SF

Holly Cole

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PREVIEW If voice has a color, Holly Cole’s gleams like rich, burnished copper. A jazzy postmodern chanteuse with a sensual, sultry bent, the Canadian performer stops into Yoshi’s San Francisco during her first United States tour in six years. Her current trio includes longtime pianist Aaron Davis, bassist Marc Rogers, and saxophonist John Johnson.

Cole has a stylish new self-titled album (Koch) in tow, recorded in New York with a nonet headed by bassist and coproducer Greg Cohen. Cohen plays music across the board, having toured with both Ornette Coleman’s free-jazz ensembles and Woody Allen’s New Orleans–style group, and he’s also worked with more eccentric pop songwriters like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, both of whom Cole has favored on past releases like her 1995 Tom Waits tribute album, Temptation (Metro Blue/Blue Note). Gil Goldstein arranged 6 of the new recording’s 11 tunes, an eclectic bag of standards ranging from Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini’s "Charade" to Cole Porter’s "It’s All Right with Me." At times buoyant and swinging, the record also shows Cole at her most hauntingly intimate.

Although Cole has been making outstanding records for several years, Holly Cole is the first to be domestically distributed since 1997’s pop-slanted Dark Dear Heart (Metro Blue), which included two originals, the title tune by reclusive singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara, and songs by Joni Mitchell and Sheryl Crow, among others. Cole first made her mark with savvy versions of torchy jazz standards like "Don’t Smoke in Bed," but like all great vocalists, she inhabits everything she sings: from Brian Wilson’s "God Only Knows" (off Shade [Alert, 2003]) to Stephen Sondheim’s "Loving You" (from Romantically Helpless [EMI, 2000]). Her lush, purring tones, subtle phrasing, and soulful empathy always take the songs beyond simple interpretation. Much like a great actor, Cole never lets you see the craft but reveals the shadowy dimensions of character and the essential details of the story.

HOLLY COLE Tues/4, 8 and 10 p.m., $16–$20. Yoshi’s San Francisco, 1330 Fillmore, SF. (415) 655-5600, sf.yoshis.com

“Cinema Piemonte”

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PREVIEW The northwestern Italian region of Piemonte is noted for production of wine, wheat, and Fiats. Its principal city, Turin, a.k.a. Torino, was briefly the nation’s capital after unification — and soon afterward became the focus of its early film industry as well. While both crowns were eventually stolen by Rome, the area maintained a role in Italian cinema through the decades. That history is sampled in this weekend of features set in Piemonte, presented by the Associazione Piemontesi of Northern California in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute and Regione Piemonte. The four programs run a wide gamut, not least because they span 90 years between them. The closer on Sunday should be a major occasion: a restored print of Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 Cabiria, the apex of the lavish costume epics that dominated Turin’s industry and proved a huge influence on the likes of D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. This three-hour tale of ancient Rome will be accompanied live by pianist Stefano Maccagno, playing his original score. Another big international hit was 1949’s Bitter Rise, a heady brew of neorealism and noir melodrama that made Silvana Mangano — at the time a very well-developed 19 years old — into the first postwar Euro bombshell. Packed into tight clothes as a scheming peasant rice harvester, she seemed the very embodiment of wanton s-e-x years before Bardot, Monroe, and Loren came along. Mario Monicelli’s 1963 I Compagni, a.k.a. The Organizer, is a somewhat more serious labor drama, with Marcello Mastroianni, superb as usual, portraying a professor agitating for improved textile worker conditions at the dawn of the 20th century. Opening the weekend, and serving as its lightest note, is Davide Ferrario’s Dopo Mezzanote (After Midnight, 2004), a whimsical romantic comedy set in Turin’s Mole Antonelliana — a beautiful 19th-century structure that happens to house Italy’s National Museum of Film.

CINEMA PIEMONTE Fri/29, 7 p.m.; Sat/1, 4 and 7:30 p.m.; Sun/2, 4 p.m., free

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF

www.piemontesinoca.com, www.fortmason.org

Dining in the off-hours

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LATE LUNCHES One of the things that makes Don’t-call-it-Frisco such a fine place is the disproportionate ratio of successful slackers to office drones who live here. You know the type: they sleep in until 10, read the whole newspaper over a bagel and coffee, get some sort of exercise, and then spend the rest of the day creatively earning money. I’m one of them — hell, you’re probably one of them. Waiters, bartenders, freelance mortgage brokers, writers, graphic designers … there are all sorts of creative types doodling around the city during off hours, working after the sun goes down and eating their meals whenever they please. The only problem? When you finish breakfast at 11 a.m., you want lunch around 3 or 4 p.m. — and many power-lunch spots serving the corporate world close between 2 and 5 p.m., when the earliest cocktailer trickles in. So where do late lunchers eat? For those of you who think outside the cubicle, here are a few restaurants that’ll serve you no matter what time the lunch urge strikes.

Everything about Bar Bambino (2931 16th St.; 701-8466, www.barbambino.com) is carefully rustic. In the restaurant’s front window, a rough-hewn community table seats 10 and a soft white Italian marble bar reaches all the way back to an open section of the kitchen, displaying cheeses and charcuterie. A few scattered indoor tables give way to a quiet, heated outdoor patio. The menu shows owner Christopher Losa’s love for northern Italy, where he lived for several years: the food is simple, traditional Italian, like the polpetti, pork-and-veal meatballs in a rich tomato sauce with dark chard. There’s nothing superfluous on the plates (order some sides for that), and the dishes are affordable. "I’m all about gastronomic progression, but how many times a week can you eat peppered sardines in cilantro foam?" laughs Losa. "Sometimes you just want a plate of really good pasta." The highly polished Italian wine list offsets Bar Bambino’s simple food.

If you want to know where the really good meals are, follow the chefs. When San Francisco’s culinary heroes have slept off last night’s shift (and postshift drinks) and finished their coffee, they head to Sunflower (506 Valencia and 3111 16th St.; 626-5022) for cheap and authentic Vietnamese eats. Sunflower has two locations: a tiny (like, four tables tiny) space on Valencia and a larger dining room around the corner on 16th Street. Both locations share the same kitchen, which speedily produces hangover-curing dishes like sticky wontons (stuffed with pork, rolled in rice, and deep-fried) and all kinds of pho, with the requisite Mission vegan options available. The industrial-strength Thai iced tea or coffee is sweetened by plenty of condensed milk and will keep you buzzing long into the evening. The produce is fresh and the meat is nondubious, something of a rarity for a pho restaurant.

Absinthe (398 Hayes; 551-1590, www.absinthe.com) hasn’t gotten a lot of press in the past couple of years, but that’s not because the restaurant has slipped any. The Yelpers and the new-restaurant junkies may have gone to feed on fresh prey, but good ol’ Absinthe remains a staple of opera diners and cocktail connoisseurs. The bar’s lounge area stays open through Absinthe’s lunch rush, dinner rush, and the post-opera blitz. Sure, you’ll drop some coin on a meal at Absinthe (a decadent lunch for two plus cocktails runs about $100), but you’ll eat, and be treated, like royalty. Forget about the tired waitstaff dying to drop the checks so they can go home — the service here is as good as the Chartreuse cocktails and the fresh crab.

Restaurant Lulu (816 Folsom; 495-5775, www.restaurantlulu.com) is a total find in the restaurant wasteland that makes up this part of the SoMa corridor. It has the best salty, lemony mussels around, hands down. The industrial-chic decor is at odds with the impeccable and friendly service (read: no pretense, no attitude). Lulu’s is perfect for a hefty lunch circa 3 p.m., after a midday spin at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The kitchen at Perbacco (230 California; 955-0663, www.perbaccosf.com) will only do a bar menu between lunch and dinner, but it’s worth a trip to the heart of the Financial District for some ultra-authentic Italian snacks and drinks. The house specialty is the charcuterie plate (the sassy little meat-chef slices everything on a vintage machine right behind the bar), but everything’s good. Try their signature cocktail as a brightly acidic complement to the heavy, comforting meatiness offered on the rest of the menu.

OK, so you never want to hear the words "Asian fusion" again. I know: I don’t either. But buck up and check out Ozumo (161 Steuart; 882-1333, www.ozumo.com) on the backside of Steuart. If you just can’t bear to order anything with the word "fusion" in its name (your loss), you can still try the sushi. Ozumo is where the other servers in the area head for their post-lunch-shift drink — in case you wonder who the raucous group in the front lounge are. If you sit up there too, you can even pick up a wireless signal from next door. Hey, it’s like you really are in an office … but with cocktails. Viva la SF-slacker lifestyle! (Ella Lawrence)

“From San Francisco to Silicon Valley”

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REVIEW The camera loves San Francisco. Weather, light, hills, and landmarks all make it primary fodder for photographers, too many of whom hew to the postcard views. Known for his architectural documentation of the industrial outer rings of Europe’s cities, Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico came to the Bay Area to capture its transitional developments: Silicon Valley and the San Francisco of strange buildings and telephone wires. No Victorians or trolley cars here, which means that many viewers may recognize the city as they know it: construction, do-not-enter road signs, and a distant skyline; sunbathers in Dolores Park rather than the Golden Gate’s majesty; Verizon Wireless billboards; and the 76 gas station globe. A conventional picture of the Marin Headlands drifting in fog is interrupted by the foregrounding of high-rise apartments. A stunning landscape photo taken from Twin Peaks revels in the incongruities of our still-beautiful city, with grassy California hills overlaying the low-slung Sunset and Castro, and Market Street forming a V with a long afternoon shadow.

"From San Francisco to Silicon Valley" also includes a plethora of freeway shots, which makes sense, given the show’s title. Basilico shoots both the silent underpasses and the blurred velocity of downtown-bound cars. As we transition to the valley, the highways provide the visual link. Instead of giving way to a rising crowd of buildings, the roads beget alien corporate campuses and manicured exurbia. Basilico the architect gleefully frames the garish structures and sprawling sameness that define much of the Silicon Valley landscape, though his best portraits include counterpoint evocations of California nature. On the same floor of the museum, in "Picturing Modernity," Carleton E. Watkins’s photograph The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill (circa 1868) presents San Francisco as a hungry upstart. More than 100 years later, Basilico’s shot of roughshod development in the hills outside San Jose tells a similar story.

FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO SILICON VALLEY Through June 15. Mon.–Tues. and Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.; $7–$12.50 (free first Tues.). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Elastic band

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After struggling to settle into a listening routine with Dig That Treasure (Asthmatic Kitty), the sprightly debut from Bay Area trio Cryptacize, I decided to take the recording for a walk. Buoyed by the sudden spring weather, I floated down Harrison to the candy-striped fuzz of "Heaven Is Human," and before long, found certain street noises complementarily weaving their way into the track. "Bells are ringing / Gates are singing," Nedelle Torrisi coos on "Cosmic Sing-A-Long," before bandmate Chris Cohen joins to harmonize on the gentle rallying cry, "Every note is an unfinished song."

Cryptacize’s numbers are arranged as twisty medleys, their frequent stops and starts redolent of the impressionistic fragrance of melody. Torrisi and Cohen previously explored similarly horizontal song structures together in the Curtains, but the addition of percussionist Michael Carreira — who plays drums as if he were painting — and proper duets lend Cryptacize a markedly easygoing, domestic air. Sharp melodic inversions and time changes are softened by Torrisi’s and Cohen’s disarmingly sweet voices and a general balancing of tunefulness with cacophony.

As with Cohen’s earlier band Deerhoof, Cryptacize strives for the development of a private musical language rather than the typical filtering of influences. "We never really jam," Cohen e-mails from his Oakland home, "but some songs are sections designated as free tempo so we [just have to] follow each other’s movements out of the corners of our eyes. There are also parts where we improvise on a specific theme or riff, but these moments are built into a song." This kind of programmed free association is especially evident on more mosaic pieces like "Heaven Is Human," but instead of resulting in free-jazz confusion or Deerhoof density, Cryptacize’s wide-eyed stitch often seems like the score to an imaginary musical.

Part of this stems from the album’s isoutf8g production, in which the multiplicity of the compositional elements plays against a sparing sound. The overdubs are few and far between, and the silences many. "Hearing parts separately was important to us for this album. We wanted the listener to have lots of empty space," writes Cohen. Even on thicker-sounding productions like "We’ll Never Dream Again," the two guitar tracks are panned to either side, emphasizing the song’s moving parts on headphones.

One can be forgiven for picturing a stage while listening to these wide expanses. It’s there in the plaintive opening of "The Shape Above," the pitched mood swings on "How Did the Actor Laugh?," contemplative confessionals like "Water Witching Wishes," and the outstretched verses of "Stop Watch." When I ask Cohen about it, he fills me in on his and Torrisi’s youthful exposure to musical theater and sings the praises of Leonard Bernstein. "Mike actually isn’t a big fan of show tunes, although we did turn him on to our favorite, West Side Story, when we were on tour in October," Cohen e-mails, before explaining the theatrical roots of the disc’s inviting title: his father, an aspiring collegiate composer, cowrote a musical review of the same name. He lent the title to Cryptacize "cautiously," Cohen continues, "warning us that his cowriters might sue us!"

Legal proceedings notwithstanding, Cryptacize has all the qualifications to reinvent the rock opera. In the meantime, the band is readying Dig That Treasure‘s prismatic pop for the road, angling for bewitchment. "Since we don’t exactly bombard the audience with volume," writes Cohen, "Nedelle has developed a set of hand movements to hypnotize them."

CRYPTACIZE

With Why? and Dose One

March 6, 9 p.m., $13

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

Breezy’s

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› paulr@sfbg.com

Since the symphony strike of the mid-1990s, the west side of the Civic Center has seen more than its share of high-profile destination restaurants open their doors. From Jardinière (born 1997) to Essencia (2007), the tone of the restaurants in the neighborhood (whose epicenter is the corner of Gough and Hayes) has become considerably … tonier.

Much of the upscale-ishness doubtless has to do with the demolition of the Central Freeway viaduct and the reemergence of Hayes Valley as a nice place to live. A fresh bloom of boutique shops tends to confirm this. But east of Gough, the song remains largely the same: opera, symphony, ballet, with the occasional "in conversation with" at Herbst Auditorium thrown in. Yes, we are talking performances of one kind or another, and performance audiences often want something to eat in a civilized setting beforehand and aren’t always eager to cash out their 401(k)s or Google stock options to pay for it. Does the west Civic Center, with its new wealth of destination spots, have anything to offer these people? Ivy’s was the archetype of this sort of value restaurant, but it closed more than a decade ago.

On a recent weekend evening, mild and clear after weeks of stultifying rain, we slipped into Breezy’s at about 7:30 and found both large dining rooms full. A half hour later, as the clock struck eight, the restaurant was nearly empty; we were like the two forlorn members of a school of tasty fish who didn’t get the memo about the approaching great white shark. As curtains grandly rose in grand buildings on the other side of Gough, we made do with a chocolate tart.

Bawer Tekin and Dawn Wiggins opened Breezy’s last fall in a space long occupied by the Blue Muse, whose fanatical devotees will be relieved to know their restaurant has reappeared a block away, in a space that adjoins the performing-arts parking garage. The old space, meanwhile, looks little-changed and is still rather cavernous, with the front room still dominated by the big bar and the rear dining room faintly secret, like a cell in a medieval cloister. A creamy color scheme brings some warmth to this brutal roominess, and the iridescent tiles on the support pillars exert a certain hypnotic appeal, as Rubik’s Cube did a generation ago.

But forget about Breezy’s pleasantly unobtrusive décor and its friendly, efficient service, which holds up well even at the heart of the pre-performance rush. You’re there to eat, and the food is good. Quite good! Interesting without calling undue attention to itself, and reasonably priced in a fat-cat city where the word affordable often seems as if it’s been read right out of the language.

Chef Rodney Baca’s menu offers, according to the restaurant’s Web site, "the fresh tastes of the Mediterranean, with a swirl of Asian flair." Nicely put. The food, in other words, is that by-now familiar amalgam of California–New American cuisine, with touches of local and sustainable, along with a few blatant violations of these tenets. I love stuffed tomatoes, and Baca’s version ($9) is excellent — a baseball-size, reasonably ripe (for February) fruit, opened at the top like a Halloween pumpkin for a lively filling of prosciutto, cheese, and basil — but … a tomato in February? With basil? Everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, Voltaire wrote in Candide, except (and I choose to believe this is implicit in the Voltairean text) winter tomatoes.

An arugula and watercress salad ($6) is a little more like it. The greens reached the table still practically glistening with rain, and instead of walnuts (those usual suspects), Baca used spicy peanuts to add crunch while making, possibly, a sly Super Bowl reference. Aged bleu cheese is a standard player in these salads and did appear in this one, but the vinaigrette acquired a refreshing sheen from pomegranate juice.

The kitchen also handles pasta beautifully, and this is an important consideration for performance-bound people, who will be more comfortable sitting there for an hour or three if they’ve eaten something a little lighter than a 20-ounce steak. You can get some steak with your pasta if you like; linguine alla carbonara ($14), with a classic sauce of pancetta cream and green peas, also includes meatballs of rib eye and Asiago cheese — just enough meat to register. And macaroni and cheese ($6, for a serving big enough to be a small main dish), is infused with truffle oil, scattered with crisped bits of chorizo, and plated with mixed micro greens, for a full-spectrum effect.

The chocolate tart ($7) we were so contentedly eating when the room cleared, as if in response to an air-raid siren, did suffer from a tough crust. Our server had mentioned this to us beforehand. But it was flavorful tough crust, we had good knives, and the ganache inside was intense and at the very precipice of not being sweet. Embedded on the surface of the ganache like bits of buckshot were blueberries, while napped around the edge was a wild berry marmalade and a dusting of pulverized pistachio.

At weekday lunchtime (the other busy period for restaurants in this area) Breezy’s is nicely accessible. Its large carrying capacity must help. Choices tend toward the conventional — Cobb salad ($9), say, or seared ahi tuna ($11) on a focaccia bun — and as at dinner, toward lightness too. Lightness, freshness, the pleasant startlement of a fresh breeze in the face: the name Breezy’s made not much sense to me before I went there and ate the food, but then I did and now it does. *

BREEZY’S

Lunch: Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Mon.–Thurs. and Sun., 5–10 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5–11 p.m.

409 Gough, SF

(415) 552-3400

www.breezysf.com

Full bar

Moderately noisy

AE/DC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Madonna, Wilde, and bears — oh my!

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The International Bear Rendezvous has come and gone, but a few stragglers searching for a good time can still be found in "Bear Hunting," James Gobel’s series of lush and faintly melancholy portraits. Attired in flannels, suspenders, and trendy band T-shirts, Gobel’s burly and bearded imagined subjects might appear uncannily familiar to regulars of the Eagle or the Lone Star, or to certain segments of BUTT magazine’s readership.

But while their clothing scans along contemporary gay subcultural lines — which these days seems to overlap with the dress sense of male hipsters — Gobel poses them in the mannered body language of the 19th-century aesthete. Eyes slyly cocked, paused by some combination of antique architectural details — a velvet curtain, a divan, a newel post, flocked wallpaper — each bear holds aloft a flickering candle, as if he’s studied Cindy Sherman’s anonymous, imperiled heroines alongside Oscar Wilde’s famously photographed languid contrapposto.

Not that the supersaturated royal purples, peacock blues, and John Deere greens or the acrylic, yarn, and wool felt textures of Gobel’s marquetry need more illumination. His canvases almost pop off the wall. But the bears appear to remain oblivious to their rainbow-colored surroundings. Like Ingrid Bergman in Gas Light (1944) or Joan Fontaine in Rebecca (1940), they seem trapped in a haunted house in which something isn’t quite right and the past lingers on like a killer hangover. In Holding Tenderly to What Remains, the subject reveals a "Madonna Live at Coachella" T-shirt beneath his Pendleton. The title, in combination with the shirt, immediately underscores the nostalgia industry driven by and marketed to the pink dollar, in which subcultures — yes, even bears — become marketing demographics.

The question that Gobel’s portraits stop short of answering is, what happens when the flame goes out? *

JAMES GOBEL: "BEAR HUNTING"

Through March 29

Tues.–Fri., 10:30 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m.–5 p.m., free

Marx Zavattero Gallery

77 Geary, SF

(415) 627-9111

www.marxzav.com

Lee Friedlander’s lively American necrologies

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REVIEW Throughout Lee Friedlander’s 50-year oeuvre, much of which is now on display at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the photographer has been lauded for his liveliness, optimism, and mobility. Yet his paean to modern Americana often resembles monochrome memento mori. Taken as a whole, Friedlander’s work has always seemed driven to two poles: the ephemeral and the haunting.

Heavily impressed by the avant-naturalism of European photographers Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as the post–World War II experimentalism of Robert Frank, Friedlander staked his claim at a moment in the 1950s when the photograph transcended the moribund category of journalistic tool and became its own art form. Modeling much of his working method around Cartier-Bresson’s so-called decisive moment, Friedlander’s timeless images still have a striking past tense about them. Now ossified on film, these thousand microcosmic moments, captured throughout the 1960s and ’70s, seem like lively obituaries.

While Friedlander first made a name for himself as a contractor for Atlantic Records — where he shot such musicians as Ornette Coleman — he was never a celebrity photographer. In fact, his most intriguing work resulted from a personal obsession with traveling and shooting the country, crisscrossing between New York and his home state of Washington. And so the images of nocturnal motel rooms, cycloptic TV sets, and storefront tessellations conjure the American dynamism and dread of Vladimir Nabokov or David Lynch. The plethora of windows and mirrors in his street photography admit countless apertures through which to see his subjects. But Friedlander’s playful sense of humor always appears just within the clutches of something inexplicably sinister — like the cartoonish shadows that often hover into his frame. Though his more recent work — in portraiture, nudes, and particularly in nature — may suffer slightly from the inevitable cooling of youth’s ambition, Friedlander’s baroque attention to detail and depth of field are unmatched. This is a definitive exhibition on one of America’s most ingenious, albeit conflicted, photographers.

"FRIEDLANDER"

Through May 18

Mon.–Tues., Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m.

$7–$12.50, free for members and 12 and under

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

The Bewitching Mary Blair Project

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REVIEW Beginning in 1940 and continuing through the ’60s, Mary Blair was a key contributor to the Disney aesthetic. As one of Walt Disney’s right hands, she was responsible for the design of both the It’s a Small World and Alice in Wonderland rides at Disneyland, as well as numerous large-scale tile murals that adorned the exteriors of Tomorrowland and still grace the lobby of the Walt Disney World Contemporary Resort in Florida. Not only is her work part of the Disney canon but she also created illustrations for the classic children’s Little Golden Books. Illustrative artifacts of Blair’s life and concept art for her now-legendary amusement park architecture are all part of "The Art and Flair of Mary Blair."

The Cartoon Art Museum exhibit includes a representative sample of Blair’s illustrative range. From the announcement of the birth of her son to a cigarette advertisement, her distinct sense of color and design inevitably indicate the era in which they were produced. And in its innocent nostalgia — most clearly displayed in the stylized gouache sketches made during her South American travels — Blair’s work simultaneously projects an idealistic view of the future.

In her plan for the exterior of It’s a Small World, she combines squares, triangles, and diamonds with overlapping fields of color to shape a complex geometric composition. The patchwork quality of the surface closely resembles the fabric designs of one of Blair’s modernist contemporaries, Ray Eames, who also recognized the intricacies and the simplicity of both natural and built environments. Composed of the world’s most recognized landmarks, Blair’s condensed multi-cityscape is less representative than it is abstract: its Eiffel Tower resembles a geodesic slice.

THE ART AND FLAIR OF MARY BLAIR

Through March 18

Tues.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

Cartoon Art Museum

655 Mission, SF

$2–$6

(415) 227-8666, www.cartoonart.org

Newsom’s woman problem

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OPINION Be nice, wait your turn, pay your dues, your time will come.

This is the “guidance” given to women in politics, and many of us have bided our time and paid our share of dues. But what happens when our time comes, and we speak out for what we believe in? We are called pushy, mean, controlling, or cold. And worse — we are stripped of our positions.

In the last month, four of the most respected women in city government have been removed from their posts:

•Susan Leal is considered one of city government’s best managers and was leading the city toward a future of sustainable energy usage. According to the Chronicle, she was fired from her position as director of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission because the Mayor did not consider her to be a “team player,” and because it appeared that Leal was readying herself for another run for Mayor in 2011.

•Leah Shahum is a fearless bike advocate and Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. She was removed from the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency for being an outspoken critic of the city’s inaction on promoting alternative forms of transportation.

•Roma Guy is a fierce advocate for women’s health, a former lecturer in San Francisco State University’s health education department and a longtime progressive activist. She was removed from the city’s Health Commission without explanation.

•Debra Walker is the only woman on the city’s powerful Building Inspection Commission, a longtime affordable housing activist, and a fighter for reform and transparency in the Department of Building Inspection (a male-dominated department in a male-dominated field). Walker lost her leadership position on the commission after she was targeted by the mayor’s office for openly disagreeing with his positions.

We can’t allow these affronts to go unnoticed and we can’t afford to lose more good women in power — or let the few that remain be silenced into inaction. It is time for women to stand behind our sisters who work hard every day to represent us in government, many on a volunteer basis, while also pursuing full time careers and caring for their families.

The National Women’s Political Caucus and the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee are working to increase the number of women in positions of influence in city government. In September of last year, 47 elected officials and other community leaders from the San Francisco women’s community came together for a Women’s Policy Summit where the participants agreed that our top priority is to promote more women to positions of influence in government.

Even though women comprise 51 percent of the voting population, we hold only 16 percent of the seats in Congress, 23 percent of state legislative seats nationwide, and 27 percent of the seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Only one elected executive office in San Francisco — district attorney — is held by a woman.

San Francisco must do more to promote women to leadership positions. We must also call on the mayor to appoint women to positions of influence in city government and demand an explanation when he removes qualified women from their posts without good cause. The time for patience and waiting our turn has passed. *

Alix Rosenthal, Amy Moy and Micha Liberty

Alix Rosenthal is the founder of the San Francisco Women’s Policy Summit. Amy Moy is president of the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee. Micha Liberty is president of the National Women’s Political Caucus (SF chapter).

 

Big finish

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

After more than three weeks of testimony, a series of expert witnesses, reams of documents entered into evidence, and some stunning admissions on the part of the nation’s largest alternative newspaper chain, the Guardian‘s lawsuit against the SF Weekly is headed for the jury just as this issue hits the streets.

The outcome could impact the future of the alternative press.

The Guardian is charging the Weekly and its corporate owner, Village Voice Media, with predatory pricing, arguing that the Weekly for many years sold ads below cost with the intent of harming the locally owned competitor. That would be a violation of the California Unfair Practices Act.

The Weekly‘s last few witnesses were slated to take the stand Feb. 26 and closing arguments are set for Feb. 27, when Judge Marla Miller told the jury that it will probably begin deliberating.

The daily newspapers and the mainstream media in general have ignored the case. "That’s a shame," Mark Fitzgerald, a columnist for the trade magazine Editor and Publisher, wrote in a Feb. 24 piece that called the trial "sometimes raucous."

In fact, it’s been fascinating, and the jurors have seen some remarkable evidence. Since the chain, then known as New Times, bought the Weekly in 1995, the evidence has shown that the paper has never once made a profit. In fact, the corporation has had to ship in $13 million from its Phoenix headquarters to keep the Weekly afloat.

Several top executives, including two former Weekly publishers, Troy Larkin and Chris Keating, have admitted under oath that the Weekly was selling ads below cost. The Guardian‘s financial expert, accountant Clifford Kupperberg, has presented evidence that the Weekly sold ads below cost as much as 90 percent of the time and that the predatory practices have cost the Guardian between $5 million and $11 million.

On Feb. 22, Everett Harry, an expert witness hired by the Weekly, as much as admitted the same thing, presenting a series of charts that showed consistent below-cost sales.

The Weekly‘s lawyers are arguing that the 16-paper chain and its senior management never intended to harm the Guardian. Any financial setbacks the Guardian has suffered were due entirely to the dot-com bust, the post 9/11 recession, and the rise of Internet advertising, they say.

They also say that the Weekly and the Guardian have so many competitors in the San Francisco market that it would be foolish for VVM to try to damage a single competing newspaper.

But three witnesses have come forward to testify that Mike Lacey, one of the two principal owners of Village Voice Media, specifically vowed to put the Guardian out of business when he took over the Weekly. Memos from Weekly publishers to the bosses in Phoenix refer to the Guardian as the only significant competitor and discuss how the Weekly can take ads away from the Guardian.

In some memos, Weekly executives talk of how well they are doing in San Francisco, even as the Weekly was losing more than $1 million a year. The clear implication: the Weekly publishers weren’t being judged on how much money they made, but on how effectively they’ve tried to cripple the Guardian.

The jury will have to find that the Weekly sold below cost, that it did so to harm the Guardian, and that the Weekly‘s behavior played a significant role in causing the Guardian financial harm. The panel can then award damages.

Alternative papers around the country, particularly independents, are watching the trial closely. If the Guardian wins, the jury verdict could send a signal to big publishing outfits in California and in the 20 other states with similar antitrust laws that below-cost selling and attempts at market domination could be risky business.

Building green in SF

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Wind turbines and solar panels may soon sprout on San Francisco rooftops as the city considers rival plans to implement mandatory green design standards for new residential and commercial buildings.

One ordinance proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Green Building Task Force would require new commercial construction of more than 5,000 square feet, residential buildings above 75 feet, and renovations to buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certified by 2012, the second-highest designation.

The U.S. Green Building Council developed the point-based LEED system based on numerous green factors. The lowest green standard is LEED Certified, followed by Silver, Gold, and Putf8um. The new Academy of Sciences building, with the country’s largest living roof, is LEED Putf8um.

Newsom’s legislation would start off by mandating requiring only the lowest standard, LEED Certified, which requires 26 points, and gradually move to LEED Gold by 2012. But Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has introduced an ordinance that would require the same buildings to immediately earn LEED Gold certification.

According to the LEED system, most existing buildings already have between 18 to 22 points, so Newsom’s proposed goal should be fairly easily attainable. A bike rack outside a building qualifies for 1 point. Proximity to mass transit gains another point, and Muni runs within two blocks of 90 percent of all San Francisco residences, according to the Municipal Transportation Agency.

At a green building standards workshop Feb. 20 at the San Francisco Green Party’s office, about 20 people voiced their concerns with the ordinances in front of three city commissioners.

"We need to correct the language to include all buildings," said panelist Patricia Gerber, a member of the city’s Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force. The San Francisco Office of Economic Analysis last year concluded both proposed ordinances would impact only 38 percent of the construction industry. "We should look to Europe for inspiration," Gerber recommended. "They have much stricter standards."

Some European nations started mandatory green construction in the mid-’90s, but critics say the United States has lagged.

"There are no minimum requirements on windows, insulation, and leaks," Gerber told the Guardian, describing the proposed ordinances. "LEED is a joke."

But Mark Westlund, spokesman for the Department of the Environment, defended Newsom’s longer LEED certification timeline. "We want to develop a green building plan that business can work with," he told us.

The Green Building Task Force claims that businesses need time to adjust to the higher costs associated with green materials, such as EnergyStar windows, can reduce heating costs by 30 to 40 percent. "They’re expensive because they’re used on a small scale. The minute they require it, it will become cheaper," John Rizzo, Green Party member and City College Trustee, told the audience. "It would be great if this could be done on a statewide level."

Panelists noted that green buildings save money in energy costs over the long run. Another criticism raised at the workshop was the Newsom plan’s loopholes. "Even if a project is approved green, it might not end up green," Gerber told us. If a construction company runs out of money for example, it can ask the planning director to waive LEED certification.

In addition, the event attendees questioned the credibility of the mayor’s Green Building Task Force, which does not include any environmentalists. Rather, it is composed of developers, financiers, architects, and engineers.

"We feel it represents a good variety of industry people, and so far we haven’t received any negative responses on the ordinance," Mark Palmer, San Francisco’s green building coordinator, told us.

Smaller residential buildings in San Francisco will not require LEED certification, but could be required to follow a GreenPoint scorecard developed by Berkeley nonprofit Build It Green.

Newsom’s ordinance will be presented March 19 at the Building Inspection Commission, which has already forwarded Peskin’s measure to he Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee. According to Peskin’s office, the two ordinances will likely be combined once supervisors decide which standard to seek.

SCENE: Where to Buy

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SCENE QUEENS


Photography: Jeffery Cross
Clothing from: Harputs Adidas (1527 Fillmore, SF; 415-923-9300, www.harputs.com), Minnie Wilde (3266 21st St., SF; 415-642-9453, www.minniewilde.com), Porcelynne Design Collective (487 14th St., SF; 415-861-2647, www.porcelynne.com), the Seventh Heart (1592 Market, SF; 415-431-1755, www.myspace.com/theseventhheart), and Thrift Town (2101 Mission, SF; 415-861-1132, www.thrifttown.com)
LEFT
DJ Nuxx: Jeans by Cheap Monday and suspenders from the Seventh Heart; Cockblock T available at cockblock.bigcartel.com
CENTER
Bianca: Butterfly dress by Yugula from Porcelynne Design Collective
Sebastian: 1985 Run-DMC Adidas suit from Harputs Adidas
RIGHT
Alison: Belt and stockings from Minnie Wilde and dress by Uniqlo, New York City
Kat: Striped top from Minnie Wilde and boots from Thrift Town

WINDOW DRESSING


Photography: Spenser Hansen
Concept: Mirissa Neff and Spenser Hansen
Location: Pink (2965 16th St., SF; www.pinksf.com)
Styling: Phoebe Durland and Mirissa Neff
Makeup: Nicole Hansen
Cover makeup: Nicole Hansen and Andrew Jones
Hair: Faith Allen
Assistance: Bree
Clothing from: Five and Diamond (510 Valencia, SF; 415-255-9747, www.fiveanddiamond.com), RAG, Residents Apparel Gallery (541 Octavia, SF; 415-621-7718, www.ragsf.com)
LEFT
Anne: Vest and gloves by Skin Graft and ring by Bootleg
Dugan: Vest by Heathen, wristband by Wildcard, and rings by Bootleg
All clothing from Five and Diamond
CENTER
(Clockwise from top)
Dugan: Leather aviator hat and skeleton tank by Wild Card, vest by 2013, and necklace and rings by Wild Card. All from Five and Diamond.
JD: Hat by Heathen, earrings by Tawapa, tie by Erin Macleod, collar by Sure Shot, and rings and pendant by Bootleg. All from Five and Diamond.
Anne: Earmuff by 2013 and tie top by Melodia from Five and Diamond.
Cool Design couple earrings from RAG.
Isis: Hat by Steam Trunk, necklace, earrings, and bracelet by Tawapa, and rings by Bootleg. All from Five and Diamond. Vest by Kitten Hawk from RAG.
RIGHT
Carlos (left column, top and middle; center column, bottom right): Pants and chain by 2013, vest by Heathen, jacket by Skin Graft, belt and wristband by Wild Card, earrings by Tawapa, and necklace by Bootleg. All from Five and Diamond. White shirt by English Laundry from RAG.
Isis (center column, top left and bottom left): Coat by Ayya and jewelry by Tawapa from Five and Diamond.
JD (center column, top right; right column, second from bottom): Jacket and hat by Heathen, T-shirt by Five and Diamond, belt and hand spats by Wild Card, earrings by Tawapa, and necklaces by Bootleg. All from Five and Diamond.
Dugan (right column, top and second from top): Canvas suit and matching cap by Heathen and rings by Bootleg. All from Five and Diamond.
Anne (left column, bottom; center column, center; right column, bottom): Jacket, skirt, and belt by Wild Card, scarf and bloomers by Five and Diamond, hat by Heathen, and pendant by Tawapa. All from Five and Diamond. Vest by Kitten Hawk from RAG.

HOUSE PARTY


Photography: Alexander Warnow
Location: Space Gallery (1141 Polk, SF; 415-377-3325, www.spacegallerysf.com)
Styling: Mirissa Neff
Assistance: Aracely Gonzalez and Lale Shafaghi
Clothing from: Azalea (411 Hayes, SF; 415-861-9888, www.azaleasf.com), Callibug Designs (www.callibugdesigns.com), Deeper Shades of Soul (www.deepershadesofsoul.com), Nice Collective (www.nicecollective.com), RAG, Residents Apparel Gallery (541 Octavia, SF; 415-621-7718, www.ragsf.com), Self Edge (714 Valencia, SF; 415-558-0658, www.selfedge.com), the Seventh Heart (1592 Market, SF; 415-431-1755, www.myspace.com/theseventhheart), and Upper Playground (220 Fillmore, SF; 415-861-1960, www.upperplayground.com)
LEFT TO RIGHT
Durand (standing): Rag and Bone blazer and Rogue’s Gallery T from Azalea and Flat Head jeans from Self Edge
Ariel, a.k.a DJ Domino (pointing): Track jacket from Upper Playground, Podoll T, Spare Change belt, and Skull jeans from Self Edge
Mr. Grant (DJ): Jacket by Nice Collective, Horseface bandanna from the Seventh Heart, and Sam Flores T from Upper Playground
Lale (kneeling): Sam Flores lily-pad bandanna and Jeremy Fish T from Upper Playground and Icon National skirt from RAG
Alana (passed out): Fustaa Saski T from Upper Playground, MzzTrzz leather obi from RAG, and Levi’s 518 jeans from the Seventh Heart
Jin (dancing): Fedora by Heathen from RAG, jacket by Callibug Designs, and T by Deeper Shades of Soul
Anne (on couch): T dress by Nooworks, hat by Ten Wrens, and clip by Feather Witch from RAG
Aaron (on couch): Solis scarf from Azalea, Tenderloin boys T from RAG, Flat Head button-down jeans from Self Edge, and suspenders from the Seventh Heart
Aracely (standing): Superfisial pom beanie from Upper Playground, Nite Zebra T by Loomstate from Azalea, belt by Jennifer Blair, and T dress by Nooworks from RAG
Jake (standing): Tie by Gytha Mather from RAG, T by 5733 from RAG, and Rebel cap and fingerless gloves from the Seventh Heart

>>Back to winter Scene 2007

SCENE: Fresh Taps

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The year in drinking was tough on our collective livers but tremendous for our taste buds. More new drinking venues opened or reopened this year than we can track, so we’re studying the larger trends below and listing most of our favorites. (Camper English; www.alcademics.com)

Make mine wine


Soon, it seems, there’ll be as many wine bars in San Francisco as coffee shops. Most new wine bars are not bars at all, though — they’re either retail outlets with tasting bars inside or small-plates restaurants by another name.
District (216 Townsend, SF; www.districtsf.com), however, is a wine bar that really feels like a bar. Its high ceilings keep you from feeling penned in, despite the large downtown crowd inside. Other new wine bars of note: South Food and Wine Bar (330 Townsend, SF; www.southfwb.com) specializes in Australian and New Zealand wines; Bin 38 (3232 Scott, SF; www.bin38.com) focuses on New World wines and has an interesting beer selection; Terroir Natural Wine Merchant (1116 Folsom, SF; www.terroirsf.com) features biodynamic wines; and the Wine Bar (2032 Polk, SF; 415-931-4307) plays sports on big-screen TVs.

Happy ever after hours


Clubs and later-hour venues are opening earlier for increased happy hour drink sales — in effect becoming cocktail bars with club crowds. The result is more bars open more of the time, which is more of what we like.

The Ambassador (673 Geary, SF; www.ambassador415.com) is gorgeous and crowded — there’s a bouncer and a line to get in at night — but after work it’s a fine place to chill with friends. Jumbo club Temple (540 Howard, SF; www.templesf.com) lets you pork out on the dance floor; its restaurant, Prana, is open for dinner and drinks early in the evening. Swanky Vessel (85 Campton Place, SF; www.vesselsf.com) caters to people charging drinks to the corporate account. Matador (10 Sixth St., SF; 415-863-462) is the cleaner but still dark reincarnation of Arrow Bar. Harlot (46 Minna, SF; www.harlotsf.com) serves food from Salt House next door and has a naughty bordello theme, whereas Etiquette (1108 Market, SF; www.etiquettelounge.com) just serves cocktails and has a naughty Victorian theme.

Tipple with garnish


Some of the best drinking can be had at eateries — think of all of those kitchen-coddled fresh fruits and vegetables begging to be muddled into delicious drinks.

Jardinière’s J Lounge (300 Grove, SF; www.jardiniere.com), has capitalized on its presymphony crowd’s thirst with a neat drink program. Similarly, the downstairs lounge at Bacar (448 Brannan, SF; www.bacarsf.com) now pours cocktails and hosts live music on weekends. The Presidio Social Club (563 Ruger, SF; www.presidiosocialclub.com) serves a short list of tasty drinks from a very long bar. “Drink kitchen” Bar Johnny (2209 Polk, SF; www.barjohnny.com) is a restaurant serving well-made drinks under false pretenses. Enrico’s (504 Broadway, SF; www.enricossf.com) has reopened and now features live music acts and cutting-edge cocktails. Palmetto (2032 Union, SF; www.palmetto-sf.com) is receiving raves for its drink menu, as is Grand Pu Bah (88 Division, SF; www.grandpubahrestaurant.com), which can be a bit tricky to find but is well worth seeking out. Ducca (50 Third St., SF; www.duccasf.com), in the Westin St. Francis Hotel, has a large lounge and an outdoor fire pit.

High, not dry


Most venues that serve high-end cocktails also focus on other things — food in restaurants, say, or entertainment programming in nightclubs. Last year a small batch of fab cocktail-only bars sprung up around the city, and the word on the street is that in 2008 we’ll see more cocktail bars with fewer distractions.

Cantina (580 Sutter, SF; www.cantinasf.com) serves updated versions of Latin cocktails like Pisco Sours, margaritas, and caipirinhas — the best part is that they’re available by the pitcher. Usually the place has a heavy service industry presence, which means the relaxed crowd isn’t shoving up against the bar, desperately waving cash and cleavage. The Sir Francis Drake Hotel added a second bar this year: the tiny Bar Drake (450 Powell, SF; www.bardrake.com) in the lobby, with a cocktail menu created by the same person who did the list upstairs at the Starlight Room. In Oakland, art deco–themed Flora (1900 Telegraph, Oakl.; 510-286-0100) is getting so much attention for its 20-seat bar and its cocktail program — created by the bar manager of the Slanted Door — that we were surprised to learn it’s actually a restaurant.

We’re here, we’re beer …


For a while most beer-and-wine-only bars were selling soju and sake cocktails in an attempt to stay trendy. Now we’re seeing more beer-focused venues that build the concept around the brew, not the food.
Gestalt Haus (3159 16th St., SF; 415-560-0137) opened in the old Café la Onda space, moved the bar to the back, and put in a double-decker bike rack that lures fixie-riding Mission hipsters like a free Journey concert. The bar serves both meat and veggie sausages and offers its beer in giant liter mugs. Wunder Brewing Co. (1326 Ninth Ave., SF; www.wunderbeer.com) is a new brewpub that serves homemade beers in the former Eldo’s space in the Inner Sunset. La Trappe (800 Greenwich, SF; www.latrappesf.com) in North Beach is a restaurant with a Belgian beer focus, and the Trappist (460 Eighth St., Oakl.; www.thetrappist.com) is an East Bay spot with a similar concentration. Nickies (466 Haight, SF; www.nickies.com) has reopened with a polished look and a large beer selection, though it could go almost anywhere on this list, thanks to its food and nightlife programming.

Endangered species


It seems the least popular type of drinking establishment to open this year is the thing we used to know as a bar, which doesn’t serve food (or whose food only serves to keep you drinking) or have a dance floor, cocktail waitress, or bottle service reservation in sight — but there still exists that magic time called happy hour.

In this new topsy-turvy world a lack of luxurious amenities can be a selling point, as at 83 Proof (83 First St., SF; www.83proof.com), where the only there there is a whole bunch of early-to-mid-twentysomething people packing in after work to consume fair-priced drinks. Revolutionary! Broken Record (1166 Geneva, SF; 415-963-1713) is an Excelsior dive that lures in customers with drink tickets for free Pabst. No-frills Castro gay bar the Metro (2124 Market, SF; 415-703-9750) has moved into the former Expansion Bar space, while the old Metro space is now the no-frills Lookout (3600 16th St., SF; 415-703-9750). And Bender’s (806 S. Van Ness, SF; www.bendersbar.com) — which sounds like it could be a gay bar, but isn’t — has reopened after a long hiatus due to massive flaming (in a fire).

>>Back to winter Scene 2007

The case closes

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I’ll start with a correction: I wrote last week that Cleveland and San Francisco were the only two cities where the chain that owns the SF Weekly faces direct competition from another alternative paper.

Actually, Village Voice Media, which used to be called New Times, owns the Seattle Weekly. The Stranger, owned by Tim Keck, competes directly against the Weekly.

And the LA Weekly, also a VVM paper, competes against the much smaller Los Angeles City Beat.

My point – and the point that we brought up in trial – was that VVM does very well in markets where there is no direct, head-to-head competition from another alternative paper of the same size and market share, but does badly when it faces real competition. I’m not the only one who thinks this; allow me to quote a Jan 27, 2003 filing by the U.S. Department of Justice, which had accused New Times and VVM, which were still separate companies, of conspiring to kill competition in two cities.

“In markets where they faced no direct alternative newsweekly competitor,” the federal complaint reads, “both defendants had double-digit annual profit margins. However, in Cleveland and Los Angeles … their profit margins were pinched.”

So I think that’s pretty clear.

The bigger story, of course, is that testimony ended today in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing case against the SF Weekly and its corporate parent. Judge Marla Miller has set closing arguments for Thursday morning. Then the case, which has been pending since 2004, will finally go to a jury.

The Weekly’s lawyers pulled a weird move at the very end of the trial, recalling Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann to the witness stand and asking him a question that had almost nothing to do with the issues at hand. Brugmann had testified early in the trial, and on cross-examination, he was asked if he knew that the San Francisco Chronicle had lost some $300 million over the past few years.

No, Bruce said; Hearst Corp, which owns the Chron, is a privately held corporation and nobody’s sure exactly what the numbers are.

This time around, Weekly lawyer H. Sinclair Kerr pulled out a Guardian story from a year ago that reported on court records showing a $330 million Chronicle loss. I guess the implication was the Bruce didn’t remember what was in his own paper (frankly, I didn’t remember the exact figure either; I review almost every one of the hundreds of news stories we run every year, but I can’t swear to recall every detail of every single one).

Bruce’s response: Sure, we reported on the best figures we could find. And the point was?

Of course, the Weekly is trying to argue that since some daily newspapers are losing money, it would be reasonable to expect any an alternative newspaper in San Francisco to lose money, too. And thus any financial hit the Guardian has taken over the past seven years is the fault of market conditions, not predatory pricing by a big Phoenix-based chain.

The final witness in the case – Bill Johnson, the publisher of the Palo Alto Weekly, called by the Guardian to rebut the Weekly’s financial experts – made a strong case that the whole “dailies-are-losing-money-so-the-weeklies-should-too” line of argument is deeply flawed.

Johnson, whose company also owns the Pacific Sun and four community papers, testified that “there are big differences between the way market forces have affected dailies and non-daily papers.”

He pointed out that dailies have been hit much harder by the Internet: Before sites like Craiglist emerged, a large percentage of the revenue of daily papers came from classified ads, most of which have moved to the web. Weeklies were never as dependent as classified, he said.

Perhaps more important, much of the information that readers used to get from their morning daily paper – national and international news – can now be found just as easily on the web.

But papers like the Guardian still offer unique local content that can’t be found anywhere else. “Local papers have this connection with their local audience,” he explained. In fact, he said, “most non-daily publishers I know have done very well” during the past seven years, the time period the lawsuit covers.

He explained that the Palo Alto Weekly saw its display-ad revenues drop in 2002, but quickly rebounded. The dot-com bust and 9/11 had an impact, of course, he said, but after a year or so, “we held our ground and regained ground.” That was also true of his other Bay Area papers, Johnson said.

Johnson also discussed the Weekly’s theory that the San Francisco market is so full of media that the two alternative papers aren’t direct competitors in their own market. “Those two papers are looking for the same audience,” he said.

Johnson, who sat through the testimony of Harvard economist Joseph Kalt, completely dismissed the eminent professor’s theory that it would be irrational for the Weekly to try to damage the Guardian through below-cost selling. If one paper has deeper pockets and can drop its prices, it will gain market share. The smaller competitor will be forced to lower its prices, and both papers will start to lose money. But the paper with greater resources can continue to grow, showing advertisers that it’s becoming dominant in the market, and the paper with no source of outside capital won’t be able to keep up.

“It happens all the time,” Johnson said.

Kerr objected, and Judge Miller ordered that last remark stricken from the record.

Klubz: Lights Down Low – turn it up!

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ldlsml.jpg
Lingering in the ‘Loin. Photo by Joshua Rotter.

By Joshua Rotter

When the lights are turned low and the music is turned up, it’s time to get down at Lights Down Low. This biweekly party in the heart of the Tenderloin’s seediest section at Hyde and Turk brings much-needed festivity to an otherwise bedraggled block.

The stylish crowd encompasses the latest local hipperatti, all the kids you see leaving Academy of Art College and entering gainful employment at Flax or one of the many retail clothing stores around the city. And you don’t even have to enter the club, hosted by DJ’s Sleazemore and Rchrd Oh?! and highlighting a revolving group of guest DJs, to see these seen-and-be-scenesters: many line the sidewalk out front, drinking from paper bags while debating whether Bob Dylan or Neil Young is the greatest singer-songwriter of all time. All that was missing from this style council’s spectacle were the passing tour buses of yesteryear from which tourists once gawked at the city’s wildlife.

Once inside, if you are fortunate enough to navigate past the narrow bar packed with peeps, make your way down to the crowded basement dance floor where the hi-octane electro, disco, and hip-hop jams will have you bumping. If you do down a few brews, be prepared to hold it, because those lines inside means the queues outside loos are as difficult to penetrate as the most exclusive VIP rooms. When bathroom breakers return to the dimly lit dance floor, their olfactory senses may be dulled, but they’re ready to dance and make romance, ’cause when the lights go down, the DJs give them something they can feel.

Lights Down Low
Second and fourth Fridays of the month, 10 p.m.-3 a.m., $10
222 Club
222 Hyde St, SF
(415) 440-0222

Tooth and consequences

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› culture@sfbg.com

It’s two days after Christmas and I’m sprawled out on a plastic-lined chaise lounge, sipping fluoride and waiting for the blood to stop gushing from my gums so the doctors can get back to work. Beyond the noise of drills and X-ray machines I hear grunts from several other patients and the sounds of merchants outside hawking sombreros, sweetbread, bootleg Fendi bags, and pottery. Kind of strange, but I’m not worried anymore. This is my second day at Dr. Rafael Lopez’s dental clinic, and I’m no longer freaked out that it’s nestled among trinket stores and cantinas in a bustling bazaar in Mexico.

I also don’t care that the dentists here speak hardly any English, nor I any Spanish. I mean, it’s not like I’m alone. All the other patients at Dr. Lopez’s office are either Canadian or American, and all the people shopping out front are too. In fact, nearly every person I’ve met on the streets here is Caucasian and an English speaker. We’re all dental tourists, and we’ve come to Los Algodones — a sunny border town near Yuma, Arizona, which allegedly has more dental clinics and pharmacies per block than any other city in the world — to save money. In my case, I’m in for three root canals with posts and crowns for the price of a secondhand scooter on eBay: $1,850, about a third of what I’d pay for the same procedures in the States.

I’d heard about Dr. Lopez’s clinic through a friend of my mother’s, but Los Algodones, like other dental tourism destinations, was easy to find on the Web. In fact, the town’s Web site, www.losalgodones.com, is actually a dental clinic referral network, with pictures of smiling clinicians and graphic before and after shots flashing across its home page. Clinics like Dr. Lopez’s, which often handle 10 to 20 patients a day, are set up exclusively for foreigners. Dr. Lopez estimates that 80 percent of his customers are American and 20 percent are Canadian; most Mexicans in the area can’t afford his rates. Many of them come to towns like this for big-ticket procedures like bridges and reconstructive surgery, some of which can cost more than $10,000 at home.

And they’re coming in increasing numbers. According to HealthCare Tourism International, a nonprofit accreditation and information organization set up to monitor the medical tourism boom, an estimated 1 million Americans will travel abroad this year for some of sort of medical service, up from the National Coalition on Health Care’s figure of about 150,000 in 2004. Of the procedures sought, 40 percent will be dental related. A recent article in the New York Times on the dental tourism phenomenon cited a boom in luxury travel packages designed around dental procedures. A root canal followed by a little fly-fishing in Costa Rica? Why not? The money you save can justify a short vacation.

ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM


Dr. Lopez’s clinic is, hopefully, the end of the road for me. I’ve been struggling with dental problems (and the potential resulting bills) for years. With all this talk of health care reform, you’d think I would have been able to find a decent low-cost US dentist, especially in civic-minded San Francisco. But it just wasn’t happening. For whatever reason, dental care and health care are viewed as two separate issues in the United States. When it comes to diseases, colds, and broken bones, you can usually catch a break, but good luck trying to get your teeth fixed on a budget. The truth is, even if you have some form of dental insurance, which is unlikely — according to the American Dental Association (ADA), only about half of all Americans do — dental care is nearly impossible for average wage earners to afford. At least, I’ve never been able to afford it. And I’ve looked everywhere.

My own dental horror story began nearly a decade ago when the Marine Corps kicked me off my retired father’s lifelong dental plan. I was fine for about a year, until the day I awoke with a terrible pain in my mouth. I was 19 at the time, taking classes at a community college and working at a café — barely able to pay rent, let alone find the time and money for a visit to the dentist. So I did the next best thing: simply ignored the pain, staving it off with copious amounts of ibuprofen when it got intense. The over-the-counter denial did the trick for almost two years, but I knew I would be forced to eventually bite the bullet, however softly.

And then it happened. My teeth started breaking. Not hurting, at least no more than usual, just breaking off — in huge, gray chunks.

This went on for years. By the time I was 25, four of my teeth had shattered and the rest seemed well on their way to doing the same. I adopted the diet of a five-month-old, unable to chew anything tougher than bananas or scrambled eggs. It was time to act, but I had no idea where to go. As a full-time student, getting by on financial aid, loans, and whatever I could rake in as a part-time waiter, I was nearly destitute. I’d recently transferred to San Francisco State University, but at that time, in order to purchase the student dental plan the school offered, I also had to purchase its medical plan, a combination that would have increased my monthly bills by nearly $200.

It was tempting, particularly in comparison with most employer-related or individual plans I qualified for, which could run into the thousands. But SFSU’s dental plan screened out existing problems, like the trainwreck I had going on, and carried an annual cap of less than $1,000. (Unlike medical insurance plans, which feature deductibles, most dental plans have annual monetary ceilings.) So even with the plan I would still be unable to afford even a fraction of the work I needed to have done. Since my student days, SFSU has implemented a dental-only plan available to undergrads, but often the limits are too low to cover anything other than cleanings and fillings.

Thus I began my search for a pro bono dentist, figuring that with all the uninsured people living in the city there must be someone around. It quickly became clear, however, that scoring free dental is harder than finding a decent vegetarian restaurant in rural Alabama.

QUEST FOR DENTAL


First, I had a glimmer of hope: a medical and dental clinic in Berkeley that had the word free in its name.

The Berkeley Free Clinic (BFC) has been offering free medical and dental care to the hard-up since 1969. It provides free HIV tests, medicine, preventative education, and more. But I needed dental work — and that was another story. As the only clinic in Northern California offering free fillings, extractions, and referrals to discount dentists, BFC is insanely popular. And since it’s run by volunteers and donors, it’s also chronically understaffed. Jessica Hsieh, a clinic coordinator, explained that the facility does as much as it can with limited resources. "We used to take patients on a first-come, first-served basis," she says. "But there were so many people lined up every night that our waiting room and hallway became fire hazards."

To deal with this problems, the clinic has devised a maddening selection system, which includes spotty business hours and a name-in-the-hat-style lottery. It sounded a little sketchy, but I gave it a go.

After making the 45-minute commute from my home, I arrived at the clinic at exactly 5:30 on a Monday evening. I scribbled my name on a small slip of paper, handed it to the receptionist, and took a seat in a waiting room crowded with students, broke workers, and homeless people. A nurse came out and told everyone to sit tight; the dentists were taking our names into a separate room and she’d return soon with their random choices. Ten minutes later, she came out again, read off three names, and then told everyone else to go home.

The room had been quiet as we all waited to see who’d won, but when a young blond girl with designer jeans and a fancy cell phone rose to claim her prize, the atmosphere became tense.

"That’s fucking bullshit," said a man with dirt on his face and ripped boots. "I’ve been coming here for weeks. This is her first fucking time!"

One of the dentists apologized and reminded us that we were welcome to keep trying as many times as we liked. I took his advice and returned three more times, missing a day of study or work for every fruitless visit until I gave up. One of my teeth in the back had started aching like hell, and I couldn’t stomach the wait any longer.

I broadened my search to include dental schools like that at the University of California San Francisco, where the wait times were rumored to be long, but once on the list, getting work done was guaranteed. After talking to students at the UCSF clinic, though, I realized treatment would require several days off from work and school because each step a student made during surgery would have to be approved by a busy professor and analyzed by other students. And the discount wasn’t exactly phenomenal.

The average cost of a single complete root canal procedure (root canal, post, and crown) at UCSF is more than $1,100, almost twice the amount I wound up paying in Mexico and way more than I could afford at the time.

So I scrapped the dental-school idea and dug deeper, figuring that if I couldn’t find free or cheap dental work, I could at least find a place that offered a payment plan. And I did find such a place.

Western Dental is like the McDonald’s of dental clinics. With multiple locations in almost every city in California, it’s effectively cornered the market on affordable dental work. Only it’s not cheap. A complete root canal procedure on one tooth can cost up to $1,590 — a lot less than a regular dentist, but much more than a dental school and about three times as much as Dr. Lopez charged me in Mexico. People flock to Western Dental because it lets you pay off your dental work like you would a car. You plunk down $99 for a yearlong membership, make a 20 to 30 percent down payment, and then pay the rest off monthly over the course of one year. And Western Dental doesn’t take your credit history into account when working out a plan.

Out of desperation, I eventually did get one of my teeth fixed at the Mission and 24th Street location, and wound up paying a $350 deposit and monthly installments of $110 for the next 12 months.

CAVITY CAVEATS


With my most painful tooth taken care of, I could now focus on finding a better deal, which is how I wound up in Mexico. So far it seems to have been a pretty smart decision. My new teeth look great and they’re holding up fine. I was treated extremely well by Dr. Lopez’s staff. But there are many reasons not go to Mexico for cheap dental work. And Brad Hatfield, a Korean War vet and retired city planner from Arizona City who asked that I not use his real name, knows them all.

Hatfield has been making the three-hour trip to Los Algodones for nearly a decade. He’s seen the town evolve from a haven for cheap trinkets and booze into what it is now: a medical resort for Americans with expensive tooth and eye issues. Hatfield started going to Los Algodones when he realized that even with his insurance he’d never be able to afford necessary dental work. But now, many years and thousands of dollars later, he’s learned his lesson.

"The problem with dentistry in Mexico," says Hatfield, "is that there’s no recourse. If something bad happens, you can’t sue anyone. All you can do is ask for your money back." And that’s just what Hatfield did when he returned from Los Algodones recently and discovered that his new teeth were worthless. Indeed, he claims that almost none of the work he’s gotten in Mexico has held up longer than a year or so.

This last time was the worst. "As soon as I got home," says Hatfield, "my gums started hurting really bad and bleeding off and on." When he called his clinic to complain, they denied his request for a refund and invited him back for some discounted work instead. Hatfield went back, got the work done, and thought his problems were over. But a few days later he realized they weren’t. "I was sitting here eating a piece of chocolate, and all of a sudden I realized I was chewing on two of my teeth and the bridge that was connecting them. All the work they had done had just fallen out."

Hatfield has tried repeatedly to get his dentist to refund his money back, but all he gets in response are invitations to return for more work. "Now they want to just rip all my teeth out and give me a full set of implants. It’s going to cost thousands of dollars on top of the $10,000 I’ve already spent there over the past year."

Hatfield is currently trying to get his problems fixed at a dental college in Mesa, Arizona, but he’s facing steeper prices and will probably have to return to Mexico soon. "My dental and medical problems have ruined me as a person," he says. "I can’t get a job because my teeth are so screwed up, and I can’t think through all this pain. I just don’t understand why dental work is so expensive. It’s much worse than medical."

THE BIG YANK


Hatfield brings up a good point. For some reason dental issues aren’t included in national or local debates about health care. Healthy San Francisco, the universal, citywide health care access program operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health, doesn’t cover access to dental services, which were never even considered for inclusion. When reached by the Guardian for comment on this exclusion, SFDPH spokesperson Eileen Shields stressed the difference between the city’s program and regular insurance plans, saying "[Healthy San Francisco] is a health access plan, providing access to basic medical care. I mean, my health plan doesn’t even include dental — does yours?"

Denti-Cal, the state dental insurance program offered as part of Medi-Cal, is an option for California residents with a low income, a social security number, and at least one child. But it obviously doesn’t help the throngs who fill the waiting rooms of Western Dental. San Francisco General Hospital keeps an oral surgeon on call for extreme emergencies but if you want your janked-out teeth replaced or aren’t doubled over in chronic pain, SF General can’t help you.

It doesn’t look like any of this is changing soon. None of the candidates running for president this year has announced a platform that specifically deals with the high cost of dental care in America. Why? Why are medical and dental issues treated as two separate entities? And why is it so hard to afford dental treatment even with insurance?

Hsieh of the BFC thinks it may have to do with the fact that dental issues aren’t thought to be as life-threatening as medical issues. But if an infected tooth is left untreated, it can lead to death just as surely as unchecked pneumonia. On its Web site, the ADA acknowledges the high cost of dental insurance but privileges prevention over treatment, claiming that most dental problems are preventable. If Americans would just take care of their teeth, use their paltry insurance plans for routine checkups, and quit eating so much candy, they wouldn’t have to get root canals. But I brush after meals, floss regularly, and stay away from sweets — and I’ve been in and out of dental clinics with major problems since I was five.

Another theory has to do with the high costs of dental school and specialized equipment, which makes sense. But the truth of the matter, commonly pointed out in the ongoing health care debate, is that mixing profit with patients is a recipe for disaster. As long as insurance companies are able to make billions by fleecing their customers, and as long as dental clinics and drug companies are allowed to set their own prices, the general population is going to be cavity ridden and kind of ugly.

For now, it seems dental tourism may be the best option for people with normal-to-low incomes and chronic problems. Two months after my visit to Mexico, my teeth feel much better and I’m back on solid food. But this kind of travel isn’t for the fainthearted. The weather and food in Los Algodones are great. But getting your teeth ripped out and reconstructed in a foreign country with no legal recourse is dangerous and scary, especially during the high-traffic winter season when the tendency to rush through patients escalates.

My triple root canal, for example, took a mere two visits. The doctors hacked away for 10 hours straight, let me heal for one day, and then stuck on the crowns and pocketed my check. I stumbled out of Dr. Lopez’s office a few days before New Year’s, in a Novocain-induced daze, with blood on my shirt and pieces of rubber molding stuck to my cheeks. My jaws and head ached as I shuffled through the mile-long border-crossing corridor, sweating and dry-heaving.

As I approached the checkpoint, I wondered if I had made the right choice.

Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually made one. It was this or nothing.

Emma Lierley contributed to this report.


>>View a video interview with a Canadian dental tourist

SF Weekly witnesses make the Guardian’s case

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An expert witness for the SF Weekly put a bunch of charts before the jury Friday, trying to undermine the Guardian’s predatory pricing case – but every one of the charts seemed to prove exactly what we’ve been trying to say.

The Guardian is suing the Weekly and its corporate parent, Village Voice Media, for predatory pricing. The claim is that the 16-paper chain poured millions into propping up the San Francisco paper, which for 12 years has lost money while it sold ads below the cost of producing them. That, we argue, was done to harm the locally owned competitor.

Clifford Kupperberg, the Guardian’s expert witness, put the damages at between $5 million and $11 million.

Everett Harry, an accountant who specializes in analyzing damage claims in litigation, tried to take apart Kupperberg’s analysis. One of his weapons: A series of “scattergrams,” graphic representations of large numbers of sales transactions for clients that have advertised in both the Weekly and the Guardian.

Harry tried to use the charts to argue that the Guardian wasn’t losing business to lower-priced Weekly ads. But the stunning fact was that every single scattergram showed that the Weekly was indeed selling ads below cost.

Our expert, their expert

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Lawyers for the SF Weekly and its corporate parent tried mightily today to discredit the testimony of the Guardian’s expert on the damages caused by the chain’s predatory pricing in San Francisco.

It was a classic legal strategy: The Weekly lawyers tried to find flaws in Clifford Kupperberg’s detailed damage report, then brought in their own expert to argue that our expert was wrong.

But in the end, I didn’t see anything presented that undermined the Guardian’s basic argument: The Weekly’s below-cost sales damaged the local paper, and those damages were in the millions of dollars.

The crux of the attack on Kuppergberg’s data: The projections he showed for lost profits during 2001-2007, the period when the Guardian is charging the Weekly was selling ads below cost, exceeded the level of profits the paper had made in the previous few years.

Projecting damages in a case like this is an inexact science: You have to try to establish what would have happened if the illegal conduct hadn’t happened. Kupperberg used a series of different models to do that, and came up with damages of between $5 million and $11 million.

How, Weekly attorney Rod Kerr asked, could Kupperberg suggest that the Guardian would have made profits of well over 10 percent a year when the most the paper had earned in the previous decade was about 5 percent?

Well, Kupperberg noted, the 1990s were a period of rapid growth for the Guardian and the alternative press in general, and during periods of rapid growth, many companies re-invest profits in expanding their infrastructure. When a market starts to level off and mature, those investments pay off; that’s a period he called the “profit maximization level.”

So it wouldn’t be at all unreasonable to assume that, after spending money to expand in the 1990s, the Guardian might have been able to hold costs down and see real economic gains in the next decade.

The other point, of course, is that the Guardian’s owners, Bruce Brugmann and Jean Dibble, have never looked for high profits – all the money has been re-invested in the paper. So the money that the Guardian lost to SF Weekly’s predatory pricing might not have appeared on a balance sheet as “profit” – it might have appeared as higher expenses associated with improving the paper.

Kupperberg made another important point in his testimony: Ralph Alldredge, the Guardian’s lawyer, asked him directly: “Is there any doubt in your mind that the SF Weekly sold a significant percentage of its ads below cost during this period?”

“No,” said Kupperberg.

Then the Weekly brought in it’s expert, Everett Harry, who did the opposing-expert-witness thing and tried to say that Kupperberg’s figures were all wrong. His basic line was the same thing the Weekly has been retailing all along: The early part of this decade was marked by a recession, 9/11 and the rise of the Internet, all of which hit local newspapers and led to a decline in revenues.

But other weekly newspapers in the region (and weeklies all over the country) came out of the recession fairly quickly and saw revenues (from display ads, which are what this case is about) come back strongly. And between 2001 and 2007, there is no evidence that the Guardian lost any display ads to the Internet.

The San Francisco alternative weekly market was unlike markets anywhere else: One competitor, with $13 million in chain money to back it up, was systematically depressing the price of display ads. And the Guardian suffered damages as a result.

I have more when Harry finished his testimony and is cross-examined tomorrow.

The damages: $5 – $11 million

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An accountant with more than 30 years experience analyzing damage claims in lawsuits testified today that the SF Weekly’s practice of selling ads below cost damaged the Bay Guardian badly – and he put the financial toll at between $5 million and $11 million.

Clifford Kupperberg took the stand in the Guardian’s predatory-pricing suit against the SF Weekly and its corporate owner. The Guardian is charging that the Weekly for more than seven years violated the state law barring companies from selling a product below cost for the purpose of harming a competitor.

Guardian attorney Ralph Alldredge walked Kupperberg through the detailed process of how he evaluated the Weekly’s and the Guardian’s costs, the price of display ad space in the two papers, and the projections he made of how much the Weekly rate-cutting had harmed the locally owned paper.

If the jury finds that the Weekly and Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times, broke the law, Kupperberg’s calculations will be the basis for awarding monetary damages.

Noise Pop: Dancing in a crafty place

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We all know the dance floor can be a dangerous place. What with all of those flailing limbs, gyrating pelvises, and spastic movements, total chaos can and does easily ensue. Thanks to Canadian electro phenomenon MSTRKRFT — who seem to have everyone and their baby’s mama getting down — club violence has taken on a whole new meaning with the murderous single "Street Justice," off their seething debut, The Looks (Last Gang, 2006). Urgent, screeching-siren guitars squeal under the thumping bass and the ominous chant "This is a killing on the dance floor," conveying the imminent threat of sonic carnage and giving the notion of "killing it" a threatening new meaning.

Made up of JFK, the bass player of now-defunct electrorock outfit Death from Above 1979, and Al-P, DFA 1979 producer and a former member of quirky electric pop combo Girlsareshort, these two have perfected a mix of raw, hormone-heightening, boogie-worthy beats with a savage rock sensibility. With a sound that nods to house legends Daft Punk but without their asexual austerity, JFK and Al-P combine electro-fueled urban grit with sultry rock ‘n’ roll, appealing equally to dance diehards and of-the-moment musical opportunists. Masquerading in stage attire as evil as their thumping racket, MSTRKRFT have been known to don gold spray-painted hockey masks as they man the decks, a sinister look that’s more Jason Voorhees than Gallic space visitor. Liberally passing Crown Royal bottles around onstage, this sensual duo liven up their club appearances with their naughty golden dancers, who wear the signature masks and little else, making steamy remixes like "Sexy Results" that move beyond pure aural fantasy. (Hayley Elisabeth Kaufman)

MSTRKRFT

With LA Riots, Lazaro Casanova, and Sleazemore

March 1, 9 p.m., $20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 626-7001

www.mighty119.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Noise Pop: Do’s and the Don’ts

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San Francisco’s Dont’s are JJ Don’t (bass), Ken Don’t (drums), Jonny Don’t (vocals), and Joey Don’t (guitar), but as with the Beatles, a fifth Don’t looms like a specter. In this case it’s the Mountain Don’t, a fearsome triumph of mixology that involves a shot of vodka, one of Robitussin, a touch of absinthe, and a splash of Mountain Dew Code Red. It is the band’s go-to tipple, and given that most of the Dont’s songwriting occurs during bouts of improvisation after too much of it, the drink is easily as influential on their sound as, say, kraut rock.

The influence question is unusually tricky with the quartet, who cut their second self-released LP, Inner El Camino, last year at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio. While the Dont’s exercise many familiar art rock themes — the pinched vocals and twee urbanity of the Talking Heads in "Measure Up" and the beat-driven guitar warfare, DFA-style, of "Blahblahblah" — their methods for getting to them are so anathema to that scene that the whole connection becomes flimsy. Improv rock — to the degree to which these guys take it (lyrics too are made up midsession) — is supposed to be fumbly jam-band stuff.

Joey Don’t, for one, doesn’t buy that line in rock’s sand. "I don’t subscribe to the aesthetics people place between hippies and avant-gardists," he remarked by e-mail. "I like the Grateful Dead as much as I like Can." The good part is that the Dont’s don’t have to be right: they just have to be willful. The music runs its own show, and a tangible sense of liberation crackles across Inner El Camino. It comes up again in Ken Don’t’s description of recent rehearsals: "We’re experimenting with MIDI guitars, drum triggers … our trademark bullhorn miasma. We don’t know where any of that will lead, and frankly, we don’t care."

THE DONT’S

With the High Violets and the Union Trade

Feb. 29, 5 p.m., free

Parkside

1600 17th St., SF

(415) 503-0393

www.theeparkside.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Noise Pop: Running with Wale

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Back in 2006, when Washington DC music veteran Ronald "Dig Dug" Dixon, of legendary go-go band the Northeast Groovers (NEG), first got wind that some rap upstart named Wale (pronounced Wah-lay) had not only sampled NEG’s music without permission but also jacked Dixon’s stage name for his single’s title and refrain, he was not happy. But when Dixon learned that Wale also hailed from the nation’s capital, better known for its go-go scene than its hip-hop, and that the single "Dig Dug" was in fact a heartfelt homage to both NEG and go-go, all bad vibes soon subsided and the young hip-hop hopeful got his elder’s blessing.

In the two years since, Wale’s career has taken off at an accelerated pace. The unsigned artist performed at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards, appeared on the cover of Urb, and gathered countless other write-ups and gushing features in such publications as XXL, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly, which honored him as one of the top eight new faces to watch this year. And Wale, who has rightfully dubbed himself "the ambassador of rap for the capital," seems poised to live up to all this hype, especially since last July’s mixtape 100 Miles and Running caught the attention and respect of one Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen), who has since produced the still-unsigned rapper.

Wale, who performs at Mighty on Feb. 29 as part of Noise Pop, is taking all of this in stride. Speaking recently by phone as he drove around Los Angeles with his manager, the MC — who was born Olubowale Folarin 23 years ago in DC to Nigerian immigrant parents — proclaimed confidently that talent is what got him to the position he’s in today.

"Lucky?" he asked, somewhat surprised when I questioned him about the recent hype and accolades bestowed on him. "Lucky? That implies that I don’t have talent. I do. And that comes first. And after that, there is some luck….

"My manager is good at his job."

And what label will the much-sought-after artist sign with? "Actually, I may not even sign with a label. I may not need to…. Just wait and see how it goes," said the ambassador, who seems destined to put DC firmly on the rap map.

WALE

With Trackademicks and Nick Catchdubs

Feb. 29, 9 p.m., $15–$20

Mighty

119 Utah, SF

(415) 626-7001

www.mighty119.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

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