Photo by Robert Altman from www.altmanphoto.com
By Steven T. Jones
Sunshine activist Kimo Crossman made an excellent point in an e-mail he blasted out this morning, citing a story in the New York Times that illustrates how mayors are usually held accountable for how they spend their days — and how our Mayor Gavin Newsom isn’t.
The story was about how Mayor Rudy Giuliani spent his time after 9-11 and whether it justifies his recent statements about spending more time at Ground Zero than many rescue workers, many of whom now suffer from debilitating respiratory problems as a result of their work, and the failure of Giuliani to properly safeguard their health.
Here in SF, Newsom has been repeatedly criticized by the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (which, unfortunately, has no enforcement powers) for failing to disclose his complete public schedule, which most days lists a couple events at most. Today is a good example, with the mayor’s schedule listing only “Mayor Newsom will be conducting meeting in City Hall.” Wow, that’s helpful.
Compare that to the detail and specificity for the mayor of New York, and the mayors of many big cities, and you’ll get some insights into how Newsom feels about public accountability.
SF
Where’s our mayor?
WOW, a slice of Black Rock City
By Scribe
These are frantic days for many Burning Man artists, a stressful race to the finish line that is next week’s departure for Black Rock City. I got the call from my old camp, Opulent Temple, that they needed some extra minions so I agreed to help out with their impossibly ambitious project: a massive 10-foot tall steel “star” stage (which is actually five stages, all cut and welded from scratch) and a huge open air bamboo dome. I’d already put in a few recent work days on the stage at the Box Shop on Hunter’s Point (where I’d spent more than nine months reporting this story a couple years ago), so I opted to head out to the West Oakland Warehouse (WOW) to do some dome work and peak in on some other projects, particularly “Crude Awakening” by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito, who are most widely known around SF as the sculptors of Passage, which now resides near the Ferry Building.
It was like stepping into another world.
PG&E’s latest lies
EDITORIAL Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which has made a lucrative practice over the years of co-opting environmentalists, is launching one of its boldest and most disgraceful initiatives yet — a campaign seeking to convince the Potrero Hill and Bayview–Hunters Point communities to oppose the city’s new peaker power plants by arguing that they’ll add pollution to the air.
Remember: This is the company that for many years ran the single worst source of air pollution in the region, a foul power plant that was finally shut down a few years back after a long and bitter battle. This is the same company that operates a nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault. The same company that polluted the wells in Hinkley, as depicted in the movie Erin Brockovich. This is a company that’s been lying to communities like Bayview–Hunters Point and Potrero for decades. Nobody should trust PG&E today.
We explained the background last week (see "Peaker Plants and SF’s Energy Future," 8/8/07), but the summary is this: San Francisco wants to install three small-scale power plants at the foot of Potrero Hill. The city’s argument: unless the peakers, which would provide backup power at peak demand times, are in place, the state’s regulators won’t allow the shutdown of the dirty Mirant power plant in the same neighborhood.
Some environmentalists, including San Francisco Public Utilities Commission member Adam Werbach, say San Francisco doesn’t need the peakers or the Mirant plant, but the powerful Independent System Operator, which controls the state’s power grid, disagrees.
That means Mirant will continue to spew poison unless the peakers operate — and PG&E is trying to stir up opposition with the threat that the neighborhood will wind up with both the peakers and Mirant. PG&E, of course, won’t own the peakers; they’ll be run by a company called J-Power USA for 10 years, at which point (if they’re still even needed) they’ll revert to the city. So the private utility is trying to stop the new plants to avoid future competition.
It’s a cynical ploy, but it might be effective — and there’s an easy way the city can stop it. The supervisors, the mayor, and the city attorney should simply announce that the contract with J-Power will state that the peakers can’t operate, even for a second, until the Mirant plant is shut down for good. It’s a simple, clean solution; what is everyone waiting for? *
PS As Amanda Witherell reports in this issue, the public San Joaquin Valley Power Authority has taken legal action against PG&E, charging that the company is vioutf8g state law by interfering with the creation of a Community Choice Aggregation program. There’s some solid evidence that PG&E is doing the same thing in San Francisco, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera should immediately open an investigation into whether this city should file its own complaint against PG&E.
Jang Soo BBQ
› paulr@sfbg.com
You won’t find kimchee mousse on the menu at Jang Soo BBQ, but that’s not a criticism, since you probably won’t find it on any menu in town. Korean cooking, despite its many charms — could it be the most winning of the spicy cuisines? — has so far resisted the dressing-up that has given a Cali-French gloss to food traditions from around the globe. If you’re eating Korean food here, you’re almost certainly in a traditional Korean barbecue joint, with a grill (charcoal or gas, lighted or not) in the middle of your table. And if you’re lucky, you’re at Jang Soo, which is one of the most attractive such places, if not the most attractive, in the city.
Let’s start with the simple matter of aesthetics. At more than a few Korean spots, even some of the best-known ones along Geary in the inner Richmond, the décor situation can range from the indifferent downward to the downright harsh, with overhead fluorescent lighting worthy of a black-site interrogation room being a particularly noisome likelihood. Jang Soo, by contrast, gleams gracefully with spot and sconce lighting. And I like the panel of checkerboard-style tiles along the wall at each table; the black and white ceramic squares serve as a kind of backsplash in case your adventures in grilling start to get out of hand. (Since the grills are gas fired and heat up very quickly, this is not a far-fetched scenario.) Most and best of all, the place seems clean. If you could know only one fact about a restaurant’s physical plant, this is the fact you would value the most.
The food suggests that the kitchen, while invisible to the clientele, is in equally good order. There are no big surprises on the menu — except, perhaps, for a greater number of seafood dishes than experience has conditioned one to expect in Korean restaurants — and plenty of familiar faces, among them bul go gi (slices of broiled beef) and bibimbab (beef salad). But the freshness of the ingredients and the care with which they’ve been handled is palpable. A small dish of pickled cucumber coins, for example, had the satisfying crunch of the homemade kind and would have been good even without the accompanying red chili-garlic paste.
The cucumbers, of course, were presented as part of that cavalcade of small dishes (banchan is the Korean word) that give the flavor of a banquet to meals in Korean barbecue restaurants, even at lunchtime. Jang Soo’s portfolio of treats includes (in addition to the cukes) bean sprouts, marinated tofu strips, seaweed dressed with spicy sauce, pickled threads of carrot and daikon radish, geutf8ous bricks of rice paste, hot scallion fritters, and of course kimchee — excellent, with nonsoggy cabbage and plenty of garlic and chiles in harmony. Dinnertime adds a fix of dried sardines in spicy sauce, and of course, noon or night, there is soup, perhaps seaweed or tofu.
These preliminary spreads can have much the same effect in Korean restaurants that plates of chips and salsa do in Mexican restaurants: be so addictively tasty and so filling that the main courses, when they finally arrive, can seem anticlimactic or superfluous — unless you are starving, and we were. Over the noon hour, the tabletop grills seemed to be in hibernation, and plates of food emerged fully cooked from the kitchen: pork bul go gi ($9.95), a pile of marinated, broiled meat shaved into strangely shaped ribbons, like scorched rubble from a house fire, and o jing au bokum ($8.95), chunks of sautéed calamari in spicy sauce. I found the calamari’s "spicy" sauce to have a notable, not quite ideal sweetness, while the seafood itself was a little tough — always a risk with calamari, which overcooks quickly and unforgivingly. The pork, on the other hand, was exemplary.
At dinner, our server lighted the grill with her little sparking wand, switched on the vent hood, and a few minutes later appeared with a platter of uncooked flesh: dak gui ($18.95), or marinated boneless chicken thigh meat, on one side, and hae san mul gui ($20.95) — squid, octopus, shrimp, and clams — on the other. She spooned half the seafood onto a sheet of aluminum laid atop the grate, while half the chicken went straight onto the grate. And now a word to the wise: you have to turn stuff yourself, when you think it’s cooked long enough on one side or your seafood medley needs tossing. That’s why you’re given a set of tongs. We waited rather innocently for our server to come flip the chicken flaps for us, even as they began to smoke ominously, and we ended up with some fragrant cinders. Luckily the larger pieces of meat resisted scorching, and we cooked the remainder of both chicken and seafood ourselves, turning often.
The restaurant’s clientele appears to be heavily Korean or at least Asian, certainly not Anglo. If they or you are lucky, walking to the restaurant, or maybe taking one of the innumerable Geary buses, is feasible. Certainly it is preferable, since parking in the neighborhood is hellishly difficult. The exceptions to this hard rule are work-week middays, when the streets are empty and all you have to do is feed the increasingly voracious parking meters. Does everyone who lives on the West Side drive downtown to work? Dang.<\!s>*
JANG SOO BBQ
Daily, 11 a.m.–<\d>10 p.m.
6314 Geary, SF
(415) 831-8282
Beer, wine, soju
AE/DISC/MC/V
Pleasant noise level
Wheelchair accessible
Oh, honestly
› superego@sfbg.com
SUPER EGO Sweetheart, the only reason I’d ever lie to you is to score free drinks or get down your $300 freaky-deaky, pizza-stained pipe pants. I’m not the Internet — I’m your friend. You’ll never have to add two years to my age or subtract two inches from my width. And as for my length — well, I do go on a bit. Everybody knows that. (Wait. Do people still lie on the Internet anymore? Lemme check…. OK, back. Yes. Yes, they do.)
This is how incredibly, embarrassingly forthcoming I am: I can’t stop singing the new Girls Aloud single, "Sexy! No No No …," in my head (thanks, Perez fucking Hilton). I conveniently can’t recall if I’ve ever partied in the private rooftop hot tub at the Porn Palace. I used a SpongeBob beach towel from Target this morning to dry my nether parts before I put them back on. And, to Hunky Beau’s eternal chagrin, I can name any designer collection from spring ’86 to fall ’94 in two accessories or less. I wasn’t even born then! Plus, I totally forgot about National Underwear Day last Thursday. Bad gay. Bad.
Also, you’re gorgeous. Here’s a million dollars. Taste the veracity, baby.
But I still have a few little secrets left, and here are two. First, yes, I’m hot-hot-hot for drag kings. Hot in a "nuzzle me nude until your Crayola-stache rubs off on my nipples" way. I know! Ew! But this girl can’t help it, and my cup’s about to overfloweth Aug. 18 at the 12th annual San Francisco Drag King Contest at SomArts, during which a bevy of horny-drippin’ butches will b-boy it up in a bout for the king crown. It’s just like the International Fight League, but with more Mötley Crüe mashups and medical adhesives.
I asked Lu Read, the organizer, how it felt to have reached a fake-dick dozen of these suckers, and he told me "definitely balls to the wall" and that the SFDKC is "like Tease-o-Rama on testosterone and the Miss Trannyshack Pageant on steroids." Lock up your wife and child. This year’s contest boasts two preparty pump-ups and a wild after-party, all featuring a veritable queue of tuneful supporters — from rockers the Momma’s Boyz to sexpot table jock Mauricio Aviles to legendary DJ Derek B (whom I’ll miss mightily when he hightails it to far-too-fashionable Berlin next month). It’s a cavalcade, it’s a carnival, it’s a drag kingdom. Crayola nipples.
Secret two: boat parties terrify me. For one, you can’t escape — if some E’d-out fairy unicorn rainbow twirlbot latches on to you, there’s nowhere to run but in circles. But I’ve spent whole weeks doing that in my room before, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem, right? (You try finding the doorknob when you’re cross-eyed and your fingernails are moon lobsters.) For two, I prefer the bartender to mix my cocktails, not the motion of the ocean. I’ve got A legs, not sea legs. Groan.
But I do love me some PacificSound, the old-school kids who bring you the bright, techno, outdoor Sunset Parties all summer long — and Aug. 18 they’re taking it to the docks and all around the bay with their infamous Fully Loaded Boat Party. I’ve heard on good authority that magical things happen at these Pacific proceedings: helicopters fly under bridges, gays find true love, club columnists forego the ginger capsules and antinausea Bio Bands and get crazy to the boom-boom styles of Galen, J-Bird, Solar, Charlotte the Baroness, and so many more. Could it possibly be true? Oh, let’s find out for ourselves.
So. Saturday — techno boat party, drag king contest. What will I dress as? No lie: Moby Dick. *
FULLY LOADED BOAT PARTY
Aboard the San Francisco Spirit
Sat/18, 5 p.m.–11 p.m., $35 presale
Tickets available at Tweekin’ Records
593 Haight, SF
(415) 820-1664
SF DRAG KING CONTEST
Sat/18, 8 p.m., $15–$35
SomArts
934 Brannan, SF
(415) 282-2363
Faithfully unfaithful
The world of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos (a.k.a. The Stoolie, 1963) is an incredibly complicated one. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that its inhabitants are ex-cons, petty thieves, snitches, and ambiguous lovers, all of whom are as loyal as they’re unfaithful. Or maybe the complexity emerges from the strong sense of honor and morality that these underground characters share.
Maurice (Serge Reggiani), a robber, is sent to prison because somebody snitches on him. He’s willing to believe that it was his best friend, Silien (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who betrayed him. But Silien, a small-time crook who we know almost immediately is also a police informant, proves to be the only person Maurice should have trusted.
The film’s aesthetic adds to its layers. Borrowing elements from the gangster movie and film noir and combining them in a way that resembles a low-budget B flick, Melville creates a personal response to the French new wave. His characters and story are mere starting points from which to present a highly stylized, detached contemplation of the circumstances under which we can each become the most devoted or the most disloyal of people. All this might be inspired by Melville’s experience with the World War II French Resistance, which the director most overtly examined in his acclaimed 1969 film Army of Shadows. (Maria Komodore)
LE DOULOS
Aug. 17–23, $6–$9
Castro Theatre
429 Castro, SF
(415) 621-6120
Mates of down-home states
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
I might as well just fess up and own it: as much as I love the concrete and anonymity of the city, I’ll always remain a country boy at heart. I grew up in a town of 2,000 people, where everyone knew one another’s business. Intimately. Moose in the backyard were a regular occurrence. Country music was everywhere. Potato-sack racing and the 4-H club played an integral part of my childhood, as odd as it is to contemplate such things over the din of traffic outside. And just as my hometown has grown and citified over the years since I ran from it screaming, so has my perception of it. Back in the day, I couldn’t wait to leave. Now that I’m older, I overromanticize the hell out of that place. Show me a dirt road and just watch the sentimentality pour out of me.
Perhaps it’s these feelings that first drew me to the down-home comforts and easygoing twang of local rural Americana raconteurs Or, the Whale. Or perhaps it was their lush, Opry-fied harmonies or the fact that their recent self-released debut, Light Poles and Pines, surges with a sense of camaraderie and community that reminded me of small-town life. Whatever the reason, I was hooked, and soon enough I found myself sharing a picnic table at Zeitgeist with four members of the band, eager to learn more.
Named after the secondary title of Herman Melville’s classic tale of struggle and strife Moby-Dick, Or, the Whale is — sticking with the zoological theme — still a mere calf. Because the bandmates sound like they’ve played together forever, it’s a surprise to learn that the septet formed less than two years ago, partially through Craigslist ads. "Some of us were already friends," singer-percussionist Lindsay Garfield explains, "but a lot of us had never met before that ad. But here we are, like a family. We’re very lucky."
Lucky us, while we’re at it: Light Poles and Pines, recorded one year after those fortuitous e-mails, makes for a mighty impressive introduction. Recorded in two days, mostly using entire takes with few overdubs, the disc feels like an informal front-porch session between seasoned musicians who have shared endless miles on the road. How else to explain the confident looseness of stomping barn burner "Bound to Go Home," the hoedown ebullience of "Threads," the intuitive heartstring-tugging musicianship of "Rope Don’t Break"?
Add to this the fact that the group has four lead vocalists — and the remaining members all sing backup — and it isn’t much of a leap to imagine Or, the Whale as a modern-day incarnation of another gang of rural mythmakers, the Band. Before I can indulge in Robbie Robertson–<\d>Levon Helm comparisons, though, Garfield chuckles and sets me straight: "We’re nowhere close to that yet! And we’re definitely not session musicians." She adds, "We’re certainly huge fans of the Band, though," as bassist-vocalist Justin Fantl jumps in: "We’ll gladly take the suggestion, thanks."
No problem, and I’ll stick by it. Here’s why: over the course of 13 songs, Light Poles and Pines swings effortlessly between knee-clapping bluegrass, campfire country-gospel sing-alongs, straight-up classic Nashville tearjerkers, and probably a few other forms I’m forgetting. Yet taken together, they are a clear and cohesive expression of the back-to-our-roots ethos at work here, much like that of Robertson et al. Vocalist–<\d>guitarist–<\d>banjo player Alex Robins jokingly describes Or, the Whale’s sound as "a big, delicious stew," and he’s right. Hearty, rustic, nostalgia inducing — sounds like a stew to me.
How did they muster such fine home cooking? "With this album we wanted to create the feel of a live show, happy flubs and all," vocalist-guitarist Matt Sartain suggests. "It’s those little imperfections, which give it a real, honest feel, I think." Robins is quick to agree: "No one had veto power. If everybody else liked that I missed a note in a particular part of the song, it didn’t matter that I wanted to do it over. We’d keep the flub anyway, and eventually I’d see that they were right."
It’s this level of openness and mutual respect that may prove to be Or, the Whale’s greatest asset. By the time this goes to print, the close-knit, fiercely DIY band will be wrapping up a 25-city coast-to-coast tour that it orchestrated itself — proof positive of the commitment the members share with one another and their cause. Garfield, Fantl, Robins, and Sartain — along with fellow members accordionist-organist-vocalist Julie Ann Thomasson and drummer-vocalist Jesse Hunt — will end their journey here in San Francisco, at the Great American Music Hall, deserving of a hero’s welcome. "This tour — booking everything, promoting it all ourselves — it means everything to us," Garfield explains. "We’re really proud of what we’ve done. This truly shows how much we mean to each other, and it’s just going to bring us even closer together."<\!s>*
OR, THE WHALE
With Birds and Batteries and Social Studies
Aug. 25, 9 p.m., $12
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
(415) 885-0750
School blues
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Roll over and let MF Doom give you the news: even during the soporific, sunlit waning days of summer, you needn’t wander far before tumbling headlong into a deep ditch of gloom. And is it any surprise, when even the top 10 is capped with hand-wringing, ditsy throwback-pop ditties like Sean Kingston’s suicide-dappled "Beautiful Girls" — just a few skittish dance steps away from Amy Winehouse’s anxious revamps of sweet soul music?
So when Danville-raised Film School headmaster Greg Bertens made the move away from the Bay to Los Angeles last September to be with his girlfriend and get some distance from 2006, his splintered group’s annus horribilis, it doubtless seemed like dour poetry that he ended up living just a few doors down from punk’s crown prince of dread, Glenn Danzig.
"Oh yeah, Glenn and I go way back!" Bertens said drolly from LA, describing Danzig’s lair as ivy covered and encircled by a gate topped with an iron fleur-de-lis. "Once in a while I see him walk by in a big, black trench coat. LA in general is a big amusement park, and Glenn Danzig happens to be an attraction close to my house."
That new home was where Bertens rediscovered his will to make music — and lost the old, jokey misspelling of his first name, Krayg. There he wrote and recorded Film School’s forthcoming album, Hideout (Beggars Banquet), alone at home with only a guitar, a keyboard, and a computer equipped with Pro Tools, Logic, and assorted plug-ins, while listening to old Seefeel, Bardo Pond, and Sonic Youth LPs. Guest contributions by My Bloody Valentine vet Colm O’Ciosoig, who also lived in the Bay Area before recently moving to LA, and Snow Patrol bassist Paul Wilson filled out the lush, proudly shoegaze songs that Bertens eventually took to Seattle for a mix with Phil Ek (Built to Spill, the Shins).
The recording is "the closest so far to what I’ve been trying to get to since Film School began," Bertens told me later, but it came at a price, following the release of the San Francisco group’s much-anticipated, self-titled debut on Beggars Banquet. Poised to become one of the first indie rock acts of their late ’90s generation to break internationally, after opening tours with the National and the Rogers Sisters, Film School instead found misfortune when Bertens was jumped outside a Columbus, Ohio, club.
Then the group’s instruments and gear were lost in Philadelphia when thieves stole their van, audaciously driving over the security gate of a motel parking lot. Despite benefits and aid from groups like Music Cares, the loss magnified band member differences, leading to the departure of guitarist Nyles Lannon (who also has a solo CD, Pressure, out in September), bassist Justin Labo, and drummer Donny Newenhouse, though longtime keyboardist Jason Ruck remains.
"Understandably, it kind of compounded any difficulties we might have had," Bertens recalled, still sounding a little tongue tied. After such events, he continued, "you definitely tend to reevaluate what is important in your life setup."
The loss of certain key pedals was particularly felt, although, he added, "ironically, after a year or so, one of the instruments showed up on eBay, and it was traced back to a pawnshop in Philly." The entire lot of gear had apparently come in three weeks after it was stolen, but though the store claimed it had checked with the local police department, and the band and Beggars had furnished the police with serial numbers and descriptions, no one made the connection. "We found a general unorganized response to the whole event," Bertens said with palpable resignation.
Yet despite the negativity Bertens associates with 2006 — "I think it was a heavy year globally as well, and Hideout comes a little from that, the impulse to hide out when external and internal factors are unmanageable" — he did find an upside to Film School’s downturn: the response to the theft "kind of restored my ideas about the music community within indie music. We’re a small band, and all these people — people we knew and people we didn’t know and other bands — all kind of came to our aid. I kind of knew that community existed, but I never experienced it." As a result, he said, the new CD’s notes will list the names of more than 150 people "we feel completely indebted to." Something for even Danzig to brood about.
ARTSF STRESSED What would we do without Godwaffle Noise Pancakes brunches and raucous noise shows stories above Capp and 16th Street? Let’s not find out, though word recently went out that the venue for those events, the four-year-old ArtSF, is being threatened. Allysun Ladybug Sparrowhawk has been handling art and music shows at the space for more than a year, and she e-mailed me to say she hadn’t been informed of an approximately $4,000 yearly building maintenance fee until the space received an eviction notice. "When there is a repair on the building, most of the cost is put on us," she wrote. "It should be split equally between all the tenants but most of the other floors are empty."
Since a slew of the organization’s art studio spaces is empty, she continued, "we are struggling to make the rent as it is. A fee like this has really threatened our existence." Does this mean even more artists and musicians are going to be priced out of this already-too-pricey city? Keep the pancakes coming: contact artmagicsf@yahoo.com and visit FILM SCHOOL
With Pela and the Union Trade
Wed/15, 9 p.m., $10
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
HEARING RAID
MOCHIPET
Girls really do love breakcore — and Journey reworks — by this son of a Taiwanese rocket scientist. With the Bad Hand and Bookmobile. Wed/15, 9 p.m., $10. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com
WHITE SAVAGE
Look out — no wavy cacophony and apelike yelps. With the Go, Bellavista, and Thee Makeout Party! Fri/17, 9 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com. Also with the Frustrations and the Terrible Twos. Sat/18, 6 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
THE DRIFT
Tarentel’s Danny Grody sails in, following the release of a limited-edition 12-inch of remixes by Four Tet and Sybarite. Sun/19, see Web site for time and price. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com
SOMNAMBULANTS
The SF-by-way-of-Brooklyn synth poppers toast their new Paper Trail (Clairaudience Collective) with contemporary dance by peck peck. Aug. 23, 9 p.m., $8. Space Gallery, 1141 Polk, SF. www.spacegallerysf.com
Against them!
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
So the members of Rage Against the Machine are having themselves a little reunion outing, eh? What a great reason for a massive flock of shirtless, chest-bumping frat boys to jump in place with middle fingers extended while screaming, "Fuck you — I won’t do what you tell me!"
It should come as no surprise that the politically charged rap-rock foursome caved in for a supposed one-off performance — their first in almost seven years — at the recent Coachella Festival. Since 2001 the festival’s organizers have been shelling out the bling for such iconic alt-rockers as Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Stooges, and the Pixies to kiss and make up for one stifling day in the desert. Now Rage-oholics have a machine to rail along with again — at least until October.
So far the group has only committed to a string of scattered festival appearances around the country, including four dates headlining the "Rock the Bells" tour, the annual hip-hop festival including performances from the Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, Nas, Mos Def, and EPMD. According to RATM, there are no plans for a new album; guitarist Tom Morello stated in a May Blabbermouth.net interview that recording a follow-up to their last studio disc, Renegades (Epic, 2000), would be "a whole other ball of wax right there" and "writing and recording albums is a whole different thing than getting back on the bike and playing these songs."
But why play these songs now? Is it only a coincidence that the RATM realliance followed the dissolution of Audioslave in February? Morello confirmed this with Billboard.com in March, revealing that "the Rage rebirth occurred last fall when it was clear that there was not going to be any Audioslave touring in the immediate future." In addition, sources for the Los Angeles Times disclosed that Coachella’s quick sellout and the ticket scalping that followed factored into the band’s decision to add more dates after that appearance.
RATM, however, have spun their reunion to NME.com as a response to the "right-wing purgatory" that this country has "slid into" under the George W. Bush administration since the group’s demise in 2000. As Morello additionally told Billboard.com, "These times, I think, demand a voice like Rage Against the Machine to return" and "the seven years that Rage was away the country went to hell. So I think it’s overdue that we’re back."
So what took RATM so long, and why listen to a leftist band that’s earned its salary from a subsidiary of a corporate media conglomerate, namely Sony Records? And who’s willing to listen — the decider in chief? Efforts ranging from the worldwide protests against US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to legislation to cut off war funding crafted by the Democratic-led Congress have failed to move the Bush camp. It’s doubtful that a band known for its aversion to both the Democratic and Republican parties is going to have any impact.
Since RATM’s so-called "Dixie Chicks moment" at Coachella, corporate media has definitely scrutinized the group’s defiance of the Bush regime. During a performance of "Wake Up," Zach de la Rocha made a speech stressing that the current administration "should be hung and tried and shot." The band members quickly came under fire, and on a segment of Hannity and Colmes, Alan Colmes pegged them as "anarchists," while Sean Hannity suggested that they should be investigated by the Secret Service. Guest Ann Coulter scoffed, "They’re losers, their fans are losers, and there’s a lot of violence coming from the left wing." In rebuttal, de la Rocha deemed the three "fascist motherfuckers" and reiterated that the band believes Bush "should be brought to trial as a war criminal," then "hung and shot." Thanks for clearing that up, Zach.
RATM’s songs have more significance today then they did 10 years ago, but if RATM choose to have a voice now, will their cause be served come November should they dissolve again? It’s likely de la Rocha would retreat to the rock he’s been hiding under for the past seven years if the band decides to part ways a second time. Even if the rap-rock pioneers’ material is tagged as anarchist propaganda for the masses, they definitely have something more to offer listeners than does, say, a Smashing Pumpkins reunion. A reassembled RATM couldn’t come at a better time — and these songs are meant to be played and heard now. Perhaps this time we’re ready to listen and stand up with them. *
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
Rock the Bells Tour
Sat/18, 1 p.m., $76–$151
McCovey Cove Parking Lot
24 Willie Mays Plaza, SF
(909) 971-0474
Your neighborhood streets on wry (hold the Sesame)
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
"Who are the people in your neighborhood?" Wasn’t that the consciousness-raising question we were coaxed into asking as tots by the irresistibly catchy song stylings of public television? Well, if they’re the mix of humans and Muppet-esque monsters of Avenue Q, they’re strikingly but only superficially reminiscent of the denizens of that sidewalk utopia propagated by PBS children’s programming. After all, Sesame Street began way before anyone could stay shut up all day surfing the Internet for porn, like Trekkie Monster (Christian Anderson), let alone sing about it.
The inhabitants of Avenue Q are also the friends, allies, love interests, and fellow losers whom a recent college grad with few prospects and an elusive purpose — puppet protagonist Princeton (voiced and operated by Robert McClure) — can sort of maybe count on to get him through a disillusioning world that already seems downhill the moment one’s rolled off the university assembly line.
Such is the premise and highly qualified promise of Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s much-hailed musical comedy, which makes a vibrant San Francisco debut at the Orpheum Theatre in a Broadway touring production happily packed with energy and a talented, impressively versatile cast. Many jaded years after Big Bird was first through with watching you, Lopez and Marx’s reappropriation of such small-screen indoctrination serves up a deflated age writ Broadway large, an arch nostalgia tailor-made for an overeducated, underemployed population of thirtysomething slacker-searchers.
Avenue Q mines TV and Broadway in equal measure, with knowing references to each in a kind of pop cultural marriage overtly joined in one show tune–<\d>loving puppet named Rod, a closeted stockbroker who plays a kind of veiled Bert to sloppy but good-natured roommate Nicky’s Ernie. And if disappointment, humiliation, and an understated resilience are things everyone shares to varying degrees on Avenue Q (a run-down row of New York City brownstones with off-the-beaten-track rents — a decidedly grubby version of Sesame Street nicely realized by set designer Anna Louizos), they also come together in one neat, compact package that isn’t even Styrofoam based: Gary Coleman (voiced and operated by Carla Renata), the has-been TV child actor and ignominious tabloid fixture here turned, in one of many inspired touches, into the building super.
Smart, lively, and consistently funny, Avenue Q pretty well lives up to the heap of praise that brought the 2004 musical a small mound of Tony Awards. The show lags a bit in the second act (where, in medium-funny numbers like "Schadenfreude," the formula can begin to wear thin), but it’s never a bore. And if there’s inevitably a sentimental aspect to the "it sucks to be you and me" universality of its theme, it winds up on what is probably the best possible note — contained in the double-edged line "Everything in life is only for now" — which at the last moment smuggles in a defiant optimism clothed as ambivalence and compromise, much as throughout the play a certain felt reality (admittedly of a decidedly middle-class variety) comes agreeably filtered by felt puppets.
OTHERS MATTERS
Insignificant Others is a new musical comedy featuring its own assortment of lovable college grads unleashed in another big (or anyway biggish) city, by San Francisco playwright-composer-lyricist L.<\!s>Jay Kuo. It may not have anything like the budget of Avenue Q — and in truth doesn’t manage the tightrope walk between its sentimental theme and a cutting comic irony as smoothly either — but while uneven in both conception and execution, Insignificant Others nevertheless has some significant talent and inspiration behind it.
The story concerns a circle of five twentysomethings from Cleveland who relocate to San Francisco with hopes of embarking on lives of romance and adventure beyond the workaday world’s cubicle walls. At the center of these tales of the city is a buxom young firecracker named Margaret (the strong and winning Sarah Kathleen Farrell) on the lookout for Mr. Right — a designation given considerable latitude in a city with a scarce supply of heterosexual men, which becomes the excuse for three of the show’s most crowd-pleasing and clever numbers.
Friendships drift, but a crisis draws the characters together again, though this central thread comes over as both weak and overblown, and its resolution too pat and syrupy. Insignificant Others‘ best parts remain the more comedic ones, wherein Kuo’s generally polished lyrics and able if less consistently original music tend to reach their highest points.<\!s>*
AVENUE Q
Through Sept. 2, $30–<\d>$90
Tues.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m. (also Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.); Sun., 2 p.m.
Orpheum Theatre
1192 Market, SF
INSIGNIFICANT OTHERS
Through Sept. 23, $35–<\d>$39
Thurs.–<\d>Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.
Zeum Theatre
221 Fourth St., SF
Manhattanization, from LA to SF
By Tim Redmond
Joel Kotkin, the widely known urban writer and thinker, has a fascinating piece in the Sunday L.A. Times called “Why the Rush to Manhattanize L.A.?” I don’t entirely agree with his argument for L.A.; he writes about New York-style density and says:
It’s not so clear, however, that L.A., which has been expanding outward for more than 100 years and is famously sun drenched, car crazy, blessed with natural beauty and earthquake prone, should follow a similar course.
I think it’s clear that L.A. can’t continue to expand outward, and that it’s far too car crazy, and that future growth should be driven by transit, not freeways.
But his larger point is that we are so enamored these days of “new urbanism” and a rush to build tall buildings that we aren’t thinking about the long-term impacts:
Ultimately, it comes down to whether Los Angeles will have a serious debate about where it is headed. Jumping blindly on the Manhattan express, without considering the implications for the city and its many great neighborhoods, is not a promising first step.
In San Francisco, we’ve had this debate for years — but right now, as the Chronicle is arguing only about which of a group of oversized highrises is the best, we aren’t thinking clearly about why we’re making these decisions.
Whither Jascha Ephraim?
By Robert Bergin
Dear Jascha Ephraim,
Stumbled across your CD a couple days ago. I was going through my collection, looking for stuff to sell to Amoeba because I’m broke and I needed a copy of Pootie Tang. If you haven’t seen Pootie Tang, you should. It’s right up your alley. But yeah, I came up with three or four CDs I didn’t want anymore and some promos, which I figured would be enough. Who needs Softies full-lengths when you’ve got the 7-inches, right? Anyways, no fucking way did I sell your self-titled. True, I haven’t spent time with it in a while, but that doesn’t change the fact that my roommate and I listened to you almost daily during the spring of 2006. You don’t part with that.
So what happened man? Where’d you go? Your Web site is bare. Your MySpace
has a wall post that hints that you might have left SF for Kentucky – WTF? – but other than that, nada. The world needs more of your tunes. “Goldfish Euthanasia” was for my little brother what that Offspring song about road-rage was for me. We need your sharp-witted synth-pop vulgarities. Or maybe just a status update? Hope alls well.
XOXOXO,
Robert
Is Bruce Brugmann alive, or is he spinning in his grave?
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Several folks pointed out to me that the San Francisco Chronicle carried a premature comment on my death, in its Aug. 9th feature “What people say about the designs (of our new towering highrise buildings).”
It quoted Michael S. McGill, the former executive director of the San Francisco Urban Planning & Research Association and former executive director of the Bay Area Forum, 64, now living in Washington, D.C.
Said Gill, “Having left SF at the end of the two-decade war over high-rises, in the early ’90s, I am astonished at the apparent public support for ‘the tallest high-rise on the West Coast.’ How things have changed! Is (San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher) Bruce Brugmann still alive, or is he spinning in his grave?”
Hey, Mike, good to hear from you. Your report of my death is premature and I am happy to report that the Guardian
is still firmly on top of the highrise issue, which I like to call pellmell Manhattanization. We stopped the first highrise boom with Proposition M, the limited growth initiative on commercial highrises and the downtown highrise boom.
But now the issue is highrises with million-dollar condos, ugly, much too high and out of proportion for a compact city and its compact neighborhoods, built not for residents but for people working outside the city and driving out our lower income and middle classes.
You can rest assured, Mike, that we are on the story and fighting them every way we can. And soon you may see the equivalent of a Prop M for highrise condos. Can we count on you to come back and join the battle?
Postscript: “The Devil’s Bargain at the Transbay Terminal,” a blog by Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond, eloquently summarizes the key political point behind the new highrise boom. “Nobody in California wants to pay higher taxes for anything. So the folks at City Hall have decided that the only way we can have a new transit terminal is if we hock a piece of our city and our skyline to fund it. So we take some of the land on the terminal site and let a developer build monstrosity of a highrise on it–and that will bring in the money that we can’t get any other way.”
Peaker plants and SF’s energy future
EDITORIAL Over the next few weeks, the Board of Supervisors will be looking at two major electric-power programs that could add a lot of new generation capacity (and possibly new pollution) to southeast San Francisco and a new source of backup power from out of town. Both projects seem to have broad support at City Hall.
The main questions that city officials ought to be asking about plans for a new power plant in Potrero Hill and a new power cable to bring electricity across the bay are:
•Do we really need either?
•What is motivating the powerful but little-known state agency to demand that San Francisco — the only US city with a federal public power mandate — prepare for a future in which energy use continues to grow, conservation lags, the private sector controls the city’s power supply, and the city’s plans for cutting power use are a failure?
The California Independent System Operator, known as Cal-ISO, was created in the wake of the wretched energy deregulation plan that the State Legislature concocted in 1996. The outfit, run by a five-member board appointed by the governor, is supposed to ensure that every part of California has enough electricity — now and in the future.
But the board members are almost all former utility executives, including a retired Pacific Gas and Electric Co. official, and like most utility executives, they seem to believe that the only track for electricity use is upward.
So Cal-ISO has informed San Francisco that it doesn’t have enough power on hand to make it through 2010. That means the city needs to either find a new way to import more power (the only significant current pathway is a cable that runs up the Peninsula and is owned by PG&E) or build more power plants inside its limits.
The problem with building more plants, particularly the kind of plants Cal-ISO likes — fossil fuel burners that can run day and night without interruption — is that San Francisco residents are trying to get rid of the last big polluting plant, Mirant Corp.’s facility at the foot of Potrero Hill, not build more.
So the latest solution involves the installation of three natural gas–<\d>fired generators known as peakers, which would run only when demand is high and other sources (including the solar facility the city plans to build) aren’t operating. The mayor and the supervisors are referring to these plants as "city-owned generation," making this sound like a big step on the way to public power.
And on one level, it is: San Francisco won the turbines (which are essentially big jet engines) as part of a settlement with Williams Energy after the energy crisis, and they could be part of a municipal utility. But the current plans call for the Chicago subsidiary of a Tokyo company, J Power, to build the structures that would house the turbines and hook them up to the power lines, then operate the plants for 10 years. Only then would they revert to city ownership.
So already San Francisco is waffling on the public power issue. (Why, for example, can’t the city build the facilities itself and hire its own engineers to hook up the turbines and run them? Why do we even need a private, outside partner?)
Then there’s the environmental impact. In theory, if the peakers only ran a few hours a day, they would spew less junk into the air than the Mirant plant currently does. And Cal-ISO is only willing to allow the Mirant plant to shut down if San Francisco develops some other form of firm local generation. But there’s nothing in writing anywhere to guarantee that the foul exhaust from Mirant would cease when the peakers fired up; in fact, it’s possible that the southeast part of the city could wind up living with both.
The other project, called the Trans Bay Cable, would be a privately owned venture carrying power from Pittsburg across the bay and into San Francisco. The power plants that would feed the cable are largely nonrenewables, and although they’re outside town, this is hardly an environmental advance.
The big question, though, is why San Francisco has to go through this exercise.
Cal-ISO predicts that the city will run short of power in a few years — but that forecast is awfully suspect. For starters, the entire projected shortfall is five megawatts in 2010, growing by 10 MW per year after that. And the city’s projections for Community Choice Aggregation suggest that conservation measures can cheaply reduce demand, by 107 MW, over the same period. Conservation, also known as demand-side management, is by far the least expensive and most environmentally sound alternative.
In fact, with an aggressive conservation plan and an aggressive solar program, it’s possible that the city could handle the local load just fine without the Mirant plant or the peakers.
That, of course, would leave much of the power in the hands of PG&E — and make the city too heavily reliant on the one Peninsula cable. That’s what makes the giant extension cord from Pittsburg seem so appealing. But the city has also been talking about extending its power line from Hetch Hetchy, which now ends in Newark, across the bay — and that city-owned, city-run alternative would make far more sense. (The company that would own the Trans Bay Cable, Babcock and Brown, has offered San Francisco a handful of cash, a total of $75 million over 25 years, to make the deal sound sweeter. But that’s birdseed compared with the revenue the city would get by building its own line and moving to create a full public power system.)
Infrastructure decisions like these tie the city down for many years to come, and the supervisors need to be careful. They should, at a minimum:
•Conduct an independent study, outside the purview of Cal-ISO, to see what the city’s energy needs really will be in the future and how they can be met with renewables and conservation.
•Direct the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to prepare a plan to build the peaker facilities as a city project, with no private-sector partner getting control of the power for 10 years.
•Guarantee the people of Bayview and the other southeast neighborhoods that if the peakers are installed, they won’t be fired up until the Mirant plant is shut down.
But there’s a larger point here. San Francisco has never had a detailed energy-options study that looks at how the city overall should address its energy needs for the next 25 years. A study like that would consider everything from tidal and wind power to public power, infrastructure needs, and extending the Hetch Hetchy line across the bay to CCA.
Instead, at the bidding of an unaccountable state agency filled with people who think like private-utility executives, the city is making a bunch of piecemeal moves that will create a patchwork of programs that may not be the right ones, may not be properly connected, and may not even be needed.
The only outfit that’s demanding we move quickly here is Cal-ISO — and before city officials decide to let the governor’s people determine our energy future, City Attorney Dennis Herrera should prepare a memo on what legal authority, if any, Cal-ISO has over the city and how San Francisco can defy that agency and determine its own future.*
Code unknown
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
The CIA maintains a number of "black sites" around the world where suspected terrorists are "disappeared." You can get a recipe for Irish Eyes Chicken Pot Pie or instructions on how to commit suicide on the Internet. Thousands of starlings spontaneously converge in a suburb in Rome where Benito Mussolini once planned on holding an exhibition celebrating Fascism. I love having dreams. There are more than 130 revolving restaurants around the world.
These are all interesting tidbits. But what do they mean? While they may sound like the search results of indiscriminate Web surfing, all are factual elements found in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ "Dark Matters: Artists See the Impossible," curated by René de Guzman. Although organized around secrecy and the unexpected, this group exhibition deals more with what can be found than what is hidden.
Perhaps surrealist André Breton was predicting the future of curation with his juxtaposition of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table; today randomness rules, and connections are coaxed by the curator and forged by the viewer. This show exemplifies such a process. For example: Sergio Prego’s video Black Monday (2006) is a mesmerizing parallax view of a small explosive going off in the artist’s studio. You get every awesome angle, and the cloud is suspended midboom. (I always wondered if the tests at Bikini Atoll were done so more military personnel would have a chance to glimpse the aesthetic wonder that is the atomic bomb.) Kitty-corner from Black Monday is Heaven Can Wait (2001–ongoing), a video installation by artist team Bull.Miletic showing more parallax views, this time from revolving restaurants around the globe, including the Equinox at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. Was it Steve McQueen who starred in The Parallax View, shot from the revolving restaurant atop the Space Needle? Or was Breton predicting the Internet and how randomness is curated into blogs? What was I blogging? I mean, saying?
It’s well known that the CIA performs secret operations under fancy code names. Trevor Paglen has compiled a list — everything he could find, from Able Ally to Zodiac Beauchamp. "Dark Matters" includes a very tall wall full of them. The piece is called Codename (2001–07). Paglen told me he knows what a handful of the named operations are about, but if he talked to the wrong person, they might mistake him for a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Secret planes where? Extraordinary rendition what? Unmarked airplanes why? But Paglen is not a crackpot. He is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer. Information thus arranged and presented — what do we do with it? At this very moment, the CIA is torturing people at secret facilities in the name of our freedom. But what I want to know is, whatever happened to Bronski Beat? We do not want to think, much less believe, that the US government runs secret prisons. So we don’t.
Robert Oppenheimer once said — or wrote, I forget — "It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them." I thought I used that quote in some other art review because I liked it so much. So I Googled "kurtz oppenheimer." What I got instead was a live-sex webcam chat. How many degrees to Internet sex? Not many. Listening Post (2002–06), by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, demonstrates as much. Spinal columns of digital screens climb from floor to ceiling. A suite of seven programmed actions culls live chats from the Internet, which scroll across the screens. One is set to grab anything beginning with "I love" or "I like." It’s harder to determine the organizing principle of the other movements, but the very public exposition of very private conversations is discomfiting. And absorbing — all those desires scrolling by. And you thought you were the only one!
Did you know that there is no alpha leader in a flight of birds? What really occurs is democracy: when just over half of the birds begin to tilt in one direction, the rest follow. I saw that on the Internet somewhere. Richard Barnes, Charles Mason, and Alex Schweder were all in Rome, hanging out and making art. Unbeknownst to the others, each of them became fascinated with the mass starling convergence at Esposizione Universale di Roma. Murmurs (2006) consists of Barnes’s photography, Mason’s sound, and Schweder’s video. Starlings have binocular vision. Who knew?
Left on its own, information will eventually organize itself. What remains is the question of credibility. One of the things I named in the first paragraph is not found in the exhibition. Or maybe two. *
DARK MATTERS: ARTISTS SEE THE IMPOSSIBLE
Through Nov. 11
Tues.–Wed. and Fri.–Sun., noon–5 p.m.; Thurs., noon–8 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission, SF
$3–$6 (free first Tues.)
(415) 978-ARTS
Mission Beach Cafe
By Paul Reidinger
› paulr@sfbg.com
Pending the results of the next big earthquake, the Mission remains beachless, unless we count rooftops and the southwest corner of Dolores Park. No summertime water there, other than from the lawn sprinklers, but plenty of ephebes in Speedos for your voyeuristic pleasure. Maybe we shouldn’t fixate on water, anyway. The Mission, while landlocked, does offer lots of sun, a pleasantly hazy slacker ethos that would do credit to those surfer-dude haunts on the San Mateo County coast, and, since early in the year, Mission Beach Cafe, at the corner of 14th and Guerrero streets.
Decriers of Mission gentrification need only take a short roll down 14th, from Market to Folsom, more or less, to have their sense of the world restored. Grit has not yet been totally expunged from this city, and a less likely setting for an urban beach you would have trouble picturing. A few years ago, I wrote about another café, just a block or so away from Mission Beach on the 14th Street corridor, in which all the food was made in little ovens — convection, toaster, microwave — while nefarious types knocked about outside, on curbs and in alleys.
The little portable-oven place folded after a few years, but the advent of Mission Beach Cafe tells us that while 14th Street is still a realm of used-car lots, body shops, gas stations, kinky porn, and maybe even some lingering nefarious types, it is also sufficiently on its way up now to sustain a genuinely gorgeous little restaurant — latest in a long series of labor-of-love, neighborhood jewels that give this city of neighborhoods its distinctive restaurant character.
The gentlemen behind Mission Beach Cafe are Bill Clarke and Alan Carter. Carter is a baker, and this aptitude finds expression in the café’s morning persona — pastries to go with your Blue Bottle coffee — as well as on the evening shift, whose menu can include a rabbit pot pie ($17.50) with a homemade crust. We saw quite a few examples of this dish making appearances around the dining room. Part of its appeal doubtless has to do with the continuing exotic appeal of rabbit, and part of that probably has to do with the fact that cooking with rabbit is tricky. Like turkey, rabbit is lean and dries out quickly, and so sealing it in a pie, with peas, carrots, and thick gravy, is a good strategy. The pie isn’t a true pie, incidentally, an enclosure of pastry. The crust is just a disk fitted over the top of the bowl in which the dish is baked, and there is no edible bottom.
The general drift of the kitchen’s intentions is captured by a single entry on the dinner menu: ahi tuna tartare with ginger and soy sauce. I’ve never had a bad version of this dish, but I’ve had it so many times, and seen it so very many others, that sampling it no longer seems necessary. But it does tell us we’re in the heart of the heart of California cuisine, a reality of mixed and eclectic influences and local, sustainable, and often organic ingredients. And even if this is familiar territory, it can be made exciting by sharp execution and the occasional twist.
Let’s put some grated fresh ginger in the gazpacho ($4.50), for instance, and some sake too. I didn’t pick up the sake, but the brassy fruitiness of the ginger was unmistakable, while the soup’s appearance was unforgettable: a silken smooth purée of Pepto-Bismol pinky peach. A turkey sandwich ($6 for half) wasn’t quite so striking in either dimension, despite avocado, bacon, and aioli, but a vegetarian sandwich ($9.50) made clever use of sun-dried tomatoes’ meatiness as a supplement to grilled eggplant, avocado, and smoked mozzarella.
Succotash ($4.50), a classic dish of the American Indians, is so simple and tasty that its slender popularity nowadays is something of a mystery. It’s a good way to use some of high summer’s fresh corn, and if you run out of fava beans, use edamame instead! The result will be just as good. And if there’s any grumbling, the seasoned fries ($4.50) should snuff it out. They’re not curly like Jack in the Box’s, but they’re just as tasty.
The one dish I found a little wanting was tilapia ($13.50) crusted with flax seeds. These looked like blue-gray lentils and gave the filet the impression of having recovered its scaly skin, but the flavor charge tended toward the imperceptible. Tilapia has its attractions — it’s inexpensive, predictable, low profile — but as a rule it needs more help from the kitchen than a witty crusting and a heap of steamed spinach on the side.
Fortunately we had already semi-gorged on the day’s flatbread ($10), a squarish mat with the puffiness of fresh pita bread and topped with garlic, pine nuts, shredded chicken, fennel, and plenty of grated parmesan cheese. The look was slightly anemic — some green or red would have been nice — but the flavors were clear and powerful. And despite the flatbread’s satisfyingness, we still had enough space available, as we approached the finish line, to accommodate a last small masterpiece of baking: brownie points ($4.50), a pair of moist brownie triangles trimmed with caramel sauce and whipped cream.
To me these sorts of foods are homey in a San Francisco, early 21st-century way, but evidently they’re also hip too, to judge by the profusion of hipsters, in shiny pants and Technicolor Adidas, among the clientele. If we are to have such ironies in the Mission, what better place than at the Mission’s only beachfront café?<\!s>*
MISSION BEACH CAFE
Pastry and coffee bar: Mon.–<\d>Fri., from 7 a.m.; Sat.–<\d>Sun., from 8 a.m. Lunch: daily, 11 a.m.–<\d>3 p.m. Dinner: Tues.–<\d>Thurs. and Sun., 5:30–<\d>10 p.m.; Fri.–<\d>Sat., 5:30–<\d>11 p.m.
198 Guerrero, SF
(415) 861-0198
MC/V
Beer and wine
Pleasant noise level
Wheelchair accessible
Too $hort resurfaces, kicking it with kicks of all ilks
Don’t forget: Life is…Too $hort.
Every once in a while it happens, and this time he comes courtesy of Sneaker Pimps’ buy-trade-swap event at Mighty on Saturday, Aug. 11. Also performing live: Kid Capri, J-Billion, and Selecta Trasha. Art installations by Bigfoot, Misk 1, David Lee, Peekaboo and Angrywoebots will be up, and FTC and Western Edition will give a live skate demo at this 21-and-older event at 119 Utah St, SF. $17 advance. Now explain to me what a “sneaker lifestyle show” is, exactly?
Chin music, pin hits
› kimberly@sfbg.com
SONIC REDUCER Drifting into a coma at last week’s lethargic Oakland A’s–<\d>Los Angeles Angels game, I suddenly woke with a snort, dropped my bag of peanuts, and realized what was missing. No, not some bargain-price rookie flamethrower, though that wouldn’t hurt. It was too quiet. I needed some screeching Queen songs to drown out the deranged A’s fans screaming behind me.
But it wasn’t just me — the A’s and their fans were suffering from a dearth of head-bobbing, fist-punching at-bat music, in addition to a real game. One lousy Nirvana snippet does not inspire high confidence or achievement, making it hard for the team to compete with the sleek multimedia machine of, say, the Giants, the Seattle Mariners, or heck, any other ball team out there blasting tunes at top volume to work up the crowd into a bubbling froth whenever a hometown hitter saunters to the plate or whenever the action lags. Of course, the selections have fallen into predictable patterns: Barry Bonds has tended to favor Dr. Dre minimalist power hooks to usher in his home-run hits. There are the inevitable Linkin Park, Metallica, and T.I. tunes as well as "Crazy Train," "Yeah!" and, naturally, DJ Unk’s "Walk It Out," beloved of so many athletes and audio staffers — although sometimes musicians have their say, as when Twisted Sister asked John Rocker and the Atlanta Braves to stop playing "I Wanna Rock" after the player’s racist, homophobic, and sexist mouth-offs back in 2000.
Maybe we’re just damaged, in need of a perpetual soundtrack to go with our every activity and our shrinking attention spans — though some might argue that baseball, like so many sports, needs an infusion of new but not necessarily performance-enhanced energy. We can all use some style to go with our substance, which might explain why presidential candidate John Edwards was said to be pressing flesh at the still-unfolding, long-awaited Temple Nightclub in SoMa last week. And why it wasn’t too surprising to get an invite on a bisected bowling pin to Strike Cupertino, a new bowling alley–<\d>cum–<\d>nightclub down south in Cupertino Square, a withering mall off 280 where the venue has planted itself on the basement level. Its neighbors: a JC Penney, a Macy’s, a Frederick’s of Hollywood, an ice-skating rink, an AMC 16-plex, and lots of darkened store spaces. I stopped to admire the wizard-embellished pewter goblets and marked-down Kill Bill Elle Driver action figures at the sword-, knife-, and gun-filled Armour Geddon — still open for all your raging goth armament needs.
Strike, however, was raging all on its own, without the skull-handled dagger it never knew it needed. In a wink toward the Silicon Valley work-hard-play-hard crowd Strike’s owners hope to attract, Angela Kinsey from The Office threw out the first ball in the black-lit, modish alley. A luxe bar dreamed up by Chris Smith, one of the team that designed Nobu, was swarming with guests clamoring for free Striketinis.
Apparently Strike Cupertino isn’t original: the first one sprung, after a full makeover, from Bowlmor Lanes in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1997, and went on, according to the press literature, to become the highest-grossing bowling alley in the world. Others are located in Bethesda, Md., Long Island, and Miami. But what, no Vegas? Strike seems perfectly suited for Sin City, with its bright, flash, well-upholstered decor — equal parts retro ’50s and ’60s, both American Graffiti and Goldfinger — and multiple massive plasma screens distractingly flickering the Giants game, ESPN, any game, above the lanes, the lounge, and every surface. Peppy, poppy ’80s rock and R&B — "Hey Mickey" and "Little Red Corvette" — coursed from the DJ booth next to the raft of pool and air hockey tables and the game arcade as upscale clubbish figurines, blue-collar bowling diehards, and Asian and Latino kids tried out the lanes and tables and some fair American and Asian finger food.
I stuck a kiwi into a chocolate fountain and spurted sticky brown stuff all over my white shoes and shirt and wondered, could this be the future of clubbing — or sports? Amusement parks for adults, lubricated with fruity but muscley cocktails? Or maybe this is as hellacious as it gets in drowsy Cupertino.
Still, I thought Strike was worth swinging by, if only to play on a sparkling, well-waxed, seemingly nick-free lane for the first time, in fresh, BO-free shoes, with immaculate, grimeless balls. Also, knowing how many miles per hour your ball is traveling is a trip, if somewhat discouraging for featherweights like yours truly. Yes, I know the $5 cover after 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays seems excessive for, well, a bowling alley, but Monday evening seems a deal with all-night unlimited play for a flat $14. Word has it that the nightspot also enforces a dress code — and that even Bonds would have to leave his cap at home — but I say perhaps just cut back on the supershort bowling-shirt dresses and fishnet stockings on the teenagey waitresses. We’re not in Vegas yet, Toto.
STRIKE CUPERTINO
Cupertino Square
10123 Wolf Road, Cupertino
(408) 252-BOWL
YOU SCORED
OLIVER FUTURE
The Los Angeles buzz band generates scratchy, acidic melodic rock with plenty of post-punk seasoning. With Boy in the Bubble and 8 Bit Idiot. Wed/8, 9 p.m., $7. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com
ROBBERS ON HIGH STREET
Veering from tree cities to familial familiars, the NYC combo come with Grand Animals (New Line). With the Wildbirds and the Old-Fashioned Way. Thurs/9, 9:30 p.m., $8. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com
GREAT NORTHERN
Melodic pop for modern-rock romantics. With Comas and Twilight Sleep. Sat/11, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com
MIKAELA’S FIEND AND SEXY PRISON
Driving punk tumult meets salacious death disco. With Mika Miko and Twin. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., call for price. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org
PELICAN
The Windy City instrumentalists skew shorter — seven minutes at most — and focus on songs on their new City of Echoes (Hydra Head). With Clouds and Garagantula. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com
Lennar, asbestos, ATSDR, El Dorado, BVHP
By Sarah Phelan
ATSDR’s Region 9 office covers a lot of ground, including San Francisco’s Hunters Point Shipyard.
Susan Muza works at the Region 9 office of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. That’s the agency that agreed on July 17 to do a public health assessment of Lennar’s development at Parcel A of the Hunters Point Shipyard where fear runs high that the community may have been exposed to toxic asbestos dust.
Community members voiced those fears during a July 31 Board hearing, but the Board voted 6-5 against urging the SF Department of Health to temporarily shutting down Lennar’s construction site, until health concerns had been addressed.
As it happens, ATSDR has experience with such assessments in California, thanks to Oak Ridge High School in El Dorado County, where naturally occurring asbestos was identified in surrounding rocks and where a vein of asbestos was disturbed during construction of a soccer field at the school.
Muza told me that at Oak Ridge High, ATSDR sampled and tested soil from baseball and soccer fields, parking lots, as well as dust collected from a school classroom that had potentially been affected by a leaf blower.
What ATSDR found, says Muza, was that “sports coaches, outdoor maintenance staff and student athletes had the potential to be exposed at levels higher than previously thought.”
In the case of Lennar’s Parcel A development, the classrooms and basketball courts of the Muhammed University of Islam sit on the other side of a chain link fence, where massive amounts of asbestos-laden rock were moved in the last year, but where air monitors weren’t operating for three months, and watering was inadequate for six months.
“At Oak Ridge High, we recommended that people try to limit any further exposure and that those most highly exposed inform their physicians that they had potentially been exposed to asbestos, that they should monitor for signs of disease, related to that exposure, and that they should participate in very good preventative care, such as flu shots, to make sure their respiratory health stays healthy,” Muza said.
ATSDR is also monitoring cancer registers in the EL Dorado area.
As Muza notes, “one big problem with asbestos is it has a long lag time. The period between exposure happening and disease manifesting can be 10-40 years.”
Although the San Francisco Department of Public Health has claimed that workers were wearing CAL OSHA authorized asbestos monitors at the Hunters Point shipyard site and that CAL OSHA did not report any exposure exceedances, Muza told me that ATSDR does not support using worker asbestos limits in evaluating community members’ exposures, other than as a reference point.
As ATSDR’s website explains, “worker limits are based on risk levels that would be considered unacceptable in nonworker populations.”
The reasoning behind disqualifying worker limits as a valid assessment tool is that community members may be children who are lower to ground, more active and have higher metabolisms. Or they may be seniors, or residents who live near the site, 24/7.
“No exposure to asbestos is good,” says Muza. “We are all exposed to it, thanks to brake linings, amongst other things, but we want to keep our exposure as minimal as we can.”
In the case of Oak Ridge High, ATSDR recommended some removal activities, because material from the vein of asbestos that got broken when the soccer field was built, got spread around the school.
“And we recommended paving and landscaping activities to reduce people’s ability to being exposed,” adds Muza, noting that ATSDR did not recommend that Oak Ridge High be closed or relocated.
In San Francisco, ATSDR plans to evaluate the asbestos dust mitigation plan that Lennar agreed to when it got the green light to begin development on Parcel A in 2005. ATSDR will also evaluate how Lennar actually implemented that plan, along with results from air monitors, and any other data that they can ascertain will be helpful.
“We also plan to gather community concerns, be very transparent and talk to everyone,” says Muza who has sent out a letter to stakeholders, including the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee, the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, The San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, and, of course, the Muhammed University of Islam.
Says Muza, “We will summarize the concerns we hear, sort out what we can address from what we can’t and come to the community with a plan.”
Countdown to Burning Man
New author Jess Bruder hooked up with the Flaming Lotus Girls on the playa in 2005 as they were building Angel of the Apocalypse, featuring the group prominently in her just-released “Burning Book.”
Photo by Caroline Miller, aka Mills
By Steven T. Jones
With only a few more weeks until thousands of Bay Area residents head out to Burning Man, the anticipation is palpable. Impossibly ambitious art projects are being pushed toward completion at a frenzied pace in myriad local warehouses and work spaces, people’s bicycles and hair are taking on a sassy and colorful flair, fencesitters are making the decision to attend or not, and burners can be seen buying googles, costumes, and dozens of gallons of waters at stores around town.
Into this excitement now comes “Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man” by Jessica Bruder, an engaging collection of words and images from everyone’s favorite countercultural blowout. The book will hit the streets Aug. 7, but you can catch Bruder — who logged time with lots on local burners, from Extra Action Marching Band to the Flaming Lotus Girls — tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Booksmith in SF or Aug. 6 at 7 p.m. at Cody’s Books in Berkeley.
Or out on the playa at the end of the month. See you there.
The homeless sweep won’t work
By Tim Redmond
I came to San Francisco in 1981, and there were people sleeping in Golden Gate Park. Dianne Feinstein, who was the chief exec back then, would periodically try to get rid of them. Art Agnos and Frank Jordan did the same thing. At one point in the 1990s, when Willie Brown was mayor, he discovered the shocking fact as if for the first time, and had a team sweep the campers out. Now the Chronicle has gotten the scoop yet again, and the mayor has dispatched his shock troops and is trying it all anew.
It won’t work this time, either.
There simply aren’t enough places for homeless people to sleep in this town. The shelters are unpleasant and often dangerous, and don’t work for people who are opposite-sex couples (all the shelters are men- or women-only) or people who have dogs (and there are quite a few homeless people with dogs). They aren’t a long-term answer for people who drink or take drugs, since they’re all alcohol and drug-free (or are supposed to be).
The transitional housing the mayor is promoting is fine — but there are thousands of homeless people and not enough rooms for all of them. So if you sweep the park, you just get homeless people sleeping in doorways.
Mark Salomon had an interesting post on this on the PRO-SF listserv; you can read it after the jump.
Farina Focaccia and Cucina Italiana
› paulr@sfbg.com
Imagine a restaurant situated inside a bottle of sparkling water, and you will have a working sense of Farina Focaccia and Cucina Italiana, the latest entry along 18th Street’s burgeoning food row in the Mistro. The Italians, in their inimitable way, refer to sparkling water as con gas, and Farina is an Italian restaurant — a Ligurian-influenced restaurant, to be precise, which means it’s not quite a head-on rival to Delfina, a few steps away. Delfina’s food tends toward the Tuscan, and the heart of Tuscany is Florence, a storied city well away from the sea. Tuscan cuisine makes ample use of grilled beef and also maiale (wild boar) and porcini mushrooms — the latter a pair of delicacies taken from nearby forests in the Apennines.
Liguria, by contrast, is a maritime region, a slender boomerang of littoral country whose center is the ancient port city of Genoa and whose long shoreline on the Tyrrhenian Sea runs from the French Riviera in the west nearly to Livorno in the east. We would expect then that Ligurian cuisine would emphasize seafood (other staples include lemons, olive oil, and pesto), and that is indeed what we find at Farina. (Farina, incidentally, means "wheat meal" in Italian; it was also the name of a creamy hot cereal I preferred as a child to oatmeal, which tended to be lumpy. And … it sounds vaguely like Delfina — coincidence?)
The sparkling-water effect has largely to do with a half wall of wine goblets that separate the bar from the main dining room. There are also expansive plate-glass windows along both 18th and Dearborn streets, and these blur the boundary between outdoors and indoors. Passersby are constantly peering into the restaurant, while the people inside peer right back, at least when not peering at one other. Although Farina is just a few months old, the see-and-be-seen, watch-zone factor has already reached Los Angeles–<\d>like levels. All this represents a radical change from the space’s previous life as the home of Anna’s Danish Cookies. Noise, interestingly, is under control, despite plenty of hard surfaces, including a slate gray concrete floor and a passage of gleaming white tiles high above the food bar near the back of the dining room. The high ceilings, with joists painted hospital white, must help.
The early word on Farina was that it was overpriced, and while the serving-size-to-price ratio is indeed rather stringent, the food itself is superior. Excellence at a high price is the Wolfgang Puck formula for success. The first promising hints are given by the house-baked breads: squares of plain and cheesy focaccia, along with slices of whole wheat and white country breads and a walnut bread, some of them still warm from the oven. The goodness of the breads prefigures that of the pizzata di Recco ($16), a large rectangle of pizza-like crust topped with garlicky tomato sauce, oregano, capers, anchovies, and gooey white melted cheese. The pie’s name refers to the Ligurian town of Recco, renowned for its cheese focaccias.
Another classic Ligurian-style dish is house-made tortellini ($17), stuffed with sea bass and served in an earthenware crock. The crock holds a shallow pond of white-wine-and-parsley sauce dotted with heirloom tomato quarters, mussels, clams, and rose-colored bits of calamari. The sauce was underseasoned — the only such example we came across. Salted up a bit, it made a nice match with a Ligurian white wine from the Cinque Terre ($9 for a glass), a seaside district famous for its five villages perched on cliffs. The wine had a grassiness I associate with American sauvignon blanc and tasted a little odd on is own, but it merged comfortably with the mollusk-heavy sauce.
The Catalana salad ($13) captured the magic of so much Italian cooking, regardless of region. It was so simple — tuna confit on a bed of onion and fennel slivers, with a light showering of pitted black olives, minced anchovies, and heirloom tomato chunks — as to sound boring, but it turned out to be a beautiful concertina of sweet, salty, sour, and rich effects.
We did feel, over a noontime visit, that portions were almost too small and starkly plated. The insalata di giorno ($9) turned out to be quite similar to the Catalana, and while it cost less, it was worryingly slight, although cannellini beans provided some ballast. We ended up ordering a panino ($9) of prosciutto and fontina cheese, and this soon arrived as an appealing golden square of pressed bread, tastily filled though presented with nothing more than a heaplet of mixed greens. Only the torta verdure ($9), a slice of spinach pie made with flaky pastry, seemed to carry real weight.
As for the dessert menu: the roving eye of the sweet tooth quite quickly found the panna cotta ($8). If Farina means to unseat Delfina as the king of Italian cooking on 18th Street, then panna cotta will be central to the strategy. Delfina’s buttermilk version has been on the menu from the beginning and is now legendary. Farina’s pastry chef has wisely chosen not to copy it. Instead of a geutf8ous cylinder, Farina’s panna cotta takes the form of a martini-glass parfait, a layering of cooked cream — softer than Delfina’s — atop a blackberry compote itself topped with a dollop of blackberry whipped cream.
But perhaps an unseating is neither necessary nor possible. Perhaps Farina and Delfina will turn out to be complements to each other, not watchful rivals. It’s not every two-block segment of street in town, after all, that can offer us a pair of Italian restaurants like these, alike and dissimilar but both sparkling.<\!s>*
FARINA FOCACCIA AND CUCINA ITALIANA
Lunch: Mon.–<\d>Fri., 11 a.m.–<\d>2:30 p.m. Dinner: nightly, 6–<\d>10 p.m.
3560 18th St., SF
(415) 565-0360
Beer and wine
AE/DC/DISC/MC/V
Well-managed noisiness
Wheelchair accessible
Black and white and color
One of the most exciting aspects of being a newspaper editor is recognizing a wave of activity that isn’t connected to government mind control or onslaughts of corporate-sponsored and mass-marketed art. This kind of spontaneous mass energy is happening via photography in San Francisco right now. August is known as a slow month, but the city’s galleries are alive with contemporary photos. Bill Daniel’s latest look at the US landscape is opening at RayKo Photo Center, the Daniel-influenced vagabond spirit Polaroid Kidd has his first Bay Area show at Needles and Pens, Greg Halpern’s moody views of Buffalo and Kelli Connell’s double-minted prints are up at SF Camerawork, and at City Hall — through the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery — the work of 32 local photographers is on view.
Baptized in arguments regarding its viability as an art form, photography remains as contentious as it is expansive. Witness a veteran such as Duane Michals sharpening his claws on the megapopular likes of Cindy Sherman in last year’s rant-monograph Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank (Thames and Hudson). We live in an era when the ready availability of portraiture seems to have made its definition even more reductive; via MySpace and more explicit sites, people use cameras to readily package themselves as products. Yet when black-and-white and color and digital and film collide with unpredictable results, photo portraiture can be as varied and lively as the work you’ll find on these pages.
Thanks to fellow Guardian arts editor Kimberly Chun for suggesting, late in the selection process, a focus on portraiture. This decision necessarily narrowed the Bay Area photographers to choose from; there’s a wave of garden- and eco-driven work being done by Bill Basquin and others, while Dusty Lombardo, R.A. McBride, and Jackson Patterson are discovering tremendous depth in interiors. Thanks also to Basquin, Daniel, Glen Helfand, Chuck Mobley, Katie Kurtz, and Dave and Ray Potes for their suggestions.
Twelve years ago I interviewed therapist and author Walt Odets because he was bringing much-needed humanity to discussions of the AIDS crisis; to find out that he’s also a superb photographer whose subjects have included Jean Renoir and his wife, Dido, is a revelation. In distinctive ways, Vic Blue, Robert Gumpert, and Amanda Herman reveal what journalism usually ignores or renders shallow. The intimacy of Vala Cliffton’s photos makes one ponder her presence within the scenes she depicts. Matthias Geiger shows a city you might not have noticed even when it’s been in front of your face. Stan Banos has an eye for the many shades of gray within the multihued and the cuckoo. Job Piston is that rare Bay Area photographer whose work brandishes a sexual edge that isn’t obvious or predictable. Jim Goldberg’s urban work has been canonically influential since the publication of Rich and Poor (Random House, 1985) and Raised by Wolves (Scalo, 1995). Photography is just one aspect of Désirée Arlette Holman’s hand-fashioned fantasy world, a place that looks like a wicked satire of our own.
If you’d like to see more about some of these artists, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision. (Johnny Ray Huston)
Stan Banos
NAME Stan Banos
TITLE The Marine
THE STORY "This photo was taken in San Francisco during Fleet Week in ’04."
INSPIRATION "I’ve always had a vague obsession with time and place, and the camera is the best-suited instrument to record such transient moments (particularly when you can’t draw). I generally try to incorporate whatever signs of irony life can offer within a rectangle."
FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS "I have more favorite photographers as an adult than I had favorite ballplayers as a kid: Bruce Davidson, Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Carl de Keyzer, James Nachtwey, Cheryl Richards, Henry Wessel, Elliott Erwitt, Martin Parr, Lee Friedlander … the list is endless."
SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commission Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21.
WEB SITE www.reciprocity-failure.com
Victor J. Blue
NAME Victor J. Blue
TITLE Honduran immigrants, Detention Center Tapachula Mexico
THE STORY "I went to the Guatemala-Mexico border to photograph immigration there. These guys had been caught trying to ride the freight train to the United States. We only had a few minutes to take pictures inside. They were on a bus back to Tegucigalpa within a day, probably just to try again."
FAVORITE MONOGRAPHS The Mennonites by Larry Towell (Phaidon, 2000), Exploding into Life by Eugene Richards and Dorothy Lynch (Aperture, 1986), Kosovo 1999–2000: Flight of Reason by Paolo Pellegrin and Tim Judah (Trolley, 2002), Under a Grudging Sun: Photographs from Haiti Libere 1986–1988 by Alex Webb (Thames and Hudson, 1989).
WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? "The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the people of San Joaquin County."
WEB SITES www.victorjblue.com, online.recordnet.com/projects/iraq/Jose/index.html
Vala Cliffton
NAME Vala Cliffton
TITLE Unicorn
THE STORY "Unicorn is a portrait of my niece and my brother after their trip to Hawaii. My niece is in love with Hawaii and could not seem to detach herself from her scuba gear that afternoon. My brother was trying to catch a nap before dinner. The combination of elements in this unposed portrait captures an essential and intriguing aspect of their father-daughter relationship."
INSPIRATIONS "The Family of Man [Harry N. Abrams] was the first photography book I can remember picking up and being interested in. Photography was always a part of our family life. One of my projects while at the San Francisco Art Institute was to print the black-and-white snapshots taken of the family over the years."
WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? "I have spent the past couple or years working as a filmmaker and producing music videos, some of which I have put up on YouTube at youtube.com/alavala11."
SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commision Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21.
WEB SITE alavala.com
Matthias Geiger
NAME Matthias Geiger
TITLE Train
THE STORY Train is taken from Geiger’s "Tide" series, which he describes as "an examination of human presence" in "places of transit and momentary rest…. The technique of layering still images allows past, present, and future moments to appear simultaneously, reflecting the notion that each moment in time is a construct of our memories, our presence, and our projections."
INSPIRATIONS "Direct physical experience such as being outdoors, dance, and meditation, as well as readings on metaphysics."
WHAT ARE YOU SHOOTING NOW? A series on utopian subcultures.
SHOW "Matthias Geiger: Tide." Sept. 6–Oct. 20. SF Camerawork, 657 Mission, second floor, SF. (415) 512-2020, www.sfcamerawork.org
WEB SITE www.matthiasgeiger.com
Robert Gumpert
NAME Robert Gumpert
TITLE Untitled
THE STORY "For the past 13 years I’ve been doing an off-and-on documentary project called ‘Lost Promise: The Criminal Justice System.’ This image was done in August 2006 while I was documenting the closing of San Francisco County Jail No. 3. Built in 1934 and beset by a number of serious issues and several lawsuits ordering its closure, the jail was finally closed in August 2006, when inmates were moved to County Jail No. 5, built on land adjacent to the old jail."
FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Don McCullin, Lewis Hine, August Sander, Leonard Freed, Gilles Peres, and Philip Jones Griffith.
WEB SITE www.robertgumpert.com
Amanda Herman
NAME Amanda Herman
TITLE Untitled
THE STORY The image is taken from Herman’s most recent work, the short film Lost Island, which looks at the impact of Hurricane Katrina on one large family two years after the storm forced them from their home in Chalmette, La. Herman met the Morris family in Oakland while doing free family portraits for survivors at a relief day in October 2005, one month after Katrina drove them from their homes, and, she writes, "over time, I became interested in exploring the intricacies of one family’s experience with the disaster." Donations and income from the sale of the Lost Island DVD will go into a family fund to assist the Morrises as they rebuild their lives in Oakland.
FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Seydou Keita, Allen Sekula, Susan Meiselas, Jeff Wall, Wing Young Huie, Wendy Ewald, Jessica Ingram, Eric Gottesman, and others.
SHOW "Inchoate," through Aug. 11. Patricia Sweetow Gallery, 77 Geary, mezzanine, SF. (415) 788-5126, www.patriciasweetowgallery.com
WEB SITE www.amandaherman.com
Désirée Arlette Holman
NAME Désirée Arlette Holman
TITLE Something Ain’t Right
THE STORY "This image is from a larger series of video and photo work depicting actors wearing crude, handmade (by me) chimp costumes. Something Ain’t Right was inspired by smoking chimps in zoos in South Africa and China. One zookeeper claimed that the chimps were smoking because they are frustrated. Could captivity make a chimp neurotic and lead it to smoke? Others claimed that the chimps were imitating tourists, recalling the cliché ‘Monkey see, monkey do.’ "
INSPIRATION "I am inspired by psychology, popular culture, figurative sculptures (including toys), art, and various types of fantasy and fiction making. I capitalize on the potential to create fantasy from realistic imagery through the use of the camera."
FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS Currently include Tracey Moffatt, Liza May Post, and Suzy Poling.
SHOWS "CCA: 100 Years in the Making," at the Oakland Museum of Art, and a solo show at San Francisco’s Silverman Gallery. Both open in October.
WEB SITE www.desireeholman.com
Job Piston
NAME Job Piston
TITLE A Year Later
THE STORY "I was making portraits of young Hollywood and became interested in deconstructing glamour. This is a good friend of mine who was sent away to a facility for a long while. I took this picture the first time I visited him. Today popular figures openly go to rehab; it too has become glamorous."
INSPIRATION "Complicated personalities, intimacy in public spaces, secrets, the figure, and the fountain of youth."
SHOW "Our World," at SF Arts Commission Gallery’s City Hall space, through Sept. 21; "Evidence of Things Unseen," Peninsula Museum of Art in Belmont, through Oct. 21; solo show at Silverman Gallery in San Francisco in October.
WEB SITES www.jobpiston.com, book-of-job.blogspot.com
Walt Odets
NAME Walt Odets
TITLE Greg Hoffspiegel, Palo Alto, California, 2007
THE STORY "Because it is so instantaneous, there is much chance in photography. This photograph seems to me about the gaze and emotion of the three figures, some combination of attention, reflection, loss, and pathos, as well as the visual organization."
INSPIRATION "I have taken pictures since I was 16. If I can use the camera in a way that forces deconstruction of what we normally see but do not observe, then I feel I have accomplished something."
FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPHERS "Henri Cartier-Bresson, of course, and Ed Ruscha and Lee Friedlander, for their elegance and form, intellect, and relentless literal rendering, respectively."
SHOW An October 2007 three-person show at SF Camerawork, devoted to winners of the James D. Phelan Award for photography.
WEB SITE www.waltodets.com/photo
Jim Goldberg
NAME Jim Goldberg
TITLE Untitled
PHOTO COURTESY OF STEPHEN WIRTZ GALLERY
THE STORY The image is drawn from "The New Europeans," a project Goldberg started around the time of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. The series focuses on the journeys of refugees and immigrants from war-torn or economically devastated homelands in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere to settle in Europe, specifically Greece and Ukraine. In June, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris presented Goldberg with the HCB Award so he could travel to his subjects’ countries of origin and tell the complete stories of their migration.
SHOW "Jim Goldberg: New Work." Oct. 3–Nov. 10. Reception Oct. 4, 5:30–7:30 p.m. Stephen Wirtz Gallery, 49 Geary, third floor, SF. (415) 433-6879, wirtzgallery.com