San Francisco

Metal Mania: Rock of ages, for all ages

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› cheryl@sfbg.com

It was June 2007, and the Friday night crowd at Thee Parkside was primed for brutality. When headliners Hatchet took the stage, two of my senses immediately spiked: my hearing, which seemed not long for the world, and my sight, which couldn’t believe that such aggressive thrash was emanating from what appeared to be a quintet of teenagers.

Well, not quite. As of March 2008, the median age of the North Bay band was 20.2, with vocalist Marcus Kirchen, 23, and lead guitarist Julz Ramos, 22, bringing up the average. Guitarist Sterling Bailey and drummer Alex Perez are both 19, and bassist Dan Voight is 18. Granted, Death Angel drummer Andy Galeon was 14 when The Ultra-Violence (Enigma) was released in 1987. Nonetheless, by ’87, not even half of Hatchet were born.

Raised in the post–Headbanger’s Ball era, its members forged their own paths to a place that local metalheads can both recognize and appreciate. "Hatchet is breathing new life into a scene that has been pretty dead for a long time," Shaxul, owner of San Francisco’s Shaxul Records, told me over e-mail. "They pay homage to ’80s thrash metal and they do a great job. I think they are about as relevant as a band can get in what you would call the ‘Bay Area thrash metal underground.’ Especially since they are the ones carrying it right now!"

Kicking back around a table at Thee Parkside one recent afternoon, Ramos — Hatchet’s main songwriter, though Kirchen pens most of the lyrics and all members contribute to the overall process — recalled getting Metallica’s Black Album (Elektra, 1991) at age 10 or 11, and discovering Master of Puppets (Elektra, 1986) soon after. Possessing a similar story, the 11-year-old Kirchen also checked into Metallica kindred like Exodus and Testament.

Growing up in the Internet age has its advantages: Bailey and Kirchen joined Hatchet after answering Craigslist ads, and the band hooked up with their label, Metal Blade, via MySpace.

One day the group logged on to read a message beginning, "’Hello from Metal Blade,’" Ramos said. "We were scratching our heads — ‘Is this a joke?’ That was the label that I always [wanted] to be on, because they are strictly metal. They’re not gonna try and change anything, or steer you in another direction."

Hatchet’s album, Awaiting Evil, was recorded in Petaluma and is tentatively due out May 31, with a tour in the works for later this year. Thematically, the disc addresses dark topics: what Ramos described as "a post-apocalyptic world future." Musically, Kirchen promised, "it’s gonna crush."

Staunch fans of the original Bay Area thrash bands, Hatchet is proud to be part of the scene’s legacy — but they don’t see themselves as imitating what came before. "Even though a lot of [our music] is reminiscent of [earlier bands], it really takes from that and stems into new directions," Kirchen explained. "I think it helps that we’re coming along about 20 years down the line, because there’s so much that’s happened in metal since then.

"When I listen to bands like Exodus or Vio-lence, I hear such a difference — it’s all thrash, but it’s different," he added. "If you were to put Hatchet into that, you couldn’t say ‘Hatchet sounds like Exodus’ or ‘Hatchet sounds like Testament.’ You’d say ‘Hatchet sounds like Hatchet.’" While their sound does owe a certain debt to the thundering riffs and drumbeats of bands like Exodus and Testament — as well as Slayer, Metallica, and even Iron Maiden — Hatchet’s enthusiasm is a large part of their appeal. It’s music made by metal fans, for metal fans, with the stage barely keeping the two groups apart.

"When you think of Hatchet, you think Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986). At the shows, we thrash together. We bring that vibe where everybody’s included," Kirchen said. And my experiences seeing them live bear this out, particularly at a January Fat City show that included a rambunctious pit of Hatchet-aged fans.

"That’s really key in developing this young crowd," continued Kirchen, "that feeling of all these kids coming together to be a part of something. We really throw away the rock-star vibe. I think that separates us from a lot of the older bands who’ve been playing for a long time, and they have the thing built up to, ‘We’re untouchable.’ We don’t want to be like that. We want to be down-to-earth."

HATCHET

April 25, 7 p.m., check Web site for price

Balazo Gallery

2183 Mission, SF

Metal Mania: See you in the darkness

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While Oakland’s metal elders continue to thrash despite the odds, a new generation of bands is poised to augment the Bay’s already fearsome reputation. San Francisco’s Animosity was founded in a summer school classroom, where 14-year-old Leo Miller found the accomplices he needed to start gigging with his local hardcore heroes. Although Miller lists NorCal skull-crackers like Hoods and Sworn Vengeance as inspirations, Animosity’s goals were clear: "If you listen to our first demos, as pathetic as they were — we were 14 — we were trying to play extreme metal, from the beginning."

Their fall 2007 album, Animal (Black Market Activities), is a maelstrom of frantic leads, limber blast-beats, and guttural roars, produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. "We didn’t want to make an overproduced, studio death-metal record," explains Miller. "The trend nowadays is to have everything doctored, triggered, and quantized." The band begins a North American headlining run on April 7.

Likeminded Oakland death metallers All Shall Perish have raised eyebrows with their chunky syncopation and eerie guitar parts, working alongside Animosity to establish the Bay Area as a flashpoint for metal’s most extreme permutations. The group is currently in the studio smelting a follow-up to 2006’s The Price of Existence (Nuclear Blast), and the lockstep interplay between drummer Matt Kuykendall and guitarists Ben Orum and Chris Storey is sure to yield thunderous breakdowns and furious shredding, with singer Hernan "Eddie" Hermida glass-gargling over the top. Expect the album in late 2008.

The region’s extreme contingent might pile on the beats per minute, but there’s also a groovier game in town. If you think that San Francisco’s stoner story starts and ends with High on Fire, prepare to be blown away by Floating Goat. Drawing on the best of Pentagram, Sabbath, C.O.C., and a host of others, the outfit’s surging, sinuous riffs are infectiously heavy. Vocalist Chris Corona’s soulful singing and dive-bombing hammer-ons soar above the fray, while bassist Ian Petitpren and drummer Aaron Barrett comprise the rest of an extremely powerful trio. The band is currently unsigned, plying 2006’s self-released album The Vultures Arrive on the Northwest touring circuit.

Even more thunderous than the swung hum of Floating Goat are the volume-addicted San Francisco duo Black Cobra. Eschewing the classic rock roots of stoner metal in favor of tectonic doom and clattering thrash, Los Angeles expats Jason Landrian and Rafael Martinez make a racket that defies their paucity in numbers. Buried deep within the sludgy, swirling fuzz are hoarse shouts and gloomy guitar dirges, anchored by Landrian’s two titanic tom-toms. The duo is currently touring Europe with Austin riff-minstrels the Sword and Oakland hesher-darlings Saviours, and return to play Annie’s Social Club on April 24.

This untapped vein of younger metal is only just now being disinterred. Although the death of the Pound has made venues harder to come by, these rough new ingots continue to forge themselves in the fires of relentless touring, building a reputation that might one day be compared to that of the Bay’s thrash greats, one riff at a time. Call your friendly neighborhood concert booker and request the best in San Francisco metal by name.

FLOATING GOAT

With Super Giant and HDR

May 27, 8 p.m., call for price

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

Metal Mania: The return of the kings

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s a Sunday night in late February, and the facade of Slim’s is shrouded by the shadow of a monstrous black tour bus. Inside, middle-aged bikers rub shoulders with teenagers in skin-tight jeans and garish print hoodies. At the bar, tattooed hipsters vie for position against glowering heshers and balding suburban fathers in polo shirts. As New Orleans black metal band Goatwhore kicks into a crescendo, the masses teem, pumping their fists and offering devil-horn salutes. Song finished, vocalist Ben Falgoust gulps for air before raising the mic to his mouth: "Are you guys ready for Exodus!?"

The multitude roars. They are ready for Exodus; ready to rock out to a band that formed in San Francisco 28 years ago, before many of them were even born. They are ready to help write a new chapter in the bloodstained tome of American metal and ready to crank their iPods to 11. After the winter of the ’90s, when the genre hibernated through grunge, boy bands and rap-rock, metal is back in bearlike force, packing halls across the nation and charting albums with astounding frequency. (Most recently Lamb of God’s Sacrament (Epic) hit number eight on the Billboard charts in September 2007, and the Bay Area’s Machine Head reached no. 54 with The Blackening [Roadrunner] last April.)

While it’s true that some of this success is due to the work of our nation’s talented young headbangers, it is the reinvigoration of the genre’s veteran warriors that makes the renaissance so momentous. Almost three decades ago, the Bay Area witnessed the birth pangs of thrash metal: a frantic mixture of hardcore punk and the burgeoning new wave of British Heavy Metal that would come to define heavy music in America for much of the ’80s. This generation of thrashers produced Metallica, who need no introduction, but it also produced a pair of massively influential bands that never quite garnered the spotlight they deserved: Exodus and Testament.

After years of strife, drug addiction, illness, and disregard, these two titans are both back on the road, promoting brand new albums to brand new fans with the same fury they mustered in their youth. As Exodus guitarist Gary Holt puts it over the phone while taking a well-earned respite from the road: "We’re proving that the founding fathers still know how to do it better than anyone else."

Rob Flynn — guitarist for the vintage Oakland thrash band Vio-lence and current frontman for local groove-metal crowd-pleasers Machine Head, who were recently nominated for a Grammy — has witnessed the thrash revival from both sides of the stage. Speaking by phone from his tour bus, he lauds the two bands’ success: "Exodus and Testament are appealing to an entirely new generation of kids, as they should." This appeal is the result of a national hunger for musical authenticity that both outfits are eager to sate. Similarities between Reagan- and George W. Bush-era politics have fueled a new wave of thrash polemics, and the bands’ undiminished ability to slay from onstage has won them a new legion of supporters.

EARLY SUCCESS


Exodus was the first of the two bands to coalesce. Holt joined forces with childhood friend Tom Hunting on drums and Kirk Hammet on guitar; Hammet would play on the band’s early demos before leaving in 1983 to join Metallica. In 1985, the group released Bonded by Blood (Torrid), an incendiary full-length filled with breakneck tempos and anthemic, shout-along choruses, eminently deserving of its place on the short list of best metal albums.

Testament got off to a slower start, forming in 1983 under the name Legacy, which had to be scuttled after a jazz combo of the same name complained. Joined in 1986 by a man-mountain of a singer named Chuck Billy, the group released their debut, The Legacy in 1987 on Megaforce Records. While they retained the pummeling tempos that defined the thrash idiom, they drew heavily on the progressive leanings of lead guitar player Alex Skolnick, a prodigy who joined the band when he was just 16. Their third album, Practice What You Preach (Megaforce) was extremely well-received, with the title track garnering video plays on MTV throughout 1989.

When interviewed by phone, Billy is quick to point to two catalysts for the music’s early success. The first was its combative nature, which pitted ascetic thrashers against their mortal enemies, the so-called posers. Groups sought out ever more extreme tempos and tunings in order to alienate the hair-sprayed acolytes of glam metal, whose temple was located on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Beyond distinguishing themselves from their gussied-up foils in Mötley Crüe, bands strove to out-do each other: "It was all friendly competition, the desire to be bigger and do better," explains Billy.

Flynn sums up the impact of Testament and Exodus memorably: "If it wasn’t for those bands, there wouldn’t be a Machine Head. When I was a kid, Exodus was my favorite band of all time. Bonded by Blood was like my life. I once punched some kid in the face for saying that Gary Holt sucked."

In addition to Vio-lence, local outfits like Death Angel and Forbidden released classic albums during this period, taking advantage of a record industry shopping spree that was triggered by the success of the Big Four — Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer — during the years 1988 to 1990. This success had its consequences as the towering reputation of those four groups began to overshadow the lesser-known acts that had helped pioneer the thrash idiom. The slight sticks with Holt to this day: "We were one of the first thrash metal bands ever, and it certainly sucks when you hear people referring to the ‘Big Four’ and you’re left out, considered by some to be a ‘second-tier’ band."

THE DARK AGE


For Exodus and Testament, things would get much worse before getting better. As the airwaves clogged with one metal band after another, the genre’s countercultural status began to erode. Diagnosing the problem, Holt recalls the beginning of the music’s slow implosion: "I’ve always thought metal needed a common enemy. It became a parody of itself." On Jan. 11, 1992, Nirvana’s Nevermind (DGC) hit No. 1 on the Billboard’s album sales chart, neatly coinciding with Capitol Records’s decision to drop Exodus from its lineup, and ushering in a long winter for metal in America. Exodus broke up. Testament sustained itself by touring in Europe, where, as Billy explains, "they didn’t have that grunge thing, so it’s been all metal, all the way." Faced with uninterested record executives and a fan base that was buying flannel, thrash retreated into the underground.

Financial struggles were soon compounded by medical woes. In 1999, Testament guitarist James Murphy was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Although he made a full recovery, Murphy was forced to rely on a number of local fundraisers to afford treatment. In 2001, lightning struck twice, and Billy developed a rare form of cancer known as germ cell seminoma, which also necessitated extensive and expensive treatment. In August 2001, San Francisco’s dormant thrash community banded together for "Thrash of the Titans," a benefit concert to raise money for Billy and Death frontman Chuck Schuldiner, another metal god battling cancer (Schuldiner passed away in December of that year). The concert showcased reunions by Exodus, Death Angel, and Legacy, the pre-Billy incarnation of Testament.

As the metal community united around its stricken heroes, old grudges were put aside, and the two bands began making tentative comeback plans. The reinvigoration of Exodus was tragically put on hold in 2002 when original vocalist Paul Baloff suffered a stroke while riding his bike and lapsed into a coma, eventually being taken off life support at his family’s request. While Holt was pained by the loss of his old friend and bandmate, he was determined to soldier on: "I felt like I still have something to prove, even if I don’t. I still keep a chip on my shoulder."

Billy recovered fully in 2003, and Testament was offered a slot at a metal festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Reenlisting the participation of Skolnick, who had left the band to pursue his interest in jazz, Testament rediscovered the pleasures of touring for new audiences and found itself poised to regain some of its past glory. As Billy explains, "The whole music business is all about timing. The reunion show that brought people together again enabled people to put their problems aside, to do it for the music. The reason those bands weren’t touring was that the climate of metal wasn’t right.

"I think the bands like Shadows Fall, Trivium, and Chimaira — all these bands making names for themselves by bringing back our style of music — its perfect for a band like us," he continues.

By the time this article is published, Testament will have played two sold-out shows at the Independent, a triumphant homecoming in a city eager to acknowledge its extensive thrash history. On April 29, they will release their first album of new material in nine years, The Formation of Damnation, on Nuclear Blast, a label that is also the new home of Exodus, who released The Atrocity Exhibition … Exhibit A in October 2007.

Billy describes the Testament release as a return to form, with more traditional thrash elements replacing the midtempo brutality that defined their ’90s material. "We hadn’t written a record that had lead guitar sections," he says. "We have Alex Skolnick back in the band — it was feeling good, like it used to. I wanted to sing more, not do death metal vocals. I wanted it to be heavy, but have catchy melodies." The few tracks that Nuclear Blast has divulged to journalists confirm his analysis: they include scorching Skolnick shred and singing that is at times almost hooky.

The Atrocity Exhibition is a more modern-sounding recording, appropriating the blast beats and Byzantine song structures of death metal and continuing the trend established by the act’s two other recent releases, 2004’s Tempo of the Damned and 2005’s Shovelheaded Kill Machine (both Nuclear Blast). This evolution has its detractors, much to Holt’s frustration. "Some people want me to write Bonded by Blood over and over again," he says, "But I can’t." Despite the protestations of the purists, Exodus’s recent material is invariably successful at adapting the techniques and innovations of a new generation of metal without compromising the group’s essential sound.

Both bands will continue to tour voraciously throughout the spring and summer, eager to win over new fans with their daunting chops and undimmed energy. According to Holt, their hard work on the road is already paying off. "It’s a change for us to look out in the audience and see kids that are 17 or 18 years old," he says. "In the last five years we’ve been beating ourselves to death on tour and we’ve acquired a new audience. The old guys all have mortgages and their wives won’t let them go to shows anymore." This time around, even the subprime lending crisis is unlikely to deter Exodus and Testament. Far from being nostalgia acts, the two bands have relied on their competitive natures to keep their music on the bleeding edge of metal, refusing to sacrifice even a lone beat-per-minute to old age. Buoyed by fans both old and new and revered by a rapidly expanding metal world eager to give them their due, the new order is bonded by the blood of the past — but looking toward the future.

Grooves

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KYLIE MINOGUE

X

(EMI)

As with any highly anticipated release from a pop siren, there’s sure to be predictable praise from diehard fans: think of all the Janet devotees who’ve supported her multiple failed attempts to relaunch as an pop icon, instead of a wardrobe-malfunctioning pariah. Also to be expected are the rip-to-shreds haters who will use any sign of weakness as bait. For miniature Aussie pop goddess Kylie Minogue, her 10th effort, X, was receiving equal amounts of love and hate many moons before its repeatedly pushed-back release date. Thanks to the cyberpirates of the techno-age, Minogue’s aural goodies were offered up for all of the online world to hear — even before the official tracklist was determined.

Leakage aside, opinion didn’t deter this überpop-tart from bringing a fiercer, more sexed-up version of her already adorable self to the dozen tracks on the uneven but thoroughly enjoyable X. Highlights include the vampy swagger of opener "2 Hearts" and the frenetic disco-meets-electro jam "In My Arms," written and produced by Scottish electro prodigy Calvin Harris and laced with his signature warped, underwater synths and pert handclap percussion. In its weaker moments, X sounds like a mashup of modern pop heavies. The robotic chant of "Speakerphone" recalls a made-for-TV version of Daft Punk’s "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and "Nu-di-ty" is a Britney-esque banger, with jolts of ripping bass and nasally vocal "whoops" that would have fit perfectly into the guiltily pleasurable Blackout (2007). Back in her skyscraping stilettos, Kylie proves with X that her kitten-with-a-whip dance anthems still titillate. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

THE BREEDERS

Mountain Battles

(4AD)

Eighteen years after debuting with the alluringly odd Pod (4AD), and 15 since careening full force into the mainstream for a few months with the bubble-bass alterna-anthem "Cannonball," the Breeders return with Mountain Battles, their fourth album in nearly two decades. While hardly prolific, the Kim Deal–led enterprise has been successful in concocting fetchingly askew garage-pop, and their latest presents the band in marvelously fevered, fearless form, covering a considerable amount of stylistic and emotional territory over the course of 35 minutes.

Deal’s exuberantly woozy vocals remain as cough syrup–thick as ever, and the microphone give-and-take with sister Kelley once again yields delectable results. "Bang On" — a fiercely minimal hip-wiggling thump à la ESG — focuses around the chanting proclamation, "I love no one, and no one loves me," with Kim’s sunny assertion of the phrase chased by Kelley’s frowning echo. Elsewhere, the opiated melodica backdrops of "Istanbul" make for a seductive travelogue, as does "Regalame Esta Noche," an exquisitely vulnerable Spanish-language ballad rendered in the dustiest, huskiest of tones. Listeners seeking the familiar Breeders guitar-chug, however, will gleefully throw themselves face-first into the psychedelicized swirls of "Overglazed," an ecstatic thunderer set a-twitch by Kim’s howling repetition of a simple, inarguable line: "I can feel it." Honestly, though: who couldn’t? (Todd Lavoie)

THE BREEDERS

With Colour Revolt

April 30, 8 p.m., $23

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

www.slims-sf.com

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Om: Miami 2008

(Om)

Back when I was a younger young ‘un, Om helped open my ears to the world of San Francisco house music. I’d waste gallons of gas I couldn’t afford, driving around listening to the likes of Miguel Migs and Colette because my car had a decent sound system. Lately, though, I’ve been disappointed with the label since it seems to have drifted away from the soulful house I had grown to love. So I was skeptical when I popped the new Om: Miami 2008 in my deck while driving down I-580. Two bridge tolls and four missed exits later, I was still in a trance from the Fred Everything’s deliciously nostalgic "Here I Am." Overall the compilation stitches together a slew of impressive sounds, including Eric Kupper’s remix of Samantha James’s "Breathe In." Om is clearly back to its old tricks, and I’m all ears. (Jamilah King)

The joy of cowboys

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

"The western has not so much died as fragmented," declared New York Times critic A.O. Scott in a think piece last year about Hollywood’s latest incarnations of the genre. Citing Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns and more recent, far-flung revisions such as Wisit Sasanatieng’s 2000 Tears of the Black Tiger, Scott argued that the western is a mutable export because the myth of the Old West existed even before the advent of cinema. Myths build on their grandeur and solidify their status with each new telling and embellishment, whether those revisions take the form of broadsides spreading the dastardly deeds of Billy the Kid or cinematic Cold War–era allegories staged by John Ford under a baking Arizona sun.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s film series "Non-Western Westerns" has traced the global fragmentation of the western myth from more familiar locales such as Utah (as represented by the Italian Alps in Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 film The Great Silence) and the Mexican desert (Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 El Topo), to unexpected stopovers in Bollywood (1975’s Sholay) and Hong Kong (Johnnie To’s 2006 Exiled). But the most curious, if not the most joyful, destination in the series’ itinerary has to be the land once known as Czechoslovakia, the home of Oldrich Lipsky’s rangy 1964 horse opera Lemonade Joe.

Lemonade Joe is a sweet and goofy musical parody of the type of westerns Hollywood specialized in before Sam Peckinpah sauntered into town. Though made the same year as Leone’s breakthrough, A Fistful of Dollars, Lipsky’s movie is its diametric opposite. The good guy’s whites remain stainless; the bad guys are mustachioed; and the Trigger Whiskey saloon is likelier to erupt into musical numbers or slapstick fisticuffs than gunfire. The plot follows song-prone sharpshooter Lemonade Joe (played by the suitably dashing operetta stag Karel Fiala) as he weans the rowdy menfolk of Stetson City off of their beloved firewater and over to his miracle tonic, Kolaloka lemonade, all the while competing for the hand of temperate ingenue Winifred Goodman against archnemesis and Trigger Whiskey owner Doug Badman.

Lemonade Joe‘s hand-tinted look is clearly at odds with its soundtrack. But Lipsky’s last concern is fidelity, let alone realism. Indeed, the plot is periodically nudged along by touches that are as evocative of Bugs Bunny cartoons as they are of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925). Smoke rings spell out messages, dotted lines plot the course of bullets, men fall like dominos after a single punch, and an unforgettable wide screen close-up travels deep into Joe’s yodeling throat.

As singularly silly as Lemonade Joe may be, its eccentricity is a reflection of the western genre’s established popularity in Eastern and Central Europe. Writer Jirí Brdecka based his screenplay on the Lemonade Joe stories he penned for magazines in the ’40s. Around the same time, Karl May’s novels set in the American West were immensely popular in Czechoslovakia. During the Cold War, Eastern Bloc countries produced and consumed westerns that functioned as ideological critiques of America, yet trafficked in the trappings of that most stalwart of American icons: the cowboy.

Then again, wherever it is set, the western has always been about the encroachment of capitalism and civilization onto untamed, lawless wilderness. Many of the genre’s narratives are driven by an unspoken nostalgia for a savage paradise lost. In Lemonade Joe, this takeover is staged in economic terms. Joe’s father turns out to be the president of the company whose product he constantly shills, and whose fiercest competition is the whiskey market. In true entrepreneurial fashion, Joe and his newly-won Winifred hope to ride off into the sunset to sell their new product, Whiskeykola, bringing together alcoholics and teetotalers under brand unity.

Lipsky’s imagery and Brdecka’s screenplay may be slyly critical, but they’re far from a critique of American imperialism. If anything, their movie’s outlandishness might be seen as a rebuff to the then–Soviet Union’s aesthetic mandate for socialist realism. Lemonade Joe is an East Side love letter to a now-vanished chivalric myth of the West, one that Hollywood was discarding in favor of moodier and bloodier fare, and one to which it is impossible to return — except, perhaps, in the movies.

NON-WESTERN WESTERNS: LEMONADE JOE

Sat/5, 3 p.m., $5

SFMOMA, Phyllis Wattis Theater

151 Third St, SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Chop from the top

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OPINION San Francisco officials released two very different documents last week. The first was a list of the 596 city employees making $150,000 a year or more in base salary. The second was a letter to the 334 patients of the Chronic Care Public Health Nursing program informing them that as of April 15 they will no longer have a public-health nurse helping them manage their illnesses.

You might expect that when the mayor proposes an "across the board" budget cut from city departments because of a looming budget deficit, almost any position in city government would be on the table. You might expect that maintaining services to the most vulnerable city residents would be a priority. But according to these two documents, you’re safe if your salary is $150,000 or more, and you are abandoned if you are poor, frail, and chronically ill.

Last week, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin suggested that instead of just cutting from the bottom, the city also consider cuts at the top. "So let me understand," the Chronicle quotes District Attorney Kamala Harris (No. 55 on the top-earners list), "Aaron Peskin is basically saying we should eliminate all the doctors and lawyers who work for the city."

But Harris didn’t understand. Peskin isn’t proposing to cut all of those 596 positions. He is proposing that in a fiscal crisis, the agenda should include some cutting from the top, not just the bottom.

As a public health nurse in the program slated for closure, I’ve been working to treat and make plans for my patients during the day, while working at night to keep the program open. I’m not worried about my job: nurses are in high demand and there’s comparable pay in many private hospitals. But private health care rarely serves the people I’ve come to know doing this job for the past year: frail, uninsured elderly folks with no families; patients who face language and literacy barriers who can’t navigate the system and use emergency rooms when they feel sick; long-time residents of Laguna Honda Hospital coming back to the community not knowing how to use a cell phone, let alone monitor their diabetes.

As the number of chronically ill people skyrockets, along with the costs of caring for them, it would seem a no-brainer to fund a group of nurses who are experts in keeping those folks out of the hospital. But our health care system still operates on an acute-care model. While Medi-Cal will pay the city much of the expense of sending a nurse to do brief wound care for a diabetic, it pays much less for a nurse to keep that same person healthy enough to avoid the next wound. Calcuutf8g future savings from chronic care health services is hard. So on paper at least, it’s a money-saver, if not the moral choice, to close the program.

When I was in nursing school, my public health professors told me, "in Public Health, you have to be an advocate, because your patients can’t be." But I bet those 596 top earners can defend themselves — and Peskin is right, some of them should be given the opportunity.

Stefan Lynch

Stefan Lynch, RN, is a public health nurse at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and a member of Service Employees International Union 1021.

Emeric Kalman, 1931-2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Savannah Blackwell is a former Guardian reporter.

Labor’s merger pains

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› jesse@sfbg.com

Part one of a series on the emerging problems with labor mergers

For well over 100 years, San Francisco hod carriers — workers who assist stone, brick, and plaster masons — have gathered at the Local 36 hiring hall to find work. Though not as large and bustling as it was in its heyday, the hall, now situated in Daly City, still serves as an important social as well as professional gathering place for San Francisco and San Mateo County "hoddies."

But on Monday, March 10 and Tuesday the 11th, when the union’s members arrived to put in for jobs, they found the entrance shuttered and a paper sign taped to the door.

"This Office Will be Temporarily Closed Due to the Transition of the Separation between Local Unions," the sign read. Several South Bay phone numbers were listed below — one for the dispatch office at Local 270, a much larger South Bay chapter of the Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA), and one for Carlos Lujan, 270’s business manager. When the workers tried to call the numbers to secure work, they claim officials at 270 told them they couldn’t help them.

Meanwhile, several told the Guardian they could hear the phone ringing through the hiring hall door as calls from contractors came into the office. Every phone call most likely meant a job that would not be filled by one of the willing workers left outside.

"I felt abandoned," 25-year union member Jerrold ‘JJ’ Jones told the Guardian. Jones told us he waited for nearly three hours for the hall to open on March 11, only to give up in frustration. "Here I pay dues six months in advance and because that hall is closed, I didn’t have the opportunity to go out for a job that day."

A LESS THAN PERFECT UNION


The reasons for the hall’s closure trace back to an ill-fated merger between Local 36 and Local 270. The story is more than just a tiff in a relatively small labor group; it’s symbolic of a much wider issue that’s beginning to explode in organized labor.

In recent years, unions across the country have been encouraging smaller locals like 36 to join with larger shops to increase their clout and negotiating power. Supporters say these mergers create organizations better able to stand up to giant businesses and institutions.

But the trend also has drawbacks: more members under the aegis of one organization means more power in fewer hands — and sometimes, a lack of union democracy.

Local 36 seemed a prime candidate for merger, with only 120 members. Local 270 had more than 4,000 dues-paying workers and hefty political and trust fund accounts. But high-placed sources within the San Jose local tell us that it’s had serious turmoil over the past year — and the members from San Francisco say they feel left out.

Local 270’s leader, Carlos Lujan, is the subject of an investigation by the international union’s inspector general. Documents provided to the Guardian show that the inspector general has been looking into several complaints about Lujan’s leadership, including his conduct of meetings. An official from the parent union has observed the last three executive board gatherings and is expected to file a report with the Washington brass in the coming weeks.

"Clearly there are troubles out there," attorney Bob Luskin of the Washington firm Patton, Boggs, told us. Luskin acts as the union’s special counsel. "The marriage [between 36 and 270] looked like a good idea at first," he said. "But in the end, it didn’t turn out so well."

Much of the current internal strife at Local 270 appears to have begun when Lujan announced his retirement at the end of March 2007. Two weeks prior to his planned departure, Lujan’s advisors proposed a post-retirement consultant’s job for him. According to a complaint filed with the Department of Fair Housing and Employment by former 270 employee Leslie Scanagatta, the consulting gig would have paid Lujan $500 a week, and the union would pay to fly him from his home in Texas to San Jose for meetings.

Scanagatta’s complaint states that Lujan became angry after she and several other officials voiced concerns with the plan. It alleges that Lujan declared to another union official that she would "be terminated by the end of the week" — which she was.

"It was devastating," Scanagatta, who now works for Santa Cruz County, said. "I was laid off for eight months and I’ve taken a 38 percent pay cut now."

Lujan did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment.

One of the people pushing for Lujan’s consultant job was Edgar Calonje. Calonje, who worked for the union as an independent contractor, said he met with Lujan before the boss announced his retirement, and that Lujan told him and Enrique Arguello, a member of 270’s executive board, that he was planning "to get his retirement [benefits] and consultant fees as well."

"We thought if we helped him [get the deal], we would be in good shape," Calonje said by phone from Nicaragua, where he was visiting family. "But that’s not what happened."

First, Lujan withdrew his retirement and decided to stay on. Then, in November 2007, Colanje lost his job — after, he says, a private memo he had written surfaced in which he criticized Lujan’s leadership and integrity.

Shortly after Colanje was let go, Arguello — who now says he didn’t actively support Lujan’s retirement plan — resigned from his job as a business agent rather than accept a demotion. A Nov. 28 letter from Lujan to Arguello obtained by the Guardian states, "the reason for the change in your position was because the pattern of actions made by you in the past could put this Local in a difficult position."

THE LOCK OUT


Early in 2008, the atmosphere of dissension in San Jose began to affect the hiring hall in Daly City, and eventually boiled over into physical confrontation. First, former Local 36 business manager Alex Corns clashed with Lujan and resigned in a huff from his new job at 270. Then Will Davis, who ran the Daly City hall after the merger, was dismissed. A March 6 letter from Lujan to Davis cites Davis’s "lack of commitment to work under my agenda as Business Manager" as the reason for his termination.

The following afternoon, Friday, March 7, Davis and Corns arrived at the hall to find the locks changed. That evening, they told us, a group of former Local 36 members met in a pizza parlor across from the shuttered hall and decided to petition the International to grant Local 36 back its independence. According to their account of what happened next, which was verified by Sgt. Ron Mussman of the Daly City Police Department, when Davis, Corns, and the other participants in the meeting emerged from the pizza parlor, they saw Lujan sitting in his pickup truck, which was parked in the restaurant’s lot. Across the street, two officials from 270 were inside the hiring hall removing computer equipment.

The now-dissident union members surrounded Lujan’s vehicle. Lujan fled the scene, according to worker and police accounts, allegedly striking one of the members in the forearm with his car as he backed up. The incensed crowd moved across the street and the workers from 270 barricaded themselves inside the hall. Lujan reportedly flagged down a police car as he drove away and the cops drove to the hall to escort the two men from San Jose safely out of the building.

Corns and Davis said they could not secure keys to the hall’s new locks by the time of Monday morning’s job call. For two consecutive mornings, out-of-work union members were turned away. Corns told us he finally called a local locksmith late Tuesday morning, March 11, so that members could be dispatched to jobs the following day.

HOW BIG IS TOO BIG?


For Corns, the failed merger with Local 270 is a personal as well as a professional tragedy: he was instrumental in helping 36 join with 270 after Lujan’s election as the bigger local’s business manager. Now he feels responsible for jeopardizing the organization he’s worked for since he was a teenager.

"I’ve been in the union for 35 years," Corns said, his voice choking up. "This is so heartbreaking to me."

Beyond the problems with one controversial business manager, Corns says the story is about the larger problem: increasingly top-down union management. In late February, he told us, 70 members of Local 36 voted unanimously to secede from 270 and become an autonomous chapter again. A representative from LIUNA was present at the vote and confirmed their version of the events for us. Despite the members’ calls for autonomy, officials in LIUNA’s International office in Washington, DC refused to go along; instead, on March 13, union brass granted their secession from Local 270 but immediately forced 36 into another merger — this time with a chapter based in Oakland, Local 166.

As a result of the two mergers, Corns says, the assets of Local 36 have been swallowed up by the larger chapters. He produced old bank account statements for us that showed well more than $100,000 in Local 36’s coffers before the organization joined with 270. Now, he says, he doesn’t know where that money is. Laborer’s International spokesperson Jacob Hay told us that the parent union is undertaking a "reconciliation process" to determine how much of Local 36’s money should go to Oakland and how much should stay in San Jose. Despite the apparent desire for independence among 36’s members, Hay argued that the union is making the right decision by forcing them into another merger.

"We think that it is in the best interests of smaller locals like [36] to join with larger, more powerful locals," he said. "You have more collective bargaining power with larger numbers [of members] … the goal here is to get all the hod carriers in the Bay Area into one local."

Will Davis and other Local 36 members do not share Hay’s bigger-is-better enthusiasm. "We’ve never gotten a good reason why we can’t just have the local back," Davis said. "We’ve never done anything wrong. We’ve never been under investigation. Why are we being punished for something we didn’t do?"

Editor’s Note: In the paper edition of this article, the Guardian misidentified two dates. Lujan announced his retirement in 2007, and the atmosphere of dissension began to affect the hiring hall in Daly City early in 2008.

Rip up the mayor’s club-violence plan

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EDITORIAL Back in January, 34-year-old Clarence Corbin was shot and killed during a fight outside Jelly’s Dance Café nightclub in Mission Bay. Mayor Gavin Newsom leapt into action, announcing that this sort of violence was unacceptable. We’re with the mayor on that, although we wish he’d shown the same kind of energy in dealing with the epidemic of shootings in the Bayview and Western Addition over the past few years.

But his solution — a crackdown on nightclub promoters — is unlikely to do anything about violence and will almost certainly damage the creative underside of the city’s entertainment scene.

Sup. Sophie Maxwell is carrying the mayor’s legislation, which she introduced March 4. Some of the provisions just seem silly: the bill, for example, would ban "loitering" within 10 feet of a club between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. Of course, people stand outside clubs all the time — among other things, to smoke cigarettes — so the bill says smokers would be exempted. So would people who are waiting for cabs. People who simply wanted some fresh air or to make a phone call (or to make out away from the dance floor) would be subject to fines. The loitering law, like most similar laws, seems like a blueprint for discriminatory and illegal enforcement. (Will young African American men get cited more often than white people? Of course they will.)

How are the cops going to decide who’s really waiting for a ride (cabs can take half an hour to arrive on a Saturday night) and who’s just hanging out? Might potential troublemakers just light up a cigarette and thus be free from legal action? It’s hard to see the practical logic here.

Then there’s the provision that would require promoters who hold two or more club events a year to obtain a permit (and presumably, pay a fee). Applicants would have to have proof of $1 million in liability insurance.

That, frankly, would kill a whole lot of small-time events in San Francisco.

Although Newsom complained to the press about "fly-by-night promoters," the city’s full of well-established people who do shows at various clubs with various programs a few times a year or a few times a month — and most of them are small-time operators. Very few have ever had any problems with the law, or promoted a show that led to violence — but most of them would have to shut down, because the $1 million in insurance money would be too expensive.

The Bay Area Reporter suggested March 13 that the bill could harm nonprofit events promoters by forcing them to devote much of the charitable take from their shows to paying for insurance and security plans.

We just don’t see how any of this really addresses the problem of violence outside of San Francisco clubs (and we don’t really see that clubs are to blame for much of the violence in the city anyway). When Sup. Ross Mirkarimi tried to get Mayor Newsom to put cops on foot in high-crime areas, the mayor balked. When Sup. Chris Daly tried to create a violence-prevention program that might have actually gotten to the root causes of this horrible pattern of kids killing one another, the mayor rejected it.

Instead, he wants to create a strange and ineffective plan to give police an excuse to arrest the wrong people that will penalize the small promoters who every week give so much to the city’s cultural landscape.

If club owners are concerned about crowds fomenting violence outside their doors, then the problem needs to be addressed. But this is an ass-backward way to do it. The supervisors need to rip this plan apart and start fresh.

Sharing the pain

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EDITORIAL We’re generally not for cutting employee salaries to address the city’s budget deficit. And we’ve never been fond of claiming that doctors and lawyers who earn less-than-market wages working for the city of San Francisco should be penalized because they earn what appear in newspaper stories to be fat paychecks.

But Sup. Aaron Peskin was not on the wrong track when he suggested, only slightly facetiously, that Mayor Gavin Newsom ought to be looking for high-paid staffers to cut instead of slicing services for the poor. Peskin’s point was not so much that the top layers of city bureaucracy were outrageously overpaid (although a few of the mayor’s aides and some of the department heads he’s hired could fit in that category) but that all of the cuts have come at the bottom. Find 10 surplus bureaucrats making $150,000 a year and you could save the entire program that provides public-health nurse visits for chronically ill San Franciscans.

Sure, some of this is politics: Newsom is taking a stab at the mayor with a suggestion bound to win popular support. But it’s also a serious policy issue: when the city’s in the red, where should the burden fall? In Newsom’s current budget proposals, it falls almost entirely in the wrong places.

Eliminating a deficit of more than $300 million is daunting. Of course, the city wouldn’t have this problem if Newsom and his predecessors had been willing to look at obvious (and flexible) sources of new revenue. Public power alone would’ve brought in almost enough to cover this year’s shortfall (and would have earned the city so much cash during the better years that it could have been set aside in a rainy-day fund to prevent these kinds of budget roller-coasters). The city’s major taxes are a regressive mess; fixing the business tax alone (and making it more progressive) would help the economy and allow the city to raise cash from those most able to pay.

In other words, instead of axing nurses who help sick and housebound senior citizens, Newsom ought to be looking for money from the wealthy.

But right now, the mayor is talking only cuts — and for the most part, only cuts of lower-paid, front-line workers. The least the mayor could do is make a good-faith effort to share the pain. Looking for 10 useless high-paid execs in order to save public health nursing? How about former Sup. Bill Maher, who earns $144,838 out at the airport, where the last time we checked (see Here’s Bill; 5/26/06) he hardly ever showed up for work? Nine more patronage cronies, Mr. Mayor, and you’ll make the nut.

The price of gold

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› news@sfbg.com

Five years ago, the overseers of San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge were facing a $454 million budget deficit. That figure was larger than the gross domestic products of East Timor, the west African country of Gambia, and the Independent State of Samoa.

Investigative reporter Thomas Peele of the Contra Costa Times decided to try and figure out how a bridge in the United States could amass a funding shortfall that dwarfed the economic output of entire nations. For one, he reported in a 2002 story, the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District used money from the tolls paid by motorists to bankroll an expensive transit system that includes a network of buses in Marin County and a fleet of ferry boats that collectively cost millions per year to operate.

Peele also discovered that the bridge’s 19-person board of directors, some members of which live far from the Bay Area, spent more than $56,000 over a two-year period just to cover trips — including meals, rental cars, and hotels — to regular meetings at the Golden Gate’s administrative offices in San Francisco.

The embarrassed district promised reforms and vowed to get its economic house in order.

But five years later, we’ve learned, very little has changed.

The district touts its substantial cuts in overhead, insisting everything possible has been done to avoid raising the toll on motorists. But the Golden Gate Bridge District’s financial problems aren’t going away — and the only solution the administration can come up with is perpetual toll increases.

Even that answer poses huge problems. The bridge doesn’t expect that the actual volume of toll-paying motorists, or the ridership on its buses and ferries, will rise in the near future at the same pace as its expenses, which are largely consumed by employee salaries, benefits, and other perks that the district’s hundreds of workers, including its board members, enjoy.

Public records show today that the district pays for health insurance for 14 of the (very) part-time directors. Last year alone, that insurance combined cost $48,000 — even though several of the board members, including two mayors and four county supervisors, are already eligible for insurance coverage in their home counties.

The bridge district’s projections show vast deficits stretching off into the next decade — and if the problem isn’t solved, a public transit system will be at risk. Riders, among them a high number of business commuters, make 9.4 million annual trips on Golden Gate’s transit system. If the fiscal mess continues unabated, the board will either have to hike tolls to larger numbers ($10, $15, $20?) or start cutting back on the buses and ferries.

The only alternative, says Golden Gate board member and San Francisco supervisor Gerardo Sandoval, may be to ask state lawmakers for the right to change the district’s charter so it can raise money a different way, such as through sales or parcel taxes.

But many of the board members, who benefit from the lucrative sinecure and the power of this bureaucracy, don’t want to take that risk. "Their fear is that if they go to Sacramento, no one’s going to ask them their opinion," Sandoval told us. "The end result is going to be some legislation that significantly changes the way the bridge is run."

BUY A BIB, SAVE A BRIDGE


Bridge officials say the projected deficit was a lot worse five years ago, before they instituted cost-cutting measures. The biggest cuts came in the form of eliminating nearly 200 positions, about a fifth of the workforce. The district also instituted a hiring freeze and forced workers to negotiate wage rollbacks and share more of the costs of their medical coverage.

Bus services from the district’s fleet of 200 were reduced by 22 percent in March and November of 2003, and taking a bus from Marin to San Francisco now costs 34 percent more than it did five years ago. The weekday fare for a ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco was raised a whopping 118 percent, and available ferry seats were reduced 23 percent by cutting trips. It can cost between $7 and $8 one-way to ride Golden Gate’s ferries and buses today.

But over the next five years, the district still anticipates its deficit will reach $91 million.

So after raising the toll five years ago, bridge officials want to do so again as soon as September. Motorists would pay $6 in cash, $5 if using a FasTrak prepaid device, and $3 instead of $1.50 for disabled drivers.

"It seems pretty clear that the [bridge’s] staff is driving the board of directors, and not the other way around, toward infinite toll increases," Sandoval said. "It’s a ludicrous idea, but that’s the only one they have right now."

Earnest bridge staffers point out in reports prepared for the public that they’ve implemented "revenue enhancements," such as putting out a donation box for visitors who might be willing to give up some pocket change and creating special sales programs at the gift shop.

Online trinkets for sale have even been expanded. At Goldengate.org you can purchase a piece of the bridge’s original cable for $175 or an $8 baby bib that reads "Golden Gate Bridge: Big, Strong and Awesome, Just Like My Dad."

But that’s not going to add up to $91 million.

Meanwhile, the anticipated deficit doesn’t even include capital projects like the nearly $185 million the district wants to spend overhauling and replacing its buses and ferries, or the $36 million it hopes to spend over the next 10 years deterring suicides, which are perhaps the second best-known feature of the Golden Gate Bridge after its aesthetic beauty.

And, of course, the bridge constantly needs repainting, thanks to the wind and salt air. "There’s more [required] maintenance on the Golden Gate Bridge than any other bridge in the country because of where it’s at…. It has to be looked after everyday by a crew of ironworkers and painters and whatever else is needed," said board president John Moylan.

The district’s largest operating expense involves paying the remaining 836 full- and part-time workers at the bridge and granting them fringe benefits like insurance coverage and supplemental pensions. This year alone salaries and benefits will cost about $100 million.

THE RED INK MOUNTS


About 60 percent of the district’s budget goes toward keeping its ferries and buses running, but key performance measures show that Golden Gate’s transit system does poorly in three crucial areas, including cost efficiency and effectiveness. When compared with national averages, Golden Gate Transit has one of the top five highest operating costs per "vehicle revenue mile" — a barometer of efficiency — out of the 150 largest transit agencies nationwide, making it more inefficient than BART, AC Transit in Alameda County, and the transportation authorities in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to 2005 figures maintained by the federal Department of Transportation.

It’s common for transit systems to rely on government subsidies, and few environmentalists have sympathy for drivers who whine about toll increases from the comfortable interiors of their automobiles. Mass transit is the future of urban living.

"The Golden Gate Bridge may not be as efficient as other comparable systems," Sandoval said, "but if we abandon the investment we have made in mass transportation, it will really leave us with poor options in the years to come."

Alan Zahradnik, Golden Gate’s director of planning, adds that the bridge’s buses and ferries are dissimilar to other transit systems around the country because they tend to carry fewer commuter passengers over greater distances mostly during peak hours compared to transportation authorities like San Francisco’s Muni and AC Transit.

"It’s more expensive to provide suburban, fixed-route transportation," Zahradnik said.

Nonetheless, without an increase in the toll for motorists, the bridge expects to sustain annual deficits for each of the next 10 years until the red ink reaches $290 million.

So it would seem that if the district is asking everyone to tighten their belts, its board of directors should probably do the same. The extraordinarily large 19-member Golden Gate board contains more than twice as many directors as the seven-member board that oversees Muni’s trains and buses and the nine-member board that governs BART.

That’s a throwback to history. When the bridge district formed in 1928, several counties north and south of the span were asked to participate in the $35 million bond issue required to construct a road across the Golden Gate, and although the bonds were paid off decades ago, each of those counties still receives representation on the board.

"There have been attempts to topple the bridge district in the past, but they’re so hard-wired, it’s been impossible," said Susan Deluxe, a Tiburon resident and long-time critic of the district.

The list includes two counties located far to the north, Mendocino and Del Norte — the latter bordering Oregon. But the board’s structure hasn’t been tinkered with since its formation.

When asked whether the far-flung board has outlived its usefulness, the representative from Del Norte County, Gerald Cochran, explained that the distant jurisdictions help diminish tension between the representatives from San Francisco and Marin, who frequently argue over who should contribute more to maintain the bridge. Besides, he said, Del Norte stepped up to help make the Golden Gate Bridge happen in the first place.

"It’s not what we do today," Cochran said, "it’s what we did 75 years ago to get this bridge built. We make our contributions."

The travel expenses of the two directors representing Del Norte and Mendocino counties were the highest board-meeting travel costs he found back when Peele first reported on the board’s budget — $42,404 to cover trips from their home counties to San Francisco for regular board meetings over two years.

In 2002, bridge officials told the public that the district’s top-heavy administration would spend less along with everyone else to save money. The newest $6 toll was proposed "with the understanding that staff will continue to focus on finding internal cost savings," one staff report promised.

But that’s not exactly what new numbers we obtained from the district through a public records request show. Transporting distant directors to district meetings over the past two years cost more than $54,000.

Exasperated district staffers respond that travel for board members to conferences around the globe has already been trimmed and the number of regular meetings they hold in San Francisco were cut to save on the $50 stipends board members traditionally earned per meeting for serving.

A HEALTHY PERK


A majority of the directors receive health insurance coverage from the district, either Blue Shield or Kaiser — a perk that few other part-time boards in the state offer. Last year, that cost $48,000.

But many of the directors already receive coverage from plans in their home counties. The bridge paid $1,200 last year to cover Mike Kerns; he is also a Sonoma County supervisor, where he’s on a second plan that includes life, dental, vision, and health coverage — and costs taxpayers there about $63,000 annually, the clerk of Sonoma County’s board told us. Kerns was on vacation when we called his office at press time.

Board member Albert Boro receives health insurance through the bridge, but taxpayers in San Rafael, where he’s the mayor, pay an additional $19,000 annually to cover him there, according to figures provided by San Rafael’s city manager.

But Boro told the Guardian that the bridge coverage is "secondary and it’s only utilized when my primary doesn’t cover something…. It’s not a premium in the sense that it might be through the city [of San Rafael]."

Three San Francisco supervisors participate in the plan offered here for county employees, which annually costs taxpayers approximately $10,500 per person, according to the controller’s office. But the bridge also covers those individuals. The list includes Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval and costs a total of $14,000 to cover all three of them, according to district numbers we requested.

Ammiano said the benefit could be done away with if it truly became a burden on the bridge’s budget. "That would take the will of the board," he said. "[Doing away with it is] not something I would be against, but I can only speak for myself."

Board director Bevan Dufty, also a San Francisco supervisor, declined to sign up for the coverage when he joined the bridge’s board in 2005.

"I had insurance and it seemed duplicative to me … I meet with people every day who don’t have insurance from all walks of life and so I felt fortunate," Dufty said.

Only about 12 percent of the 450 or so special districts that responded to a survey two years ago asking about health coverage said they offered such benefits to their directors or trustees, according to Neil McCormick, head of the California Special Districts Association. The group represents around 900 waste management, utility, fire, and recreation districts across the state. The Golden Gate district is not a member.

The real problem here is that after the district retired its bond debt in 1971, it never came up with an adequate revenue source to cover all of its operating or capital costs. Bridge officials never sought from state lawmakers a mechanism, for instance, to borrow money at a fixed rate, like school districts do.

So what will the bridge do in five more years? Nobody seems to know. According to San Francisco board member Janet Reilly, "That’s the $64,000 question…. There’s only so much toll tolerance among drivers."

Complexions Contemporary Ballet

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PREVIEW It’s about time. This Saturday, Complexions Contemporary Ballet is finally making its Bay Area debut. The company is 14 and travels all over the globe, from Israel to New Zealand. Founded by former members of Albert Ailey American Dance Theater Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson, the company started out small, primarily with duets Rhoden created for himself and Richardson. In the Bay Area, Rhoden’s work has been seen most often during the Ailey company’s yearly gigs. In 2002, the Oakland Ballet (then under the leadership of Karen Brown) debuted his Glory Fugue to much acclaim. Meanwhile, Richardson, a principal guest artist of American Ballet Theater, is mesmerizing in whatever capacity he chooses to perform. In the Bay Area he is best known for the title role in San Francisco Ballet’s filming of Othello. Today, Rhoden is a hot item in musical theater, film, video, and jazz, as well as ballet and modern dance. Complexions’s 20-odd dancers continue to focus most of their endeavors on the prolific Rhoden’s choreography, which favors speed, angularity, and the kind of power attacks even a William Forsythe could admire. As performed by Complexions, the pieces showcase forceful dancers who draw their perspectives from a wide variety of backgrounds — both artistic and cultural. The program for this one-night stand includes a solo by Ailey dancer Abdur-Rahim Jackson; the rest of the program is entirely by Rhoden and features the recent Dear Frederic (2007), an homage to Chopin, and honors Marvin Gaye with the closer Chapters Suite (2007), which Rhoden peopled with a fabulously eclectic mix of street characters.

COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET Sat/5, 8 p.m., $25–$40. Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. (415) 499-6800, www.marincenter.org

Careers & Ed: Degrees of separation

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› culture@sfbg.com

Julia Cosart spends her days attending to San Francisco’s skin woes — unwanted hair, unwelcome wrinkles, and clogged pores — at Spa Radiance. Her calm, self-assured, soothing demeanor is not unlike the atmosphere of the spa in which she works. Which is why it’s hard to imagine her in the fast-paced, cutthroat world of advertising.

But that is where Cosart imagined herself ending up, having graduated in 2004 from the University of Nevada at Reno with a combined degree in advertising and journalism. After college, she tried her new career on for size with an advertising internship. "I realized I hated it," she says.

After working a few other jobs, including a stressful stint at a home for troubled youth, she decided to become an aesthetician by training at Miss Marty’s School of Beauty in San Francisco. Now, she says, "I love what I do. I only work three days a week, but make enough to live in a beautiful San Francisco apartment. Most importantly, I don’t go to a job I hate every day. There is very little stress in my life, and that’s no accident."

Cosart isn’t alone. According to experts like Alexandra Robbins, author of Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis: Advice from Twentysomethings Who Have Been There and Survived (Perigee, 2004), Cosart represents a current movement among recent (and not-so-recent) college graduates who are entering jobs that have nothing to do with their degree(s), or with a traditional four-year college at all. Generation Y is not one that leaves college to head straight for the embrace of the corporation that will keep them until retirement; people now in their mid-twenties will most likely change careers several times throughout their life. They are also delaying getting married and having children, deferrals that make it less appealing or necessary to immediately seek out a career-track job.

"I know someone who went to an Ivy League school and then became a mailman," Robbins says. "People are starting to realize that college isn’t a direct segue to the ‘real world.’"

TIME IS MONEY. SO IS MONEY.


For many college grads following this path, the appeal is both more money and more free time. While their newly graduated classmates work 50 hours per week to earn $25,000–$45,000 per year in typical post-BA employment, grads who take jobs that don’t require degrees (such as in the service industry) can earn much more.

That’s why Bert Ladner slings sushi to the Gucci-clad Financial District masses instead of using his degree in finance from San Francisco State University to be an entry-level accountant. In an ironic twist, he says, "I’ll definitely be waiting tables until I pay off my student loans. It would be impossible to pay those off on an entry-level salary."

It’s hard to track a server’s average "salary" — pay varies widely from restaurant to restaurant (and temperament to temperament) — but it’s estimated that a server could make $60,000 per year in a high-end restaurant. Ladner makes as much as $50,000.

Even better, he says, the lack of a set salary provides greater control over how much you make. "Need more money? Pick up an extra shift," Ladner says.

These jobs also provide more freedom about how you spend your time. Servers, aestheticians, and massage therapists all have control over the balance between money and time — and many seem to value the latter even more than the former.

"Quality of life is the top priority for the new generation for twentysomethings," explains Robbins. "It ranks higher than salary or prestige."

Some say this proves that Generation Y, widely considered to be navel-gazing, fun-loving, and responsibility-shirking, isn’t self-indulgent and lazy. It’s just that they’ve abandoned a Gordon Gecko-esque pursuit of status for a greater sense of equilibrium in life.

REAL CONNECTIONS


Another reason that service jobs seem to appeal to grads more than office jobs do is the increased level of human interaction.

"A trend I see a lot is students joining us after a few years in an office," says Rocky Hall of the San Francisco School of Massage. "In those jobs, they get tired of communicating electronically through e-mail, phone conferences, et cetera. They crave a genuine sense of connection with other people, which they find through massage."

Michelle Hamer, director of admissions for Miss Marty’s School of Beauty, agrees. "In a corporate world, it’s all done over e-mail and phone. There is an electronic wall between people. We are the last profession to touch people."

And even if grads aren’t actually touching people, they are meeting, talking to, and potentially spending social time with people they wouldn’t see in office jobs — both the clients they meet on the job and the friends they have more time for afterwards.

Riley Salant-Pearce says this is the benefit of waiting tables (he declined to name the restaurant). After earning his degree in biology from University of California, San Diego and guiding tours in Ecuador for a year, he found himself serving when he moved to San Francisco. Now, it’s hard for him to imagine doing a science job.

"I love the freedom of a restaurant job. I see my friends in 9-to-5 engineering and science-related jobs, and it’s too restrictive. They’re not having any fun. I make an equal amount of money, but I only work four nights a week," says Salant-Pearce, who estimates he makes about $40 an hour. "I make enough to live comfortably in San Francisco. Better than that, I can take time off to enjoy it."

He also likes the social environment of working in the service industry. "The restaurant was a great way to meet people," he says. "We all go out together when we get off. I realized I’m just too social to work in a lab."

Another selling point is that the interaction in these types of jobs tends to be of a happier, more relaxed sort. More often than not, those in the corporate world are stressed-out people dealing with other stressed-out people during work hours. The service industry sees those same corporate drones, but with their ties loosened at the bar or completely removed at the spa. Waiters and beauticians are salespeople, true, but they’re selling you something you already want. People want to buy drinks, eat lavish meals, enjoy massages, haircuts, and facials. This makes these industries sustainable.

"Beauty is a recession-proof industry," Hamer says. "People are always going to get their hair done. We maintain every other profession."

WHAT I COULD’VE BEEN


Yet many of these twentysomethings are consumed with self-doubt about "wasting" their college degrees. "Guilt does cause conflict for twentysomethings," Robbins says. "How do I weigh doing what I love with making enough money? A big part of that is image, thinking people judge them. It can take a big leap of faith to say, ‘You know what? This is how I’d like my life to be.’"

Christine Hassler, author of 20 Something Manifesto (New World), has been there. "After graduating from college, I became a successful Hollywood agent. By my mid-twenties, I had my own assistant," she says. "Agents are salespeople, and I don’t like sales. I was a nerd in high school, and the entertainment industry was the adult version of the popular crowd. I didn’t feel passionate about what I was doing. Now that I’m older, I realize that passion doesn’t come from external circumstances. But back then, I just felt lost."

So she decided to become a personal trainer.

"But I still felt lost. With all that education, I was counting to 12 in a gym all day. When people would ask what I did, I’d say, ‘I used to be an agent in Hollywood.’ I didn’t give value to personal training because it was frowned upon," she said.

Experts say part of getting over the guilt of having nondegree jobs is understanding they’re not just fun, easy, and carefree. Succeeding in them may not require a traditional degree, but they do require a certain amount of smarts and/or skill.

"Cosmetology requires an artistic background. You have to know people’s face shapes and what colors work on them," Hamer says. "Aestheticians approach skin from a medical perspective; they nurture and heal people with bad skin. And not everyone can do it. To be good, you have to be articulate and speak well to sell your product."

Cosart, who has been an aesthetician for three years, says she is "just now getting to the point where I’m really proud of it, where I’m not a little ashamed that this is what I’m doing with my college degree."

At the same time, Cosart is realizing that if she ever does want to rejoin the career track, it’ll take more than a BA to get her there. Since bachelor of arts degrees have become a dime a dozen, many twentysomethings feel pressure to get more advanced degrees to earn the prestige a BA might once have given them — and to distinguish themselves from the bachelor’s-holding lumpen. Cosart figures she’ll eventually go back to school, though she’s not sure what she’ll focus on. But if she does, she knows she’s learned a valuable lesson from this time outside the white-collar world.

"I’m grateful to have figured out early in life that in choosing a career, you must decide what you want your life to feel like, not what you want it to look like," she said. "Some people live for stress. I know because I listen their Blackberries buzz in their purses every 30 seconds even as I meticulously work the stress out of their pores and their shoulders. I’m not cut out for that, and I often wonder if they are."

Careers & Ed: Symphony of instruction

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› culture@sfbg.com

It may have been San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, but at times it felt more like a Pentecostal revival meeting. Forget about rules or decorum: when the spirit moved them, this crowd let loose. Imaginary batons twirled. Heads tick-tocked. Feet tapped. Giggling and applause burst out at all the wrong times.

You haven’t really experienced the symphony until you’ve sat among 2,200 first and second graders at their first live orchestra performance, hundreds of them conducting the orchestra from their seats.

"Movement is exactly what we want," says Ronald Gallman, director of the San Francisco Symphony’s Education Programs, Youth Orchestra and Adventures in Music (AIM) program. "We wouldn’t be doing our jobs if they were sitting with their hands folded in their laps."

Not everyone acts like inspired little savages; others revel in acting like adults. One girl watched the performance through a pair of improvised opera classes — tiny binoculars she brought from an explorer’s kit at home.

It’s somewhat of a relief to learn that kids of the iPod generation can still appreciate classical music. It helps that musicians in the AIM program understand a few basic principles of child psychology: keep performances short, allow plenty of opportunities to shout out and move around, and throw in a fart joke or two for good measure (the tuba player who introduced his instrument with a flatulent blast got the biggest laughs of any joke in the performance).

Founded in 1988, the AIM program serves first through fifth graders at every public elementary school in San Francisco — an impressive 75 schools — as well as third through fifth graders in some private and parochial schools, totaling more than 22,000 children. Beyond the innovation, this is only possible because the AIM program is funded entirely by private donors, foundations, and events like the Black and White Ball — which means that it’s offered at no cost to the schools. According to Gallman, this level of commitment to building equitable access to music education in public schools makes the San Francisco Symphony stand apart as a national leader.

The symphony performance is just one piece of the larger AIM curriculum, which includes four ensemble shows per year at each school as well as comprehensive materials to help teachers build interdisciplinary lesson plans around the AIM performances. Each school is able to choose the ensembles it wants — with options including jazz and all varieties of world music — thus allowing for culturally appropriate programming at different schools.

At the Claire Lilienthal School in the Richmond District on a recent school day, the Drei Brass trio had been chosen to perform for a gymnasium full of first and second graders seated on the floor, each of whom had been given a brightly colored plastic kazoo.

"Our show today is about three brass instruments and vibration!" announced Alicia Telford, the Drei Brass french horn player, her eyes wide and one eyebrow arched. She showed the kids how to feel the vibration in their vocal chords when they sung by placing a hand on the front of their neck.

Each of the brass players introduced himself as "an ambassador of ppppfffft," demonstrating that the music coming out of their instruments begins with a simple pppfffft blown into the mouthpiece — the same ppppfffft sound that the kids blow into their kazoos.

They also peppered their classical performance with recognizable tunes that the kids could intuitively follow, like the finger-snapping Pink Panther theme.

Kazoo-induced hyperactivity aside, it seems that teachers by and large are nothing but grateful for the AIM programming in their schools.

"Music is a great way to keep some children engaged who might not be the best readers or [who are] a bit behind. It’s a great way to keep them in the school system through high school."

According to JR Jowkalsky, a reading teacher at Willie L. Brown Jr. elementary school in the Bayview, the number of students who pursue orchestra or band in middle school has "mushroomed" as a result of the AIM Program.

Keith Jones, who has been teaching for 20 years and currently runs the 40-piece band at Willie L. Brown, reports that about one-sixth of the potential band students participate in the music program. Anything over 10 or 15 percent participation is considered good.

"AIM has given me 10 violins, symphony tickets for the kids, concerts here at school," he said. "It provides things that I could never provide to my students."

While the AIM program alone cannot revive public-school music education in an era of restricted funding, it’s not a far stretch to say that exposing every single public school student by the end of fifth grade to five symphony visits and 20 ensemble performances must help pick up the slack.

Now, if only there was something AIM could do to preserve the sense of wonder and complete abandon with which these kids enjoyed the symphony for the first time, conducting wildly from their seats like no one is watching.

To China, with (tough) love.

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“If there is not alarm, if there is not protest, that too would be news, that would be San Francisco complicit,” said Sup. Chris Daly today.

Daly’s words came as he and Sups Tom Ammiano, Bevan Dufty, Jake McGoldrick, Sophie Maxwell, Ross Mirkarimi, Aaron Peskin and Geraldo Sandoval passed a resolution that condemns China’s human rights record and directs San Francisco to accept the Beijing Olympic torch, with “alarm and protest,” when it arrives April 9.

The 8-3 vote was met with applause and whoops of “Free Tibet” and came on the heels of Daly’s eloquent speech in which he highlighted China’s ongoing violations of human rights, its brutal pre-Olympic crackdown that left 140 dead in Tibet, its persecution of the Falun Gong, its suppression of democracy, as illustrated by students facing down the tanks in Tiennemen Square, and its support of genocide in Darfur and dictatorship in Burma.

“The torch is coming to our City. With it comes China’s record and the attention of the press. The eyes of the world will be watching San Francisco,” Daly said.

“Our mayor and the President of the United States share the notion that the Olympics and politics somehow need to be compartmentalized, that we should deal with them separately, but t that’s impossible with an event on this scale and this magnified ,” said Daly, as he referenced the Olympic Games of 1936, 1968, 1980 and 1984–all heavily loaded occasions

“Our history and politics are intertwined with the Olympics,” said Daly, who also referenced the “land use politics” that dogged the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Voting against Daly’s resolution were Newsom allies, Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu and Sean Elsbernd.
A second resolution to welcome the Olympic torch, the Human Rights Torch and the Tibetan Freedom Torch failed.

Mayor Gavin Newsom immediately sought to undermine the importance of Daly’s resolution, telling the Chronicle that “it’s only a statement and not a law,” as the Mayor’s Office tried to upstage Daly’s victory by releasing details of the torch’s route.

But Daly remained the hero of the hour, swarmed by a crowd of paparazzi as he left the Board’s Chambers.

Acknowledging that his resolution is “highly symbolic,” Daly gave the credit to US Speaker Nancy Pelosi for bringing the world’s attention to China’s human rights’ abuses, and expressed his hope that the Board’s vote, coupled with Pelosi’s actions and statements, andother protests along the way, “can lead to greater change.”

The April 9 torch relay start 1 p.m with an opening ceremony at McCovey Cove. The torch will then travel along 3rd Street from McCovey Cove to the Embarcadero and past Fisherman’s Wharf to Jefferson Street.
From Jefferson, the torch will turn left on Hyde Street and travel a short distance to Beach Street, then to Polk Street near Aquatic Park.
The torch will head up Polk to Bay Street, then back to the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building at Justin Herman Plaza, where an area is designated for protesters.Protesters will also be allowed in Union Square, Portsmouth Square, Civic Center and Washington Square.

But city officials also say that groups won’t need a permit and and that they are expecting more protesters along the torch’s relay route than in the designated “free speech” areas.

Ammiano: Parking meters are now free

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Due to public protests, San Francisco parking meters will now be free. April Fools.

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on April Fools day, April l, 2008.) B3

New Deal Feted

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By David Carini

The New Deal turned 75 yesterday, March 31st. About 150 people turned out to the Koret Auditorium in the main SF library to mark the occasion and to listen to a six-person panel discuss the series of landmark government initiatives. Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi, two authors and two union organizers called for a return to the core principles of social justice and fair treatment that led to such things as minimum wage laws and the formation of social security.

“They did it in the 30’s, we can do it now,” Harvey Smith, adviser to the Living New Deal Project, told the audience. Smith was upset over the potential privatization of the Cow Palace, and joked that the city may sell of chunks of Golden Gate Park soon.

Sup Daly’s main concern was affordable housing and making sure the city represents ordinary people instead of big downtown businesses. “We don’t have enough resources to fund what we need, like schools and hospitals because we give corporations too many tax loopholes,” Daly said.

The panel urged the audience to organize their communities in fighting the privatization of San Francisco, which they said would make this city a haven for the elite. “The New Deal wasn’t just a gift from Congress, workers had to fight for it. If change is going to happen, it will be from the bottom up,” labor activist Karega Hart said.

Home Depot, good riddance

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So Home Depot has pulled out of its plans to build a giant store on Bayshore Boulevard. I hope Gavin Newsom, Sophie Maxwell, Aaron Peskin and all the others who supported this terrible deal are paying attention and get the point: You do business with big national chains and you’re more than likely to get screwed.

It’s the same thing that happened with the mayor’s wi-fi proposal: City officials got all excited about a promise from a big private-sector operator that cares nothing for San Francisco – and when the dollars didn’t add up, the vendor bailed.

In both cases, the deal was bad for the city. Home Depot would have hurt small businesses, brought horrible traffic to nearby neighborhoods and done little for the local economy.

And the whole thing stunk of sleaze: Former mayor Willie Brown began pushing the deal after his political consultant, Jack Davis, was hired by the company to lobby him.

But the supervisors went along with it, by a 6-5 vote (with Peskin casting the swing vote for the chain) – and now the city is back to the drawing board. If the supes had rejected Home Depot, we could be well underway toward creating a community-based alternative for the site.

That’s what Sup. Tom Ammiano wants to start working on now. “We need to get a collaborative effort going to find the proper use for that site,” he told me.

Meanwhile, Newsom is calling Home Depot to make one last push. He wants to company to put its plans on hold, instead of abandoning them. In other words, he’s asking that the site be left empty for as long as Home Depot wants.

Talk about a stupid idea.

Gorilla escapes from San Francisco zoo

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According to a statement posted today, a gorilla has escaped from the San Francisco Zoo and officials have not yet located the animal. Here’s video purporting to document the gorilla moving around the outside of the zoo.

>

*Closely observe the site linked above. Someone’s on a mission.

SPORTS: Fantasy baseball’s dark side

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By A.J. Hayes

My name is Tony H. and I’m a fantasy baseball player.

There I said it.

Actually I haven’t been an active participant in fantasy ball in more than a decade, but sometimes the urge to seek out “post-hype sleepers” and under-the-radar bargains in fantasy publications is so strong that I have to leave Barnes & Nobles immediately

Apparently, I will be a fantasy baseball player for life.

fantasy.jpg
Evil?

It all started innocently enough back in 1993, when a co-worker introduced me to his in-house league. Figuring it was another way to put my absorption of all things baseball to use and earn some pocket cash at the same time, I showed up at the “draft” – held in a clandestine conference room on the Saturday morning before the start of the baseball season – with a rough idea of what I wanted my team to look like and three crisp twenties from the ATM.

I felt like a real big-league general manager at the draft, and the blueberry bagels weren’t so bad either.

Being a Giants fan, my goal was to select as many San Francisco players as reasonably possible and then flesh out the rest of the squad with pre-inter-league play American Leaguers. That way, there would be no conflict of interest with my team and my team.

That first season I managed to land Barry Bonds to play the outfield and selected fellow -Giants Robby Thompson and Royce Clayton as my keystone combo. The rest of the squad was filled out with the likes of Joe Carter, Mo Vaughn, Lance Johnson and Paul O’Neill. I made one or two exceptions to my rule, selecting National League players such as catcher Joe Oliver, outfielder Bernard Gilkey and a couple of senior circuit pitchers including a youngish Curt Schilling and Steve Avery of the Braves.

When the season began I became ensconced in baseball like never before – raising in the early – pre-internet — hours to scour the morning boxes and tabulate “my guys” total bases, their RBI output and stolen bases.

It made going to work a bit more fun, especially when I would pass one of my fellow fantasy players in the hall after Chuck Finley threw one of his league leading 13 complete games that season – that’s a lot of extra points – or Tom Henke racked up another save.

But by mid-season, the fun turned into serious business. I blew a gasket when Felix Jose failed to live up to the hype with another 0-for-5 game and when Ben McDonald hit the skids after I inserted him back into my starting lineup.

The real life Giants meanwhile were having an amazing campaign in ’93.

Raise your voice for nightlife!

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There’s some heinous new legislation targeted at pretty much killing independent nightlife in the city coming up, folks. Mayor Gavin Newsom and Supe Sophie Maxwell think it’ll curb violence happening outside some of the bigger clubs, but the proposals — requiring even the smallest promoters to apply for permits and show proof of $1 million in liability insurance, as well as citing anyone who stands outside a club for more than three minutes unless smoking or hailing a cab — would wipe out a ton of vital little parties and charitable events after dark. Read more about it here. (And look for our editorial on the subject in Wednesday’s Guardian.)

nightlife.jpg
Nightlife: Even Swedish kids like it!

Here’s your chance to speak up about this to the Entertainment Commision! Info courtesy of the fab DJ Raverpup, who’s spearheading the resistance.

Hi everyone,

Just a reminder that tomorrow, Tuesday, April 1, the Entertainment Commission meeting will have the new promoter permits on the agenda, and the floor will be open for members of the public to make comments for up to three minutes. We need to get a good turnout of independent promoters (and party people) to comment on this and make it apparent how this new legislation will affect us and San Francisco nightlife. The meeting will be at 4PM at City Hall; follow the link below for more information.

http://www.sfgov.org/site/entertainment_page.asp?id=78062

Give me a break, Matt Smith

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I’m starting to wonder how many times I’m going have to fight this battle.

For five weeks, as our predatory-pricing case against the SF Weekly was in trial, Andy Van De Voorde, the Denver-based hit man who works for Village Voice Media, attacked me, attacked the Guardian, attacked our witnesses and attacked the whole idea that an independent paper had the right to go to court to fight a predatory attack by a national chain.

When a San Francisco jury found (by an 11-1 margin) that VVM and its local outlet, the SF Weekly, had sold ads below cost for seven years with the intent to harm the Guardian – a violation of state law – Van De Voorde attacked the judge, the jury and the law itself.

Then when we started to talk about what the verdict meant, the hit man retailed the same old arguments all over again, in yet another blog post.

And now Matt Smith, the Weekly columnist who is often wrong on the issues but generally has some sense, has jumped in with what appears to be a preview of the arguments we can expect when the Weekly pursues its appeals.

Rhymin’ Riot XX-style at Yerba Buena

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By Vanessa Carr

muz.jpg
Julie Atlas Muz (photo: Karl Giant)

Opening tonight, Fr/28, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is The Way That We Rhyme a multimedia group show featuring work by a heavy-hitting line up of contemporary female artists that emphasizes performance and interaction.

Aptly titled, The Way That We Rhyme references a lyric from Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic,” a lengthy shout out to the feminist foremothers and heroines – from Angela Davis and Gertrude Stein to Kara Walker and Yoko Ono – who have shaped and inspired the current generation. Fittingly, Le Tigre’s homage includes Vaginal Davis and Tammy Rae Carland, two artists featured in the Yerba Buena show.

Le Tigre performs “Hot Topic”

Tonight’s opening party features San Francisco punk outfit Brilliant Colors and folk-bluesy rockers The Sarees, a DJ set by Erase Errata’s Jenny Hoyston, and performances by feminist performance and video art collective Toxic Titties and crazy comedienne extraordinaire Dynasty Handbag, as well as a film screening and interactive projects by a number of the participating artists.

Dynasty Handbag – “The Quiet Storm” By Jibz Cameron, Hedia Maron 2007

But it seems that Saturday – with its full schedule of interactive programs – is the day not to be missed.

City sees (stars and) tiger stripes

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Kulbir and Amritpal Dhaliwal– the brothers attacked Christmas Day at the San Francisco Zoo by Tatiana the Siberian tiger–have sued San Francisco.
sm-tiger-background.jpg
Readers may recall that following the attack, the City accused the Dhaliwal brothers, who saw Tatiana fatally maul their friend Carlos Souza Jr, of taunting the tiger, lying to the authorities and being under the influence.

But now the attorneys for the Dhaliwal brothers are claiming that that their clients have been “defamed by a public relations firm, acting as an agent of the City and County of San Francisco and the San Francisco Zoo. Members of the public relations firm, including but not limited to Sam Singer, made false statements about Claimant’s action on the date of the attack.”

Kulbir’s attorneys note that their client suffered serious physical and emotional injuries, including deep lacerations and wounds, all over his body, head and face, requiring stitches, had surgery to both knees, and has scarring from the tiger attack.
imagesstandingtiger.jpg
Adorably majestic from afar, tigers are majorly fatal, up close and personal.

“Claimant has also been wrongfully deprived of the use of his vehicle, a 2002 BMW M3,” states Kulbir’s claim. “Further, Claimant has suffered emotional injuries as a result of the tiger attack as well as humiliation and degradation from the smear campaign brought against him.”

Kulbir’s brother, Amritpal, has filed a similar claim against the City, except that the extent of his injuries differ–and then there’s the fact that the Beemer, which the police subsequently impounded, only belonged to his brother.

The amount of damages Geragos is asking, on behalf of the Brothers Dhaliwal ?
“In excess of the jurisdictional minimum of ‘unlimited Jurisdiction’ of the Superior Court.”

Maybe the brothers will donate a portion of their award, assuming they win their case, to improve animal welfare at the zoo?
Maybe they won’t win.
But either way, this case keeps a needed spotlight on the Zoo, in terms of who runs it, how the money is being spent, why and whose interests are being best served.

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