PREVIEW Watching dancers launch themselves into space is every bit as exciting as the sparks and explosions that fill traditional July 4 celebrations. Take, for example, the frequently airborne Scott Wells and Dancers. The company’s Last Call show will be every bit as full of surprises as a fireworks display, only more environmentally friendly and weather independent. If you’re not familiar with this masterful artist, Wells is a super free spirit who has been setting up frameworks for contact improvisation pieces for the past 16 years. Many choreographers create works that use contact improvisation as a starting point for generating ideas that then get formalized. But Wells offers the real thing: the experience that there is only one moment, and it’s now. He also chooses music wisely and uses it beautifully. Two things strike you when you watch these dancers/athletes tumble, fly, and roll: the trust is absolute, and so is the fun. For Last Call, the company is bringing back — for the last time, Wells says — Home Again, the riotous 1991 encounter of man-meets-furniture. I am no great sports fan, but when Wells mounts Gym Mystics, his 2007 take on gymnastics, I’ll join the club. Also on the schedule is the world premiere of West Side Story, staged for 11 performers to Leonard Bernstein’s legendary score. Independence Day festivities include a 5 p.m. party prior to the performance with food, drinks, movies, and a guest artist.
SCOTT WELLS AND DANCERS Fri/4, 7 p.m. (party, 5 p.m.); Sat/ 5 and July 10–12, 8 p.m. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida, SF. $18–$22. (415) 863-9834, www.artaud.org
If anyone can relate to John Mellencamp’s hit “Hurts So Good,” it’s former San Francisco Giants second baseman Ron Hunt.
While some batters hit for power and others hit for average. Hunt just got hit. And hit. And hit. And hit.
During his dozen seasons National League career with the Mets, Giants, Expos and Cardinals, Hunt was tattooed by an incredible 243 pitches.
He was nailed by future Hall of Famers such as Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax and Jim Bunning, as well as journeyman such as Mike Garman, Don Wilson and Bob Priddy.
No matter the hurler’s pedigree, Hunt said the thrown baseballs hurt all the same.
And on just about all of them Hunt had to suppress a grin as he hobbled to first base.
“Heck, getting plunked kept me in the big leagues for 12 seasons,” Hunt, now 67, said at a recent reunion of Giants infielders “I didn’t mind it one bit.”
I was listinging to Forum this morning on my way to work and although a few complete idiots called in, most of the talk was about how great it is that California now has legal same-sex marriage. I was struck by one caller who announced, with a kind of bemused confidence, that the protests and acrimony are really old news and will soon by ancient history.
The man, who identified himself as straight and 30 years old, said that when his generation takes control of this country, same-sex marraige will be legal, accepted and no longer an issue at all.
Michael Krasny, the host, pointed out that there are stil some young, religious types who oppose gay marriage, but the called shrugged that off. Sure, there are a few, and there will always be a few bigots and nuts around, but in fact, even the young religious types aren’t as adamant about this issue. When you grow up exposed to something as part of your culture, you come to accept it, the man said.
Yeah, I know, when I was in college I thought that when my generation took control, pot would be legal and war would be outlawed, but this guy is right. The wonderful politics of same-sex marraige is that fact that the battle is over, and we’ve won.
When two 80-year-olds who had fought all their lives for basic human rights and dignity took their vows from a mayor about half a century younger than them, it was both a victory celebration and a passing of the torch. Thanks to older queer pioneers like Lyon and Martin, and the generation that followed them, homosexuality is now a part of mainstream American society. Queers are everywhere, literally — on TV, in the movies, in magazines, in comedy, in popular music, in professional sports, going to high-school proms … and that’s never going to change.
So the religious right can make a last gasp attempt to overturn the Supreme Court decision, but that’s going to fail. The tide has turned.
As the fireworks display known as Indian cuisine finds a measure of American celebrity, some of us are left to wonder about an equally spice-rich tradition that remains slightly obscure even in a sophisticated international city like San Francisco. The foods I’m referring to are from East Africa — from Ethiopia and its northern neighbor (and once unwilling province), Eritrea — and maybe the African connection gives us our first clue about their relative obscurity. In my lifetime, most of the food news from Africa has been bad news, beginning with a terrible famine in the West African land of Biafra in the late 1960s to, more recently, a similar crisis in the Sudanese region of Darfur.
Starvation is a chronic threat in modern Africa, and it seems tasteless, somehow, to go out and eat Ethiopian food at a well-provisioned restaurant in a rich city while actual Ethiopians are starving. What would they think of us? What should we think of ourselves? Yet the food is marvelous, and it doesn’t seem quite right to ignore it — and the people who are trying to make a living by offering it in their restaurants — as an awkward gesture of sympathy or solidarity. Our uneasy compromise seems to be to have a certain number of Ethiopian restaurants and to enjoy them, as long as they don’t become too high-profile or glossy. When the first bistro opens with a menu of "modern Ethiopian cuisine," we will know the wind is shifting.
Meantime, there are such lovably unaffected places as Club Waziema, which has been dishing up platters of Ethiopian food on Divisadero Street in the Western Addition for nearly 10 years. When they say "club," they’re not kidding; the deep space has a sort of sports-bar aura in its streetside quarter but acquires a pool-hall feel (complete with pool table) in its raised rear room. In between, opening off the narrows that connects front and rear, is a cozy nook for two that might be a made-over closet but feels like a spot you’d be delighted to find on a 19th-century railcar.
You’d probably be delighted, too — not to mention flabbergasted — to find food like Waziema’s on any 19th-century railcar. Restaurants cooking spice-charged food are like huge aromatherapy candles, bathing their environs with bewitching scents, and Waziema is no exception. Even out on the street, you can smell it before you see it, and once you’re through the door, you’re in the zone.
The menu describes dish after dish as "spicy," without saying what those spices are. (Even the Ethiopian lager Harar is spicy.) The best-known of Ethiopian flavoring agents is a paste known as berbere, which often is made from many of the same spices — cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, coriander, turmeric, fenugreek — that turn up in the Indian garam masala (known to us as curry powder), along with the softening, sweetening presences of allspice and nutmeg. Then there is mitmita, a cayenne pepper-like powder ground from dried red African chili peppers.
If I was taking a quiz, I would guess that Waziema’s lamb stew ($11.50) — boneless chunks of meat simmered with garlic, ginger, and spices — had some mitmita in it, mostly because of the sauce’s red clay color and a distinctive chili, almost Tex-Mex flavor. The menu described the lamb as "mild," but we thought we detected some heat. The beef stew ($10) was similar, with cubes of meat in a rich sauce, except the sauce lacked its sibling’s sunrise glow. It looked more like beef burgundy, and in fact berbere paste can include red wine. If cubed meat isn’t your thing, you might go for the spicy chicken ($10.50), which features a pair of legs braised on the bone in a golden sauce. (Our server asked us if we wanted the chicken "mild, medium, or hot," with the assurance that "hot isn’t that hot." And it wasn’t. It was just right, really.)
Can’t decide? Get the combo ($12.50), which provides half-portions of two of the meat dishes. On the vegetable side of the menu, the combo will bring you sizable samplings of all the meatless dishes. These include spicy lentils (quite dal-like), garlicky collard greens, a vegetable stew (of carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage in garlic sauce), and mushroom chunks in a thick brown sauce like the beef’s. Everything is presented family-style on a large platter lined with a disk of injera, the spongy Ethiopian flatbread made from teff flour. (Teff is an Ethiopian grain with a pleasantly sour taste.) More injera is provided on the side for tearing into pieces and scooping up bites of the various stews.
One lesson to be drawn here is that Ethiopian cooking, like Indian cooking, tends to be vegetarian-friendly. Even carnivores could graze happily for a long while on a platter of the vegetable dishes. (One possible issue for hard-edged vegans: much of Ethiopian cooking is typically done in clarified butter.) Another lesson is that Waziema gives unusually good, I might even say exceptional, value. Prices are moderate, servings are not small, and the sense of bounty is enhanced by the festive heaping of everything onto a colorful platter that lands in the middle of the table like an edible flying saucer.
Divisadero between Castro and Geary remains one of the city’s most vital and interesting restaurant rows. Although there has been some cautious infiltration by upscalers, the neighborhood still has a few days’ growth of beard, and it still has a good supply of places like Club Waziema, where those with a few days’ growth of beard are among friends and the matter of hunger is both an occasion for reflection and celebration.
Image from the late, perhaps lamented, giantsvsas blog.
By A.J. Hayes
This coming weekend, the Giants will host the A’s for the 12th year of inter-league play. While San Francisco fans have typically viewed the cross bay series with a shrug and a ho-hum, to Oakland management and their fans, this cross-bay face off is serious business.
The clubs have been competitors for the affection of Bay Area baseball fans since 1968, when the A’s moved to town – but over the past decade the Giants have also become Oakland’s biggest rivals on the field.
Even during exhibition games, the A’s have historically played the Giants with an extra spring in their step. And don’t forget green and gold’s four game sweep of the Giants in the 1989 World Series (A’s fans certainly haven’t). Since inter-league play began in 1997 Oakland and holds a 34-28 advantage against San Francisco.
These Bay Bridge series (the series moves to Oakland June 27-29) also gives the A’s a chance to vent their long simmering resentment towards for all things orange and black.
Check out the copy of this promotional flyer for the A’s games this month:
“June. The Month of Champions. Teams representing 16 World Series titles since 1968. The Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Angels, New York Yankees, Florida Marlins, Philadelphia Phillies…and the San Francisco Giants.”
The A’s and their fans never miss an opportunity to promote the fact that in the Giants have yet to win a World Series during their 50 years in San Francisco. It doesn’t matter how many home runs Willie Mays and Barry Bonds hit – where are the rings?
We can understand their bitterness. Because despite winning four world titles since coming to Oakland 40 years ago, the A’s have always played second fiddle to the Giants.
Pianist Chick Corea’s band Return to Forever was the last of the fusion fruit to drop from the tree of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970). From its early-1970s start, RTF followed the Joe Zawinul/Wayne Shorter–led Weather Report and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra into the critically thorny but audience-friendly avenues of rhythm-based electric jazz. Corea fronted several versions of the band, but from 1974 to ’76, a balanced muscular quartet variation — with the leader on keyboards, Stanley Clarke on bass, Al Di Meola on guitar, and Lenny White on drums — became a popular and resonant standard of the fusion genre. RTF confidently balanced jazz, funk, and rock on three studio albums before Corea reconfigured the ensemble as a more bloated lineup that included four horn players and his wife Gayle as a vocalist. Now, after more than three decades, the definitive RTF quartet has reunited for an international tour and a two-night, four-show stand in San Francisco. And on May 27, Concord Records released a newly remastered two-CD anthology of music by the foursome, including 1973’s "Hymn to the Seventh Galaxy" with Di Meola’s predecessor, guitarist Bill Connors.
Corea modeled the band on the power of McLaughlin’s group, but his spunky RTF had more personality onstage, more subtlety in its playing, and more diversity in its songwriting. Clarke, who figured in all the RTF variations, was just coming into his own as a writer and performer with the quartet. The bassist would go on to show his versatility by playing in a number of jazz styles with George Duke, Pharaoh Sanders, and McCoy Tyner, as well as taking a rock ‘n’ roll side-trip with Ronnie Woods’ New Barbarians and sharing the stage with Keith Richards during the New Barbarians’ tour in 1979. Di Meola was just 19 when he joined the combo in 1974 and became an international star through his collaborations with fellow guitarists McLaughlin and Paco DeLucia. White, a veteran of the Bitches Brew sessions along with Corea, was playing with the Escovedo brothers’ legendary Azteca when Corea asked him to join RTF. White has since balanced drumming with mainstreamers like Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Henderson while producing Nancy Wilson and Chaka Khan, among others.
All RTF members wrote music for the outfit, and though Corea’s compositions were prominent, the others’ contributions were integral to the quartet’s accessibility. The quartet’s first album, and RTF’s fourth overall, Where Have I Known You Before (Polydor, 1974), sports a heavy, fuzzy sound: Corea plays Moog synthesizers on a recording for the first time, and the group searches for identity in its use of electronics and its blend of jazz and rock influences. The project’s next — and best — album, No Mystery (Polydor, 1975), includes more funk as well as tunes by each band member, all while mixing electric and acoustic instruments. Clarke’s groove-driven "Dayride" leads to a rock-based jam titled "Excerpt from the First Movement of Heavy Metal" — RTF had a generous sense of humor — and eventually Corea’s elegant title tune. The pianist’s complex "Celebration Suite" closes the disc. No Mystery‘s follow-up and the quartet’s last album, Romantic Warrior (Columbia, 1976), was the ensemble’s best-selling full-length, again mixing electric and acoustic textures in ways that most fusion bands wouldn’t dare.
Three years and three albums doesn’t necessarily add up to a legacy, but this foursome always was more than the sum of its parts.
I push off and head down a makeshift plywood runway, compressing as I roll over the edge and into the Technicolor graffiti of the drainage ditch. The transition between the banked wall and the flatbottom has an abrupt kink in it, enough to send you to your face if you’re caught sleeping. I take some weight off the front end and try to maintain my speed as I pump into the opposite corner and carve the far end of the ditch where there’s an over-45-degree wall that runs behind what my friends and I call the "death pit" — a gaping cutaway in the bottom of the culvert, five feet deep, filled with broken glass, and frequently used as a urinal. Since I’m at the apex of my backside carve, up a wall 10 feet above last week’s Miller Time, I’m jolted by the crackle of a loudspeaker:
"You are trespassing. Leave the area at once or you will be arrested."
My concentration shot by the sheriff’s announcement, I jump off my deck and over the chasm at the base of the bank, barely clearing the skater’s version of a Vietnam tiger pit, and land on the rough concrete beyond the edge. My board bullets straight in, though, so I’ve got to lower myself — gingerly — into the mostly dry detritus and rescue it before my friends and I jet out of the spot and into the manicured back nine of Pleasanton’s Castlewood golf course. We get to the car, throw the boards in the trunk — mine has a "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" sticker on the bottom — and head to the next spot, a ditch called the Rat Trap.
The year is 1987. I’m 16, in high school, and living with my parents in Fremont. The scene plays out over and over in much the same way: a drainage ditch, a nicely painted curb or ledge at a shopping center, the occasional backyard pool, and night sessions at the Tar Banks, a set of embankments around a loading dock with curbs at the top. It’s an underground railroad of repurposed architecture, none of it designed with a skateboard in mind but all of it highly skateable.
Taking the $4.7mil Cunningham skatepark. Video by Jarrod Allen, www.jarrodallen.com
Every weekend my crew hits as many spots as we can, and the constants shape up like this: urethane, aluminum, Canadian hard rock maple, concrete, and asphalt. Maybe blood, maybe beer — we’re teenagers after all — but nearly always: cops.
Skateboarding may not be a crime, but it sure as hell feels like one.
Flash forward 20 years. I’m with a different crew as I pull onto a street in suburban Redwood City, and I’m no longer rollin’ in my mom’s Plymouth Sundance, but my own truck. The other thing that’s changed is the number of wheels per head. There are four heads to eight wheels, and we’re here to ride the Phil Shao Memorial Skatepark. On bikes.
The park does not disappoint. There are a million kids trying tech ollie flip tricks around the perimeter of the park, but the bowl is what I’m about. Big and shapely with almost burlesque hips poured into her concrete, I’m in love as soon as I roll in. There are a few local bikers who have the place dialed, nonchalantly airing a few feet out and throwing the bars before heading back down the tranny. The only two skaters riding the bowl are a tall skinny teenager and his little sister, who looks to be about 10, and they have it on lockdown: lipslides on the spine, grinds, rock and rolls — everything smooth and fast. "Yeah!" I yell as they take their runs, stoked on their skills.
I know the times have changed when I see the little girl come up out of the bowl in the $450,000 public piece of silky-smooth concrete perfection, walk over to her mother, who’s posted up on a ledge, get a cell phone and make a call. Not five minutes later there are seven (I counted) Redwood City police officers converging on the bench where my friends and I are sitting. They randomly collar my buddy Scott — though I was the last one to drop in — and write him a ticket for $100. I have to admit, I’m flabbergasted.
Guess what: skateboarding isn’t a crime anymore — it’s gone mainstream. Successful companies hire lobbyists to promote the sport, and communities spend big bucks building new facilities for skaters. And now some skaters, many of them kids who never had to live in the underground world that I did, are using their legitimacy to push out the new outlaws — people who ride BMX bikes.
It’s crazy — two cultures that share so much, fighting over how many wheels they ride.
"Is that your daughter’s bike?"
The question comes from one of my coworkers, and, believe it or not, it’s not intended to be snarky. I can’t ride in public without someone saying "cute little bike," while giggling to themselves — or laughing and pointing. Seeing a six-foot-tall, 200-pound, bald-headed, tattooed white dude on a "kid’s bike" is like being passed on the sidewalk by a bear on a unicycle. At one point reactions like these would’ve rubbed me the wrong way, but nowadays, I nod and smile. Sometimes, I try to explain what constitutes a "full grown" BMX bike. While it’s got small wheels — 20 inches in diameter — the top tube, from the seat to the stem, measures 21 inches, and the handlebars are considered pro-sized at eight inches high by 28 inches wide.
Bicycle motocross, or BMX, is purported to have started in 1963 when the Schwinn corporation of Chicago unveiled the Stingray, which was basically a downsized version of the company’s balloon-tired cruiser-type bikes. Kids pretended to be grown-ups by aping Roger DeCoster and other moto heroes — launching their bikes off jumps, racing in empty fields and abandoned lots, and cranking wheelies down the sidewalks of Anytown, USA.
"It all began the way most individual sports start," motorcycle customizer Jesse James says in a voiceover at the beginning of the 2005 BMX nativity story/documentary Joe Kid on a Stingray, "kids pretending to be grown-ups, but acting like big kids."
I have been riding since I was seven. After three decades, one truism remains, and I can’t candy-coat it. I’ve got to speak it like a true BMXer: BMX is rad. It is and always has been an entity unto itself, progressing from wheelies, skids, and bombing hills to encompass myriad styles and surfaces, from streets to pools to dirt jumps to ramps to the balletic grace of flatland freestyle.
This summer, big kids on little bikes will be jumping 30-foot gaps at as many miles per hour as BMX pays homage to its racing roots at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. On June 12 in New York’s Central Park, Kevin Robinson will try to break the legendary Mat Hoffman’s record for the highest quarter-pipe air on a bike — 26 feet, 6 inches.
It doesn’t take death-defying world records, the X Games, the Olympics, or the stupefaction of squares with cameras to make BMX legit. That feeling of overcoming fear and doubt by jumping a little farther, a little higher, the rush of nailing a trick, or carving a bowl, hasn’t changed in half a century. The legitimacy lies in that feeling, behind your breastbone, and it doesn’t change as you get older. Your wrists hurt, your ankles hurt, and your back hurts, but the feeling is the same. Kid’s bike? Hell yeah, it’s a kid’s bike.
It’s not as though I was blissfully unaware of a beef between bikers and skaters that day in Redwood City. Ask any BMXer to tell you a story of friction between the two and four-wheeled sets, and it’s not going to take them long to come up with something.
"When I was 12 years old, a skateboarder threw my bike out of the bowl at Ripon skatepark," says Jackson Ratima, now 19, a Daly City rider sponsored by Fit Bikes. "He was, like, 20 years old or something."
Tim "Wolfman" Harvey, 21, another up-and-coming pro, tells a similar story about a visit to the Bay Area from his native Massachusetts, when a local skater hassled him at the Novato skatepark. "I didn’t even know anything about California. It was my first time out bike riding, period. The guy was giving me all kinds of crap, yelling at me."
Ironically, Harvey, as friendly and easygoing a guy as you could hope to meet, almost turned pro for skateboarding before an ankle injury made it nearly impossible to ollie, an essential trick in street skating. He now lives in Petaluma and is a member of the painter’s union in San Francisco, where he’s a familiar face at street spots, but now on a bike. Back then, though, he "thought California was a scary place."
The Bay Area — and SF in particular — may be the worst place for bikers seeking a vibe-free session. "I’ve never experienced hostility like it is out here," Ratima says.
Smoldering after the Redwood City incident, I began to fixate on the "Skateboarding Is Not a Crime" slogan from my youth. Originally a bumper sticker made by Transworld Skateboarding magazine in the mid ’80s, Santa Cruz Skateboards currently makes a deck with that written on it, so the skate community has gotten a lot of mileage out of being oppressed.
"Skateboarding isn’t a crime?" I’d ask myself. You’re damned straight skateboarding isn’t a crime: it’s the law. BMX is a crime. There isn’t a biker alive who rides transition who hasn’t rolled into a taxpayer-funded park and had a knee-high grommet point to the sign and say, "Bikes aren’t allowed."
Not allowed, huh? Son, I skated my first pool when you were doing the backstroke in your papa’s ball bag.
Look: I love skateboarding and always will. Both skaters and bikers are doing the same thing, copping that same feeling rolling over the same terrain. The war makes no sense.
"We have religion and race and class dividing us. I refuse to be divided by what type of wheel size I have," says Jon Paul Bail, a local at Alameda’s Cityview skatepark.
Bail, 40, is the artist and pundit behind politicalgridlock.com. Through the Home Project, a program run through the Alameda Unified School District, Bail helped raise $150,000 to build the park, $8,000 of which came directly from his company’s coffers. He helped design the park, and he helped pour the concrete in the park, which opened in 1999. Mixed sessions of bikers and skaters were going down for six months with minor tensions but no major incidents when then–City Attorney Carol Korade advised City Hall that mixed use was too dangerous, and shut the bikers out.
My call to Corinne Centeno, Redwood City’s Director of Parks, Recreation, and Community Services, got off to a rough start: "I understand [the Phil Shao Skatepark] is not bike-legal, right?"
"Right. It was built as a skatepark," she replied, subtly italicizing the first syllable with her tone of voice.
"It wasn’t designed for bikes," she repeated, before adding, "but their having been prohibited from the start hasn’t necessarily kept people out." In an effort to do just that, the city is building a fence around the park, with bids currently ranging from $23,000 to $60,000.
The semantic argument — "it’s called a ‘skatepark,’ not a ‘bike park’<0x2009>" — is usually reserved for laypeople who don’t know enough about skateboarding or bike riding to see its inherent lack of logic.
Drainage ditches are not called a "skating ditches," nor were they designed for skating. Swimming pools are not called "skating pools." Yet, therein lie the roots of the modern skatepark, along with full pipes, which are based on industrial-size drainage systems also not intended for wheels. Every day skateboarders and bikers transcend these limits through creative repurposing.
Collision, and the fear of collision, is the main thing public officials cite when shutting bikers out of parks. "It’s unnerving," Vancouver pro skater Alex Chalmers wrote in a 2004 Thrasher manifesto, "BMX Jihad: Keep It in the Dirt."
"BMXers cover so much ground so quickly, especially when they’re pedaling frantically to blast a transfer, that it’s particularly hard to gauge these collisions," he wrote.
But the fact is that in any given park BMXers and skaters take different lines, and the best way to acclimate each group to the other is through exposure. If bike riders are banned, it increases the risk of collisions when a few bikers decide to chance the ticket or brave the vibe-out and ride anyway. A lot of bikers hit parks early in the morning because they don’t want to deal with hassles. During the overlap in "shifts," this leads to bewildered skaters who aren’t used to the lines a biker takes, and vice versa.
And the head-on menace is greatly overstated, largely disappearing when a park is integrated, if only unofficially. At Cityview, the police have displayed somewhat less zeal in ticketing bikers during the past few years. "They treat us like gays in the military," says Bail. "Don’t ask, don’t tell." And yet everyone manages to coexist.
At the new $850,000 skatepark in Benicia, which opened in October, integration isn’t a big deal. "From its conception, we designed it to be a skateboard park and also for bikes," says Mike Dotson, assistant director of parks and recreation. Technically, the park has designated bike hours, but since it’s largely unsupervised, there’s a mildly laissez-faire approach to enforcement. "In the very beginning there was a lot of concern about the use of both bikes and skateboards," Dotson says, stating that the park was packed the first few months. "Initially we had one or two calls on it. Since then I can say I haven’t had any calls on it — in relation to bikes and skateboards being in it at the same time or other complaints."
And there are mixed-use parks all over the world, as far away as Thailand and as nearby as Oregon: "You go to Oregon, and you can ride wherever you want," says a stunned Maurice Meyer, 41, lifelong San Francisco resident and founding member of legendary bike and skate trick team the Curb Dogs. Long Beach, Las Vegas, Phoenix, even Alex Chalmers’ hometown of Vancouver — all have parks where bikes and skates legally ride at the same time. What’s up with the Bay?
Lawyers, insurance underwriters, and city hall types may never understand how a park works. "It’s out of ignorance," Bail says. "To them it looks like chaos. To anyone who has skate etiquette — which is everyone — we all take turns."
Besides, let’s face facts: a skatepark is a dangerous place — to different degrees at different times, and for different reasons. "I swear to God, every time I go to the skatepark I see a hundred boards flying all over the place," Ratima says, "and I’ve never seen a bike go flying and land on a guy’s head." It’s not an inflatable jumpy house — it’s fun, but it’s not made out of cotton balls and your mother isn’t here. Usually.
Rose Dennis, press liaison for the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, seemed baffled that someone would want to ride a bicycle inside the skatepark part of the new Potrero del Sol. Perhaps as a way of distracting me from my damn-fool idea, she kept hyping the park’s "other amenities."
I live three blocks from Golden Gate Park — if I want to play Frisbee, I’m not going to drive across town. I want to ride. When I brought up the possibility of scheduling bike-only sessions in the yet-to-be opened park, she suggested I draft a letter to general manager Yomi Agunbiade, before adding that "the facility wasn’t designed for that type of recreation."
When I (graciously, I thought) let her know that it would be not only possible to ride a bike there, but highly gratifying, she got a little heated: "At the end of the day, the buck stops with us. If one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place, believe me, no one’s going to have any sympathy for Rec and Park if they make really nonjudicious decisions."
In other words, like a lot of city officials, she’s worried about getting sued.
But you know what? There’s actually less chance a BMXer will successfully sue the city. I give you California Government Code Section 831.7, which states the following: "Neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable to any person who participates in a hazardous recreational activity … who knew or reasonably should have known that the hazardous recreational activity created a substantial risk of injury to himself or herself and was voluntarily in the place of risk."
The law lists "bicycle racing or jumping" as being a "hazardous recreational activity." It’s on a fairly extensive list, along with diving boards, horseback riding, and the ever-popular rocketeering, skydiving, and spelunking, which, as I’m sure you’ve heard, are all the rage with the kids these days — much more popular than BMX.
But the words "skateboarding," "skateboarder," and "skateboard" are not listed anywhere in the text of the Hazardous Recreational Activities law, commonly called the HRA law. In fact, the International Association of Skateboard Companies has been lobbying to get the bill amended to specifically include "skateboarding" since 1995, when Assemblymember Bill Morrow (R-San Diego) took up the issue. Morrow’s bill was rejected by the state Senate Judiciary Committee in 1996. In 1997, Morrow and skateboard association lobbyist Jim Fitzpatrick gave up on amending the HRA and instead pushed Assembly Bill 1296, which added Provision 115800 to the state’s Health and Safety Code, which states, in part and in much less forceful language — without using the word "liable," for instance — that owners or operators of local skateparks that are not supervised must require skaters to wear helmets, elbow pads, and knee pads, and that they must post a sign stating said requirement.
It doesn’t say anything about "if one of you guys breaks your skull open and you’re bleeding all over the place" while wearing a helmet, then you can’t hold the operator liable.
When I asked San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Virginia Dario-Elizando how the law might apply to the city’s skateparks, she told me, "This question has never come up. I must tell you, I’ve never even seen the rules for the skateparks — no one’s ever asked me to look at them."
BMXers are willing to compromise if that’s what it takes. In May, San Jose opened the 68,000-square-foot Lake Cunningham skatepark, built by the same design firm (Wormhoudt) as the Benicia park at a price of $4.7 million, and the place has bike hours. Like any park, there are rules. Like some parks, there’s supervision, so the rules are enforced: separate bike sessions; helmet, elbow, and knee pads required at all times; brakes required on bikes; no smoking; no songs with swear words over the park soundsystem; no bikes in the three bowls with pool coping even though they only allow plastic pegs, which are undoubtedly softer on coping than metal skateboard trucks … it’s a long list of restrictions. It’s inconvenient for guys who don’t like pads or don’t run brakes, and there’s some griping, but we’ve got our eyes on the prize: the place is amazing, with a huge full pipe, massive vert bowls, and a decent street course.
I would like skaters to realize a couple of things: skating and BMX aren’t so different from each other, at least in the feeling each gives you, right there, behind your sternum, where your heart beats.
Bikers are going to ride no matter what, just like skaters are going to skate. Legal or not, we’re not going to go away. "I got arrested for riding there when I was 14," Ratima says of the Daly City skatepark. "They took my bike and threw it in the back of the car. I just kept going every day, and finally they just gave up."
"I’ve ridden bikes on vert," Thrasher editor Jake Phelps tells me during a phone conversation. "I can ride a bike in a pool, I can do that. I’m stoked when I ride a bike in a pool. Feels hella fun to me. Catching air on a bike is awesome, no doubt about that."
This, from the longtime editor of the bible of the "fuck BMX" set. It’s either baffling or heartening. I can’t decide which. "I don’t mind people that are just regular," he says. "If they’re skateboard people or they’re bike people too, I’ll respect anybody that respects me."
That’s what it comes down to: respect. I respect the fact that skateboarders did not come into this age of skateparks easily. I faded out when there was nothing, and I came back when they were in small towns across America, and I missed all the politicos and dreary meetings. It’s time for bikers to stop feeling like second-class citizens and demand a seat at the table. In the words of Black Flag, it’s time to rise above.
Nobody is quite ready to anoint Cal product Brian Horwitz as the next Lou Gehrig. But last Sunday – on the 83rd anniversary of the start of the Yankee legend’s Herculean 2,130 consecutive game streak – the San Francisco rookie made the type of dramatic big league entrance the “Iron Horse” would have been proud of.
In his debut big league start, the 25-year-old outfielder drilled his first two major league hits and scored the tying run on Sunday in a thrilling 4-3 comeback win over visiting San Diego. The second knock, a solid 10th inning single off all-time-saves leader Trevor Hoffman, fueled the game winning rally.
Brian Horwitz, slugger
“I couldn’t have written it any better than today,” said Horwitz, who has scratched and clawed his way through the Giants minor league season since his ignominious beginnings in pro ball in 2004. “I know I can hit up here. I have the confidence in myself to get the job done.”
In this current season of Giants rebuilding, Horwitz – who is married, stands 6-foot-1, 187 pounds and has longish straight black hair that parts naturally in the middle – is the latest of a troop of farmhands the club has auditioned. By the end of September, San Francisco hopes to have separated the prospects from the suspects.
If Horwitz’s track record is any indication, when 2008 is done he should land in the former category.
Heading into this season Horwitz brought a sizzling .322 career minor league average.
It was on June 1, 1925 that the almost 23-year-old year-old Gehrig pinch-hit in a game for the Yankees. He started the next day, when, according to legend, regular New York first baseman Wally Pipp begged out of the lineup with a headache. Gehrig batted 3-for-5. It would be 13 seasons before Gehrig missed another game.
Horwitz’s consecutive game streak was not expected to last nearly as long. Talented left fielder Fred Lewis – the man Horwitz spelled on Sunday – stroked a very un-Pipp-like game tying pinch-hit, two-run triple to drive in Horwitz in the 10th inning Sunday
But the fact that Horwitz has managed to slip on a Giants jersey this season marks a significant accomplishment for the Southern California native.
A cursory inspection of the sea of fans sporting navy blue and crimson at the Oakland Coliseum this past weekend proved that a) Boston Red Sox fans travel really well. And b) David Ortiz replica jerseys are not limited to “Big Popi” sizes.
Dozens of men, women, teens and toddlers of all dimensions ringed the stadium, spreading New England support from foul pole to foul pole and representing Ortiz, the Red Sox massive slugger. And those not wearing Ortiz’s iconic No. 34 modeled jerseys and t-shits representing the likes of Manny Ramirez, Kevin Youkilis, and Jonathan Papelbon. Sprinkled among them were some retro pieces featuring the numbers of Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski and Ted Williams.
No matter how Oakland fared on the field against the visiting Bosox, the Green and Gold bean counters knew in advance they would be big winners at the box office. Boston is the hottest ticket in baseball and the Red Sox currently lead the American League in road attendance with an average of nearly 35,000 fans per road game. Plus, the A’s charge more for their tickets when the world champs come to town. In all the three game set in Oakland series netted 97,592 customers.
But long before the Red Sox won two world championships over the past four seasons, the Red Sox were a big draw in the Bay Area. During the Red Sox inaugural inter-league visit/invasion of San Francisco a few seasons ago, Boston fans famously took over the lower grand stand of the Giants freshly minted ball park.
New England and the Bay Area have their share of bicoastal similarities. Both area have Irish/Italian roots; both have legendary sea ports, each has boho street cred and each region is over-shadowed by neon glitz to the south.
Prior to Saturday evening’s contest at the Coliseum we ventured into the heart of the Red Sox Nation’s west coast capitol and let it’s citizenry speak for themselves.
Ray Remocapozzi, 35, sporting Bosox cap and t-shirt:
“I grew up and live in Reno and try to make it out to the Bay Area every time the Red Sox come in. My mom and dad are originally from the Boston area and my half-brother, who is 18 years older than me, turned me on to the team. When I was growing up he brought me a bunch of Red Sox stuff: caps t-shirts, pennants. Naturally, I rooted for them. This is the second time seen the Red Sox this year and the second time we’ve brought our two-year old daughter (out-fitted in Lil’ Popi tee). Red Sox fans are a tight knit group and we run into the same people year after year. This is Red Sox Nation way out west.”
When the French Open kicks off this Sunday, there will be a major void in one of its two main events. Earlier this month, three-time women’s defending champion Justine Henin announced her retirement at the age of 25, a move that caught even some of the sport’s main journalistic voices by surprise. Once Henin’s goodbye sunk in, it all began to make a strange sort of sense. Her fantastic game if not personality is respected by all fans — male and female — of the sport, even if she’s remained obscure to casual observers who only recognize the names Federer, Sharapova, and Williams. But because of her short stature and relatively small physique, that same well-respected game was built on a level of effort and commitment that even some of Henin’s greatest opponents might not understand.
Justine Henin reaches
Henin regularly faced and beat players four to nine inches taller and twenty to forty pounds heavier (if not always stronger). A fierce one-handed backhand was her chief weapon, at a time when that shot seems endangered amongst top professionals. In an insightful reaction piece for ESPN, Stephen Tignor of Tennis magazine (a rock journalist cohort at Puncture in the ’90s) wrote about watching Henin in-person at Roland Garros last year. According to Tignor, instead of grunting like so many players or squealing Sharapova-style when she hit the ball, Henin made a different, less audible noise: she gasped. With her fretful, almost panic-stricken looks to coach Carlos Rodriguez between every point of a match, Henin long seemed on the verge of bolting. That’s precisely what she did in the second set of a notorious 2006 Australian Open final against Amelie Mauresmo, when her mid-match forfeit due to stomach pains (which Henin attributed to anti-inflammatories) permanently soured many people’s opinions of her. A few years later, a somewhat more personable Henin’s retirement from tennis while ranked #1 in the world — though amid a string of notable losses — is almost an inverse of that notorious match. She’ll decide when to stop, and how to write her own story.
On the men’s side, Roland Garros is hosting a very different kind of three-time defending champ, the never-say-die 21-year-old Rafael Nadal, who has yet to lose a match at the tournament. Nadal goes into this year’s French Open as the favorite, having won 108 out of his last 110 matches on clay. That status hasn’t been so easy to attain in 2008, though. Nadal entered this spring’s clay season facing perhaps the longest title drought of his young career, as if he’d never quite shook the hangover of his loss to Roger Federer in last year’s painfully-close Wimbledon final. (Since that match, Nadal’s near-peerless record in tournament finals noticeably nosedived.) He’s since won three events, but has had to do so within a compressed time frame that left his feet blistered. His most recent victory at a tournament in Hamburg required him to vanquish the top men’s player of the year so far, Novak Djokovic, in a nearly three-hour three-set marathon that qualifies as one of the best matches of 2008 — then turn around and beat a relatively well-rested Federer the next day.
It may seem overly dramatic to call Giants rookie shortstop Emmanuel Burriss a member of baseball’s “lost generation” — but if you have any doubts just look at the numbers.
The fact that Burriss is young, African-American and playing professional baseball makes him a rarity in today’s game. It’s no different in college baseball.
Emmanuel Burriss
Sixty-one years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, the influx of new black in the sport’s elite ranks has all but dried up.
“It’s sad,” Burriss, 23, said. “I don’t think many young African-Americans kids would even know who Willie McCovey or Reggie Jackson is today.”
Born and raised in Washington, D.C. before playing three seasons at Kent State University, Burriss is the first product of the District’s public school system to be drafted by a major league baseball club since 1989.
A “sandwich” pick (33rd overall) by San Francisco in the 2006 amateur draft, the speedy Burriss batted .360 and led the nation with 42 stolen bases in his final collegiate season.
Now, less than two seasons later, Burriss has already graduated to the major leagues. In 22 games, the middle infielder has batted .255, and has demonstrated a sturdy glove and strong arm.
“I didn’t even know they had baseball in D.C.,” said the former African-American big league infielder and current Giants cable television commentator Bip Roberts, with a sadness tinged sigh. “When I watch Manny the thing I notice is that he has good baseball instincts. He has ability that a manager likes. He’s a switch hitter, has great speed and instincts to play shortstop at a high level. I can see why they kept him up here.”
Burriss also has a sense of social consciousness to match his high baseball I.Q. If Major League Baseball is really about making baseball attractive again to inner city kids, Commissioner Bud Selig should make it a point to pick Burriss’ brain ASAP.
For a number of reasons, including the skyrocketing costs of playing organized youth baseball, lousy promotion of the game’s top black stars and competition from other sports, baseball’s popularity in the inner city has dropped off the charts over the past 20 years in the inner city.
The Giants currently have four African-American players on their active roster. Across the bay, Oakland has three.
Burriss said it was so rare to run into an African American player in college his first two seasons of minor league ball, that he immediately forms a bond with them.
“I always thought it was exciting whenever I’ve run into another African-American on the field. It’s like ‘Wow there’s someone else. I’m not alone in this,” Burriss said. “I always make it a point to meet them and talk about the fact that we are African-Americans and that we have to work hard to keep the population up in baseball.”
In current baseball vernacular, “wearing it” refers to owning up to a hellacious slump, a shoddy performance or bone-headed play sans lame excuse.
“I threw like ass… basically,” former Giants pitcher Sidney Ponson so elegantly put it following a horrible game a few seasons ago. That’s a fine example of “wearing it.”
Blaming a shipment of “soft” bats for a home run drought — as Oakland slugger Jack Cust did this spring — is most assuredly not “wearing it.”
In the late ’70s, much-maligned former Giants shortstop/futility icon Johnnie LeMaster, AKA “Bones,” AKA “Johnnie Disaster,” took “wearing it” to a whole new level.
In one game vs. the Montreal Expos in 1979, LeMaster “wore it” – literally.
A prototypical good field/no hit shortstop during his best days at the park, the super slender LeMaster was enduring a prolonged stretch of through-the-wickets fielding/don’t-even-bother-stepping-into-the-box hitting that had everyone from little kids to blue-haired ladies at Candlestick Park calling for his scraggly ’70s-style mustache.
Razzing LeMaster had become the official second language of the frozen concrete bowl by the freeway.
So without informing the higher ups in the San Francisco front office, LeMaster had his name plate removed from the back of his No. 10 Giants jersey and replaced simply with a three letter word: “Boo.”
“It really caught everyone off guard, in fact when I walked to the plate that night I could hear manager Joe Altobelli say, ‘Why does John have “Bob” on the back of his uniform?’
“That stunt cost me a $500 fine, but it was worth every penny. It won over some of the media and the fans really got a kick out of it,” said LeMaster who was honored by the Giants last weekend as part of the club’s season long 50th San Francisco Anniversary celebration.
It was the Paintsville, Kentucky resident’s first visit to San Francisco’s downtown ballpark.
Somewhere, maybe in a moldy gym locker or a clandestine liquor cabinet, a brilliant game plan for big league success has sat untouched for more than a quarter century.
Were talking about “Billy Ball,” the late Billy Martin’s blueprint for righting the ship of moribund baseball franchises. It was last used in Oakland in the early 1980s.
The A’s were the last team of dubious talent that Martin managed to meld into winners. He took an Oakland club that had lost 109 games in 1979 and led them to the American League Championship Series within two seasons with essentially the same personnel.
Martin may have been a kook of momentous proportions, a guy who drank and fought like a pirate – a real pirate, not the Pittsburgh variety. But he knew how to light a fire under a ball club and get it back on the winning track.
Billy took four major league clubs with losing records (Minnesota, Detroit, Texas and Oakland) and turned them instantly into winners. He also increased attendance by his presence alone – and what percentage of ticket sales do you think current A’s manager Bob Geren and Giants skipper Bruce Bochy are responsible for?
Employing a ramped up style that resembled sand-lot ball (some would prefer the term “bush league”) Martin led clubs would blitz opponents by using everything from double steals and hidden ball tricks to literally falling down on the job.
“My favorite was the ‘first and third play,” recalled Shooty Babitt, an infielder on Martin’s 1981 Oakland club. “Billy loved to steal home. So if he had runners on first and third would have a guy like Wayne Gross, who was probably the least athletic guy on the club, take a good lead off first and then suddenly fall down. Right, away and the pitcher would throw to first base and the guy at third would walk right in. We thought he was crazy when he told us to do that, but lo and behold we scored a few runs by doing that.”
Once a particular recipe for success has worked in professional sports – Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense, for example – other teams desperate for a winner will run it into the ground. So why it is that no one has adopted Martin’s strategies?
Green mania is old news or no news for the weekly tabloids. A quick perusal of In Touch and OK! reveals someone out there still cares about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Life & Style frets over Angelina Jolie’s doc visit, while US Weekly creates a baby album for Shiloh.
Martha Stewart appears with two equally fierce-looking toy canines on the cover of her "Color" issue: the bitches are back! Every Day with Rachael Ray presents a new shorter, darker ‘do for Rachael-holics to digest. Men’s Vogue sports a car on the cover — a mystifying first for the supposed tout le monde of men’s fashion. Rolling Stone‘s package on the best of rock in 2008 is equally perplexing: is the year even half over? Simon Doonan’s interview with Madonna is a refreshing change of pace for Elle. Wherever Madonna goes, a touch of green is sure to follow.
The Wire’s oft-excellent Wire Tapper CD series entreats Magazinester to make a purchase. Cover girl Gudrun Gut doesn’t. The Eddie Harris and "Funky Cuba" features in Wax Poetics are more appealing. At the end of the day, tired eyeballs turn to what’s free and brave, such as the first issue of the handsome rock mini-zine Low Life. ANP Quarterly has the most stories (including ones about Hamburger Eyes, Colette, Tom of Finland, Jim Goldberg, and Emory Douglas) Magazinester wants to read. A close runner-up: Vice‘s fashion issue, which spotlights frilly cat costumes, Ryan McGinley’s wardrobe, wildly embellished trucks, international street fashion, and, er, an investigative report on men’s rooster cuts in Iran.
REVIEW Bruce Williams and Donnell Alexander’s Rollin’ with Dre (One World/Ballantine, 192 pages, $25) is a strange and sinister book. What makes it strange is that it’s actually about Williams, who worked as a bodyguard, valet, personal manager, and confidante for Dr. Dre. It’s his biography, not Dre’s, so it falls into the category of an insider’s tale. Typically I avoid this subgenre like I avoid the boasting "friend of a friend of somebody famous" at a party.
But as I read about Williams’ small-town upbringing, love of sports, time overseas, arrival in Los Angeles, and 20-year tenure as Dre’s confidante, Rollin’ with Dre took on a picaresque sheen. Plus, its story is intriguing. Thanks are due to ghostwriter Alexander, who helps mold a samurai-like image of Williams.
As for Dr. Dre, Williams and Alexander render him an introverted genius most comfortable in the studio, surrounded by friends and fellow artists. Suge Knight at Death Row and Jimmy Iovine at Interscope serve as the story’s ravenous, predatory lords, preying on Dre’s talent. Williams plays the part of loyal, selfless guardian from Dre’s early days with NWA through his blockbuster success with Eminem and 50 Cent. He keeps dire forces at bay so the artist can create masterpieces and travel the world.
A surprising thing about Williams’ book is how little actual sex and violence it contains. It’s rare that a tell-all is so frank without giving way to lurid gossip and dish. Rollin’ with Dre is a manly man’s tale, complete with free weights, fast cars, drinking contests, and plastic bags of stagnant urine dropped from building-tops. There are bitches and niggas here, yet the book is damn near scandal-free. In places it appears that Williams is still protecting Dr. Dre, only this time from the potential fallout of his tell-all.
We get the story of a reasonably stable, sober, law-abiding father and husband who once guarded a mutually beneficial arrangement with a mega-star by tapping into a cool detachment acquired from his days as a Marine and as a corrections officer. Indeed, a remote tone permeates even the most intimate of passages. When near the deathbed of Eazy-E, for example, Williams’ emotional investment in the moment seems sparse. With every flying fist, whizzing bullet, and falling body, he shakes his head, says "That’s a shame," and keeps moving. The same tact that served him well in his profession sometimes leaves the reader outside in the cold.
Still, Rollin’ with Dre‘s glimpse into the creative process of a world famous hit-maker is compelling, as is its look at the pitfalls and perils of the unscrupulous, violent, and larcenous world of corporate gangsta rap. Throughout the episodes involving groupies, the tales of blunts getting smoked, and weapons being brandished, Williams seems to effortlessly walk a tightrope that separates cool-headed big guy from Type A gung-ho asshole. Yet Alexander allows him to stumble on enough occasions for the reader to suspect the book’s overall sheen of sugarcoating. With violence, double-dealing, and revenge the norm, how could anyone survive for more than 20 years without getting a little blood on their hands? There seems to be a lot going on between the beats.
"Gangsta," Williams remarks at one point, "I don’t know if it’s right, but I know that it’s true." It’s that perspective that makes Rollin’ with Dre sinister.
CHEAP EATS It’s a question of balance. If I brag, it’s because I also put myself down a lot, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think me insecure. That’s not it at all. I am capable of saving the day, but probably more likely to trip over a milk crate with a crunched, empty can in it. My fuck-ups are occasionally spectacular and always well documented. You don’t have to read Cheap Eats. Just look at my shirt.
I mean, read Cheap Eats, by all means. The thing about failure is that it makes better copy than success. That almost has to be a saying already, and I’m either an idiot for repeating it or a genius for inventing it — in which case I’m a braggart for pointing it out and an idiot for bragging. It’s a question of balance.
For some reason there was this idea afloat that, if the puerco pibil came out great, we would have no choice but to kill Earl Butter. I know, I know. It didn’t make sense to me either, because he was the maker of the pork — and the chief advocate for killing the cook.
If it was a suicide attempt, it failed. Maybe a cry for help?
I think not. It had something to do with bisexual people’s favorite film ever, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, starring Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek. I never saw it.
My favorite movie is Vernon, Florida. Still! Almost thirty years later! I’ve worn out two video tapes already, and it’s the only movie I ever made a CD of, so I could listen to it in my car, the visuals having long since been stamped onto my brain. Some day, after I finish film school, I’m going to do a remake of Vernon, Florida starring Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek as the couple who sits on their steps and talks about sand. Nobody ever does remakes of documentaries, I’ve noticed. Why is that?
Don’t think too hard. That’s my job. And you can rest assured I’ll do it. As soon as every other restaurant reviewer in the world is writing about movies, their friends, cars, sports, and chickens instead of restaurants, I’m going to go to film school and start making remakes of all my favorite documentaries.
The beautiful thing about Once Upon a Time in Mexico, according to Earl Butter, isn’t Johnny Depp or Salma Hayek. It’s pork. Specifically, puerco pibil, the marinated, slow-roasted pork dish that Johnny Depp’s character just loves. And, if you think following Cheap Eats can be tough, check this out: apparently if a chef’s puerco pibil tastes too good, Johnny Depp kills him.
I never understood why people complained about violence in movies, until now. You can’t kill someone for cooking something real good! Not even in real life. I just saw No Country for Old Men. Didn’t like it, but I have to admit that you can kill someone for losing a coin toss, pissing you off, trying to kill you, being married to someone who pisses you off, just for fun, or for no reason at all. But killing someone for cooking something too good, that crosses the line. I didn’t even see Once Upon a Time in Mexico and I’m going to have nightmares about it.
Well, Robert Rodriguez — writer, director, producer, editor, music maker, cutie-pie, and complete bastard for making me have nightmares — puts on a little cooking show at the end of the DVD, according to Earl Butter. You also can watch it on YouTube. That’s what I did.
Earl Butter followed the director’s directions, I believe, except for the banana leaves. He invited seven people over for dinner: one was me and none was Johnny Depp.
But he’s out there somewhere, you gotta figure, and for all we know he reads Cheap Eats as faithfully as everyone else in the world. So at the risk of reviewing my best friend’s cooking, the pork was quite … hmm, good? But not great. A little dry. And perhaps not spicy enough. Middle of the road. I say this for your own protection, Earl.
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My new favorite restaurant is Thai Noodle Jump, mostly for the name, and because it’s on my way to the bridge from pretty much anywhere. Sometimes I need a bowl of duck noodle soup. Can’t recommend the grilled beef salad, though, because the meat was way overcooked. But the soups … big bowls, decent prices. Small, cozy place. Great name.
Carbon dioxide, deforestation, and nitrous oxide all shoulder their share of the blame for Global Warming. But what about Lee Elia?
Now, you won’t find Elia’s name mentioned in any Al Gore lecture. He’s not a greedy corporate bigwig, an eco terrorist, or a clueless oil tanker captain – just a curmudgeonly baseball lifer.
But 25 years ago this week, during a highly unsuccessful two-season stint managing the Chicago Cubs, Elia emitted the most extreme, paint-peeling meltdowns in the history of sports.
When he was done blasting away at Cubs fans with an obscenity-laced rant that included a jaw-dropping 36 F-bombs over the first three minutes, Elia surely had released enough green house gasses to liquidate massive mountain glaciers and multiply the thermal expansion of upper ocean layers from Pacifica to Antarctica. .
A quarter century later, Elia’s diatribe still ranks as the No. 1 outburst in the history of sports – eclipsing Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy (I’m a man! I’m 40!”); Indianapolis Colts coach Jim Mora (Playoffs?! Are you kidding?! Playoffs?!) and any number of profanity laced diatribes by former Dodgers skipper Tommy Lasorda.
The Legend of Elia rant has grown so much over the years, that every April 29, sports radio broadcasters from coast- to- coast gather for a moment to celebrate “Lee Elia Day” – popping multi-generational copies of the tirade into their Monrantz tape decks and laughing hysterically.
After dealing with mounds of monotone sports clichés on a daily basis, Elia’s rant allows beleaguered sound bite gathers a moment to smile. Obviously, because of Elia’s unrestrained profanity, only carefully edited versions of Elia’s adult content diatribe have ever made it to the public airwaves.
Now, thanks to the internet of course, Elia’s diatribe can be heard in all its profane glory.
The hapless Cubs were off to a typical dreary start to their ’83, settling into last place in the National League East place after a 4-3 loss to the Dodgers at Wrigley Field that afternoon.
As the Cubs exited the field and the 9,391 fans in attendance filed out of the grand stand, a couple of jerks pelted Chicago’s Keith Moreland and Larry Bowa with stadium trash.
“About 85 percent of the (f-ing) world is working,” Elia growled into the microphone of Chicago radio man Les Grobstein, one of a half dozen reporters to witness the rant first hand. “The other 15 come out here.”
He was far from finished.
Moments later, Elia’s season-long slow burn escalated into an inferno. He lit not only into the debris flinging morons, but each and every Cubs fan that had ever skipped school or work to take in a mid-week day game at the “Friendly Confines.”
SFIFF His last letter read, "Forget me" and "I’m never coming back." But instead of crying, waiting, hoping he’ll return, or pleading, "Please, Mr. Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter, a letter for me," she decides she will follow him, wherever he may go, because maybe, just maybe, one fine day, they’ll meet once more, and he’ll want the love he threw away before.
What follows is the sublime La France (2007), a holy union of war movie and love story, consecrated in the same chapel of pop that houses tearful penitent Brian Wilson, radiant nun Anna Karina, and verse-scribbling choir boy Jacques Brel — and stage-set with the mist-swathed romanticism of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.
After our heroine and "Dear Jeanne" letter recipient Camille (Sylvie Testud) dons the boyish garb of a wartime Viola to unearth news of her soldier husband, she stumbles on a mysterious military troop slumbering uneasily in the woods. Camille wants to eat like them, march like them, and become one of them, with the sacrificial passion of a lover desperate to wear the garments and walk in the footsteps of her pined-for mate. But in the fall of 1917, all is not-so-quiet far from the Western front as director Serge Bozon’s band of brothers — many played by the actor-auteur’s fellow French film critics — pick up impromptu instruments fashioned from canteens and pots to play the sweetest yet strikingly barbed lovelorn tunes. What better way to meet doom while their country takes some of the heaviest casualties of World War I? What better way to mend a broken heart?
La France is "a war movie but almost in the absence of war and a love movie almost in the absence of love," as Bozon explains via e-mail while attending a Buenos Aires film festival. It turns gracefully on "a quest — just like the war, because we are never in the battlefields. So the war is more a horizon — something outside, always close but almost never reached.
"The unifying impulse is this magnetization, by definition from outside," he continues. "I think here the master of magnetization is Jacques Tourneur, the Henry James of cinema: how to drive la mise en scène by the absence of something at the (double) center of the story."
Balancing the visually sumptuous La France (lensed by the director’s sister Céline) on what he describes as the edge and arrogance of English pop-sike and the narcotic etherealness of California sunshine pop, Bozon has made one of the most unique films in the festival. No joke. He sports only two shortish works — the 84-minute L’Amitie (1998) and the 59-minute Mods (2002) — beneath the belt of his modish slacks: La France is his first feature. It’s also inadvertently launched something of a burgeoning DJ career for the music-obsessed director, who promises to draw from his healthy garage rock and Northern soul singles collection for at least one dance-party during the fest.
SFBGWhy did you title the film La France? Does the soldiers’ plight say something about your country in general?
SERGE BOZON To put it in the words of Michel Delahaye, one of my favorite film critics from the ’60s (in Cahiers du Cinéma) who wrote a paper about La France, I’ve tried to tell the story of those men who "got lost in the shadow of victory."
I wanted to deal with desertion, not to tell the story of the deserters who were caught by the French army, not to tell the story of the deserters who managed to reach their goal, but to tell the story of the deserters "in between," because they are the only ones who have left no trace (no trace in France, because they managed to escape France, and no trace in any other country, because they never attained their destination). So it’s like a secret story that only fiction can tell. To sum up, this crucial part of French history can only exist through fiction. That’s why I chose the title.
Just listen to "Going All the Way" by the Squires or "On Tour" by the Chancellors (two garage diamonds found by the mighty Tim Warren of Crypt Records), and you’ll understand the relation of this title to the music. "On Tour" is a song, as you can guess, about the life of a group on tour (the girls, the cities, the trains, boats and planes). But like all the real garage bands, the Chancellors never played even once outside their own city (Potsdam, actually). Now think about the "tour" of my soldiers. You begin by expecting some light pop, but in the end it’s only frustration and anger.
SFBG What do war movies mean to you?
SB It is the only classic American genre that is still alive in France, where a lot of war movies are made each year. The menace of war is unceasing — or even eternal. To be more precise, my movie is more a movie about the menace of war than about the war itself, so I could have done it in a present-day setting. But what I wanted, from a historical point of view, is to deal with the question of desertion, which was huge in France in 1917. I filmed only the menace, and this menace is in our present and desertion is, still, in our present history — "needles and pins," to quote the Ramones covering the Searchers.
SFBGWhich war movies have intrigued you or inspired La France specifically?
SB The American and Russian war movies of the ’40s and ’50s. And I must press this point: the movies of [Samuel] Fuller, [John] Ford, [Raoul] Walsh, Tourneur, [Howard] Hawks are not more important for me than the sublime Russian war movies — for example [Ivan] Pyryev’s Tales of the Siberian Land (1947), [Leonid] Lukov’s Two Soldiers (1943), [Yuli] Raizman’s Mashenka (1942), [Alexander] Macheret’s Soldiers of the Swamp (1939).
In all of these movies, contrary to Walsh, Fuller, and company, you have songs in crucial moments and the moods do not have to be hard-boiled all the time. There is a lot of childish tenderness and emotive exuberance among the soldiers, because the relation of men to virility is more naive. You also have beautiful female characters. Mashenka, for example, is a war movie about a woman. You also have a non-American, rural way of filming the landscapes with a romantic touch (in the musical sense, like Berlioz).
For example, A Good Lad from 1943 by Boris Barnet is — in one hour! — a musical with opera singing during the war scenes, a comedy, a love story, and a war movie, and everything is perfectly balanced and free. By the way, Barnet is the best Russian film director ever, far away from the auto-proclaimed Russian geniuses like [Sergei] Eisenstein, [Andrei] Tarkovsky, and [Alexander] Sokurov, whose movies all suffer from a severe grandiloquence and solemnity disease.
In these different aspects, those Russian movies are more like the early ’30s American movies, when the exuberance of the filmmakers was not restricted by the Hays Code, the strict separation of genres, all those narrative and ethical codes. Just think of a typical ’30s masterpiece like Sailor’s Luck (1933) by Walsh. My movie, with some exceptions, is much more Russian than American.
SFBG What do you want those who see La France to come away with?
SB Ninety-six tears.
LA FRANCE May 2, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 6, 6:45 p.m., Clay
San Francisco and dining al fresco aren’t necessarily allies. But they’re not exactly enemies. We do have those gorgeous sunny spring days and plenty of places to enjoy them while we drink and dine. If you’ve been heartbroken over the closed kitchen at Zeitgeist, or if the rooftop deck at Medjool feels more like a frat party gone wrong than an afternoon social gathering, you can rest assured there are even places outside of the Mission that serve food and cocktails outside. So hop on your Yamaha, Bianchi, or Muni and check out some of these fabulous places to catch some sun with your buzz. Keep in mind these spots are best for brunch and lunch. And bring a hoodie in case the sun subsides — San Francisco fog is about as forgiving as a hangover.
PIER 23 CAFE
Check out views of the Bay Bridge and Coit Tower from this waterfront café with surfboard decor. Rain or shine, this dive gets packed with beer guzzlers and sunbathers. Enjoy buckets of Pacificos and top-shelf margaritas alongside pub grub like burgers, nachos, and the best fish tacos in town, until your vision’s blurred and skin is blistered. Then enjoy the live music on warmer nights and heat lamps on cooler ones.
The faint of heart need not attempt Café Flore — sharking a table here takes more nerve than buying booze underage. But there’s a reason to steel one’s resolve: this Castro hotspot, voted Best Café in our 2004 Readers’ Poll, is ideal for any occasion, be it brunch, coffee, or an afternoon brew. With breakfast served daily until 3 p.m. and a full bar, there’s no better spot for sun-drenched boozing and cruising.
The garden patio at La Note is worth the wait — and wait you will, because they don’t take reservations for weekend brunch. Grab a java beforehand to stave off caffeine withdrawal as you watch other patrons enjoy their succulent crème fraîche pancakes. And don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. Complete with blue-and-white checkered tablecloths, this is the perfect spot for brunch bliss or an afternoon assiette de charcuterie.
If bike rides through Golden Gate Park leave you craving a wet one to quench your thirst, this spot — located behind the oceanfront Beach Chalet and just steps from Queen Wilhelmina’s Windmill — offers the perfect spot to rest on your laurels and soak up some sun. Choose from an extensive list of beers from the onsite brewery, and when the fog rolls in, head inside to cozy up to the stone fireplace in the glass-ceilinged dining room. On weekends you can nurse a hangover and get a head start on your day’s drinking with crab benedict and a Bloody Mary.
Located in a secluded alley between Union Square and the Financial District, Café Claude is a scrumptious substitute to the crowded Belden Lane. This quaint sidewalk café is reminiscent of Parisian bistros, and is therefore the perfect spot to nosh on a Niçoise salad and sip Sancerre. Plus there’s jazz on weekends.
For those days in deep summer when everywhere but the Mission District is covered in heavy fog, there’s no reason to look farther than El Rio for a bit of sunny respite. Its multilevel back deck, barbeques, margaritas, and live salsa bands draw a mostly gay male crowd on Sundays, but you can get down with the ladies every fourth Saturday of the month, when the line to get in snakes down the block.
If the summer fog has taken even the Mission captive, escape to Sam’s via the Tiburon ferry. From here, you can sip margaritas on the waterfront deck while viewing the cloud-engulfed city. Snack on fried calamari or head inside post-sunset for fine dining and seafood.
The Pilsner doesn’t serve food, but its state-of-the-art cooling system, which keeps draft beers chilled to 31 degrees, makes this Park Chow neighbor a Castro gem for gay and straight clientele. Expect to throw back a few on the garden patio with cleated patrons just back from the fields, because Pilsner Inn supports a handful of sports teams, including softball, soccer, bowling, and pool.
With his shaggy blue-black hair, boyish good looks and slight frame, the Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum looks as if he stepped out of an audition for American Idol. He could also pass as a record store clerk, a college student or a wine steward.
The point is, Lincecum (he’s listed at 5-foot-11, 170 pounds, but appears to be smaller) looks as if he could do anything for a living except play major league baseball.
But not only does the Bellevue, Washington native draw a nice check every two weeks from the Giants, the 23-year-old has quickly become the ace of San Francisco’s staff and arguably most exciting hurler to matriculate through the orange & black’s farm system since John “The Count” Monetfusco back in 1975.
Some in the media have nicknamed Lincecum, “The Franchise.” We prefer (with apologies to Rick James) “Super Freak.”
How else would you describe an average-sized dude expelling hardballs as if there’s a howitzer attached to his right side? Whether it’s from the torque generated from his “windmill” delivery or just unexplainable natural ability, Lincecum (lin-suh-COME) brings his pitches with markedly abnormal velocity.
That power pitching led to 150 strikeouts in 2007 over just 90 innings – tops among all rookies. Two seasons after he was selected as the 10th overall selection in the 2006 amateur draft, Lincecum has already lapped every player selected ahead of him, including No. 1 pick Luke Hochevar of Kansas City, who was bombed last weekend in Oakland, a day after Lincecum tossed seven shutout frames in a 3-0 Giants win at St. Louis.
With the victory, Lincecum solidified his position as the Giants “stopper,” i.e. the pitcher you turn when you absolutely need a win or to halt a losing streak.
Lincecum has become even more of a complete pitcher this season. In 2007, the righty authored a 7-5 record and 4.00 ERA with basically a dazzling fastball and an overhand curve. This season he’s introduced a darting slider and criminal change-up to his repertoire.
All that makes the recent news that the Giants brain-trust is seriously contemplating a move to an unheard of six-man starting rotation all that more disheartening.
Yesterday’s, er, news that men (sex, sex, sex, money, money, sports) take greater risks after viewing porn, got me wondering what will happen to the stock market when the feds start spraying female moth pheromones.
Will the market go soft? Will everyone, drag queens included, start dressing as giant female moths?
Will my cat start puking? And is Fodor really warning folks to stay the f*** away ?
(These latter two questions are raised in a somewhat erratic piece at the Huffington Post)
But don’t worry, Mommy, Arnie says the spray is safe.
Seriously folks, to reassure us all, the California Department of Food and Agriculture sent this transcript of the Governor speaking from Salinas.
“Hello-Today, Governor Schwarzenegger was in Salinas to continue statewide discussions on budget reform.
After his event, the local ABC station asked him about LBAM spraying. The transcript is below. Thought you may find it interesting.
ABC: Will you comment on LBAM spraying?
Governor: It’s important we do everything we can because it can destroy our agriculture products and harm our environment. Other countries can cut off our agriculture trade. Public safety is my number one priority and there is nothing that shows this program is unsafe.
ABC: Senator Migden is proposing legislation to prevent spraying before an EIR is done. Do u have a position?
Governor: We have done all the studies in the world and nothing says it is unsafe. We wouldn’t spray if it were unsafe.
ABC: You would look these people in the eye and tell them it is safe?
Governor: This is safe. The spraying is safe and there is nothing that says otherwise.
Meanwhile, folks who remain unconvinced that the spraying is safe are being urged…to catch a bus to Sacramento tomorrow, April 16.
Read on for details:
Enough already, we get it. Go ahead, put the cap back on the Sharpie, and step away from the bus.
That’s right, you, the graffitist/frustrated Giants fan who’s been going around town doctoring the Giants advertisements on the back of Muni coaches- making the ad copy that initially read: “All Out. All Season,” say instead: “All Outs. All Season.”
Very funny. Ha, ha. ha. Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum. Actually we’ll need a bottle of rum to numb the pain if the Giants get pinned with one more ugly 7-0 shutout.
It’s been only a week, but we’ve seen enough. The Giants lineup is not working. What makes it scarier is that the 1985 Giants, the club that posted the worst record in San Francisco history – 62-100 – had a lineup (featuring Chili Davis, Jeffery Leonard, Bob Brenly) that was considerably better than the current team.
This year, Giants ads have promised a grittier club that hangs together win or lose.
And while, yes, the Giants have two potential pitching aces in Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum and a couple of exciting position players, including the daring and eminently watchable Eugenio Velez, will that be enough to keep an easily distracted fan base from hanging in there?
It won’t do the Giants any good to work out any mid-season trades – who would they deal?
But it might not be a bad idea for the Giants to plant a scout in Hollywood.
That’s where they might catch a glimpse of the banished Barry Bonds eating breakfast with Larry King or taking in a Tyler Perry movie premiere. Despite batting .276, with 28 homers and 66 RBI last season, no team wanted Bonds this spring.
Bonds is ready, willing and certainly able to play another season – and it should be with San Francisco. What better way for the club to celebrate its 50th Anniversary in San Francisco than by having one of the club’s all-time greatest players knocking balls into the bay?
We say bring back San Francisco’s favorite surly slugger.
My name is Tony H. and I’m a fantasy baseball player.
There I said it.
Actually I haven’t been an active participant in fantasy ball in more than a decade, but sometimes the urge to seek out “post-hype sleepers” and under-the-radar bargains in fantasy publications is so strong that I have to leave Barnes & Nobles immediately
Apparently, I will be a fantasy baseball player for life.
Evil?
It all started innocently enough back in 1993, when a co-worker introduced me to his in-house league. Figuring it was another way to put my absorption of all things baseball to use and earn some pocket cash at the same time, I showed up at the “draft” – held in a clandestine conference room on the Saturday morning before the start of the baseball season – with a rough idea of what I wanted my team to look like and three crisp twenties from the ATM.
I felt like a real big-league general manager at the draft, and the blueberry bagels weren’t so bad either.
Being a Giants fan, my goal was to select as many San Francisco players as reasonably possible and then flesh out the rest of the squad with pre-inter-league play American Leaguers. That way, there would be no conflict of interest with my team and my team.
That first season I managed to land Barry Bonds to play the outfield and selected fellow -Giants Robby Thompson and Royce Clayton as my keystone combo. The rest of the squad was filled out with the likes of Joe Carter, Mo Vaughn, Lance Johnson and Paul O’Neill. I made one or two exceptions to my rule, selecting National League players such as catcher Joe Oliver, outfielder Bernard Gilkey and a couple of senior circuit pitchers including a youngish Curt Schilling and Steve Avery of the Braves.
When the season began I became ensconced in baseball like never before – raising in the early – pre-internet — hours to scour the morning boxes and tabulate “my guys” total bases, their RBI output and stolen bases.
It made going to work a bit more fun, especially when I would pass one of my fellow fantasy players in the hall after Chuck Finley threw one of his league leading 13 complete games that season – that’s a lot of extra points – or Tom Henke racked up another save.
But by mid-season, the fun turned into serious business. I blew a gasket when Felix Jose failed to live up to the hype with another 0-for-5 game and when Ben McDonald hit the skids after I inserted him back into my starting lineup.
The real life Giants meanwhile were having an amazing campaign in ’93.
Here’s why dive bar karaoke is better than what you’ll find at the established venues: (1) you’re less likely to get shamed by karaoke "professionals" who hog the mic and collude with the KJ to play nothing but show tunes and ballads; (2) wait times tend to be shorter, giving you more chances to shine; and (3) the song repertoire tends to be a bit wackier, which — if you’re lucky — means finding such rare gems as Danzig’s "Mother" or your favorite Paula Abdul B-side. Now go forth and rock that mic.
With its lush red velvet glow and fine wine and Belgian beer selection, Amnesia (853 Valencia, SF; 415-970-0012) hardly feels like a dive bar, which is what makes its free Tuesday night karaoke so special. Plus, the fact that it’s hosted by Glenny Kravitz, one of the most prolific KJs in the dive bar circuit, means there will be a huge selection of music and props — à la cowbell and toy sax.
If you want a dimly lit, dive-classy karaoke spot with a great beer selection and a hipster crowd that will actually hit the dance floor while you croon Usher, then come to the Attic (3336 24th St., SF) for its once-a-month karaoke night on second Mondays.
Not only does Annie’s Social Club (917 Folsom, SF; 415-974-1585, www.anniessocialclub.com) offer the rare opportunity to sing Iron Maiden and Judas Priest at its "punk and schlock" karaoke nights, but its also pours drinks stiff enough to make you think you can actually pull off a high-pitched heavy-metal wail. Monday nights are free with karaoke on the main stage; Fridays and Saturdays you’ll pay cover for the band but can slip into the tucked-away karaoke room that holds a mercifully small crowd. Come prepared by previewing their song list online.
There’s no better way to take a Friday after-work happy hour (6–9:30 p.m.) with your coworkers to a whole new level of embarrassment than with karaoke at the Beale Street Bar & Grill (133 Beale, SF; 415-543-1961). Running 22 years strong, this Financial District spot draws a hugely mixed crowd, ranging from suits to bike messengers and construction workers.
It’s hard to name the best thing about Bow Bow Cocktail Lounge (1155 Grant, SF; 415-421-6730) — whether it’s the bartender known for getting wasted, throwing firecrackers, and forgetting to charge you for drinks; the opportunity to sing your karaoke selection in either English or one of several East Asian languages; or some of the strangest background graphics you’ve ever seen. But once you’ve been, there’ll be no mystery why it’s heralded as one of the best karaoke spots in the city. Sing until closing on Friday and Saturday nights.
Neighborhood folks and young Mission transplant types rub elbows at Thursday-night karaoke at Jack’s Club (2545 24th St., SF; 415-641-5371). Jack’s keeps it real with cheap beer, an energetic crowd, and classic karaoke tunes including hip-hop and old-school jams.
There is no better way to mourn the beginning of another workweek than to make like an Outer Mission hipster and head to the Knockout (3223 Mission, SF; 415-550-6994) for its Monday night "Krazy for Karaoke Happy Hour" (6–9 p.m.). After a shot of karaoke-induced adrenaline and a few drinks from its quirky menu — which includes hot toddies, spiked root beers, and electric limeade — you’ll start to feel like Friday’s not looking quite so far away after all.
Lingba Restaurant & Lounge (1469 18th St., SF; 415-355-0001), a swanky Southeast Asian restaurant in Potrero Hill with an adjoining bar, hosts karaoke on Sunday nights with none other than the Karaoke Shark himself, Glenny Kravitz.
Who says the Mission is hopelessly overrun by hipsters and bridge-and-tunnelers on the weekends? The Napper Tandy (3200 24th, SF; 415-550-7510) has a warm, neighborhood-sports-bar kind of feel — the kind of place where you go to catch the game, shoot pool, eat fish and chips, and sing your favorite hits on a Saturday night.
On Friday and Saturday nights, Rick’s Restaurant and Bar (1940 Taraval, SF; 415-731-8900) draws an older crowd of Sunset regulars and neighborhood folk — and occasional San Francisco State University students — for crooners, classics, and pop.
Starting at 6 p.m. on Monday nights, El Rincon (2700 16th St., SF; 415-437-9240) serves up Cuban food and karaoke, featuring music ranging from Latin and reggae to ’80s punk, pop, and goth.
