This hasn’t been that big a deal in the local press, but isn’t it pretty screwed up that the mayor of San Francisco, the day after an oil spill that was causing catastrophic environmental problems in his city. took off to Hawaii on vacation?
I mean, he’s supposed to be in charge here, supposed to be a leader. He could have postponed his trip a few days, right?
By Rita Felciano
Bay Area Odissi dancer Asako Takami died on November 3, 2007 in San Francisco after a four-year battle with ovarian cancer. She was 47 seven years old. Founder and artistic director of the East Bay-based Pallavi Dance Group, Takami was an exquisite dancer and much-revered teacher of who had lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years. As a sign of their love and affection for this remarkable woman and artist, the Bay Area dance community honored her in a benefit at the Cultural Integration Fellowship in San Francisco on October 27, 2007.
Born in Nigata, Japan, Takami became interested in Odissi, the Indian classical dance style from the state of Orissa, at the age of 20. In 2000, in an interview with Hinduism Today she explained her fascination with the art. “I’d never seen women who were really beautiful and really powerful. That energy I’d never felt in anything — that was my first impression. I could not forget it.” For the next 15 years she studied with Smt. Kumkum Lal and Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in India and Japan. She gained international attention through her participation in Ralph Lemon’s Tree, part two of “The Geography Trilogy.” The work was performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October 2000.
Mythili Kumar, Artistic Director of Abhinaya Dance Company in San Jose, remembers Takami for her “exquisite grace and perfect technique.” Her death, she said, “is a tremendous loss to the dance world but I feel so fortunate that we got to know such a wonderful, humble and sweet person. We will miss her so much.” Takami is survived by friends and her partner Ralph Lemon. A memorial service will take place Sun/18 at 2 p.m. in the Bolinas Community Center, 14 Wharf Road, Bolinas.
photo courtesy of wmchu on flickr
I’ve ridden my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge hundreds of times, and often stopped to watch the sunset or to look down at the awesome power of the tide ripping by, but yesterday, for the first time, I walked all the way across. I noticed something I’d never seen before.
On the south tower, tucked among all the brass plaques noting the officials and feting the feat of construction that is the bridge, there was a monument to Pacific Gas & Electric, thanking them for donating all the lighting for the bridge.
I was standing with my friend, who’s an electrician, and who wryly noted that it’s PG&E that really won in that deal — the free lighting fixtures just translates to another guaranteed customer.
But what I was thinking was, gee, there was all this dust-up and opposition to any corporate sponsorship of the bridge to raise a portion of the $60 million for future repairs. Despite assurances from authorities that the bridge wouldn’t be renamed or adorned with company banners, it seems that nobody was interested in having the name of a corporation anywhere near the bridge or its immediate environs.
And here we have a corporation that has a long, litigious relationship with San Francisco, that costs taxpayers and ratepayers millions of dollars, and that regularly tries to purchase our goodwill through massive greenwashing campaigns and big dollar donations — and their name is bronzed right onto the bridge.
Nice. Classy.
What’s newsworthy about Board of Supervisor President Aaron Peskin changing his vote three weeks ago on Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier charter amendment tightening laws controlling the Ethics, Elections and Sunshine Commissions?
Nothing—except the real reason the Chronicle’s running dogs of the press were dragged out of their kennel this weekend to tear into Peskin’s Oct. 23 change-of-heart vote: the Gap’s Don Fisher is pissed off that he poured $185,000 into Prop. H, only to see it fail on the Nov. 6 ballot. So, now, he and his Republican allies are punishing Peskin for having the nerve to place the ultimately successful Prop. A on the ballot, thus defeating their well-heeled efforts to turn San Francisco into a giant parking lot.
By Justin Juul
After attending SF360 Film+Club’s recent screening of Freedom of Space — a film about the harsh realities of enjoying an illegal sport– and then meeting some friends in a Safeway parking lot for a midnight skate-jam on some shitty ramps, the only thing I can say is: Why the fuck hasn’t anyone built a decent skatepark in this city?
All the elements have been present for over a decade: thousands of people who would come to a park if there was one, business owners who are sick of calling the cops on skateboarders, cops who are sick of wasting their time, and a huge base of high-profile companies like High Speed Productions (Thrasher, Slap, Juztapoz), DLX Distribution (Spitfire, Thunder, Anti-hero, etc.), FTC and Huf that could easily ante up some funds for a project. And why doesn’t SF have something like The Burnside Project in Portland? Are SF skaters just too lazy, or is there some force working against them? Rather than go off on an un-researched rant about the SF skate community not doing its job, I thought I’d talk to someone who’s been in the trenches for a while.
The Burnside Project in Portland
To find out more about the reality of SF’s skate park struggle I spoke to Rick Dinardo, Co-Founder of the Bay Area Skate-park Coalition.
SFBG: So Rick, my main question is: Why doesn’t San Francisco, the birth place of modern day street skating, have a decent park?
Rick Dinardo: Oh my god, how much time do you have? Before I get into it, though, you should realize that San Francisco finally is getting a good centrally-located skatepark. It’s going to be in Portrero Hill, right by the regular park that’s been there for years. As for why it’s taken the city 30 years to get off its ass and build one, well, that has to do with red tape, real estate, government corruption, lack of interest, and a whole lot of other bullshit, mostly money related.
SFBG: Well okay, I understand it’s difficult to get licenses and land and all that, but why haven’t all the huge skateboard companies, especially the ones that capitalize on their SF roots, why haven’t they gotten together and just fucking done the thing? It seems like they have enough money to at least fund a DIY project if not something as amazing as Rob Dyrdek’s deal in Kettering, Ohio.
Dinardo: First of all, I think you’re overestimating how much money these companies are making. These parks cost millions and millions of dollars, and that’s in places like Scott’s Valley where there is still open space for building. Land prices in SF are out of this fucking world. Whatever those companies chose to donate would be a drop in the bucket in a situation like this.
Also… I don’t think the companies you mentioned are very community oriented. I mean, this is capitalism we’re talking about, and they’re trying to make money, not sustain a community. I don’t think they care as much about supporting skateboarding in SF as they do about making the sport popular across the globe.
What does it take to override a wartime Republican president’s veto? Water, apparently.
Thirty five years ago, facing a rising tide of discontent over polluted water, Congress overrode d Nixon’s veto of the October 15, 1972 Clean Water Act. As a result, municipalities were able to apply for federal funds to help build and improve their local sewage treatment plants, and water got cleaner, as a result.
Yesterday, facing a mounting tide of discontent over global warming and rising sea level are real, Congress (unable to end the war or provide health care for kids,) united to reject Bush’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act.
As a result, 900 water projects will receive federal funds, including restoration in the Florida Everglades and the replacement on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers of locks that farm groups say are crucial for shipping grain.
Here in California, the Act authorizes $1.3 billion for 54 projects, including $106 million to strengthen the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees—a shoring-up project that has profound implications for San Francisco Bay.
As Will Travis of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission told me this week, one of the central questions now facing this region is, ‘How do we build around a Bay that we know is going to get bigger, but we don’t yet know by how much?
“It’s a bit like seismic safety,” Travis said, noted that the 8-year plan that BCDC is proposing is just a proposal.
“It’s the beginning of a long conversation,” Travis explained. ” What’s not in that proposal yet is how the federal agencies and the business sector and the research facilities and laboratories fit in.”
Travis also admitted that this conversation could be “a struggle.”
“The first reaction of most people when they realize that sea level is rising and that we have a lot of extensive development on low lying areas around the Bay is, ‘Run for the hills!’”
“And that’s a reasonable course, until you realize the implications in an estuary that is the most urbanized in the United States,” added Travis, who believes that what’s needed is “a more nuanced approach.”
Part of that approach, suggests Travis, may involve some counter intuitive steps.
“In some places, we may see the encouragement of more development along the waterfront so we can use the economic engine to protect that development—and the low-lying areas behind it. That’s where it’s going to get interesting.”
As a harbinger of what’s to come, consider the battle that is breaking out over 1,400 acres that Cargill owns in Redwood City. Save the Bay and other environmental groups are urging Cargill to abandon plan to build homes on those acres, while Cargill is committed to developing those lands, and Redwood City is trying to decide what to do.
Fun, huh?
San Francisco may have to wait weeks for election results and undergo an complicated ballot-counting procedure, but we may not end up having to pay for it. That’s because the city is suing its election vendor, ES&S, for breach for contract, City Attorney Dennis Herrera and other city officials announced this morning. His press release follows:
By David Crockett
In what was maybe the least surprising news story since that guy from ‘N Sync announced he was gay, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom seemed headed for an easy reelection, even with the sparse returns on election night, when he and his supporters gathered at the Ferry Building.
“The best is yet to come,” Newsom told his followers, at the beginning and end of his speech, adding, “As great as we are, we can still be so much more.”
Shinichi Iova-Koga’s work is grotesque, beautiful, and funny. As a dancer he is never less than mesmerizing — ephemeral like smoke, limpid like a vernal pool. And yet he is an accidental dancer. The son of two painters, he was initially drawn to photography; at age 12 his bathroom doubled as a darkroom. Then, at San Francisco State University, he became a film major. "All the while," he says, "I was involved in theater, but I thought my main line was behind the camera."
The Oakland-born Iova-Koga also trained in Tadashi Suzuki’s method for actors, through which he was introduced to Butoh. Another influence was the investigative method of Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater. His most formative teacher, however, was Butoh dancer Hiroko Tamano: "While we were making rice balls one day, [Tamano] asked me if I wanted to join Harupin-Ha [Butoh Dance Theater]." After a while, like many of Tamano’s pupils, Iova-Koga needed to strike out on his own. He traveled to Japan and Germany to study and work with other Butoh masters and, not incidentally, learn to adapt the genre to his expressive needs.
Thanks to these shifts in focus, he has developed a personal form of mixed-media dance theater that integrates contradictory impulses — the ancient and the technological, the chaotic and the formal, nature and nurture. He might be called a dancer at the edge. To Iova-Koga, this may well be a compliment; he has said that "only a dance at the edge reveals the honest life." His process blurs the distinctions between categories of thinking, being, disciplines, and performing. He likes to dig into both humorous and horrible subjects. The resulting works have taken him around the world.
One of his early works, 1996’s Desert Body, showed dramatic flair but not much personal voice. Ironically, he says, "I first started with Butoh so that I could be a better director. Now by chance I am a dancer." He is very precise about what this means to him. Dancing, he has said, means "focusing on the body being danced. To mentally construct a choreography that ignores this is to create a false dance."
Iova-Koga is an avid solo performer as well as a collaborator; he is often inspired by the people around him. His harrowing Tasting an Ocean — influenced by his father’s having lived through the atomic bombing of Nagasaki at the age of five — kept a 2003 audience at the tiny Noh Space on the edge of their seats. His most recent, highly acclaimed solo, Milk Traces, which he has performed in Europe and Japan, was prompted by the birth of his daughter. He calls her his main teacher now: "I follow her without questions."
In ensemble pieces such as Heaven’s Radio, an adaptation of a Samuel Beckett radio drama, and this summer’s Our Breath Is as Thin as a Hummingbird’s Spine (cocreated with Nanos Operetta), Iova-Koga has worked with other Bay Area theater artists (Nils Frykdahl, Ken Rudstrom, and Allen Willner) and Butoh dancers Tanya Calamoneri and Leigh Evans. The duet Ame to Ame, featuring Yuko Kaseki, another Germany-based frequent collaborator, finds the two playing out a riotous male-female relationship in terms of both meanings of the word ame, Japanese for "candy" and "rain." The absurdist Cockroach casts Kaseki as the ghostly wife to Iova-Koga’s husband; she dances through his tea-slurping last moments. His newest enterprise is C(h)ord, which he’s collaborating on with Seattle’s Degenerate Ensemble. It premieres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on April 24, 2008.
Wooden Shjips released their "Dance, California/Clouds over Earthquake" 7-inch single (Sick Thirst) last year in much the same way as they had their instigating, self-released Shrinking Moon for You 10-inch: packaged in an unassuming, clear plastic sleeve with hardly any information besides song titles. Beyond sending bloggers and journalists into a tizzy over their sexy, squalling grooves, this set confirmed Wooden Shjips as essential California. While Devendra Banhart and Vetiver reel in mellow ’70s album rock and Comets on Fire carry the torch of scraping psychedelia in the key of Quicksilver Messenger Service, Wooden Shjips recover the dark star lurking behind flower power in groups like Blue Cheer and yes, the Doors. The A-side is all feverish face melt, but it’s on "Clouds over Earthquake" that the band really sets the agenda. A shapely guitar lead dissolves into the heat waves of a droning pulse, eventually giving way to band leader Ripley Johnson’s echo-chamber vocal: "Fire / The sun is rising / Cut through the black clouds / Over earthquake."
Their early records sold out their limited pressings long ago, a fact the band took into consideration when packaging the first 2,000 copies of its eponymous first album (Holy Mountain) with a bonus CD compiling all of the singles’ tracks. Besides being a warm gesture to new fans, the comprehensive packaging has the effect of consecrating Wooden Shjips’ reputation. It seems certain that this band is now at the helm of San Francisco’s ever-burgeoning psych-rock scene. There is also evidence of serious if subtle musical progress being made, from the cryptic garage rock of tracks like "Death’s Not Your Friend" to the artfully expansive arrangements of Wooden Shjips‘ culminating diptych, "Blue Sky Bends" and "Shine like Suns."
In keeping with their scattershot release history, Wooden Shjips have released a new 7-inch on yet another label, Sub Pop. Although many musicians are tailoring their work to iTunes, Johnson’s moved in the opposite direction, recognizing that the material nature of his band’s releases seals their music’s aura, which, redolent of ’60s and ’70s minimalist garage rock, occupies a very specific, romantic spot in many record collectors’ hearts. "It was inspired in part by private-press and limited-press records, like George Brigman’s Jungle Rot [self-released, 1975]," Johnson writes from New York, where Wooden Shjips recently played a round of CMJ festival shows. "More in the sense that if you make a record and put a lot of care into it, someone might discover it someday and dig it."
Long cognizant of the fetish for mystery objects, the singer-guitarist even went so far as to give away the first several hundred copies of Shrinking Moon for You. The gamble paid off nicely, judging by the piqued curiosity inspired by early raves the 10-inch drew from tastemakers like the Wire‘s Byron Coley and Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke. These reviews ignited the dash among critics to tease out the elements of the Shjips’ suggestive sound as so many influences; the Velvet Underground, the Doors, Terry Riley, and Spacemen 3 are most frequently named, though I’d also refer listeners to the burned-rubber daydream of Monte Hellman’s classic 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.
It would be silly to contend that the Shjips don’t work from the fierce template pioneered on the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat (Verve, 1967), but their cobalt blue jams hardly tell of an anxiety of influence. What matters with Wooden Shjips is the evident relish they take in reconfiguring the shards of a particular music history and the sense of utter bliss in their fire-and-brimstone sonic landscape.
Hey framer, don’t try to frame Jenifer K. Wofford. She’ll turn that frame into a threshold. Her creative identity ricochets from teacher to student to painter to performer to director to curator with a self-determining force that exposes the mutability of such labels.
In May, Point of Departure, Wofford’s evolving series of postcard-size portraits of Filipina nurses, was a highlight (along with understated contributions by Bill Jenkins and Alicia McCarthy) of the UC Berkeley MFA show at the Berkeley Art Museum. In late July and early August, Wofford and 8 of 14 other participating Bay Area artists — including 2007 Goldie winner Michael Arcega — journeyed to Manila, the Philippines, for the first of three installments of the traveling exhibition "Galleon Trade," which she conceived and organized. (The show’s next stop will be at San Francisco’s Luggage Store, and from there it will venture to Mexico City.)
It usually takes a large institution with major funding to assemble a project of "Galleon Trade"<0x2009>‘s scope, but Wofford can not only skewer a museum’s lust for colonialist decoration (as one third of the performance mob known as Mail Order Brides and in solo pieces such as 2005’s Chicksilog) but also do the cultural exchange work that these establishments somehow fail to achieve with all of their resources. "The word that came up for all of us was serendipity," she says, discussing "Galleon Trade"<0x2009>‘s Manila manifestation, which required last-minute scrambling between the city’s thriving visual art and experimental film and video venues. "The entire time we were there, there was just one intersection after another where things fell into place."
The community goals of Wofford’s "Galleon Trade" are counterpointed by her solo art endeavors, which repeatedly tap into transitional spaces and isolated states of being. Hospitals (in Point of Departure and 2006’s drawing-video project Nurse) and motels (in 2005’s installation Motel Cucaracha) are just two liminal zones that Wofford is drawn to as if they were magnetic fields. She explores both in a manner that pinches people’s assumptions about privilege and servitude and what makes an insider or an outsider. "I’m fascinated by borders, or places where people don’t belong," she says. In fact, for her next solo show (at Southern Exposure) Wofford plans to spotlight and perhaps parodically re-create metal detectors in order to tap into their tragicomic potential. This idea takes on another facet when Wofford mentions that her "bullshit detector" goes off anytime that she reenters the art world just after teaching in high school.
"I just can’t not be inappropriate," Wofford jokes, the triple negative demonstrating her affinity for the truth that often resides in awkwardness. "Comedians of color like Dave Chappelle know that you get heard by being funny — the court jester gets to stay in the court. Also, humor can be disarming for a lot of people." This quality, partly forged through her work with fellow MOB artists Eliza Barrios and Reanne Estrada, is present whether she’s displaying the absurdist properties of the Flip-Flop on a Stick (in a hilarious video homage to a hand-fashioned bug-killing contraption she found at a market in Manila’s Quiapo District) or proving Yma Sumac will have her revenge on Hollywood. "Most of my projects have been born from some infantile Beavis and Butthead moment," Wofford goes on to confess, the pop-cult reference pinging off the gray-hoodie poses she and her sister Camille adopted for the 2006 performance-painting Woffords, Paint. "After I stop laughing, I start thinking about why I was snickering."
Where do we come from, and where the hell are we going? Wofford has a keen sense of just how impossible it is to answer those questions, which means she’s as good a person as any to follow into the future.
A casual observer might simply call Kerry Laitala a filmmaker and leave it at that. But anyone who’s seen her spooky, intricate, delightfully creative works, including 2003’s Out of the Ether, 2005’s Torchlight Tango, and 2006’s Muse of Cinema, would certainly disagree. A self-described "media artist-archaeologist" whose art hinges not just on subject matter but on the physical manipulation of film stock, Laitala makes movies for viewers who’re willing to leave their preconceived notions about cinema at the screening-room door.
"Ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in the world don’t know what [experimental film] is," she said from the living room of her San Francisco apartment. The eclectic decor includes an array of Halloween decorations that Laitala displays year-round, stacks and stacks of books, and curiosities seemingly plucked from a cabinet of dusty Victorian delights. "A lot of people don’t like [experimental film] because it doesn’t fulfill their expectations of what cinema should be. They’re not interested in engaging with something that they’re not familiar with. That’s just human nature."
Having a limited audience doesn’t bother Laitala, who’s been making films since high school. She was first inspired after seeing a 16mm archival print of the Hindenburg explosion. "I was blown away by the paradox of how beautiful it was and how tragic it was too. How horrific and simultaneously incredible it was."
In college at the Massachusetts College of Art and grad school at the San Francisco Art Institute, Laitala pursued experimental filmmaking. At MassArt, "I saw Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart when I was 18 or 19 years old. That was where I became interested in experimental film and working with a medium in a way that’s more personal."
Since the late 1980s, Laitala has completed an impressive array of short films, installations, and projector performance works (including 2007’s Hocus Pocus, ABRACADABRA, recently staged at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley winery). Her art has screened all over the United States, Europe, and Asia, and she’s about to head down under for her Australian debut. The reason for her international popularity is clear: even if only point-one percent of the population embraces experimental film, Laitala’s works are exceptional — and anyone with a pair of eyeballs, even a befuddled popcorn-movie fan, can see it. Muse of Cinema, a 20-minute re-creation of the experience of going to the movies when movies were still being born, makes use of a serendipitous flea market find: antique magic lantern slides. The result is inspired, multilayered, and visually astonishing.
Five years in the making, Muse of Cinema also highlights Laitala’s technical skills. I asked her to explain hand processing, the technique she uses to create her vivid images. She told me, "After you’ve exposed your film in the camera, you have an image on the film, but you can’t see it. It’s a latent image. In order to bring the image out to the viewer’s eyes when you project it, you have to process it. You can either have a lab do that or you can do it yourself. When you process it yourself, you can manipulate the material. You’d have the pay a lab a lot more money to do that, but also [when you do it yourself] you have a lot more control. Oftentimes it has a handmade look to it because there might be certain kinds of idiosyncrasies with the way that you do the hand processing that’s different than how a lab would do it, where everything’s in a very standardized, sterile setting. With hand processing you can get a lot of interesting effects that are very hard to replicate digitally."
Muse of Cinema‘s soundtrack, created in collaboration with Robert Fox, is similarly complex, an evocative mix of sound effects and music snippets. Because they require her to gather plenty of material for her images and her soundtrack — and endlessly manipulate both to achieve the effects she desires — Laitala’s films are labor-intensive, which is part of the reason she enjoys making them. "I get a lot of ideas during the process of working with the material," she said. "You discover things that you would never set out to achieve if you had everything mapped out from beginning to end. I think a lot of artists work that way. People keep saying, ‘You gotta stop using the phrase experimental film, because experimental film makes it sound like you don’t know what you’re doing.’ It’s a really tricky thing. A lot of people call themselves film artists. You’re working with a medium in the same way that a painter would work with paint. You’re working directly with the stuff itself."
In a follow-up e-mail after our meeting, Laitala further explained herself: "My process is organic, utilizing elliptical forms, allowing my projects to evolve and become entities unto themselves. I am more interested in ideas that arise in a nonlinear fashion where my images can carry myriad meanings, for literal connotations are limiting." And there’s no limit to what this talented artist can achieve.
"Citizens. Wake Up. A new day is dawning in San Francisco and all over the world."
Keith Hennessy, "A Speech to the Poor Artists," San Francisco City Hall, Oct. 4, 2000
Keith Hennessy has made work in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, yet he has stayed at the margins all this time. Yes, his audiences are good, and they show up time after time to watch his latest work, but he hasn’t gotten the grants that would allow him to do big tours or reach a more mainstream audience. Maybe he prefers it that way. Maybe big audiences wouldn’t be comfortable with hearing what he has to say. But Hennessy is that rare artist who succeeds in transutf8g fierce social concerns into artistically satisfying creations that enlighten and entertain.
"Why are you wasting your time researching the grace, beauty, and strength of the human body in motion?"
Hennessy started out as a competitive social dancer in his native Canada and worked his way to San Francisco by clowning, juggling, and doing political street theater. In the Bay Area he studied with Lucas Hoving; in 1985 he became a founding member of Contraband, the most radical dance-theater group of the period. He has had a roller coaster existence ever since, pushing himself to develop new theatrical expressions that allow him to explode the conventions of form in order to speak to and about the marginalized: the poor, the victims, the ostracized, and the homeless. Against all odds he believes in art’s power to reassume its ritualistic and healing function.
"Stop trying to hack your way alone through hostile jungles in the dead of night. Take the FreeWay. It’s paved and easy, and a 24-hour SafeWay is always available."
One of Hennessy’s most daring and controversial pieces was his 1989 solo Saliva, for which he collected spit from willing audience members, mixed it with pigment, and painted his naked body with it. It was an extraordinary act of defiance, courage, and solidarity — as well as spectacular theater.
Spectacle, Hennessy has discovered, is a way to draw in audiences, not to expose them to mindless entertainment but to amuse and challenge them. This can be an intoxicating mix. During his four years with the French circus Cahin-Caha, he became an experienced aerialist and refined his skill of using circus, cabaret, and other popular art forms to create works that foster a sense of community and a set of shared values that are difficult to resist. Hennessy believes in the power of the imagination and in art as a spiritual practice. He also allows his collaborators the full range of their own imaginations.
Last year’s double bill "How to Die" was raw, violent, and difficult to watch. Both pieces examined the erotics of death. SDF USA (Sans domicile fixe, i.e., homeless) paid tribute to the many homeless people, primarily male, who kill themselves every year. American Tweaker honored disco diva Sylvester and an era of unprecedented sexual abandon and sense of liberation within the gay community.
This year’s Sol Niger is probably Hennessy’s best work yet. Looking at the devastation humankind has brought on itself — up to the present day — through a series of tightly structured vignettes, the work celebrates and laments the glory and the frailty of being alive. This is activist art that works — as art and as a call to action. Sol Niger returns to Project Artaud Theater from January 16 to 26, 2008.
"Citizens of San Francisco. Citizens of the second millennium. Wake up. The global city is yours. Blessed be."
One of the first things to strike you about a foolsFURY production is its sheer kinetic energy and rigorous physical vocabulary. Hovering somewhere between modern dance and mime, or maybe the fashion runway and the circus, the movement of the actors onstage suggests tightly coiled regimentation and an unpredictable, acrobatic freedom. Bodies rewrite the most seemingly inconsequential gestures as larger than life or in an altogether different register, so that you might suddenly see and wonder at them.
But the next thing to strike you will surely be the words. From its first outing nearly a decade ago to recent San Francisco and New York runs of artistic director Ben Yalom’s translation and staging of The Devil on All Sides (French playwright Fabrice Melquiot’s magic-realist rumination on Yugoslavia’s civil war) and the remounting in September of its exquisite version of the Henry James ghost story The Turn of the Screw (directed by company member Rod Hipskind), foolsFURY remains wedded to deep, often darkly comical, and alluring texts steeped in the mysterious potency of words.
The physical athleticism and stylization onstage — grounded in a unique, evolving synthesis of techniques from Tadashi Suzuki and Viewpoints to commedia dell’arte and Jerzy Grotowski — are, of course, inseparable from the company’s approach to such texts, whether they’re Martin Crimp’s silky and sinister ellipses (Attempts on Her Life), Don DeLillo’s gloomy, incantatory wisecracking (Valparaiso), Kirk Wood Bromley’s neo-Shakespearean, post-American rag (Midnight Brainwash Revival), or even Shakespeare himself (in one inimitable take on Twelfth Night that went solely by its telling subtitle, What You Will). This pairing of soaring physicality and textual depth has been a driving force behind the success of the small but restlessly active, ambitious company (which has also become a vital teaching center in the theater community) since its noteworthy debut in 1998.
Together with other choice elements — including the sensitive use of music, sound, and scenic design — foolsFURY’s heightened theatrical language is, at its best, a surprise and a challenge to audiences, inspiring and even requiring them to develop new ways of receiving a performance. Yalom concedes that it has taken some time to achieve all of this, including a stable group of like-minded, technically practiced actors. He claims he wasn’t thinking beyond a single play when he almost inadvertently founded the company. "I had no idea what it meant to be a professional theater director or artistic director," he recalls. "I was working with a couple of companies, trying to get them to hire me to direct a play — specifically The Possibilities, the Howard Barker play. After a while I started to get to know the scene, and it became pretty evident that that wasn’t going to happen. So I decided I was going to produce it myself."
Novice though he was, he had long been thinking about what makes theater different and vital, a train of thought the company members have since taken up together. "After spending a lot of time experimenting, we started to find certain aesthetic forms that were interesting. But to me it really comes down to the larger question ‘What should be the role of this art form in our contemporary culture?’ Because, frankly, if it doesn’t have a specific value and something that is unique about it, then, much as I love doing it, it would be irrelevant. I don’t think that’s the case [with foolsFURY], though it’s taken me a long time to figure out how and why."
And the name? "I made it up," says Yalom. "It really fit the Barker piece, and I think to a certain extent it fits [the company]. What underlies a lot of our sensibility is a collision of things that are uncomfortable and things that are funny because they’re uncomfortable. We’ve done a couple of shows that would be categorized as comedies. The far greater amount of work has been things that have been funny but funny because they are challenging and thought provoking and, certainly sometimes, very upsetting. The Barker was a perfect example of that: the ‘fool’ and the ‘fury’ just sort of crammed together."
The second I step into Creative Growth one late Friday morning, I feel slightly elated. It may have something to do with the sunlight streaming through the ceiling windows of the wide-open space, a white-walled relative of the equally amazing (in an entirely different manner) Paramount Theatre a few blocks away. It may have something to do with the fact that almost 100 people are making art at the same time and instead of hearing snippy criticisms, I’m meeting a guy named Jorge Gomez, who likes to hug. Whatever it is, it isn’t an accident. A few hours later I read an excellent profile of Creative Growth by Cheryl Dunn in ANP Quarterly, and she describes the same overwhelming and singular sensation that comes with encountering "the ferocious energy of intense art-making and creative energy being mined from the deepest levels of human consciousness."
Since 1974, Creative Growth has served artists with physical, mental, and developmental disabilities. It’s the oldest and largest studio of its kind in the world. It has not only exerted a deep influence on today’s Bay Area visual art (to cite an immediate example, at least two other 2007 Goldie winners have connections to Creative Growth) but also been the home studio of artists such as George Kellogg, Dwight Mackintosh, Donald Mitchell, William Scott, and the late Judith Scott, each one distinctively visionary. Creative Growth and all of its artists, past and present, deserve the Lifetime Achievement Award, though the world has yet to catch up with what’s happening at 355 24th St. in downtown Oakland.
"Working in the midst of 150 living artists making things every day has been an incredible experience," Jennifer O’Neal, Creative Growth’s gallery director, says to me as we sit at a table within the gallery, which is connected to the space’s studio in a manner completely at odds with the sterile insularity of commercial art spots. "It’s art doing something very real. Art can be a privilege, and this place turns privilege on its ear."
In the seven years since Creative Growth’s executive director Tom di Maria arrived from the Berkeley Art Museum — and the five years since O’Neal ventured over from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — the Creative Growth force field has extended across the country and around the world; for example, both the space and William Scott have had shows at New York’s White Columns gallery space, just two of at least a dozen such shows happening in different cities and countries this year. "William’s mother and sister traveled with him," O’Neal says, remembering Scott’s solo exhibition, every piece of which was sold. "Now, at the age of 40, he can start to take care of them."
Scott may or may not be at the studio the day I’m at Creative Growth. After admiring his fantastic paintings of San Francisco and the Bay Area since 2004, when local painter Timothy Buckwalter first told me about them, I’m a bit starstruck — especially when Creative Growth teacher Spike Milliken (after waving hello to fellow practicing artist Tara Tucker) shows me some of Scott’s latest large-scale, increasingly intricate paintings of a penthouse-free Frisco, where sites such as Orlando Towers and Hallelujah Village thrive. "Check out the depth of feeling," Milliken says, pointing to the individually nuanced lights within the windows of a Scott-rendered building that looks uncannily like Fox Plaza. Ten minutes later I marvel at some enormous Frankenstein’s monster heads in the corner of a storage space. It turns out that Scott, who loves Halloween, made them.
Milliken gives me a whirlwind tour of Creative Growth, showing me Stanley Rexwinkle’s narratively complicated yet spare work, Chuck Nagle’s big sculptures, some dessert-themed art by the witty Terri Bowden, a T-shirt featuring John Martin’s drawing of a fly ("It might represent wildlife in his landscape"), and William Tyler’s ’50s-sensibility interiors. All of these people are featured in One Is Adam, One Is Superman: The Outsider Artists of Creative Growth (Chronicle Books), which pairs their pieces with deeply candid photo portraits by Leon Borensztein, but to see their art in person is something else entirely. I’m momentarily hypnotized by stacks and stacks of Mackintosh’s and Mitchell’s drawings. Then Milliken opens a drawer filled with the NECCO-shaded, gender-bending glam dandies of Aurie Ramirez, and I’m wowed once more.
"If we considered alcoholism a disability, there would be no more distinction between artists and artists with disabilities," Milliken says as we once again cross from the gallery back to the studio and check in with Nick Pagan as he works in Creative Growth’s ceramic space. That type of thought is one I’ve entertained often in recent years, after making art with many of the same materials found at Creative Growth played a huge role in digging me out of the depressive side of manic depression. Within the art world and the academy there has been a lot of writing about definitions of and responses to outsider art, but much of it usually makes me want to simply go straight to the source — the art itself — and to early texts such as Roger Cardinal’s sadly out-of-print 1972 book Outsider Art (Praeger), which engages with Jean Dubuffet and art brut while presenting pieces by Adolf Wölfli and others that cry out for color-plate treatment. Who is outside and who is inside, anyway?
Outside Creative Growth, many if not all of the space’s artists are treated like outsiders; inside Creative Growth they’re in touch with their selves in a manner that exposes the ignorance of increasingly automated urban ways of being. "Matthew Higgs has said something [in an article by Buckwalter] that stuck with me," O’Neal relates at the end of our conversation. "Creative Growth serves a 24-mile radius of persons with disabilities around the East Bay. If you were to take a compass and trace a similar circle around any urban center, you’d find that talent."
Get out your compass and start tracing.
Four years ago this month Colter Jacobsen got his biggest break, his most bruising teardown, and his greatest opportunity in one 24-hour period. He’d been tapped to do a project in a much-talked-about exhibition, "17 Reasons," alongside John Baldessari, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, and Chris Johanson, organized by California College of the Arts curator Kate Fowle and Mission gallerist Jack Hanley. Jacobsen worked for weeks on the sort of public art-slash-intervention the curators wanted, "inserting new works into street life," and finally draped the midsize bronze commemorative tablet erected by the state at the corner of Albion and Camp with a sculptural suite of water-stained packing boxes and fruit crates, altered with paint, glue, collage, watercolors, and pencil into a text-laden carousel of raw forms (and, incidentally, a tribute to Kylie Minogue). When the art walk began all was well, but as afternoon wore into evening road workers discovered the desecration, and by morning the piece had been demolished. Luckily, Matthew Higgs, whose work was also in "17 Reasons," had viewed Jacobsen’s project just before dusk and invited him to stage an even grander installation at White Columns in New York City.
And when New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith singled out Jacobsen’s work at the resulting 2005 exhibition, his crew in San Francisco cheered from afar. Since then it’s been one thing after another for our lad. (He appears in and created the titles for The Key of G, Robert Arnold’s 2006 documentary on the struggles of Gannet Hosa-Belonte, who lives with Mowat-Wilson syndrome in the Mission. Jacobsen was one of his caregivers for several years.) Finally, with gallery representation and a growing international fan base, Jacobsen, now 32, can devote himself to his art full-time. In a town rich with brilliant visual and conceptual artists of all stripes, it can be hard to get attention; in some ways Jacobsen’s lucky, and he knows it. You won’t find a humbler guy.
At a recent Jack Hanley Gallery show Jacobsen tried a lot of new things, but you couldn’t get away from the doubling. A found photograph of a baptismal scene in a spooky arts and crafts church hung low on one wall. Across the gallery, just as low, Jacobsen had hung a tiny painting of the same scene — same muddy colors, same dimensions. His delicate drawings seem to be already in ruins, as if commenting on the urban realities of life in the Mission. Many are what he calls memory drawings — each an image taken from life and then matched with an identical one drawn from memory. The work’s sort of scary that way, recalling Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, who keeps the terrorists’ secrets locked up in his brain and recites them under compulsion.
Just as impressive as Jacobsen’s draftsmanship is his brilliant infusion of old-school, Mission school, DIY junk assemblage with a sophisticated gay semiotics. When the poet and curator Bill Berkson uncovered a series of texts he’d written 25 years back, he decided, well, Joe Brainard’s no longer around to do the job, so why not ask Jacobsen? (The result, Bill, in 20 panels, was included in the spring exhibit at Hanley.) I wonder if you can judge a person by their artistic heroes; Jacobsen’s wild grab bag includes Brainard, Fran Herndon, Jack Smith, Jess, Kenward Elmslie, Denton Welch, and Jack Spicer — artists and writers with a vision off-kilter and sublime. Just like a burning radio, Jacobsen gives off sparks and a crazy echo of music.
Make your way through the twists and turnarounds of Michael Arcega’s visual puns and titular wordplay — exhibit one: El Conquistadork, the 2004 Spanish galleon constructed of Manila folders that he launched in Tomales Bay, a point in the historic trade route between Mexico and the Philippines — and you’ll find yourself connecting the dots to the Manila, Philippines, native’s first artistic incarnation: an elementary school graffiti artist who once went by the tag Design.
"Then I switched it to Sen, then I got turned in and dwindled," Arcega says, recalling his eventual bust at Upland High School in Southern California. Yet school still rules the San Francisco Art Institute graduate’s world. The 34-year-old is currently hiding out in his Stanford studio, buried in first-year course work for an MFA. One can only wonder what the teenage Arcega would have made of the immaculate grounds of the so-called Farm — he remembers thinking when he first made the move from Eagle Rock High in Los Angeles to Upland, "Oh my god, the walls are so clean here!" — though today the artist clearly channels his subversive, pranking tendencies into pointed works executed with a meticulous hand and a puckish wink. Informed by ’90s multiculturalism but intent on moving forward, Arcega’s pieces, primarily sculptures and installations, upend language and probe the hybrids formed by cultural colonizers and the colonized.
Arcega’s exhibition at the de Young Museum, "Homing Pidgin," part of the "Collection Connections" series in which local artists make new art that reinterprets the museum’s objects, seems tailored for the San Francisco resident. He riffs off the Oceanic Art collection with the acuity and seemingly personal perspective found in such previous pieces as Terrorice, in which he conflates the United States’ "aid" supplies of arms and food with the construction of a rice AK-47 and grenade. Lingering in that zone where ha-ha morphs into aha, Arcega’s massive wooden Spork wittily spears the cultural-culinary invasions of fast food and the popular carved or painted salad utensils that populate souvenir shops in the Philippines while referencing the fact that most tribal cultures ate with their hands before the arrival of European explorers. The museum’s clubs, used in war and in ceremonial dances, are made over by Arcega, reenvisioned as intricate warships and barges topping ax handles and dance clubs — one even emits pulsing disco lights — perched on table legs. The artist also revisits mystery meats of the past — and explodes them — with Spam/Maps: Oceania, which replicates every teeny Pacific atoll using the canned luncheon meat and US occupation–era military ration whose name is an anagram of maps.
It’s powerful stuff from a punny guy. "He can move seamlessly between media, with the highest level of creative skill, to create pieces that disseminate his point of view in both political and historical terms," Arcega’s gallerist Heather Marx pinpoints via e-mail. "His brilliant use of humor subtly challenges the traditional notions of art practice, thus veiling the weightiness of his messages."
Arcega has certainly traveled far from the moment he first glimpsed and then imitated the graf art in the basement of his elementary school. He’s since leapfrogged from illustration to painting, sculpture, performance, and installation before, as he says, "discovering text as a medium. Now I just pick from an arsenal of past explorations." But right now the rigors of the academy call. "I wanted to put things on hold while I was at school so I could play without consequence," he says happily. "It’s stepping back to leap forward."
Last week’s rovings included a stop at Bistro Burger, in the basement of the Westfield San Francisco Centre — centre! Please. We’re not at Wimbledon. But the burger transcended its deracinated, strip-mall, airport-prison, why–am–I–in–Las Vegas setting. The meat (Niman Ranch, of course) was tender, juicy, intensely flavorful, and cooked medium rare, as agreed. A slice of pepper jack cheese was present but not overwhelming, and the bun was plump and soft, like a good pillow, but also not overwhelming.
You need not resign yourself to beef here. Any of the burgers are available with a turkey patty or some sort of vegetarian option, though since we showed up rather late in the evening (having completed our other urgent, mall-related business), they’d run out of turkey. Unburgers include a respectable sandwich of grilled mahimahi (a lovely fish but not too exciting: snag a mayo packet or two), while the seasoned curly fries are better than Jack in the Box’s, and that is saying something. Really. They are just decadent. You will have to block out the next day as a fat holiday.
Some days later: a late dinner at Masala (reviewed in these pages aeons ago), on Ninth near Lincoln, near the penny-factory de Young Museum and the recently unswaddled reincarnation of the Academy of Sciences — a splendor of glass. The two structures could hardly be more dissimilar: one incorporates the past and, in its lightness, seems to be at peace with its sylvan surroundings, while the other …
Masala is still pretty good. Less fiery than memory insists. Prices are moderate, and the setting is handsome and proper enough for parents. We found the service to be slightly sluggish, perhaps because it was a weekend night. The restaurant was busy though not full, but a fair number of the people who came to the door weren’t looking for tables but sackfuls of carryout.
D before H, except … It was with a certain tingle of what V.S. Naipaul calls "horror interest" that I recognized I’d misspelled "Stendhal" (10/24/07). It was also too late to fix it — "too late," as Othello says to Desdemona, then strangles her. May I be spared such a fate. As for the unexpected Stendahl: Could he or she be a Scandinavian playwright, of the obscure school?
› news@sfbg.com
San Francisco’s rent-control and affordable-housing laws could be struck down by a statewide initiative that appears to be headed for the June 2008 ballot.
The measure is sponsored by a coalition of conservative property rights advocates under the guise of limiting the government’s ability to seize property by eminent domain.
Cities and progressive organizations are fighting back by trying to qualify a competing ballot measure that would restrict the ability of governments to seize owner-occupied homes but would invalidate the more radical initiative. Groups from the San Francisco Tenants Union to the League of California Cities are actively mobilizing to gather the needed signatures by the Dec. 3 deadline.
SFTU director Ted Gullicksen told the Guardian, “180,000 rental units stand to be affected in San Francisco,” and argued that the invalidation of rent-control laws would rapidly gentrify the city. He noted that environmental groups have lined up against the measure because of ambiguous wording that “could also impact the revamping of the Hetch Hetchy Dam as well as the work on the levees and the delta.”
His group is mobilizing volunteer signature gatherers to qualify the competing measure — which would need more votes than the right-wing measure to quash the latter — and trying to educate the public through the Web site www.eminentdomainreform.com and a Nov. 14 rally planned for noon at the State Building at Van Ness and McAllister.
Eminent domain laws have been a hot-button political issue since 2005, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Kelo vs. City of New London that the Connecticut city could use eminent domain to seize land for a private development project. The furor over that decision triggered last year’s Proposition 90, which would have restricted eminent domain and defined “regulatory takings” so as to cripple local governments’ ability to enforce environmental laws and other restrictions on property use.
Prop. 90 was narrowly defeated (by 47.6 to 52.4 percent of voters statewide, but 29 percent in San Francisco), and advocates for the constitutional amendment titled Government Acquisition, Regulation of Private Property hoped to learn from the experience in crafting this new measure, for which they say they’ve gathered 850,000 signatures and plan to have one million by the Nov. 26 deadline for turning in 694,354 valid signatures of registered voters.
That measure “had a substantial amount of baggage in that it delved into regulatory takings,” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, told the Guardian. The latest proposal, he said, “is a fairly tightly drafted measure that deals with eminent domain.”
Actually, as the Attorney General’s Office has concluded in its summary of the measure, it would also strike down rent-control laws, a key source of affordable housing in San Francisco, Berkeley, and a couple of other California cities. The measure’s broad prohibition on laws that “transfer an economic benefit to one or more private persons at the expense of the private owner” could also be interpreted as invalidating inclusionary housing laws, which require developers to create a set percentage of below-market-rate units, and other laws that regulate property.
Coupal admitted the measure attacks rent control and told us, “We think that’s part and parcel of complete property rights protection.” But he noted that units are only removed from rent-control protection when existing tenants move out. And he denied that the proposed act would affect inclusionary housing laws, citing a section that reads, “Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit or impair voluntary agreements between a property owner and a public agency to develop or rehabilitate affordable housing.”
Yet he also admits that it’s an open question whether affordable-housing requirements for developers will always be deemed voluntary. He said, “The issue of what is voluntary is currently being litigated in a number of courts.”
OPINION About a year and a half ago, James was dealing drugs on a street corner in San Francisco. He wasn’t a hardened repeat offender, just a young man with little education and few prospects. He got arrested and soon faced adult felony drug charges for the first time.
California law sets the punishment for selling narcotics at up to three years in state prison. But we know that 7 out of every 10 people we send to California prisons will commit a new crime within three years of being released — the worst recidivism rate in the nation. If James ended up in state prison, there was a 70 percent chance that he would go straight back in a few years after his release, and we would actually be less safe, not more, for our trouble.
So instead of business as usual, we decided to try something new. We sent him to Back on Track, a program established by a reentry initiative created by my office in partnership with Goodwill Industries, other community service providers, and the business sector. After a year and half, Back on Track had put this former offender into the workforce and gotten him off the street.
Since we launched the initiative, more than 100 former offenders have successfully completed Back on Track. In the process, we’ve learned a lot about public safety and how to change the broken policies of the past that have crowded our prisons and jails without making us safer.
For decades, beginning with the war on drugs, there were only two brands of law enforcement: tough and soft. For decades we’ve chosen to get tough, but it’s mostly been tough on us: we’ve filled our state prisons to the breaking point with low-level offenders — mostly drug offenders.
Isn’t there a smarter way to keep us safe?
Through Back on Track we’re initiating a new brand of law enforcement. Low-level drug offenders are referred to Back on Track, where they face swift sanctions for making bad choices and clear incentives for making good ones. The participants receive the basic opportunities for living crime-free that most of us take for granted: concrete job training and employment; union-based preapprenticeships in the building trades; college enrollment and help navigating financial aid; tutoring, money management, and banking instruction; child care, anger management, and parenting support. That’s the carrot, but there’s a stick too. Drug sellers must plead guilty to enter the program, and if they are rearrested or terminated from the program, they go straight to jail — no excuses.
Fewer than 10 percent of Back on Track graduates reoffend — and the program costs only $5,000 per participant, compared to $35,000 per year to house them in jail.
In October we held a graduation ceremony for Back on Track, one of four we’ve hosted since we launched the initiative. James was among the 13 young men and women who graduated. Today all 13 have full-time jobs or are working while they go to school. None have reoffended. More than 100 people currently in the program are following in their footsteps. Every day they’re teaching us that even a modest investment in people, coupled with accountability and clear guidance, can keep our community safe.
Kamala D. Harris
Kamala D. Harris is San Francisco’s district attorney.
› sarah@sfbg.com
GREEN CITY Until recently, politicians and the public tended to view the problems facing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta levees as separate from the problems facing the San Francisco Bay. But now that human-made distinction is beginning to blur as scientists predict that rising sea levels and levee failures could have profound consequences for both ecosystems.
As wetlands scientist Philip Williams explained at the State of the Estuary Conference in Oakland last month, if the levees fail, a hole will open that will cause the northern area where the bay meets the delta (roughly from Richmond to Antioch) to fill with salt water and deepen, thereby eroding the delta’s valuable tidal marsh habitat.
This doomsday scenario has environmentalists clamoring for an increase in tidal marsh restoration efforts in the southernmost stretches of the bay, which are already home to the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project and a broader US Army Corps of Engineers effort to build levees and restore marshlands to protect property from flooding.
As Dr. Letitia Grenier of the San Francisco Estuary Institute said at the SOE conference, people aren’t the only ones who need habitat protection. The mosquito-eating Yuma bat, the California clapper rail, the least tern, and the chinook salmon are just a few of the many species that live around, fly across, or swim through the bay and the delta, and their survival depends on a mosaic of interconnected habitats.
Yet no agency has the clear authority to require that marshland marsh be restored, levees built, development prevented, and greenhouse gas emissions reduced.
In a recent report for the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, executive director Will Travis notes that while the BCDC, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Association of Bay Area Governments are working together as part of a Joint Policy Committee, "none of the four agencies has the authority to prohibit development in flood-prone areas [or] require that levees be constructed to protect low-lying areas, and BAAQMD does not have the authority to regulate emissions from vehicles."
Pointing out that the BCDC was created in 1965 to regulate bay fill and thus prevent the bay from becoming smaller, Travis writes that his agency "is neither legally responsible for dealing with this dramatic change of conditions that is making the Bay larger, nor does BCDC have any explicit legal authority to address this problem."
That said, in an Oct. 29 report posted on the BCDC’s Web site, Travis announced that his agency "has taken the initiative to formulate a broad outline of a comprehensive strategy for addressing climate change in the Bay region and identified changes that are needed in state law so that BCDC can play a productive role in implementing such a strategy."
This strategy includes mapping flood-prone areas, ceasing planned developments in such areas, identifying property that requires protection, and identifying areas that should be allowed to revert to tidal marsh and other types of natural habitat.
"Another probable impact of climate change is that more precipitation in the Sierra Nevada will fall as rain rather than snow, and the snow pack will melt earlier in the spring," Travis writes. This will in turn reduce the amount of late spring and summer runoff into the delta, allowing salt water to extend farther into the delta than it does now.
Travis predicts that sea level rise and higher flood flows resulting from climate change, as well as earthquake risk, will also increase the probability of catastrophic levee failure. Travis also notes that "pulling existing development back from the Bay shoreline and foregoing planned development of low-lying areas can provide an opportunity to expand the restoration of tidal wetlands."
To address these challenges, the BCDC is proposing an eight-year work program with the goal of achieving environmental accountability. "Any proposed new development within the area likely to be inundated by sea level rise should be required to obtain approval both from the local government and from BCDC."
But first, the BCDC or a new regional agency will need state legislation giving it that authority — and public recognition that seriously dealing with climate change means accepting some new regulation of private property.
Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.
› tredmond@sfbg.com
I’ve been talking to the folks at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association about housing. It’s been an interesting conversation — SPUR has been known largely as an advocate for downtown development and rarely as a beacon of progressive wisdom.
But these days there are people on staff who really care about urban issues, and they aren’t always wrong. So when Dave Snyder, SPUR’s transportation person, who was formerly the director of the SF Bicycle Coalition, phoned and asked me to come by and discuss the Guardian‘s call for a new housing policy, I was happy to pay a visit.
And after talking to SPUR’s executive director, Gabriel Metcalf, and policy director, Sarah Karlinsky, I realized that we agree on a basic frame of reference.
San Francisco is in a state of crisis that threatens the future of the city. Housing isn’t just another policy issue to debate; it’s the central factor shaping the future of the city. If we do nothing — in fact, if we go along as we have been doing, building a few thousand units of market-rate housing and some affordable units on the side — we’re heading for disaster. This will become a city where only rich people can live, where a few working-class and poor folks are tolerated but the majority sentiment favors the very wealthy. It will be a city unlike the one so many of us love. The politics will be much more financially conservative. Social liberals like Gavin Newsom will be fine, but anyone who dares talk about business paying for health care or taxes supporting social programs will be irrelevant to electoral politics. As Calvin Welch likes to say, who lives here votes here.
The SPUR board has a lot of downtown types and developers, and some of them probably think it would be a fine thing if San Francisco became a city of wealthier homeowners. I don’t think the staff are of the same view. Snyder, Metcalf, Karlinsky, and I all agree: what’s happening now is simply unacceptable.
We part, sharply, when we talk about solutions. Metcalf argues that building lots and lots of housing, of all kinds — tens of thousands of units a year, bringing San Francisco to the density of Paris — will eventually bring down costs and make the city affordable again. And failing to build enough market-rate housing will just put more pressure on the existing housing stock, driving up prices even more.
That position requires a certain faith in market–based solutions, and I’ve always argued that the economics of San Francisco housing are too unusual for traditional thinking. Luxury condos in this city are like jails and freeways: you build them, they fill up, and the problem you set out to solve is still there. The new housing downtown isn’t keeping down prices (or demand) in the neighborhoods; it’s creating its own new demand.
When I suggested that we stop building new housing for the rich until we have, say, 40,000 new units for low-income and middle-class San Franciscans, Snyder jotted down some figures and told me the price tag for that much affordable housing would be $8 billion. Actually, if some of the housing is put into land trusts and is available for purchase by middle-income people, that number drops a bit, and if you leverage state and federal money, the amount San Francisco has to raise drops again, maybe to $2 billion or so. Still, it’s a very big number.
And it’s a very big problem. And in one sense, if we don’t solve it, nothing else really matters.
