SoMa

Homeless = without a home

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This morning on Forum Michael Krasny hosted Jennifer Friedenbach from the Coalition on Homelessness and CW Nevius, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing the homeless sweeps in SoMa and the vitriol stirred up by the Chron’s coverage of life on the streets by pointing at the shit, the needles, the trash, the insanity.

Near the end of the piece, Nevius says that using the cops to ticket homeless people who do these things is one solution and a way to hold them accountable. He said he doesn’t know how to solve the overall issue of homelessness. In the background, you can hear Friedenbach simply say, “Housing.”

Which is the whole frustrating disconnect on this issue. “Homeless” does not automatically translate into “criminal,” or “insane,” or “druggie,” or “lover of shitting on the street.” Nobody wants to see people sleeping in the streets, using drugs, defecating, or publicly displaying their individual psychotic problems. So give them a place to live. Don’t buy cops, buy housing. Let people do what they need to do behind closed doors.

One caller mentioned new housing developments at 5th and Mission and how none of the buyers of the million dollar condos are going to want to see the streets outside their doors in such a condition. Again, another major disconnect — developers want attractive neighborhoods, but when it comes to building affordable housing that might make those neighborhoods more attractive by housing the homeless, they run away screaming that it can’t be done.

Scavenging’s new spirit

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› culture@sfbg.com

>>Click here to check out our Style 2007 Guide

It’s a warm September night, and I’m standing in a crowded art gallery in South San Francisco, staring at a metal octopus that moves its tentacles when you press a button. In many ways, it’s like every other reception I’ve been to: a table with snacks and wine, a healthy feeling of snobbery in the air, and a swath of hipsters blocking my view of everything. But as I walk around I notice some differences. The smell of decomposing flesh, the sound of heavy machinery, the walk-in "free shed," dozens of trash cans, and the mounds of refuse on the horizon all suggest that I’m standing in the middle of a landfill. Which, well, I am. It’s the site of the art exhibition "Waste Deep," by Nemo Gould, the San Francisco Dump’s artist in residence. And what’s most striking? I feel completely at home.

After spending most of September with junk collectors, vintage clothing nerds, and art diggers, I’m now completely accustomed to wallowing in trash and noticing freebies. For example, before driving to the SF Dump this evening I ate free baked goods at the X-rated Cake Gallery in SoMa, scrounged through leftovers at an estate sale in Bernal Heights, and knocked back pints of free Pabst at Broken Record in the Excelsior.

Yes, friends, I have become a bona fide freeloader. But like my newfound partners in grime I shun the connotations of the term. I choose instead to see myself as a sort of hip cultural revolutionary, one of the loose band of entrepreneurs and artists I’ve met over the past month who shamelessly revel in their personal gain because, at the end of the day, they know they’re "working" for a good cause. Not only are we getting a lot of cool free shit, but we’re also helping to transform the traditional hippy-dippy recycle-reuse-redistribute ethos into something more refreshing.

The freestyle movement is growing. Freeganism, a ragtag philosophy of cost-free living in a gift economy, has gained some national attention of late — especially in these economically challenging times — and the freegan ethos incubated in San Francisco, where groups like the Diggers gave away food during the ’60s. This city knows a thing or two about priceless give-and-take. And thanks to the freegan types I’ve been hanging out with, I now look at scavenging as an art form, a party, and a necessary lifestyle, one that has more to do with fashion, art, music, booze, and friendly competition than with fighting world hunger, globalization, or the war machine. Oh, most scavengers are concerned with all of that too, but creating awareness (about irresponsible consumption and the effects of wastefulness on the environment and humanity) is the fortunate by-product of the lifestyle, rather than its focus — which is, of course, copping free stuff.

THRIFTY EYE FOR THE HIP GUY


My journey from a life spent paying to consume to one consumed by the pursuit of freebies began two years ago, when I moved into a new building in the Mission. My neighbor was Aaron Schirmer — a reclusive artist who lives in a world of secondhand designer denim, seminew Macintosh computers, and used sound systems — whom I’d occasionally run into on my way to buy cigarettes and Jim Beam. Usually we’d smile and nod. But one day while he sat smoking on the stoop, he flagged me down. "Check out what I found today," he said.

At his side sat a large bag of American Apparel man panties and a crate of old-school electro cassettes. When I asked where they’d come from, he rambled on about free markets, dumpsters, and swap meets. Then he stopped abruptly, fished for the keys to his house, and said, "Here, I’ll show you."

I followed him into a hallway lined with half-finished paintings and strategically cracked mirrors, through a ’50s-style kitchen, and into his living room. In the corner, beneath a dangling gold and green Eames-style lamp, sat a 50-inch color television. His bedroom walls were lined with random bric-a-brac and outsider art, and his couch was a row of velvet-lined theater seats. Schirmer spread his arms and did his best Vanna White. "Here it is," he said. "I found all of this shit on the streets. People leave piles everywhere, and I just roam around all day and pick through them."

I quickly fell into a routine with Schirmer, a retired world-traveling DJ who now spends his days spinning rare records, tending his garden, and scavenging. I would come over to his house after work, crack a beer, and check out his finds, occasionally claiming certain items for myself. We’d then scroll through the Free section on Craigslist to devise a tentative map for the following day’s scavenge. I rarely had time to join him on his daily hunts, but I quickly learned that the free pot is virtually bottomless. And I was hooked.

These days I roam the neighborhood (corporate dumpsters are always a good bet) or scour the Internet anytime I need something. On my most recent search I found a stuffed bunny, a six-foot-tall stack of records, a pair of cowboy boots, and — I shit you not — Sharon Stone’s old couch. But I’m no expert. Anyone can search a Web site, but it takes a true connoisseur, someone like Kelly Malone, to build a business from scavenging.

FREE-MARKET ECONOMY


Malone, cofounder of the Mission Indie Mart, spent 10 years climbing the retail ladder at places like the Gap and Limited until she worked her way up to a glamorous life as a traveling designer. But then tragedy struck — in the form of ovarian cancer and its debilitating treatment process — and she had to quit. After spending the first few days of her indefinite vacation watching television, drinking too much at the Phone Booth, and watching old movies, she decided to revisit an old hobby: scavenging. "I just started over and kept positive," Malone said. "When I wasn’t sick from the chemo, I was trash-picking for cool stuff to sew and reconstruct." Malone began meticulously scouring estate sales, flea markets, and garage sales for that perfect owl clock or a one-of-a-kind sundress. She also got into interior and exterior design, grabbing spare paint and building materials off the streets, then enlisting her friends to help construct a backyard oasis.

Soon, though, Malone’s home had morphed into a retro junk museum. Her backyard was now dotted with old benches, barbecue grills, sculptures, and a sound system. Clothes were spilling out all over the place, and she had enough paint to cover a mansion. It was time to expand.

Malone began taking her stuff down to the flea market in South San Francisco. She set up a booth with music and goodies, offered free beer and hot dogs to friends, and spent whole weekends selling dolled-up vintage goods and making friends with others who did the same. It was there that she struck up a business relationship with Charles Hurbert, a public relations representative at a marketing firm who has a penchant for outsider art and found fashion. Soon Malone and Hurbert combined forces and decided to look beyond sanctioned venues. Malone’s backyard beckoned. The Mission Indie Mart was born.

The first mart went off without a hitch. Malone and Hurbert invited swap meet–interested friends to set up booths in Malone’s backyard. Cheapo flyers were designed, beer was purchased and resold at cost, and reimagined found apparel was offered for sale. It was a thrifty one-off that felt like an illegal rave, and people loved it. Mission District locals swarmed Malone’s backyard and nearly bought up her entire inventory. When she held it again the next month, the mart was even more successful and attracted more people — so many that her landlord threatened to evict her. So Malone sought sponsors and a new venue. The next Mission Indie Mart will be at 12 Galaxies and will feature a set by DJ Lovedust, extremely cheap Stella Artois, and an even bigger collection of vendors.

The mart’s success suggests that this model benefits its founders, who make some income from the event, and attendees, who get cheap goods, as much as it does San Francisco’s thriving community of independent designers, vintage-clothing dealers, and the recycling-scavenging movement in general. Malone and Hurbert are proving again that with a little effort and creativity, free shit can be turned into gold.

FRUGAL PHILANTHROPY


That’s also what Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez, the founders of SwapSF, are doing at CELLspace — but for them the party and the product are more important than the money.

The couple started SwapSF a few years ago as a way to poach their friends’ unwanted apparel. "I had this friend who owned like a million pairs of limited-edition sneakers that he never wore," Lewis said. "The swap idea started as a way for me to get my hands on some of them." So Hernandez and Lewis, who have been throwing events since they met at a party five years ago, did what came naturally: they drew up a flyer, bought a bunch of cheap beer and pizza, and invited their friends to get down.

The idea has taken off, as I witnessed Sept. 22 when I threw a few shirts, a pair of pants, and some old hats in a bag and pedaled down to Bryant and 18th Street to volunteer at their recent event, the Most Hyperbolically Stupendous Clothing Swap Ever. It was to be a win-win situation: a little time in exchange for first dibs at free clothes. I arrived at CELLspace at 11 a.m. to find a DJ spinning downtempo hip-hop, a handful of kids sorting through bags, and Hernandez, who greeted me with a smile, a name badge, and a beer. I’d envisioned spending a leisurely afternoon sipping beer provided by Trumer Pilsner (the event sponsor) with about a hundred other scavengers, and the day seemed to be turning out that way.

But neither I nor the organizers were quite prepared for the four-hour clusterfuck that awaited us. Soon the volunteers were drowning in a mile-high volcano of pants, shirts, scarves, and underwear. By noon, the event’s official start time, a line wound around 19th Street. At 12:30 p.m. the place was packed. It was as if every hipster in the Mission had gotten wind of an opportunity for free music, beer, and dancing and had gathered up their unwanted clothes to join the party — a party that happened to result in free clothing for charity organizations like A Woman’s Place, the AIDS Emergency Fund, and San Francisco General Hospital.

FREE YOUR MIND


Since starting in Lewis and Hernandez’s apartment and then relocating, the SwapSF event has become so popular that it’s getting hard to handle. Even the duo have been surprised by its sudden and exponential growth. It seems that by using sarcastic graphic design on their flyers, guerrilla promotion techniques (word of mouth, stickers, blogs, etc.), and a refrigerator full of beer, Hernandez and Lewis have tapped into a new way to market charity events to a community of self-obsessed hipsters. Like Malone, the SwapSF duo see something wrong with the way our culture consumes and wastes, but they’re reluctant to jump on a soapbox — or even stand close to one.

Which may be why their parties have been garnering more attention and support than have the more traditional free markets that have been held across the nation for years. Malone and her contemporaries are creating awareness with no pretenses, no preaching, and no Hacky Sack–playing hippies. They are nurturing a world of gift exchange that speaks to a new generation of recyclers who enjoy the selfish thrills of scoring, a good party, and daytime drinking more than — or at least as much as — the satisfaction people find in collective self-sacrifice and charity.

Even San Francisco Dump artist Nemo Gould isn’t making his garbage art purely, or even mostly, as a political statement. "By virtue of it being made out of garbage, my art does make a statement about waste and overconsumption," Gould said. "But that’s not what it’s really about." Although Gould sees the danger in the complex environmental situations that create places like the SF Dump, his desire to work there had more to do with personal satisfaction than with changing the world. The dump’s Artist in Residence Program offers one of the most coveted positions in the city because it guarantees lifelong access to free garbage.

"There’s a scavenger spirit," Gould said. "Whoever has it is compelled to collect. Whatever comes after that is up to the scavenger."

The scavenger spirit is currently creating a subculture. Like skateboarders who view the city’s byways as a concrete playground, the new breed of scavengers looks at the urban environment from a different perspective. In their eyes the streets of San Francisco are aisles in a seven-mile-by-seven-mile warehouse of free shit. Their primary goal is to decorate their homes with one-of-a-kind furniture, dress their bodies in fly gear, and pad their pocketbooks, all while avoiding overdraft charges and, on the side, helping to generate awareness. In their separate and edgy styles, Gould, Malone, Hernandez, Lewis, and Schirmer have managed to turn this spirit into a lifestyle that doesn’t alienate people with its self-righteousness. I mean, everyone wants free shit, right? Who can’t relate to that?

THE (FREE) SHIT LIST

There’s a fine line between scavenging to make a statement and being a straight-up freeloader. Luckily, it’s up to the individual to decide exactly where that line is drawn. Here are some resources for learning more about the score.

FREEGAN.INFO


Information about strategies for sustainable living beyond capitalism; includes freegan hot spots in San Francisco.

freegan.info/?page=SanFrancisco

REALLY, REALLY FREE MARKET


A monthly alternate-economy festival and a really good place to get rid of your old stuff.

www.reallyreallyfree.org

MISSION INDIE MART


Kelly Malone and Charles Hurbert’s unique party take on the freegan ethos.

www.myspace.com/missionindiemart

SWAPSF


Jason Lewis and Monica Hernandez’s fabulous swap bonanza.

www.swapsf.com

MYOPENBAR.COM


A list of every open bar, happy hour, and extremely cheap alcohol event in the city.

sf.myopenbar.com

GOING.COM


A cross between MySpace and Yelp that focuses entirely on events, including a free section featuring happy hours, art openings, and concert ticket giveaways.

www.going.com

SAN FRANCISCO DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT


Official city site for recycling, disposal, and reuse information.

www.sfenvironment.org

SAN FRANCISCO DUMP


Learn about our city’s unique take on garbage and strategies for recycling.

www.sunsetscavenger.com

SCRAPEDEN SF


An art foundation dedicated to transforming trash into interactive public sculptures.

www.blackrockarts.org/projects/scrapeden-sf

ARTGOODHITLERBAD


Mission Indie Mart cofounder Hurbert blogs his best scavenger finds.

www.artgoodhitlerbad.com

NEMO GOULD


The latest artist in residence at the SF Dump has been making cool stuff from garbage for years.

www.nemomatic.com

The price of the sweeps

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› amanda@sfbg.com

The number of homeless individuals slapped with quality-of-life citations and the cost to the city of processing those citations reached new highs in the past 14 months, according to a study released by Religious Witness with Homeless People. San Francisco taxpayers have paid more than $2 million for more than 15,000 citations issued to people for crimes committed because they have no place to live.

"The quality-of-life citation … begins an extremely expensive process," said Michael Bien, a lawyer on the steering committee of Religious Witness, an interfaith activist group started in 1993 by Sister Bernie Galvin.

The study, released at an Oct. 4 press conference, was based on documents provided by various city departments. The authors collated the costs from the initial ticket issued by a cop through the entire court process, including the new price of prosecution by the District Attorney’s Office (see "The Crime of Being Homeless," 10/3/07).

The results are an update of a similar survey conducted last year (see "Homeless Disconnect," 9/5/06). Collectively, the two studies found that a total of 46,684 citations have been issued to homeless people, at a cost of more than $7.8 million, since Mayor Gavin Newsom took office.

But the mayor might not want you to know that. While Religious Witness was unveiling the study at a press conference in the South Light Court of City Hall, the mayor was hosting a simultaneous event about his heavily promoted Care Not Cash program, which provides homeless people with services and housing instead of the money they once received through the County Adult Assistance Program.

"What really bothers me," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the crowd gathered to hear Religious Witness, "is that we learn at the last minute that Mayor Newsom decides to have a press conference at the exact same time. To me, that couldn’t be more base and exhibitive of bad form … to try and upstage a press conference like this." He said the mayor’s administration should be working with organizations like Religious Witness, not competing against them.

NEWSOM WON’T MEET


Galvin expressed dismay that the mayor chose not to attend, on top of scheduling a competing press conference on the issue of homelessness. "We’ve never had a press conference where we didn’t have full press coverage," Galvin said.

"We’ve been trying to meet with Mayor Newsom since the day he took office," Bien said. "He hasn’t even given us the dignity of a response."

Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard, said he knew nothing about the event until he returned from his boss’s fete at the Pierre Hotel, a single-room-occupancy hotel on Jones Street that houses some Care Not Cash recipients. He denied any intention to detract attention from Religious Witness’s study. "I chose to do this a couple of weeks ago. There’s no deep, dark conspiracy," Ballard said. The day was chosen to announce that Care Not Cash had "reached a significant milestone of housing over 2,000 formerly homeless individuals," according to a press release.

Actually, the Care Not Cash program exceeded the 2,000 mark in August, according to statistics posted on the mayor’s Web site.

This is not the first time the mayor has scheduled a competing press conference. In June, on the same day the Board of Supervisors passed the city’s Community Choice Aggregation plan for more city-owned renewable energy, the mayor announced a new partnership with Pacific Gas and Electric Co., to study tidal power (see "Turning the Tides," 6/27/07).

Religious Witness chose Oct. 4 to release the study results because it’s the Feast of St. Francis, a day celebrating the city’s patron saint, "a man known to have enormous compassion," Father Louie Vitale explained. "Does the mayor have compassion fatigue?" he wondered aloud.

The decisions about where a city spends money speak volumes about its values. "Every budget is a moral document," said John Fitzgerald, who enumerated many other uses to which the $2 million could have gone, from placing 1,028 people in three-month residential drug treatment to five new drop-in mental health clinics, 157 new caseworkers, or 10,230 preventable evictions.

THE NEW MATRIX


Sup. Chris Daly, who attended but did not sponsor the Religious Witness press conference, said, "Not only is the use of police to target homeless people uncompassionate and inhumane, but it’s also ineffective." He recalled the first Religious Witness press conference, which denounced then-mayor Frank Jordan’s Matrix program, which teamed police officers with social workers to remove homeless people from Union Square and later Golden Gate Park. That program was deemed a failure because it criminalized homeless people and alienated them from helpful services by teaming outreach workers with law enforcement.

"We’re repeating a policy that we know is a failure," Daly said. "It’s a complete lack of compassion."

Recently Daly made public a memo he obtained from the mayor’s office through a public records request. The document outlined a new "downtown outreach plan," similar in sound and structure to Jordan’s Matrix. In a Sept. 28 Weekly Report to Newsom’s chief of staff, Phil Ginsburg, deputy chief of staff Julian Potter wrote, "The pilot program includes three separate teams of officers and social service staff that work a 15-block area" in two separate shifts patrolling the SoMa district. "In each of the three teams an officer will work in tandem with two social service representatives. Any person committing a crime (littering, encampment, trespassing, urinating, defecating, dumping, blocking sidewalk, intoxication, etc.) will be asked to cease the behavior and enter into services. If the individual resists services the officer will issue a citation."

Though it’s reminiscent of the approach that Jordan advocated, both the Operation Outreach team, made of police officers who typically interface with homeless people, and the Homeless Outreach Team, operated by the Department of Human Services, have denied they would accept the approach as Potter penned it.

"I have to be very emphatic," said Dr. Rajesh Parekh, director of HOT. "We are not going to be teamed up with police officers." Though police officers often refer HOT to specific people, he said recent news reports are inaccurate and "in the interest of our clients we’ve never done shoulder-to-shoulder work."

Lt. David Lazar, who heads the San Francisco Police Department’s Operation Outreach, agreed that his officers won’t walk in lockstep with the doctors and social workers who are offering services. But the line can get a little fuzzy: "We’re there at the same time, but we’re not necessarily together," he said. "We’re separate in our approach."

"Basically what the memo is proposing is illegally arresting people," Jenny Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told us.

Under state law, people can’t be taken into custody for infractions like urination and littering. But camping illegally can be considered a misdemeanor, and a citation could eventually lead to an arrest and a jury trial. Prosecuting and imprisoning people is far more expensive than providing shelter.

While some see the coupling of enforcement with services as a way to encourage more people to get help, others contend it’s not a simple equation.

"I think some people are not always able to say yes the first time we do outreach with them," Parekh said. "I’m hoping that as time goes on we’ll be able to persuade them. It’s an ongoing process. It’s not a one-time thing." He said more than half of the help offered is accepted in some form, but it can take as many as 20 attempts to win over what amounts to a small number of people who require persuasion.

Representatives from the Coalition on Homelessness on Oct. 4 witnessed the first of the SoMa sweeps, or "displacements," as they’re more kindly called, and confirmed that the cops and service providers had some distance between them.

"That’s what they did during the first month of Matrix," Daly said to the Guardian. "That will change over time."

In the meantime, the supervisor has reintroduced a $5 million allocation for supportive housing for homeless people that was passed by the board last spring but defunded by Newsom.

Bless the animalia

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I completely spaced that last Thursday, Oct 4, was World Animal Day (known to the more ecumenical among us as the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi) — I was probably busy beating my kitty. KIDDING! I was beating my fish. But fur flew in the City, I bet, as many people hauled their four-footed friends to church to have them blessed.

No comment on that. (What’s the Latin for ringworm again? Tinea.) But there’s a pretty nifty gallery show right now at David Cunningham Projects in SoMa that pays tribute to the wee people in fur coats, called “Animal Rites.” It features works of artists as various as Ireland’s Michael Beirne, fab homegirl Kerri Lee Johnson, and even an anonymous artist from the 17th century. Stop by and pet your eyes. And click here for more info, including some more neato images.

michaelbierne.jpg
Michael Beirne, Untitled, 2004

kerrileejohnson.jpg
Kerri Lee Johnson, Rabbithead girl, boy, horse

“Animal Rites”
Through Nov. 10
David Cunningham Projects
1928 Folsom, SF
415-341-1538
www.davidcunninghamprojects.com

Gay times

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

A series of slide projections cycling through a gamut of theater posters greets audiences taking their seats at Theatre Rhinoceros’s 30th season opener. Ranging in design from the openly trashy to the quietly tony, many of these posters offer eye-catching portions of skin and equally intriguing titles: Cocksucker: A Love Story, Deporting the Divas, Pogey Bait, Show Ho, Intimate Details, Barebacking, and Hillbillies on the Moon. It adds up to a hefty if scantily clad body of work that owes its existence to a good extent to the advent of Theatre Rhinoceros. Begun in 1977 by Alan Estes in a SoMa leather bar with a production of Doric Wilson’s The West Street Gang, the Rhino today is the longest-running LGBT theater in the country.

Thirty years like these call for a moment of reflection, and the Rhino’s lasts a brisk and enjoyable 70 minutes. Conceived and directed by John Fisher, who became artistic director in 2002, Theatre Rhinoceros: The First Thirty Years takes a jaunty look back at a raucous, at times traumatic, but overall remarkable theatrical career intimately tied to the social and political history of the queer community. While making no attempt to be exhaustive, or exhausting, Fisher’s swift, celebratory pastiche (with dramaturgy by actor and associate artistic director Matt Weimer) neatly suggests the range of artistic output and the sweep of events and personalities that have gone into defining the theater and its times.

The bulk of the show comprises a choice selection of scenes and songs from productions past (with some original compositions and arrangements by Don Seaver and snazzy choreography by Angeline Young), put on by a capable five-person ensemble, all but one veterans of previous Rhino shows. Sporadically introduced by Fisher — who as MC strikes the right note at once, with a deadpan motorized entrance onto a stage decked out (by designer John Lowe) in a shimmering red glitter curtain worthy of Cher or Merv Griffin — the selections progress more or less chronologically, though the cast leads off with a rendition of "Dirty Dreams of a Clean-Cut Kid," from the musical of the same name by lyricist Henry Mach and composer Paul Katz, which was a hit for the Rhino in 1990. It’s an apt piece to introduce part one of the show, "Coming Out/Living Out," the first of four sections charting the development of the theater and its audience.

Other highlights include a scene from Theresa Carilli’s Dolores Street, an early lesbian-themed play that marked the Rhino’s (at the time somewhat controversial) turn to more inclusive queer programming. It’s a still tart and funny comedy about the relationships in a young lesbian household in San Francisco, at least judging by the scene expertly reproduced by Laurie Bushman and Alice Pencavel.

The live sequences come interspersed with videotaped interviews of Rhino founders and associates, including Lanny Baugniet, P.A. Cooley, Donna Davis, and Tom Ammiano. The cast also reads excerpts from letters to the theater from subscribers and some well-known playwrights, most offering praise and thanks, others caviling at the quality of a specific production, expressing indignation over liberties taken with a script, or offering resistance to the changes in programming that opened the stage to lesbian themes and, eventually, many other queer voices. (It’s indicative of how far things have come that a letter like this last one, which pointed to once serious divisions in the larger gay community, elicited only comfortable laughter from the opening night’s audience.)

In part two, "AIDS," the ensemble re-creates highlights from the Rhino’s historic long-running revue, The AIDS Show: Artists Involved with Death and Survival. A collaborative venture between 20 Bay Area artists and an unprecedented, defiantly upbeat response to the terrifying onset of the AIDS crisis, the show took aim at the still largely repressed issue of safe sex through such numbers as Karl Brown and Matthew McQueen’s cheeky sizzler "Rimmin’ at the Baths" and their equally clever and forthright "Safe Livin’ in Dangerous Times" (both beautifully rendered by the full cast of Theatre Rhinoceros), as well as the terrible toll in drastically foreshortened lives (seen here from the perspective of a mother, affectingly played by Bushman, in Adele Prandini’s "Momma’s Boy"). The AIDS Show, which went on to tour the country and put the Rhino on the national map, premiered to packed houses in 1984, the year its creator and Rhino founder Estes died of the disease.

This show’s parts three and four deal with the growing diversity of voices and issues in the years of relative liberation and mainstream exposure for the LGBT population. A scene from Brad Erickson’s Sexual Irregularities (played by Weimer and Kim Larsen) broaches the conflict between homosexuality and religion, a theme increasingly explored in new work for the stage, while one from Guillermo Reyes’s Deporting the Divas (played by Larsen and Mike Vega) points to the increasing presence of minority voices, reporting on the gay experience from the perspectives of particular ethnic subcultures.

In the postmodern micropolitics of sexual identity characteristic of the new millennium (and spoofed hilariously by Weimer, Larsen, and Vega in a scene from Fisher’s Barebacking), queer theater is characterized by increasingly hybrid categories and a plethora of voices from all sectors of experience. The cast sums up the road thus far with a characteristically proud and wry glance at the possibilities ahead in the show’s final, original number, "The Rhino" (by Seaver, with lyrics by Weimer). But, to invoke an older song, anything goes.

THEATRE RHINOCEROS: THE FIRST THIRTY YEARS

Through Oct. 14

Wed.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m.; $15–$35

Theatre Rhinoceros

2926 16th St., SF

(415) 861-5079

www.therhino.org

Sutter bleeds St. Luke’s

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Dr. Bonita Palmer has worked at the embattled St. Luke’s Hospital on the southwest corner of César Chávez and Valencia for 17 years.

Before a packed room of union organizers and religious leaders Sept. 12 at St. Mary’s Cathedral near Japantown, she gave a brief speech about her experiences at the beloved but financially troubled hospital.

"St. Luke’s has been struggling to stay afloat for many years," Palmer told the audience. "Under managed care, reimbursements are down, the numbers of uninsured patients are up, and the growing gap between income and cost of care stresses the health of working people."

Money woes at St. Luke’s are no secret. Its parent company, California Pacific Medical Center, an otherwise lucrative group of San Francisco hospitals owned by Sacramento’s Sutter Health, describes the losses at St. Luke’s as anywhere from $20 million to $30 million annually.

Patient advocates and unions representing St. Luke’s workers have long feared closure of the hospital and its badly needed acute-care services, which thousands of residents — the city’s poorest among them, living nearby in the SoMa, Mission, and Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhoods — often visit when they can’t get expensive medical treatment elsewhere.

The hospital continually faces cuts executed by the CPMC, from its downgraded neonatal nursery to the subacute unit, where, Palmer says, patients who require nonemergency but highly specialized care from professionals are being turned away. "Sutter scrapped its plan for a much-needed upgrade to our emergency room even as we continue to receive the overflow of patients from" San Francisco General Hospital, she said.

Staffers learned most recently that outpatient physical therapy, which had already been trimmed, will be done away with completely, while the hospital’s 36-bed inpatient psychiatric unit and outpatient clinic have already been closed. A woman in the audience confessed afterward that she was nearly brought to tears by Palmer’s tale.

The decisions only worsened Sutter’s reputation across Northern California for dwelling on its bottom line and further enraged the United Healthcare Workers–West union, which represents thousands of Sutter workers and with which the company has regularly battled for a decade.

St. Luke’s contains one of the most active emergency rooms in the city, and aside from General Hospital a mile or so away on Potrero Avenue, it serves more patients benefiting from Medi-Cal and Sutter’s version of charity care services than just about any other facility.

The CPMC, which fully merged with St. Luke’s in January, promises the hospital will be a part of the company’s future. But the CPMC also comes closer every day to beginning construction of a new $1.7 billion hospital on Cathedral Hill, closer to the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. And critics worry that CPMC’s new bid proves not only where its priorities are but also that once-independent St. Luke’s — opened in 1871 by an Episcopal minister — will suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Sup. Tom Ammiano, who’s closely observed the fate of St. Luke’s for years, says the CPMC is slowly amputating one of the few hospitals left in the southern portion of San Francisco while paying lip service to nonprofit health outreach.

"They lie without guile," he said. "Waterboarding would be more enjoyable than dealing with these people."

Sutter initially took over St. Luke’s in 2001 as part of a settlement agreement after the hospital sued Sutter in 1999, alleging state antitrust violations in Sutter’s brokering of an exclusive contract with the Bay Area’s largest network of doctors. St. Luke’s officials claimed the contract stripped wealthier patients away from the hospital, which hurt its bottom line.

The settlement required Sutter to bankroll St. Luke’s with a series of subsidies — and included a promise of up to $20 million for needed retrofit work that doesn’t appear to have been done — while allowing the hospital to remain somewhat independent. The terms expired last year, and St. Luke’s has since been completely folded into the family of San Francisco hospitals known as the CPMC, which includes the Davies Campus, nestled between the Castro neighborhood and the Lower Haight, the Pacific Campus on Buchanan Street, and the California Campus in the opulent Pacific Heights area.

While St. Luke’s can’t complete a fiscal-year cycle without coming up short of cash, the CPMC as a subsidiary of Sutter Health earns tens of millions of dollars in net income annually, much of which is sent to Sutter’s home office in Sacramento. In 2003, for instance, the CPMC transferred $118 million in net income — the money remaining after expenses are covered, which any other business would call profit — out of the city. Other ailing Sutter-owned hospitals around the state receive inflows of money from Sacramento, such as a Santa Rosa medical center that got $16 million in 2003, according to documents Sutter must provide to the state.

"In good times, affiliates share a portion of their revenue in excess of their expenses to help strengthen the network through this shared balance-sheet approach," Sutter spokesperson Karen Garner told us. "And in times of need, our affiliates can count on the network to help ensure that those services can continue to be available to their local communities."

But Sutter has announced that it plans to close part of the money-losing Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa, which faces high seismic retrofit costs, fueling concerns that something similar will happen at St. Luke’s. Sutter also last year moved to sever ties with Marin General Hospital and wash its hands of a costly needed retrofit there. An acute-care facility in San Leandro that loses money may soon be closed as well, as locals there learned just this month when a Sutter employee leaked the news to the San Leandro Times.

"CPMC plans to stop serving unprofitable areas, ignoring their obligation to the community," Helen York Jones, a union steward of CPMC employees, said at a July rally outside St. Luke’s. "How can they be entrusted with a large share of the area’s health care system?"

For a supposedly nonprofit chain of hospitals, Sutter Health is very profitable, having one of its best years in 2006. Its net income from operations amounted to more than $500 million, an increase of 33 percent from the previous year, which its execs attributed to the company’s outsize investments. Sutter controls more than two dozen medical centers throughout California and one located in Hawaii.

The company’s mammoth $2 billion investment portfolio brought the company $159 million in returns last year. Sutter’s CPMC subsidiary also benefited from more than $50 million in local, state, and federal tax breaks during 2005, according to figures maintained by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Meanwhile, Sutter has announced plans to spend $1.1 billion fully replacing facilities in Sacramento and San Mateo. In fact, the company broke records in June when it acquired state-backed bond financing of $958 million — which essentially amounts to a low-interest, tax-free loan — which it intends to use for seismic retrofit projects at several of its hospitals across the state.

But according to state records, the company doesn’t intend to use any of the loan money for retrofitting the St. Luke’s campus, part of which the state has concluded poses "a significant risk of collapse and a danger to the public after a strong earthquake," according to state structural ratings. State law gives hospitals until 2013 to meet strict seismic standards or shut down.

"Sutter wants to use money to fuel their corporate expenses in markets that are making money or have the potential to make money," Sal Roselli, president of the United Healthcare Workers–<\d>West, said.

Roselli believes the CPMC wants to close the emergency room at St. Luke’s and more or less turn the hospital into a clinic, perhaps once the Cathedral Hill location is completed; Sutter, he said, promises to maintain community services during its hospital takeovers but often backslides on those promises within months.

CPMC spokesperson Kevin McCormack doesn’t outright deny the possibility that St. Luke’s will someday see vastly fewer ER patients.

"St. Luke’s is still going to be a vital part of anything we do in terms of providing health care in San Francisco," McCormack said. "We intend to strengthen its role — not just to keep it going, but to make it better. Because right now what happens is that a lot of people don’t have access to preventative care, so they end up using the emergency room when they have a problem with, say, diabetes or asthma."

But Ammiano remains skeptical.

"If we allow this to happen and if we can’t find alternatives," he said of the cuts at St. Luke’s, "it’s really going to not just tear a hole in the fabric of that neighborhood but also the whole southeast section."

Feast: 7 slop shops for functioning alcoholics

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Our mayor isn’t the only one who (allegedly) leads a Jekyll-and-Hyde life of steadfast labor and drunken debauchery. It seems most San Franciscans are highly productive by day, yet totally hammered almost every night. And we don’t let all the booze stop us from staying in shape either. We are notoriously healthy and hedonistic at the same time. It seems impossible, but the facts are there. SF ranks near the top of almost every "healthy-smart city" list, and yet we allegedly consume more booze per capita than any other city in America. The magic lies in the unified opposition of our daytime and nighttime eating habits. Afternoons spent counting carbs and choking down organic salads are balanced by nights of chain-smoking, guzzling beer, and ingesting some of the greasiest foods money can buy. The laws of the working drunkard state that if you’re gonna drink, you gotta eat. Thus, within walking distance of nearly every great SF bar there sits an equally amazing food stand. Just be sure to avoid these places by day. Beer goggles make you see food the same way they do ugly faces and flat asses.

EL FAROLITO


You can find the line cooks at El Farolito seasoning meat with their own sweat long after most taquerias have flipped their signs to cerrado. The Little Light House serves traditional Mexican street fare — which ranges from humdrum (bean burritos) to hilarious (brain and tongue tacos, a perfect gift for your totally hammered friend who "lost his wallet" at the last bar) — until 1 a.m. on weekdays and until 3 a.m. on weekends. Oily tortilla chips and colon-cleansing salsa make this sedentary roach coach an obligatory pit stop for anyone hoping to flush their system before morning.

2777 Mission, SF. (415) 826-4870; 4817 Mission, SF. (415) 337-5500; 2950 24th, SF. (415) 641-0758

CREPES A-GO-GO


The Crepes A-Go-Go on 11th Street robs European burritos of their foreign mystique by serving them from a dirty trailer, the way God intended. You’re not going to find any lightly powdered Suzettes here, but you can score just about any other variation on the theme. Sweet, savory, sickening? Crepes A-Go-Go has it all. Equipped with multiple brands of hot sauce, "fresh" vegetables, meat, assorted cheeses, and jumbo jars of Nutella, this French chuck wagon and its chefs will have you digesting before your head hits the pillow … or sidewalk.

350 11th St., SF. (415) 503-1294

THE TAMALE LADY


You can’t plan every weekend around bars with food nearby, but your chances of topping off a bender with some down-home Mexican cuisine will grow exponentially if you stay within walking distance of the dives in this review. Virginia Ramos, the svelte tamale nymph, spends her weekends hawking cheap eats at Amber, Delirium, Zeitgeist, and bars all around Folsom Street from about 10 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Pork, chicken, and vegetable are her specialties.

Mostly in the Mission and SoMa, SF.

THE BACON-WRAPPED HOT DOG MAN


San Francisco may not have a fleet of bacon-dog vendors roaming the streets as does Hollywood, but we do have a lone soldier. Adam Gonzales-Hernandez, better known as the Bacon-Dog Cart by his fans at yelp.com — where he’s listed as the fifth-best restaurant in SF — pops up in the right place at the right time (usually around Mission and 16th from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.). He can also be found later in the evening under the freeway by The Endup.

NAAN-N-CURRY


Indian chefs have yet to devise decent handheld versions of palak paneer, chicken curry, or mixed sabzi, so you should only stumble into Naan-N-Curry’s 24-hour downtown location if you’re cool with smelling like coriander and cumin for the next week or so. Cheap and reliable curry in a cup.

336 O’Farrell, SF. (415) 346-1443

ISLAND CAFÉ


When you’ve been knocking back pints of Guinness at Shannon Arms (or at any Irish pub in the Sunset) since noon, and it’s now 2:30 a.m., you’ve got a slim chance of avoiding a hellish hangover. Some people call their dealers, some give up and sacrifice a sick day, but the truly dedicated head over to Island Café, the city’s only 24-hour Hawaiian joint. Spam burgers, Polynesian nachos, pineapple milk shakes, and off-the-wall pork dishes will have your stomach pumping double time to rid itself of toxins.

901 Taraval, SF. (415) 661-3303

MR. PIZZA MAN


Don’t freak out if you’ve missed the Tamale Lady or forgot to tell your cabby to stop at one of the other spots on this list. Just stumble to your room, log onto Mr. Pizza Man’s Web site, and chillax with a snifter of Fernet as San Francisco’s patron saint of late-night delivery makes you a pie to order. Mr. Pizza Man’s got all the fixin’s — pineapple, jalapeño, and cheese make a tried-and-true hangover preventative — as well as locations within five minutes of almost every address in the city.

Locations across the Bay Area. 1-800-570-5111, www.mrpizzaman.com

Feast: 6 eateries uber alles

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French and Italian cuisines always get the raves; German food tends to get short shrift. It’s usually called heavy, not comfort food, and beets, pickles, and sauerkraut aren’t on the instant craving gratification list for most Americans. But they are for me. And while I’ve yet to sample a schnitzel as heavenly as I did last year in Leipzig, local interpretations of German cuisine are worthy competitors. As summer comes to a close (or to Burning Man) and my thoughts may turn to Oktoberfest (which, you should know, happens in September in Germany), I find myself wanting to eat German food over everything else … essen über alles, if you will. Without belaboring the obvious — like how good-looking Teutonic folk are, and how the massive lists of German beer can be poured out in half liters, liters, or glass boots to suit your drink kink — here are a handful of very spaetzle spots.

SUPPENKÜCHE


The cool, understated interior design that pairs monastery style with a beer-hall aesthetic — two German traditions — reveals owner-chef Fabrizio Wiest’s former life as a graphic designer. He also makes special T-shirts for events like Oktoberfest and, last year, Germany’s hosting of the World Cup. Suppenküche has been the kaiser of SF German restaurants since opening in 1993; its food, vibe, and crowd are among the most engaging of any such place in this city. The venison medallions in red wine plum sauce are my personal favorite, but just about every dish here is outstanding — washed down, of course, with a choice from a deluge of amazing brews.

525 Laguna, SF. (415) 252-9289, www.suppenkuche.com

WALZWERK


Part the thick, pinckel-yellow plastic curtain and enter the mesmerizing, anachronistic world of Walzwerk, San Francisco’s East German restaurant. Relish the redness of your beet soup below giant portraits of Engels, Marx, and Lenin, or devour hearty garlic roast pork or jaegerschnitzel with your comrades under a Young Pioneers camping poster. Walzwerk feels entirely foreign and imaginary, like someone’s grandmother’s East Berlin basement circa 1975. One of the city’s best culinary hideouts with a museumlike bathroom, Walzwerk probably won’t stay secret much longer as it increasingly enters the lives of others.

381 S. Van Ness, SF. (415) 551-7181, www.walzwerk.com

SCHNITZELHAUS


Wooden planks all rise to the same ceiling point with Austro-Germanic symmetry at SoMa’s cozy, Alpine-style hideaway. Go early on weekend nights for schweinehaxen, a pork leg dish (it runs out quickly), and pick the exceptional potato soup over salad. There are five sausage plates (but sadly not a combo sausage plate), lots of sauce-topped schnitzel variations (cream, pepper, lemon, anchovy), and other solid dishes like deer ragout and stellar sauerkraut. Despite occasional food downers (cold spaetzle), Schnitzelhaus is still a great little place.

294 Ninth St., SF. (415) 864-4038, www.schnitzel-haus.net

SCHROEDER’S


Gather your mates at Schroeder’s on Fridays for after-work beers and maybe a sausage appetizer plate. Enjoy the ladies’ beer-chugging contest. Drink more beer. Hop around clumsily with a buxom waitress in Bavarian costume to the sound of the polka band. Drink more beer. Watch as the fantastic murals become creepier and the deer heads continue staring at you — your clue to call a cab, right after you yell, "Endlich Freitag!" to the wall, or to the guys in lederhosen, and everyone laughs and hoists their mugs in a TGIF salute. Despite Schroeder’s status as the West Coast’s oldest German restaurant (it opened in 1893), the tour-bus quality deserves an upgrade. But it’s one of the best places to drink yourself silly, and I love it for that.

240 Front, SF. (415) 421-4778, www.schroederssf.com

ROSAMUNDE SAUSAGE GRILL/TORONADO


You don’t always want to sit down and pay for a big meal. Sometimes you just need something salty, meaty, and cheap … but a changeup from tacos. Hit the Lower Haight, mein Freund, for one wicked tandem. Get the meat fix (say, wild boar and apple sausage) at Rosamunde Sausage Grill, and bring it next door to Toronado for a German (and many, many other kinds) of beer.

545 Haight, SF. (415) 437-6851; 547 Haight, SF. (415) 863-2776, www.toronado.com

LEHR’S GERMAN SPECIALITIES


If your enthusiasm for German food has you craving special pickles, mustard, wursts, or spaetzle mix, visit Lehr’s in Noe Valley. Go anyway, actually, sample some of the chocolates and candy, and enjoy a spectacular throwback to family-run, neighborhood grocery stores. Let’s do the time warp again.

1581 Church, SF. (415) 282-6803*

Feast: 6 top-notch tipples

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Vanguards of the gastronomic West, we San Franciscans no longer teeter through establishments that struggle over cooking a steak or making a dry martini. Now it’s heirloom this, house-made that. But yet, too often we find menu exoticism riding roughshod over care and competence. Go to a grill in Millbrae and you may sooner find mustard-encrusted salmon than a truly good burger; likewise, walk into a lounge in SoMa and you might see a bartender rolling up his sleeves to make a Thai-basil gimlet, only to then throw some Jameson into decaying java to pass off as an Irish coffee. Fortunately, though, there are still some bars that don’t get caught up in this culinary hullabaloo and can pull off even the easiest drinks. Following are some of our favorites.

AMERICANO RESTAURANT AND BAR


If the intended goal of making a cosmopolitan is a cocktail that is at once darlingly pretty and also scrumptious to the average palate, then a couple of monkeys with a couple of bottles of liquor could make a whole tasting menu. The cosmo at Americano, though, is made with the same care the staff gives a martini: real sugariness matches the tartness, the cranberry juice is nothing more than a soft touch, ice chips float atop it all, and an astonishing amount of alcohol is fitted into the space provided. Americano, replete in hotel swank, also provides the perfect place for kicking back and mingling with fellow business types.

8 Mission, SF. (415) 278-3777, www.americanorestaurant.com

ELIXIR


There is a growing movement to put rye instead of bourbon in manhattans. While some followers of this ethos hold office hours at Elixir, the manhattan made here with Elixir’s hand-selected barrels of Eagle Rare Bourbon is a treat. Too often a manhattan’s distinguished tones will come together all hunky. Here, though, those same flavors are coaxed into a cuddle puddle of dignity. The drink’s insane smoothness doesn’t come from sanding away the subtler notes either but from polishing the whole thing up.

3200 16th St., SF. (415) 552-1633, www.elixirsf.com

BOURBON AND BRANCH


According to Esquire, Bourbon and Branch is one of the top bars in the country. It feels, then, a little perverse to recommend getting a gin and tonic here (not to mention a waste of time even bringing it up). But in a world where so many gin and tonics are rendered impotent with second-class tonic, Bourbon and Branch is clearing a path by making its own. Even with its slight orange flavor, this mixer is the perfect way to sparkle out even the nicest gin. (Of course, no Bombay Sapphire here). One terrible caveat: get here on a lucky day — the homemade tonic goes quickly.

501 Jones, SF. (415) 346-1735, www.bourbonandbranch.com

ACE CAFE


It’s not hard to find bars in San Francisco that cater to beer aficionados. It’s a little more difficult finding one that appeals to refreshment devotees. Such a person may appreciate an obscure microbrew but will really yearn for a Tecate that’s ice cold. Sadly, bar refrigerators in San Francisco are rarely chilly enough to bring out all the refreshment qualities of beer — but not Ace Cafe’s. The refrigerator here pumps out beers that make your palm burn if you hold them too long. If that’s not enough, Ace Cafe chills its glasses as well. And wait — what’s this? Are these pretzels to munch on? This place knows how to serve a beer.

1799 Mission, SF

LAZSLO


You wouldn’t think Laszlo, with its blaring techno, European clientele, and postindustrial decor, would be the place to relax with a White Russian at the end of an evening. But as the bar apparent of Foreign Cinema, it can consistently make a creamy but still cutting nightcap. Plus, the sidewalk tables provide a charming space for enjoying the Mission Street show.

2534 Mission, SF. (415) 401-0810, laszlobar.com

LI PO


The overwhelming mai tai–ness of Li Po comes across in everything from its bizarre, saturated decor to its sometimes even more bizarre bands and mishmash clientele. In fact, being here is like swimming in a giant mai tai. This wouldn’t be so bad, except the bartenders here maintain that their mai tai has a secret ingredient — and that could be bad for the skin. Fortunately, this secret ingredient does wonders for the taste of the drink. More than just your typical fruity cocktail, Li Po’s version will have you rocking out alone in the basement, only to come drooling back to fork over $7 for another. Yes, the place can sometimes attract tourists. But since when is having the chance to buy a mind-blowing beverage for a sexually confused Minnesotan a bad thing?

916 Grant, SF. (415) 982-0072*

Feast: 5 sexy suppers

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Some dates are sweet. You go to a nice restaurant with lacy tablecloths, order food that won’t make your breath stink later, have polite conversation while shyly catching each other’s eye over the rim of your wine glass, and hold hands tentatively as you walk to the car, wondering if you’ll share a delicate kiss before you part ways for the night. But these aren’t usually the dates I want. More often, I like my dates down and dirty, boozy and bawdy, or, at the very least, out of the ordinary. I want to be either seduced by the cuisine or seduced by my company, but either way, I want my evening out to get me off. Here are some date destinations that are a guaranteed sure thing.

ASIASF


You can’t talk about food and sex and San Francisco without talking about this SoMa phenomenon. The food is good — the crab cakes are more crab than filler, and the beef in the steak salad was good quality — but the real reason you’re here is the drag show, though "drag show" is an anemic phrase for describing what you’ll see. This swanky spot features some of the hottest women this side of the Y chromosome (or Thailand) and some of the best dramatic performances this side of the Fringe Festival. My personal favorite? Red-haired Ginger, who downed a liter of Grey Goose and a bottle of "pills" while lip-syncing to "All by Myself." Pair her performance with the mint-heavy pomegranate mojito, and you’ll find yourself trying to take her home at the end of the night. (Note: She won’t go — she has a beau.)

201 Ninth St., SF. (415) 255-2742, www.asiasf.com

MAHARANI’S


You know those fantasies you have about being royalty in some foreign country while you seduce your polite, well-mannered, yet kinky lover-to-be over a plate of something steamy? This is the place you want to do it. The main dining room isn’t much to look at, but get a reservation for the Fantasy Room and you’ll find yourself in a private, beaded booth with cucumber-infused drinking water, warm towels scented with rose water, and Indian food served more elegantly than you ever imagined it could be (think geometric plates and California cuisine–<\d>style garnishes). The prix-fixe menu is a bit overpriced, but the Kama Sutra cocktail really is titilutf8g. And there’s something to be said for having control over your own lights and playing shoeless footsy under your private table.

1122 Post, SF. (415) 775-1988, www.maharanirestaurant.com

OVATION AT THE INN AT THE OPERA


San Francisco does dive bars, and does them well. But this city also does sexy elegance in a way that’s particularly ours, and Ovation is a perfect example. This hotel restaurant is opulent and classically romantic, with green velvet chairs and white tablecloths and entrées that cost more than most parking tickets. But in true Bay Area style, it’s also accessible, comfortable, and beautiful in an understated way — all of which make it sneakily sexy. The small, intimate bar grounds the dining room, and a fireplace warms the dignified décor, which might otherwise seem cold and baroque. Plus, is there anything hotter than illicit bathroom sex when you’re all dressed up?

333 Fulton, SF. (415) 553-8100

WOODHOUSE FISH CO.


I’m not sure I understand the appeal of oysters. I’ve trained myself to like them, especially with a bit of horseradish and ketchup. But are they really an aphrodisiac? Is it because of their obvious resemblance to female body parts? Or is it because you know that if your date can handle their mucusy texture and fishy flavor, they surely can handle, uh, yours? I can’t begin to guess. I prefer the sides of broccoli and fries (both well made) over the seafood at this joint in the Safeway district. But there’s one thing I find truly sexy about Woodhouse oysters: on Tuesday nights, they’re $1 apiece. Which means that after filling up, there’s still enough cash for a shot of tequila at the Transfer and coffee in the morning. And what’s sexier than shellfish? A date that doesn’t break the bank.

2073 Market, SF. (415) 473-CRAB, www.woodhousefish.com

SUPPERCLUB


Dinner in bed? It’s almost too obvious. But you can’t deny the appeal of overt sexuality, even if it’s delivered in a stylized, sometimes-too-LA package. The all-white dining room at this dinner-as-experience destination is striking, and I’ve rarely tasted food so delicious and subtle — particularly the vegetarian options — as it is here. And whether it was watching a tranny strip down, without fanfare or theatricality, to his bald, tattooed, masculine self, or whether it was the Late Night Sneaky I ordered (top-shelf tequila, a Corona, and an ExportA cigarette in a shot glass), or whether it was just settling into the couch cushions as my dirty martini settled into my bloodstream, it was hard to wait to jump my date until we got home.

657 Harrison, SF. (415) 348-0900, www.supperclub.com*

Soma, Manhattan, and the SF Weekly

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I was a bit startled to see the supplement called “Spaces” fall out of my SF Weekly today; it’s a slick, 16-page fluffer for the real estate industry, complete with an ad for Vanguard Properties on the cover.

Even by the standards of shameless ad supplements, this is pretty low; selling the cover of anything to an advertiser is considered pretty shoddy form. I suspect (still waiting for confirmation from the Weekly folks) that the editorial department over there had nothing to do with this, but it does contain some stories (one marked “advertorial,” two others not marked at all) — and boy, are they a piece of work.

My favorite is called “Lifestyles of the Young and Wealthy: Is SoMa San Francisco’s neighborhood du jour?” The piece, by Chelsea Sime (who is not an SF Weekly staff writer) is all about a realtor named Michael Novia who lives in Sausalito but “knows first-hand how unique — and lucrative — the SoMa neighborhood has become.”

Novia’s proud that SoMa has come such a long way, and promises: “Five to 10 years from now, SoMa will be a little Manhattan.”

How lovely. What a great perspective for an alternative weekly to be promoting.

Oh, and by the way: If you go to the supplement’s website, as published, (sfweeklyspaces.com) not only is there nothing there, but it appears that SF Weekly doesn’t even own it.

Slow down the land rush

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EDITORIAL At around 11:30 p.m. on the evening of Aug. 30, the San Francisco Planning Commission, its members bleary-eyed and half asleep, approved an eight-unit housing development at 736 Valencia St., despite the anguished pleas of the neighbors. The project includes no affordable housing and is legally designated as condominiums, which means it doesn’t fit the stated goals of the eastern neighborhoods’ planning process, which is supposed to promote affordable housing.

But that planning process is still under way, the proposals so far are weak, and, in the meantime, every developer in town is trying to sneak under the wire and get a project approved before the new rules take effect. And the Planning Commission is allowing that to happen. The supervisors need to intervene now, before it’s too late.

The blueprint for zoning in the city’s eastern neighborhoods — some 2,200 acres that include the central waterfront, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Showplace Square and East SoMa — is critical to the city’s future. Those areas include many of the last industrial sites and blue-collar jobs in the city — and developers are eyeing the land for a massive influx of high-end housing.

If there are going to be decent-paying jobs that don’t require advanced academic degrees in San Francisco, and affordable housing for low-income and working-class people, it will require careful use of this land.

And so far, the signs aren’t good.

The project at 736 Valencia is a perfect example. The commissioners failed to account for the fact that this relatively small project is part of a much larger land grab in the neighborhood; at least six other projects are in the pipeline for a small stretch of that street, and together they’ll have a significant impact on the area. The last thing the Mission — desperate for family and affordable housing — needs is a long strip of new million-dollar condos, built with little in the way of community amenities and little regard for the needs of residents. And yet the commissioners have made it very clear that they aren’t going to slow anything down.

In effect, that means the entire eastern neighborhoods plan — and the hope for a significant increase in affordable housing in town — could be almost pointless. By the time the plan is in place — early next year at the earliest, and that may be an optimistic timeline — a lot of the land may already be spoken for, and a lot of nonconforming projects may already be under construction.

Remember: every market-rate housing project takes away land that could be used for affordable housing. And at this rate, there is no way the city can come close to meeting the goals set in the General Plan, which call for more than 60 percent of new housing in town to be available at below-market rate.

The supervisors need to step in, fast, and pass legislation barring any new development in the eastern neighborhoods until a final plan is in place. The land rush is on, and time is running out.<\!s>*

Supes should run redevelopment

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom, scrambling to blunt community criticism of the Redevelopment Agency’s activities in Bayview–Hunters Point, has appointed a new agency director, Fred Blackwell. But the problem was not with the top of the agency (the outgoing director, Marcia Rosen, was neither corrupt nor incompetent) but rather with the entire direction that redevelopment has taken in San Francisco under several generations of mayors. It’s time to take seriously the suggestion of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — that the agency be taken out of the mayor’s control and given to the district-elected supervisors.

Redevelopment is a powerful tool that has been terribly misused all over the nation, and the scars in San Francisco are real and lasting. A rapacious Redevelopment Agency determined to wipe out low-income housing devastated huge swaths of the Western Addition and South of Market in the 1960s, and the communities still haven’t fully recovered. Some people argue that the entire program should be abolished — that redevelopment should be consigned to the dustbin of bad urban history.

But at a time when it’s terribly hard for cities like San Francisco to raise money for affordable housing, basic infrastructure (see accompanying editorial), and ambitious programs like public power, the legal advantages of redevelopment are too good to give up. A state-chartered redevelopment agency sells bonds and raises money with nothing to back up the bonds except the projected increase in property taxes expected from improving a blighted area. The city can’t do that on its own; if it could, then raising, say, a billion dollars for affordable housing would be relatively simple.

In theory, the redevelopment agency could also fund municipal wi-fi, public power, and all sorts of other major projects.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of people in low-income neighborhoods don’t trust redevelopment — and given the history, it’s hard to blame them. But part of the essential problem with the Redevelopment Agency in past years has been its utter lack of accountability; the Western Addition and SoMa plans were drawn up in secret and executed with little regard for community input.

As long as San Francisco supervisors are elected by district, they will be, by definition, more accountable, closer to the neighborhoods, and less corrupted by money than any citywide elected official. Giving the board control over redevelopment is a far better model.

Plenty of cities allow their legislature to run redevelopment. The city councils of both Oakland and Berkeley also function as the directors of those cities’ redevelopment agencies. It’s time to move San Francisco into that column. *

Where are all the payphones?

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› news@sfbg.com

Click here to read more about payphone deregulation

When the big earthquake, terrorist attack, or other civic disaster finally hits San Francisco, a lot of people are going to be in for a major shock: their high-tech cell phones and computer-based office telephone systems might not work.

But after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, residents found there was still a way to reach their loved ones and let the world know they were OK; they used an old-fashioned communications tool that’s low tech, securely grounded, publicly accessible, and reliable.

It’s called a pay phone.

Next time there’s a disaster, we may not be so lucky: pay phones, fixtures of the public landscape for more than a century, have been quietly disappearing. And many of those that remain don’t work. These essential communication tools — good for emergencies, privacy, and the poor — are falling victim to deregulation laws, the greed of telecommunications companies, and the public’s obsession with high technology.

In San Francisco they’ve departed in droves from sidewalk carrels; corner stores; bus shelters; subway platforms; office, museum, and movie theater lobbies; supermarkets; shopping malls; city swimming pools and YMCAs; diners; parks; and gas stations. They’ve been disappearing at a rate of about 10 percent annually for the past four years, down from roughly 400,000 at the height of the dot-com boom to 150,000 today, trade group attorney Martin Mattes told state regulators last year. The decline in San Francisco mirrors those in California and the nation.

And while pay phones may seem like quaint relics of another era, they remain an important part of the nation’s communications system, serving millions of people who for one reason or another don’t have or can’t use cell phones. And consumer advocates say the loss of the pay phone system is a serious problem.

Although cell phones are pretty ubiquitous, not everyone can afford one — and not everyone can use one. For socially marginalized people, pay phones are still a lifeline. For people who can’t use wireless technology — and can’t afford a home phone line — they’re essential.

Why are pay phones vanishing? The ready answer — cell phones — identifies the technology that’s replacing them and cutting into their profits. But it doesn’t completely explain why a society that once valued pay phones — and may ultimately remember that it still does — has let them disappear. That story has more to do with the politics of deregulation and the profits of telecom companies.

THE POWER OF OLD TECH


In the 2004 climate-change disaster film The Day after Tomorrow, Dennis Quaid plays a climatologist who anticipates dire consequences from a sudden oceanic temperature drop, which is triggered by global warming and leaves New York City frozen solid. From the beaux arts NYC Public Library where he’s taken shelter, the Quaid character’s son (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) needs to call Dad in Washington, D.C., but the cells don’t work. So he finds a half-submerged mezzanine pay phone with a dial tone ("It’s connected to the telephone lines," he notes brightly), drops in a couple of coins, and bingo — he gets Dad’s insider travel advisory.

Such a scenario — at least the pay phone part — isn’t science fiction. In fact, it has played out like that in NYC a few times and also did so in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. When the Twin Towers went down Sept. 11, cell phone masts went down with them. Lines were endless as outgoing calls from lower Manhattan funneled through two nearby landline pay phones, as reported on NBC’s Today. Ditto in the summer heat wave of 1999, when New York air conditioners on overdrive toppled wireless transmitters like dominoes, silencing cell phones from NYC to the Great Lakes. Landline telephones — including pay phones — continued to ring. And when the waters rose in New Orleans, residents flocked to pay phones made available for free use to contact loved ones and let the world know they were stranded.

Landline pay phones — like wired home and office phones — are simply more durable and reliable. "I love my cell phone," said Natalie Billingsley, who heads the California Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates. "But I wouldn’t give up my landline. There’s not enough [wireless] network redundancy."

When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area in 1989, electricity and cell phone service were out for hours, but, Billingsley said, "landline phones were back up in 10 minutes."

Regina Costa of San Francisco’s the Utility Reform Network recalled that when the quake trashed Pacific Street in Santa Cruz, the public switch connecting local phones to the larger network worked despite a local power outage.

The reason, Costa says, is that the traditional wired phone network has a robust, independent electrical backup. Not so wireless transmitters and cable fiber-optic systems, both powered by the public grid.

"Wire lines are a really big public safety feature," Billingsley told us. Backup generators at switching points, where regional and long-distance lines converge, create "all kinds of redundancies" for rerouting calls if parts of the network go down.

That’s not just a technological issue. The new tech networks lack robustness and redundancy, Billingsley said, in part because such standards are no longer mandated. Before telecommunications were deregulated, companies were required to pay for reliability. Now reliability is no longer a public service. Under deregulation, reliability is more spotty. Last year state legislators addressed the need for adequate backup power-pack standards for Internet phones — but in the end, consumers will need to buy the backup systems.

In Japan, where the old but vital wired pay phone network has been reduced by more than half (from 910,000 to 390,000) since the public phone company was privatized in 1985, a public safety official recently warned against such shortsightedness. "To remove public telephones amounts to decreasing the means of communication during emergencies," disaster prevention program director Hitoshi Omachi of Yokohama’s Chiiki Bosai Laboratory observed in a May 8 Asahi Weekly article about cell phones overtaking pay phones. "People should think about measures to maintain public phones, including financial assistance from the central or local governments."

Then there are the social issues. Beth Abrams, director of Grupo de la Comida, which feeds 2,000 immigrants and refugees in the Mission each week, said many are dependent on pay phones. "The thing to remember," Abrams told us, "is that a pay phone could mean somebody’s life in an emergency, when time is of the essence." A child suffering an asthma attack or an adult with heart disease or diabetes (the occurrence of which is high in the immigrant community) "often needs immediate response and has difficulty walking far," Abrams said. Many people whom her group serves don’t have cell phones and rely on pay phones when caring for children outside the home or answering job ads.

Howard Levy, attorney and executive director of Legal Assistance to the Elderly, which serves about 1,000 clients a month, told us many seniors in the Tenderloin and in SoMa hotels don’t have home phones or cell phones. Besides the disincentive of cell phone cost, "folks beyond a certain age don’t feel comfortable with the technology," which is not designed for people "whose vision isn’t so great," Levy said.

Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness told us that "a lot of folks do have cell phones nowadays, on a prepaid card," but have only intermittent access, and none when the card runs out. "Poor people in general — people who have extremely low incomes — even if they have a phone at home, [it] can be shut off at times," she said. "Pay phones are really important for emergency situations for folks living outside," or when homeless people are first on the scene, to report an emergency.

In an impromptu survey of eight clients at the Independent Living Resource Center, a San Francisco disability-rights advocacy and support group, services coordinator Diane Rovai found three who had been seriously inconvenienced by lack of pay phone access. One needed a ride home from the airport and was stranded after an entire bank of pay phones was removed; another "missed a really important meeting" after getting wrong directions (the phone she finally found "was dirty and not in good repair"); and the third, who has no cell phone, has problems when she goes out to meet people.

"There are still people who depend on pay phones," particularly in rural communities, Anna Montes said. She belongs to San Francisco’s Latino Issues Forum and is a member of the PUC advisory committee on Universal Lifeline Telephone Service, which subsidizes phone service for low-income households.

Four percent of state households don’t have basic phone service, she said, and many of those are poor and Latino and rely on pay phones.

"Pay phones should be supported because there are individuals who can’t afford [cell phones] and places where wireless doesn’t work," said Bill Nussbaum, a telecommunications lawyer at TURN. "Public policy is a reason to wrap [pay phones] into the goal of universal service, the concept of maximum penetration with reliable and affordable phone service for all."

THE END OF PUBLIC SERVICE


One reason the government has allowed pay phones to disappear is that most people don’t think about them. Cell phones often seem like all one needs to stay in touch, at least to those who own them.

"There’s an unfortunate assumption that everyone has a cell phone. It’s not true," said Harold Feld, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit public interest media and telecommunications law firm.

Regulators used to feel it was important for people to have access to public phones, but "they don’t think it’s important anymore," he told us.

Feld pointed out that pay phones used to be owned by AT&T, which created and maintained the pay phone network as part of a widely accessible phone system. Government-guaranteed profit on the company’s investment essentially subsidized even those pay phones that weren’t profitable, an arrangement institutionalized by the 1934 Telecommunications Act. Moreover, as a regulated public utility, the phone company needed permission to get out of the pay phone business.

With the monopoly’s breakup in 1984, competitors could enter the pay phone market, and by 1996 AT&T could get out of it.

"The old Bell monopoly came with a historical sense of public service that did not survive the [company’s] breakup and the new cost-benefit accountants and the MBA bottom-line artists," technology historian Iain Boal, coauthor of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2005) told us. "Under neoliberal economic doctrine, all public goods are suspect."

Boal noted, "The new telecom companies had little or zero interest in the public phones they inherited. In fact, quite the reverse. It was in their interest to close or leave trashed any boxes that weren’t profitable and in general to force laggards to mobile phones."

It didn’t happen immediately, attorney Mattes, who has represented the California Payphone Association, a trade group, told us.

"Because the pay phone business was still pretty good in the late 1990s, the telephone utilities stayed in the business during those years, competing with the independents," Mattes said. Pay phone rates also rose.

But the economics of the pay phone business started to change around 2000, Mattes said, mostly due to wireless competition, and companies had difficulty collecting for toll-free calls and calls made through other long-distance providers. So telephone utilities started giving up their less-profitable pay phone locations.

"Bell South abandoned the pay phone market entirely about five or six years ago," Mattes said. "AT&T and Verizon have been gradually leaving the market, giving up their less-profitable pay phones at a steady pace."

From January 2005 to June 2007, AT&T reduced its pay phone lines in California by more than half — from 77,467 to 36,870 — according to PUC counts. And in the same period, Verizon went from 28,743 to 16,421 pay phones.

While the pay phone business was "modestly profitable," according to Mattes, it was mainly important to the utilities "as a platform for customers to make highly profitable long-distance calls." But, he said, with competition in long-distance and wireless services, the profits have been squeezed out of long-distance calls. Pay phone use also dropped dramatically, he said, due to wireless competition.

TURN’s Costa suggested that the old AT&T overpaid in its postdivestiture bid to acquire cable and bypass local exchange carriers for direct connections with its former customer base. Later, it abandoned the poor voice-quality network and may have needed to recoup losses.

"The Bells have a separate incentive to pull out copper," the older coaxial wire that connects almost all landline phones, Feld said. "The FCC says they don’t have to share [fiber-optic cable wire with competitors] as they do copper, and copper needs to be maintained. It was laid because regulators made them. It’s more costly to maintain than they can charge."

"Without regulation," Feld noted, "big companies can leave the [pay phone] market, but they can also increase line charges" — monthly fees for phone connection to the local exchange — "and interconnection fees" for long-distance connection, paid by callers and local exchanges to the nonlocal carrier for allowing calls to go through.

The loss of pay phone service is one more result of faith-based deregulation, the belief that the market will provide for everyone’s needs. "The demise of pay phones was utterly predictable," Boal told us. "It’s a disgrace."

And the impact of the disappearance of pay phones ripples beyond service needs.

OUTSOURCED


A sprawling ’70s low-rise cement building at West Portal and Sloat, once hidden by shrubs from view of the adjacent Muni tracks, is now vacant and slated to become the new Waldorf High School. It used to be the Pac Bell operators’ building, housing 35 workers, mostly women with more than 30 years of service, "the forefront of the [union] movement," said Kingsley Chew, president of Communications Workers of America Local 9410 in San Francisco.

Those operators answered 411 information queries and routed 911 emergency calls. Two years after winning a strike by shutting down the phone company, the operators saw their jobs outsourced in 2006 to Dublin and Pleasanton.

The majority of the local’s members are women, Chew said. Their male counterparts, mostly collectors in the coin department, are now gone, accounting for the loss of 25 to 30 union jobs in the past five years. Besides gathering coins from pay phones, the collectors maintained the phones and removed graffiti (which is more prevalent these days).

Pay phones once meant union jobs, and as their numbers have declined, so has the union. Local 9410 membership is down from 3,000 when Chew took office in 2003 to 750 today, with those still around mainly technicians who install and repair phones.

Chew calculated that one job here is financially equivalent to six jobs in India or the Philippines, where 1-800 calls are processed and workers are paid $400 a month. The city and the state lose local business tax revenues when jobs go overseas, he said, and the costs of vanishing pensions as workers are laid off are eventually externalized and borne by local residents when demand for public services rises.

There may be greater demand for pay phones soon: the major phone companies are expected to raise home-phone rates. Basic service rates have generally been averaged geographically, within a major company’s service "footprint," Lehman said, but deaveraging can soon occur, which will drive up the price of basic rural and high-cost urban services.

Meanwhile, two state programs supporting pay phones are being axed.

REGULATIONS DIE


Two pay phone regulatory programs remain on the books, one frozen and one barely operating. The PUC created both programs in 1990 as part of a legal ruling, when new pay phone providers were struggling to gain a foothold in former Pac Bell (now AT&T) and GTE (now Verizon) monopoly territory and consumers were encountering new system abuses.

One program, the Public Policy Payphone Program (PPPP, or Quad-P), was designed to subsidize phones located "in unprofitable locations to serve the health and safety needs of the public," while the other, the Payphone Enforcement Program (now known as Payphone Service Providers Enforcement), was established "to ensure that pay phone consumer safeguards are being followed." Both programs, which were expanded statewide, were funded by a monthly per-line surcharge on the industry, unlike other telecom public policy programs, which are supported by a percentage surcharge on consumers’ monthly phone bills.

But the list of potential state locations for subsidized pay phones was reduced from 67,000 in 1988 to 22,000 in 1989, just before the state programs were initiated, and to 1,975 in 1993. By 1998, when deregulation was complete and pricing went to market rates, Pac Bell had only 300 subsidized business phones out of 140,000, attributing the change to the increased number of independent providers and to multiphone contracts, which enabled revenues and costs to be averaged out.

Applications to designate or install Quad-P phones have to pass through the PSPE advisory committee, which hasn’t aggressively solicited them or approved more than two or three (with just one installed) of the 33 received since 2001, according to the Division of Ratepayer Advocates.

Almost nobody knows that Quad-P exists — or that anyone can file an application if a proposed site meets certain criteria. Currently, there are only 14 Quad-P phones statewide, mainly in parks, down from 40 in March, with 13 supported by AT&T and one by Verizon.

The PSPE was set up "to enforce, through random inspections, consumer safeguards for all public payphones … such as signage requirements, and rate caps for local, long distance and directory assistance calls within California."

Until recently, inspectors made the rounds of for-profit as well as subsidized pay phones, numbering more than 400,000 in the ’90s, on a rotation schedule that took a decade to complete. Between December 2001, when the project came under PSPE administration (it was formerly run by the industry), and June 2007, civil-service inspectors logged 133,893 violations on 39,444 phones, a rate that has slowed with staff downsizing. The DRA estimates its activities reduced the average rate of violations significantly. The inspection staff was cut in half last fall, to three, and other program staffers were transferred to other divisions to cut expenses.

The number of pay phones to monitor has declined, but with reduced inspections, violations have begun to rise. Numbering too few to be proactive, inspectors now respond only to consumer complaints registered on the PUC’s consumer fraud hotline. This number, not posted on pay phones, is 1-800-649-7570; it accepts calls between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. There’s no after-hours message machine, but if you’ve got a computer and are still primed when you get home, you can log on to the PUC Web site, at www.cpuc.ca.gov, to report a complaint. Patterns of systemic abuse — and dead phones — are less likely to be detected from reactive, hotline-triggered complaints.

Last summer the industry’s PSPE advisory committee formally requested that both programs and the committee itself be eliminated and program surcharges ended, citing reduced activity and need. "All that Quad-P has done is subsidize its own costs," said Mattes, the attorney for the California Payphone Association. "It deserves a quiet burial."

The DRA argues that the reduction of these state programs is premature: even if dramatic market changes have made pay phones a distant second choice over wireless for many, the old technology is still important.

For one thing, predictions of the death of pay phones may be exaggerated. "It is likely that some core base of payphones will continue to be used regularly and earn a profit," the division observed in a July 2006 report, responding to gloomy industry forecasts.

For another, the actual basis for the pay phone network’s decline is far from clear. The division noted "a distinct lack of quantitative analysis regarding both the reduction … and demographic information about the location and need for payphones" in its program review comments, part of the PUC’s formal rule-making process (to be concluded in coming months, following administrative law judge Maribeth Bushey’s findings).

Acknowledging that "concerns about migration to wireless phone plans and cost recovery issues (including interconnection costs, phone card fraud, and 911 services)" need to be addressed, the division restated the universal service goals of both the ’96 act and the original 1934 Telecom Act, quoting a commission ruling from a decade ago, now more urgent: "Parties have not substantiated that telephone service will continue to be available at unprofitable locations to satisfy public health, safety, and welfare needs. Nor have they convinced us that the marketplace will replace the existing public policy payphones or fulfill the public policy objective in public health, safety, and welfare."

The DRA recommends a two-pronged strategy for stabilizing the for-profit market and assessing the need for subsidized pay phones — one that could potentially restore proactive inspections.

Instead of eliminating Quad-P oversight, it said, "the task, rather, is to address these problems by reforming and strengthening the program, as well as by assessing [systematically] the continuing public need for payphones" and finding ways to meet it. The division proposed a formal workshop or survey to compile data about profits and costs, locations, and demographics — hard data on where pay phones exist and where they don’t but are needed.

The DRA also suggests that regulatory oversight be overhauled; that the PUC exert closer control over pay phone service providers by imposing fines or through disconnection; that pay phones be registered or certified, as they are in numerous other states; and that new procedures be adopted for installing and removing pay phones.

Oversight is needed, the division says, even if the industry can’t pay for it; it recommends a surcharge on monthly phone bills, as there are for other public policy telecom programs. It also says an overdue audit of both programs is needed and that the hotline-triggered inspection regimen needs to be reassessed within 12 to 18 months of its inauguration last fall.

SAVING PAY PHONES


On the ground floor of San Francisco’s City Hall, a single pay phone remains among six phone bays. Under existing subsidy rules, the city — which contracts for multiple phones — is ineligible for a subsidy.

It seems like high time to figure out how to restore some conventional lines of communication. Instead of shifting the whole cost of backup phones to the public, why not consider allocating it between the industry and ratepayers, placing the industry’s contribution on a sliding scale to be reviewed every year or two along with revenues, and even incorporating a percentage of more competitive telecom video and cable profits?

Admittedly, this goes against the current tide. Avid deregulators — like former PUC commissioner Susan Kennedy, now Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chief of staff, and current commissioner Rochelle Chong — have aggressively promoted advanced technology and less oversight.

But is what’s good for AT&T and Verizon really good for ratepayers or small businesses? Letting the pay phone network — a real, decentralized public space — be dismantled just because many of us now have private cell phones violates fairness and common sense. Corporate-minded advanced-tech boosters may dismiss the older technology, but it serves everyone.

"Just because it’s old," TURN’s Nussbaum said, "so what?"<\!s>*

Chin music, pin hits

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Drifting into a coma at last week’s lethargic Oakland A’s–<\d>Los Angeles Angels game, I suddenly woke with a snort, dropped my bag of peanuts, and realized what was missing. No, not some bargain-price rookie flamethrower, though that wouldn’t hurt. It was too quiet. I needed some screeching Queen songs to drown out the deranged A’s fans screaming behind me.

But it wasn’t just me — the A’s and their fans were suffering from a dearth of head-bobbing, fist-punching at-bat music, in addition to a real game. One lousy Nirvana snippet does not inspire high confidence or achievement, making it hard for the team to compete with the sleek multimedia machine of, say, the Giants, the Seattle Mariners, or heck, any other ball team out there blasting tunes at top volume to work up the crowd into a bubbling froth whenever a hometown hitter saunters to the plate or whenever the action lags. Of course, the selections have fallen into predictable patterns: Barry Bonds has tended to favor Dr. Dre minimalist power hooks to usher in his home-run hits. There are the inevitable Linkin Park, Metallica, and T.I. tunes as well as "Crazy Train," "Yeah!" and, naturally, DJ Unk’s "Walk It Out," beloved of so many athletes and audio staffers — although sometimes musicians have their say, as when Twisted Sister asked John Rocker and the Atlanta Braves to stop playing "I Wanna Rock" after the player’s racist, homophobic, and sexist mouth-offs back in 2000.

Maybe we’re just damaged, in need of a perpetual soundtrack to go with our every activity and our shrinking attention spans — though some might argue that baseball, like so many sports, needs an infusion of new but not necessarily performance-enhanced energy. We can all use some style to go with our substance, which might explain why presidential candidate John Edwards was said to be pressing flesh at the still-unfolding, long-awaited Temple Nightclub in SoMa last week. And why it wasn’t too surprising to get an invite on a bisected bowling pin to Strike Cupertino, a new bowling alley–<\d>cum–<\d>nightclub down south in Cupertino Square, a withering mall off 280 where the venue has planted itself on the basement level. Its neighbors: a JC Penney, a Macy’s, a Frederick’s of Hollywood, an ice-skating rink, an AMC 16-plex, and lots of darkened store spaces. I stopped to admire the wizard-embellished pewter goblets and marked-down Kill Bill Elle Driver action figures at the sword-, knife-, and gun-filled Armour Geddon — still open for all your raging goth armament needs.

Strike, however, was raging all on its own, without the skull-handled dagger it never knew it needed. In a wink toward the Silicon Valley work-hard-play-hard crowd Strike’s owners hope to attract, Angela Kinsey from The Office threw out the first ball in the black-lit, modish alley. A luxe bar dreamed up by Chris Smith, one of the team that designed Nobu, was swarming with guests clamoring for free Striketinis.

Apparently Strike Cupertino isn’t original: the first one sprung, after a full makeover, from Bowlmor Lanes in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1997, and went on, according to the press literature, to become the highest-grossing bowling alley in the world. Others are located in Bethesda, Md., Long Island, and Miami. But what, no Vegas? Strike seems perfectly suited for Sin City, with its bright, flash, well-upholstered decor — equal parts retro ’50s and ’60s, both American Graffiti and Goldfinger — and multiple massive plasma screens distractingly flickering the Giants game, ESPN, any game, above the lanes, the lounge, and every surface. Peppy, poppy ’80s rock and R&B — "Hey Mickey" and "Little Red Corvette" — coursed from the DJ booth next to the raft of pool and air hockey tables and the game arcade as upscale clubbish figurines, blue-collar bowling diehards, and Asian and Latino kids tried out the lanes and tables and some fair American and Asian finger food.

I stuck a kiwi into a chocolate fountain and spurted sticky brown stuff all over my white shoes and shirt and wondered, could this be the future of clubbing — or sports? Amusement parks for adults, lubricated with fruity but muscley cocktails? Or maybe this is as hellacious as it gets in drowsy Cupertino.

Still, I thought Strike was worth swinging by, if only to play on a sparkling, well-waxed, seemingly nick-free lane for the first time, in fresh, BO-free shoes, with immaculate, grimeless balls. Also, knowing how many miles per hour your ball is traveling is a trip, if somewhat discouraging for featherweights like yours truly. Yes, I know the $5 cover after 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays seems excessive for, well, a bowling alley, but Monday evening seems a deal with all-night unlimited play for a flat $14. Word has it that the nightspot also enforces a dress code — and that even Bonds would have to leave his cap at home — but I say perhaps just cut back on the supershort bowling-shirt dresses and fishnet stockings on the teenagey waitresses. We’re not in Vegas yet, Toto.

STRIKE CUPERTINO

Cupertino Square

10123 Wolf Road, Cupertino

(408) 252-BOWL

www.bowlatstrike.com

YOU SCORED

OLIVER FUTURE


The Los Angeles buzz band generates scratchy, acidic melodic rock with plenty of post-punk seasoning. With Boy in the Bubble and 8 Bit Idiot. Wed/8, 9 p.m., $7. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. www.bottomofthehill.com

ROBBERS ON HIGH STREET


Veering from tree cities to familial familiars, the NYC combo come with Grand Animals (New Line). With the Wildbirds and the Old-Fashioned Way. Thurs/9, 9:30 p.m., $8. Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com

GREAT NORTHERN


Melodic pop for modern-rock romantics. With Comas and Twilight Sleep. Sat/11, 9 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. www.slims-sf.com

MIKAELA’S FIEND AND SEXY PRISON


Driving punk tumult meets salacious death disco. With Mika Miko and Twin. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., call for price. 21 Grand, 416 25th St., Oakl. www.21grand.org

PELICAN


The Windy City instrumentalists skew shorter — seven minutes at most — and focus on songs on their new City of Echoes (Hydra Head). With Clouds and Garagantula. Sun/12, 8:30 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com

Citizen planning

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› sarah@sfbg.com

The Eastern Neighborhoods Plan has become a high-stakes battleground involving anxious developers stalled by a temporary building moratorium, progressives who want more affordable housing, concerns about dwindling light-industrial spaces and an exodus of African American residents, environmental justice, and a list of other issues that are central to this sprawling section of the city.

But the folks in the neighborhood known as Western SoMa are just happy that they’re no longer a part of that mess. Instead, they’re excitedly experimenting with a new approach to planning using an innovative and largely untested grassroots model.

Five years ago, when the city Planning Department first announced its intention to rezone the Eastern Neighborhoods, a group of disenchanted SoMa residents decided that they wanted to secede from that process and develop an independent, more comprehensive, community-based plan.

"A lot of us were offended by the Planning Department’s top-down, autocratic process," Jim Meko, who later became chair of the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force, told the Guardian. "It was a bad process for everybody, but it was particularly bad for SoMa because the neighborhood had already been rezoned in the 1990s."

Meko survived three major demographic shifts within three decades: the AIDS epidemic that decimated SoMa’s gay community, the live-work loft zoning loopholes that gutted the artistic community, and the dot-com crash that displaced many techies. He feared that the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan would impose a "one-size-fits-all mode that treated all of SoMa like postindustrial wasteland."

So Meko set his sights on pressuring the Planning Commission to split his neighborhood from the rest of the Eastern Neighborhoods, which include the Mission District, Eastern SoMa, Showplace Square, Potrero Hill, and the Central Waterfront. Western SoMa is bordered by Mission and Bryant, 13th and Fourth streets, and Harrison and Townsend.

That dream became a reality in February 2004, and that November the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force formed, with a stated objective to "recommend zoning changes that will preserve the heart and soul of their neighborhood, while planning for the realities of 21st-century growth."

Since beginning its work in 2005, the 22-member task force has met as often as five times a month and has created a values statement; a set of planning principles; committees focusing on business and land use, transportation, and arts and entertainment; and a committee that integrates a variety of issues.

Its June 28 town hall meeting was the first time the task force threw the doors open to the community at large, although the occasion happened to come on the heels of a high-profile budget battle between Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly, whose district includes SoMa and who helped set up the task force.

Within five minutes of Meko’s kicking off the meeting, a small but vocal group of attendees began to heckle him midspeech. Perhaps they were there to confront Daly, who had been slated to attend but was out of town. Whatever the reason, while accusing Meko of "having an agenda" and "using the bully pulpit" to present his own views, this faction was anxious to know how many task force members are property owners and which particular group of them would be dealing with crime, the fight against which Newsom has made a top budget priority.

For one wobbly, tension-filled moment, it felt as if this first crack at a citizen planning forum might crumble. But then another participant saved the day by requesting a simple but basic meeting ground rule: no personal attacks.

From that moment, the mood in the room lightened. Pretty soon the rest of the 150 residents who had gathered in the multipurpose room of Bessie Carmichael School on Seventh Street to share their thoughts on Western SoMa were talking about what they liked and what could improve. Even the hecklers quieted down and seemed to meld into the discussion.

As Planning Commissioner Christina Olague put it at the meeting, "This is possibly one of the most exciting things going on in planning. No one understands the heart and soul of a neighborhood like the people who live there. We hope this is a model other neighborhoods will adopt, because a neighborhood plan without the involvement of neighbors who live and breath a community is chaos — just a bunch of buildings zoned in a language no one can read or feel."

But while residents were happy to create lists of neighborhood needs — more parks, bike lanes, affordable housing, child care facilities, and trees; wider sidewalks; and fewer homeless people — they were less keen on the idea of increasing building heights. One proposed means of financing improvements would be to increase allowable heights from 40 to 65 feet in some places.

Some locals complained about partygoers who urinate in the streets and play music loudly in cars instead of going home when the clubs close. But a youthful resident politely pointed out that "it may not be possible to stop young people from being young."

In the face of requests from senior citizens for more dinner theater and fewer nightclubs in SoMa, task force member and nightclub owner Terrance Allen observed that it’s probably only possible to "nudge existing conditions."

Recalling the battle that broke out between residents and partygoers after city planners decided to put affordable housing next to the wildly popular nightclub 1015 Folsom, Allen said, "You don’t want to start a war by putting subsidized housing next to the city’s biggest nightclub." Or as Meko put it, "We don’t want to set up conflicts by putting family housing across from the Stud."

By evening’s end, the consensus was that the meeting was a success. "We have much more in common than we have apart. That’s the whole key," said Marc Salomon, who sits on the task force’s transportation committee. As Meko told the Guardian the next day, "Wasn’t it a fantastic experience? It was the closest thing to a cocktail party without a bartender."

Meko said the task force is eager to complete its work and is shooting for having a draft plan ready by the next town hall meeting, on Oct. 24.

"But we need to do more community outreach," he added, noting that there weren’t many Filipinos at the first meeting even though they have a large presence in Western SoMa. "We’re looking at what SoMa could be like in 20 years. The other Eastern Neighborhoods are watching, and they are envious." *

Paper trail

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Up to 160 journalists and editors being cut from the payrolls of the Bay Area’s biggest two daily newspapers will flood a shrinking media job market, forcing many from their homes and making it difficult to pay their rents or mortgages.

But it also means something else: less news, and therefore less accountability and diminished democratic debate.

That was the sad conclusion of many observers and media professionals after the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News both revealed recently that they’d be laying off about a quarter of their respective newsroom staffs.

"Something has to give," Chron editor Phil Bronstein told Editor and Publisher recently. "If you have 15 priorities, sometimes the bottom three or four don’t get done. You may have to do fewer stories, and you can do that."

The disturbing pronouncements by their parent companies, the Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, even led some veterans who weren’t immediately facing pink slips to leave on their own accord, unable to stomach the sorry state of their profession. Yet even as the bloodletting began in earnest at the Chron last week, Bronstein hadn’t presented much of a game plan for how Hearst actually expects to continue operating a major metropolitan newspaper.

"There’s no question that with the Bay Area — like other big metro markets — the diminishing number of journalists will definitely impact the public," just-departed managing editor Robert Rosenthal, who announced he was leaving two weeks ago as the cuts were about to begin, told the Guardian.

The paper even started a blog for fallen staffers to exchange leads on new opportunities. Among the first posts was a public relations gig in San Francisco, which to many earnest reporters is like crossing over to the dark side.

Despite its lagging finances, the Chronicle has still been the city’s main paper of record — based mostly on its extensive resources and large newsroom — no matter how many blogs, online journals, and alt weeklies claw at its heels, or whether people consider it a poor paper.

But Sunday editor Wendy Miller, who was squeezed out last week, told us that the paper has been promoting sensationalism while failing to put some of its best stories from beat reporters high on the Sunday front page. As an example, she pointed to Carrie Sturrock’s regular education coverage, like recent stories on far-flung alternative-energy research at Stanford University and the punishing collection tactics of student-loan agencies.

"That front page too often is driven by crime and tabloid and goofy local stories," said Miller, an industry veteran of more than two decades who spent her last seven years at the Chron. "I think this is too sophisticated of a market for a front page like that. While I do think there’s a lot of good work that we do, we don’t play it well…. We don’t put our very best work on the cover often."

Now the situation could grow worse, as changes are certain at the paper along with the layoffs. It’s not clear, for instance, that its Sunday edition will contain an Insight section anymore, laid-off editor Jim Finefrock, who spent more than 30 years at the paper, told us last week just after he cleaned out his desk.

Washington bureau chief Marc Sandalow was let go after more than 20 years at the Chronicle, 13 of them inside the Beltway, and the paper has also made an effort to cut the job of fellow longtime DC reporter Edward Epstein. The moves would halve the bureau’s staff and cast doubt on how the Chron would continue its knowledgeable stories on some of the most powerful members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who are only now attaining major leadership positions.

"I always knew it would mean extremely unpleasant belt-tightening," Sandalow told the Guardian, referring to the paper’s hundreds of millions of dollars in losses since Hearst took it over in 2000. "I just didn’t think it would be suffocation."

Bronstein apparently is unsure of how the Chron can even begin to change the course of its unique money-losing trajectory. Despite the industry being wounded by fleeing subscribers and competitive Web outlets, most newspapers are still making big profits, with the Chron being a fairly rare exception. Sources add that the job cuts might save just $8 million or so per year, not nearly enough to make up for the paper’s staggering losses, for which no one had any reasonably good explanations.

"Something’s not right with our structure," John Curley, a deputy managing editor who’d been at the paper for more than 20 years, told the Guardian. "There isn’t another metropolitan daily that has a dominant position the way the Chronicle does that loses money."

Indeed, SFGate.com is among the most regularly visited newspaper sites in the country, and the model has greatly expanded the paper’s readership. But Curley explained that local advertisers "don’t necessarily want to reach someone in Zurich who might be interested in reading our political analysis." For most papers, online ads still generate remarkably little revenue.

The company initially announced in May that it was eliminating 100 newsroom employees out of its total of 400. We’re told that some guild cuts were officially enacted last Friday, with more on the way, but no one’s entirely sure who has accepted buyouts so far, and much uglier terminations could take place soon. "People are terrified," one source said. "Their phone rings, and they don’t want to answer."

At the same time, nine members of the top brass, including two deputy managing editors, Curley and Leslie Guevarra, were sent packing. Bronstein worked hard to appear assured of the paper’s future in Editor and Publisher, telling the journal recently that the Chron would be focusing more on local news as part of its strategy, with less of a "buffet-style," but he offered few specifics. He nonetheless told staffers during recent meetings that he doesn’t really know what to do and invited them to offer their own solutions.

The mood’s been decidedly glum at a modest SoMa dive known as the Tempest, where Chron staffers are known to commonly lurk and where some of the recent sendoffs for departing staffers have been held.

"Business has been very good for me this week," a bartender there said late at night on June 8. "But I know 25 percent of these people won’t be coming back. This won’t be good for business in the long run."

As for the Merc, www.GradetheNews.org fueled the rank and file’s worst fears by first reporting that 60 newsroom positions at that paper would get the ax, in addition to the 35 union employees who were shoved out last December.

The paper got the tip from John Bowman, now former executive editor of the San Mateo County Times, also owned by MediaNews, who disclosed the layoffs to the public after deciding he was "fed up" with MediaNews honcho Dean Singleton’s slash-and-burn business strategy.

Amid the chaos, the Merc‘s brand-new top editor, Carole Leigh Hutton, sent a memo to staffers begging them to remain calm and "focus some of that energy on doing the journalism we do so well" instead of indulging in rumors at the watercooler about what was planned.

Furious over cuts at his paper, Bowman decided to quit the same day that he talked to GradetheNews about an April meeting he attended with other MediaNews editors at which the layoffs were discussed.

Singleton, the industry’s undisputed king of consolidation, months ago cut some copyediting jobs and moved others to a single hub in Pleasanton where its Tri-Valley Herald was formerly located. Bowman told GradetheNews the move had caused "an incredible number of errors," including glaring geographical mistakes even in headlines.

"You want copy editors who know your city, who know your beat, who can ask great questions and help make your story better," Luther Jackson, executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, told us. "That’s just a general rule, I would say. Copy editors are really underappreciated in general."

Jackson added that Bowman’s figure of 60 isn’t set in stone, and while the paper has admitted it plans to initiate more layoffs soon, it still hasn’t decided how many. GradetheNews also interviewed reporters at "several of the chain’s papers" who echoed Bowman’s complaints and wrote that some of the papers are dreadfully short of reporters, including beat writers who specialize in specific local subjects.

We never heard back from Bronstein, Singleton, California Newspaper Publishers Association executives George Riggs and Kevin Keane, or former Merc executive editor Susan Goldberg, who high-tailed it out of San Jose recently for a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

But Merc business reporter Elise Ackerman, who’s worked at the Peninsula daily for seven years, told us the paper’s union plans to provide execs with suggestions on how to improve the paper and boost income, though she didn’t give details.

"I do think that this is really just a rough transition, and I was really impressed with Carol Leigh Hutton," Ackerman said carefully. "She’s communicating very clearly…. I don’t think that she’s going to preside over the bloodletting that we saw at the Chron." *

For more on this evolving story, visit www.sfbg.com.

Dining listings

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Welcome to our dining listings, a detailed guide by neighborhood of some great places to grab a bite, hang out with friends, or impress the ones you love with thorough knowledge of this delectable city. Restaurants are reviewed by Paul Reidinger (PR) or staff. All area codes are 415, and all restaurants are wheelchair accessible, except where noted.

B Breakfast

BR Saturday and/or Sunday brunch

L Lunch

D Dinner

AE American Express

DC Diners Club

DISC Discover

MC MasterCard

V Visa

¢ less than $7 per entrée

$ $7–<\d>$12

$$ $13–<\d>$20

$$$ more than $20

DOWNTOWN/EMBARCADERO

Bocadillos serves bocadillos — little Spanish-<\d>style sandwiches on little round buns — but the menu ranges more widely, through a variety of Spanish and Basque delights. Decor is handsome, though a little too stark-<\d>modern to be quite cozy. (PR, 8/04) 710 Montgomery, SF. Spanish/<\d>Basque, L/D, $, MC/V.

Boulevard runs with ethereal smoothness — you are cosseted as if at a chic private party — but despite much fame the place retains its brasserie trappings and joyous energy. (Staff) 1 Mission, SF. 543-6084. American, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Brindisi Cucina di Mare cooks seafood the south Italian way, and that means many, many ways, with many, many sorts of seafood. (PR, 4/04) 88 Belden Place, SF. 593-8000. Italian/<\d>seafood, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Bushi-tei melds East and West, old and new, with sublime elegance. Chef Seiji Wakabayashi is fluent in many of the culinary dialects of East Asia as well as the lofty idiom of France, and the result is cooking that develops its own integrity. The setting — of glass, candles, and ancient lumber — shimmers with enchantment. (PR, 3/06) 1638 Post, SF. 440-4959. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

Café Claude is a hidden treasure of the city center. There is an excellent menu of traditional, discreetly citified French dishes, a youthful energy, and a romantic setting on a narrow, car-free lane reminiscent of the Marais. (PR, 10/06) 7 Claude Lane, SF. 392-3515. French, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Chaya Brasserie brings a taste of LA’s preen-and-be-seen culture to the waterfront. The Japanese-<\d>influenced food is mostly French, and very expensive. (Staff) 132 Embarcadero, SF. 777-8688. Fusion, D, $$$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Cortez has a Scandinavian Designs-<\d>on-<\d>acid look — lots of heavy, weird multicolored mobiles — but Pascal Rigo’s Mediterranean-<\d>influenced small plates will quickly make you forget you’re eating in a hotel. (Staff) 550 Geary (in the Hotel Adagio), SF. 292-6360. Mediterranean, B/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cosmopolitan Cafe seems like a huge Pullman car. The New American menu emphasizes heartiness. (Staff) 121 Spear, SF. 543-4001. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

NORTH BEACH/CHINATOWN

Da Flora advertises Venetian specialties, but notes from Central Europe (veal in paprika cream sauce) and points east (whiffs of nutmeg) creep into other fine dishes. (Staff) 701 Columbus, SF. 981-4664. Italian, D, $$, MC/V.

Dalla Torre is one of the most inaccessible restaurants in the city. The multi<\d>level dining room — a cross between an Italian country inn and a Frank Lloyd Wright house — offers memorable bay views, but the pricey food is erratic. (Staff) 1349 Montgomery, SF. 296-1111. Italian, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Enrico’s Sidewalk Cafe remains a classic see-and-be-seen part of the North Beach scene. The full bar and extensive menu of tapas, pizzas, pastas, and grills make dropping in at any hour a real treat. (Staff) 504 Broadway, SF. 982-6223. Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Gondola captures the varied flavors of Venice and the Veneto in charmingly low-key style. The main theme is the classic one of simplicity, while service strikes just the right balance between efficiency and warmth. (Staff) 15 Columbus, SF. 956-5528. Italian, L/D, $, MC/V.

House of Nanking never fails to garner raves from restaurant reviewers and Guardian readers alike. Chinatown ambience, great food, good prices. (Best Ofs, 1994) 919 Kearny, SF. 421-1429. Chinese, L/D, ¢.

SOMA

Le Charm might be in San Francisco, but it has a bistro authenticity even Parisians could love, from a wealth of golden wood trim to an enduring loyalty au prix fixe. The chicken liver salad is matchless, the succinct wine list distinctly Californian. Ponder it in the idyllic, trellised garden. (PR, 9/06) 315 Fifth St, SF. 546-6128. French, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Chez Spencer brings Laurent Katgely’s precise French cooking into the rustic-<\d>industrial urban cathedral that once housed Citizen Cake. Get something from the wood-<\d>burning oven. (Staff) 82 14th St, SF. 864-2191. French, BR/L/D, $$, MC/V.

Fly Trap Restaurant captures a bit of that old-time San Francisco feel, from the intricate plaster ceiling to the straightforward menu: celery Victor, grilled salmon filet with beurre blanc. A good lunchtime spot. (Staff) 606 Folsom, SF. 243-0580. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

*Fringale still satisfies the urge to eat in true French bistro style, with Basque flourishes. The paella roll is a small masterpiece of food narrative; the frites are superior. (PR, 7/04) 570 Fourth St, SF. 543-0573. French/Basque, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

India Garden indeed has a lovely garden and an excellent lunch buffet that does credit to South Asian standards. (Staff) 1261 Folsom, SF. 626-2798. Indian, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

NOB HILL/RUSSIAN HILL

Acquerello reminds us that the Italians, like the French, have a high cuisine — sophisticated and earthy and offered in a onetime chapel with exposed rafters and sumptuous fabrics on the banquettes. Service is as knowledgeable and civilized as at any restaurant in the city. (PR, 3/05) 1722 Sacramento, SF. 567-5432. Italian, $$$, D, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Ah Lin offers Mandarin-style Chinese cooking in an easy-to-take storefront setting on Cathedral Hill. The dishes are well behaved and tasty, with only an occasional flare-up of chile heat. The roast duck is one of the best deals in town. (PR, 10/06) 1634 Bush, SF. 922-5279. Chinese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Alborz looks more like a hotel restaurant than a den of Persian cuisine, but there are flavors here — of barberry and dried lime, among others — you won’t easily find elsewhere. (Staff) 1245 Van Ness, SF. 440-4321. Persian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Bacio offers homey, traditional Italian dishes in a charmingly cozy rustic space. Service can be slow. (PR, 1/05) 835 Hyde, SF. 292-7999. Italian, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Cordon Bleu has huge portions, tiny prices, and a hoppin’ location right next to the Lumiere Theatre. (Staff) 1574 California, SF. 673-5637. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢.

CIVIC CENTER/TENDERLOIN

Mangosteen radiates lime green good cheer from its corner perch in the Tenderloin. Inexpensive Vietnamese standards are rendered with thoughtful little touches and an emphasis on the freshest ingredients. (PR, 11/05) 601 Larkin, SF. 776-3999. Vietnamese, L/D, $, cash only.

Max’s Opera Cafe Huge food is the theme here, from softball-<\d>size matzo balls to towering desserts. Your basic Jewish deli. (Staff) 601 Van Ness, SF. 771-7300. American, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Mekong Restaurant serves the foods of the Mekong River basin. There is a distinct Thai presence but also dishes with Laotian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and even Chinese accents. (PR, 1/06) 791 O’Farrell, SF. 928-2772. Pan-<\d>Asian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Olive might look like a tapas bar, but what you want are the thin-crust pizzas, the simpler the toppings the better. The small plates offer eclectic pleasures, especially the Tuscan pâté and beef satay with peanut sauce. (Staff) 743 Larkin, SF. 776-9814. Pizza/<\d>eclectic, D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

HAYES VALLEY

Frjtz serves first-rate Belgian fries, beer, crepes, and sandwiches in an art-<\d>house atmosphere. If the noise overwhelms, take refuge in the lovely rear garden. (Staff) 579 Hayes, SF. 864-7654; also at Ghirardelli Square, SF. 928-3886. Belgian, B/L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Hayes Street Grill started more than a quarter century ago as an emulation of the city’s old seafood houses, and now it’s an institution itself. The original formula — immaculate seafood simply prepared, with choice of sauce and French fries — still beats vibrantly at the heart of the menu. Service is impeccable, the setting one of relaxed grace. (PR, 7/06) 816 Folsom, SF. 863-5545. Seafood, L/D, $$$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Sauce enjoys the services of chef Ben Paula, whose uninhibited California cooking is as easy to like as a good pop song. (PR, 5/05) 131 Gough, SF. 252-1369. California, D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Suppenküche has a Busvan for Bargains, butcher-<\d>block look that gives context to its German cuisine. If you like schnitzel, brats, roasted potatoes, eggs, cheese, cucumber salad, cold cuts, and cold beer, you’ll love it here. (Staff) 601 Hayes, SF. 252-9289. German, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

*Zuni Cafe is one of the most celebrated — and durable — restaurants in town, perhaps because its kitchen has honored the rustic country cooking of France and Italy for the better part of two decades. (PR, 2/05) 1658 Market, SF. 552-2522. California, B/L/D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

CASTRO/NOE VALLEY/GLEN PARK

Firewood Cafe serves up delicious thin chewy-<\d>crusted pizzas, four kinds of tortellini, rotisserie-<\d>roasted chicken, and big bowls of salad. (Staff) 4248 18th St, SF. 252-0999. Italian, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Los Flamingos mingles Cuban and Mexican specialties in a relaxed, leafy, walk-<\d>oriented neighborhood setting. Lots of pink on the walls; even more starch on the plates. (PR, 11/04) 151 Noe, SF. 252-7450. Cuban/<\d>Mexican, BR/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Fresca raises the already high bar a little higher for Peruvian restaurants in town. Many of the dishes are complex assemblies of unusual and distinctive ingredients, but some of the best are among the simplest. The skylighted barrel-<\d>ceiling setting is quietly spectacular. (PR, 7/05) 3945 24th St, SF. 695-0549. Peruvian, L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Gialina offers fabulous thin-crust pizzas in the nouveau-quaint heart of Glen Park’s village center. Toppings reflect the companionable spirits of innovation and playfulness. For dessert: chocolate pizza, though beware the danger of starch overload. (PR, 3/07) 2842 Diamond, SF. 239-8500. Pizza/Italian, D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

Hamano Sushi packs them in despite a slightly dowdy setting and food of variable appeal. The best stuff is as good as it gets, though, and prices aren’t bad. (Staff) 1332 Castro, SF. 826-0825. Japanese, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

HAIGHT/COLE VALLEY/WESTERN ADDITION

Alamo Square is an archetype for the "good little place around the corner." Five different kinds of fish are offered next to three cooking techniques and five sauces. (Staff) 803 Fillmore, SF. 440-2828. Seafood, D, $, MC/V.

Ali Baba’s Cave Veggie shish kebabs are grilled fresh to order; the hummus and baba ghanoush are subtly seasoned and delicious. (Staff) 531 Haight (at Fillmore), SF. 255-7820; 799 Valencia, SF. 863-3054. Middle Eastern, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

All You Knead emphasizes the wonderful world of yeast — sandwiches, pizzas, etc. — in a space reminiscent of beer halls near Big 10 campuses. (Staff) 1466 Haight, SF. 552-4550. American, B/L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Asqew Grill reinvents the world of fine fast food on a budget with skewers, served in under 10 minutes for under 10 bucks. (Staff) 1607 Haight, SF. 701-9301. California, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Bia’s Restaurant and Wine Bar proves hippies know what’s what in matters of food and wine. An excellent menu of homey items with Middle Eastern and Persian accents; a tight, widely varied wine list. (PR, 11/04) 1640 Haight, SF. 861-8868. California/<\d>Middle Eastern, L/D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

Blue Jay Cafe has the Mayberry, RFD, look and giant platters of Southernish food, including a good catfish po’boy and crispy fried chicken. Everything is under $10. (PR, 4/04) 919 Divisadero, SF. 447-6066. American/<\d>soul, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Brother-in-Laws Bar-B-Cue always wins the "Best Barbecue" prize in our annual Best of the Bay edition: the ribs, chickens, links, and brisket are smoky and succulent; the aroma sucks you in like a tractor beam. (Staff) 705 Divisadero, SF. 931-7427. Barbecue, L/D, $.

Burgermeister uses top-grade Niman Ranch beef for its burgers, but nonetheless they’re splendid, with soft buns and crisp, well-<\d>salted fries. Foofy California wrinkles are available if you want them, but why would you? (PR, 5/04) 86 Carl, SF. 566-1274. Burgers, L/D, $.

MISSION/BERNAL HEIGHTS/POTRERO HILL

Cafe Phoenix looks like a junior-<\d>high cafeteria, but the California-<\d>deli food is fresh, tasty, and honest, and the people making it are part of a program to help the emotionally troubled return to employability. (Staff) 1234 Indiana, SF. 282-9675, ext. 239. California, B/L, ¢, MC/V.

Caffe Cozzolino Get it to go: everything’s about two to four bucks more if you eat it there. (Staff) 300 Precita, SF. 285-6005. Italian, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Caffe d’Melanio is the place to go if you want your pound of coffee beans roasted while you enjoy an Argentine-<\d>Italian dinner of pasta, milanesa, and chimichurri sauce. During the day the café offers a more typically Cal-<\d>American menu of better-<\d>than-<\d>average quality. First-rate coffee beans. (PR, 10/04) 1314 Ocean, SF. 333-3665. Italian/<\d>Argentine, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Il Cantuccio strikingly evokes that little trattoria you found near the Ponte Vecchio on your last trip to Florence. (Staff) 3228 16th St, SF. 861-3899. Italian, D, $, MC/V.

Chez Papa Bistrot sits like a beret atop Potrero Hill. The food is good, the staff’s French accents authentic, the crowd a lively cross section, but the place needs a few more scuffs and quirks before it can start feeling real. (Staff) 1401 18th St, SF. 824-8210. French, BR/L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Circolo Restaurant and Lounge brings Peruvian- and Asian-<\d>influenced cooking into a stylishly barnlike urban space where dot-<\d>commers gathered of old. Some of the dishes are overwrought, but the food is splendid on the whole. (PR, 6/04) 500 Florida, SF. 553-8560. Nuevo Latino/<\d>Asian, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Couleur Café reminds us that French food need be neither fancy nor insular. The kitchen playfully deploys a world of influences — the duck-<\d>confit quesadilla is fabulous — and service is precise and attentive despite the modest setting at the foot of Potrero Hill. (PR, 2/06) 300 De Haro, SF. 255-1021. French, BR/L/D, $, AE/DC/MC/V.

*Delfina has grown from a neighborhood restaurant to an event, but an expanded dining room has brought the noise under control, and as always, the food — intense variations on a theme of Tuscany — could not be better. (PR, 2/04) 3621 18th St, SF. 552-4055. California, D, $$, MC/V.

Dosa serves dosas, the south Indian crepes, along with a wealth of other, and generally quite spicy, dishes from the south of the subcontinent. The cooking tends toward a natural meatlessness; the crowds are intense, like hordes of passengers inquiring about a delayed international flight. (PR, 1/06) 995 Valencia, SF. 642-3672. South Indian, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Double Play sits across the street from what once was Seals Stadium, but while the field and team are gone, the restaurant persists as an authentic sports bar with a solidly masculine aura — mitts on the walls, lots of dark wood, et cetera. The all-<\d>American food (soups, sandwiches, pastas, meat dishes, lots of fries) is outstanding. (Staff) 2401 16th St, SF. 621-9859. American, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack offers a tasty, inexpensive, late-night alternative to Pasta Pomodoro. The touch of human hands is everywhere evident. (Staff) 18 Virginia, SF. 206-2086. Italian, D, $, cash only.

Esperpento is as authentic a Spanish-style tapas restaurant as you’ll find in San Francisco, but even better — the paella is good! (PR, 4/07) 3295 22nd St, SF. 282-8867. Spanish/tapas, L/D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Foreign Cinema serves some fine New American food in a spare setting of concrete and glass that warms up romantically once the sun goes down. (Staff) 2534 Mission, SF. 648-7600. California, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Front Porch mixes a cheerfully homey setting (with a front porch of sorts), a hipster crowd, and a Caribbean-inflected comfort menu into a distinctive urban cocktail. The best dishes, such as a white polenta porridge with crab, are Range-worthy, and nothing on the menu is much more than $10. (PR, 10/06) 65A 29th St, SF. 695-7800. American/Caribbean, BR/D, $, MC/V.

MARINA/PACIFIC HEIGHTS/LAUREL HEIGHTS

Greens All the elements that made it famous are still intact: pristine produce, an emphasis on luxury rather than health, that gorgeous view. (Staff) Fort Mason Center, Bldg A, Marina at Laguna, SF. 771-6222. Vegetarian, L/D, $$, DISC/MC/V.

*Harris’ Restaurant is a timeless temple to beef, which appears most memorably as slices of rib roast, but in other ways too. Uncheap. (PR, 5/04) 2100 Van Ness, SF. 673-1888. Steakhouse/<\d>American, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Kiss is tiny, industrial, not particularly Anglophonic — and serves some of the best sushi in the city. Warning: the very best stuff (from the specials menu) can be very pricey. (Staff) 1700 Laguna, SF. 474-2866. Japanese, D, $$$, MC/V.

Letitia’s has claimed the old Alta Plaza space and dispensed with the huge cruise mirror. The Mexican standards are pretty good and still pricey, though they don’t seem quite as dear in Pacific Heights as they did in the Castro. (PR, 6/04) 2301 Fillmore, SF. 922-1722. Mexican, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Mezes glows with sunny Greek hospitality, and the plates coming off the grill are terrific, though not huge. Bulk up with a fine Greek salad. (Staff) 2373 Chestnut, SF. 409-7111. Greek, D, $, MC/V.

Out the Door is the takeout-friendly child of the Slanted Door, and the food reflects the same emphasis on first-quality ingredients. You can eat in if you want or shop for hard-to-find Asian groceries at reasonable prices. (PR, 1/07) Westfield Center, 845 Market, SF. 541-9913; One Ferry Bldg, SF. 861-8032. Vietnamese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Plump Jack Café If you had to take your parents to dinner in the Marina, this would be the place. A small but authentic jewel. (Staff) 3127 Fillmore, SF. 563-4755. California, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

SUNSET

Marnee Thai A friendly, low-key neighborhood restaurant — now in two neighborhoods — that just happens to serve some of the best Thai food in town. (PR, 1/04) 2225 Irving, SF. 665-9500; 1243 Ninth Ave (at Lincoln), SF. 731-9999. Thai, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Masala means "spice mixture," and spices aplenty you will find in the South Asian menu. Be sure to order plenty of naan to sop up the sauce with. (Staff) 1220 Ninth Ave, SF. 566-6976. Indian/<\d>Pakistani, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Nan King Road Bistro laces its mostly Chinese menu with little touches from around Asia (sake sauces, Korean noodles), and the result is a spectacular saucefest. Spare, cool environment. (Staff) 1360 Ninth Ave, SF. 753-2900. Pan-<\d>Asian, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Park Chow could probably thrive on its basic dishes, such as the burger royale with cheese ($6.95), but if you’re willing to spend an extra five bucks or so, the kitchen can really flash you some thigh. (Staff) 1240 Ninth Ave, SF. 665-9912. California, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Pisces California Cuisine brings a touch of SoMa sophistication to an Outer Sunset neighborhood in need of paint. (You can’t miss the restaurant’s black facade.) The kitchen turns out a variety of seafood preparations — the clam chowder is terrific — and offers an appealing prix fixe option at both lunch and dinner. (PR, 8/06) 3414-3416 Judah, SF. 564-2233. Seafood, L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

P.J.’s Oyster Bed Of all the US regional cultures, southern Louisiana’s may be the most beloved, and at P.J.’s you can taste why. (Staff) 737 Irving, SF. 566-7775. Seafood, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Pomelo Big portions of Asian- and Italian-<\d>inspired noodle dishes. If you need something quick, cheap, and fresh, pop in here. (Staff) 92 Judah, SF. 731-6175. Noodles, L/D, $, cash only.

Sabella’s carries a famous seafood name into the heart of West Portal. Good nonseafood stuff too. (Staff) 53 West Portal, SF. 753-3130. Italian/<\d>seafood, $, L/D, MC/V.

Sea Breeze Cafe looks like a dive, but the California cooking is elevated, literally and figuratively. Lots of witty salads, a rum-rich crème brûlée. (Staff) 3940 Judah, SF. 242-6022. California, BR/L/D, $$, MC/V.

So Restaurant brings the heat, in the form of huge soup and noodle — and soupy noodle — dishes, many of them liberally laced with hot peppers and chiles. The pot stickers are homemade and exceptional, the crowd young and noisy. Cheap. (PR, 10/06) 2240 Irving, SF. 731-3143. Chinese/noodles, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tasty Curry still shows traces of an earlier life as a Korean hibachi restaurant (i.e., venting hoods above most of the tables), but the South Asian food is cheap, fresh, and packs a strong kick. (PR, 1/04) 1375 Ninth Ave, SF. 753-5122. Indian/<\d>Pakistani, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Tennessee Grill could as easily be called the Topeka Grill, since its atmosphere is redolent of Middle America. Belly up to the salad bar for huge helpings of the basics to accompany your meat loaf or calf’s liver. (Staff) 1128 Taraval, SF. 664-7834. American, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Thai Cottage isn’t really a cottage, but it is small in the homey way, and its Thai menu is sharp and vivid in the home-<\d>cooking way. Cheap, and the N train stops practically at the front door. (PR, 8/04) 4041 Judah, SF. 566-5311. Thai, L/D, $, MC/V.

*Xiao Loong elevates the neighborhood Chinese restaurant experience to one of fine dining, with immaculate ingredients and skillful preparation in a calm architectural setting. (PR, 8/05) 250 West Portal, SF. 753-5678. Chinese, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Yum Yum Fish is basically a fish store: three or four little tables with fish-print tablecloths under glass, fish-chart art along the wall, and fish-price signs all over the place. (Staff) 2181 Irving, SF. 566-6433. Sushi, L/D, ¢.

RICHMOND

Eva’s Hawaiian Café re-creates the Hawaiian lunch-plate experience in a Clement Street storefront done up in primary colors worthy of a 1970s-era middle school. The food is excellent and inexpensive, the service skilled and cheerful, the setting immaculate. What’s not to like? (PR, 3/07) 731 Clement, SF. 221-2087. Hawaiian, L/C, ¢, MC/V.

Katia’s, a Russian Tea Room evokes the bourgeois romance of old Russia, and the classic Slavic food is carefully prepared and presented. Silken Crimean port is served in a tiny glass shaped like a Cossack boot. (PR, 12/04) 600 Fifth Ave, SF. 668-9292. Russian, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Kitaro This Japanese restaurant, unlike many others, has a lot of options for vegetarians. (Staff) 5850 Geary, SF. 386-2777. Japanese, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Lucky Fortune serves up a wide variety of Chinese-<\d>style seafood in a cheerfully blah setting. Prices are astoundingly low, portions large. (Staff) 5715 Geary, SF. 751-2888. Chinese, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Mai’s Restaurant On the basis of the hot-and-sour shrimp soup with pineapple alone, Mai’s deserves a line out the door. (Staff) 316 Clement, SF. 221-3046. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢, AE/DC/MC/V.

BAYVIEW/HUNTERS POINT/SOUTH

Bella Vista Continental Restaurant commands a gorgeous view of the Peninsula and South Bay from its sylvan perch on Skyline Boulevard, and the continental food, though a little stately, is quite good. The look is rustic-stylish (exposed wood beams, servers in dinner jackets), and the tone one of informal horse-country wealth. (PR, 3/07) 13451 Skyline Blvd., Woodside. (650) 851-1229. Continental, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Cable Car Coffee Shop Atmospherically speaking, you’re looking at your basic downtown South San Francisco old-style joint, one that serves a great Pacific Scramble for $4.95 and the most perfectest hash browns to be tasted. (Staff) 423 Grand, South SF. (650) 952-9533. American, B/BR/L, ¢.

Cliff’s Bar-B-Q and Seafood Some things Cliff’s got going for him: excellent mustard greens, just drenched in flavorfulness, and barbecued you name it. Brisket. Rib tips. Hot links. Pork ribs. Beef ribs. Baby backs. And then there are fried chickens and, by way of health food, fried fishes. (Staff) 2177 Bayshore, SF. 330-0736. Barbecue, L/D, ¢, AE/DC/MC/V.

BERKELEY/EMERYVILLE/NORTH

Ajanta offers a variety of deftly seasoned regional dishes from the Asian subcontinent. (Staff) 1888 Solano, Berk. (510) 526-4373. Indian, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

La Bayou serves up an astounding array of authentic New Orleans staples, including jambalaya, (greaseless!) fried catfish, and homemade pralines. (Staff) 3278 Adeline, Berk. (510) 594-9302. Cajun/<\d>Creole, L/D, ¢-$, MC/V.

Breads of India and Gourmet Curries The menu changes every day, so nothing is refrigerated overnight, and the curries benefit from obvious loving care. (Staff) 2448 Sacramento, Berk. (510) 848-7684. Indian, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

OAKLAND/ALAMEDA

Connie’s Cantina fashions unique variations on standard Mexican fare — enchiladas, tamales, fajitas, rellenos. (Staff) 3340 Grand, Oakl. (510) 839-4986. Mexican, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Garibaldi’s on College focuses on Mediterranean-<\d>style seafood. (Staff) 5356 College, Oakl. (510) 595-4000. Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Gerardo’s Mexican Restaurant offers all the expected taquería fare. But a main reason to visit is to pick up a dozen of Maria’s wonderfully down-home chicken or pork tamales. (Staff) 3811 MacArthur, Oakl. (510) 531-5255. Mexican, B/L/D, ¢-$. *

Ghostbusters

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Entertainment commissioner Audrey Joseph is, by her own assessment, a tough cookie. She successfully beat back a developer’s efforts to close her old SoMa nightclub. She attended her first Halloween in the Castro as a windup doll. And when skinheads targeted the famously gay Halloween event in the late 1980s, Joseph helped form the Gay Guards. But for all that, she is the first to admit that her latest gig — which involves helping Sup. Bevan Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom move Halloween festivities out of the Castro — won’t be easy.

"Sometimes I feel like a whipping post," Joseph told the Guardian the day after she gave the city’s first public presentation of the Dufty-Newsom plan to move the event into a parking lot behind AT&T Park — a lot that just happens to lie in the district of Newsom nemesis Sup. Chris Daly.

With Dufty stuck in traffic, though he did show up later, and Newsom nowhere in sight, Joseph was flying solo May 30 as she laid out their plan to an audience that was composed primarily of middle-aged Castro business and property owners. The city won’t close Market and Castro streets, and it won’t provide portable toilets or entertainment in the Castro, but it will police the area, and Castro merchants will be asked to voluntarily close early.

"We’d love to see the Castro dead," Joseph said as she laid out plans to lure Halloween revelers into the stadium parking lot by holding a concert featuring an as-yet-unnamed mainstream entertainer.

Some Castro residents expressed ambivalence about killing off what one attendee said amounts to "a sacred holiday" for the gay community, others pointed out that it would take a major hip-hop artist to lure the bridge-and-tunnel crowd to a concert that will cost $10 to $25 a pop, and bar owner Greg Bronstein questioned the sanity of closing early on what is the busiest business night of the year. Deputy police chief David Shinn pointed out that unlike New York’s 30,000-strong police force, which can encircle the Big Apple’s Halloween parade, the San Francisco Police Department’s 2,400 officers cannot ring the Castro.

"We’ve heard everyone’s cries about wanting Halloween out of the Castro," Joseph told the crowd. But her headache stemmed from the fact that her audience represented a small but highly vocal fraction of the 49,839 registered voters in Dufty’s district — and similarly small but vocal groups exist in Daly’s district too. Rincon Tenants Association president David Osgood decries the proposed plan as "the worst case of NIMBYism."

"This is an obvious effort by one neighborhood to get rid of their own event," Osgood told the Guardian. "But people are going to go to the Castro anyway. Halloween in the Castro has a flamboyance you don’t get anywhere else. Moving Halloween to the Embarcadero is like trying to move Mardi Gras out of New Orleans to Omaha. It’s just not going to work. It needs to be planned where it is."

But Joseph has high hopes for AT&T Park as a Halloween site, even though she has had a hard time finding event promoters. "The site is bigger, there’s less residential impact, it’s right on a Muni line, and we won’t have to stop traffic on the Embarcadero during rush hour when we’re setting up," she said.

Defending the lack of community meetings about Halloween in the past six months (something Newsom and Dufty had promised), Joseph said, "The city had to debrief from last year’s event, make a plan, and get Supervisors Dufty and Chris Daly to sign off on it, since both districts are involved, then meet with the mayor, the port, and a string of musical promoters."

As for concerns that people will just show up in the Castro or drift there once the city pulls the plug on the stadium parking lot concert at 10 p.m., Joseph said, "I’m open to suggestions. I’m trying to create a safe and fun environment where people say, ‘Wow, this is a great party!’ instead of coming to the Castro, looking terrified, and holding on to each other — for the thrill of what? Being stabbed or shot?" *

Hole in the street

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› news@sfbg.com

It was warmer than usual that Saturday morning in Golden Gate Park. Peter Cummings woke up behind a bush, took his shirt and shoes off, put on his headphones, and staggered down the hill with a bottle of whiskey and a big smile on his bearded, dirt-stained face. He sat down on the bench at Stanyan and Hayes and greeted passersby in his usual charmingly rambunctious way. For the past seven years, this had more or less been his daily routine.

The only thing that made this day different was the food and the heroin. That morning Cummings skipped breakfast. He usually went to the corner deli to buy some bread and soup, but not this particular Saturday. Then, around 2 p.m., a couple guys walking down the hill found Cummings convulsing in a quiet nook behind a fallen log. One of them gave him CPR and a Narcan shot, and a couple others ran across the street to St. Mary’s Medical Center to get the paramedics. But it was too late.

Hundreds of homeless people die every year in San Francisco, and many of them leave our world silently and with little impact on the city. But the loss of this particular alcoholic, bipolar, homeless man changed the landscape of one San Francisco neighborhood. As Gavin Newsom’s administration aggressively pursues its 10-year plan to abolish chronic homelessness, this man’s legacy shows how someone living in the park may actually be a good thing — if not for himself, then at least for the community.

"He watched out for me," Cirrus Blaafjell, who lives in the neighborhood, told the Guardian. "Some of the guys would harass me when I came out here at night to walk the dogs, and Pete would yell at them, ‘Leave her alone. She’s a nice person!’" When University of San Francisco student Amanda Anderson was followed through the park one day by a seedy character, Cummings launched his own inquiry. "Who tried to hurt Amanda? I’m gonna beat his ass when I find him!" Cummings yelled into the trees.

Even certain city officials agree. "He did seem to keep all the other drunks in line," Officer John Andrews of the San Francisco Police Department told us. "A lot of times when we had a problem, he’d come around and say, ‘Hey, Andrews, we’re taking care of things. Don’t worry.’ If someone was really intoxicated, he’d take them into the bushes. And he never argued with anyone."

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development considers people to be chronically homeless if they’re alone, disabled, and have been sleeping on the streets or in shelters for a year straight or intermittently for three years. Newsom’s initiatives aim to put all 3,000 chronically homeless residents of San Francisco into permanent homes by 2014. "It’s a concept based on Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point," Angela Alioto, the chairperson of the 10-year plan, explained. "If you take care of those who are the most chronic and use the most resources first, you will tip the scale of the whole problem."

But the Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit advocacy group, disagrees. "The phrase chronically homeless is misleading," director Juan Prada told us. "Chronic makes you think of general health issues, so you create an impression that homelessness is a condition. We see homelessness as a systemic failure to address poverty and the lack of housing."

Cummings, who lived in the park for the past seven years, was definitely chronically homeless. But had he survived another seven years to see the mayor’s initiative come to fruition, he may not have ever accepted the helping hand. "I live here by choice," Cummings once told me. "I have money, I have a place to go. I just like it here."

The corner of Stanyan and Hayes is almost never quiet. Belligerent drunks, ambulances speeding to the emergency room half a block north, and road-raged drivers blaring their horns at a badly designed left turn are part of the daily ruckus. Cops show up regularly. "People would call us about trash and shopping carts or about drunks yelling and screaming and fighting each other," Andrews told us. "And you have all types of guys up there in the horseshoe pit."

Hidden amid the trees in the northeast corner of Golden Gate Park, the horseshoe pit is known as a gathering place for hardcore drug users. Nothing remains of its original incarnation except some rusty equipment and a faded life-size mural of a horse. Today it’s a haphazard jumble of used needles, sleeping bags, and seedy characters often too messed up to talk. Despite having this hub as his home, Cummings stayed relatively drug-free for the past four years. And between his Veterans Affairs and Social Security checks, he was bringing home about $3,000 a month. Instead of paying rent, Cummings used his income to buy liquor for himself and food for everyone in the park. "Where does all my money go?" he used to ask people walking their dogs as his friends munched on hot dogs and piroshkis on the grass behind him.

"He used to buy cartons of milk and leave them quietly next to people who he thought would need it," remembers Jerry, a 52-year-old chronically homeless man and one of Cummings’s best friends.

Cummings kept his past well hidden from his park friends, but when he died, dozens of people in the Upper Haight–North Panhandle area came out with stories about him from the past two decades, back to a time when he was sober, happily married, and a model member of the community.

"People used to call him the mayor of Cole Valley," said Jacob Black, a cab driver. "He knew everybody in town."

Cummings was born in Melrose, Mass., on March 11, 1954. He lived there with his parents and two siblings until his father, an engineer at a forklift company, was transferred to Oregon in 1971. "[Peter] picked on me a lot, but I always outsmarted him," younger brother Rick Cummings, who is a sales rep in the health care industry, told us. "It was a typical brotherly thing." Cummings joined the Coast Guard at age 20 and developed a lifelong love for the ocean while stationed in Hawaii and Guam. He was honorably discharged in 1978 when he injured his knee on an open hatch cover.

For the next couple years, Cummings wandered around Northern California, growing pot and mushrooms in the mountains and sleeping on the beach. "He always attacked me for my middle-class, suburban lifestyle," Rick says. "He never wanted that." For most of the ’80s, Cummings lived under a seedy bridge in downtown Portland, with a heroin addiction and early symptoms of bipolar disorder. He ended up in San Francisco, where he decided to give sobriety a shot. As Rick said, "He had it together enough mentally to know that he had to either get cleaned up or die."

Once in San Francisco, Cummings took lithium for his bipolar disorder, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, and by all accounts stayed sober for almost 14 years. For the first time in his adult life, everything was going really well. He got married to a beautiful Peruvian woman, rented an apartment in Cole Valley, bought a used Jaguar and a Boston whaler, which he took out for salmon fishing in the bay, and was constantly surrounded by a solid group of friends. He even worked as a drug rehab counselor at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics.

Cummings was known among AA and NA circles as a handsome, spiritual role model with a killer sense of humor who always brought fresh fish to barbecues. "When I got sober, I was living on the streets and hated life," friend Dana Scheer says. "Pete reached out to me as he did to countless people. He was like a sober guru to me — I knew him as a very stable, rock-solid person."

Then, around 1998, things started to go downhill. His AA sponsor died of cancer; his wife left him; and the VA screwed up his bipolar meds. Cummings became increasingly isolated. He stopped attending meetings and moved out of the Haight, first to work as a building manager in SoMa and then to pursue a love interest in Mill Valley. "I went over to visit him one day, and he was drinking Coors," Scheer says. "This was my mentor from AA, so it was a little bit shocking." When Scheer left that evening, Cummings gave her a few of his belongings, including a stack of blankets. "I thought that was significant, because he always took care of me," Scheer says. "Blankets symbolize warmth and comfort, and he had always given me that. That was the last time I saw him before he ended up on the street again."

Cummings returned to the Haight around 2000, but this time he was drunk and high and incoherent. "When you’re that kind of addict, you don’t just start drinking a little wine," Scheer says. Cummings eventually ended up at the horseshoe pit, where he was reunited with some old AA friends who had also relapsed. And that’s where he lived for the last seven years of his life.

Despite recent city efforts to abolish camping in Golden Gate Park, Cummings continued to live in the bushes, often changing location to avoid getting caught. "It’s completely illegal for people to live in the park," Rose Dennis, director of communications at San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department, told us. "But if you’ve been on the streets for seven years, you become resilient."

Alioto told us she has no problem with homeless people not wanting a roof over their heads. "If a person truly wanted to live on the street, there is nothing we can or should do," she told us. "They have a constitutional right to live and travel."

On the outside, Cummings the homeless guy was nothing like Cummings the sober guru, but he continued to help people with drug and alcohol problems. "Peter helped a lot of kids get out of bad situations," Jerry told us. "He was in the Coast Guard, so he knew all the vital signs. He saved a lot of lives, including mine — twice. I owe him a pair of Levi’s from the time I bled all over his after falling down a 30-foot cliff."

Cummings apparently overdosed just a few feet south of the horseshoe pit that had seduced him back into this lifestyle. The week after Cummings died, the Hayes entrance of Golden Gate Park was eerily quiet. "The park is like a cemetery," Jerry said with tears in his eyes. "Everyone’s walking around like corpses." His homeless friends scattered to mourn the loss of a friend and source of nourishment in their own way. "When you’re living on the streets, people are dying left and right," Scheer says. "And when that happens, you just want to get loaded and forget about everything."

Residents of the North Panhandle didn’t have a reason to stop here anymore either." I used to sit on the bench and just talk to him," Christian Blaafjell says. "He was crazy, but he was great. I miss him." Even Andrews is well aware of the impact Cummings’s passing will have on the community. "He was the leader of this pack," he says. "I don’t know what’s going to happen to these guys over here." He pauses. "Hopefully, they’ll leave."

The sight of Cummings limping down Hayes Street might have looked bad for the city, but the services he offered to its most fallen people were indispensable. "Maybe he was just doing his job," says James Warren, a friend from Cummings’s AA days. "Maybe what he learned from the program, he took to the streets. Pete took his legacy, generosity, love, and compassion back to the streets so that they might know that there was a better place and that he’d been there. I know I wouldn’t have made it through if it wasn’t for him." *

Peter S. Cummings died May 5 in San Francisco. He is survived by his parents, Richard and Nancy; his sister, Pam; his brother, Rick; and dozens of friends.

Summer 2007 fairs and festivals guide

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ONGOING

ArtSFest Various venues; www.artsfestsf.org. For its fourth year, ArtSFest presents a showcase of theater, dance, visual art, film, music, spoken word, and more. Through May 28.

Night Market Ferry Bldg Marketplace, along the Embarcadero at the foot of Market; 693-0996, www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com. Thurs, 4-8pm, through Oct 26. Marketplace merchants and farmers offer their freshest artisan foods and produce at this weekly sunset event.

United States of Asian America Arts Festival Various venues; 864-4120, www.apiculturalcenter.org. Through June 30. This festival, presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, showcases Asian Pacific Islander dance, music, visual art, theater, and multidisciplinary performance ensembles at many San Francisco venues.

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival Yerba Buena Gardens, Third St at Mission; 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. Through Oct, free. Nearly 100 artistic and cultural events for all ages takes place at the gardens this summer including Moroccan percussionists, Hawaiian ukulele players, Yiddish klezmer violinists, Balinese dancers, Shakespearean actors, Cuban musicians, and Japanese shakuhachi players.

BAY AREA

Silicon Valley Open Studios www.svos.org. Sat-Sun, 11am-5pm, through May 20. Check out Silicon Valley artists’ works and the spaces they use to create them at this community art program.

MAY 8–20

The Hip-Hop Theater Festival: Bay Area 2007 Various venues; www.youthspeaks.org. Youth Speaks, La Peña Cultural Center, the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, and San Francisco International Arts Festival present this showcase of new theater works that feature break dancing, MCing, graffiti, spoken word, and DJ sampling.

MAY 10-20

Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival Various venues; www.mcmf.org. The Mission Creek Music and Arts Festival features the best and brightest independent musicians and artists, including music by Vincent Gallo, Acid Mothers Temple, Edith Frost, and Gary Higgins. Literary and film events are also planned.

MAY 12

KFOG KaBoom! Piers 30-32; 817-KFOG, www.kfog.com. 4-10pm, free. Kick off the summer with this popular event featuring music, a spectacular fireworks show, food and drinks, and activities for kids. Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Guster, and Ozomatli perform.

BAY AREA

Arlen Ness Motorcycles Anniversary Party Arlen Ness, 6050 Dublin, Dublin; (925) 479-6300, www.arlenness.com. 10am-4:30pm, free. Celebrate the company’s fourth year in Dublin and 37th year in business with a display of the largest selection of Ness, Victory, American Iron Horse, and Big Dog Motorcycles in California, a walk through the museum, and a live music from Journey tribute band Evolution.

Beltane Pagan Festival Civic Center Park, 2151 MLK Jr. Way, Berk; www.thepaganalliance.org.10am-5:30pm, free. This year’s festival focuses on children and young adults and features a procession, performances, vendors, storytelling, an authors’ circle, and information booths.

Peralta in Bloom Spring Festival Carter Middle School, 4521 Webster, Oakl; (510) 655-1502, www.peraltaschool.org. Due to a fire, Peralta’s spring festival will be held at a temporary home this year. Expect the same great live entertainment, carnival games, old-fashioned high-steppin’ cakewalk, free arts and crafts, and delicious barbecue as always.

MAY 13

Hood Games VI "Tender Love" Turk between Mason and Taylor; 11am-4pm. This celebration of youth culture features live skating and music, art, a fashion show, contests, and a raffle. Bonus: every mom who shows up for this Mother’s Day event gets a free skateboard.

BAY AREA

Russian-American Fair Terman Middle School, 655 Arastradero, Palo Alto; (650) 852-3509, paloaltojcc.org. 10am-5pm, $3-5. The Palo Alto Jewish Community Center puts on this huge, colorful cultural extravaganza featuring ethnic food, entertainment, crafts and gift items, art exhibits, carnival games, and vodka tasting.

MAY 16–27

San Francisco International Arts Festival Various venues; (415) 439-2456, www.sfiaf.org. The theme for this year’s multidisciplinary festival is the Truth in Knowing/Now, a Conversation across the African Diaspora.

MAY 17–20

Carmel Art Festival Devendorf Park, Carmel; (831) 642-2503, www.carmelartfestival.org. Call for times, free. Enjoy viewing works by more than 60 visual artists at this four-day festival. In addition to the Plein Air and Sculpture-in-the-Park events, the CAF is host to the Carmel Youth Art Show, Quick Draw, and Kids Art Day.

MAY 18–20

Festival of Greece 4700 Lincoln, Oakl; (510) 531-3400, www.oaklandgreekfestival.com. Fri-Sat, 10am-11pm; Sun, 11am-9pm, $6. Free on Fri 10-4 and Sun 6-9. Let’s hear an "opa!" for Greek music, dance, food, and a stunning view at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Ascension’s three-day festival.

MAY 19

A La Carte and Art Castro St, Mountain View; (650) 964-3395, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. A moveable feast of people and colorful tents offering two days of attractions, music, art, a farmers’ market, and a special appearance by TV star Delta Burke.

Asian Heritage Street Celebration Howard between Fifth and Seventh streets; 321-5865, www.asianfairsf.com. 11am-6pm, free. More than 200 organizations participate in this festival, which features Asian cooking demonstrations, beer and sake, arts and crafts, a variety of food, and live entertainment.

Family Fun Festival and Silent Auction 165 Grattan; 759-2815. 11am-5pm, free. Enjoy this second annual family event in Cole Valley, featuring a kids’ carnival with prizes, street theater, live music, refreshments, and a silent auction.

Oyster and Beer Fest Great Meadows, Fort Mason, Laguna at Bay; www.oreillysoysterfestival.com. 12-7pm, $15-19 ($50 reserved seating). O’Reilly’s Productions presents the 8th annual festival celebrating oysters and beer, featuring cooking demos, competitions, and live performance from Flogging Molly, Shantytown, The Hooks, and more.

Saints Kiril and Metody Bulgarian Cultural Festival Croatian American Cultural Center, 60 Onondaga; (510) 649-0941, www.slavonicweb.org. 3pm-midnight, $15. Enjoy live music, dance, and traditional food and wine in celebration of Bulgarian culture. A concert features Nestinari, Zaedno, Brass Punks, and many more.

Taiwanese American Cultural Festival Union Square; (408) 268-5637, www.tafnc.org. 10am-7pm, free. Explore Taiwan by tasting delicious Taiwanese delicacies, viewing a puppet show and other performances, and browsing arts and crafts exhibits.

Uncorked! Public Wine Festival Ghirardelli Square, 900 N Point; 775-5500, www.ghirardellisq.com. 1-6pm, event free, wine tasting $40-100. This second annual wine festival features wine tasting, five-star chef demonstrations, wine seminars, and a chocolate and wine pairing event.

BAY AREA

Cupertino Special Festival in the Park Cupertino Civic Center, 10300 Torre, Cupertino; (408) 996-0850, www.osfamilies.org. 10am-6pm, free. The Organization of Special Needs Families hosts its third annual festival for people of all walks or wheels of life. Featuring live music, food and beer, bouncy houses, arts and crafts, and other activities.

Pixie Park Spring Fair Marin Art and Garden Center, Sir Francis Drake Blvd at Lagunitas, Ross; www.pixiepark.org. 9am-4pm, free. This fair for preschoolers and kindergarteners features bathtub races, pony rides, a petting zoo, a puppet show, and much more.

MAY 19-20

Bay Area Storytelling Festival Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area, San Pablo Dam Road near Castro Ranch, El Sobrante; (510) 644-2593, www.bayareastorytelling.org.

Sat, 9:30am-8pm; Sun, 9:30am-5:15pm, $8-65. Gather around and listen to stories told by storytellers from around the world at this outdoor festival. Sheila Kay Adams, Charlotte Blake Alston, Bill Harley and others are featured.

Castroville Artichoke Festival 10100 Merritt, Castroville; (831) 633-2465, www.artichoke-festival.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $3-6. Have a heart — eat an artichoke. This festival cooks up the vegetable in every way imaginable and features tons of fun activities for kids, music, a parade, a farmers’ market, and much more.

Day of Decadence Women’s Expo Sedusa Studios, 1300 Dell, Campbell; (408) 826-9087, www.sedusastudios.com. 1-4pm, $5. Twenty-five women-owned businesses exhibit their products and pamper their customers at this decadent event. Includes free services, champagne, refreshments, and a chocolate fountain.

French Flea Market Chateau Sonoma, 153 West Napa, Sonoma; (707) 935-8553, www.chateausonoma.com. 10:30am-5:30pm, call for price. Attention, Francophiles: this flea market is for you! Shop for antiques, garden furniture, and accessories from French importers.

Himalayan Fair Live Oak Park, 1300 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 869-3995, www.himalayanfair.net. Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 10am-5:30pm, call for price. This benefit for humanitarian grassroots projects in the Himalayas features award-winning dancers and musicians representing Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Mongolia. Check out the art and taste the delicious food.

Maker Faire San Mateo Fairgrounds, San Mateo; (415) 318-9067, www.makerfaire.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-5pm, $5-15. A two-day, family-friendly event established by the creators of Make and Create magazines that celebrates arts, crafts, engineering, science projects, and the do-it-yourself mindset.

Muscle Car, Hot Rods, and Art Fair Bollinger Canyon Rd and Camino Ramon, San Ramon; (925) 855-1950, www.hatsoffamerica.us. 10am-5pm, free. Hats Off America presents this family event featuring muscle cars, classics and hot rods, art exhibits, children’s activities, live entertainment, and beer and wine.

Passport to Sonoma Valley Various venues; (707) 935-0803, www.sonomavalleywine.com. 11am-4pm, $55 (weekend, $65). This first of its kind, valleywide event will provide visitors rare access to the many hidden gems of California’s oldest wine region. More than 40 Sonoma wineries are participating, and the cost includes unlimited tasting.

Sunset Celebration Weekend Sunset headquarters, 80 Willow Road, Menlo Park; 1-800-786-7375, www.sunset.com. 10am-5pm, $10-12, kids free. Sunset magazine presents a two-day outdoor festival featuring beer, wine, and food tasting; test-kitchen tours, celebrity chef demonstrations, live music, seminars, and more.

Spring Fling Open House Rosenblum Cellars, 2900 Main, Alameda; (510) 995-4100, www.rosenblumcellars.com. Noon-5pm, $30. Try new and current releases at Rosenblum’s Alameda winery while enjoying wine-friendly hors d’oeuvres and music from local musicians.

MAY 20

ING Bay to Breakers Begins at Howard and Spear, ends at the Great Highway along Ocean Beach, SF; www.baytobreakers.com. 8am, $33-40. See a gang of Elvis impersonators in running shorts and a gigantic balloon shaped like a tube of Crest floating above a crowd of scantily clad, and unclad, joggers at this annual race from the Embarcadero to the Pacific Ocean.

BAY AREA

Jazz on Fourth Street Festival Fourth St, between Hearst and Virginia, Berk; (510) 526-6294, www.4thstreetshop.com. 11am-5pm, free. Local merchants present this annual outdoor music festival featuring Marcus Shelby Quartet, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Group, two Berkeley High combos, and the award-winning Berkeley High Jazz ensemble.

Niles Wildflower Art and Garden Show Niles Blvd at Main, Fremont; www.niles.org. 10am-3pm, event free, garden tour $12-15. Take a self-guided tour of beautiful home gardens and enjoy the creative works of local artists.

MAY 24–27

Sonoma Jazz Plus Festival Field of Dreams, 179 First St W, Sonoma; 1-866-527-8499, www.sonomajazz.org. $45-95. Thurs-Sat, 6:30 and 9pm; Sun, 8:30pm, $45-110. Head on up to California’s wine country for Memorial Day weekend and soak in the sounds of LeAnn Rimes, Tony Bennett, Smokey Robinson, and Harry Connick Jr.

MAY 25–28

Memorial Day Folk Music Camp Out Waterman Creek Camp, Santa Cruz County; (510) 523-6533. www.sffmc.org. $7/night. Preregistration required. Camp and sing along with the San Francisco Folk Music Club. Everybody’s goin’!

MAY 26

Soul Jazz Festival Crown Canyon Park, 8000 Crow Canyon, Castro Valley; www.souljazzfestival.com. 12-8pm, $45-49. A one-day music event celebrating the worlds of jazz, funk, and soul. This year pays tribute to Ella Fitzgerald and features Johnny Holiday, Ladybug Mecca of Digable Planets, and Ella Fitzgerald’s son, Ray Brown Jr.

MAY 26–27

Carnaval San Francisco Harrison between 16th and 24th streets; (415) 920-0122, www.carnavalsf.com. 10am-6pm, free. The vibrant Mission District plays host to the best of Latin and Caribbean cultures and traditions with an array of food, music, dance, and art. The theme for this year’s carnaval is Love Happens, and it features speed dating at the Love Nest, a performance by Los Lonely Boys, and a parade on Sunday.

North American Cycle Courier Championship Speakeasy Brewery, 1195 Evans; 748-2941. Sat, 9am-2pm; Sun, 10am-1pm, free. This weekend-long celebration of bike culture features a race on a closed course that tests all areas of bike messenger skill.

BAY AREA

Santa Cruz Blues Festival 100 Aptos Creek, Aptos; (831) 479-9814, www.santacruzbluesfestival.com. 10am-7pm, $20-100. Rhythm and blues buffs beware. This annual festival, in its 15th year, showcases some of the most renowned acts of new and vintage R&B, soul, and blues rock, including Los Lonely Boys, Etta James and the Roots Band, and Little Feat. International food booths, juice bars, and beer make this event add to the appeal.

MAY 26–28

The San Francisco Cup International Youth Soccer Tournament and Festival Golden Gate Park’s Polo Field, SF; (415) 337-6630, www.sfcup.com. 8:30am. This 20th annual premier event brings together 128 national and international teams of both genders for great soccer excitement.

MAY 26–JUNE 30

Bay Area Summer Poetry Marathon Lab, 2948 16th St, SF; (415) 864-8855, www.thelab.org. 7-10pm,. $3-15 sliding scale. Various Bay Area and national poets read their work at this event held throughout the summer.

MAY 27

Antique Street Faire Main St, Pleasanton; (760) 724-9400, www.pleasantondowntown.net. 8am-4pm, free. This semiannual event sponsored by the Pleasanton Downtown Association provides more than a mile of antiques and collectibles displayed by about 300 professional dealers.

Art in the Vineyard Wente Vineyards Estate Winery, 5565 Tesla, Livermore; (925) 456-2305, www.livermoreartassociation.com. 11am-5pm, admission free, wine tasting $15. Mark your calendars for the 35th anniversary of this popular event, featuring 40 talented multimedia artists in addition to music by Vested Interest.

Asian Pacific Heritage Festival Bay Area Discovery Museum, 557 McReynolds, Sausalito; (415) 339-3900, www.baykidsmuseum.org.10am-5pm, free. Experience taiko drumming, the Marin Chinese Cultural Association’s Lion Dance Team, and other Polynesian and Pacific Islander arts groups, as well as traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino cuisine in honor of Asian Pacific Islander Month.

Caledonia Street Fair Caledonia St, Sausalito; (415) 289-4152, www.ci.sausalito.ca.us.10:30am-6pm, free. This fest boasts multicultural food, dance, music, and more than 120 arts and crafts vendors. Don’t miss out on the Taste of Sausalito luncheon and wine-tasting event featuring food and wine prepared by select Napa and Sonoma wineries and restaurants.

MAY 28

Stone Soul Picnic Cal State East Bay’s Pioneer Amphitheatre, 25800 Carlos Bee, Hayward; 1-800-225-2277, www.kblx.com. Doors at 10am, show at noon, $56-81.50 includes parking. KBLX Radio 102.9 FM presents its 10th annual R&B and soul music event, featuring performances by Isaac Hayes, the Whispers, the Dells, and Tower of Power.

MAY 29–30

BALLE Film Fest Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, Berk; (415) 255-1108, ext 112, livingeconomies.org. 6 and 8:30pm, $10 for screening, $15 for night. Business Alliance for Local Living Economies presents a two-night film festival reutf8g to BALLE principles, including Everything’s Cool, a film about global warming, and Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary about China’s industrial revolution.

MAY 31–JUNE 3

Contra Costa County Fair Contra Costa County Fairgrounds,10th and L streets, Antioch; (925) 757-4400, www.ccfair.org. Thurs-Fri, noon-11pm.; Sat-Sun, 11am-11pm, $4-7, parking $3. Now 70 years old, this county fair has a little of everything. Daily sea lion shows, a man dressed as a giant tree, and, of course, clown acts, are just some of the events presented to fairgoers this year.

JUNE 1–10

East Bay Open Studios Various venues; (510) 763-4361, www.proartsgallery.org. Open studios: June 2-3, 9-10, 11am-6pm; formal artists’ reception May 31, 6-10pm, free. For more than 25 years, the East Bay Open Studios have drawn more than 50,000 visitors to Pro Arts Gallery and various artist workspaces to support the work of local artists. The public can view exhibits, purchase artwork, attend workshops, and go on an art bus tour.

Healdsburg Jazz Festival Check Web site for ticket prices and venues in and around Healdsburg; (707) 433-4644, www.healdsburgjazzfestival.com. This ninth annual week-and-a-half-long jazz festival will feature a range of artists, from the George Cables Project and Roy Hargrove Quintet to the funky Louisiana-style Rebirth Brass Band and first-rate vocalist Rhiannon.

JUNE 2

Berkeley Farmers Market’s Strawberry Family Fun Festival Civic Center Park, Center at MLK Jr, Berk; (510) 548-3333, www.ecologycenter.org. 10am-3pm, free. Living up to its name, this festival is a guaranteed good time for the whole family. Highlights include environmental information booths, hands-on activities, delectable strawberry shortcake, and live performances by Nigerian Brothers, EarthCapades Environmental Vaudeville, Big Tadoo Puppet Crew, and Young Fiddlers.

Heartland Festival Riverdance Farms, Livingston; (831) 763-2111, www.eco-farm.org. 10am-7pm, $10 advance, $12 at gate. Celebrate a summer weekend by picking berries, taking farm and garden workshops, buying fresh produce from a farmers’ market, and enjoying live music at this family event.

Sonoma Valley Vintage Race Car Festival Sonoma Plaza, Sonoma; (707) 996-1090, www.sonomavalleyvisitors.com. 5pm, free entrance. Wine and food $30 in advance, $35 at the door. A gigantic taste explosion filled with more than 30 vintage dragsters, gourmet food, and wine samples.

Springfest 2007 Osher Marin Jewish Community Center, 200 North San Pedro, San Rafael; (415) 499-8891, www.mdt.org. 1 and 5pm, $14-22. Marin Dance Theatre presents this spring program featuring various performances directed by Margaret Swarthout.

JUNE 2–3

Art Deco and Modernism Sale Concourse Exhibition Center, 635 Eighth St; (650) 599-DECO, www.artdecosale.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 11am-5pm, $7-9. An extravagant art sale featuring pottery, books, art, vintage clothing, glass, furniture, and other accessories dating from 1900 to 1980.

Art in the Avenues Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, Ninth Ave and Lincoln; www.sunsetartists.com. 10am-5pm. This annual exhibition and sale presented by the Sunset Artists Society brings together artists and art lovers from all over the Bay Area.

Great San Francisco Crystal Fair Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna; 383-7837, www.crystalfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-4pm, $5. This year’s fair is sure to please anyone interested in mystical and healing arts. Check out the more than 40 vendors catering to all of your crystal, mineral, bead, and jewelry needs.

Union Street Festival Union between Gough and Steiner; 1-800-310-6563, www.unionstreetfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. This year marks the 31st anniversary of one of San Francisco’s largest free art festivals. In addition to more than 200 artists and 20 gourmet food booths, the event features activities that represent the history of the Union Street Festival, including a special photographic exhibit that shows Union Street as it was 100 years ago.

BAY AREA

Marin Home Show and Benefit Jazz Fest Marin Center Exhibit Hall and Fairgrounds, San Rafael; (415) 499-6900, www.marinhomeshow.com. Sat, 10am-7pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, $8 (Sat tix include free return on Sun). Not only will there be hundreds of experts in everything from renovation to landscaping on hand to answer all of your home and garden questions, but there will also be live jazz acts to entertain you throughout the weekend. Proceeds benefit Marin County public schools.

JUNE 3

Santa Cruz LGBT Pride March and Rally Starts at Pacific, ends at Lorenzo Park, Santa Cruz; (831) 427-4009, www.santacruzpride.org. 11am-5pm, free. Join the largest gathering of queers and allies in Santa Cruz County. Stage lineup includes Frootie Flavors, Nedra Johnson, Twilight Vixen Revue, Horizontes, and Assemblymember John Laird. Valet bike parking provided.

JUNE 6

Strollin’ on Main Street Party Main between St John and Old Bernal, Pleasanton; (925) 484-2199, ext 4, www.pleasantondowntown.net. 6-9pm, free. Stroll down Main Street and visit vendor booths, a beer and wine garden, and a stage where featured band Drive will play.

JUNE 6–AUG 29

Summer Sounds Oakland City Center, adjacent to 12th St/City Center BART Station, Oakl; www.oaklandcitycenter.com. Wed, noon-1pm, free. The Oakland City Center presents a weekly spotlight on an array of diverse musical artists.

JUNE 7–17

San Francisco Black Film Festival Various venues; (415) 771-9271, www.sfbff.org. The festival celebrates African American cinema and the African cultural diaspora by showcasing films by black filmmakers and emphasizing the power of film to foster cultural understanding and initiate progressive social change.

JUNE 8–10

Harmony Festival Sonoma County Fairgrounds,1350 Bennett Valley, Santa Rosa; www.harmonyfestival.com. Fri, 12pm-9pm; Sat, 10am-10pm; Sun, 10am-9pm, $20-149. This year’s theme is "promoting global cooling" boasts an ecovillage offering tips for living and consuming, a well-being pavilion featuring natural remedies, and a culinary showcase of dishes using natural ingredients. Festival-goers can camp onsite and musical highlights include Brian Wilson, Erykah Badu, the Roots, moe., and Rickie Lee Jones.

JUNE 9

Dia de Portugal Festival Kelley Park, San Jose; www.diadeportugal.com. 10am, free. The Portuguese Heritage Society of California presents this annual festival featuring a parade, live music, food and wine, a book and art sale, and more.

Temescal Street Fair Telegraph between 48th and 51st streets, Oakl; (510) 654-6346, ext 2, www.temescalmerchants.com. Noon-5pm, free. This fair will feature live music, crafts, martial arts demonstrations and food samplings from local restaurants, including an Italian beer and wine garden, a tribute to days when the district once flourished with beer gardens and canteens.

JUNE 9–10

Italian Street Painting Festival Fifth Ave at A St, San Rafael; (415) 457-4878, ext 15, www.youthinarts.org. 9am-7pm, free. Street painters paint beautiful and awe-inspiring chalk artwork on the streets of San Rafael.

Live Oak Park Fair Live Oak Park, 1301 Shattuck, Berk; (510) 898-3282, www.liveoakparkfair.com.10am-6pm, free. Is there a better way to revel in the summertime than to enjoy original arts and crafts, delicious fresh food, and live jazz by Berkeley’s Jazzschool all weekend long in beautiful Live Oak Park? Didn’t think so.

San Jose Gay Pride Festival Discovery Meadow, Guadalupe River Park, San Jose; (408) 278-5563, www.sjgaypride.org. Sat, 10am-6pm, free; Sun, 10:30am, $15. This year’s San Jose pride celebration is two days’ worth of events, speakers, and music, including performances by the Cheeseballs, Average Dyke Band, and Smash-Up Derby. After the parade on Sunday, cruise vendor booths peddling their LGBT-friendly goods and services.

JUNE 9–24

San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon, SF; (415) 392-4400, www.worldartswest.org. Sat, 2 and 8pm; Sun, 2pm, $22-36. Performers from around the world converge at the Palace of Fine Arts to bring San Francisco a diverse selection of the world’s most talented dancers, including North Indian Kathak, Cantonese style Chinese lion dance, flamenco, and Middle Eastern belly dance.

JUNE 14–16

Transgender and Queer Performance Festival ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; (415) 863-9834, www.freshmeatproductions.org. Thurs-Fri, 8pm; Sat, 7 and 10pm, $15. Fresh Meat Productions celebrates its sixth annual festival. This year’s artists perform traditional forms and path-blazing ones: hula, taiko, traditional Colombian dance, aerial dance, spoken word, rock ‘n’ roll, theater, hip-hop, and modern dance.

JUNE 14–17

CBA 32nd Annual Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival Nevada County Fairgrounds, McCourtney, Grass Valley; www.cbaontheweb.org. Ticket prices vary. Rhonda Vincent and the Rage, Cherryholmes, the Del McCoury Band, Dan Paisley and the Southern Grass, Country Current, the US Navy Band, the Dale Ann Bradley Band, and John Reischman and the Jay Birds perform at this California Bluegrass Association bluegrass jamboree.

JUNE 14–24

Frameline31: San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival Various venues; (415) 703-8650. www.frameline.org. The 31st annual film festival by and about the LGBT community continues with a whole new program of innovative queer cinema.

JUNE 15–17

International Robogames Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, SF; www.RoboGames.net. Noon-10pm, $15-20. Engineers from around the world return for the fourth annual event listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest robot competition. Featuring 83 different competitions, including 18 just for walking humanoids.

JUNE 16–17

North Beach Festival Washington Square Park, 1200-1500 blocks of Grant and adjacent streets; 989-2220, www.sfnorthbeach.org. 10am-6pm, free. Touted as the country’s original outdoor arts and crafts festival, the North Beach Festival celebrates its 53rd anniversary with juried arts and crafts exhibitions and sales, a celebrity pizza toss, live entertainment stages, a cooking stage with celebrity chefs, Assisi animal blessings (Vallejo/Columbus), Arte di Gesso (Italian street chalk art competition, 1500 block Stockton), indoor classical concerts (4 pm, at National Shrine of St Francis), a poetry stage, and more.

San Francisco Free Folk Festival San Francisco City College, North Gym, 50 Phelan, SF; www.sffreefolkfest.org. Noon-10pm, free. Folkies unite for the 31st anniversary of this festival that features local and national artists, dances, open mics, family events, and workshops.

San Francisco Juneteenth Celebration Art of the Fillmore Jazz Presentation District, Fillmore from Geary Blvd to Fulton; 931-2729, www.sfjuneteenth.org. 10am-7pm, free. This Bay Area-wide celebration celebrates African American freedom while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. Promoted through a community festival that celebrates and shares African American history and culture through music, the performing arts, living history, and other cultural activities. Seven full blocks of food, arts and crafts, and community and corporate information booths. Three stages of entertainment, educational speakers, and health and job fairs. All neighborhoods welcomed.

BAY AREA

Marin Art Festival Lagoon Park, Marin Center, Ave of the Flags at Civic Center, San Rafael; (415) 388-0151, www.marinartfestival.com. 10am-6pm, $8. More than 250 fine artists join in at the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Marin Center. Look out for the stilt walkers!

Russian River Blues Festival Johnson’s Beach, Guerneville; (952) 866-9599, www.russianriverbluesfest.com. 10am-6pm, $45-180. Head on down to the river for this annual affair featuring Buddy Guy, Little Richard, Koko Taylor, Roy Rogers and the Delta Kings, Lowrider Band, Elvin Bishop, and many others. Festival organizers also invite attendees to indulge in wine tasting for a nominal fee.

JUNE 17

Native Contemporary Arts Festival Esplanade at Yerba Buena Gardens, Fourth St and Mission, SF; (415) 543-1718, www.ybgf.org. 12pm-3pm, free. This fest features amazing performances, plus kids can make their own dream catchers, baskets, and bracelets.

JUNE 17–AUG 19

Stern Grove Music Festival Stern Grove, 19th Ave and Sloat, SF; www.sterngrove.org. Sun 2pm, free. This beloved San Francisco festival celebrating community, nature, and the arts is in its 70th season.

JUNE 20–24

Sonoma-Marin Fair Petaluma Fairgrounds, Petaluma; www.sonoma-marinfair.org. $8-14. This fair promotes and showcases agriculture, while displaying the diverse talents, interests, and accomplishments of the citizens of California, especially the youth of Sonoma and Marin counties. Catch acts such as Cheap Trick, SHe DAISY, and Bowling for Soup on the main stage.

JUNE 22–24

Sierra Nevada World Music Festival Mendocino County Fairgrounds, 14480 Hwy 128, Boonville; www.snwmf.com. Three-day pass, $125; camping, $50-100. Camp for three days and listen to the international sounds of Bunny Wailer, Toots and the Maytals, Luciano, Ojos de Brujo, Les Nubian, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars, Junior Kelly, Sugar Minot, and many others.

JUNE 22–JULY 8

Alameda County Fair Alameda County Fairgrounds, 4501 Pleasanton, Pleasanton; (925) 426-7559, www.alamedacountyfair.com. $4-9. Enjoy opening night fireworks, carnival attractions, a wine competition, a karaoke contest, an interactive sports and fitness expo, concerts, and oh so much more.

JUNE 23

Dyke March Dolores Park between 18th and 20th streets, SF; (415) 241-8882, www.dykemarch.org. Rally at 3pm; march at 7pm, free. Head on out to march with the San Francisco chapter of this now internationally coordinated rally. A Dolores Park celebration and rally precedes the march.

JUNE 23–24

San Francisco Pride 2006 Civic Center, Larkin between Grove and McAllister; 864-FREE, www.sfpride.org. Celebration Sat-Sun, noon-6pm; parade Sun, 10:30am, free. A month of queer-empowering events culminates in this weekend celebration, a massive party with two days of music, food, dancing that continues to boost San Francisco’s rep as a gay mecca. Do not under any circumstances miss the parade!

BAY AREA

Danville Fine Arts Fair Hartz Ave, Danville; (831) 438-4751, www.danvillecachamber.com. 10am-6pm, free. The quintessential arts and crafts fair descends upon Danville each year, bringing with it fine food and drink, Italian-style street painting, and more.

JUNE 23–25

King of the Bay Third Ave, Foster City; www.kingofthebay.com. 1pm, free. See the world’s top kiteboarders and windsurfers compete at this event.

JUNE 23–30

Jazz Camp West 2006 (510) 287-8880, www.jazzcampwest.com. This eight-day jazz program for adults and older teens features more than 100 classes taught by more than 45 nationally and internationally known artists.

JUNE 23–AUG 4

Stanford Jazz Festival Various venues. (650) 736-0324, www.stanfordjazz.org. This acclaimed festival has been injecting Northern California with a healthy dose of both classic and modern jazz for more than three decades.

JUNE 23–SEPT 8

Concert in the Hills Series Cal State East Bay, Concord Campus, 4700 Ygnacio Valley Rd, Concord; (925) 602-8654, www.concord.csueastbay.edu/concertinthehills.htm. Free. This series celebrates its eighth season with performances by acts such as Dr. Loco and His Rockin’ Jalapeño Band, Aja Vu, Joni Morris, and Native Elements.

JUNE 29–JULY 1

Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival Black Oak Ranch, Laytonville; (707) 829-7067, www.katewolf.com/festival. Fri, 1pm-midnight; Sat, 10am-11:30pm; Sun, 11am-10pm, $55-160. This annual tribute to Northern California singer-songwriter Kate Wolf, who is credited with repopularizing folk music in the 1970s, features performances by Utah Phillips, Joe Craven and Sam Bevan, the Bills, and many others. Don’t miss the "Hobo Jungle Campfire," a nightly campfire on the creek shore with story swappin’ and song jammin’ aplenty.

JUNE 30–JULY 1

23rd Annual Fillmore Jazz Festival Fillmore between Jackson and Eddy, 1-800-310-6563, www.sresproductions.com. 10am-6pm, free. Three stages of nonstop entertainment featuring top and emerging artists. Ten blocks of art booths and gourmet food.

JUNE 30–JULY 4

Marin County Fair Marin Center, Ave of the Flags at Civic Center, San Rafael; (415) 499-6400, www.marinfair.org. 11am-11pm, $11-13. This county fair stands above the rest with its promise of nightly fireworks, There will be many fun, new competitions to enter this year, including the Dancing Stars Competition, in which contestants may perform any style of dance — from tap to ballroom, salsa to boogie. Also not to be missed is the 18th annual "Creatures and Models" exhibit and the 37th annual "National Short Film and Video Festival," plus food and rides and other fun fair stuff.

JULY 1

Vans Warped Tour 2006 Shoreline Amphitheatre, 1 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View; (650) 967-3000. www.warpedtour.com. 11am, $29.99. As Cities Burn, Bad Religion, Boys Like Girls, Coheed and Cambria, Escape the Fate, Pennywise, the Used, Funeral for a Friend, Revolution Mother, the Matches, and others perform at this annual punk music and culture event.

JULY 3–4

WorldOne Festival Cerrito Vista Park, El Cerrito; www.worldoneradio.org. Mon 5pm, Tue 10:30am, free. Worldoneradio hosts a world music and culture stage in the park. The eighth annual event is produced as a public service and fundraiser for area nonprofits.

JULY 4

City of San Francisco Fourth of July Waterfront Celebration Pier 39, Embarcadero at Beach, SF; (415) 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1-9:30pm, free. SF’s waterfront Independence Day celebration features live music, kids’ activities, and an exciting fireworks show.

JULY 5–8

International Working Class Film and Video Festival New College Roxie Media Center, 3117 16th St; www.laborfest.net. Held annually to commemorate the San Francisco general strike of 1934 brings together filmmakers and labor artists from around the United States and internationally.

BAY AREA

High Sierra Music Festival Plumas Fairgrounds, 204 Fairground Rd, Quincy; (510) 595-1115, www.highsierramusic.org. 11am-11pm, $35-156. Enjoy your favorite jam bands on five different stages and at five different late-night venues, a kid zone, arts and crafts, food and drinks, beer, yoga, dancing, camping, and more. The lineup features performances by Xavier Rudd, the Disco Biscuits, Yonder Mountain String Band, Martin Sexton, and Les Claypool.

JULY 6–SEPT 29

Marin Shakespeare Company Festival Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, Dominican University of California, Grand Ave, San Rafael; (415) 499-4488, www.marinshakespeare.org. Fri-Sun, varying times, $7-30. The Marin Shakespeare Company presents its outdoor festival featuring performances of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Henry IV, Part 1, and Henry IV, Part 2.

JULY 10–21

Mendocino Music Festival Various venues; (707) 937-2044, www.mendocinomusic.com. $15-45. David Lindley, Mollie O’Brien, the Chris Cain Quartet, and others celebrate the 21st anniversary of this classical and contemporary music festival.

JULY 12–15

World California Fest Nevada County Fairgrounds, Grass Valley; (530) 891-4098. www.worldfest.net. $30-140. The 11th annual festival features eight stages and four days of music, with performances by everyone from Ani DiFranco to the Venezuelan Music Project. Camping is encouraged.

JULY 13–15

San Francisco Silent Film Festival Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; (415) 777-4908, www.silentfilm.org. Call for times and prices. The Golden Age of the silver screen comes to life, complete with a swelling Wurlitzer.

JULY 14-15

San Francisco International Chocolate Salon Fort Mason Conference Center; www.SFChocolateSalon.com. Sat, 11am-6pm; Sun, 10am-4pm, $20. The first major chocolate show on the West Coast in two decades takes place this summer with the theme Chocolat, in honor of Bastille Day. Experience the finest in artisan, gourmet, and premium chocolate with tastings, demonstrations, chef and author talks, and wine pairings.

BAY AREA

Los Altos Arts and Wine Festival Main and State, Los Altos; (650) 917-9799. www.losaltos-downtown.org. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-6pm, free. Enjoy original art and free entertainment while indulging in gourmet food and fine wine.

San Anselmo Art and Design Festival San Anselmo between Tamalpais and Bolinas, San Anselmo; 1-800-310-6563, www.artanddesignfestival.com. 10am-6pm, free. The San Anselmo Chamber of Commerce brings this buffet of cooking, home, and landscape design to the masses.

JULY 19–29

Midsummer Mozart Festival Various venues; (415) 627-9141, www.midsummermozart.org. $30-60. The Mozart-only music concert series features pianist Janina Fialkowska, the Haffner Serenades, and the Coronation Mass.

JULY 19–AUG 6

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Various venues; (415) 621-0556, www.sfjff.org. The world’s first and largest Jewish film festival has toured the Bay Area for 27 years.

JULY 21–22

Connoisseur’s Marketplace Santa Cruz Ave, Menlo Park; (650) 325-2818, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. This annual midsummer festival hosts live jazz, R&B, and rock ‘n’ roll as well as arts and crafts, chef demonstrations, international cuisine, and lots of fun for the kids.

JULY 27–29

Gilroy Garlic Festival Christmas Hill Park, Hwy 101, Gilroy; (408) 842-1625, www.gilroygarlicfestival.com. 10am-7pm, $6-12. If 17,000 pounds of garlic bread isn’t enough of a reason to go, then all the other manifestations of this flavorful food are. Gourmet food and cook-offs, as well as free music and children’s activities, entertain you as you munch.

JULY 29

San Francisco Marathon Begins and ends at the Ferry Bldg, Embarcadero, SF; www.runsfm.com. $110 to compete. Tighten your laces for 26.2 miles around the Bay. The less enthusiastic can run a half marathon, 5K, or "progressive marathon," instead.

Up Your Alley Dore Alley between Folsom and Howard, Folsom between Ninth and 10th streets, SF; www.folsomstreetfair.com. 11am-6pm. Hundreds of naughty and nice leather lovers sport their stuff in SoMa at this precursor to the Folsom Street Fair.

AUG 3–5

Reggae on the River Dimmick Ranch, French’s Camp, Hwy 101, Piercy, Humboldt County; (707) 923-4583, www.reggaeontheriver.com. $165-225. Further details pending. This year’s riverside roots and reggae fest features the Roots, Shaggy, Angelique Kidjo, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Mad Professor, the Itals, Eek-A-Mouse, Sierre Leone’s Refugee Allstars, and many others.

Reggae Rising Dimmick Ranch, French’s Camp, Hwy 101, Piercy, Humboldt County; www.reggaerising.com. $175 for a 3 day pass. Further details pending. This new summer festival will benefit various nonprofit groups in this southern Humboldt community and features Damian Marley, Sly and Robbie, Tanya Stephens, Fantan Mojah, and more.

AUG 4–5

Aloha Festival San Francisco Presidio Parade Grounds, near Lincoln at Graham, SF; www.pica-org.org/AlohaFest/index.html. 10am-5pm, free. The Pacific Islanders’ Cultural Association presents its annual Polynesian cultural festival featuring music, dance, arts, crafts, island cuisine, exhibits, and more.

AUG 9–12

Redwood Empire Fair Redwood Empire Fairgrounds, 1055 N State, Ukiah; (707) 462-3884, www.redwoodempirefair.com. Noon-11pm, $3-6. Bring the family to this old-timey fair, complete with rides, food, and fun.

AUG 10–12

Comcast San Jose Jazz Festival Various venues; (408) 288-7557, www.sanjosejazz.org. $5. This three-day music festival hosts dozens of acclaimed musicians playing all flavors of jazz.

AUG 11

SEEN Festival 2006 People’s Park, Telegraph and Dwight, Berk; (510) 938-2463, www.maxpages.com/seen2000. 11:30am-5pm, $5 suggested donation. This year marks the 12th anniversary of this world music, reggae, and soul festival.

AUG 11–12

Nihonmachi Street Fair Japantown Center, Post and Webster, SF; (415) 771-9861, www.nihonmachistreetfair.org. 11am-6pm, free. Japantown’s 34th annual celebration of the Bay Area’s Asian and Pacific Islander communities continues this year with educational booths and programs, local musicians and entertainers, exhibits, and artisans.

Pistahan Yerba Buena Gardens, 700 Howard, SF; www.ybgf.org. 11am-5pm, free. The Bay Area Filipino festival of culture and cuisine features arts and crafts, live entertainment, food, and more.

Vintage Paper Fair Hall of Flowers, Golden Gate Park, Ninth Ave at Lincoln, SF; (323) 883-1702, www.vintagepaperfair.com. Sat, 10am-6pm; Sun, 10am-4pm, free. Craft lovers will enjoy this fair, which presents works made from all kinds of paper — from photographs, postcards, and memorabilia to brochures and trade cards.

AUG 18–19

Solfest Solar Living Institute,13771 S Hwy 101, Hopland; (707)744-2017, www.solfest.org. "The greenest show on earth" is back for another year featuring exhibits about renewable energy, green building, ecodesign tools, organic agriculture, and much more.

SEPT 1–2

Millbrae Art and Wine Festival Broadway between Victoria and Meadow Glen, Millbrae; (650) 697-7324, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-5pm, free. More than 100,000 visitors will gather for this festive Mardi Gras-style celebration featuring R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and soul music, as well as arts and crafts, food and beverages, live performance, and activities for kids.


SEPT 8–9

Mountain View Art and Wine Festival Castro between El Camino Real and Evelyn Ave, Mountain View; (650) 968-8378, www.miramarevents.com. 10am-6pm, free. Known as one of America’s finest art festivals, this vibrant celebration featuring art, music, and a kids’ park draws more than 200,000 arts lovers to Silicon Valley’s epicenter.

SEPT 9

Solano Stroll Solano Ave, Berk and Albany; (510) 527-5358, www.SolanoStroll.org. 10am-6pm, free. The vibes are always mellow and the air filled with rhythm at the Solano Ave Stroll. In its 33rd year, the milelong block party will feature a pancake breakfast, booths, entertainers, a parade, and more, this year with the Going Green — It’s Easy! theme.

SEPT 15

Expo for the Artist and Musician SomArts, 934 Brannan, SF; (415) 861-5302; artsandmedia.net. 11am-6pm. This eighth annual event, sponsored by Independent Arts and Media, is the Bay Area’s only grassroots connection fair for independent arts, music, and culture, featuring workshops, performances, and networking.

SEPT 22

California Poets Festival History Park San Jose, 1650 Center, San Jose; californiapoetsfestival.org. 10am-4:30pm, free. Celebrate California’s distinctive heritage of poets, poetry, and presses at this all-day outdoor festival. *

Compiled by Nathan Baker, Angela Bass, Sam Devine, Molly Freedenberg, and Chris Jasmin

How Weird, how wonderful, how sad

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2

By Steven T. Jones
San Franciscans threw an epic dance party on the streets of SOMA yesterday, one that was unfortunately cut down in its prime by official San Francisco. The How Weird Street Faire drew about 10,000 costumed fun-seekers to bop to some of the city’s best DJs and soak in the warm sunshine. It was quintessential San Francisco, the kind of event that makes the city what it is, and organizers are to be commended for throwing a raucous but remarkably self-policing and harmonious party.
howweird.jpg
Photo from www.fogcityjournal.com.

But then, at 6 p.m., it suddenly ended. The city arbitrarily imposed an earlier than usual ending and won’t let the event return to this neighborhood in future years, despite its success and popularity. Soon, the cops started sweeping the streets to kick the crowds out of this public place, often rudely. Capt. Denis O’Leary — the station commander who has given How Weird such a hard time — was even personally pushing people out and telling attendees, “Time to go, people want their neighborhood back.”
Maybe, but 10,000 people want the How Weird Street Faire back and they want the city to stop placing so much emphasis on the concerns of a few sourpuss NIMBYs.

How Weird, how wonderful, how sad

-
0

By Steven T. Jones
San Franciscans threw an epic dance party on the streets of SOMA yesterday, one that was unfortunately cut down in its prime by official San Francisco. The How Weird Street Faire drew about 10,000 costumed fun-seekers to bop to some of the city’s best DJs and soak in the warm sunshine. It was quintessential San Francisco, the kind of event that makes the city what it is, and organizers are to be commended for throwing a raucous but remarkably self-policing and harmonious party.
howweird.jpg
Photo from www.fogcityjournal.com.

But then, at 6 p.m., it suddenly ended. The city arbitrarily imposed an earlier than usual ending and won’t let the event return to this neighborhood in future years, despite its success and popularity. Soon, the cops started sweeping the streets to kick the crowds out of this public place, often rudely. Capt. Denis O’Leary — the station commander who has given How Weird such a hard time — was even personally pushing people out and telling attendees, “Time to go, people want their neighborhood back.”
Maybe, but 10,000 people want the How Weird Street Faire back and they want the city to stop placing so much emphasis on the concerns of a few sourpuss NIMBYs.

Locals only?

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0

BOOK REVIEW Not for Tourists Guidebooks has just released the fourth edition of its Not for Tourists Guide to San Francisco. Besides having a mad grip of inaccuracies, the title is problematic: this tome is definitely not not for tourists.

The first thing I found wrong with the book was its only foldout map. It’s a highway map, which is weird, since most city dwellers tend to stay clear of the damn things. They’re for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and, uh, the tourists. And the map isn’t even detailed enough for you to see where on- and off-ramps are or tell which is which. And with San Francisco’s grand total of four highways, it’s hard to imagine why the NFT folks didn’t devote their largest page to a Muni map – just one of many things this book doesn’t have.

In all fairness, Muni routes are included in the 120 minimaps that comprise most of the book. But the layout is incredibly daunting! To follow one bus route, you might have to flip back and forth 20 times to see where the line will take you – shit most locals just don’t have friggin’ time for. I became further discouraged by the decision to devote pages to Ghirardelli Square, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Pier 39. (If not for tourists, for whom?) But despite this and despite noticing an ad for Segway Tours of the Marina Green (insert sound of me retching here), I still gave the rest of the guide a whirl, determined to get some practical use out of it.

I attempted to find a liquor store when I was trapped in SoMa without rolling papers – only to discover the intersection I was at, Fourth Street and Mission, was on the corner of three maps. The bar I was in (my favorite) was nowhere to be found. I was in minimap limbo. Next I tried to wax nostalgic with the maps of neighborhoods where I used to live – only to discover that some bars listed on the neighborhood directories weren’t dotted on the maps.

So I tried using the guide to call my neighborhood grocery store, Eight-Twenty-Eight Irving Market, to see if it carried printer paper. Apparently, it falls somewhere between liquor store and supermarket, because it’s not in the book. (BTW: it carries college rule but not printer paper.) Finally, I called the Hotel Utah – only to lose an eardrum when that killer "bee-doo-eet!" sound alerted me to the fact that the number listed in the guide was disconnected.

Maybe, maybe buy the Not for Tourists Guide for first-year college students or other new SF transplants. But if you’ve been here for longer than six months, just hang on to your Muni map and your BART schedule and save the $14.95 (suggested retail) for 411 charges.

www.notfortourists.com

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