he calls a grassroots coalition of mayors, business leaders, and community activists. He’s steadily convincing them we need more nuclear power by trading the classic doomsday scenario of a massive radioactive explosion for the creeping killer global warming.

"I’m aghast," Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian who helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility and is one of the most prominent international critics of the dangers of nuclear energy, told us.

Caldicott, who’s authored several books on the subject, most recently Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer (2006), said, "I’ve never seen a propaganda exercise which is so fallacious. Both the politicians and the media are buying it."

She and other nuclear watchdogs who’ve been patrolling the industry for more than 30 years say it’s anything but a safe, reliable, economic, and emissions-free silver bullet.

Let’s look at the facts.

SAFETY

When it comes to safety, Moore told us, "US nuclear power plant employees enjoy the so-called healthy worker effect: people employed at the plants have lower mortality rates from cancer, heart disease, or other causes and are likely to live longer than the general population."

To support this claim, he cited a 2004 Radiation Research Society study of 53,000 workers. After reviewing it, Caldicott said, "I’m very suspect. There’s nothing here about people who are living with cancer."

Caldicott admits there’s a void of data about the health of nuclear workers and people who live near plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t mandate baseline studies of cancer rates in areas surrounding the sites of nuclear facilities.

But people living near Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania plant that came within minutes of a catastrophic meltdown in 1979, demanded studies, which found evidence of increases in thyroid cancer in the region. And Caldicott, in her recent book, pointed out that there are a number of things the government doesn’t want to admit. "To this day there is no available information about which specific isotopes escaped nor the actual quantity of radiation that was released," she wrote, going on to detail how, for lack of sufficient data about the distance the radiation may have spread, scientists studied the rates in the livestock of nearby fields and found supporting evidence that the plume of poison spread as far as 150 miles away.

And of course, there’s Chernobyl, where a 1986 nuclear-plant disaster caused lasting health problems and contaminated a huge swath of what was then the Soviet Union.

The unavoidable fact is that the industry thus far has had two terrible, nightmarish accidents, one of which was catastrophic and the other very nearly so.

And every part of the nuclear-power cycle involves serious health risks.

"You want to get really sad?" asked Molly Johnson, a lifelong environmental justice activist and San Luis Obispo County resident. "Go to New Mexico, go to Arizona, see the families that are dying because of the uranium mining. Their water is irradiated from the uranium tailings that are still there…. Why would we continue that?"

These days intentional attacks are even more of a concern. But Moore isn’t sweating. He said he thinks a plane colliding with a power plant is unlikely, even though the 9/11 Commission Report found that al-Qaeda operatives at one point considered aiming for the Indian Point reactor in New York.

Even if a jet hit a plant, Moore insists, the plant would be strong enough to withstand a collision. "If you drove an airplane into that, it would just be one messed-up airplane you’d have to deal with," he said.

Not exactly, say the critics.

"He is just dead wrong about reactor security. Breathtakingly misinformed," said Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a public interest group that’s been studying nuclear power and proliferation issues for nearly four decades. "Virtually no reactor containment in the US was designed to withstand a hit by a jumbo jet. Significant parts of the plant essential to preventing a meltdown are outside containment anyway."

Hirsch is speaking of power lines, which transmit electricity from the plant and also carry electricity to it — power that’s used to keep dangerous components cool and safe. If that power were cut off for any length of time, a meltdown could occur in the pools where explosive spent fuel is kept.

These spent-fuel storage areas — essentially big swimming pools where radioactive waste is kept underwater until a long-term storage facility is built — rely on a steady pumping of water to cool the superheated waste. All you’d have to do is stop that water pump, and there’d be a meltdown. And the storage areas don’t necessarily have the same fortified structures as the reactors.

Hirsch said, "A successful attack on a nuclear plant or, even worse, a spent-fuel pool would be the worst terrorist event to ever occur on earth by far, capable of killing over 100,000 people immediately and hundreds of thousands of latent cancers thereafter, contaminating an area the size of Pennsylvania for generations."

There’s no immediate solution in sight for long-term storage, so these pools of deadly waste will likely remain on reactor sites for many years.

San Luis Obispo County’s Mothers for Peace recently sued the NRC over the newly established laws regarding protection against terrorist attacks, which only require plants to be able to ward off five potential external terrorists on the ground. It took 19 people to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that power plant operators must also consider the possibility of an air attack when designing spent-fuel storage tanks.

Mothers for Peace is fond of noting that existing security measures aren’t what you’d call foolproof. During a recent earthquake, 56 of 131 sirens in the San Luis Obispo area — designed to alert residents of a possible accident at the plant — didn’t go off because the power was out and they aren’t backed up by generators or batteries.

When Mothers for Peace and the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility brought the failure to the attention of the NRC, the agency said that nothing is perfect and that the sirens over the course of 1,000 hours worked 99 percent of the time.

"Except the five hours you’d actually want them to work," David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility said.

Nuclear power is either a creeping killer or a sitting bomb. Wind farms and solar-panel arrays are not leaching poisons into the environment. They’re not direct targets for terrorist attacks, and if they were, the result wouldn’t be all that horrible. Imagine cleaning up a bombed wind farm versus a nuclear power plant.

"Wind farms are on nobody’s list of targets," Weisman added. "If a windmill falls and there’s no one there to hear it, do you need an emergency evacuation plan?"

RELIABILITY

A centerpiece of the pro-nuke argument is that nuclear power is a baseload source, meaning it can generate energy all day, every day. Solar and wind, of course, rely on the cruel (and unpredictable) forces of nature to generate power.

But one could argue the same about nuclear power plants. They’re run by people — and the record of those operators isn’t encouraging.

Moore expressed great confidence in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: "They have very, very stringent requirements and regulations. It’s all there for anybody to see. All of these reactors are inspected regularly. There is no reason in my estimation to suspect the NRC of anything other than being a responsible watchdog agency. If you want to take the time to dig into it, you can find out what’s going on."

David Lochbaum does take that time — and he’s found out a lot. After working for 17 years as a consultant to the NRC, he joined the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) as a nuclear-safety engineer. He spends his days combing NRC reports and documents and compiling studies on the safety of the industry. His experience and research have caused him to conclude that the commission can’t stay on top of the 103 plants in the country.

"We get a lot of calls from workers in the plants, and NRC employees that have safety issues they’re afraid to raise," he said. "We had three calls last week. That’s a little more than usual, but we usually get 50 to 60 whistleblower calls a year." He said sometimes the workers have already raised the issue internally but need an ally to force a remedy at the plant. Other times they’re afraid to speak about what they’ve seen without fear of retaliation.

Lochbaum authored a September 2006 study for the UCS titled "Walking the Nuclear Tightrope" on the issues of safety and reliability. It’s a chilling read; it carefully outlines how regulators have been complicit in allowing plants to operate far longer than they should and how these overstressed plants eventually have to be shut down for years to restore safety standards. He found that in the last 40 years plants have ground to a halt for a year or more on 51 occasions. In most cases it wasn’t a spontaneous incident but an overall decaying of conditions that compromised safety.

"Some observers have argued that the fact no US nuclear power reactor has experienced a meltdown since 1979 (during which time 45 year-plus outages have occurred) demonstrates the status quo is working successfully," Lochbaum wrote. "That’s as fallacious as arguing that the levees protecting New Orleans were fully adequate prior to Hurricane Katrina by pointing to the absence of similar disasters between 1980 and 2004."

One of the most recent and chilling examples is the 2002 outage of the Davis-Besse plant near Toledo, Ohio, where a hole the size of a football was discovered in the vessel reactor head. Only a half inch of steel remained to prevent a massive nuclear meltdown. The plant was overdue for a shutdown and an inspection and had been granted the extension by the NRC.

When asked what he thought about that close call, Moore said, "I didn’t think it was a close call. I thought it was a mechanical failure that should have been caught sooner. It was caught long before it became an accident or anything like that."

"When you say close call, that means that nothing actually happened," he concluded.

But when there’s a facility where an accident could lead to mass deaths, even close calls are grounds for concern. That’s why we have to hold nuclear plants to such high standards. And the fact that plants have to close so often to avoid disastrous accidents doesn’t say much for the reliability argument.

EMISSIONS

This may be the issue on which the pro-nukers make the most headway. Moore cites a number of international studies, posted on the NEI’s Web site, that show nuclear plants competing only with hydropower when it comes to emitting the lowest level of carbon dioxide. Even solar panels and wind turbines, when one factors in the entire energy process, emit more greenhouse gases, according to these studies, though all these power sources release significantly less than burning coal or natural gas.

The anti-nuke crowd says a true study has never been completed that quantifies the CO2 emissions from mining uranium and turning it into usable nuclear fuel. Both are heavily energy intensive. Additionally, they argue that transporting waste will incur even more CO2 emissions, whether it’s shipped across the sea for reprocessing in Europe or trucked across the country for burial in Yucca Mountain.

But the waste itself is also a huge issue. Although nuclear power plants don’t have bad breath, they do emit toxins — and it’s an unresolved issue as to where to put them. The current forecast for opening the Yucca Mountain repository is 2021. Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada opposes building the facility, and he’s pushing a bill that would require plants to keep the crud in their backyards.

"They’ve had 50 years to work on the waste issue," Weisman said. "And the best solution they’ve come up with is, who do we not like enough to send it to?"

Either way, Moore thinks waste is not a problem. If anything, it should be reprocessed — he likes to call it "recycling." Under that process, spent fuel is bathed in acid to separate out the usable plutonium. That can be followed by vitrification — a complex, energy-intensive process of suspending the highly radioactive and corrosive acid in glass, which is then sealed in expensive trash cans of steel and concrete and buried underground for at least 300 years, after which point he predicts it should no longer be a problem.

"It makes more fuel," he said.

Actually, Hirsch said, "it makes more weapons-grade plutonium." He argues that the last thing the nation should do is allow nuclear-plant operators to separate the plutonium and put it on the market, where it can be leaked for bomb making.

Additionally, there are a number of waste sites around the country that are slowly emitting what they’ve been designed — or not designed in some cases — to contain.

The worst is probably in Hanford, Wash., where decades’ worth of reprocessed spent radioactive fuel pushed the area beyond Superfund status into a "national nuclear waste sacrifice zone.

"Hanford is the most contaminated site in North America and one of the most significant long-term threats facing the Columbia River," Greg deBruler, of Columbia Riverkeeper, wrote in the Fall 2006 issue of Waterkeeper, the group’s quarterly journal. "It’s difficult to comprehend the reality of Hanford’s 150 square miles of highly contaminated groundwater or its 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste sitting in 45-year-old rotting steel tanks."

Much of that waste includes leftover reprocessed spent uranium fuel, which ate through its casks and poisoned the community’s drinking water.

Moore said, "It’s not as if everyone is dead. The nuclear waste has been contained."

Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

ECONOMICS

"The economics of nuclear power are well proven around the world. It is one of the most cost-effective forms of energy," Moore said.

Just check the record. Of the 103 reactors that were built in the United States, 75 ran a total of $100 billion over budget. India more recently went 300 percent over budget on its 10 reactors. Finland is already 18 months behind and $1 billion over on a reactor.

Given this track record, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration "Annual Energy Outlook 2005" reported that "new plants are not expected to be economical." They’re so risky, in fact, that not a single plant could have been built without the 1957 Price-Anderson act, which moves the liability for a nuke plant off its owners and onto US taxpayers. "If they were really economical, they’d be able to get insurance," Weisman said. The bill was recently renewed.

The nuclear industry forges on unperturbed, claiming that new plants have been streamlined for easier construction. Additionally, the siting and licensing laws for plants have been changed to speed up the process by precluding public input. (Given the industry’s safety record so far, that’s not comforting.) Experts predict it will now take 10 years to build a new nuclear plant. Thirty-four licenses are currently pending at the NRC as utility companies race to secure the $8 billion the federal government set aside for subsidies.

"Imagine how many wind turbines that could buy," said Harvey Wasserman, a longtime anti-nuke activist who recently authored the book Solartopia, which outlines a plan for completely renewable energy by 2030. In fact, renewables are far cheaper. Building the facilities to create one gigawatt of wind power costs about $1.5 billion; about two gigawatts could replace the Diablo Canyon Power Plant.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In the end, it comes down to money, and that’s where nuclear power may be the most vulnerable.

Sam Blakeslee, a Republican Assembly member from San Luis Obispo, introduced a bill last year that calls on the California Energy Commission (CEC) to conduct an in-depth study of the true costs of nuclear power to assess its viability as part of California’s future energy plans. The bill passed unanimously, and Schwarzenegger signed it.

"This will be cradle to grave," said Weisman, of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, which has focused its scrutiny on the industry’s costs.

The group has long been suspicious of PG&E’s financial woes, which came to a head this past March when the California Public Utilities Commission allowed the company to use $16.8 million from ratepayers to fund its in-house study of relicensing its two nuclear plants. "The licenses won’t be up until 2023 and 2025, so why are they looking at relicensing now — and why does it cost $16.8 million when the state’s study is projected to cost $800,000?" Weisman asked.

Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) is introducing a bill this year that will undercut PG&E’s study before the CEC’s analysis is completed, which is expected to occur around November 2008.

"Our very simple idea here is that before any relicensing of our aging nuclear power plants can proceed, the CEC study be completed," Leno said. "Clearly, PG&E is very eager to move forward its relicensing process. They have many years to accomplish that task."

Leno said the stakes are too high and the inherent risks of the toxins already accumulated in seismic zones along the coast need to be carefully weighed against the prospects of generating even more waste. "We should proceed with absolute caution, forethought, and consideration."

NOWHERE TO RUN

Those risks, that caution, are something that never leaves the minds of the people who live in the plants’ fallout zones, areas as vast as a steady breeze or trickling flow of water can make them. That’s really the problem with nuclear power plants. After 50 years there are still too many unknowns. In Moore’s lectures and during interviews and debates, the former Greenpeace activist likes to say more people are killed by car accidents and machetes than by nuclear power plants, but that mocks the magnitude of a meltdown.

A car accident kills at most a few people. A machete attack might kill one person. A nuclear accident has the potential to inflict casualties in the tens of thousands, maybe even millions, and to render entire cities uninhabitable. And while most of the time, most of the plants may be perfectly problem free, it only takes one accident to wreak environmental havoc.

These days opposition to nuclear energy isn’t about mass protests in the streets. "When KQED calls and asks for the sounds of a protest, I say that’s not how it happens," Weisman said while showing a DVD of a Jan. 31 San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission meeting that droned on for more than 12 hours. The meeting ultimately resulted in what he’d hoped for: a continuing delay of PG&E’s permit to site new dry-cask storage tanks for thousands of tons of nuclear waste accumuutf8g at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. He and Rochelle Becker, the group’s director, sat through the whole thing. "That’s what protesting is now," he said.

Becker, a pert, soft-spoken woman with the aging visage of the youngest grandmother in the room, said correctness is crucial. "Never, ever exaggerate. When they want to talk about safety issues and isotopes, we refer them to someone else because we don’t have that expertise. All we have is our credibility, and if we lose our credibility, we don’t have anything."

THE PLUTONIUM PAYCHECK

Which makes what Moore is doing look like such a travesty.

"Maybe we should hire Hill and Knowlton," joked James Riccio, Greenpeace’s nuclear-policy analyst in Washington, DC, on thinking about gearing up for a new wave of anti-nuke activism.

To Riccio, Wasserman, Weisman, Hirsch, Caldicott, and many others who spoke with the Guardian, Moore is nothing but a dangerous distraction who’s getting the wrong kind of attention. Wasserman disputed Moore’s credentials as a Greenpeace founder in the Burlington Free Press article "The Sham of Patrick Moore."

When questioned by the Guardian, Moore called Wasserman a jerk. Moore said he’s still an activist — and in addition to parroting for the nuclear industry, he runs a sustainability consulting company, Greenspirit Strategies, which advises industries on controversial subjects like genetically modifying organisms, clear-cutting, and fish farming. His clients include hazardous waste, timber, biotech, aquaculture, and chemical companies, in addition to conventional utilities that process nuclear power and natural gas.

Moore insists he’s not hiding anything. "In every interview I do the reporter already knows that I’m cochair of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and that I work for the nuclear industry," he told us.

But Moore did not identify himself as such during a lengthy interview with us until we asked. The disclosure was also missing during the long biographical presentation given to the folks in Fresno on Feb. 22, which did include pictures of his Rainbow Warrior days. Again, on May 24, Moore didn’t mention his plutonium paycheck during a radio debate on KZYX. Neither did the moderator, and it was only when Hirsch, his debating partner, got a moment to speak that it was revealed. "Let’s be clear here, Patrick," Hirsch said. "You’re being paid by the industry." *

Joseph Plaster, Andrew Oliver, and Sam Draisin helped research this story.

Muse of fire

May 22, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Perhaps the most intriguing question about David Gordon’s Pick Up Performance Company’s Dancing Henry Five is why it works so well. Gordon took the third of William Shakespeare’s Henry plays, the monumental but stiff Henry V, sent it through the wringer of his imagination, and spit it out as what he calls in the subtitle "a pre-emptive (post modern) strike and spin." That’s about as razor-sharp and witty a label as you could stick on this elegant and prickly entertainment, which lasts for an hour but resonated well beyond the confines of the ODC Theater’s modest stage during its May 16 to 19 run.

Not that Gordon didn’t have plenty of help; for one, there is Shakespeare’s resonant language, taken from Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version, which buoyed a dispirited Britain. Then there is William Walton’s mostly excellent score. And let’s not forget the Bushites, whose own strike and spin provided the impetus for this sly look at history repeated. As for Gordon’s eight-member ensemble ("plus three dummies," as Valda Setterfield, the key pin in this finely tuned work, makes a point of specifying), it is an admirably gifted and beautiful group of dancers.

Gordon is not the first to use dance and language in a fully integrated way, but few others have become as masterful at holding the two in perfect balance. In a nod to his roots in the Judson Dance Theater, his work looks casual and ordinary. The language can be everyday conversational, the dancing based on walking. But the commonplace surface is deceptive. Gordon has assembled his components with a clockmaker’s attention to using finely calibrated gears that interlock to create momentum and flow. The resulting work charms with easy grace but impresses through impeccable craft.

For Dancing, Gordon took key elements of Shakespeare’s play — Henry’s debauched youth, his politically expedient abandonment of old friends, his going to war for economic reasons and with the moral force of religion behind him — and spun them into a contemporary fable whose parallels at times amuse but more often cut deeply.

The British-born Setterfield, Gordon’s life and artistic partner for the past 30-plus years, was the key to setting the tone for a work that easily could be but never became preachy. Her clipped delivery — sometimes cool, sometimes wry, and always straightforward — set up an ironic contrast with the mellifluous sonority of the Shakespearean language heard on tape. She brilliantly navigated between her roles as master of ceremonies, observing chorus, and when necessary, the various characters. Her function, she explained, was "to fill in, fill up, and fill out." She did so with the simplest of means. With direct addresses to the audience, while scurrying about or from her pedestal on a ladder, she interpreted the swiftly moving narrative. As the dying Falstaff, with a pillow held as a belly, she shrank in front of our eyes; as a woman with an adult-size rag doll in her arms, she became a mother who has lost a child to war; and as an attendant to Catherine of France, she was dainty, subservient, yet authoritative.

For all its simplicity, Gordon’s choreography is structured in overlapping phrases and precisely timed rhythms that are endlessly fascinating. Much of the dancing is robust, but it is always inflected. In the opening passage, the apparently random walks had a slight bounce to them. The Dauphin’s insulting gift of tennis balls became a game of passing and bouncing — at first one, then two balls — while crisply circling walking patterns were maintained. During the multilevel battle of Agincourt, the pounding poles’ rhythmic accelerations suggested the rising violence. However, whether throwing dolls and folding chairs was the best way to choreograph the collapse of civility remains dubious.

Dancing is also elegant and refined. Setterfield’s charming English lesson to the future queen (a sturdy, fleet on her feet Karen Graham) was delivered as a minuet between the two women, their arms lacily acting out the anatomical vocabulary. After Falstaff’s death, Sadira A. Smith danced a lyrical solo that mourned the loss of innocence. In the courting duet, which became a trio with Setterfield as an intermediary, the dour king (a stocky Tadej Brdnik) even managed a low-level jeté or two. The costumes were rugby inspired, and Jennifer Tipton’s lush lighting design was brilliant. *

Chasing the church

May 16, 2007

By Steven T. Jones
Toward the end of Christopher Hitchens’ wonderfully caustic anti-tribute to Jerry Falwell on Slate today, he chides the Democratic Party for trying to follow the Republican Party in pandering to the religionists. That’s a very real fear that has the potential to do immense damage to this country and its constitutional separation of religion from government.

Image from Sunday’s New York Times Review of Books

Just last week, during the Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco on which I reported, both national party chair Howard Dean and state party chair Art Torres talked about reaching out to churchgoers. “We believe God is not a Democrat or a Republican. He’s a social progressive,” Torres said. It was a funny line that broke up the room of party faithful, but it has some serious implications.

The mark of Zidane

May 15, 2007

› johnny@sfbg.com

Z marks the spot, whether that spot is the television, cinema screen, museum installation, or the memories of millions of people who’ve borne even cursory witness to the career of Zinedine Zidane, especially its instantly mythic — as opposed to merely controversial — final athletic moments. All of the above spots are touched on by the masterful Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a multiformat work at the crest of a current fascination with athletic documentary. Shadowed by Verónica Chen’s undersung swimmer drama Agua (2006), Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s project reveals sports’ potential as a source for pure cinematic dynamism. Moreover, it taps into a famous athlete’s tremendous resonance as a subject of artistic portraiture.

The presence of the word Portrait in Zidane‘s English title is an important one. The film’s codirectors (the latter of whose recent installation The Boy from Mars is a favorite of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul) shot only one match, from Real Madrid’s 2005 season. But they are portraying both Zidane and this century. If ever there was a solitary — if team-playing — figure up to the task of embodying or at least evoking a universe, Gordon and Parreno have chosen him. To use the vintage words of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Zidane’s actions have transcended the thrill of victory and agony of defeat.

Zidane makes its public SF debut at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, thanks to film curator Joel Shepard. (One can always dream of a future screening at the Metreon, where its Kevin Shields– and Bay Area–influenced sound design, Mogwai score, and panoramic scope would be ideally realized.) Because I’ve only seen it on DVD, in lieu of writing a review, I recently spoke with Gordon. The Turner Prize–winning native of Glasgow, Scotland, began our talk while looking at a Neil Young record in a bookstore, before grabbing a cup of tea, and maintained his casual good humor whatever the topic.

GUARDIAN What led you to choose Zidane as the film’s subject? Were you a fan?

DOUGLAS GORDON Yeah. The first time we met Zidane, it was difficult to try and behave like adults. I can speak French OK, but I tried to introduce myself and sounded like a girl meeting John Lennon in 1960. I fell to pieces.

SFBG The George Best movie Football as Never Before (1971; directed by Hellmuth Costard) has been cited in relation to Zidane. But it comes from a different era, and Best is a different kind of subject or icon, and you’re using different equipment.

DG We developed our idea in blissful ignorance of Costard’s movie. But when we were having trouble figuring out how to deal with portraying the halftime period, someone mentioned [it] to us. At that point it wasn’t available on DVD, so Philippe actually flew from Paris to Berlin to go to the National Film Archive in Germany.

Later, we watched it together and looked into Costard’s practice. Obviously, he didn’t want to engage with the industry of cinema or the vocabulary of cinema — it was almost antithetical to his practice — whereas we wanted to play with the idea of a star and how a star is mediated, to see if we could get under the skin rather than stay on the surface.

SFBG Can you tell me about your tactics in using 17 cameras within one game to capture Zidane? To me, television hasn’t figured out how to present soccer. Some sports translate intimately to television, but soccer is often held at a distance.

DG Most televisual representations of football are based on a kind of theatrical convention of only shooting from one side — you have an entrance-left-exit-right type of motion. By breaking that down, you actually break up the architecture of the stadium. It’s no longer rectangular; it’s become circular in a way.

We wanted to make a portrait of a man: a working man who happens to be Zinedine Zidane, and the work happens to be football. It wasn’t a particularly good day at the office for him — he didn’t score any goals, and he got red-carded. But we wanted what we did to be along the lines of a Robert Bresson picture; to capture the honesty of the everyday.

Kon Ichikawa’s 1965 Tokyo Olympiad was a reference, and — more for me than for Philippe — the NFL. I wasted my youth watching 16mm, fantastically well-photographed NFL [footage]. Beautiful stuff, [shot by] cameramen who’d just come back from the war [in Vietnam]. Seagulls might flap by in front of them, and it wouldn’t be edited out. There was something rough about the NFL stuff that we wanted. There’s a couple of scenes in Zidane where the camera drifts up. That was deliberate, but it’s a reference to the sort of accidental beauty that can happen in that type of footage.

SFBG One thing that the film brings across is that there are long periods of the game when Zidane is meditative and literally just standing. Then when he does move, it’s incredibly sudden and really focused.

DG Some people have said that it’s a little reminiscent of nature programming. He’s definitely on the hunting side of things rather than the hunted.

It’s an exercise in one man’s solitude, though. There happen to be 80,000 people in the stadium, and he’s part of a team of 11, but there are huge periods where he’s completely alone.

Before shooting, we went to about 15 or 16 games and sat on the pitch. One of the big differences about the way we shot the film is that, apart from one camera, everything was on his level. There’s only one aerial camera that we used very sparingly as a backup. We knew the way he would walk around and that he’d pace himself during the game, so when we talked to the [project’s] producers, another reference we used was the corrida. You just don’t know if he’s the bull or the bullfighter.

If you were inside the head of Zinedine Zidane, you wouldn’t see him at all, which would sort of defeat the purpose of the film. But we did want to give his point of view, and there are specific passages where you see him move his head as if he’s a little disoriented. At points like those you don’t really know if you’re looking at the world through his eyes or looking at him.

SFBG What was his response to your portrait?

DG He’s not a man of many words, but he got pretty animated [when he saw it].

We kept him informed. We knew it was going to be a fairly hardcore exercise and that it was better to tell him how we were approaching it step-by-step rather than just turn up after a year’s worth of editing and hit him with [the finished work].

There were a couple of times [during the process] where he was really surprised and said, "That doesn’t look like me, this is not how I look on TV, this is not how I look in a newspaper — this is how my brother looks late at night talking to my mother."

We were nervous about how he felt he was portrayed because of the red card and the violence [in the match]. But he said, "I would do it again. The guy was an asshole."

SFBG That brings me to an inevitable question: what was it like to see things play out somewhat similarly in the final match of the 2006 World Cup?

DG I was in the stadium, and I couldn’t believe it. Of course, you couldn’t see what was going on because as usual there were another couple of Italians lying down feigning injury.

I knew we’d obviously stumbled upon something when, even before I’d seen the incident, people in the English press were quoting our film to make Zidane out to be a baddie.

SFBG Was that frustrating?

DG I think [Zidane]’s been sent out [of matches] more times than anyone else who wore the number 5 in the history of football. He’s a real person; he’s volatile.

It doesn’t really matter what [Italian player Marco] Materazzi said to him; what matters is that he said something to one of the greatest footballers of this generation. There’s five minutes left to go in [Zidane]’s career, and you want to taunt him about his wife?

SFBG How did you come to collaborate with Parreno?

DG Philippe and I have had mutual friends since the early ’90s. We’d pop up in the same group exhibitions around 1990 and 1991. He made a film with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Carsten Höller in 1994 called Vicinato, and then I got involved — along with Liam Gillick and Pierre Huyghe — in [1996’s] Vicinato 2. We’d spent a long time together talking about the script, and we shot it together down in Monaco. We watched a lot of football during that period as well.

But the genesis for the project really happened in Jerusalem, of all places. Philippe and I happened to be in a group exhibition ["Hide and Seek," curated by Ami Barak] there in 1996, and it just so happened the exhibition was under a football stadium, the Teddy Kollek Stadium. We finished our installations very early, and since Jerusalem isn’t a place to go idly wandering, we bought a football and played Keepy Uppy for about a week. During that time we spoke of what we remembered about being kids playing football, watching football, and what we aspired to [achieve]. Then we spoke about cinema and the fact that people had been waiting for us both to make a movie.

We chose Zidane partly because — and I think it’s the same after our film — he’s an incredibly enigmatic character. He has this absolutely impenetrable facade. He’s Zinedine Zidane.

Every time we met him, there was some other family member with him, and they’re all bigger than him. When he’s off the pitch, he’s not as big as he seems when he’s on the field. It’s incredible what happens to his physiognomy and physicality when he’s playing.

He was won over because during the first meeting we had with him, we said, "We want to work with you because, looking back over the past few generations, you represent something more than just another football star, something deeper than [Diego] Maradona or more complex than [David] Beckham." We had reedited some footage of [Manuel dos Santos] Garrincha, the old South American player, from a beautiful film [Garrincha, Joy of the People, directed by cinema novo pioneer Joaquim Pedro de Andrade] shot in the early ’60s. I think the fact that we’d chosen Garrincha and not Pele or Maradona, for example, really struck a chord with [Zidane].

SFBG What you’re saying goes back to the fact that Zidane both triggers and reframes issues of race and nationalism because he’s so powerful as an athlete and individual.

DG Someone told me that in France during the recent election there was a lot of graffiti over campaign billboards for [Nicolas] Sarkozy and Ségolène Royale saying, "Zidane, Zidane." I wish someone had taken a fucking photograph for me, but I could probably restage it somewhere.

Sometimes I think it even comes down to the Z. There’s something about it, like the mark of Zorro.

SFBG What have you thought about the art world response to Zidane?

DG We’ve spoken to a lot of people about sports, and about cinema. People have had a tendency to forget that Philippe and I used to say that we’re trying to drag people from the white cube [of art spaces] to the black box and from the black box to the white cube.

We didn’t lose sight of this, but it got lost along the way that Philippe and I knew [that] by choosing a subject or model like Zidane, we had the opportunity to really mix things up in terms of the audience. Kids could, in years to come, in turn take their kids to see it at the National Gallery in Scotland or the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. For kids who have the DVD, that can work the same way that it does when kids who maybe have a postcard of a painting can see the real thing — they’ll have an affiliation with it.

SFBG How does the installation version of Zidane differ from the cinematic presentation?

DG It’s two projections — the cinematic one, plus one of the cameras. It seems like a glib deconstruction, but when you see it, it’s a different experience, much more demanding. It’s almost a forensic detail of how we made [it]; if you troll around to 17 different museums all over the world, you’ll see there are 17 different points of view.

Of course, when the one camera is the camera used in the cinematic version, you get this bifocal effect.

SFBG For you to have mentioned Bresson earlier while discussing Zidane is interesting, because the setting and subject matter are not what one would connect to Bresson. Usually when film directors mention him, their work is stylistically aping or imitating him.

DG The cinematography of [1966’s Au Hasard] Balthazar was influential. But more so, there’s a book Philippe sent to me [Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, most recently published in English by Green Integer] that had an impact, in the way he talks about the difference between the model and the actor. This was really clear to us when we were trying to speak about Zidane. People would say he’s an actor, and we’d say, "No, he’s not, he’s a model." He’s not playing a role. He’s doing his job, but with the awareness of being looked at, and that’s very different from the way the actor performs. Some of what Bresson says in his notes almost could have been written specifically for the Zidane film. It’s nice to quote Bresson, because he’s so unfashionable.

SFBG And so great! Some of the best current movie directors also produce work for art spaces. You’ve given a lot of thought to the specificity of DVDs and cinemas and gallery or museum installations, so I wanted to ask you about those distinctions.

DG One of the things that Philippe and I were constantly asked [at Zidane‘s film premiere] was "Were you excited to be working in the cinema?" We weren’t more excited than we would be [working] anywhere else. If there’s anything that would identify a certain practice of our generation of artists, it is that most of us are working with the exhibition as a format, and the context informs the format while the format interferes with the context. A lot of people don’t get that at all. I’m not trying to blow an intellectual trumpet here, but there is a certain amount of practice necessary to understand that. This is why when someone like David Lynch tries to move out of the cinema or TV screen into the gallery, it doesn’t work sometimes. The filmmaker might not do enough with the gallery or the museum. *

ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT

Thurs/17–Sun/19, 7 p.m.; Sun/20, 2 and 7 p.m. (all screenings sold out except for Sun/20, 2 p.m.)

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Screening Room

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978-2787

www.zidane-themovie.com

Tattoo you

May 15, 2007

CHEAP EATS She had tattooed knuckles. One hand said PORK and the other said CHOP. I expressed my adoration, and she said, "You should see the other ones."

"Should I?" I asked.

She has a girlfriend in Canada. This was not a date but a business meeting.

Business = new favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Pho Clement, between, I think, Third and Fourth avenues on Clement Street. One hundred and seventy things on the menu, not counting appetizers and sandwiches.

Over two bowls of soup big enough to paddle two small canoes in, I said to my new friend Pork Chop, "What else ya got?"

"Bacon," she said. I think she said it was on her stomach, but I kind of passed out at that point, and when I came to we were making whole different sentences.

Something about Michigan. Turns out, thanks to Pork Chop’s encouragement, I am going to go there this summer for that wimmin’s music festival. Pork Chop works in the kitchen and has been attending the festival for six or seven years. Says it has changed her life.

I’m sure it will change mine too. For one thing, I won’t be as pretty as I am now, what with black eyes, broken teeth, and every manner of structural damage.

Oy, the things we do for a story, eh, fellow hard news reporters and investigative journalists? I tell you. I for one am not a fan of pain or mosquito bites. Yet there I will be, in Michigan in August, getting my ass kicked by both bugs and backward-thinking lesbian feminist separatists. Ah, but someone’s gotta go see what these girls are having for dinner, and there’s no question I’m the tranny for the job.

Oh: I say backward-thinking because their definition of wimmins is stuck all the way back on what Mr. Doctor had to say about it, overriding all present tense appearances to the contrary. Because everyone knows that the last-century medical profession, or in other words, "the Man," interprets reality more accurately and certainly more definitively than we do, its living and kicking and messy subjects, prone as we are to the pesky revisionism of tick tick time, the great editor.

To review: trans men welcome, beards and testosterone and homemade wieners and all; trans women, no, nope, not welcome, sorry.

But now I have a friend on the inside. In the kitchen. With tattoos! And I don’t know why I love soup so much, but with all due respect to pork, if I could have tattoos on my knuckles I think they would say SOUP and SOUP. Big bowl of steamy, sopping noodles on my belly … but it’s always only a dream because as much as I love tattoos, and seeing them on other people and thinking about them on me, and soup, I can’t take the pain, personally, like I said.

So … "Do you regret any of them? Your tattoos?" I asked.

Her bowl of pho was way bigger than my hot and sour shrimp soup, yet she was almost finished and I was just getting started. I’m a slow eater.

She thought about it. "No," she said, finally, tentatively. Then: "Maybe ‘pork pies’ instead of ‘pork chop.’"

But that’s editorial. That ain’t regret.

Pork butt, pork buns, pork soup, pork meat, pork beef, more pork, I thought, savoring my pineapples, tomatoes, and celery. Sometimes with shrimp and sometimes with catfish, I’ve been ordering canh chua for as long as I’ve been eating in Vietnamese restaurants, and it hadn’t occurred to me until now to ask for noodles too.

The waitressperson had seemed delighted by this suggestion, and I was certainly delighted by the outcome. Only it came out in two separate bowls, and one reason I was so far behind was because it took me 10 minutes to decide whether to add the noodles to the soup, or the soup to the noodles.

Anyway, it was great, and nobody was in no hurries. And I left when I left with a sloshy stomach that worked weirdly well on the soccer field. At least at first. I scored a goal early, then kind of went to sleep in the grass and dreamed about doughnuts. *

PHO CLEMENT

Daily, 10 a.m.–10 p.m.

239 Clement, SF

(415) 379-9008

Takeout available

Beer and wine

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Moving the bike plan forward

May 15, 2007

EDITORIAL It’s an odd year for Bike to Work Day: San Francisco is in the middle of an ambitious plan to improve the city’s bicycle infrastructure — and it’s utterly stalled. The city can’t add a single new bike rack, can’t add a single bicycle route sign, can’t take a single step to improve bike safety, and can’t move forward on any of the 60 projects that are in the hopper. Every single transportation improvement that involves bicycles is on hold for at least a year.

For that you can thank Rob Anderson, a dishwasher and blogger who thinks bikes are unsafe in the city and recently wrote on his blog that "if the Bike Nut Community (BNC) gets its way on city streets, traffic in the city will be made unnecessarily worse for everyone, with more air pollution as a result, as motorized traffic idles in traffic jams, squeezed into fewer lanes after the BNC creates bike lanes by eliminating traffic lanes and street parking."

The lone antibike nut filed a lawsuit claiming that the city’s bicycle plan lacked adequate environmental review, and in a departing slap at San Francisco, Judge James Warren signed off on an injunction blocking all bike improvements just before he retired. Now the city has to complete its entire plan — at least another year’s work — then complete an environmental impact report (EIR) on it, and then return to court to get the injunction lifted. It’s costing money and time, and it’s making it harder for what should be a safe, healthy, pollution-free method of transportation to pick up more adherents in what ought to be the nation’s most bike-friendly city.

But there’s not a lot anyone can do about Anderson and his pro-car crusade (yes, he says very clearly on his blog, district5diary.blogspot.com, that he’s pro-car and that "cars are a great invention, and they are here to stay"). In another year a judge will toss out this ridiculous injunction, and the city can get on with its planning.

But it’s critical right now that city hall not sit back and wait. The bicycle plan needs to be funded, and the project planning needs to continue moving forward at full speed, so that when the EIR is completed and the city is allowed once again to implement new programs, the projects will be ready to go. This lunatic lawsuit shouldn’t give Mayor Gavin Newsom an excuse to defund bicycle programs for the next year.

The truth is, thousands of additional people have begun to ride bikes to work over the past few years, and that’s had nothing but a positive impact on the environment. Bikes can and should be a central part of the city’s transportation infrastructure. That’s the lesson for Bike to Work Day. *

Stationary biking

May 15, 2007

› steve@sfbg.com

This year’s Bike to Work Day, set for May 17, comes as San Francisco’s cycling network lies dormant in a court-imposed coma. The city isn’t allowed to make any physical improvements to promote safe bicycling until late next year at the earliest, more than two years after the injunction began. Yet that setback could be followed by the most rapid expansion of bike lanes in the city’s history.

At issue is the San Francisco Bicycle Plan and its stated goal of making "bicycling an integral part of daily life in San Francisco." City resident Rob Anderson and attorney Mary Miles don’t share that goal — particularly when it translates to taking lanes and parking spaces from cars — and they challenged the plan in court last year after it won unanimous approval from the Board of Supervisors and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Ironically, this environmentally benign mode of transportation was attacked under the state’s landmark California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires detailed studies of projects that might have impacts on the environment and measures that can be taken to offset those impacts.

City officials and bike advocates were shocked last June when Judge James Warren — in his final ruling before his retirement — issued a sweeping injunction against bike projects in the city, which was upheld and reinforced when Judge Peter Busch heard the case in September.

The judges found that city officials had taken an impermissible shortcut around CEQA by claiming the bike plan was exempt from its strictures. As the plan was being developed, some bike advocates and city officials had called for more resources to be put into doing the detailed studies CEQA calls for, and that’s what now appears to be happening.

"The good thing about the lawsuit is it is forcing the city to do the traffic analysis that it should have done with the bike plan and it reveals the absurdity of our interpretation of environmental laws," Dave Snyder, the former executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), who is now a planner with the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, told the Guardian.

Now city planners and consultants are preparing environmental impact reports (EIRs) on up to 60 proposed bike projects in the city, which will be queued up and ready to begin once the bike plan is approved. "The projects can be approved all at once," Snyder said.

At least, that’s what could happen if the city’s political leaders don’t lose their will to create a more bicycle-friendly city.

Oddly enough, it was the vague, feel-good nature of the plan that created all the problems.

Cities are required to have a bike plan, updated every five years, to qualify for certain state funding. San Francisco did its first plan in 1997, and in 2001 transportation officials and bike advocates set out to develop an updated version.

From the beginning, there were divisions between those who wanted to focus on completing the bike network with ready-to-go projects and those who wanted a more comprehensive and innovative plan laying out policies for education, enforcement, safety, new traffic models, integration with public transit, and everything else associated with cycling.

Responsibility for developing the plan was shared by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the San Francisco Planning Department, and the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic, with significant input from the city’s Bicycle Advisory Committee, the SFBC, and other groups. For reasons of expediency, the decision was made to focus on a relatively vague plan, one that made all sorts of high-minded statements and offered lofty goals.

The plan was presented as an effort to radically transform the roadways to make bicycling a more attractive option, but it didn’t include the detailed transportation analysis needed to support that effort — nor did it draw any conclusions about which car spaces to give over to bikes.

"The plan makes no decisions…. The plan has no measurable objectives anywhere in it," Snyder said, noting that the vague nature of the final product was the reason it was so uncontroversial. "Anytime anything passes unanimously, you know you didn’t ask for enough."

Andy Thornley was chair of the Bicycle Advisory Committee when work on the plan got under way and now serves as program director for the SFBC, which was heavily involved on outreach for the plan. SFBC officials were shocked by the injunction but said the city should have devoted more resources to the project.

"It was a logical outcome to the city’s undercommitment to the bike plan," Thornley said of the lawsuit. "There wasn’t the commitment from the mayor on down to doing this right."

"We had discussions about what it means that the plan doesn’t have any benchmarks," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the SFBC and a member of the MTA board. Sure, it had the goal of having 10 percent of all vehicle trips be by bicycle by the year 2010. "Only later did we realize that the 100 pages behind it didn’t support that goal."

MTA public affairs managers wouldn’t allow the Guardian to speak directly to Oliver Gajda, the main staffer on the bike plan then and now. They required questions in writing and answered the one about lack of city support for the initial plan by writing that "the court’s decision was not based on resource issues."

Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard, also resisted admitting that the city did anything wrong, responding in writing to a written question by saying, "Actually, the City moved forward drafting and implementing this bike plan quite ambitiously, even though there was a risk it would be challenged in court."

Yet it was clear to all involved that doing the traffic analysis and other work would have headed off the injunction.

"Dave Snyder was always an advocate that the bike plan should be a bike plan and lay out what we’ll see for bicyclists," Tom Radulovich, executive director of Livable City, told the Guardian. "But the decision was made to do a bike plan in the abstract, not laying out specific routes."

Nonetheless, bike advocates say they’re happy with the commitment that city officials are now showing. "Now we’re clearly and unequivocally doing a bike plan," Radulovich said. "To some degree, the city has had to commit itself."

Bevan Dufty, chair of the Transportation Authority’s Plans and Programs Committee, has been demanding that bureaucrats report to him regularly to show progress on the plan.

"I think the fact that we’re seeing them regularly trotted out before the committee is a good thing, because it makes them hit their benchmarks," he told us.

Dufty also overcame the MTA’s restrictive approach to public relations and facilitated our interview with Peter Albert, who took on the job of deputy director of planning for the MTA 10 months ago.

"Right now we’re just looking to do the environmental review to clear the bike plan," Albert told us.

He said that staff and consultants are now going through 60 proposed projects to determine what their environmental studies will entail. Later this month that work will be presented during a scoping meeting, at which planners and advocates will decide whether some of the more complex projects will be eliminated from the plan.

"Our goal is to make sure this is as solid an environmental review as possible. We don’t want to deal with any more legal issues," Albert said. "I feel right now there is a huge will to have this done correctly."

Yet advocates have a slightly different view of that political will, particularly given the projection of completed EIRs by July 2008, followed by the approval process, and maybe more court fights.

"We’re not crazy about the timing, but the scope is good. We’ve moved to projects that we’re planning to do," Thornley said. "So, in a backwards way, the commitment has come to the plan from the gun of the injunction."

"But we have real concerns about the timeline and scope getting shrunk," Shahum said. "Our fear is that we’ll go from 60 projects down to 16."

That’s because the plan will now look at the physical changes to roadways that are bound to get controversial once neighborhood groups grapple with the idea of losing traffic lanes or parking spaces.

"You’ve got a lot of people who are afraid of NIMBY opposition, and that goes from the mayor and the supervisors to the bureaucrats working on the plan," Shahum said. She added that the political leadership of San Francisco is more supportive of bicycling than it’s ever been, "but you still have to work really hard for them to do the right thing in the end."

"Why did it take four years to get the Valencia Street bike lanes?" she asked, noting that the project has proved to be an unqualified success.

"They changed Valencia Street, and nothing [bad] happened, so that opened them up a little," Radulovich said of city officials. But only a little. "There is still a certain ad hoc quality to what they’re doing, rather than being standards-based in how streets are designed."

City policy regarding bike projects — which the Planning Commission will revisit this summer when it considers changes to how it interprets traffic level-of-service (LOS) impacts under CEQA — is that anything that slows car traffic is considered a significant environmental impact that requires extensive study and mitigation.

"It’s imperative for them to fix the way they do CEQA," Radulovich said. "LOS reform would help us in future projects."

Radulovich said that most California cities were built with a focus on automobiles before CEQA was even approved. Yet the law now requires expensive and time-consuming studies before those spaces can be converted to use by public transit, bicycles, or pedestrians.

"That’s why, in some ways, CEQA has become an impediment to making us environmentally sustainable," Radulovich said. "It’s turned into a tool that slows down the taking of spaces back from cars."

While the detailed EIR work is being done, Albert and others say the city is still committed to doing bicycling planning work, applying for grants, and making sure San Francisco can move forward quickly once the injunction is lifted. "We’ve been set back, but we’re not stopped," he told us.

"The current injunction is frustrating because we want to be moving forward with bike improvements each month. While we cannot make physical changes such as bike lanes and bike racks, planning and design are continuing," Ballard said, also noting that the Mayor’s Office is doing regular conference calls to ensure the bike plan moves forward quickly.

"I and the bike advocates are pushing to use this time to do the planning work so we’re ready to go once we have an approved plan," said Sup. Chris Daly, the only regular cyclist on the Board of Supervisors. Once the injunction is lifted, he said, "You will have the most rapid striping of bike lanes in the history of the city." *

Not Coachillin’

May 8, 2007

SONIC REDUCER “I can’t believe you slept through the police helicopter above the tent at 3 a.m. and the megaphone going, ‘Disperse immediately or you’ll all be arrested,'” tentmate Fluffy marveled the day after another ear-busting night of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s unofficial after-party scene in the campgrounds. It was only 8 a.m., though the sun was already beating down relentlessly like our heedless neighborhood drum circle.

I’ve snoozed through my share of lousy plays, bad bands, and crappy circuses, but I never thought I’d slumber through the 24-7 thrills at the Empire Polo Fields. And the chopper was just the chaser to April 28 trance headliner Tiesto, who began his loud set, pompously booming out over our not-so-fair tent city of spring breakers and Euro tourists, with “In the beginning there was the earth….”

We’re gonna have to sleep through the history of the planet, was my last thought as I drifted off.

O Coachella, don’t you cry for me, ’cause I’ve come from Alabama Street with a heat rash on my knee — and doubts about making the scene at the festival despite the fact that about 160,000 brave music fans were expected to face down the desert swelter as the event swelled to three days.

At this juncture, Coachella might be described as a music festival on steroids: it’s a carnival for 18 and overs with rides, art installations, dancers, and completely insane people wearing full-body chicken costumes in the 110-degree heat, though still boasting a comprehensive bill of today’s so-called hot bands. It’s your one-stop smorgasbord for music lovers, who will happily chat you up about the performer they deemed the most mind-blowing the previous night or the last Rage Against the Machine show they caught.

And they got what they came for: the Björk shroom headdress; the crazed buzz rising from such festival circuiteers as Amy Winehouse and Klaxons; solid pop from Jarvis Cocker and Peter Bjorn and John; show-stopping performances by DJ Shadow, CSS, Arcade Fire, and Konono No. 1; and the rattle of reunion bones by an amped and antic Rage Against the Machine, glowering and balding Jesus and Mary Chain, and, er, Crowded House. You couldn’t go amiss if you stuck to the desert to-do’s rave roots and entrenched yourself beneath the mirror ball, video screens, and pink and blue lights of the Sahara tent: the performances there by Justice and LCD Soundsystem connected with the crowd with a screw-it-all exuberance.

But the untold story lay far away from the press tent and Palm Springs love nests — in the crowded, brutal heat of the campgrounds next to the performance area. Is it possible to review a camping trip? In what seemed like a dusty, straw-strewn football field with thousands of other wake ‘n’ bakers? I spent far too much time taking refuge from the nonstop heat at the campground’s cybercafé, where hundreds of shirtless boys and bikinied girls would miserably crouch, recharging their cells at a bank of outlets, sit stunned watching the Coachella film on a loop, or lie on the ground like clammy, comatose dead fish, waiting out the morning before the acts began in early afternoon.

The southerly discomfort led most campers on a lengthy hike from the tent city, past the obscenely grassy country clubs surrounding the polo grounds, to find refrigerated refuge and 40s at Ralph’s, the nearest supermarket, where people were literally chillin’ on store lawn furniture. Coachella: the fest that inspired global warming — and a post–<\d>Earth Day longing for air-con.

Organizers Golden Voice had a clue: they gave away free water sporadically and provided campers with free Internet use and showers. But there were too few laptops, the wi-fi was too erratic, and the showers were locked down too early — and you knew there was too little shade in general when audience members broiled in the sparse shadows of lemonade stands.

The crowd — weighted with Rage Against the Machine fans eager to see the band’s first concert in more than five years — was also heavy on the testosterone. But maybe that’s just the state of Rage love: the band never really seemed too underground to me but has historically worked to surface activist subversion via modern rock radio. And their audience was still boiling — and amazingly good-natured despite the sleepless nights. As for myself, I finally woke up hours after the helicopter early April 29 to the sound of a random dude shouting, “Whoo!” and yammering loudly in Portuguese to the tentizens the next flap over. Later I was tempted to put my own spin on Zack de la Rocha’s onstage suggestion that Bush and Cheney be “tried for war crimes and shot.” I know the 12-hour roller coaster ride of quality hallucinogens can be a bitch — but then, so can I: is it so wrong to want the early morning shouters and the dude with the air horn to be tried for crimes against humanity’s sleep schedule and shot? I’d settle for finding out where they were dozing it off and delivering a special whoo-gram of my own.

BOB DYLAN STUDIED HERE That’s the rumor, anyway, at the Blue Bear School of Music, which has seen Tracy Chapman and more than 20,000 other musicians come through its doors in the past 36 years. Executive director Kevin Marlatt told me the nonprofit’s second annual fundraiser — showcasing 2007 Grammy Lifetime Achievement winner Booker T. Jones as well as Blue Bear staffer Bonnie Hayes and Sista Monica — will include an appearance by the James Lick Middle School Band, the result of the organization’s efforts in the last year to get more involved in public school music education. Since it took over the James Lick music program and brought in 30 guitars, he says, more than a dozen bands have popped up at just that school. So Stax around for a good cause. *

BOOKER T. JONES

Sat/12, 8 p.m., $45–$125

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.bluebearmusic.org

Disorientation

May 8, 2007

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The closest chicken fried steak to my shack is at the Route 1 Diner in Valley Ford. You probably know it, if you’ve ever been to Bodega Bay. And if not, what the fuck? The Sonoma coast has the prettiest beaches in the world. Surfers don’t like it because they get eaten by sharks, but, other than that …

Anyway, I’m not a beach reviewer.

Two chickens, like I said. That’s all the chickens I have left is two chickens. One lays eggs, and the other one eats them. Or: tough times for a chicken farmer. Oldest trick in the book is to suck the egg out of an egg, then fill it up with Tabasco sauce and put it back in the nest.

But I treat my chickens with a little more respect, I like to think, than most backyard farmers. Instead of Tabasco sauce, I’m whipping up a little roux — butter and flour — then adding onions, fresh jalapeños, tomatoes, and hot sausage. Season to taste, and this way if the oldest trick in the book doesn’t trick her out of the nasty habit, she’ll practically already be jambalaya.

One way or another, I’ll be eating lunch again in no time, by my calculations. But right now I’m still eating breakfast because it’s only 10:30. And I’m all-the-way out of money, so I have to put it on the card, but there’s a $10 minimum, so I have to have coffee too, even though I’m already overcaffeinated, and therefore I can’t stop writing on napkins.

Guess what. Now that I ain’t getting any at home, I can order eggs in restaurants again! Chicken fried steak and eggs ($8.75). Route 1 Diner, Valley Ford, on the way to Bodega Bay — for you. For me, it’s on the way to the city and back.

The eggs are not as fresh or as free-rangy as I’m accustomed to, but the chicken fried is great. Big, thick slab of cubed steak in a nice, crispy breading, draped over a mound of hash browns and just drowned in gravy.

Speaking of which (gravy), Satchel Paige the pitcher was here with his little Thai fambly, and his big American fambly threw a little picnic party for him recently. In Sacramento! So even though I didn’t get to ground out weakly to second against him, or eat no all-you-can-eat sushi with him, or laugh at his little tiny daughter for almost choking to death on cantaloupe instead of chicken bones, I did get to see my old big old friend, and hug him and stuff. And talk about how good the chicken wings were, just like in the good old days.

Except this time I was in Sacramento, which can be very disorienting. Warmth. Mosquitoes. Fireworks. A keg. And when I got back to the Bay Area, you’re not going to believe this, but I swear to you there was a small, compact car on fire at the MacArthur Maze, on the ramp from West 80 to South 880. Couple fire trucks, police, flares, one lane open, and traffic slowed some but not too bad because it was one in the morning, or at any rate after midnight.

Went to sleep in West Oakland, and by the time I woke up, in West Oakland, the media had blown the whole thing entirely out of proportion. Other people had to have seen this. Right? I swear, it was an old Pinto, slapped on the ass, or something. No big deal, a little campfire fire, they were roasting hot dogs and marshmallows.

And by four in the morning it wasn’t a Pinto anymore, it was an oil tanker, spun out and exploded. And the freeway had melted and collapsed and the MacArthur Maze as we know it was no more, snarling traffic all day, affecting the travel plans of generations to come and just generally ruining everything.

You’da thunk I’d have heard something like that right outside my window. Big rig goes boom, couple football fields of freeway crashing down, sirens, states of emergency, and so on. Yeah, right.

My point being: damn, those were some damn good chicken wings! Eh, Satch? To knock me out that hard. I must of ate about a bucket of them myself. And if I knew the name of the Sacto deli that battered and fried and buttered and hot-sauced them, I’d review it.

But I don’t, so … *

ROUTE 1 DINER

Mon. and Wed., 6:30 a.m.–7 p.m.; Thurs.–Sat., 6:30 a.m.–7 p.m.; Sun., 6:30 a.m.–5 p.m.

14450 Route 1, Valley Ford

(707) 876-9600

Takeout available

No alcohol

MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Crawling through Coachella, chapter 1

May 2, 2007

Yep, this was the year I finally stopped pooh-poohing, scoffing, scorning, and smugly hrumphing in the delightful cool of the Bay Area and caught the traffic jam heading from LA to Indio for Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, expanded to three days for the first time. Of course, lucky me, I also got to make the traffic snarl from the freeway exit to the parking lot entrance, and then the teeming mass from the entrance to the ticket taker…you get the picture.

Spidey 3: Hazy days, much music, as Michael Christina’s three-legged I.T. overlooks it all. Photos by Charles Russo.

Way too much going on in that headdress, dancing queen: a member of Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque.

Was it worth the cross-stage cacophony, exploding shampoo bottles, the tent city filled with philosophical quasi-frat boys and random ravers that go bump and then, “WHOOO!” at 5 in the morning? You tell me. My brain underwent a major meltdown. Here’s a free-associatin’ “review”-slash-overview of the Coachella, to be continued with more wonderful photos by Guardian contributor Charles Russo. And gripes — err, I mean, critiques — from yours truly.

Zacky, can you hear me? No, ’cause the Lemonheads are threatening to drown the main stage out.

Everyone was obviously there for the Rage Against the Machine reunion, a first since the band went dormant about seven years ago – which explains the major bro-down going on everywhere you looked. The final headliner on the last night, Sunday, April 29, of the three-day fest, they were definitely doing their best to power past the hype and bring the rock with such modern rock staples as “Killing in the Name” and “Bulls on Parade.” The scruffily bearded Zack de la Rocha bounded about, blissfully ignorant of the hordes heading toward the exit, hoping to get a jump on the truly terrifying traffic tangle expected on the way back to LA.

Killing in the name of guitar hero Tom Morello.

“My mind has been completely blown!” raved one woman at the campground’s Cybercafe after Bjork, who gave everyone a good preview of her new album, Volta, backed by a womanly chorus and band in brightly hued new wave, Polyphonic Spree-goes-to-the-Acropolis Grecian gowns. Brass, strings, vibes, Lemur, the works – and some inspiring costume changes from the Bjorkly one.

One thing we can count on: Bjork pushing the fashion envelope; here, she channels a voodoo priestess June Allyson.

Another artist that got the buzz around the polo grounds and tent city was the Bay’s own DJ Shadow. As we melted in our Tevas, we overheard kids talking up Shadow, who headlined the second largest stage the opening night, Friday, April 27. Sounded tops. Shadow would helpfully step up to the mic to remind everyone that all the tracks that night were his own – if they weren’t recognizable they were brand spankin’. Color splashed videos flickered overheard on a massive screen as Keak groused about those freaks.

Shadow wonders if the audience would take it the wrong way if he blurted, “Talk to the finger.”

The Roots sounded tight, hitting it hard midday Sunday. We wandered away midway through a Tarantino-esque

“Can we take quirkily punctuated names to a nutty new level?” the Roots ponder.

I do love me some Jarvis Cocker. Guess I just have a weakness for snide, brainy Brits who like to chatter on about imaginary rain storms and apologize – sorta – for their tardiness on stage. Pulling feel-good tracks from his new solo album, Jarvis, the forgotten son of Joe Cocker (not!) let the healing begin with “Fat Children” and “Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time.” Too bad we couldn’t get a little of that fabled Anglo rainy-day action, he hinted, introducing “Heavy Weather.”

Jarvis, don’t let your fresh witticisms grow up to be dried-up curds of embittered alcholism.

Locals only?

April 24, 2007

BOOK REVIEW Not for Tourists Guidebooks has just released the fourth edition of its Not for Tourists Guide to San Francisco. Besides having a mad grip of inaccuracies, the title is problematic: this tome is definitely not not for tourists.

The first thing I found wrong with the book was its only foldout map. It’s a highway map, which is weird, since most city dwellers tend to stay clear of the damn things. They’re for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and, uh, the tourists. And the map isn’t even detailed enough for you to see where on- and off-ramps are or tell which is which. And with San Francisco’s grand total of four highways, it’s hard to imagine why the NFT folks didn’t devote their largest page to a Muni map – just one of many things this book doesn’t have.

In all fairness, Muni routes are included in the 120 minimaps that comprise most of the book. But the layout is incredibly daunting! To follow one bus route, you might have to flip back and forth 20 times to see where the line will take you – shit most locals just don’t have friggin’ time for. I became further discouraged by the decision to devote pages to Ghirardelli Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Pier 39. (If not for tourists, for whom?) But despite this and despite noticing an ad for Segway Tours of the Marina Green (insert sound of me retching here), I still gave the rest of the guide a whirl, determined to get some practical use out of it.

I attempted to find a liquor store when I was trapped in SoMa without rolling papers – only to discover the intersection I was at, Fourth Street and Mission, was on the corner of three maps. The bar I was in (my favorite) was nowhere to be found. I was in minimap limbo. Next I tried to wax nostalgic with the maps of neighborhoods where I used to live – only to discover that some bars listed on the neighborhood directories weren’t dotted on the maps.

So I tried using the guide to call my neighborhood grocery store, Eight-Twenty-Eight Irving Market, to see if it carried printer paper. Apparently, it falls somewhere between liquor store and supermarket, because it’s not in the book. (BTW: it carries college rule but not printer paper.) Finally, I called the Hotel Utah – only to lose an eardrum when that killer "bee-doo-eet!" sound alerted me to the fact that the number listed in the guide was disconnected.

Maybe, maybe buy the Not for Tourists Guide for first-year college students or other new SF transplants. But if you’ve been here for longer than six months, just hang on to your Muni map and your BART schedule and save the $14.95 (suggested retail) for 411 charges.

www.notfortourists.com

FIREWORKS, TEENAGE GIRLS AND AN SFPD PATROL CAR: Former cop caught in alleged corruption snafu

April 18, 2007

By G.W. Schulz

Chronicle gossip sluts Matier & Ross caught up with an interesting scoop today involving a guy who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. His name is Arkady Zlobinsky. That’s him below in a photo the Chron ran, which kinda looks more like a Glamour Shot stolen from a bargain-bin picture frame than a staff-produced image.

Former SFPD cop Arkady Zlobinsky from, uh,
a series of Glamour Shots the Chronicle lined up?

Anyway, a while back, we reminded you of a short-lived feature we’d launched last year called “Cops Behaving Badly,” which was supposed to be a regular summary of the more disturbing and/or hilarious police disciplinary cases arriving at the San Francisco Police Commission for review, details of which we could obtain as public records from the commission’s secretary, a nice guy named Sgt. Joe Reilly.

Well, the series started off as loads of fun. There was the cop who got busted with pot in Lake Tahoe. There was the domestic-violence investigator who drunkenly crashed into a parked SUV in Marin County while off the clock. There was the lieutenant who was allegedly pulled over at different spots throughout the city three times while off duty in a string of civilian automobiles, twice with a golf towel curiously wrapped over his license plate.

He claimed to sometimes play golf late at night in the park, and the towel must have miraculously got caught in his trunk. All a big misunderstanding, but after apparently letting him go a few times, officers finally reported the incidents and the chief was forced to charge him with being uncooperative by refusing to turn over his license and trying to intimidate the officers who’d pulled him over. That was the same lieutenant who was arrested in 1983 for soliciting an act of prostitution.

Meeting acute

April 18, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the only voices raised on behalf of understanding Timothy McVeigh — that is, as someone slightly more complicated than a Hollywood-style incarnation of pure evil — was that of Gore Vidal. Vidal insisted on pointing to the obvious: the bombing of offices that included the local headquarters of the FBI and the ATF — although utterly cruel and misguided in leading to 168 deaths — was not arbitrary wickedness but a carefully considered act of revenge. As Vidal put it in his article on McVeigh for Vanity Fair, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City "was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas."

McVeigh — a decorated military hero of the Gulf War, as it turned out — had counterattacked a government he claimed was waging war against the American people. In this opinion, McVeigh, who insisted he had no accomplices, was not alone. He represented a growing libertarian movement afoot in the American heartland. Moreover, as Vidal, a critic from the left of federal tyranny, pointed out in a 1998 piece for Vanity Fair, "Shredding the Bill of Rights," the government had violated Posse Comitatus in laying its siege of the Branch Davidians.

For Vidal’s attention to the matter, McVeigh began a correspondence with him, even inviting the writer to attend his execution — an invitation Vidal declined. This immediately sounds like a fascinating, even dramatic dialogue. But stageworthy? Edmund White’s two-hander, Terre Haute, shrewdly ups the ante a bit, imagining an actual date between Vidal and McVeigh — respectively cast as the lightly fictionalized writer James Brevoord (a fine John Hutchinson) and the transparently McVeigh-like terrorist Harrison (a fiercely magnetic Elias Escobedo, who even bears a strong physical resemblance to the original). They encounter each other in the flesh in a series of brief meetings across a plastic security screen in the maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Ind., during the days preceding Harrison’s execution.

On death row Harrison has had time to think over his actions. Neighbor Ted Kaczynski, we learn, has suggested he would have done better to blow the building up at night, when it was empty of innocents. But Harrison remains unrepentant, even if we see the burden of responsibility close over him when the lives of innocent "collaterals," particularly the children at the day care center, get mentioned. Brevoord — who is there to write on the meaning of Harrison’s act and to boldly ask the whys so studiously erased in the media — sympathizes with Harrison’s anti-imperialism while provoking the younger man with mounting scorn for his embrace of feeble right-wing conspiracy theories.

Besides a political tête-à-tête, the meeting is the occasion for a clash of personalities, temperaments, and backgrounds, all of which White brings out starkly in the dialogue: Brevoord, for instance, is the kind of man who has no trouble using kerfuffle in an idle sentence, although an indeed is more than enough to throw Harrison for a loop. The tension here is often lightly comical, but the point about education, intellect, and political opposition (and the art of the interviewer) is well made. And if the script feels overly expositional at times, the actors offer strong and credible performances throughout.

The New Conservatory Theatre Center’s US premiere is a sharp and intimate production, staged by director Christopher Jenkins with intelligent assurance, including a concentration on character that garners moments of alternately subtle and electric intensity between two men negotiating an extraordinary situation. Yet the director can’t resist kitschy flourishes, introducing the McVeigh character, for instance, with a short piercing scream of sound and a light that illuminates Harrison standing like Hannibal Lecter behind the see-through wall of the visiting cell. Scenic designer Bruce Walters’s visiting room, meanwhile, is a simple but convincingly dire arrangement of wire-woven Plexiglas walls, yellow-taped borders, and blinking security cameras.

White draws the facts of the case, as well as the style and argument from Vidal’s relevant essays, into well-crafted if sometimes information-laden dialogue. It can be too clashing and unnecessarily confrontational, but it is generally graceful and filled with absorbing ideas, especially in the monologues given to the Vidal character. Unfortunately, the play gets distracted from the meat of its story. That tale not only sports an intriguing tension between two very different sorts of rebels but is politically urgent and deep, ranging from the correct response to a truly totalitarian encroachment on fundamental liberties to the dissolving relation between cause and effect in a culture dominated by mind-numbingly interchangeable images of good and evil.

Instead, the play ends up veering off into carnal considerations of repressed desires, a layer to the characters’ relationship that was probably best left hinted at. The best you might say about it is that it further humanizes a figure too quickly passed off as a cartoon rather than a riddle that needs solving. But in practice it tends to trivialize what’s gone before, inevitably mixing an unhelpful pinch of Freud into the media-repressed why of a terrible public act. *

TERRE HAUTE

Through May 6

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; $22–$40

New Conservatory Theatre Center

25 Van Ness, SF

(415) 861-8972

www.nctcsf.org

Love machine

-

April 17, 2007
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW To look at the formally austere self-portraits made by the American artist Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) at various points throughout his career, you might surmise, from the repeated images of his stiff, unsmiling visage, that he toiled in obscurity for dry, dusty decades as an administrative underling at a low-level law firm, forever obsessed with organizing his paper clips, pausing from his tedious task only long enough to clean his spectacles on a crisply starched pocket handkerchief and tie the laces of his uncomfortable shoes, polished deep black the previous evening while listening to news of the Lindbergh kidnapping on his wooden Philco tube radio. As the crotchety stepfather of modernism, Sheeler cultivated a stern yet slightly mewling look of quotidian routine, as if neither he nor any other mere individual should assume particular importance amid the daunting technological advancements of his era. Like all true-blue men of meager means in the early part of the 20th century, Sheeler was enthralled with industrial progress and glorified all things steel and chrome. If this clerk allowed himself one indulgence, it was basking in the cult of the machine.

If modernism taught us anything, however, it’s that appearances can — no, should — be deceiving. Hat, coat, and desk chair notwithstanding, Sheeler was no paper-pushing nine-to-fiver. Indeed (a word I imagine he uttered frequently, accompanied by a nearly imperceptible tilt of the head), this self-proclaimed precisionist was rather radical in behavior, artistic methodology, and aesthetic philosophizing — though always politely so. Working with deliberate pacing and patience as a filmmaker, photographer, and painter and alarmingly proficient at drawing and printmaking, Sheeler established a unique dichotomy between new and old, rendering the former as oddly antiquated and the latter as the cat’s pajamas. Fittingly, his remarkable body of work remains strikingly contemporary; thus the "Charles Sheeler: Across Media" exhibition, handsomely installed in the upper galleries of the appropriately angular de Young Museum, has not the aged patina of a haphazard retrospective begrudgingly granted to a doddering éminence grise of yesteryear but the luminous sheen of a classy chassis careening into J.G. Ballard’s Crash by way of the icy David Cronenberg adaptation. Sheeler is Vaughan, so turned on by cogs and shafts, bolts and pylons, that he becomes the ghost in his own machine.

Born in Philadelphia, Sheeler studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then booked passage for Paris, where he looked askance at Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s cubist conundrums before returning to the States, plonking down a fiver on a Brownie camera and taking up commercial photography with an emphasis on architecture.

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with photographer Paul Strand on Manhatta, a six-minute city-symphony film ostensibly based on portions of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass yet excising virtually all traces of the bearded bard’s insatiable lust for life in favor of abstractions formed by bridges, skyscrapers, and the sun setting over the Hudson River. Widely considered the first American avant-garde film, Manhatta screens repeatedly in the gallery and is surrounded by related photographs that further reveal Sheeler’s New York state of mind.

Sheeler soon settled in a rented farmhouse in Doylestown, Penn., with fellow artist Morton Shamberg, but it was the home’s 19th-century stove that Sheeler referred to as his "companion," so enamored was he of its utilitarian exactitude and sensuous shape. Comfortably ensconced in the farmhouse, Sheeler spent years deftly rendering his kitchen and bathroom in ink, paint, and the darkroom’s chemical bath.

Having gained a reputation as a fastidious exemplar of precisionism, Sheeler was hired by the Ford Motor Co. to photograph and make paintings of its factories. Soon after, Fortune magazine commissioned Sheeler to produce a half dozen paintings that "reflect life through forms and trace the firm pattern of the human mind." Naturally, Sheeler looked not to living things for inspiration but to objects simultaneously beautiful in their simplicity and threatening in their potential to destroy: waterwheel, railroad, airplane, dam, steam turbine, and hydroelectric turbine (he really loved turbines).

Among many other career and exhibition highlights are the iconic, ironic American Landscape, in which human-made structures — cylinders, silos, smokestacks — have entirely supplanted natural splendor (score one for culture); experimental photographs of the interior of an 18th-century Quaker fieldstone house; and the dazzling The Artist Looks at Nature, from 1943, in which Sheeler paints himself in the process of sketching his 1932 drawing Interior with Stove, which in turn was based on his much earlier photograph The Stove. In this singular work, Sheeler links various media in which he excelled, positions himself in a perfectly logical space-time continuum, and moves into the realm of the uncanny. For an artist who implicitly championed the places, products, and processes of capitalism and whose every invisible brushstroke stoked the fires of the first corporation generation, this tricky bit of derring-do signals a metarebellion against the industry under whose wheels Sheeler’s entire century would soon be crushed. It’s enough to make you fall in love with that old stove all over again. *

CHARLES SHEELER: ACROSS MEDIA

Through May 6

Tues.–Thurs. and Sat.–Sun., 9:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m.; Fri., 9:30 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

De Young Museum

Golden Gate Park

50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, SF

$6–$10 (free first Tuesday)

(415) 750-3614

www.thinker.org/deyoung
>

Bar wars

-

April 17, 2007
0

› news@sfbg.com

For the owners of the Hole in the Wall Saloon, the plan was simple: move their popular South of Market gay bar out of its dingy and dilapidated quarters to a much better spot around the corner. With numerous bars and nightclubs already along the stretch once known as the gay miracle mile, they assumed their place would fit right in.

But SoMa is changing — and the bar’s new neighbors in the increasingly residential district are using every regulatory trick in the book to block the move. Another bar, they say, is one too many.

The Hole in the Wall’s current location on Eighth Street frequently lives up to the place’s modest-sounding name. The plumbing stops up. The patched floor sags in places. And the bar tilts at an unnatural angle. Co-owners Joe Banks and John Gardiner, who are life as well as business partners, spent years seeking a new space for their eclectic, art-filled taproom. Last year they thought they had found an ideal spot a block and a half away on Folsom, between Dore and 10th streets.

At today’s prices, the building was a bargain — only $1.2 million. After making sure that the space, a former dance studio, was zoned to allow for a bar, Banks and Gardiner hired a local design-build firm to renovate the building. They hoped to open the new location by April 15, the bar’s 13th anniversary.

Now they just hope to open.

In early December project manager Jeff Matt was working on the build-out of the new space when a man named Jim Meko stopped by and asked him to give a letter to the owners. The letter, obtained by the Guardian, is on letterhead for the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force. The task force, which Meko chairs, is advising the Planning Department on a new zoning plan for South of Market.

The letter was a copy of a five-month-old missive Meko had addressed to the real estate agent representing the building’s sellers. It warns that if the property were sold to someone who wanted to open a bar, the buyers could face "obstacles" such as protests to the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and petitions to the Planning Commission.

Silvana Messing, the agent to whom the letter is addressed, told us she never received it. The agent representing Gardiner and Banks as buyers, who asked not to be identified by name, claims he didn’t see the letter either. But if he had gotten it before the sale, he said, "I probably would have advised [Gardiner and Banks] not to buy the place."

Meko, who lives around the corner from the Hole in the Wall’s new location, told us Banks and Gardiner "tend to live right on the edge of the law" as bar owners. He charged that the place used DJs without the proper entertainment permits and that there have been reports of drug dealing and nudity on the bar’s premises.

Gardiner admitted that he and Banks have employed DJs in the past but says they did not know that a DJ requires a special permit: "We thought an entertainment license was for places with live bands…. When we found out, we stopped it." Banks and Gardiner denied that drug dealing takes place at the bar. As for nudity, several Hole in the Wall regulars recalled a time in the mid-’90s when patrons occasionally drank in the buff, but they told us such behavior died down long ago.

Officer Rose Meyer, the San Francisco Police Department’s permit officer at Southern Station, gave the bar and its owners glowing reviews. Referring to Gardiner in particular, Meyer told us, "Southern Station would have no objection to him operating [at the new location]. I don’t foresee there being any problems."

"He has always been responsible" in the past, she said.

Meko claims the letter wasn’t meant to stir up opposition to the bar’s move. Instead, he said, he was simply trying to warn Gardiner and Banks about the simmering antinightlife attitude among SoMa residents. "It’s real precarious," Meko said. "Neighbors just rise up. They become real irrational…. They can go crazy."

When 10th Street resident Damien Ochoa received notice from the Planning Department about the new bar in early January, he didn’t rise up — at least at first. But given that his bedroom window is less than 50 feet from the bar’s back smoking area, he was concerned. As a result, he said by phone, he "started to do a little bit of research about the owners." In the course of his research, he got in touch with Meko.

Ochoa said Meko informed him that "they’re potentially not good neighbors." After a neighborhood meeting, Ochoa, Meko, and several other residents pitched in money to file a petition in Ochoa’s name asking the Planning Commission to look at the project under its power of discretionary review. Other neighbors lodged protests with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Within weeks all of Meko’s warnings to the real estate agent had come true.

As a result, work on the new bar is at a standstill. It cannot begin again until the protests work their way through hearings and appeals. It could be many months until the outcome is decided. Banks and Gardiner say they have staked their financial future on the new bar, with tens of thousands of dollars in construction loans set to come due before the end of the year. Without any income from the new location, they might not be able to stay afloat.

Banks told us the opposition to the bar’s move came as a complete surprise. The Hole in the Wall, he said, is "a place where everybody’s welcome. It’s a gay bar, but everybody’s welcome." To try to resolve the dispute, Banks and Gardiner hired Jeremy Paul, an experienced permit expediter, to shepherd the project through the regulatory process and to negotiate with Meko and the neighbors. The two sides are currently in talks about enclosing the back smoking area, a change that could cost more than $100,000. Paul expressed guarded optimism that the project will eventually go forward, but he told us the rancor over the new saloon is an example of "the identity crisis" San Francisco is going through.

"The Hole in the Wall relocation is a case study in how dysfunctional this system is," Paul said. Zoning in the area allows for a bar, he said, "and if these people don’t want to live in a bar district, they should check the zoning where they’re buying a house or renting an apartment" before moving there.

Paul added that if the residents are dead set against any new bars on their block, they should work to change the zoning.

The task force Meko chairs is at work on a new zoning plan for the area, which it will eventually present to the Planning Department. Some nightlife supporters worry that the goal may be a more residential neighborhood with no room for more bars.

Meko and Ochoa strongly deny that Meko is behind the residents’ actions. "I’m a neighbor," Meko told us, claiming that he is simply working with other neighbors to prevent the noise, smoke, and litter that could accompany the bar. As for the task force’s work, Meko said he is actually trying to bring more nightlife into SoMa, but only in appropriate areas with adequate "buffers" for the residents.

"I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life trying to broker peace between" bar owners and neighbors, he asserted. He noted that the Entertainment Commission, on which he also sits, is working to clarify permit rules for clubs and bars.

John Wood, a member of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition, said the neighbors "have reasonable concerns" about the new bar but those concerns "are being overblown." Wood noted that the bar is only rated for 49 patrons at a time and that by agreeing to soundproof the building and possibly enclose the back patio, the owners have been very accommodating. "Even nightclubs don’t go through those kinds of measures," he said.

Banks told us he and Gardiner desperately want to resolve the situation. "We’re willing to do anything within our financial means," he said. "We want to save it. The Hole in the Wall is our baby." *

Rev up the presses! Judge Illston rules in favor of a Guardian motion to open all the Hearst/Singleton records during and after the Reilly antitrust trial

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April 12, 2007
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann (scroll down for the publishers’ briefs and monopoly news you will see nowhere else)

There’s bad news and good news today. The bad news is that Federal Judge Susan Illston ruled today
April l2 that the Hearst/Singleton documents of secrecy and stonewalling remain under seal in the Reilly antitrust trial. She adopted the proposals for sealing as put forth by the Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens attorneys.

The good news is that Illston was clearly exasperated with the publishers’ continuing demands for sealing records and stated that “during and after the trial” the public will have a “highly compelling interest in access to all evidence presented by the parties.” She concluded her one paragraph order by saying that “the instant sealing orders will therefore have no effect on the sealing of any evidence presented at trial.”

Attorney James Wheaton of the First Amendment Project in Oakland had earlier won a ruling from Illston to unseal the Hearst/Singleton court records, but allowed the publishers to seal a new batch of records during a later filing. Wheaton asked for a review and argued that Illston “should apply the more stringent standard applicable to dispositive motions” and that the court “should not seal a record submitted with a dispositive motion unless defendants have made the required showing of ‘compelling reasons’ and a balancing of ‘all relevant factors’ to justify sealing.” A dispositive motion is one directed toward or effecting dispositon of a case.

Illston responded to Wheaton’s appeal with today’s order that would unseal the Reilly trial documents and in effect open up the publishers’ monopoly moves to lock up the press of the Bay Area and much of California to an unprecedented examination by the staffs of the chain papers, the rest of the press, and the public.

Wheaton is representing the Guardian and the Media Alliance in this action. See my previous “Stop the presses” blog for more information on the secrecy and stonewalling battle and copies of the publishers’ filings asking for the lastest batch to be sealed. See Illston’s unsealing decision below and Wheaton’s appeal in my previous blog. The Guardian will put up all records during and after the trial on its website at sfbg.com.

Professional note to Reilly and his attorneys Joe Alioto and Dan Shulman: make sure you get all the relevant monopolizing documents of the nation’s biggest chains into the trial so that the Bay Area, and the rest of the world, can see how it is done and how monopolies censor and mangle the coverage of their own monopoly moves. This is one of the big Censored Stories of our time. And it is indeed chilling to watch these events unfold.

Repeating the key question: why is it that a reader and an intervening alternative newspaper have to do the job of the California Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney’s office? Antitrust? What’s antitrust these days? B3

Click here to view Judge Illston’s order to unseal

Stop the presses! Here come the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration from the nation’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, Gannett, Stephens) Why people get mad at the media (l4)

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April 11, 2007
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

As expected, Federal Judge Susan Illston ruled on Tuesday April l0 that Clint Reilly can go to trial in his antitrust suit opposing the Hearst/Singleton deal to monopolize the Bay Area newspaper market.

The San Francisco Daily, a free daily, played the story the way it ought to be played: on the front page, with a strong head, “Newspaper monopoly trial allowed, Bid to block it quashed,” and a good lead that said, “A federal judge yesterday cleared the way for an unprecedented jury trial to determine if the consolidation of newspapers in the Bay Area violated antitrust laws.”

The Chronicle and the Singleton papers continued to run the story as if it were a rummy little squabble between a lone angry reader and a big company out there somewhere, without any redeeming journalistic or public interest values.
But the Chronicle did move the story from its usual burial spot in the business section to a new burial spot: straddling the fold on page 4 of its Bay Area section with yet another Rip Van Winkle sleeper head, “Judge permits trial over newspaper deals.”

The story is even harder to find on the Chronicle’s website. When I checked about 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, It ranked 23rd on the list of Bay Area stories, behind Farley the cartoon strip, and behind such blazers as “Bay Bridge Labor Day closure may begin early” and “Rain, rain will go away–’til possibly Saturday” and “Out to pasture they go–3 police horses retire/Long in the tooth, these mounts head to Santa Rosa ranch” and “Muni breakdown creates delays.” However, it did rank ahead of “Miniature boats provide major fun.”

More: not only are the Galloping Conglomerati blacking out and mangling a major story involving their own papers,
but worse they are continuing to reverse their own historic free press and sunshine-in-the-courts positions. They are continuing to press the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration in federal court to cover their
moves to monopoly.

Alas, Illston allowed the publishers to keep their records sealed, and the Reilly responses sealed, in their latest filings on April 6, despite her earlier order to open the court records on the demand of the Guardian and the Media Alliance. (The Guardian is appealing her decision and will continue to press to open up the records and keep them open throughout the trial, which is scheduled to begin on April 30.)

Too bad. You can tell, just by glancing at the extensive list of Reilly declarations and records that the publishers want to keep under seal, that there is a lot of explosive stuff in the hopper. Meanwhile, the Riley case remains the only major impediment to the Hearst/Singleton deal. And I am getting the impression that Riley is building a strong case and that Hearst and Singleton are getting extremely nervous about the outcome. It’s going to be a helluva trial.

Check the publishers’ filings below for a preview of coming attractions and the lengths to which they will go behalf of court secrecy and stonewalling. Check also the move by the Guardian attorneys, the First Amendment Project in Oakland, to request Illston to review her sealing order. Most important, check Illston’s excellent, well-reasoned order denying summary judgment. She nails the Hearst/Singleton position on point after point. B3

1. Click here to view the declaration of Joseph J. Lodovic, president of MediaNews Group/Singleton

2. Click here to view the declaration of Daniel E. Ehrman J., vice president of planning and development of Gannett

3. Click here to view the proposed order to seal from the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst, MediaNews Group/Singleton, Stephens Group, Gannett, and California Newspapers partnership (B3: a business partnership of the papers)

4. Click here to view the proposed order to seal from the MediaNews Group/Singleton

5. Click here to view the letter from the Guardian and its First Amendment Project attorneys asking Judge Illston to review her decision allowing the publishers to seal documents

6. Click here to view the Illston order of April l0 denying the Hearst/Singleton motion for summary judgment and giving Clint Reilly standing to sue

Six ed

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April 10, 2007
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Conventional wisdom — chew before swallowing, hang on to your nine-to-five, the safety of the passengers depends on keeping conversation with the driver to a minimum — usually suffices eight days a week. But along march catastrophic events, and the rules fly out the window. Luckily, agile industry vets such as Six Degrees founders Bob Duskis and Pat Berry know how to respond to fate’s highs and lows. For instance, the label was universally warned not to release its Arabian Travels comp post–Sept. 11.

"Everybody told us, ‘You are crazy if you put this record out. People are going to be angry. Retailers aren’t going to carry it,’ " Duskis recalls at Six Degrees’ sizable Mission District office. "And we thought, you know, this is the perfect time to put this record out! More than ever people need things that transcend stereotypes — a positive representation of what comes from the Middle East." That, on top of evidence that Americans were suddenly ravenous for any information about a world they had once largely ignored, convinced them to go ahead. Turns out "it’s one of our best-selling compilations!" Duskis delivers the kicker, chuckling. "And we got a lot of mail from people of Middle Eastern descent who live in this country saying, ‘Thank you very much!’ Obviously, we feel like music is a great connector."

On the cusp of Six Degrees’ 10th anniversary celebration, sitting in a conference room atop some 20,000 CDs in the company’s downstairs warehouse with his 14-year-old hound Scout by his side, Duskis, 47, is feeling ever more optimistic about the future. On April 18 the label head will be joining the imprint’s Bombay Dub Orchestra, Jef Stott, and r:sphere of Zaman 8 on the steelers’ wheels — as he often does online via the label’s monthly radio show and occasionally does at one of many nights sponsored by Six Degrees at Supperclub, Madrone Lounge, and elsewhere. Part of the party: Backspin: A Six Degrees 10 Year Anniversary Project, which finds roster artists covering their faves (Karsh Kale takes a tabla to the Police’s "Spirits in the Material World").

Six Degrees has plenty to toast, while providing a lesson in indie survival techniques. After hitting it big with licensed bossa nova royalty Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo (2000) and subsequently downsizing amid the industry’s early ’00s doldrums, the imprint has been busily undertaking new projects, expected for a company that has always looked forward: a digital-only Emerging Artists series including Bay Area artists Stout and Zaman 8 as a way of breaking new performers with lower overhead, and a new partnership with Starbucks Entertainment to play and promote the debut by the silky-voiced, groove-obsessed, and cute-as-a-bug Brazilian singer-songwriter CeU, the first non-English-language artist to break into the chain’s Hear Music Debut series and find exposure to java junkies everywhere. "Hitting that consumer that’s outside the traditional pathways, which have been closed to us or just aren’t working anymore, it’s the kind of thing we need to do," Duskis explains. "All signs are pointing for this to be a big breakout."

Breaks and smarts have gotten Duskis and Berry this far: the two met at Palo Alto new age independent Windham Hill. Duskis had worked his way up to become the head of A&R; Berry, VP of sales and marketing. Both were united in their belief that the label should explore more global sounds, and they eventually departed to create Six Degrees under the umbrella of then-Polygram-owned Island at the behest of their genre-crossing hero Chris Blackwell, who asked the two to market the "weird stuff, all the nonpop stuff."

After Blackwell left, Duskis and Berry got out of Island with their masters in the nick of time before being entangled in yet another monstrous merger. With an infusion of venture capital, they relaunched the label as a true independent in ’98 before hitting it massive with Tanto Tempo. "From the start we treated it not like this was going to be some weird, little world-electronica record but as something for a wide range of people, from young club audiences and electronica fans to older people who had hit the first bossa nova wave to pop and Sade fans. Sure enough, it became the coffee-table world music record of that year," Duskis says. (Gilberto’s latest, Momento, comes out April 24).

The success of that album pegged Six Degrees as a world fusion label, but the founders always saw the imprint as more than that, releasing artists as varied as Michael Franti, Cheb i Sabbah, and the Real Tuesday Weld — more a global content provider with a highly eclectic palate and fingers dipped in digital distribution; podcasts; music blogs; and licensing to film, TV, and commercials before anyone else. "One thing I’d say we’ve never tried, as a label," Dukais quips, "is to be so hip it hurts." *

CEU

Fri/13, 9 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

SIX DEGREES’ 10TH ANNIVERSARY

April 18, 10 p.m., $10

Supperclub

657 Harrison, SF

(415) 348-0900

www.sixdegreesrecords.com

NO STOPPING HIM NOW

Gone are the days when Jeff Chang churned out columns for the Guardian, but my Hawaii bud can be excused for burying himself in books such as his award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and his compelling new volume, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic, $18.95). Total Chaos emerged from discussions on the future of demographics and aesthetics in the arts about three years ago and found Chang editing playwright Danny Hoch, artist Doze, and DJ Spooky, as well as essays on hip-hop and queerness. It’s a wide-angle take on hip-hop’s impact on the arts, triggering what Chang calls "crosscutting debates within the book." And without: "I’ve seen a review in the National Review complaining that there’s no center to this," Chang says on the road. "But hip-hop is about call-and-response. It’s not necessarily about people having a consensus." Expect a hot back-and-forth when Chang gathers Marcyliena Morgan of Stanford’s Hip-Hop Archive and contributors such as Adam Mansbach for a hip-hop aesthetics talk April 17 (and later on May 8).

TOTAL CHAOS HIP-HOP FORUM

Tues/17, 6:30 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.cantstopwontstop.com
>

No hidin’ SECA

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April 3, 2007
0

P>› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Each SECA Art Award exhibition, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s biennial and only official nod to Bay Area artists, is cause to revisit the curious, contested idea of place in contemporary art. In his introduction to the 2006 SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) Award catalog, SFMOMA director Neal Benezra describes the exhibition as a "lens focusing on the best that the San Francisco Bay Area has to offer." That’s a tough order that the curators, Janet Bishop and Tara McDowell, with input from the SECA group, bestowed on five artists, Sarah Cain, Kota Ezawa, Amy Franceschini, Mitzi Pederson, and Leslie Shows. Do they — should they — illuminate a sense of regionality, what critic Lucy Lippard dubs "a state of mind rather than a place on the map"?

Any way you enter the third floor of SFMOMA, you’re faced with SECA artists. From the stairs you’ll see large collage paintings by Shows, landscapes that appear chemically ravaged. Via the elevator, you immediately encounter Pederson’s 2005 sculpture of gray cinder-block fragments stacked like a low-slung house of cards. On the floor at the entry to the gallery proper, there’s Cain’s small pile of leaves painted black and subdued rainbow shades. These three artists share a similar practice of transforming humble materials into something almost magical and begin to articulate an aesthetic — or state of mind — that, to various degrees, is emphatically handmade and poetic. The inclusion of the more widely exhibited Ezawa, who makes computer-rendered, cartoonlike still and video images, and Franceschini, known for digital graphics and ecoconscious public projects, however, subverts the idea of a thematic thread.

The 2004 SECA exhibition focused on artists who worked primarily in drawing in very different ways, a strategy that gave the show a sense of structure and created a dialogue between works. The current group feels more fractured; the whole seems less than the sum of its parts.

Shows and Pederson complement each other most effectively. With extensive use of meticulously collaged printed matter and paint, Shows creates sweeping, epic images of landscapes that seem to have gone through geologic shifts and been layered with kaleidoscopic chemicals. The show also includes a new series of smaller, text-based works in which she’s carefully shredded texts, unlikely selections such as Edwin Abbott’s mathematical fantasy Flatland, and ripped pieces of canvas bookbinding, fusing them into ambiguous wholes.

Her muted, earthy color schemes merge well with Pederson’s cinder blocks, which are dusted with slate-colored glitter and resemble glam-rock geodes. Her other pieces, positioned near Cain’s, employ featherweight materials, such as wood veneer and fluttering strips of tinted cellophane, to explore physical tension and tentative presence — the work is emphatically fragile and deceptively offhand.

There’s an improvisatory feel to Cain’s work that doesn’t quite flower in this setting. She scores with a wonderful site-specific installation: a tree branch dynamically merges with the wall and architecture, using the floor, shadow, and abstract spray-paint squiggles. Titled We Push Ourselves into the Mountain Until We Explode into the Sky, the piece embraces its earthy-spiritual vibes but seems anything but hokey. Her framed paintings on paper, which also contain natural elements and metallic sequins and threads, are less consistently assured and sometimes overwrought. Next to the tree, these seem trapped under glass.

You could ascribe a similar feeling to the presentation of Franceschini’s off-site project to resurrect San Francisco’s official Victory Garden program of the 1940s. The piece makes real sense in food activist Northern California during wartime. The project also exemplifies a strain of socially based art that’s thriving in SF galleries and art schools. This sort of practice, however, unfolds in streets, gardens, and ephemeral interactions and consistently engenders the challenge to create effective gallery presentations. At SFMOMA, Franceschini presents historical civic documents, spiffy new charts, prototype gardening and seed bank gear, and a video of a planting party. While these communicate the gist of this vital idea, the display feels stranded here: it may have been better served with a component that unfolded more directly in the gallery or in an exhibition with contextualizing, like-minded projects.

Bringing an animated Colorforms effect to the notorious Pamela Anderson–Tommy Lee bootleg sex tape, Ezawa wisely expands his artistic purview. In earlier pieces, including the History of Photography Remix series, examples of which are seen here, iconic images and media events become broad, deadpan cartoons. Instant recognition of the material has been key. In his new double-screen piece, Two Stolen Honeymoons Are Better Than One, a well-known but less widely seen piece of media — the aforementioned home video — pushes Ezawa’s work into more ambiguous territory, that strange zone in which celebrities, albeit naked ones with supersize body parts, seem as banal as the rest of us. Doubled to two screens and tinted in divergent hues, the scenario enters the subconscious with the kind of off-color lens that just might be in the Bay Area atmosphere — or perhaps just in this artist’s eye. *

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION

Through April 22

Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org
>

Unanswered questions

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April 3, 2007
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

Bayview–Hunters Point resident Espanola Jackson says her phone rang off the hook after the San Francisco Chronicle printed her photo — but none of her concerns — under the headline "Residents Like Plan to Revitalize Area." It was part of the newspaper’s extensive coverage of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s plan to rebuild the community around a football stadium.

"People called to say, ‘You need to sue the Chronicle,’ " Jackson told the Guardian. Newsom wants to entrust Florida-based developer Lennar Corp. with cleaning up the five highly contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard parcels. Jackson finds this plan worrisome because, as the Guardian recently revealed ("The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07), Lennar was cited multiple times last year for failing to monitor and control dust and asbestos at Parcel A, the first and only piece of the shipyard that the Navy has released to the city as ready for development. Lennar is also being sued by three employees for allegations of racially charged whistle-blower retaliation in connection with the problems on Parcel A (see "Dust Still Settling," 3/28/07).

Beyond her problems with Lennar, Jackson worries that Newsom’s plan doesn’t account for climate change or the true cost of shipyard cleanup.

"Because of global warming, that entire area is going to be underwater," Jackson said. "And if Michael Cohen [of the Mayor’s Office of Base Reuse] and the rest of them are really interested in cleaning up the area, they should send a resolution to the Board of Supervisors requesting that Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Nancy Pelosi appropriate $5 billion, which is what it will really take to clean up the shipyard."

Jackson was also frustrated that neither the Hunters Point Shipyard Restoration Advisory Board, which is composed of local residents, tenants, and environmental and community groups, nor the regulators overseeing the cleanup have been consulted by the mayor in his haste to try to keep the 49ers in town by quickly building a new stadium.

Jackson, who bought a home in the Bayview 34 years ago, said residents want a thorough cleanup, not a rush job. That was what city residents said in November 2000 when they overwhelmingly approved Proposition P, demanding that no transfer of property take place "until the entire Shipyard is cleaned to residential standards."

"It’s a landfill, and it needs to be removed," Jackson said.

Yet Lennar, which won the contract to redevelop the shipyard, is in a worsening financial position to deal with unexpected challenges at the site. The company’s profits plummeted more than 70 percent in the first quarter of 2007 because of the slumping housing market. Jackson doesn’t believe the cleanup will cost $300 million, a figured touted by Cohen, but she questions where the cleanup money will come from.

"Only white folks will be able to afford the 8,900 housing units that Lennar is proposing to build near the stadium," Jackson said.

The Chronicle‘s overwhelmingly positive coverage of the mayor’s shipyard plan came shortly after Lennar Urban president Kofi Bonner wrote to the Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency claiming that articles in the Guardian and the Chronicle about Lennar’s asbestos and dust problems at the shipyard and the lawsuit by employees "are full of errors, inaccuracies and misinformation."

Asked what errors Bonner was referring to, Lennar spokesperson Sam Singer told the Guardian, "My main complaint is with the lawsuit, which contains numerous false allegations, and with the Chronicle‘s article, which called these employees ‘executives.’ " Lennar has not requested any corrections of Guardian articles.

Asked about the lawsuit’s claim that Bonner sat by and allowed the alleged discrimination to happen, Singer told us, "Kofi is one of the leading African American executives in the nation." Neither Bonner nor Lennar vice president Paul Menaker, who are both named in the whistle-blower suit, returned the Guardian‘s calls as of press time.

Attorney Angela Alioto, who represents the three African American Lennar employees suing the company, told the Guardian that Singer’s defense of Bonner is "racist."

"Just because Kofi is African American means he couldn’t discriminate?" Alioto asked.

Equally disturbing is the Mayor’s Office’s reliance on Lennar for accurate information about the developer’s performance at the shipyard. When the Guardian contacted Newsom press secretary Nathan Ballard for comment about Lennar, he wrote to the Guardian, "You might want to give Sam Singer a call. He’s the spokesperson for Lennar and can really answer questions about that stuff … accurately."

After making it clear that we wanted Newsom’s perspective, not Lennar’s, Ballard wrote that the Mayor’s Office is "confident the systems we have in place will protect human health," an answer that dodges our question about the violations that happened over a six-month period in 2006.

Insisting that Lennar will not be asked to take over the cleanup, Ballard claimed that "if the city pursues an ‘early transfer’ with the Navy, a specialized environmental remediation firm, not Lennar, would finish certain elements of the cleanup. And the city will have extensive oversight over any such work."

Ballard refused to comment on the suit brought against Lennar by three of its employees but went into detail about the Restoration Advisory Board, which he said was "created by the Navy to advise the Navy."

"The city created its own Citizens Advisory Board independent of the Navy for local input from the Bayview community," Ballard claimed.

He also maintained that the "Navy is and will always remain legally responsible for paying for the cleanup. Over the last three to four years, we have secured more cleanup money for the shipyard than any other closed Navy base in the county. We intend to have those robust funding levels continue."

This was also one of the most toxic bases in the country, which is why the conversion effort has been difficult. Plaintiff Guy McIntyre also alleges it is complicated because of chicanery. Before being demoted, McIntyre said he told his bosses there were "severe discrepancies in the invoicing submitted by Gordon Ball," which has a $20 million construction contract with Lennar.

"Specifically, while Gordon Ball stated that over $1 million was going to a certain minority-owned subcontractor, only a small fraction of that money was actually going to the subcontractor," the lawsuit contends.

We have been trying to review those public records, so far without success. James Fields, contract compliance supervisor for the Redevelopment Agency, told us that Gordon Ball subcontracted with several minority business enterprises, including Michael Spencer Masonry, Oliver Transbay, Remediation Services, Bayview Hunters Point Trucking, and Gordon Ball’s joint-venture partner, Yerba Buena.

Fields said, "I have been advised that the project manager usually presides over the collection of the data but that they are out of the country. Because the project is substantially completed, we will ask the prime contractor, which is Ball, and the minority business enterprises and the women business enterprises under Ball to show us how much they were paid, then compare the sets of records."

In other words, there are still more unanswered questions about Lennar and its subcontractors. *

Hook, line, and Lypsinka

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April 3, 2007
0

LIP SERVICE "Why are gay men fascinated with Joan Crawford?" John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, asks contemplatively over the phone from New York. "One reason I’m drawn to her is because of her face, which is so graphic — beautiful and scary and ridiculous at the same time. It became even more so in the 1950s, and then in the ’60s and the ’70s, it softened somehow."

All alone in a hallowed spot somewhere above great female impersonators from the past who lack a feminist consciousness and contemporary drag queens who don’t know how to act, one finds Lypsinka, the role of a lifetime for Epperson, who translates cinematic gestures to the stage like no other performer. Lypsinka’s new show, The Passion of the Crawford, portrays the great movie star through a different avenue than that used by most post–Mommie Dearest drag queens. The show’s source material is Joan Crawford Live at Town Hall, an onstage interview with Crawford late in her career. "When I moved to New York in 1978," Epperson says, "I remember that across the street from Radio City Music Hall there was a whole window in the Sam Goody store promoting the vinyl recording of Live at Town Hall. It had this multiple Andy Warhol–like image of her, and of course I had to have it."

The Crawford captured on Town Hall is more than a little tipsy. A recent bootleg CD reissue has fun with her awkward asides about planes flying through thunderheads and her many portentous declarations, ending with a remix that splices her comments for maximum comedy: "I wish I were Duke Wayne, really. Barbara Stanwyck feels the same way." Considering Lypsinka’s incredible offstage talent for editing dialogue, it’s safe to assume that The Passion of the Crawford won’t play things straight either.

But in sticking to a thorough portrait of Crawford rather than using dialogue from dozens of movies to form the ultimate movie megadiva, The Passion of the Crawford marks a departure for the peerless Lypsinka, whose visits to San Francisco’s Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint in the ’90s might be the last peaks of an era when there was art instead of just commerce in the Castro. This show returns for its second run at the downtown cabaret mainstay the Plush Room, which is fitting since Epperson mentions the celebrated cabaret return of 75-year-old Marilyn Maye as one recent inspiration.

There’s a fun irony to a phone chat with Epperson, the real voice behind the lip-synching star of some of the most hilarious phone call scenes ever staged, and by the end of our interview, we’re as tipsy as Crawford at Town Hall. But in this case, we’re drunk on camp, whether discussing Pauline Kael’s rave review of Brian de Palma’s The Fury ("She totally got it," Epperson says), an After Dark review of Little Edie Bouvier Beale’s post–Grey Gardens cabaret show ("Did it talk about the eye patch she wore over her eye with the flower attached to it?" he asks), or the many splendors of Dario Argento’s Suspiria ("I love it when Joan Bennett says, ‘We’ve got to kill that bitch of an American girl,’ " he declares, doing a perfect Bennett impression). Of course, a mention of Suspiria-era Bennett can only lead to her Dark Shadows costar Grayson Hall. I tell Epperson that I have a biography about Hall titled A Hard Act to Follow. "A hard actress to follow," he retorts.

During a recent Washington, DC, engagement of The Passion of the Crawford, Epperson used his time offstage to dig through the Library of Congress’s film collection and see movies such as 1971’s Pretty Maids All in a Row, directed by Roger Vadim and starring Rock Hudson and Angie Dickinson. "Roddy McDowell and Keenan Wynne are also in it," Epperson says. "And an actress called Joy Bang. Have you ever heard of Joy Bang?

"What else can I tell you?" (Johnny Ray Huston)

THE PASSION OF THE CRAWFORD

Through April 22

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; $42.50–$47.50

Plush Room

940 Sutter, SF

1-866-468-3399

www.lypsinka.com

For a Q&A with John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Such a woman

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March 20, 2007
0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Cousin Raym is a doctor and works at Kent State. He gets to come to San Francisco for conferences, and I get to take him around for sushi, and clam chowder in a sourdough bowl, and all the things he loves that you can’t get in Ohio. Good sushi, I mean. This has happened two years in a row, and that means he has seen me more than anyone else in my family who doesn’t live here.

Raym is 50 years old and still plays tackle football. We tried his hand — or feet — at soccer, and he didn’t get a lot done but did have fun. Most of the time he looked like he was looking for someone to block or thinking about a blitz. Then we went and had sushi. Like me, Raym is a kind of a chatterbox. He has an especially expressive face: open and curious. The people he works with in Ohio say he’s "such a woman," and my cousin takes it as a compliment and goes and plays tackle football.

So he’s my hero, and his teenage daughter Megan, his oldest, is probably the person in the family I most take after, we decided. Even though I’m almost 30 years older than her. I say "we decided," but technically I already knew, ever since I saw a picture of me that made me go, "Holy crap, I look like Megan! How’d that happen?"

I was excited to show this picture to Raym, and I can do that now because I finally entered the modern era and bought me a brand new portable typewriter. So we’re sitting upstairs at the Boudin Bakery on Market Street during one of his lunch breaks, and instead of clacking out this restaurant review — ding, return — like in the good old days, I slide my sleek MacBook out of its bubble-wrap sheath and show him the picture. Yep, he says. Megan. And that’s how we decided. But he also thinks I look like my sisters, which of course I do, lucky me.

I say I take after Megan (lucky me) because in addition to the slight physical resemblance, she hates mayonnaise, loves sushi, and plays fast-pitch. Whereas I don’t know that any of my sisters have ever even tried sushi. Sushi sushi, I mean. The kind that features, you know, raw fish.

But Boudin’s is bustling, and our clam chowders are a long way off still, so I get to show my cousin some pictures of Sockywonk too: us hugging outside Just for You, me holding an egg next to her bald head. Here we are with our identical ugly monster teddy bears. I didn’t show him the boob shots she took earlier that morning while I was trying on clothes at her house.

My new portable typewriter has a built-in camera, conducive to these kinds of shenanigans. My online dating career is about to take off. But it’s not what you think: I’m not going to learn PhotoShop and cut and paste all my girlfriends’ breasts onto my body. No. In fact, instead of using pictures of me, which just ain’t working, I’m going to show those boys What’s for Dinner. Like the other night, I made a fresh tomato sauce with homemade sausage over penne, and I held the steaming plate in front of my fancy new typewriter, click.

A picture fit for a cookbook! And in the background, in the dark, you can just barely kind of see a shadowy corner, maybe, of an apron-sporting chicken farmer. Went on Craigslist, got a date.

Yeah, right. Anyway, our clam chowder bread bowls came and were everything that clam chowder bread bowls are supposed to be: lunch!

I wish I could have showed Sockywonk to my cousin in person. He’s a doctor. He knows cancer professionally, and, actually, personally. I remember catching a touchdown pass on a slant pattern. The quarterback was almost nonexistently skinny, and bald, with a little lump under his shirt: a morphine pump.

But I wondered if Raym had ever seen someone take cancer for as wild a ride as Sockywonk is taking it.

"Calls herself ‘the happiest cancer patient ever,’" I said. "She’s all excited about the tattoo she’s going to get over her mastectomy scars. Something monsterish, with long tentacles."

"Really?" he asked.

"It’s inspiring," I said.

He seemed inspired too, and in a sea of downtown lunch-breakers and tourists, we ate our little soups. *

BOUDIN BAKERY

Mon.–Fri.: 6:30 a.m.–7 p.m.

619 Market, SF

(415) 281-8200

Takeout available

Beer

AE/DC/MC/V

Bustling

Wheelchair accessible
>

The sunshine posse

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March 7, 2007
0

› amanda@sfbg.com

On Saturday mornings, with roughshod regularity, a handful of San Franciscans gather at the Sacred Grounds Cafe on Hayes Street to swap strategies and catch up on their political triumphs and setbacks. They don’t look like a powerful bunch, and they aren’t household names, but they’re changing the way the city handles public records, meetings, and information.

All of these folks started with one simple request for what ought to have been public information. All of them ran into a stone wall. They eventually found one another at hearings in front of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, where they took their cases and debated the minutiae of the law that grants them access to what they’re looking for.

For Wayne Lanier, it started with a $600 tax for neighborhood beautification. James Chaffee and Peter Warfield were seeking reform at the San Francisco Public Library. Kimo Crossman wanted more transparency in the city’s wi-fi deal with Google-EarthLink. Michael Petrelis was trying to find a keyhole into local nonprofit AIDS agencies. Allen Grossman thought the city’s attorneys should shelve their redactive black ink. And Christian Holmer — he just considers sunshine a part of his job.

They’ve been working together loosely during the past year or so — and in most cases, they’ve won. Their ongoing battles also show how the city’s laws and practices badly need reform.

Collectively, the sunshine crew considers the issue of metadata its biggest victory of the year (see "The Devil in the Metadata," 11/15/06), because it forced city officials to abandon their fear of the unseen electronic data that is generated whenever they hit send or open a new word-processing document.

Paul Zarefsky, a deputy city attorney with the City Attorney’s Office, argued that electronic documents could be rife with redactable goods and hackers could use this data to crack into the city’s server. According to him, this was ample reason to only release public information as a paper document or a PDF. The sunshine activists said this was an environmental waste and a very un–user friendly format in this age of electronic searches. The task force and Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors agreed, found the city attorney’s arguments specious, and demanded agencies follow the letter of the law and release documents in an electronic format.

Some departments still aren’t doing that, which is a problem these citizens have discovered: the Sunshine Ordinance, though very good, could be much better and is overripe for reform.

The ordinance, adopted by voters in 1993, grants San Franciscans far more traction and power than the federal and state open-records laws by setting deadlines and offering the forum of the task force for addressing complaints when documents are not forthcoming.

When a citizen makes a request for a public document, it’s often because somebody sees something from the kitchen window while washing dishes and says, "Huh, I wonder what’s going on."

For Wayne Lanier, that moment came when he received a bill from the city for $600 after he improved the sidewalk and installed some planters in front of his house on Fell Street. Lanier had gone through the proper planning and permit process and was confident everything he’d done was within the law. So why was he being fined?

With a little research, Lanier discovered that an ordinance, recently passed by the supervisors at the urging of the mayor, inadvertently took into account sidewalk fixtures such as planters when taxing property owners and merchants for putting up signs and cluttering rights-of-way. Lanier began to research how the law came to pass.

"I was told there were various meetings with the mayor," Lanier said. "I didn’t know when they were. So I started using the Sunshine Ordinance as a means to getting the mayor’s calendar. First I wrote a rather chatty letter asking for it, and there was no response. So I wrote a more formal request and also said maybe you ought to make your calendar public. The governor of Florida’s done it. It’s quite easy to do."

But it wasn’t easy for room 200. Lanier filed his original request March 3, 2006. A year later he has not received what he asked for. He’s been told by the Mayor’s Office of Communications that the calendar can’t be released because it tells exactly where Gavin Newsom is supposed to be and who is going to be protecting him. Lanier has urged the office to make the document public at the end of each week, once security concerns have passed. That hasn’t happened.

In addition to losing portions of the mayor’s calendar during a staff turnover and heavily redacting the few calendar items it has made available, the Mayor’s Office has not set or followed a policy regarding public access to this public document. But Lanier’s original request has not been dropped. Christian Holmer picked it up.

Holmer is sunshining for sunshine. A manual laborer by day, Holmer’s been a longtime resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and became volunteer coordinator of the San Francisco Survival Manual, a manifestation of the 40-year-old Haight Asbury Switchboard, once a clearinghouse of services and information for city residents. The modern-day equivalent is part of a public information pilot project approved in 2004 with the support of 10 members of the Board of Supervisors that encourages the sharing of all city documents in an open forum. Holmer makes regular and massive requests for all manner of information from a variety of agencies, urging them to employ the technological ease of e-mail to send him documents as soon they’re created by the city — in effect, CCing him on everything.

Holmer says the point is not only to compile a library of city documents but to establish best practices for the agencies that are supposed to provide information when the public requests it. By encouraging this free flow of information that takes, according to him, only a few keystrokes and mere seconds to disseminate electronically, Holmer hopes a culture of openness is being cultivated.

"You push a department to a certain level of compliance, and it raises all the boats," Holmer said.

James Chaffee began seeking public information about the San Francisco Public Library in 1974, long before the Sunshine Ordinance was born. The tall, professorial man has a habit of employing erudite references from literature, philosophy, and film in his regular newsletters decrying the secret actions of the Library Commission. His writings have received attention and acclaim in the national world of library news.

"The original library commissioners would be shocked if they could see the openness that exists now," Chaffee says.

He’s pushed for more weekend library hours and successfully brought enough attention to block the public library’s plans to purchase costly and suspicious radio-frequency identification tags and grant the task of collecting overdue fees to a debt agency.

Peter Warfield, executive director of the Library Users Association, and Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, picked up the radio-frequency issue and ran with it, making public records requests that might substantiate the library’s argument that thousands of dollars in workers’ compensation claims for repetitive stress injuries would be remedied by an investment in the expensive new technology.

The library wouldn’t turn over any documents, so Tien and Warfield went across the bay to Berkeley, which doesn’t have a Sunshine Ordinance (though the city is currently working on one). The Berkeley Public Library gave enough information to fully debunk the claims. Of more than $1 million spent on five years of workers’ comp, just 1 percent was for repetitive stress injuries. The Chaffee-Warfield-Tien efforts halted a nationwide move toward employing this potentially privacy-invading technology.

Then there’s Kimo Crossman.

Crossman is regularly criticized for his public records requests, which some city agencies feel are voluminous and burdensome. "I’ve had to stop the office a couple times. There are 300 people in this office," said Matt Dorsey, spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, which receives almost daily requests or reminders of requests from Crossman, the length and breadth of which bring some city departments to their knees.

Technology is Crossman’s interest, and he made his first public records request of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services in September 2005, for contracts and related documents between the city and Google-EarthLink.

"As an interested citizen, I wanted to participate in the wi-fi initiative," Crossman told us. He received his request — with 90 percent of the information redacted. The DTIS claimed attorney-client privilege and the need to protect proprietary information to keep Crossman from seeing more than a fraction of the data.

Even though a specific section in the Sunshine Ordinance allows for the release of a contract when there are not multiple bidders and today the deal is strictly between the city and Google-EarthLink, the DTIS still refuses to hand over the documents Crossman wants. DTIS spokesperson Ron Vinson continues to cite the advice of the City Attorney’s Office.

The city attorney’s relationship with sunshine is a problem, according to Allen Grossman, a retired business lawyer. Grossman’s requests for information have transcended their original intent — some Department of Public Works permits for tree removal near his home on Lake Street. They have become an inquiry into why so many departments regularly employ the City Attorney’s Office to represent them when it’s a direct violation of section 67.21(i) of the Sunshine Ordinance. That section states the city attorney "shall not act as legal counsel for any city employee or any person having custody of any public record for purposes of denying access to the public." The public lawyers are permitted only to write legal opinions regarding the withholding of information, which must be made public.

"The whole purpose of that section was to level the playing field and get the lawyers out of it," said Grossman, who says the office ghostwrites letters denying access, putting citizens who may not have legal counsel to advise them at an unfair advantage. It’s not in keeping with the spirit of the law.

Dorsey defends City Attorney Dennis Herrera, pointing out that deputy city attorneys no longer represent departments at the task force when there’s a complaint. They’re still writing those letters, though.

"When we give advice on sunshine, it’s a matter of public record. We will prepare a written cover-your-ass statement," Dorsey said. "To some we would appear as the bad guy, but I yield to no one on our commitment on sunshine in this city."

Bruce Wolfe, a task force member who’s seen scores of departments employ the ghostwriting tactic, said, "There is one area that concerns me greatly — the use of attorney shield. The question is what is the city attorney’s role? The advice is important because that’s something every other department can use, but it shouldn’t just be some way to squiggle out of providing records."

Dorsey related a recent case in which KGO wanted access to Muni documents that identified the names of operators. "We provided the documents, but we redacted the names. If we lose to KGO in front of the task force, we have to turn over docs. If we lose to a court that finds we violated privacy, we’re on the hook for potential substantive damages. These results can get very expensive for taxpayers. There’s an act of balance that has to occur."

Many task force members, activists, and citizens agree that the ordinance and task force are wonderful tools but still lack the necessary bite. The task force has no power to review documents and determine if a department’s secrecy claims are true. And when a department is found in violation, there are no specific fines or penalties that the task force can levy.

But some are still happy the body even exists. "We have a great Sunshine Ordinance Task Force," said Michael Petrelis, who has been trying to find information about local AIDS nonprofits and advisory boards that are usually exempt from public records law — unless they receive city funding. Petrelis found that avenue into these organizations, and when they don’t comply with records requests it’s still a boon for him, because filing a complaint requires them to come and be accountable in front of the task force, an open hearing that Petrelis can also attend. "I have learned so much at those meetings, just observing," Petrelis said. "The task force process is so valuable in all its beautiful permutations." *

Jean Baudrillard is not dead.

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March 7, 2007
0

Ah, the ecstacy of pomo French theorizing: it feels like sandpaper, tastes like mint, and never leaves the cold bathroom. Sometimes it’s a bloody butterfly. Other times it’s a tongue on vinyl. And always the future conditional pluperfect leotard. Ce ca?

And yet, the gulf may exist.

Fuck Baudrillard. Fuck Foucault. I’m going home to lie under the covers with a flashlight and review my hand-stitched limited edition of XEROX now. I hated the Matrix. Or did I only think I hated it?

No. I did hate it.

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