Shopping

Developer hypes art; screws artists

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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It’s late afternoon in Building 101 of the Hunters Point Shipyard artists’ colony, and Richard Bolingbroke has his forehead in his hands. The studio complex, which began as a squat in the 1970s, has been an artists’ sanctuary for decades, drawing flocks of curious visitors and housing internationally acclaimed residents. Bolingbroke has been there 17 years. “It’s like a sacred space,” he says.

But now, he and 15 other artists have been snagged in a minor wrinkle of the massive Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment project—and they’re being told they’ll have to vacate. 

Lennar, the project developer, is using the artists’ presence as a selling point to market homes in the new neighborhood. Billboards touting art line the entrance to the site, where construction is expected to begin soon.

Lennar is obligated to relocate Eclectic Cookery, a commercial kitchen housed in a different shipyard building that’s slated for demolition. Under a scheme that caught many by surprise, the developer intends to demolish artist studios in one wing of Building 101 to make way for the kitchen.

Representatives of Lennar, the project developer, said at a Jan. 23 meeting that displacing 16 of the 150 artists now situated in Building 101 is the only workable solution.

Iconic poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti has a studio there. He won’t be impacted, but he emailed fellow artists expressing disapproval. “As a 32-year resident in Building 101, I am shocked by the way the city and Lennar are evidently willing to break their promise that 101 will be maintained solely as artists’ studios,” he wrote. “Allowing any commercial business to move into 101 opens the flood-gates to further evictions of artists. I hope this is not really the city’s long-range plan!”

The artists have been promised temporary spaces with subsidized rent, and eventual accommodations in newly constructed studios. But their rents are expected to increase in the long term. Beyond their tenancies, the move would trigger a permanent loss of affordable, highly sought-after studio space in Building 101.

Some have had studios in the World-War-II era complex for more than two decades, allowing them to continue practicing their craft in ever-pricier San Francisco.

“If I don’t leave this space, my rent won’t change,” said Travis Somerville, who was preparing for a show at the Crocker Art Museum when the Guardian stopped by his studio. Somerville has been there since 1989, and he’s dedicated himself to making art full-time. Lennar’s proposed arrangement “would not only force me off the shipyard,” he said. “It would force me out of San Francisco.”

At the Jan. 23 meeting, Lennar joined representatives of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in hashing out the unpopular plan.

Company representative Jack Robertson broke it down in economic terms. “We’re a profit-motivated company here,” he said. “The city negotiated, very shrewdly, to require us to spend a whole lot of money up front for a whole bunch of community benefits. … We’re not getting anything out of that at all. And we’re not trying to. What we’re trying to do is make it work.”

Stacey Carter, an artist whose work is on display in Sup. Malia Cohen’s City Hall office, alerted Cohen to the issue, since her district includes the shipyard.

“The artists have been at the table, in the discussions, for a very long time. They’re an asset to the community,” Cohen told the Guardian. “We have been in touch with them, and my staff is very aware of their concerns.”

The multi-billion dollar redevelopment project will transform the landscape with 20,000 new homes, parking, and shopping amenities. It’s being financed in part with a $1.7 billion loan from a Chinese bank. Plans to accommodate the artists and the kitchen have been in the works for years, but Lennar realized only recently that its original plan for relocating Eclectic Cookery was unrealistic.

Scott Madison, who runs the commercial kitchen, is a longtime ally of the artists. He serves small businesses that can’t afford their own industrial kitchens, such as a client who cranks out 1,200 empanadas a day.

“We really want to stay on the shipyard,” Madison told the Guardian. “It has been known for a good many years now that Eclectic Cookery would likely need to be relocated. But it seems to be the nature of Lennar’s process that they don’t consider something until it’s right in front of their face.”

When Lennar first approached him about Building 101, Madison said, “We told them that this was not our first choice, because we definitely did not want to [cause] anybody to lose their studio.”

Lennar has indicated that any other option would either be too costly, or would disrupt the construction schedule. Delays translate to lower profitability.

Bolingbroke views the whole snafu as a culture clash between businesspeople and artists, and links it to a broader problem facing San Francisco. “It’s a bit like a tree,” he said. “Artists are like the roots. You can’t see them — but if you cut the roots off, the tree will wither and die.”

Nina Hartley mash notes, PETA gets naked, crafty vibes: Your week in sex events

Andrew Lam
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Nina Hartley mash notes, PETA gets naked, crafty vibes: Your week in sex events

Everyone survive the bused-in loads of pro-lifers prancing down Market Street last Saturday? Good. FYI, the Pope’s real happy with San Francisco right about now, so if you need to ask him for anything (to borrow clothes?) do it.

Real Talk forum: “Open Relationships”

Real talk: being happy in a polyamorous relationship doesn’t mean you don’t ever get jealous. Real Talk: a series of panel discussions organized by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation that explores the issues related to gay men having happy and healthy sexual lives. The last discussion focused on serosorting — this one’s for those interested in strengthening their open relationship by examining what makes us jealous, and how to work through the emotion. 

Wed/30, 6-8pm, free. LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market, SF. www.sfaf.org

American Apparel casting call/”Shop It Like It’s Hot”

Look pretty, sullen, and emaciated at this mega discount shopping event — in addition to slashed sales prices on lewks from Crossroads Trading Co., RoyalMint, Covet Boutique, Meggie, Violet Boutique, Thrifted and Modern, Alyssa Nicole, and Acrimony, American Apparel will be hawking their solid color essentials and looking for models. Enter IMCHICSF in when you buy your online ticket and you’ll get $10 off. Also: there will be a food cart.

Wed/30, 6-9pm, $20. 111 Minna, SF. www.111minnagallery.com

PETA jumps on Nude-In train

Really, the cwazy vegans over at PETA need little excuse to get naked, but we are glad that they chose this one: the cwazy nudiest are protesting cwazy Scott Weiner’s impending nudity ban (again), and they’re doing it on the steps of City Hall again, and PETA will be there drawing the correlation to the fur trade by hoisting protest signs in the buff. Of course! Insert some tounge-clicky, chuckling “only in San Francisco” condescension — then take your clothes off and join fray.  

Thu/31, noon, free. Outside City Hall, SF. www.peta.org

“Letters to a Porn Star: Nina Hartley Fan Mail”

First off, the Center for Sex and Culture has a Nina Hartley collection and that’s really exciting. Secondly, selections from said collection will be on display, in all their fawning/questioning/pervy glory, at the Center until mid-March. Tonight, take in the letters, gifts, and trinkets sent to the classically amazing pioneer feminist porn star — and check out a talk by Ingrid Olsen, a CSC fellow who has been elbow-deep in Nina land. 

Through March 18. Opening reception and talk: Fri/1, 7-10pm, free. Center for Sex and Culture, 1349 Mission, SF. www.sexandculture.org

Feelmore Fresh Fridays

Every last Friday, downtown Oakland adult store and sex culture hub Feelmore510 hosts an evening of naughty film at the recently-opened New Parkway. We guess tonight’s showing could be sexy, but in a deeply disturbing way: the film is 2010’s Venus Noire, a bio-pic of Saartjes Baartman, a woman from Southern Africa who was trotted about imperialist Britain billed as a Hottentot. Scientists examined her anatomy and proclaimed her the missing link between humans and apes, and she wound up dying from STDs and pnuemonia at 27. A valuble lesson about psuedo-science and sex, but you’ll probably be using that tissue to wipe away tears rather than any other bodily fluid.

Fri/25, 11:30pm, $10. New Parkway Theater, 474 24th St., Oakl. www.thenewparkway.com

Good Vibes vibrator bling contest

You’ve gotta buy a Good Vibes vibe to play the game (not end of world), but then with a little peacock feather, ornamental zipper, and g-l-i-t-t-e-r you can enter this Good Vibes sex toy crafting contest. The fancified vibrators will be on display at the Polk Street sex shop location during March, and winners of the competition will win gift certificates for the store. Deadline to enter your little friend (we assume they want them to be unused, but don’t let us impose our Puritanical values on your creativity)

Deadline to enter Feb. 28. Deliver by hand or mail to Good Vibrations, 1620 Polk, SF. www.goodvibes.com

Southpaw

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Southpaw

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE As I’ve often bemoaned, finding authentic ‘que outside of the Deep South is a rarity. Case in point: Southpaw opened late 2011 on Mission Street, a BBQ oasis of the gourmet kind, brewing its own beers in a couple in-house tanks. Welcoming staff and flaky catfish impressed me early on, but watery sauces and dry ribs and brisket deflated my BBQ dreams.

Fast-forward a year. With new chef Max Hussey on board, I’m back, working my way through much of the food, cocktails, and beer selection. As a Massachusetts dishwasher and prep cook, Hussey boldly slipped a resume to Emeril Lagasse at a book signing, moving to New Orleans a month later to eventually become executive sous chef of Emeril’s Delmonico. Melding Southern touches with San Francisco tastes, he’s cooked at 25 Lusk and Epic Roasthouse.

Southpaw’s BBQ staples (pulled pork, brisket, ribs) have all improved under Hussey’s watch. While ribs look dry, crusted in 17 spices, they’re actually tender, aromatic, addictive. Appropriately fatty beef brisket is smoked for 14 hours. If you must do chicken at a BBQ joint, you could do worse than this whiskey-brined version. Catfish is still strong, lightly pan-fried, and available on a sandwich ($9), which begged for a little more remoulade on melting-soft brioche. Newly-added quail explodes with boudin sausage. Each meat and catfish selection comes as a platter ($14-19), with hushpuppies and choice of two sides. Choosing those sides ($5 each or 4 for $14) is a challenge. Cheddar grit cake hides a juicy hamhock, mac ‘n cheese comes alive with red pepper, sweet potatoes are whipped soft with bourbon, sweet chili-braised Southern greens and a new creamed “lollipop” chard kale make eating greens nearly dreamy.

Creativity shines in starters like smoked pulled goat ($12) with salsa verde and house pickles scooped up by Southern fry bread, or roasted duck breast and goat cheese rosti ($12). Abandon all, however, for Natchez ($12), named after the Mississippi town, sounding a lot like “nachos”. Think warm potato chips falling apart under pulled pork and black eyed peas, drenched in pimento bechamel and hot sauce. Divine bar food.

Hussey also perfects fried oysters. These delicately treated bivavles exude briny freshness unusual for fried oysters. Currently, they’re loaded with bacon and onions on a sandwich ($11). While BBQ sauces like sweet potato remain a bit watery, lacking in flavor punch for me, Memphis smoked sauce is briskly gratifying. But all praise goes to better-than-ever Alabama white sauce: mayo-based, packing pepper and vinegar bite, it makes just about everything sing. I’d rather fill up on savory options than desserts ($8), but banana pudding with house ‘nilla wafers evokes childhood comfort.

Drink is as important as food at Southpaw. Brewer Phil Cutti started homebrewing in 1995 after shopping at SF Brewcraft. Learning from Speakeasy founders Steve and Mike Bruce, homebrewing led to his own gypsy label, Muddy Puddle Brewing. Southpaw’s small program allows him to experiment with a range of beers and collaborate with other brewers. House brews ($6) are balanced, readily drinkable crowd pleasers. Posey Pale Ale is subtly hoppy, Pisgah Rye Porter is complex without being heavy, and a Smoked Cream Ale is smooth with a smoke-tinged finish. As active members of SF Brewers Guild, which puts on the fantastic SF Beer Week (www.sfbeerweek.org) coming up February 8-17, Southpaw hosts intimate classes and tastings, like a collaboration beer pairing dinner with San Diego’s famed Stone Brewing on Feb. 11, one of the brewers they feature on their hand-selected draft menu.

In addition to beer, Southpaw founder-manager Edward Calhoun’s American whiskey selection and cocktails make fanatics like me smile. Growing up in his father’s North Carolina bar, Calhoun honed bar chops in three cities that know how to drink well: Savannah, New Orleans, San Francisco. Playful balance exemplifies the cocktails ($9), whether a Rye Old Fashioned sweetened by pecan syrup or Rescue Blues: smoky Scotch and Combier Rouge dancing with cocoa nib syrup. My favorites? Mishi’s Regret No. 2, hot with habanero, smoky with Mezcal, brightened by lemon and cassis, or cheekily-named Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari’s character on my beloved Parks & Recreation) where sarsaparilla-root beer notes of Root liquor intermingle with lemon and Shiraz wine. Get educated with whiskey flights ($12-16) grouped in themes like Peated American Single Malts or Bay Area Whiskey, or flights featuring a craft distillery like High West.

Gracious founder-manager Elizabeth Wells, an Alabama native, sets Southpaw’s downhome tone. She moves about the restaurant, attending to needs of each table. Staff follows her lead, ready with a smile, a platter of ‘que, and a glass of bourbon. Down home, indeed.

Southpaw BBQ 2170 Mission, SF. (415) 934-9300, www.southpawbbqsf.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

Noir Faze

Andrew Lam
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Noir Faze

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN While larger clothing companies are free to define their brand through glossy print campaigns and billboards staring out impassively over downtown shoppers, the little guys look elsewhere to establish identity.

Last week I went to visit a silver grill, affixed to the grin of a one Edwin Haynes, the unapologetically pierced founder of graphically subversive clothing line Sav Noir. Think T-shirts covered in upside-down crosses, hot nuns making out, and a priest hoisting a Bible, gun, and shotglass — that would be the brand’s first collection, now available. Think a tough black-and-white color palette setting off designs by local artist Henry Lewis. Also think about a back room of an unmarked studio space, which is where I was last week checking out his works of the devil, artfully arranged on an L-section sofa.

Haynes talks mess about Catholic school while members of his team — event promoter Traci P of female hip-hop crew Sisterz of the Underground and Bogl, bass-and-beat DJ and event producer — look on.

“These figures and these idols who you were forced to worship were the people doing the most dirty shit,” the ex-chef, promotor, and “fashion guy” explains as we look at his sartorial takedowns of religion splayed out before us on the couch cushions. It’s all there: slutty sisters, gangster priest, schoolgirl swilling beer. Sav Noir is adamantly for the alternative nightclub set — the people, Haynes tells me, who don’t have to wait for the end of office hours to become who really are.

That makes sense, it’s hard to picture a real estate agent rocking the white tee with the photo print of the sexily open mouth cradling pills on its tongue. (If you are a real estate agent who wears things like that, get in touch with me.)

You can cop Sav Noir’s hats and tees at Infinite (www.infinitesf.com), True (www.trueclothing.net), and Santa Cruz’s So Fresh (www.sofreshclothing.com). But you may as well make a night of it. The brand also hosts The Gift, a first Sunday dub-trap party at Vessel starring DJs Ruby Red Eye and Atlanta’s DJ Holiday. Bogl spins Tuesday nights at Monarch. The events look like they crack — the Jan. 26 launch at 1AM Gallery for the new line attracted a crowd that spilled out into the SoMa streets.

“At the end of the day, we’re all we have,” says FAZE Apparel (3236 21st St., SF. www.fazeapparel.com) co-owner Johnny Travis as he tours me around his sunny Mission space, past the racks of his own line’s SF-made button-downs with printed cuffs, peculiar pockets — just intricate enough to catch the eye, but not so crazy that they can’t be basics.

FAZE also hawks ace $21 beanies, made in LA with leather tags affixed here in the city. The line’s hoodies are lined with nursery school zoo prints, part of the “Animal City” collection that also includes a tee with snarling pumas and the words “Easy Pussy” in heavy metal slant letters. It’s streetwear, but with details that make it pop.

The shop also has one of the mores interesting arrays of hyper-local brands I’ve seen: there’s All Out Foul, a San Mateo line that supplies tees to the quickly-growing legions of Niners fans. Those tees sit alongside nautical-inspired ones designed by Charlie Noble, an Alameda Coast Guard vet. The different brands are great for the store, Travis tells me. The days of single-brand customers, he says, are over.

And FAZE (an acronym for “Fearless and Zealous Everyday”) is nothing is not group-oriented. “We don’t want to be an intruder to the community,” the SF native Travis tells me, wary of the fact that he just moved a business into a part of the Mission where rents are skyrocketing and many residents feel displaced. “We want to be a part of it.”

To that end, the regular art parties. At January’s FAZE event, the paintings created by the line’s artists on-site, made in front of the eyes of party attendees right there in the shop, were sold to benefit the Boys and Girls Club down the street. At the next event (at the shop Feb. 8, 6-10pm, free), proceeds will round another corner to another neighbor of FAZE, going to low income student support service Scholar Match. Of course, you’re welcome to buy clothes at the party.

“I know a lot of people try to get their stuff in the hands of celebrities,” says Travis. “But that’s not what we’re about. It’s people like you and I who carry brands.”

Denim legends and stained glass socks

Andrew Lam
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Denim legends and stained glass socks

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN First, I saw the socks. Half sheer, half solid, the pair’s blue rose design made me flash on stained glass cathedral. Like a sock-crazed zombie, I turned on my heels and entered the most unassuming, unmarked shop on Hayes Valley’s row of quirky boutiques and designer collections.

The pair was wildly expensive, and not being a swanky sock kind of lady, that threw me. But Japanese import shop Cotton Sheep is not for those unacquainted with the transformative power of superlative readywear. A few weeks later I was back for a tour, and to talk style philosophy with owner Eiko Critchfield’s son Rue, who credits his mother with awakening his own sense of personal flair.

“You can appreciate this story with your eyes closed,” Rue tells me, holding out an impossibly soft cotton scarf from his favorite of the shop’s handful of imported Japanese brands. The piece is by Kapital, a vaunted label that hails from Okayama, a town traditionally known for its indigo dye and denim. The true, deep blue of Kapital’s jeans, in particular, make them denim head cult items.

After Eiko impressed the company’s higher-ups with the fastidiousness with which she examined pieces in Kapital’s Japanese showroom, Cotton Sheep became the first American store to stock the brand, and the biggest US selection can still be found there — denim, hand-woven scarves, quirky button-down shirts, and of course, my wonder socks. The shop’s other brands include Merveille H, FITH, and Nuno. Each piece is handpicked for sale by Eiko.

“When you walk out the house with these pieces you know you are the only person in the country wearing them,” Rue says. He’s wearing Kapital khakis with an exposed, intricate button fly, and eye-catching strap along the backside waistband. Rue was a self-described jock before joining the family business (“sweatpants and white T-shirts,” he says ruefully), but got hooked on the line after Mom told him he needed a more fashionable dress code if wanted to work in the store.

Eiko certainly brought him up to appreciate a good outfit. She and husband Victor became pickers when they moved to San Francisco in the 1990s from Osaka, joining the hardy ranks of those who troll thrift stores for treasure, hustling to flip quality pieces to vintage stores for profit.

When they’d exhausted the Bay Area’s bins to their satisfaction, Eiko packed up the family into a Chevy Astro and took to the road, sending shipments of Americana (used Levi’s, Raggedy Ann dolls — Japan was nuts for anything that screamed “United States” at that time) to her boutique friends in Osaka whenever the van was too packed to fit more finds. “My parents relied on their sense of style to survive,” Rue says.

“I wanted to show people of San Francisco what I see in Japan that I know they would never find,” Eiko wrote me in an email when I asked her about her idea to open a shop across the street from the site from Victor’s now-defunct music store, BPM Records. “Our store is about an idea: to care for fabrics, to appreciate them, and to teach people that great fabrics will last you forever if you treat it with the care that I do.”

And please, do have care: Eiko’s a stickler for boutique etiquette, chiding those that enter with icecream cones from the Smitten kiosk down the block and cautioning careless types that don’t show the proper respect when handling her precious textiles. Check her Yelp reviews if you don’t believe me.

But the family’s about inspiring a different kind of relationship between us and our wardrobe, one with an emphasis on craftsmanship often lacking in the era of mega-brands and micro-trends. Who knows, maybe Rue will even talk me into those socks one day. “It might be a little scary to walk out of the store like that [with an expensive clothing item],” he laughs. “That’s my job, to help people be less scared.”

Cotton Sheep 572 Hayes, SF. (415) 621-5546, www.cottonsheep.com

Dapper down

Andrew Lam
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3
Dapper down

caitlin@sfbg.com

CAREERS AND ED When Ford Models announced that its newest menswear model was a woman — Olympic swimmer and New York artist Casey Legler — in the same month that Yves Saint Laurent chose Saskia de Brauw as the face of its spring-summer 2013 menswear collection, it became clear that men’s fashion was opening itself to the fact that not all people who wear suits and sport rugged looks are male-identified.

But not every butch looking for a fly three-piece has the gamine, broad-shouldered physique of Legler and de Brauw. What’s a dapper gent to do?

Enter the new wave of menswear (or, “masculine of center,” as we’ve seen the look defined on some style blogs) brands specifically tailored to the female-born or identified. Happily, downtown San Francisco’s Crocker Galleria will be the site of the first permanent menswear store to cater to the genderqueer.

“My mother started teaching me [to sew] when I was eight,” Tomboy Tailors’ 48-year-old, butch-identified owner Zel Anders writes me in an email interview. Anders has long been a fan of suits over dresses when it came to formal occasions, but was frustrated that she could never find a well-fitting outfit — even here in the Bay Area, where she’s lived since she was 17. She says the process of suit shopping grew painful, and found it necessary to steel herself before hitting the dressing rooms.

No such toughening up will be necessary at the new shop, which has already garnered a loyal Internet following despite the fact that it won’t open its doors until February 2nd. Tomboy Tailors’ staff will help customers find suits that fit right across the chest, hips, thighs, and seat, customizing them so that each garment fits its new owner.

The store will stock not only its in-house line (Anders especially touts its three-button, notch lapel suit for heavier clientele), but items from other brands selected for a pangender crowd — including a selection of men’s shoes in smaller sizes, like a Dalton wing-tip lace-up Oxford and saddle shoes from Carlos Santos and Walk-Over.

“I am having so much fun just watching people ponder and choose from the several hundred fabrics that they have as options,” Anders says about her Tomboy Tailors experience to date. ” Not only do they have to think about what color they want their suit to be, but they have to decide if they want a solid, herringbone, pinstripe, chalk stripe, plaid, or even a bird’s eye, nail’s head, or houndstooth check pattern to the fabric.” Finally, options.

Tomboy Tailors is hardly the only option for fly transpeople, dapper dames, and other genderqueers — transgressive men’s fashion site dapperQ (www.dapperq.com) recently published a list of fab online labels like Marimacho (www.marimachobk.com), The Original Tomboy (www.theoriginaltomboy.com), Saint Harridan (www.saintharridan.com), and Androgynous (www.androgynousfashion.com) that all have a mission to provide fashion for all points on the gender-fashion spectrum.

TOMBOY TAILORS OPENING PARTY

Feb. 2, 2-6pm, free

Tomboy Tailors

Crocker Galleria

50 Post, first floor, SF

www.tomboytailors.com

 

Appetite: 12 reasons to love Nevada City and Grass Valley

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Imagine if the Wild West collided with a European village. There might be winding, narrow streets through neighboring towns, plotting through pine trees. Old West saloons, wood sidewalks and columns, classic homes in walkable small towns. Not far from Lake Tahoe, at the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, there are two such tiny towns. The Gold Country towns of Grass Valley, a charming, relaxed Old West town, and its sister merely four miles away, Nevada City, the smaller, more funky-artsy and visually striking of the two. Historically, I’d trek 30 minutes off the 80 on the way back from Lake Tahoe to spend an afternoon in these towns, particularly when fall leaves are at their peak. This fall, I decided to spend the weekend here instead of Tahoe – and a restorative weekend it was.

While you’re in Grass Valley, foodies and cooks don’t miss Tess’ Kitchen Store, three floors of every cooking accoutrement you can think of, and Back Porch Market, a small but well-curated gourmet deli of cheese, salumi, wine and gourmet foods (P.S. inhaling the house pasta sauce cooking as you enter is intoxicating).


In Grass Valley, Big A Drive In may look a little forlorn, a historic drive-in serving freezes, malts, burgers and hot dogs, but their cheeseburger is unexpectedly classic and satisfying – some even say the best in the area. If there in the fall, take the slower but lovely drive along Colfax Highway at least one way to and from the 80 freeway so you can stop off at Bierwagen’s Donner Trail Fruit & Farm Market, an idyllic apple farm selling jams, pies, an array of seasonal produce, and, yes, apples.

Between nature, architecture, food, and even unexpected nightlife, here are just a few reasons to love these Gold Country towns.

1. NEW ENGLAND VIBRANT FALL COLORS AND CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS – When friends from New England told me this was THE spot they’d go for equally radiant fall colors, I was skeptical. But from my first visit in November years past, I walked through neighborhoods of old Victorians and 1800s homes, awash in the brilliant reds, yellows and oranges of my favorite season, dramatically cast against the green of mountain pines.

Besides warm fall days, crisp mountain nights and stunning fall colors, winter is a festive time in these two towns that pull out all the stops for Christmas. There’s a Victorian Christmas street festival complete with horse-drawn carriages and wandering carolers, and the Sierra Foothills Christmas Festival, known locally as Cornish Christmas, as the early, late 1800s population of Grass Valley was predominantly Cornish. Now just wish for snow for added magic.

2. ROADHOUSE EXTRAORDINAIRE: THE WILLO – The Willo has been around for decades, a roadhouse on Highway 49, about 15 minutes drive from Grass Valley. Part redneck party in the rowdy bar, part retro dream with neon sign shining like a beacon from a dark, two-lane road in the middle of the pines, it is easily my favorite restaurant in the region.

Locavores and dainty eaters beware. This place is about thick cuts of NY steak (you cook or they cook on the big grill between the restaurant and bar) and local character. For less than $20, one can pig out on hearty, old school fare. Although requested “cheese” with a $1.85 baked potato is a deli slice, taste does not suffer here. When you ask for medium rare steak, you get it: juicy, delicious.

In fact, after numerous meals at more modern restaurants in the area, even those with local ingredients and attention to produce and meat sources, most were highly inconsistent and well behind  even average big city standards. With The Willo, I felt like I got exactly what I came for: local flair, delicious food appropriate for bracing mountain air. We brought our own bottle of wine ($10 corkage), well worth it considering what was on offer, although the festive bar was doing just fine with big name liquor brands and country on the jukebox.

The dated, wood-paneled dining room is lined with Elvis, The Duke (John Wayne), and scripture verse clocks, while a Friday night only special of BBQ pulled pork sandwich ($12) is surprisingly good ‘que, and hard-working waitresses ensure you’re right at home with a “hon” and a smile. Dining at this packed roadhouse felt like the kind of meal my grandparents would have enjoyed, of the celebratory, unfussy kind in my childhood.

3. UNEXPECTED NIGHTLIFE AND MUSIC SCENE – Though I struggled to find strong restaurants outside of The Willo or Sushi in the Raw, Nevada City nightlife, though not in the same breath as a big city, can get surprisingly rowdy. Being here days before Halloween meant Day of the Dead parties, concerts at historic Miners Foundry with everyone in costume, revelers wandering the streets, reminiscent of raucous nights in party towns like Savannah and New Orleans.

There wasn’t an evening I didn’t catch street musicians singing along the streets, a few of them exceptional, like a girl with a soulful, R&B voice belting along to one guy beatboxing, the other with a guitar. On sleepier nights, the historic Mine Shaft Saloon is the dive bar in town. Crusty bartenders, chatty locals, plenty of personality, and bowls of hot and sour soup arrive through the swinging door at next door’s Fred’s Szechuan Chinese Restaurant.

4. WINE COUNTRY – As with many parts of California, the Sierra Foothills is home to a strong community of wineries. The best afternoon of my recent weekend was spent driving around local vineyards, off scenic country roads, tucked in between valleys and mountain views. My other afternoon highlight was an hour tasting wine with Alex Szabo of Szabo Vineyards in his downtown Nevada City tasting room. With big personality and opinionated passion for wine, he’s lived in Europe and San Francisco, now winemaking here. He knew every local who came through the door, his friendly repartee and stories of his Hungarian family with winemaking roots back to 1780 particularly engaging – he grew up taking “a few pulls of wine from the jug” in his Grandpa’s basement.

His tasting room is full of hand-crafted pieces like a striking bar made from red gum eucalyptus trees salvaged in Berkeley’s Tilden Park after a fire. Launching Szabo in 2003 with 40 acres (15 of them vines, the rest sustainable forest), Szabo’s winemaking style is “balanced wines that you can still grab onto.” He mentioned being the only winemaker in area growing all his own grapes on premises, and his wines do represent balance rather than merely bold fruit. Tasting through a flight ($6), I noted the pleasant funkiness of a 2010 Grenache ($23 a bottle) which he describes as a “dusty Spanish road”, but was surprised to find I preferred the Zinfandel, a varietal I rarely gravitate towards ($18 a bottle). Though there are intense blackberry notes, there’s no residual sugar and the berry is balanced by tannins and an earthiness. Balance is also found in a sweet dessert wine, an off-dry 2011 Muscat redolent of orange blossom with a creamy mouthfeel. Best of all, his Voila, at $28 a bottle, is the highest priced of any of Szabo wine.

5. GOURMET ICE CREAM – Every time I’m in Nevada City, I don’t miss ice cream at Treats. Gourmet flavors hit the mark, like plum shiso or saffron rose pistachio. Childhood favorites like Swiss orange chip, and a handful of daily gelatos (such as chocolate cherry), are made with big city-quality and standards.

6. CORNISH HISTORY – With over 60% of Grass Valley’s population being Cornish in the late 1800’s, the influence of Cornwall, England, can be felt in the fact that this small town has more than one pasty shop. But there is only one you need to visit: Marshall’s. These flaky, filled pastries are certainly old school – even the tiny shop evokes 1970’s. Marshall’s has been churning them out for decades, with your choice of vinegar or ketchup alongside a classic beef and potato or sweet, spiced apple in sugary vanilla sauce.

7. CAFFEINE FIX – Hipsterization has even reached this small foothills town, but it’s a pleasure at Curly Wolf, an espresso house with Victorian wallpaper and couches on Nevada City’s main street. This form of retro/Old World hipster feels right home off wood sidewalks, serving properly prepared cappuccinos, coffees, cold brew iced coffee, even a chocolate orange espresso reminiscent of a Caffe Nico at LA’s Caffe Luxxe.

In Grass Valley, Caroline’s Coffee Roasters is a roaster and shop of the old school kind, not necessarily a coffee geek’s dream. But when in Grass Valley, it’s where locals congregate on a Saturday morning talking arts and sports (the SF Giants, naturally) over bracing cups of coffee.

8. SUSHI HOTSPOT – One doesn’t expect to find a sushi haven in towns this small. In fact, I’ve been to bigger towns around the country that lack a sushi restaurant as good as Sushi in the Raw. The fish is fresh and pristine and the environment in a converted Victorian boasts quirky charm, feeling like a hidden big city gem.

That being said, sushi aficionados and purists, while delighting at house pickled ginger and only sustainable fish will also notice an excess of sauce on or with most sushi, a “no-no” many a hardcore sushi master from Japan has warned us against. Though wishing I could taste the cleanness of fish apart from muddles of sauce (and this is coming from a sauce fanatic), Sushi in the Raw is still one of the better meals to be found in the area, though good luck getting a reservation. You MUST call ahead no matter the night of the week – they book weeks in advance. Husband/wife owners, Susan Frizzle and Executive Chef Kaoru “Ru” Suzuki, have created that small town rarity: a coveted hot spot everyone seems dying to get into.

Octopus/tako salad ($11.50), though thoughtfully presented, was surprisingly bland  drowning in spicy sauce with kelp, carrots and shredded nori, and the popular black truffled sashimi ($10/17), made with “best fish of the day” (each piece was different: salmon, yellowtail, kanpachi, albacore, trout) was overwhelmed by Italian black truffle, truffle salt, soy vinaigrette and French black truffle oil (tasting a number of truffle sashimi dishes over the years, a light hand is needed). While a sashimi platter arrives with five different bright cuts of fish, again, one is served a generous side of three sauces… with sashimi! So the drowning continues.

Rolls/maki are solid, like the Susan Roll ($14.50) of avocado, mango, smelt roe, crab mix, green onion, ginger, while scallop shooters ($3 each or $4 “drunken”) are vividly fresh with green mussel, mango and quail egg, particularly fun ordered drunken with a shot of shochu. On the drink side, a plum refresher ($4) is a lovely way to go with organic plum wine, lightened but not diluted by lemon, ice and sparkling water. “Ru’s pick” for sake, Kikusui KaraKuchi Dry ($5.50 glass/$33 bottle) is a crisp, pleasant accompaniment.

9. JUICE CENTRAL – As with a number of small California towns, you’ll find a healthy dose of hippies and back-to-the-earth folk. In Nevada City, Fudenjuce is a blissed out roadside hut with outdoor picnic tables, serving wraps, salads and rice bowls – but go for the juice. Though you may reek afterwards, a garlic heavy Immune Enhancer is an eye-opener with carrot, apple, parsley, spinach, ginger, while Planet Favorite is tart with lots of lemon, carrot, apple. Unlike most juice shops, everything, even 24 oz. pours, are affordably under $7. Only downside is that wheatgrass shots tasted sickly sweet – I like wheatgrass for that fresh-cut grass taste and wished it had been noted that it was sweetened so I could opt out. http://www.fudenjuce.com

Flour Garden Bakery is mainly a bakery but also whips up a few fresh (and a couple thankfully green) juices in the Neal Street shopping center location of downtown Grass Valley.

10. GRAB A PINT – Though far from my top California brewery, Ol’ Republic Brewery is the first local brewery in town. The sterile, low ceiling space does have a front patio and Saturday nights draw live bands and crowds. The IPA English Ale strikes a fine balance of hoppy notes, and their range includes Bavarian Black Lager, Dead Canary (German lager), Celtic Red, Schwarzbier and Export Stout. Pretty much across the street from Ol’ Republic, Jernigan’s Tap House & Grill has a rotating draft selection of beers from around California.

11. AND ONE MORE ROADHOUSE: THE OLD 5 MILE HOUSE – Just follow the bikers (motorcycles parked out front) who congregate at The Old 5 Mile House, an 1890 roadhouse and former stagecoach stop off forested Highway 20 just 5 miles out of Nevada City. You’ll find a cozy, dark wood respite with fireplace, bocce area and back patio under massive trees. It’s a bar with decent beer selection and surprisingly tart, tasty margaritas, and a restaurant with far better-than-expected food. Recommended dishes: Piadine (aka pizza crust topped with salad) – the arugula version with tender skirt steak, chimichurri sauce, red onions and blue cheese ($14.99), the pizzas (some are better than others), and hearty 5 Mile Corned Beef Hash ‘n Eggs ($10.99).

12. HOT TUBBING UNDER THE STARS – Though my room felt a bit cavelike on the bottom floor with only one small window and minimal light at Grass Valley Courtyard Suites (ask for an upstairs room with more windows), the room was otherwise comfortable, the owners and service exceptionally friendly, with an unexpectedly pleasant hotel breakfast in a cozy dining room, a day spa and comfortable gym,  easily walkable in old town Grass Valley, and best of all, the hot tub next to the pool was the ideal way to unwind every night. The stars appeared in all their glory and crisp foothill air invigorated as I relaxed in soothing, hot waters. http://www.gvcourtyardsuites.com

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice-monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

A moratorium on progress

Zelda Bronstein
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A moratorium on progress

My friend Johnny, who lives in Seattle, tells the story of the day years ago when he saw an older woman standing on a hillside near his house, watching while bulldozers knocked down trees and tore up part of the hill to put in a freeway extension. He was pretty new to town, so he asked the woman what was going on.

She shook her head, and with a bitter smile, said: “Progress.”

If you want to look at the environmental history of the United States, you can pretty much define most of our problems as an obsession with that sort of “progress.” In the postwar Bay Area, “progess” meant turning farmland and open space into suburban housing developments, building more freeways to connect the commuters to downtown San Francisco, and erecting tall buildings in the city to fill with workers from the burbs.

At the time, those crazy people who opposed that vision were told they were opponents of progress. Now, we celebrate what they’ve saved.

In other words, not all change is good, not all development is progress, and the march of capitalism doesn’t always take us in the right direction

So please, Chuck Nevius: You can oppose a one-year moratorium on Valencia Street restaurants if you want, but don’t give me crap like this:

The same transition seems to be happening along Valencia Street. My guess is they will learn the same lesson as Noe – you can’t put a moratorium on progress.

Is it progress to turn a diverse shopping district into a monocrop of one type of business? Or is it prudent to do what we pay city planners to do, and … plan? The restaurant limit in Noe Valley worked when it was instituted, a long time ago, when people who lived there wanted to keep shoe repair places and other community-serving merchants on 24th Street. When it was no longer needed or effective, it was repealed. All we’re talking about on Valencia is ONE YEAR, to give people a chance to think about the future of their neighborhood.

Progress. Bah humbug.

 

 

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Valencia-restaurant-ban-not-the-answer-4133529.php

Was it a great year?

Zelda Bronstein
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149
Was it a great year?

At noon Dec. 19, a group of about 50 housing activists led by the Housing Rights Committee gathered at 18th and Castro, next to the giant Shopping Season Tree, to discuss the wave of evictions tenants are facing at the end of 2012. Tommi Avicolli Mecca held up a list of 26 buildings that are currently being clear of tenants under the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to evict all their tenants and sell the property as a single-family home or tenancies in common. With him was a long line of tenants who are facing holiday homelessness thanks to landlord greed.

“There are too many tenants being evicted to fit in front of the tree,” he said.

We heard story after story: A man living with AIDS facing the loss of his home after 17 years. A family being forced out after 18 years. Seniors, kids, disabled people … all of them almost certainly displaced from San Francisco.

“San Francisco is becoming a city of the rich, and we are being pushed aside,” said Lisa Thornton, who works at Rainbow Grocery and is losing her home.

“This,” Mecca said, “is an epidemic of evictions.”

And we all know why: As the second tech boom roars in to San Francisco, high-paid young workers are able to afford to buy TICs or single-family homes, and long-term rent-control-protected tenants simply can’t compete. It’s not a pretty pciture.

So I almost barfed when I say Randy Shaw’s glowing paen to Mayor Ed Lee. “San Francisco had one of its greatest years in 2012, as the city’s job growth and vibrancy outpaced nearly everywhere else,” he wrote.

Oh, gee, he says, there are some problems:

Few want San Francisco to become a city where only the rich and subsidized poor can live. But these same fears were felt in the 1980’s. When I was moving to San Francisco in 1979, the lines for vacant apartments were just as long and the competition for vacant units as fierce as what we read about in 2012. We couldn’t believe we had to pay $375 for a Mission one bedroom apartment, a rate that is less than half the cost of an SRO room without private bathroom today. San Francisco has long been an expensive city that keeps getting pricier.

So what — because we were worried about displacement in the 1980s means we shouldn’t be worried today? Those worries were real — gentrification of San Francisco neighborhoods has been rampant for decades. It’s changed the city, for the worse.

In the 1980s, Shaw was part of a broad coalition that fought to get rent control laws and eviction protections and limits on condo conversions. Now he’s acting as if none of that was worth the fight, as if protecting affordable housing wasn’t, and isn’t, the most critical issue in the city today.

A great year? Fantastic vibrancy and job growth? Not if you’re one of the growing numbers of people who are losing their homes to Ed Lee’s vision of economic development.

 

Preaching that the end is near

Andrew Lam
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0
Preaching that the end is near

Rev. Billy Talen started off as a trickster, a performance artist, and a political activist appropriating the role of the evangelical preacher (a la Jerry Farwell or Jimmy Swaggert). He was the pastor of the Church of Stop Shopping, standing in front of the Disney Store in Times Square railing against the evils of sweatshops and consumerism.

That was more than 10 years ago, and Talen, his choir, and his flock have grown and evolved since then, although they retained their core tactic of invading the citadels of commerce to engage in performance art and civil disobedience. They renamed themselves the Church of Life After Shopping, wrote books and made a movie called What Would Jesus Buy?, and then became the Church of Earthalujah five years ago when their focus switched to climate change and environmental justice issues.

Along the way, their issues and concerns became more dire, the threats they were addressing elevated to matters of survival rather than social justice. So with the Dec. 21, 2012 date approaching, Talen returned to Times Square — this time fitting right in with its doomsday preachers — and wrote a new book called The End of the World, which he’ll release in Times Square on that auspicious date.

“I’ll be back with a science-based Armageddon,” Talen told me. “Now I’m looping all the way around the tracks back to Times Square where I started. But Hurricane Sandy makes this not so tongue-in-cheek.”

When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City and the surrounding coastline with the rare strength of superstorm that climatologists say will be more common in our warming world, Talen said it was a wake-up call for those insulated by that urban environment.

“New York doesn’t have climate, we have culture,” Talen said, but Sandy changed that perspective and brought the reality of climate change home, right into the heart of capitalism. “The idea that nature is beyond the city limits, that may be over now.”

Talen said there’s “ecosystem collapse going on everyday. Earth is a total ecosystem and Earth has a tipping point, just like local ecosystems have tipping points.” His latest book leans heavily on the research of Barnosky and his team, which Talen said dovetails perfectly with the Mayan prophecies and the hopes that the galactic alignment will spark a shift in global consciousness that wakes us up to pressing problems that demand immediate action.

“It allows us to have a stage for the question, a frame for the question. We have to ask very basic questions about our survival,” Talen said. “We have this uncanny mythic, prophetic calendar, this 5,000-year calendar ending and beginning. And we have the scientists saying the same thing, so where does that leave you?” 

Last-minute gifts

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0
Last-minute gifts

culture@sfbg.com

SHOPPING Dearest Christian and Christian-adjacent reader: it’s too late for the Internet. Unless you want to shell out Santa-sized bucks for overnight delivery, you’re gonna have to fill those loved-ones’ stocking IRL, with a good ol’ fashioned brick-and-mortar dash through the metaphorical snow.

We mean you’re going to have to go shopping, duh. And your flight leaves on Saturday, or their flight lands on Friday, or you’re actually on your way to a holiday house party tonight! You can do better than a gift card. Yet even though you seem surrounded by retail options every moment of your life, when you’re forced to suddenly think about what to get tea party maven Aunt Tilly or your nine-year-old second cousin who you think is named Erica (Caitlin? Amy? Danica?) or your drunk sort-of-friends, the mind blanks and the plan nogs.

So some of the options below may seem obvious any other time of year, but here they are to help kickstart your Christmas consumer creativity motors. get ready to fill your sack with goodies! (Don’t forget to bring your own sack.)

 

GREEN APPLE BOOKS AND MUSIC

Calendars, calendars, calendars! No gift crisis cannot be solved by a glossy 2013 calendar featuring soft-focus lighthouses of Nova Scotia, baby baboons smearing ice cream in their hair, or various memes of yesteryear, repackaged helpfully for the Web-tardy. Oh, by the way, Green Apple is the largest bookstore in California, so there are books — and extremely helpful staff recommendations! — for everyone on your listicle.

506 Clement, SF. (415) 387-2272, www.greenapplebooks.com

 

HEARTFELT

Heartfelt is the very definition of a last-minute gift emporium, a place filled with low-cost creative items for all ages. Italian cookware, spandex log pillows, a hanging mobile you can customize with your own art … it’s an affordable world of creativity at your fingertips in Bernal Heights! Joke gifts (really creative ones), retro gifts, classic gifts, cool stuff you won’t see anywhere else .. you can cover almost everyone on your list in one heartfelt stop.

436 Cortland, SF. (415) 648-1380, www.heartfeltsf.com

 

22ND ANNUAL TELEGRAPH AVENUE HOLIDAY STREET FAIR

OK, more than 200 artists are showing off their goods all weekend in Berkeley — pottery, jewelry, t-shirts, hats, wall art, candles, leatherwork — surely you can find something for your dad while enjoying all the colorful characters, groovy tunes, and interesting eats that Berkeley can bring? It’s a bargain bonanza.

Dec 22-24, 11am-6pm, free. Between Dwight Way and Bancroft Way, Berk. www.telegraphfair.com

 

THE CANDY STORE

There are handmade smores. There are marshmallows made of vanilla and Maker’s Mark. Adorable candy-filled Christmas tree ornaments? Yes ma’am. A cornucopia of season-perfect foil-wrapped chocolates; pre-wrapped “round of four” gift packs featuring four kinds of house made candy; large jars of gianduja, chocolate-hazelnut spread that puts Nutella to shame? What were we talking about again?

1507 Vallejo, SF. (415) 921-8000, www.thecandystoresf.com

 

RARE DEVICE

Put a bird on them! Everyone needs a little twee under the tree, and this store — recently relocated to Divisadero in the place of our former butcher store — has lovely trinkets for all, in that naïve-sophisticate hipster style so popular with the kids these days. Everyone’s koo-koo for Rare’s impeccable jewelry collection and neato home decor and kitchenware collections — there are actually coffee mugs with birds on them, yasss. Unique kaleidoscopic printed blocks by Lisa Congdon will brighten anyone’s season, while festive Leah Duncan pillows add punch to every couch.

600 Divisadero, SF. (415) 863-3969, www.raredevice.net

 

POT AND PANTRY

What says love more than an exquisite aluminum egg timer, or cheer more than a fanciful cutting board shaped like a chicken? You’ll be ladling out the love (ladles available) and satisfying every cook and non-cook’s desire for kitchen accessories at this supercute Mission cupboard of culinary delights. This year, stick a whisk in their stocking and whip up some fun! (Sorry.) Or simply gift a unique recipe zine from P+P’s neat library. Great for everyone? Sparq stones — soapstone cubes you can use in hot or cold drinks to maintain temperature — and kicky colored salt cellars.

593 Guerrero, SF. (415) 206-1134, www.potandpantry.com

 

SUCCULENCE

The venerable and much-loved Four Star Video rental shop in Bernal Heights found that its business model had run its course, so it morphed into Succulence, a yummy boutique plant store that features (of course) succulents but also a wide range of gardening supplies and cute classes for kids of all ages. Creative and artsy plants and planters, terrariums, hanging plants — plenty here for anyone who likes to fill their home with greenery. Plus: Really cool hand-carved ballpoint pens, which, in the $50 range, are cheap for one-of-a-kind writing instruments.

402 Cortland, SF. (415) 282-2212, www.thesucculence.com

 

GREEN ARCADE

We’ll take any gift you’d like to gift us from this liberal bastion of bookery on Market Street. A wonderfully curated selection of tomes focuses on history and social and environmental issues, with a generous sprinkling of poetry, theory, and California-centric items. (While researching for this article, we were compelled by joy to snag a set of dish towels with old-time maps of the Golden State printed on them.) You’ll find great stuff for out-of-towners, armchair prophets, and new San Francisco arrivals here, or anyone who loves this kooky-beautiful land of ours.

1680 Market, SF. (415) 431-6800. www.thegreenarcade.com

 

UPPER PLAYGROUND

We have teenage boys in our life! Possibly you do in yours. They like to dress cool. Upper Playground has so many uniquely SF cool and boyish t-shirts, hats, hoodies, and related items that shopping for our cool teenage friends was so easy we began to suspect the whole enterprise. Is this reality? (There are also tasty items for women and walls as well.)

220 Fillmore, SF. (415) 861-1960, www.upperplayground.com

 

CHOCOLATE COVERED

This Noe Valley treasure is billed as “San Francisco’s Original Chocolate Boutique” — but we call it Dr Coacoa-nassus’ Chocolatarium of Head-Explosion and Wonderment. There is every kind of fantasy chocolate bar combination to be found within its charming bounds — maple-coconut chocolate, blueberry chocolate, gingerbread chocolate, luscious vegan chocolate truffles, tiny bon bons with the face of Mrs. Claus sculpted upon them! People, they had Obama chocolates here during the election. The walls are lined with mystery cabinets labeled with street signs indicating the theme of the candy within, making for an adventurous shopping experience as well.

4069 24th St., SF. (415) 641-8123, www.chocolatecoveredsf.com

 

ALL OF JAPANTOWN CENTER

Seriously, there is so much of interest here you can’t go wrong. Insanely detailed, completely untranslatable magazines devoted to singular cats and manga insanity at Kinokuniya Books; novelty fruit and animal eraser sets at Mai Do Fine Stationery so full of squee you want to eat them; scary-good replica samurai swords at Katachi; exquisitely wrapped boxes of chocolate strawberry mochi at Nippon Ya … spend a couple hours wandering this mall and you’ll come out with some really unique presents. Plus you’ll be full of delicious sushi and hot tea.

www.sfjapantown.com

 

No brand

Andrew Lam
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0
No brand

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN To the casual observer, it may have appeared as if I had taken a painful, rainy early morning Muni ride into SoMa for the sole purpose of eating plastic-wrapped Japanese pancakes filled with red bean paste in a chain store. But to adherents of the Muji phenomenon, I was actually witnessing the birth of cross-Pacific retail revolution.

“The minimalism of Muji fits San Francisco perfectly with what the city is trying to do with conservation,” said store manager Eric Kobuchi, who was standing with the cash registers behind of him, and the sleepy-eyed attendees of the November 30th press preview and reception in front of him. His company was to open its first West Coast location (540 Ninth St., SF. www.muji.us) in an hour-and-a-half.

Among minimalism aficionados, this brand is paramount. Muji was born in 1980, originally as a line of 40 house and food items that were sold in Seiyu supermarkets. The name itself means “no label, quality goods.” The items were cheap, but relatively high quality. These savings were possible, said the company, by simplifying packaging and production, and utilizing offbeat materials, like the parts of the fish near the head and tail for its canned fish.

Muji fans kindled to the line’s recycled, plain packaging (the company has courted the “sustainable” label for decades). Being a Muji consumer is an identity unto itself, at least according to the brands’s brilliant ad campaigns. From a 256-page coffee table book of such endeavors presented to me at the preview: “Muji tries to attract not the customer who says ‘This is what I want,’ but rather the one who says, rationally, ‘this will do.'”

Zen. Today, Muji’s selection is an Ikea-Gap mélange. The San Francisco location, says Azami, has a similar, but smaller product selection (minus the food — tight regulations here make importing comestibles complicated), and the same layout and presentation as its Japanese stores. I don’t doubt that little changes have been made to the Muji formula for its West Coast audience — during the press preview, display prices for some of the stock were still only visible in yen.

Muji is but one simple, made-from-recycled-material package in a shopping bag full of newish Japanese brands to hit the Bay Area. Daiso, in my eyes the epitome of dollar (or rather 100 yen, roughly $1.50) store excellence, has been plying lunch boxes, fake eyelashes, party wigs, and stationary on the West Coast since 2005. It has several stores from SF to Milpitas (SF locations at 570 Market and 22 Japantown Peace Plaza).

We have homegrown Japanese retailers as well. Lounging in a bright office lined with shelves of Japanese comics, Seiji Horibuchi explained to me how he came to open retail complex New People (1746 Post, SF. www.newpeopleworld.com) in the heart of San Francisco’s Japantown.

Dressed in head-to-toe Sou Sou, a neo-traditional line of Japanese worker comfortwear whose signature item is its brightly patterned split-toe shoes, Horibuchi says he moved to the city in 1975, and started his anime-manga publishing house Viz Media in his adopted city in 1986. Viz Pictures, a distribution company for Japanese films followed, and then New People was born, originally as a movie theater at which to play Viz titles.

But the project grew, and by its opening in 2009, the J-pop mall included a gift shop, art gallery, and entire floor of Japanese fashion brands like Sou Sou and the babydoll goth Lolita brand Baby, the Stars Shine Bright.

New People is a bit different than the new megachains in town, however. Even the casual visitor can tell Horibuchi’s inventory couldn’t have come from any other country — unlike a lot of Muji’s stock, comprised of simply-universal products, most of New People’s vinyl dolls, high design flatware, and frilly babydoll bonnets could really have only come from Japan.

But Horibuchi understands why brands like Muji choose San Francisco for their debut on this side of the country. “We’re more open to foreign culture,” he says. “San Francisco is very flexible, livable.”

Plus, Asian Americans make up nearly 36 percent of the city’s population — and that ratio has grown in recent years. Companies know that many residents are already familiar with their brand, Horibuchi says. “I’m sure they’ve done enough marketing research.”

A company that has certainly done its marketing research is Uniqlo, which opened a popup shop (117 Post, SF) this summer, then a full-size West Coast flagship store (111 Powell, SF) in Union Square in October. In its opening weeks, the latter attracted 100-plus-person lines of shoppers with cheaply-priced rainbows of colored denim and ultralight down jackets.

In a calm moment on a busy holiday shopping day, I got a chance to talk with Uniqlo’s John “Jack” Zech, a “superstar store manager” according to a publicist that sat with us while we talked.

The three of us had a view of Uniqlo’s specially-designed-for-SF “magic mirror” (put on a down jacket, press a button, and the hue of your garment in the reflection shifts through the line’s different colors), its staircase of melting rainbow tones, and slowly rotating armies of mannequins clad in ski-ready fashions, ensconced in glass cases.

Zech worked in Uniqlo’s Japanese locations for months before the SF stores opened, and he says the company’s goal is to bring the Japanese concept of supreme customer service, irrashai mase, to the rest of the world.

When you walk into Uniqlo, a person in a happi day kimono greets you warmly. But other than that, I couldn’t see much of a difference between the cheery sales staff there versus that of any of the other chain stores in the neighborhood.

You won’t find happi on sale at Uniqlo. Instead, its affordably-priced cashmere, “Heat Tech” clothing — that I promise you, actually tingles and heats your skin up — and $9.90 packable raincoats (the only clothing item made specifically for the SF store) dominate the sales floor.

In 2010, the company’s official language switched to English. All managerial staff worldwide is required to speak it. “We found that people basically need the same things in Japan, France, London, here,” chirps Kech. “[CEO] Tadashi Yanai thinks we can improve the world by being a global company.”

Which snapped me out of the reverie I’d been lulled into by banks of $29.90 beige boot-cuts. Are Uniqlo and Muji really all that different than the globalized brands from the United States? Walmart, after all, has store greeters.

“If the product is good, it will sell,” regardless of geography, Horibuchi told me. These big brands have real cute stuff (admittedly, I would like to draw Santa’s attention to Muji’s $38 cardboard MP3 speakers.) But you’re not being worldly by shopping at them, though you are being globalized.

 

Free the free

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2
Free the free

VISUAL ART It starts with the streets. Walls, the texture of walls, rough and colored in swirls of graffiti letters. Walls you feel you could reach out and touch their cold and grit. Establishing shots — the streets of San Francisco in the dot-com era. The photos are of their times: an unattended shopping cart in the streets appears as early as page three. Soon follows the spray-painted legend, “Don’t let the good times fool you.”

The pictures are inscrutable, their sequence seemingly random. Yet other than the gnomic title (Friendship Between Artists is an Equation of Love and Survival), the only text in Xara Thustra’s self-published new book’s 500 pages is a brief intro from the author insisting that the book is meant to be read from left to right, from top and bottom in the order the photos appear. There are no captions or prompts to lead the viewer. It is the mute gravity of the photos that pulls you in. What is happening here? It’s like finding a box of photos on a trash pile in the Mission — old furniture, clothes out on the curb, a pile of books and CDs. Why is all this stuff in the trash? Did the owners die? Or get evicted? Photos of strangers. You go from one photo to the next and the outline of a missing life starts to appear. What is happening here?

The action moves in and out of the streets, cinematic — the interiors dark, claustrophobic. The streets provide narration. Everything is spray painted. Demand Community Control. Everything bright, everything clean. Everything they build be like fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Familiar everyday locations have become enlisted as battlegrounds. At the Dolores Park tennis courts, someone has hung a screen on the fence, painted so that it reads “Sink the Ship” in shimmery, see-through letters. A subliminal message to the tennis players visible on the other side? Or a secret signal to an unseen underground army?

Cut to the interior. Some dim locations start to become recognizable: a performance crammed into a corner of Adobe Books, a crowd seen through a doorway at the old Needles and Pens. The images are at times grainy and low res, like bad cell phone photos or surveillance camera footage. Much is shot in indistinct rooms or hallways, tightly cropped. The people in the interiors model homemade clothing or stare back at us from unmade beds. They are dancing in high heels or fucking each other, holding whips and dildos. No one is smiling. Instead they stare defiantly into the camera as if to ask, “Who are you to watch? Which side are you on?” This is not the careless and fashionable hedonism of Ryan McGinley photos. Instead, like the subjects of Nan Goldin photos, the people in these images know how much their search for freedom costs, and who will have to pay.

Meanwhile, the battle in the streets continues. Scum bags dressed as imposter yuppies stand in front of the mall on Market Street, holding handmade signs reading, “The bombs are dropping, lets go shopping!” An effigy of Gavin Newsom burns at 18th and Castro. Back inside, homeless guys from Fifth and Market calmly eat free breakfast at the 949 Market Squat. More drab interiors, more surveillance footage, and then what is happening here? Scenes of naked people grimly carving designs into each other with razors, holding dripping, bleeding arms up to the camera. It must be 2005, I think, when we all started to give up on ever stopping the war and just started hurting each other.

Full disclosure: I am in this book. I might be too close to the people and events depicted to discern whether the images are strictly documentary or whether their arrangement is intended to create a new story. But the juxtapositions, eerie and dreamlike, pack a wallop. In one two page spread, my dead friend, Pete Lum, stairs from the left page into another photograph on the right of an unknown drag queen out front of Aunt Charlie’s on Turk Street. Their eyes seem to meet across the gutter of the book and across time and space, as if sharing a secret the rest of us cannot know.

Ultimately, perhaps the one indisputable narrative of the book is the tremendous progression in Xara Thustra’s artwork, as the early agitprop graffiti by “Heart 101” in support of street protests slowly morphs into a far more ambitious project, an ongoing collaboration with countless others through performance, print, and cinema to abandon protest and instead collectively embody through art the autonomy and ethics of a truly different world. Perhaps inevitably then, Friendship Between Artists is both a monumental achievement and something of an anti-climax. The protests, the willful art world obscurity, the dead friends — what did it all add up to?

I am certain, anyway, that nothing in the book was conceived with the idea that it would one day appear in an art book. Instead, the interventions, experiments, and protests detailed herein, while at times quite joyous, were, as the book’s title suggests, originally part of a deadly serious struggle to keep oppositional culture alive in San Francisco, and for many that struggle now feels lost. But life must go on, and this is no museum piece.

The book’s 500 pages positively overflow with life, salvaging from oblivion the raw, visceral feel of 15 years of ephemeral underground freedom. While some will be haunted by the suspicion that the answer to the above question is “not enough,” the people in these photos stare into the camera and demand we consider instead a hard-earned and far more redemptive possibility: that this isn’t an art project, it’s how we live. This isn’t representation of a different reality, but about being a different reality. And fuck you, anyway, because being free is its own reward.

For an interview with Xara Thustra, visit sfbg.com/pixel_vision.

XARA THUSTRA BOOK RELEASE AND SOLO SHOW

Thu/6, 7-9pm, free

Needles and Pens

3252 16th St., SF

www.needles-pens.com

 

10 winter essentials

Andrew Lam
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2

culture@sfbg.com

MARINE LAYER HI-LO CROPPED SWEATER, $88

American Apparel’s appeal fades when we discovered this line of comfy basics made right here in the city. Marine Layer (2209 Chestnut, SF; 498 Hayes, SF. www.marinelayer.com) specializes in men’s and women’s tees, but we love its warm-yet-trendy cropped sweater, whose hemline dips low in the back.

OTTER WAX BAR, $13

Ditch the wet look and feel: wax your sneakers, jeans, and canvas or denim clothing. Seal in that fresh feeling — also available in heat-activated dressing form — at Voyager (365 Valencia, SF. www.thevoyagershop.com). Just rub it on and you’ll be fly and dry.

VAUTE COUTURE EMILY COAT, $356.25

We swoon for this online brand’s (www.vautecouture.com) animal product-free — no itchy woolens or dead cow here! — fashion. Thanks to the Emily’s tie-front belt, winter-time no longer means you have to look like a shapeless sack of spuds.

PAUL MADONNA CANVAS SHOULDER BAG, $23

Local cartoonist Madonna’s “All Over Coffee” comic and books are essential — his illustration of the Golden Gate Bridge one Crissy Field on this kicky bag is a sparkling example of his art, available at one of our favorite bookstores ever, Green Arcade (1680 Market, SF. www.thegreenarcade.com)

JENNIFER BAIR JACKET, $124

These one-of-a-kind faux suede coats with vintage-inspired print lining make great cover-ups on milder winter days. Residents Apparel Gallery‘s (541 Octavia, SF. www.ragsf.com) selection of made-in-the-city pieces is a great one-stop shop for Bay Area gear.

SAN FRANPSYCHO BEANIE, $20

We found you an everyday hat straight from the surfer-bros of San Franpsycho, whose shop (505 Divisadero, SF. www.sanfranpsycho.com) sells the makings of insta-cred among sporty, hip types in town.

BENEDUCI HANK BOOTS, INQUIRE FOR PRICE

These brass tack soles will power you down winter-wet sidewalks but honestly, you could rock Beneduci‘s (www.beneduci.com) Italian leather kicks year-round in style. Local cred: the brand makes everything right here in SF. The boots will be available at Firehouse 8 (1648 Pacific, SF) on Sat/15 and Sun/16 and on Dec. 21-22.

KURABO BLACK 13 OUNCE MENS DENIM PANTS, $128

The perfect pair of pants, proudly produced in SF by Taylor Stitch (383 Valencia, SF. www.taylorstitch.com) for stylish gents? Possibly. Dig the local provenance — Taylor Stitch is bursting with hometown-made style. And the deep black will hide unsightly rain splashes.

RAINSHIELD O2 UNISEX CYCLING JACKET, $25

Ultralightweight, breathable, packable, and insanely cute, these zip-ups, available at Market Street Cyclery (1592 Market, SF. www.marketstreetcyclescom) will keep the drops off your pop-a-wheelie while helping up your mist-shrouded visibility factor.

CAT WALKING STICK UMBRELLA, $30

Yes, yes, we get the raining cats and dogs joke, but this is the purrfect shield against the storm: a sky-blue kitty cavorting on a midnight blue canvas, protecting you on this seriously sturdy yet lightweight piece from the San Francisco Umbrella Company (www.sfumbrella .com). Cats!

Our Weekly Picks: December 5-11

Andrew Lam
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0

WEDNESDAY 5

Jill Tracy

Spooky chanteuse Jill Tracy describes her new holiday release, Silver Smoke, Star of Night, as “the Christmas album for those who prefer the October chill.” She celebrates its release with three festive events, starting with tonight’s “Fragrance: The Allure and Magical History of Perfumes,” an after-hours party at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. The evening is both concert and launch of her limited-edition fragrances (appropriately, devoted to “dark elegance”), created with local perfumers Nocturne Alchemy. Sat/8, the Hypnodrome (where Tracy has been known to perform with the Thrillpeddlers) hosts “Creepshow Christmas” — a family-friendly show mixing ghost stories with live accompaniment. Finally, Silver Smoke‘s official CD release shindig is Dec. 19 at the DNA Lounge. Spirits will be bright! (Cheryl Eddy)

Tonight, 6-10pm, $13

San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers

Golden Gate Park, 100 John F. Kennedy Dr., SF

Sat/8, 8pm, $13–$25

Hypnodrome

575 10th St., SF

www.jilltracy.com

 

Blue Scholars

The young MCs in Seattle rap duo Blue Scholars met, quite appropriately, in a hip-hop club at the University of Washington. You can hear these academic roots clearly in DJs Sabzi and Geologic’s smart, searing rhymes. The heady lyrical content of their work tackles serious, political issues such as socioeconomic mobility, empowerment, and questioning authority. Even more impressively, these boys don’t just talk the talk. Geologic’s history of activism in the Filipino-American community and the duo’s headquarters in 98118, the country’s most ethnically diverse zip code, is the perfect recipe for the smart, relevant hip-hop that the scene most desperately needs (we’re looking at you, Chris Brown). (Haley Zaremba)

With The Physics, Brothers From Another

8pm, $19.50

Fillmore

1805 Geary, SF

(415) 346-6000

www.thefillmore.com

 

Get Carter and The Trip

Verrrry clever, Castro Theatre — programming back-to-back screenings of Get Carter (1971) and The Trip (2010). Gritty Get Carter follows a snarling Michael Caine as he prowls around Newcastle, punching his way through the local gangster contingent he holds responsible for his brother’s death. The Trip, a travelogue featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing exaggerated versions of themselves), contains some genius and quotable comedy — ABBA sing-offs, mock-epic speeches — but none more memorable than the two actors going head to head with their Caine impressions: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” Truly, an inspired double feature. (Cheryl Eddy)

Get Carter 2:40 and 7pm; The Trip 4:50 and 9:10pm, $8.50–$11

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

www.castrotheatre.com


THURSDAY 6

“Drag Queens on Ice”

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … er, definitely something, flying at you with the unstoppable momentum of a two-story wig and a pair of birdseed-filled balloons. You already know what’s green and ice skates (Peggy Phlegm) now come find out what’s queen and ice wobbles — all those years in man-stilletos can’t help you out on the rink, honey. This cherished annual hoot features a wealth of San Francisco’s beloved gender clown personalities threading their way through bewildered tourist families in Union Square (who actually get really into it, and by the end it’s a heartwarming family affair, full of squeals of delight). You can even skate with these swanning lovelies! No money back if you end up with a weave in your face. The great Donna Sachet — she of the stunning, form-fitting, fake-fur-trimmed ravishing red holiday dress — mistresses the ceremonies. Grab a warming adult beverage from nearby Emporio Rulli Il Caffe and join in the fun. But don’t you dare judge, or you might get Nancy Kerrigan’d. Skates are blades, remember. (Marke B.)

8-9:30pm, $10 entrance, $5 rentals

Union Square Skating Rink

Post and Geary, SF

www.unionsquareicerink.com

 

The Family Stone

I’ve had some good times listening to San Francisco’s Sly and the Family Stone — both letting my mind wander the groove of their funky sound and feeling the sense of pride in one’s self that Sly Stone sings so well — and I’d venture a guess that you have too. Though that innovate teacher and leader has opted for life out of the spotlight, three of the original members, Jerry Martini (saxophone), Cynthia Robinson(trumpet), and Greg Errico (drums), are keeping the music alive with the help of a few younger talents. Mostly hailing from the Las Vegas area, these new members are all performers with rich experiences listening to Sly’s music. This new Family Stone recreates the old hits in a fresh show, hoping to bring the music to all generations. (Molly Champlin)

7-8pm, $40–$45

Rrazz Room

222 Mason, SF

(800) 380-3095

www.therrazzroom.com

 

Streetlight Manifesto

Streetlight Manifesto was pretty late to the ska game, releasing its first album in 2003, well over a decade after the genre’s revival heyday. Though in a way, the band’s timing was actually perfect. Born out of the ashes of previous Jersey ska-punk heroes Catch-22 and One Cool Guy, Streetlight’s catchy tunes and punk rock virility have been nearly single-handedly keeping third-wave ska alive in a world dominated by hip-hop, mainstream pop, and EDM. The band is ringing in the new year with the release of its fifth album, The Hands That Thieve. During this tour, Streetlight Manifesto promises to play new songs, old favorites, and everything in between; so put on your skanking shoes and lace ’em up tight. It’s gonna be a good night. (Zaremba)

With Hostage Calm, Lionize

8pm, $21

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slimspresents.com

 

FRIDAY 7

Hope Beyond

Kim Gordon, artist and gallery director at Modern Eden, has curated the one-night-only art show, Hope Beyond, a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. The assembled line-up includes an impressive selection of artists representing a variety of pop-surreal and contemporary styles. The work ranges from the graffiti style sharpie drawings of Kidlew to intricate fusion of nature images and Hindi symbolism by Inge Vandormael. Personally, I’m excited to see what all of these artists will contribute to the show. Especially Serge Gay Jr. — an artist whose paintings collage and reproduce pop culture images to create dichotomies between what’s real and what’s fake and make you to take a second look at his subjects: beauty, violence, drugs, and race. With all art priced below $100 and the proceeds going to Hurricane Sandy victims, what’s not to love? (Champlin)

6pm, free

Modern Eden Gallery

403 Francisco, SF

(415) 956-3303

www.hope-beyond.com

 

SFBallet’s Nutcracker

The folks in Imperial Russia loved The Nutcracker and kept it alive during Soviet times. But the West never saw it until some White Russians, who had escaped to San Francisco, nagged then San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Willam Christensen to choreograph it in 1944. By now there are hundreds of versions all over the world; the oddest one I ever saw had Drosselmeyer arrive on a spaceship. SFB’s, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson in 2004, is set during the 1915 Panama International Exhibition. It lacks the cloying sweetness and sentimentality that infects so many others. Tomasson’s is a love letter to the City — cool, transparent, a little reserved and superbly elegant. (Rita Felciano)

Through Dec. 28, 7pm, 2pm matinees; $20–$270

War Memorial Opera House

301 Van Ness, SF

(415) 865-2000

www.boxofficesanfrancisco.com


SATURDAY 8

Misfit Toy Factory II

Did you ever feel cheated as a kid when you would see cartoons and hear stories about elves making toys from scratch, then you got a Barbie doll or video game that obviously wasn’t cobbled at the North Pole? Well, now is your chance to watch the toys actually being made. Not by elves though, but by local artists. There will be over 35 of them at Root Division Art Space bringing creativity from their various fields (painting, sculpture, and illustration mostly) to the art of toy making. All the work will be sold for a flat rate of $40. Bring cash for some shopping, or just come to enjoy the atmosphere of creativity complete with music by DJ Yukon Cornelius. (Champlin)

6pm, free

Root Division Art Space

3175 17th, SF

(415) 863-7668

www.rootdivision.org

 

John Prine

I think I need to start with a disclaimer: I love John Prine. Yes, I’m completely biased when I say that he is one of the greatest living lyricists and you’d be lucky to go see him. But why take my word for it? His more than 40 years of successful songwriting can speak for themselves. Starting off as a Chicago-area postman doing open mics in his spare time, Prine eventually got noticed — by a young Roger Ebert. Now, almost 70 years after that glowing review, Prine is still an incredible songwriter and performer, and each song is a charming, witty, and poignant labor of love. In his time as a performer, many trends and genres have come and gone, but a great folk song never goes out of style. (Zaremba)

With Justin Townes Earle

8pm, $39–$59

Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com


SUNDAY 9

San Francisco Crab Fest 2012

Continuing a long-running San Francisco tradition that takes advantage of the fact that the crab fishing season along the California coast coincides with the holiday season, the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefit District 2012 Crab Fest will offer up a tasty fete featuring the crustacean prepared in a variety of ways by local restaurants, along with exhibits, cooking demonstrations and more. A host of sustainably-produced regional wines will provide the perfect way to raise a toast to the annual event, which donates all proceeds to the San Francisco Firefighters Toy Program and the San Francisco Police Department’s Youth Fishing Program. (Sean McCourt)

Noon-3pm, $25–$30

Waterfront Terraces, Fisherman’s Wharf

145 Jefferson St., Third Floor, SF

www.visitfishermanswharf.com

 

Queer Rebels Winter Shindig

Though the weather outside is frightful, the smolderingly creative queers performing tonight at El Rio are more than capable of keeping your toasty warm. The lineup alone is worth the sleigh ride to El Rio — burlesque from the bountiful Ms. Vagina Jenkins, jazzy moves courtesy East Bay punker Brontez Purnell, the release performance of drag king blueser K.B. TuffNStuff’s Trans of Venus album, and so much more hotness. But as if that wasn’t enough to draw you like a moth to flame, this: the evening is a benefit for Queer Rebels’ year-round lineup of genderbending, empowering art events like the Exploding Lineage! experimental film fest, two-day summit of Asian American activists, and the group’s annual eponymous production of queer takes on the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. (Caitlin Donohue)

8-11pm, $7-20 sliding scale

El Rio

3158 Mission, SF

www.elriosf.com


SUNDAY 9

John Cale

Whereas Lou Reed was the primary source of the Velvet Underground’s swagger, and hard-bitten lyricism, John Cale took charge of the group’s more avant-garde leanings. Even 45 years after leaving the band, Cale continues to challenge and surprise his listeners, as evidenced by the title of his latest LP: Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood. Largely devoid of the splintering bursts of noise that defined his formative years, and the rootsy pastoralism of Paris 1919 and Vintage Violence, Cale’s latest is an art-rock record in the tradition of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush: affecting in its ability to experiment and take risks while working squarely within the pop template. Another gutsy effort from an aging icon whose renegade streak hasn’t gone anywhere. See him while you can. (Taylor Kaplan)

With Cass McCombs

8pm, $32–$48

Regency

1290 Sutter, SF

(888) 929-7849

www.theregencyballroom.com

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

On the Cheap Listings

Andrew Lam
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0

Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com. For further information on how to submit items for the listings, see Picks.

WEDNESDAY 5

“Hidden in Plain Bite: Overlooked Opportunities for Food System Reform” 371 10th St., SF. (323) 828-7040, www.ffacoalition.org. 6:30-9pm, $8-12. Come for this informative and eye-opening discussion that tackles new and innovative measures to reform our dastardly food system. Organic food offerings and a silent auction will follow the talk.

Lemony Snicket The Booksmith, 1644 Haight, SF. (415) 863-8688, www.booksmith.com. 5-8pm, free. Beleaguered children’s book hero Lemony Snicket will be on hand at the Booksmith this evening for a meet and greet promoting his latest effort, entitled Who Could That Be at This Hour?

FRIDAY 7

“Terra e Asfalfo: Around the World on a Vespa” The Emerald Tablet, 80 Fresno, SF. (415) 500-2323, www.terraeasfalto.it. Through Dec. 16. Opening reception: 6-10pm, free. How anyone can travel all around the world on those speedy little cosmopolitan numbers is beyond us. But Italian couple Giorgio Serafino and Giuliana Foresi did it — and the duo will be presenting their travels via this photo exhibit, where pictures of destinations such as Thailand, South Africa, and Italy will be on display.

Mission Holiday Block Party Various businesses on Valencia from 23rd to 14th Sts. and surrounding blocks, SF. www.valenciastreetsf.com. 5-10pm, free. Get half price on sangria at Locanda, 20 percent off clothes and accessories at Five and Diamond (while Shovel Man plays!), check out a George Chen-hosted comedy program at Lost Weekend Video’s CineCave and more at this holiday celebration in Valencia’s neighborly businesses.

“Snapshot” Southern Exposure, 3030 20th St., SF. (415) 863-2141, www.soex.org. Through Dec/20. Opening reception: 7-9pm, free. The Youth Advisory Board of Southern Exposure’s new exhibit explores the relationship between the medium of photography and the notion of memory. An experimental work, “Snapshot” features young artists’ take on fact and fiction through digital manipulation.

“Aloha on Ice” Embarcadero ice rink, Justin Herman Plaza, SF. (415) 392-2235, tinyurl.com/alohaonice. 4-7pm, free. Come bask in the warm aloha spirit at this pop-up luau. You’ll have a number of ways to get tropical at this event, like sampling Hawaiian food, making fresh flower leis, and mugging in a Hawaii-kitsch photo booth. Drink umbrellas and hellacious sunglasses tan not included.

DIY Library Party Mission Bay Branch Library, 960 Fourth St., SF. (415) 626-7512, www.friendssfpl.org. 7-10pm, free for members and friends of members, $35 for membership. The DIY aesthetic has permeated nearly all facets of our contemporary culture, so it’s past time for our local library to get in on the low budget fun. Get engrossed by an impromptu arts and crafts project, and mingle with cocktail-sipping fellow literary fans at this free event.

Hurricane Sandy Benefit Show Modern Eden Gallery, 403 Francisco, SF. www.hope-beyond.com. 6-9pm, free. We on the West Coast are lucky to not have to deal with terrors of hurricanes, which is why we urge to attend this art show benefiting our fellow Americans on the other side of the nation.

SATURDAY 8

East Bay Alternative Book and Zine Fest Berkeley City College, 2050 Center, Berk. eastbayalternativepressbookfair.blogspot.com. 10am-5pm, free. The good folks behind this event decided to go bigger with the third installment of the East Bay Alternative Book and Zine fest. There’ll be workshops on zines, screen-printing, letterpress, and comic illustration in addition to speeches from dozens of local writers.

Vagabond Indie Craft Fair Urban Bazaar, 1371 Ninth Ave., SF. (415) 664-4422, www.urbanbazaarsf.com. Also Dec/9. Noon-6:30pm, free. Etsy addicts take note! Urban Bazaar in conjunction with Etsy and the SF Etsy team will be putting the third annual holiday-themed Vagabond Indie Craft Fair. Come peruse with your keen shopper’s eye the emporium of hip, fun, and crafty items. Also probably a good idea to do some holiday shopping while you’re at it.

Holiday Indie Mart Speakeasy Brewery, 1195 Evans, SF. www.indie-mart.com. Noon-6pm, free. If you’ve never made it out to Speakeasy’s Bayview brew factory, now’s the perfect time. Indie Mart is assembling over 45 vendors, who will come equipped with DIY giftables you’ll be stocked on for your family and friends. Bonus round: today the brewery will unveil its new taproom, designed by Indie Mart creator Kelly Malone and friends.

KPFA Crafts Fair Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St., SF. (510) 848-6767 ext. 646, www.kpfa.org/craftsfair. Also Dec/9. 10am-6pm, free–$10. Go to the Vagabond Crafts Fair on Saturday and the KPFA Crafts Fair on Sunday, or vice versa or do a crafts fair crawl by attending both on the same day! Sponsored by the progressive-minded folk at the KPFA 94.1 radio station in Berkeley, this festivity is going all out by bringing craftwork from over 200 local artisans featuring glass, leather, and stone items.

MONDAY 10

Pladra Holiday Launch 5-8pm, free. 111 Minna, SF. www.pladra.com SF flannel company Pladra shows off its latest line of shirts for men and women at this holiday party and trunk show. Everything’s sourced and made in the Bay Area, for a hyperlocal, winter-ready shopping experience.

TUESDAY 11

A Long Day’s Evening Translation City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF. (415) 362-1901, www.citylights.com. 7pm, free. Turkish experimental modernists rejoice! Aron Aji has finally translated A Long Day’s Evening by Bilge Karasu for our literary loving. Attend this talk today by Aji to hear how the process took shape.

 

Canned!

Andrew Lam
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6
Canned!

news@sfbg.com

So much for the holiday spirit.

In a win for the NIMBY neighbors of the Haight neighborhood, the Haight Ashbury Recycling Center was gifted with its final eviction notice, ordering it out on the street by the day this story goes to print, Dec. 5.

But those who hoped this eviction would rid the neighborhood of poor people recycling bottles and cans may be disappointed — and so might local small businesses that could face some unintended consequences of the move.

The site, run by the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC), houses a community garden, native plant nursery, and recycling center. HANC battled eviction for nearly a decade as newer neighborhood associations complained to the city, saying the center was too noisy and attracted too many homeless people.

The recycling center is located at the edge of Golden Gate Park behind Kezar stadium, and has been crushing cans and busting bottles since 1974.

The San Francisco Recreation and Park Department issued several eviction notices to HANC over the years, and the process seemed to drag on, but the eviction notice from the Sheriff’s Department on Nov. 28 is likely the last nail in the coffin.

“We’ve exhausted our legal options,” Ed Dunn, HANC’s director, told us.

Even Sup. Christina Olague, who has championed HANC as one of their few supporters on the current Board of Supervisors, said that the recycling center was done, although representatives from Sup. Eric Mar’s office told us they were still hopeful the eviction could be delayed long enough to relocate HANC somewhere else.

Olague told us that she’d talked to Mayor Ed Lee about the issue many times, and they discussed many options. But with the finality of the eviction notice, she said, “I just don’t know what we can do.”

 

COAL FOR CHRISTMAS

The recycling center’s employees will lose their jobs just at the start of the winter holiday season. “The notion that they’d put people out of work before Christmas was horrendous,” Dunn said.

What will happen to HANC’s 10 employees is up in the air. “I have no idea what I’ll do,” HANC employee Brian McMahon told us, lowering his orange protective headphones to talk. He’s worked there since 1989, and his last job was at a Goodwill store. “The quote under my high school yearbook picture says ‘take it as it comes,’ and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Susan Fahey, the sheriff’s media relations officer, declined to discuss the details of how the officers would handle the eviction, saying only that “we plan accordingly.”

A staff report prepared for the Recreation and Park Commission’s Nov. 20 meeting estimated that just 0.1 percent of San Francisco’s recycling tonnage is processed at HANC, according to a report by citizen journalist Adrian Rodriguez. The agenda also said that the Department of Environment was confident that recyclers would use other nearby sites instead.

But the customers at HANC that we talked to didn’t agree.

“I think it’s necessary they have the [recycling center] here,” HANC customer Eugene Wong told us. Wong lives in the Haight, and hauls in his recyclables every six months or so for some extra pocket money. As Wong and his friend Bob Boston spoke, one of their Haight Ashbury neighbors, Rory O’Connor, surprised them as he walked up.

“Just droppin’ off my beer cans, man,” O’Connor said. Asked if he would make his way out to the Bayview recycling center when HANC closed, he said, “You’ll spend more on gas than you would even get back.”

There were quite a few neighborhood locals there that day, and more people drove into the recycling center than there were people pushing shopping carts. But it’s the folks with the shopping carts that had HANC’s opponents up in arms.

And though some — like Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, a regular critic of HANC — are celebrating HANC’s demise, the unintended consequences should have all small businesses in the Haight Ashbury worried.

 

CLASS WARFARE BACKFIRES

State law requires that Californians have easy access to a “convenience zone,” basically somewhere nearby that they can collect the five-cent deposit all consumers pay for cans and bottles. HANC served that purpose for a half mile radius around its location on Frederick, near Stanyan.

“Whole Foods and Andronico’s were serviced by HANC’s existence,” Regina Dick-Endrizzi, the director of San Francisco’s Office of Small Business, told us. With HANC gone, “They will be required to buy back [bottles and cans] from local stores.”

San Francisco’s Department of Environment oversees recycling policy in the city, but did not respond to calls or emails.

The reason that HANC was being pushed out was due to a vocal few, like the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, complaining that HANC was a magnet to the homeless population looking to sell bottles and cans collected in shopping carts. That group didn’t respond by press time. Now those same poor folks may take their business from Golden Gate Park to the Haight neighborhood itself by recycling at the local Whole Foods, the new legal alternative to HANC.

Sometimes local grocery stores defy the state mandate, and instead choose to pay a state-mandated fee, Dick-Endrizzi said. If Whole Foods chooses not buy back recyclables, small businesses all over the Haight will be required by state law to do it themselves.

Suhail Sabba has owned Parkview Liquors on Stanyan Street, just two blocks from HANC, for nine years. He said that he doesn’t have the employees, storage, or scale “to handle even a portion of HANC’s customers.”

He may not have much of a choice. If small businesses don’t buy back the recyclables, they would face charges of $100 a day under California state law. A year gone without complying would lead to charges up to $36,000, an amount that large-scale businesses often factor into their budgets, but which could bankrupt a small store.

When contacted, Whole Foods representative Adam Smith said that the company was aware of the issue and was still deciding on a course of action.

The company has a 60-day grace period to make a decision that, for good or ill, would ripple through the Haight neighborhood. “I might go out of business,” Sabba said.

Store owners can apply for an exemption, but the process can be as lengthy as a few months and fines could still accrue, Dick-Endrizzi said. The Office of Small Business will soon reach out to the affected store owners, but she encourages them to contact her office directly at 415-554-6134.

 

GARDEN FOR A GARDEN

The HANC site houses more than the recycling center. It also encompasses a native plant nursery, run for the past decade by caretaker Greg Gaar, who we’ve profiled before (“Reduce, reuse, replace,” 5/30/12). Gaar raises Dune Tansy, Beach Sagewort, Coast Buckwheat and Bush Monkey — all native plants bred from the dunes of old San Francisco, which Golden Gate Park used to be.

Adjacent to the nursery is a community garden with 50 plots serving just more than 100 neighbors. But the odd part is, when the city is done tearing down the recycling center and gardens, it plans to put in, well, another community garden, at taxpayer expense.

The new plan does offer a few tweaks. There will be a small stone Greek-style amphitheater, and removing the recycling center will leave more green space for the site. The new community garden will feature 10 fewer plots. As of now, there is no formal plan to transfer the 100 gardeners from HANC’s community gardens to the new plots once they’ve been built.

Some of HANC’s current gardeners count among the local homeless population, said Soumyaa Behrens, HANC’s social media coordinator. Those few homeless use their plots to grow food.

“You meet people you wouldn’t meet anywhere else,” said Miriam Pinchuck, a writer who will soon lose her and her husband’s garden plot at HANC. “It’s very shortsighted, and it’d deprive us of a chance to meet our neighbors.”

Though Dunn and Gaar are in negotiations with city officials on their gardners’ behalf, at this point it looks like the current gardeners will need to sign up for the new plots, just like everybody else.

Gaar looks like he may be the only employee to work at the new garden site once it replaces the recycling center. He’d have to volunteer, but he said that doesn’t necessarily bother him.

“For me, gardening is a joy,” Gaar said, although he did voice one concern: “I just want the nursery to survive.” With HANC’s eviction, it seems like everyone has something to worry about.

HANC evicted, but the poor recyclers could remain in the Haight

Erica Hanna
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36
HANC evicted, but the poor recyclers could remain in the Haight

In a win for the gentrifiers of the Haight Ashbury, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s (HANC) Recycling Center has been issued an official eviction notice, posted by the Sheriff’s Department, and is slated to be out on the street by this Wednesday, Dec. 5. But those who hoped this would rid the neighborhood of poor people recycling bottles and cans may be disappointed.

The HANC site in Golden Gate Park — which houses a community garden, native plant nursery, and recycling center — has been battling eviction pushed by the Mayor’s Office and mayoral appointees for nearly a decade. Previously, the city Recreation and Park Department pushed for HANC to leave, a stand reinforced by court rulings, but the eviction notice looks like the last nail in the coffin. The recycling center’s employees will lose their jobs just as the winter holiday season begins.

“The notion that they’d put people out of work before Christmas was horrendous,” said Ed Dunn, HANC’s director. The eviction caught him totally flat footed, as he had just last week given a tour to San Francisco officials interested in mediating the dispute.

“It seemed like there was growing awareness that we’re a public good,” Dunn said. “I guess that went nowhere.”

Deputies posted the eviction notice at HANC’s doors on Wednesday, Nov. 28. Susan Fahey, the Sheriff’s Department media relations officer, declined to discuss the details on how the department would handle the eviction, saying only that “we plan accordingly.”

And though some, like Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius, are celebrating HANC’s demise, the unintended consequences should have all small businesses in the Haight Ashbury worried.

 State law requires that Californians have easy access to a “convenience zone,” basically somewhere nearby that they can sell the cans and bottles and get back the “redemption” fee charge to consumers. HANC served that purpose for a half mile radius around its location on Frederick, near Stanyan.

“My position is we have to understand the full potential of the decision we’re making,” Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of San Francisco’s Office of Small Business, told us. Namely, that without HANC, two local grocers will have to pick up the slack and buy back the bottles and cans they sell.

“Whole Foods and Andronicos were serviced by HANC’s existence,” Dick-Endrizzi said. With HANC gone, “they will be required to buy back [bottles and cans] from local stores.”

The whole reason that HANC was being pushed out in the first place was due to a vocal few, like the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, saying that HANC was a magnet to the homeless population and their shopping carts filled with bottles and cans. Now those same poor folks may take their business from Golden Gate Park to the Haight neighborhood itself, frequenting the local Whole Foods, defeating the whole purpose behind the opposition’s scorn for HANC.

But sometimes local grocery stores defy the state mandate, and instead choose to pay state fines, Dick-Endrizzi said. If they choose not to take recyclables, small businesses all over the Haight would be required to individually pay customers for their used recyclables.

If they don’t, small businesses could be fined as $100 a day under state law. A year gone without dealing with the issue could cripple a business, with fines up to $36,000.

When contacted, Whole Foods representative Adam Smith said that the company was aware of the issue and was still deciding on a course of action for the neighborhood.

Fatshion

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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10
Fatshion

caitlin@sfbg.com

STREET SEEN “Can I do a small rant on boobs?” Fat activist Virgie Tovar’s boobs — I can see most of them in the swank North Beach cocktail bar we’re sitting in — are really big. Many parts of Virgie are, which is kind of her thing. The editor of the recently-published anthology Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love, and Fashion (Seal Press) talks dirty to telephone sex customers during the day, and carries her curves with a pride that runs completely counter-current to all the ways we are taught to be ashamed of fat in this world.

Obviously, I want to hear her rant about boobs. It turns out to be: Tovar is sick of partners who place their attraction to her squarely on her ample bosom. “I have to have them verbally say that [I’m fat] before we have sex. They can’t accept that they want to have sex with a fat woman.”

So don’t call her busty. Especially since if you do, you’re going to miss the whole point of her look.

“I dress for visibility,” Tovar puts it. You can definitely see her perched somewhat precariously on this North Beach bar stool. Her ample decolletage is emphasized by a floral onesie-now-a-dress, the crotch of which was cut out before our interview for enhanced comfort, a tight skirt, vintage fur coat (“My rule is, I wear fur if it’s 25 years old or older,” she tells me. “I love wearing dead animals”), teal scarf, and knee-high black boots.

You can’t miss Virgie, a fact which our fellow bar patrons quickly learn when we launch into a high-spirited discussion of one of her regular phone sex customers, a “pay pig” who gets off on paying $50 for the pleasure of her telephone voice — $50 every 15 minutes, that is.

She wants you to look at her and see fat, and look at her and see style, and look at her and want to have sex with her — and then she wants you to think about what those things say about your own adherence to normative beauty ideals. Virgie identifies her style as high femme, by her own definition “the intentional performance of femininity in order to subvert masculinity. My fat has become a part of my performance, like jewelery.”

As a chubby child, Tovar shied from glitz and glamour. Girly clothes either didn’t fit, she says, or just plain didn’t fit into her mission to be completely invisible. It was hard to hide, however, from the sartorial impulses of her mother, who loved few things more than embellishing Tovar’s garments with lace and the occasional scene from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, rendered in puff paint.

But Tovar quashed that timidity in adulthood, when she found partners who “found me sexy and wanted to do all these nasty things to me,” she says. “If your liberation comes from somebody eating your ass, by all means necessary.”

She went onto San Francisco State University’s sexuality studies department, where she focused on fat sex, eventually proposing a fat-positive manifesto to Brooke Warner, senior editor at Seal Press. That morphed into Hot and Heavy, a project that Tovar feels coincides with a surge of fat cultural activism, evidence of which she sees popping up, of all places, in retail.

Luscious shopping spots to embrace your own zaftig fabulosity? If you’re down for big brands, Tovar gives high marks to Forever 21’s plus size offerings (“It’s gaudy, it’s slutty. They’ve really tapped into that audience that I’m a part of”), also to ASOS’ Curve line (www.asos.com), Domino Dollhouse (www.dominodollhouse.com), and Cupcake and Cuddlebunny (www.cupcakeandcuddlebunny.com).

Across the country, a smattering of high femme fat vintage stores have popped up: Portland’s Fat Fancy (www.fatfancyfashions.com), Brooklyn’s Re/Dress (whose stock is available online at www.redressnyc.com). And of course, she says, there’s the old standbys: Lane Bryant, Avenue for tights and boots, and the Stonestown Galleria’s most gloriously trashy clothes purveyor, Torrid. Tovar says she finds fat fashion inspiration in Marie Claire writer Nicolette Mason, Marie “Curvy Fashionista” Denee (thecurvyfashionista.mariedenee.com), and the Near-Sighted Owl (www.nearsightedowl.com)

For Tovar, the key to fashion, for girls big, small, and in-between, is ignoring the rules and becoming the fly, fabulous change you want to see. “The tag says no, but the stretch says yes! When I see a garment, I’m seeing hope for all the hopeless situations in the world.”

HOT AND HEAVY READING

with Virgie Tovar, Deah Schwartz, Abby Weintraub, Jessica Judd

Fri/30, 7pm, free

Modern Times Bookstore

2919 24th St., SF

www.moderntimesbookstore.com

www.virgietovar.com

 

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