SF

Noise Pop puzzle

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What is this magical mystery band, Clues, that is headlining Noise Pop? One track wafting through the meshes of the Internets gives off the brainteasing fragrance of rickety rock ‘n’ roll and weird old Canadian electronics. Otherwise all one can tell is that they hail from Montreal and include former members of the Unicorns and Arcade Fire.

I got a clue or two from sweet-tempered ex-Unicorner Alden Penner, 26, on the horn from up north. Unlike the Unicorns, Clues is slowly unfolding, upon much reflection, after he and ex-AF member Brendan Reed decided to form a combo in 2003. They put out a split 7-inch two years later. "The intention of having a band together has been basically not to try to force anything," Penner said. "I think making a band work is something that requires time and it’s something you want to be gentle with." Now they’re working at Hotel2Tango on an LP that will "soon be bequeathed on the world" thanks to Constellation Records. Clues’ Noise Pop show will be their first in the Bay Area — live performance is another mystery they’re grappling with. "It’s got a lot of rough edges to it," he said, "and I think that has to do with who we are as a band as much as it has to do with the fact that our percussion involves saw blades and rusty metal."

Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $12–$14. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

Days of being wild

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER A much-floggied, foggy notion worth repeating: if the natural creative energy coming off John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees could be harnessed, we’d all be muttering, "What global warming? When’s the next Oh Sees show? Mama needs to warm her digits with some superheated, Grade-A crudo rock ‘n’ roll."

Yep, dude has been in a grillion bands including the Coachwhips, Pink and Brown, OCS, the Hospitals, and now Thee Oh Sees and the Drums. His artwork pops up in the legit exhibits like last year’s "Bay Area Now" installment at Queen’s Nails, and hell, he’s even talking about writing a feature film centered on his folk-garage-noise amalgamation Thee Oh Sees. Entire scenes are forged from this kind of go-go gumption — and yessiree an argument could be made that the San Francisco underground music and art whirls would be the sadder, sorrier, and definitely less shit-stirring if Dwyer never moved here a decade ago. If Noise Pop aims to home in on independent culture, it need look no further than this man, who I checked in with as he prepped the perfect chilly-weather meal, chili, on the brink of his Noise Pop shows.

Sick or sad? Taking the temperature of the San Francisco music scene

"I think there’s a lot of great stuff from veterans — also new young shit, the second wave from when I’ve been here. I think there will always be something rad under the covers.

"I think there’s a lot of generator shows under freeways, people playing every night. For younger people it’s same thing I had when I moved here: those house parties where people get wasted and all the bands are playing."

The way to the next great house party

"I don’t find myself at house parties every week anymore. I’m not as apt to dig in as hard as I did in the past. I did get older. Sometimes you find, ‘Shit, I’m 32. I don’t want to be here. I gotta go home.’ It’s cool, though."

Thee way of the Drums

"The Drums is mostly Anthony Petrovic [Ezee Tiger, the Hospitals] and me sharing a drum kit and playing unison drums, prep-rally style with vocals. It’s exhausting." I wonder, do you two have much experience with prep rallies? "Anthony was a cheerleader. I’m totally serious."

Thee Oh Sees SOS

"There’s a new album coming out on In the Red called Help. We just finished it with the same guys and same production: Chris Woodhouse in the Mayyors. We recorded in a hangar in Sacramento where Tape Op is made. I think it has a similar value as the last one except we recorded on two-inch tape rather than half-inch so the sound is lush." Is it Beatles-inspired? "I listen to the Beatles all the time. I guess it might be a Beatles tribute — why not? Except it doesn’t have an exclamation point and we haven’t worked on a film yet."

The way of Castleface

"I love vinyl, and it’s nice to put out people’s first record, too. And it’s an honor to put out records by people who are making good shit."

THEE OH SEES

Feb. 26, 9 p.m., $12

Café Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

www.cafedunord.com

THE DRUMS

March 1, 8 p.m., $20

Mezzanine

444 Jessie, SF

www.mezzaninesf.com

San Francisco Ballet’s “Swan Lake”

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PREVIEW Maybe it was not the best move politically for San Francisco Ballet to schedule a new, no doubt very expensive version of Swan Lake just now. But a lot — besides the pragmatic "you have to spend money to make money" — can be said for Helgi Tomasson revisiting the world’s most popular ballet. In European-derived dance, Swan Lake is the great classical achievement. Theater has Hamlet; the opera has The Marriage of Figaro; and ballet has Swan Lake.

When Tomasson joined SFB in 1985, the company had a 50-year history of presenting contemporary ballets — and had performed Willam Christensen’s Swan Lake in 1940 and Balanchine’s one-act version in 1953. But the emphasis throughout SFB’s history had been on new work, an approach that had taken them a long way. Still, Tomasson knew that the dancers of a great ballet company need the classical idiom. It creates and refines technique and roots the dancers in a living tradition. So in 1988 he choreographed Swan Lake even though he was a relative neophyte as a choreographer.

It was a risk — and a smash popular success, and by now, its sets and costumes have more than amortized. Twenty years later audiences and dancers deserve the rethinking by a much more mature artist who in the interim has created a truly great company. Tomasson is no revolutionary: choreographically this Swan Lake will respect the tradition. However, there will be a first: designer Jonathan Fenson has worked in the West End of London and on Broadway. He has seen little ballet and has never designed one.

SAN FRANCISCO BALLET’S SWAN LAKE Sat/21, Tues/24, Feb. 26–28, 8 p.m.; Sun/22, Feb. 28 and March 1, 2 p.m.; Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m.; $45–$255. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness, SF. (415) 865-2000, www.sfballet.org

Foot Village

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PREVIEW As if it were a sovereign nation of drum-toting, megaphone-wielding musical savages, Foot Village bears its own two-pronged manifesto, stating "Our national language is drumming, our national pass-time is screaming." This declaration aptly sums up the Los Angeles group’s polyrhythmic sonic attack, which is studded with explosions of feral hoots and hollers, and three drum sets’ worth of cataclysmic crashing, hissing, and banging.

The band’s witch-doctor blend of hardcore punk and noise rock is at its best on "Bones": visions of bloodthirsty, amphetamine-fueled jungle warriors out to collect heads come to mind via Grace Lee’s wild yawps over the rest of the Village’s battle cries and death-drum rolls. Foot Village’s forthcoming album of "drum essays," titled Anti-Magic (Upset the Rhythm) and out June 2009, will be the young collective’s blueprint for its war upon the ethereal as its avows to "embrace the physical and the physical alone." Considering the group’s aggressively carnal approach to music, god help anyone who gets in its way. The ensemble will perform with the Drums — a new project with John Dwyer, ex of the Coachwhips and currently of Thee Oh Sees — at Bottom of the Hill, making it a blitzkrieg of eardrum assault with no electric guitars or bass in sight. This isn’t the usual clamor we San Franciscans are fed, but the citizens of Foot Village are clearly ready to shovel their bristling wall of sound down our hungry throats.

FOOT VILLAGE With the Drums, T.I.T.S., and Casy and Brian. Wed/18, 9 p.m., $8. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

“Every Sound You Can Imagine”

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REVIEW Art is in the air at City Hall, thanks to Bill Fontana’s "Spiraling Echoes" installation. In contrast, an ambitious exhibition at New Langton Arts explores the visual properties of musical pieces. Curated by Artforum contributor Christoph Cox, "Every Sound You Can Imagine" is rife with inkjet or offset prints of compositions — Morton Subotnick’s smudgy pencil jottings are an exception. A hefty percentage of works avoid standard notation to create sight-based sonic suggestions. To glean from just one small segment or wall, devoted to late-1990s works: Ryoji Ikeda’s Variations for Modulated 440hz Sinewaves is wonderfully nauseating in its op art effect, the score for Signal’s Lines conjures clouds in the sky, and William Basinski’s Shortwavemusic suggests the jagged lines of a seismograph or Richter scale.

These works are strictly black-and-white, but Cox’s survey contains many small rainbows of playful pencil and Magic Marker musicality. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Cosmic Pulses isn’t alone in its crayon radiance — Jim Hodge’s Sea of Love, Leon Kirschner’s Study for "String Quartet No. 3," Allan Bryant’s Pitch Out, Yasuo Tone’s Ten Haikus of Basho, and John Cage’s Aria (which likens jazz to dark blue and Marlene Dietrich to the color purple) all deploy the color chart as musical chart. Barry Guy’s Witch Gong Game includes felt-tip images of mandalas, pointed stars, graphic diagrams, and moon slivers, while Rainer Wehringer’s responds to Györgi Ligeti’s Artikulation by creating black and brown combs or hair clippers. Kinetic geometric designs — the circles of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, the bird flock of check marks that is Cage’s Study for Piano and Orchestra — aren’t far from the graphic potency found in Jonny Trunk’s handsome 2005 monograph of LP covers The Music Library.

Splicing songbooks to fuse Mendelsohn to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the collage aesthetic of Hodges’ A Line Drawn in the Dark is, along with a piece by Steve Roden, one of the more inventive works here. The late Bruce Conner’s Untitled (music) has an effect similar to Will Yackulic’s recent experiments in drawing with a typewriter, while his contemporary, Wallace Berman, mines language and numeric systems. Downstairs, Christian Marclay’s video, Screenplay, sets many of these free-thinking compositional concepts into motion.

EVERY SOUND YOU CAN IMAGINE Through March 28. Tues.–Sat., noon–6 p.m. New Langton Arts, 1246 Folsom, SF. (415) 626-5416, www.newlangtonarts.org

Punk pop riddle

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Like many other newb admirers, I never knew about Zero Boys during their brief existence from 1979 to ’83. But then I got a copy of their thrice-reissued debut, Vicious Circle (now Secretly Canadian) in my hot little mitts — love that punk pop primitivism. During its short life the Indianapolis group never played the Bay Area: its 1982 SF storefront show was unceremoniously canceled. The Zero Boys broke up soon afterward, with bassist Tufty joining Toxic Reasons and relocating to the Bay, but the outfit has reunited with each reissue of Circle — a recording that’s found quite a rep for itself as a lesser-known hardcore gem.

Now, with the reemergence of Circle and History Of, a collection of unreleased recordings, a promoter fan is flying them out to play. "There’s been very little effort to revive the band on this end," said vocalist Paul Mahern, 45, from Bloomington, Ind. "It’s all fan-driven." The appeal of this record — which Mahern made at 17? "There’s a snotty kids thing, but there’s also this real musicianship. Also we were among the first wave of American hardcore that was also pop punk," he said. "Scratch the surface below Green Day, and you get the Zero Boys."

Fri/20–Sat/21, 7 p.m., $10. 924 Gilman, Berk. www.924gilman.org

Lost Angeles

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Like some unholy combination of The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and The Day of the Locust (1975), The Savage Eye (1959) is a kino-essay on American desolation penned by three directors (Joseph Strick, Sidney Meyers, and blacklisted Ben Maddow) and as many cinematographers (Jack Couffer, Helen Levitt, and a young Haskell Wexler). The 65-minute feature’s thin fictional frame story of a spurred Los Angeles woman, Judith X, is no story at all, but rather a vehicle for disembodied anomie. The film is every bit the modernist plaything, complete with a dual voice-over narration, weekend-long time-span, digressive cinematography, spindly Leonard Rosenman score and mechanized portraiture of the metropolis. If The Savage Eye works as a reclamation of the homegrown surrealism borne of street photography and pulp fiction, it’s also no surprise that codirector Strick later filmed adaptations of both Ulysses (1967) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977).

Pinning the nadir of western culture to female consumption is all too typical of the era’s would-be beats, but a sequence like the one in which the male voice-over (pompously listed as "The Poet" in the end credits) asks Judith to read other women’s trivial thoughts is disturbingly cruel. The Savage Eye is diametrically opposed to melodrama, allergic to pathos. It’s difficult to imagine how incendiary it must have seemed in 1960, when Hollywood was just beginning to awake from its long Hays Code slumber. One emblematic shot closely frames a dowdy coupling: he plies her with drinks as she evaluates the bargain being struck out of the corner of her eye. There is an admirable directness to self-contained scenes like this one. With studio noirs, a desultory atmosphere is conveyed peripherally, in a lick of the lips or sweat on the brow; The Savage Eye takes seediness as its subject, like a Weegee book come to life.

The stage may be vulgar, but the players are deathly banal. Judith fantasizes about her ex’s lover’s violent end as she retrieves the mail, a picture of everyday malice worthy of James M. Cain. And yet, no matter how savage this eye means to be, there is a creeping melancholy tugging at the handheld shots of haunted diner cars and half-lit neon. San Francisco Cinematheque screens this dream of a lost city in a fresh restoration print alongside Strick’s earlier document of Los Angeles playing itself, Muscle Beach (1948).

THE SAVAGE EYE AND MUSCLE BEACH

Wed/18, 7:30 p.m., $6–$10

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.sfcinemantheque.org

Solo album

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› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS John Campbell’s Irish Bakery is famous for its scones and pasties. My friend the Maze is famous for grinding his way through medical school and then choosing to work in publishing — freelance, at that. A feat of audacious and lively present-tensitivity for which he will forever be cemented into my heart, no matter how many crumbs he leaves in my car.

We have this sweet new routine where he runs across town to USF, where I play soccer Sunday mornings, and that way we can both be smelly and sweaty when we go out for breakfast. The camaraderie is killing me. But what are you going to do? If it wasn’t that, it would be the bacon.

Which reminds me: I’ve been challenged by my current favorite online suitor to write a song about bacon. And I use the word challenge loosely. This guy has no idea! By the way, I am famous online, completely separate from my in-print and on-stage famousnesses, for being one hot bacon-obsessed chick.

Datingwise, I have an unfair advantage over my g-g-girlfriends, and it isn’t that I stutter. Having been on both sides of the surface of the pond, I know exactly what bait to use. Bacon. The advantage is short-lived, however. I get all the bites in the world, but can’t keep anything on account of tiny tits.

I keep three very very separate mailboxes in my e-mail program: one for friends, one for Cheap Eats, and one for online dating. When that so-called "bacon explosion" rocked the Internet a couple weeks ago, all three mailboxes filled up simultaneously with links, invitations to barbecues, and pictures of the divine rolled-up weave of sausage-stuffed bacon, which, I admit, was one of the sexiest things I ever saw.

Me? Write a song about bacon? That’s like asking a kitten to be cute. As anyone lucky enough to have heard Sister Exister’s obscure first album, Scratch (available at cdbaby.com, ahem), knows, my songwriting has been, shall we say . . . a wee bit chickencentric, with occasional brave forays into eggs, and butter.

Predictably, my second solo album, about one-third written, is all about heart disease. But not the kind that comes from high-fat diets, no, the kind that comes from online dating.

Whateverwise, as much as I would love to bring all three of my bacony famousnesses together by writing a date-commissioned bacon song right here in Cheap Eats … well, to be honest I would but, incredibly, I’m drawing a blank.

So by way of stalling for rhymes, John Campbell’s Irish Bakery is famous for its scones and pasties, and me and the Maze stocked up on both. We got three scones ($1.50 apiece), a sausage roll ($3), and a beef pasty ($5).

They have glass cases just filled with piles and piles of these delicious looking things, and other things, like bread, sweet tarts … They have soup, breakfast sandwiches.

What they don’t have is anywhere to sit, except for the bar next door, the Blarney Stone, which is a great bar, so you know, with soccer on TV and all, but we were both running low on dollars and didn’t feel like feeling like we had to drink, so we took our greasy brown bags of goodness around the corner to my car. My new car. My beautiful new car. My clean and beautiful new car.

And I put on the classical music station and we ate and talked and passed the pasty and talked and laughed and just generally steamed up the windows. Everything was great! Actually, I didn’t think the scones were anything special.

They are "traditional" scones, and, I know I know, we’re people. We tend to dwell on the past, to go on living in it. Ergo: traditional = special. But I personally can’t afford to think that way or I will dry up and blow away. To me they were scones, and great, and the pasty, by virtue of being something new, was special: ground beef in gravy with carrots, onions, and potatoes all wrapped up in this sopping greasy flaky crumbly pastry dough.

Which I am still picking out of my seats.

And the camaraderie is killing me. But what are you going to do? I live in a world that defines itself, and its parts and people, historically. It’s a song. About bacon. And it’s over now, so stop dancing already and wish me weight.

JOHN CAMPBELL’S

Daily: 7 a.m.–8 p.m.

5625 Geary, SF

(415) 387-1536

Full Bar next door

Cash only

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Wrecked park department

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› news@sfbg.com

On Feb. 13, in a fourth floor hearing room in City Hall, large crowds of San Francisco Recreation and Park Department workers and supporters showed up on short notice to hear how the department was going to be gutted by deep budget cuts.

Overflow crowds of spilled into adjacent rooms to hear interim department director Jared Blumenfeld announce impending cuts to staff and hours. Although the department’s Web site stresses that "all parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, pools, golf courses, gyms, art centers, senior centers, and clubhouses will remain open," the cuts are so deep that all involved knew that the services and facilities will be shadows of their former selves.

Many people told the Guardian that they are also concerned that the process is intended to facilitate privatization of many Rec and Park functions, giving city jobs to contract workers who will not be able to duplicate the experience or connection to communities of the city workers they replace.

The Rec-Park Commission will have another hearing on the cuts at 2 p.m. Feb 19 in City Hall, Room 416, with more time for public comment. Activists working for more equitable cuts will stage a protest rally beforehand across from City Hall at 1 p.m.

At the meeting, numerous youngsters and their parents spoke of recreation directors mentoring kids who have few other positive influences in their lives. Many of these Rec and Park workers will be on the receiving end of pink slips at the end of the month. Blumenfeld announced that 51 full-time equivalent recreation director positions would be cut (the actual number of layoffs will be even higher given than many of the workers are part time).

Blumenfeld explained that $11.4 million needs to be cut from Rec and Park’s budget of the total budget about $140 million. He described some new ways to raise revenue, including charging entrance fees for the Botanical Garden, increasing pool fees, and charging the SF Public Library rent for the 32,000 square feet where local branches operate on public park land.

But even critics of the department say Blumenfeld is more accessible than his predecessor, Yomi Agunbiade, who was forced out last year after he came under fire for some of his privatization schemes and personnel issues. But raiding library funding, which is protected by voter-approved budget set-asides, is likely to create a backlash from the public.

Blumenfeld said he regretted tapping library funds, but said the move is being forced by budgetary realities. "Ultimately, this is a Lord of the Flies situation," he said.

Leah Grant of the group Friends of Potrero Hill told the Guardian at the hearing that the playground near where she lives was recently chained shut, leaving at-risk kids locked out. In an e-mail after the meeting, she wrote that it is "very, very difficult to accept that the programs for the disabled and at-risk children are going to be thrown under the bus while the privatization continues to the advantage of the wealthy and the taxpayers of San Francisco are literally being robbed of our public parks."

Grant also expressed concern that the City Fields Foundation, backed by Gap, Inc. founder Donald Fisher, a controversial funder of conservative causes in San Francisco, has essentially been taking over parks across the city and would further benefit from this year’s restructuring by filling the void with privatized services.

Blumenfeld insisted that "rumors" of privatization were unfounded, but admitted that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s nonprofit public-private partnership Rec Connect model is a key part of the mix in the new budget arrangements. As the Guardian reported ("Connect the connects," Oct. 17, 2007), the Rec Connect model is "private, funded by undisclosed corporate donations, staffed by volunteers who are often city employees or [Newsom’s] campaign donors, and unaccountable to any internal controls or outside scrutiny."

One department employee, who spoke off the record due to concerns about job security, told the Guardian that "there is not the same level of accountability for those in the Rec Connect program. If they leave the building where they are working, there is not necessarily anyone who is watching them."

Sources within the department say there will be 10 new Rec Connect sites opened to offset the budget cuts, a move that comes at a time when Newsom is trying to raise significant money for his nascent gubernatorial campaign.

"I feel like they’re using the financial crisis to push something they’ve been trying to accomplish for a long time," the source said. "And with this model, there are three to four layers of paid bureaucracy before these monies get to the kids. What they aren’t telling the public is that it is actually cheaper to allow Rec and Park workers to do our job than to pay the nonprofits, even though the workers the nonprofits contract out are making a lower hourly wage."

Lorraine Hanks, a recreation director who has worked with Rec and Park for 16 years, shared similar dissatisfaction with the Rec Connect program. In a phone interview, Hanks told us that "Rec Connect was supposed to come in and create innovative programs. They didn’t do that. They wound up doing the same things we were already doing."

Rec Connect spokesperson Jo Mestelle didn’t return Guardian calls for comment by press time.

Hanks also noted that "under Proposition J, 50 percent of funding was supposed to go to Rec and Park, and 50 percent was supposed to go to DCYF [Department of Children, Youth and their Families]. If we had that original 50 percent, we wouldn’t have to lay anyone off."

On the way out of Friday’s meeting, Betty Traynor of Friends of Boeddeker Park told us that many seniors and youngsters in the Tenderloin will have no park or safe public space to go to if the proposed cuts to hours go through, and that important programs for kids and seniors will be eliminated. Traynor added that the cuts "will also reduce hours for adult users of the park who have no other open green space in the Tenderloin."

Rec and Park employee Brando Rogers said the cuts would hurt youth who have developed relationships with employees and value these after school programs. "These are long-term relationships," she told us. "They can’t be replaced by seasonal contract workers. I’m worried that if these precious mentors have their jobs eliminated, the neighborhoods will just be decimated."

Is inequality making us sick?

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OPINION The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class gets squeezed. It’s gone on so long, we hardly get angry anymore. But we do get sick.

Several recent studies indicate that the life expectancy gap between the most and least deprived Americans has widened since the early 1980s, paralleling the growing economic inequality during the same period. And, if the past is an accurate gauge, today’s economic crisis will only make things worse.

The wealth-health gradient is evident everywhere, even here in San Francisco. According to the SF Department of Public Health, rates for congestive heart failure are 42 percent higher in the Sunset than St. Francis Wood/West Portal; 131 percent higher in Mission/Bernal Heights, and 279 percent higher in Bayview/Hunters Point.

Contrary to myth, it’s not the CEOs who are dropping dead from heart attacks; it’s their subordinates. And it’s not violence or drugs that are the biggest killers in poor neighborhoods but chronic diseases.

Some point the finger at our broken health insurance system. But studies suggest medical care accounts for only about 15 percent of our health gap. That’s because health care repairs our bodies when they break down; it doesn’t affect what makes us sick in the first place.

What about making healthy choices? Don’t the poor smoke more and eat unhealthy foods? True — it’s hard to eat well if you live in a food desert like the Bayview, where there are no supermarkets. But even after correcting for individual behaviors, health inequalities remain. Poor smokers are more likely to get sick than rich smokers.

Many factors affecting health have little to do with individual behaviors. They include exposure to lead and other toxics; the quality of schools; the outsourcing of jobs; proximity of parks; the wages and benefits companies pay; exposure to discrimination; secure, quality housing; affordable preschool … When these conditions are distributed unequally, so is our health.

A century ago, U.S. life expectancy was about 48 years. Much of the 30-year increase since is due not to new drugs or medical technologies, but to improved living conditions. The abolition of child labor, the eight-hour workday, housing and sanitation codes, and other reforms won working Americans a bigger share of our growing prosperity.

By 1976, thanks to civil rights, Medicare, and other progressive policies, economic inequality had reached a 20th century low. The health gap between rich and poor, as well as that between whites and African Americans narrowed between 1966 and 1980.

Then we reversed course. While most European countries were providing paid parental leave, universal preschool, four or more weeks of paid vacations, and guaranteed health care, the United States, starting with the Reagan administration, cut taxes on the rich, slashed social programs, and deregulated business and banking. Economic inequality in the U.S. is now greater than it’s been since the 1920s. The consequence? The health gap is growing again too.

The wide class and racial inequities in the U.S. and the health inequalities they drive are not natural. They are the products of social policies that we as a society have made — and can make differently. We once did. Solutions lie not with new drugs or technologies, but our political priorities.

Larry Adelman is executive producer of the documentary series Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (www.unnaturalcauses.org ) Find out more about the health of San Francisco neighborhoods at www.thehdmt.org and www.healthmattersinsf.org.

Compostmodern

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The easier a compost bucket is to use, the more people will use it. But Compostmodern ’09 isn’t about compost at all — it’s about design. This annual event is a collaboration between the American Institute for Graphic Artists (AIGA) and the Academy of Art University that examines the intersection of design and environmental sustainability.

This weekend’s conference, held at various locations around San Francisco, features talks and slide shows by local designers, art installations, workshops, and demonstration projects proving that brown is the new green.

"I’m interested in helping people get a good grounding in what designing for sustainability means. The reality is that this industry is still so new," Nathan Shedroff wrote on the Compostmodern blog (compostmodern.wordpress.com). Shedroff chairs the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts, and will discuss sustainability frameworks at the conference.

Local graphic designer Amy Franceschini (futurefarmers.com) presented some of her work at Compostmodern in 2006. Inspired by all things green, she posed a question that only a designer would ask: if earth-bound plants lean toward light naturally, might design liberate plants to move about freely? There were mixed results to her experiment, but the question alone gets at the spirit of the conference: bridging the gap between the possible and the possibly possible by challenging designers to be environmentalists.

Autodesk brings sustainable design into the world of software by incorporating powerful new analytical tools into 3-D modeling programs used in architectural and other design. "Full-on energy analysis used to be really challenging and expensive," said program manager Dawn Danby, a featured speaker at Compostmodern this year. "We’re making software that empowers designers to make a case for sustainability, to make better decisions, decisions that have huge impacts on things like water or energy use. We need to make design a solution, not just a bonus when times are good."

Michael Gelobter, another of this year’s Compostmodern presenters, told the Guardian that the Bay Area’s unique combination of companies, researchers, and activists all living together is what makes it the epicenter of the clean-tech revolution. Even though he’s a climate strategist, Gelobter is optimistic about the future: "We have to own this change, and in the process solve a lot of other problems like wars and financial waste.

"A lot of our relationship with climate change and fossil fuels has to do with the built environment, the designed environment — our cities, buildings, schools. and the way we design our day-to-day interactions with products," Gelobter continued. "All of those include assumptions about energy use, where we get the energy, and the form that energy comes in. And designers are really the front line in redrawing that. They’re the cutting edge of how we make the world different, so they have to be informed about policy and economics, but also [about] people’s day-to-day lives, their lived experience of how change might happen. They have to be able to design to those kind of criteria."

That’s why Gelobter founded Climate Cooler, shifting his work from policy to shopping and "changing the choices consumers have so that they can take action." He insists that cleaning up the economy is good business. "You stop smoking crack, and you suddenly have all this money to spend on things that are a whole lot healthier. That’s true with fossil fuel use and the other things that cause global warming as well."

Gelobter’s latest project will equip Intuit’s popular QuickBooks accounting software with a carbon-calculator. It’s a partial redesign to help small businesses know the impact of their purchasing patterns on global warming, and to "start using that information to make better choices, to save money, save energy, and reduce their [carbon] footprint."

Taking on Herculean problems is not for everyone. But Compostmodern seeks to engage top designers with the task of making the seemingly impossible a little more likely. It’s a goal that is essential to achieving sustainability on a grand scale and using this economic meltdown as an opportunity to redesign our world.

COMPOSTMODERN ’09

Herbst Theatre, SF

Feb. 21

8:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

www.compostmodern.org

Money talks

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› news@sfbg.com

The economy’s a mess, and the housing crisis, financial meltdown, and skyrocketing unemployment rates have left a lot of San Franciscans short of cash. But the flow of big downtown money into political campaigns hasn’t slowed a bit.

In fact, a tally of all 2008 monetary and in-kind political contributions logged in the SF Ethics Commission Campaign Finance Database shows that even in the face of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, money spent on local political campaigns in the city swelled to a whopping $20.6 million. That grand total, which does not include loans or so-called "soft money" like independent expenditures, is higher than that of any previous year recorded in the Ethics database, which tracks campaign spending back to 1998.

A review of the entire database paints of picture of how influence money flows in San Francisco: Six of the top 10 donors over the past 10 years are big businesses and downtown organizations that promote the same conservative political agenda. The campaign cash often wound up in the same few political pots — a handful of supervisorial campaigns and some coordinated political action committees.

And despite spending ungodly sums of money, downtown lost more races than it won.

More than half the total money spent in 2008 came from one source: Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which plunked down $10.2 million last fall for the No on Proposition H campaign against the San Francisco Clean Energy Act. That November ballot measure, which lost under PG&E’s barrage, would have paved the way for public power, initiating a process to make the city the primary provider of electric power in San Francisco with a goal of 50 percent clean-energy generation by 2017.

The powerful utility wasn’t only the biggest spender last year — it claims the No. 1 slot on a list of all campaign contributions spanning from 1998 to 2008, which the Guardian compiled using Ethics data. PG&E dropped a juicy $14.7 million into local political campaigns over that period, beating out runner-up Clint Reilly by more than $10 million.

Below are brief introductions to the 10 biggest spenders, 1998-2008.

They’ve got the power. The colossal sums PG&E has forked over to influence ballot measures over the years puts the utility in a category all its own. SF isn’t the only municipality where the company has poured millions into defeating a public power proposal. In 2006, when Yolo County put measures on the ballot to expand the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), which would have edged PG&E out of the service area, the utility spent $11.3 million to try and keep it from happening.

Pay to the order of Clint Reilly. Reilly, the former political consultant, now runs a successful real estate company. While his name routinely comes up on the roster of campaign contributors, he owes his status as No. 2 to his 1999 campaign for SF mayor, into which he poured some $3.5 million of his own money. "Most of the money we give is for Democratic candidates or progressive politicians, or neighborhood-oriented issues," said Reilly, who also served as president of the board of Catholic Charities.

Committee on really high-paying jobs? Third in line is the Committee on Jobs, a political action committee that aims to influence local legislation affecting business interests. The PAC is bankrolled in part by the Charles Schwab Corporation, Gap, Inc., and Gap founder Don Fisher — all of whom surface on their own in our Top 30 list. With a grand total just shy of $3 million, the committee coughed up about $100,000 in campaign-related spending in 2008. Much of that funding went to similar political entities, including the SF Coalition for Responsible Growth, the SF Chamber of Commerce 21st Century Committee, and the SF Taxpayers Union PAC (see "Downtown’s Slate," 10/15/2008). This past November, the COJ also backed the Community Justice Court Coalition, formed to pass Proposition L, which would have guaranteed first-year funding for Mayor Gavin Newsom’s small-crimes court in the Tenderloin. Prop. L failed by 57 percent.

Bluegrass billionaire. San Francisco investment banker and billionaire Warren Hellman has dropped nearly $1.2 million over the years into local political campaigns, our results show. Dubbed "the Warren Buffet of the West Coast" by Business Week for his sharp financial prowess, Hellman co-founded Hellman and Friedman, an investment firm, in 1984. Hellman is known for putting on Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, an annual SF music festival. While he tends to contribute to downtown business entities such as the Committee on Jobs and the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, in 2008 he devoted $100,000 to supporting a June ballot measure, Proposition A, that increased teacher salaries and classroom support by instating a parcel tax to amp up funding for public schools.

Fisher king. Don Fisher, founder and former CEO of Gap, Inc., is another one of SF’s resident billionaires. While Gap, Inc. turns up in 17th place in our results, Fisher himself has poured more than $1.1 million into entities such as the Committee on Jobs, SFSOS, the San Franciscans for Sensible Government Political Action Committee, and other conservative business groups. Fisher’s total includes money from the "DDF Y2K family trust," a Fisher family fund that shows up in Ethics records in 2000. In that year, $100,000 from that trust went to support the Committee on Jobs’ candidate advocacy fund, and another $40,000 went to a pro-development group called San Franciscans for Responsible Planning.

Not a very affordable campaign, either. Sixth up is Lennar Homes, the developer behind the massive home-building project at Hunters Point Shipyard, which the Guardian has covered extensively. The vast majority of its $1 million reported spending was directed to No on Prop. F, a campaign sponsored by Lennar to defeat a June ballot measure that would have created a 50 percent affordable-housing requirement for the Candlestick Point and Hunters Point Shipyard development project. The measure failed, with 63 percent voting it down.

Chuck’s bucks. Charles Schwab Corp., which set up shop in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, is an investment banking firm that reports having $1.1 trillion in total client assets. The corporation ranks seventh in our Top 30 list, with some $973,000 in donations. In 27th place is Charles R. Schwab himself, the company’s founder and chairman of the board (and the guy they’re referring to in those "Talk to Chuck" billboards posted all over SF). If Schwab’s individual and corporate donations were combined, the total would be enough to bump Warren Hellman out of fourth place. Schwab’s dollars are infused into the Committee on Jobs, the San Francisco Association of Realtors, the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, SF SOS, and other downtown-business interest organizations. "We’re a major company here in the Bay Area and a major employer," company spokesperson Greg Gable told the Guardian. "We’re interested in political matters across the board — it’s not limited to any one party." But it’s limited to one pro-downtown point of view.

The brass. The San Francisco Police Officer’s Association is another major player, spending some $913,000 since 1998 on political campaigns. The organization backed candidates Carmen Chu, Myrna Lim, Joseph Alioto, Denise McCarthy, and Sue Lee for supervisors in 2008, contributions show. All but Chu lost.

At your service. SEIU Local 1021 and SEIU 790 crop up frequently in Ethics data, with a grand total of about $860,000 in spending over the years. SEIU representatives recently turned out en masse at a Board of Supervisors meeting to urge the supervisors to support a June 2 special election to raise taxes in order to boost city revenues and save critical services from the hefty budget cuts that are coming down the pipe.

Friends in high places. No real surprises here: the Friends and Foundation of the San Francisco Public Library contributed its money to, well, ballot measures that would have affected the library. In 2000, for example, the F and F plunked $265 thousand into an effort called the "Committee to Save Branch Libraries — Yes on Prop. A."

Top 30 San Francisco campaign donors, 1998-2008

1. Pacific Gas & Electric $14,831,486
2. Clint Reilly $4,138,089
3. Committee on Jobs $2,970,857
4. Warren F. Hellman $1,191,970
5. Don Fisher (incl. Don & Doris Fisher Y2K trust) $1,164,286
6. Lennar Homes $1,002,861
7. Charles Schwab Corporation $973,176
8. S.F. Police Officers Association $913,834
9. SEIU Local 1021 & SEIU Local 790 $860,979
10. Friends & Foundation of the S.F. Public Library $858,082
11. California Academy of Sciences $818,154
12. Residential Builders Association of S.F. $753,857
13. Steven Castleman $665,254
14. S.F. Association of Realtors $647,299
15. S.F. Chamber of Commerce $614,824
16. SEIU United Health Care Workers West & Local 250 $585,937
17. Gap, Inc. $573,959
18. California Issues PAC $556,238
19. Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums $541,474
20. Wells Fargo $464,899
21. Building Owners & Managers Association of S.F. $464,027
22. Bank of America $429,316
23. Golden Gate Restaurant Association $422,685
24. SF SOS $407,491
25. AT&T Inc. and affiliates $404,704
26. Clear Channel $391,783
27. Charles R. Schwab (individual) $362,250
28. Yellow Cab Cooperative $344,907
29. S.F. Apartment Association $280,376
30. San Franciscans for Sensible Government PAC $279,009

SEX SF Feb 20

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Rue Saint Jacques

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› paulr@sfbg.com

If clothes make the man, then does the bistro make the neighborhood, or the other way around? This is a trick question, because the answer is: both. Part of the magic of any bistro is its neighborhood, which becomes part of the experience. And — the obverse — in a city of neighborhoods like ours, no neighborhood is quite complete without a bistro.

For neighborhood atmospherics, it’s hard to match the cloud village that floats on the back-country streets behind Grace Cathedral. A cable-car line, a shop or two, a run of handsome townhomes with a certain Parisian feel and a twinkling cityscape in the background — and, at the edge of things, a bistro, a quite convincing one, Rue Saint Jacques.

Don’t bother looking for a street named Saint Jacques, because you won’t find one — although you will find an authentic-looking Paris street sign in the restaurant’s front window. Don’t bother looking, either, for the strangely enchanting Uzbek restaurant called On Jackson, which until about four years ago could be found on Jackson, at Taylor. It’s in that snug corner spot that we find Eric Lanvert’s Rue Saint Jacques, with an appealing paint treatment (like butter washed with cognac), a distinct upgrade in furniture quality from Uzbek days (including rather Arts-and-Craftsy-looking chairs), and, of course, some first-rate French cooking.

By "French cooking" I don’t mean the haughty, haute kind with all the rich, intricate sauces, but the earthy kind, the bistro kind. Rue Saint Jacques’ menu is mostly an exercise in this sort of heartiness, carried off with considerable style. The dishes rely on a timeless appeal and are very much the ones you’d find in countless neighborhood bistros in Paris. They also rely on high-quality (often organic ingredients) and thoughtful, though not fancy, preparation.

For those of us who love the prix-fixe, Rue Saint Jacques is as good as it gets. A flat fee of $35 buys you three courses: any starter, any main dish, and any dessert. Some of the more luxe possibilities, such as lobster risotto and the very formidable cassoulet, do carry a surcharge, but these are the exceptions. The sans surcharge appetizers are not exactly shabby anyway; a gently beefy beef tartare is made from freshly ground Niman Ranch filet mignon and subtly spiced up with a bit of mustard, while charcuterie is presented as a duo of rich, housemade pâté slices, one of duck, another (and coarser, country-style) of pork. Meaty, chewy snails are served Catalan-style, in a chunky sauce of sausage, bacon, and melted cherry tomatoes in an earthenware crock.

The French onion soup is the color of espresso: a sign that the onions have been patiently and repeatedly caramelized for maximum intensity of flavor before being sealed under a cap of melted cheese. A pistou-style soup of winter vegetables, including cabbage, carrots, turnips, and white beans, is paler — pleasantly pale, really, though roasting the roots might have added some depth and weight. I did wonder about the addition of the out-of-season basil, which lacked its midsummer pepperiness.

The main courses, like their opening acts, are mostly familiar. Skirt steak (from Niman Ranch) is pan-roasted, sliced, slathered with a sauce of caramelized shallots, and plated with a stack of wonderfully slender, crisp herbed frites. Breast of local duck is roasted (to medium and perhaps then some), sliced, fanned over a bed of wild rice, and sauced with an ambrosial blend of cognac and green peppercorns.

The cassoulet is so heavy-duty that it reaches the table in a cast-iron skillet, complete with handle that must be oriented in an acceptable direction so as not to catch a passing thigh and send the whole thing flying. Within the skillet we find (in addition to a wealth of white beans lightly crusted with bread crumbs), confits of lamb and duck leg (the duck still on the bone), along with an entire boudin blanc and chunks of fatback. You pay an extra $7 for the cassoulet (or $26.75 à la carte), but the dish could easily feed two hungry people.

The one offering I hadn’t seen before was mijoté de porc, described by the menu card as "slow-cooked pork belly with a ragout of vegetables." Since pork belly is the source of bacon, I was expecting something rather fatty, in fact problematically fatty, but what turned up instead resembled a pot roast: chunks of tender meat in a thick, dark, slightly sweet sauce laced with wild mushrooms.

Rue Saint Jacques’ desserts are very much in the bistro mainstream and include a solid chocolate mousse and a creditable vanilla bean crème brûlée. The unconventional choice is probably the strawberry soup, which drew my eye in part because of its unexpectedness and in part because I hoped, after some heavy going through the savory courses, that it would be relatively light, despite the promise of Chantilly cream.

Dessert soups I’ve had in the past have been served in broad bowls, like regular soup, but this one arrived in a parfait glass: a base layer of soup, not too sweet and quite chunky, almost like runny preserves, with a thick cap of Chantilly cream, which is basically sweetened whipped cream. The boundary between the layers quickly became blurred, and the cream more or less self-folded into the soup, with a luxurious result.

The service staff is swift, professional, and proper, in the best French tradition. They do not fawn or make chitchat, but if something goes wrong — your order slip temporarily ends up on the kitchen floor, say, causing a delay — you’re likely to be comped a glass of wine or a shareable dish, and maybe even some excellent port to finish. Or was that Banyuls?

RUE SAINT JACQUES

Dinner: Tues.–Sun., 5:30–10 p.m.

1098 Jackson, SF

(415) 776-2002

www.ruesaintjacques.com

Wine and beer

MC/V

Moderately noisy

Wheelchair accessible

Street Threads: Look of the Day

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SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.

Today’s Look: Katie, Mission and 24th

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Tell us about your look: “I get most of my clothes at vintage thrift shops. At the moment I’m obsessed with 80s LA style, the Goth look coming out of Spain, and anything resembling Siouxsie and The Banshees.

Street Threads: Look of the Day

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SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.

Today’s Look: Jaquayla, Church and 17th St.

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Tell us about your look: “I’m in fashion school at the moment, and I’ve been sewing since the 6th grade. I love making my own clothes and I also make outfits for my kids.”

SF’s economist agrees that Newsom is wrong

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By Steven T. Jones
When I criticized Mayor Gavin Newsom’s latest budget plan as bad economics that will do more harm than good to San Francisco, Newsom spokesperson Nate Ballard said I (and the sources I relied on, from Moody’s to congressional Democrats to President Obama) didn’t know what I was talking about.
“OK, so you think he’s wrong. The City’s chief economist Ted Egan thinks he’s right. So does the Mayor’s chief economic advisor, Michael Cohen. I think the Mayor is probably going to go with Ted and Mike!” Ballard wrote (later referring me to this article, as if it proved his point).
Maybe Ballard or Newsom should have actually talked to Egan, who didn’t review Newsom’s plan and doesn’t agree with its premise. Egan told me, “We were in no way saying you should cut taxes to stimulate the economy, particularly if it means reducing government spending.”

Suck my manhole part 2: Porn god Buck Angel talks about other people’s reactions

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Justin Juul takes on singular porn hottie Buck Angel in part two of this exclusive SEX SF interview. See part one here.

SFBG: How did people in the porn industry respond to you when you first opened shop?
Angel: Oh man, it was really rough at first. People just thought I was weird, I guess, and they didn’t want to give me a chance. They didn’t want to talk to me, they didn’t want me at their shows, nothing. But, I’m a fucking pioneer, you know, and that’s just how it is when you set out to do something totally unheard of. The situation has changed a lot since I’ve become so successful on my own though. I mean, I just won an AVN award and that’s huge! But it wasn’t easy getting here.

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Street Threads: Look of the Day

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SFBG photog Ariel Soto scoops SF street fashion. See the previous Look of the Day here.

Today’s Look: Evelyn, Mission and 25th St.

Evelyn_Mission and 25tha.jpg

Tell us about your look: “I’ll wear anything as long as it’s black.”

Embedded: The boy next door

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Melissa Gira Grant gets deep about the San Francisco sex scene every Thursday on SEX SF.

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Interesting sex lives are all alike; but every boring San Francisco sex life is boring in its own way.

“Justin” moved to the Bay Area from Modesto – not seeking some sexual refuge, but heeding that other great siren call, a software engineering job in the Valley. He’s still in his early 20s, and cute in that slight and skinny way. You would never know that he’s got a secondary encrypted operating system running inside his computer just for his transwoman-on-man porn.

Hip San Francisco sex has little room for someone like Justin. That has nothing to do with “internalized” anything on his part, some lack of sophistication it’s all too easy to dismiss. “I know about Diva’s,” Justin tells me, referring to the club for transwomen and the genetic males who admire them. The reason he doesn’t go isn’t because he’s ashamed – it’s because he doesn’t want to come off as some chaser creep. “I’ve spent way too much time objectifying them,” he says. “Which is fake, but at some point, you think that real life might be that way. You know it’s not, but it’s what you see.”

Instead, Justin relies on Craigslist. He probably spends too much time on Casual Encounters, he says, “which is where most of the t4m [transgender-for-male] ads are.”

That is, there aren’t as many ads from transgender women in the regular dating section of Craigslist, and they don’t have a dedicated “seeking” listing except under “miscellaneous romance” – and he’s not just looking to fool around.

Hey, Blockhead — drink up this Friday

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Photo of Donny Vomit by Laurie Leber

1st Annual Coney Island Pub Crawl
Freak your foam with the infamous Donny Vomit, a.k.a. Coney Island’s “Human Blockhead,” as he nails SF Beer Week up through his nostril and leads a Mission District pub crawl in celebration of his new Schmaltz Brewery namesake beer. Monk’s Kettle, Amnesia, and Elixir are all on tap. Time to get hammered — with Coney Island Lager, of course!
Fri/13, 5pm-11pm, free ($6 at Amnesia)

Part 1: 5:00 pm – 6:45 pm
Monk’s Kettle
3141 16th St., SF. (415) 865-9523, www.monkskettle.com

Part 2: 7:00 pm – 9:00pm
Amnesia Bar
853 Valencia, SF. (415) 970-0012, www.amnesiathebar.com

Part 3: 9:30 pm – 11:00pm
Elixir
3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

Governor attacks the schools

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By Tim Redmond

Just for the record, according to the California Budget Project, the proposed budget that the guv is putting forward would cut $39 million from the SF public schools.
And although the city’s Rainy Day Fund (thanks to Tom Ammiano) might — might — be able to provide $24 million, it’s still going to be a year of ugly, ugly cuts.

Latest “Death of Fun” casualty: Bay to Breakers

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Photo by NileGuide

By Steven T. Jones

The Chronicle reports that the sponsors of Bay to Breakers — which have been under pressure from city officials (and the Chronicle) to crackdown on partying at the event — have banned alcohol and unauthorized floats at the popular, 97-year-old event. What the hell is happening to this town?!?!
As we’ve reported (over and over and over and over and over again), the very events that make San Francisco such a fun and dynamic place to live are under attack by party-poopers, nervous nellies, and the forces of intolerance and conservatism, people whose goal (as our friends at the SF Party Party like to say) is the “suburbanization of San Francisco.”
Already, there are movements forming to boycott Bay to Breakers and/or engage in some creative and alcohol-fueled civil disobedience. Hmm, maybe this is going to be a fun B2B after all.

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Photo by Atrayu

Suck my manhole: Porn god Buck Angel talks FTM realness

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Justin Juul takes on singular porn hottie Buck Angel in part one of this exclusive SEX SF interview.

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Buck Angel is a dude who makes a living having sex with other dudes in movies with names like “Buckback Mountain,” “Pig Ass,” and “The Buck Stops Here.” He has huge muscles and tattoos, smokes expensive cigars, and lives in Mexico where people don’t give a shit about anything. But that’s not what makes this dude so cool. Buck Angel is exceptional because he has a pussy instead of a dick.

Buck Angel started his entertainment career way back in ‘80s as a super skinny, super hot, fashion model named Susan. Seriously, he was so hot even Howard Stern wishes he could go back and “do him” (although the feeling isn’t mutual). Modeling was great for a while, but Susan knew she’d never be happy as a woman. So she became a Buck instead.

The Guardian recently sat down with Angel to find out what happens when chicks stop being chicks and start being dudes with vaginas who fuck other dudes for money and fame (or something like that).

Part One: On Being A Man With a Pussy

SFBG: Hey Buck, before we get started, I just want to get one thing straight: you’re a transsexual, right? I admit I’m not too familiar with guys who used to be girls. What do you call yourself?

Buck Angel: Ok, well, I’m obviously not a very politically correct person so this might sound weird, but here’s the deal: a transsexual is someone who changes his or her sex so obviously, I am a transsexual. I’ll always be a transsexual, but I don’t live my life that way. When I think about transsexuals, I think about people who are in the process of going through a sex change. That’s not me. I’m finished with my sex change and I’m a man!

SFBG: So you’re just, like, a dude?
Angel: Exactly.

SFBG: What about your pussy?
Angel: I’m a man with a pussy, dude. It is what it is.

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