Water

Desperately seeking cinema

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> a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jennifer Reeves’s movies are personal wishing wells, each a repository of dreams and worries. As we see ourselves reflected in the water’s surface after tossing in a coin, so too is Reeves’s presence apparent in the handmade, fussed-over quality of her moving pictures. I use that broad designation pointedly, as her films are as varied in material and form as they are prosaic in mood and temperament. Over 15 years of independent filmmaking, the New York–based artist has created hand-painted films in the style of her mentor Stan Brakhage, freewheeling shorts, fiction fantasias, 16mm double-projections, feature narratives, and experiments in high definition. San Francisco Cinematheque hosts the formally restless filmmaker for a three-program tour.

Reeves’s early shorts channel riot-grrrl spark with scratched-up film stock. Elations in Negative (1990) is a good sample of the celluloid-mad sexual politics of these 16mm beaters, though Taste It Nine Times (1992), with its vivid pickle-biting innuendos, will be missed from the Cinematheque run. In painted films like The Girl’s Nervy (1995) and Fear of Blushing (2001), Reeves’s appropriation of Brakhage’s technique conveys playful femininity in color, pattern, and music.

Though Reeves toyed with narrative early on, most notably in 1996’s psychodrama Chronic, 2004’s The Time We Killed represented a kind of breakthrough. An unhurried 94 minutes passes through the dark mirror of an agoraphobic poet keeping to her New York apartment during the buildup to the Iraq War. "Terrorism brought me out of the house, but the war on terror drove me back in," Robyn (Lisa Jarnot) says in her peripatetic voice-over, adding later, "I’m afraid of catching the amnesia of the American people." Reeves’s magnetically immersive filmmaking is such that the political situation neatly folds into an extended experiment in subjectivity — besides being an unstinting portrait of madness (it’s everywhere in this film: in a record’s spin and neighbors’ voices echoing through the walls, in dogs’ faces, bathwater, and masturbation), The Time We Killed also serves as an understated chronicle of the collateral psychic and moral damage of our country’s manufactured warmongering.

The Time We Killed is heavier than Reeves’s other work, though it’s not without humor; she finds the ridiculous, unwieldy side of depression in Robyn’s litany of death fantasies and a painfully misguided interaction with a curious neighbor. Robyn’s locked in, but Reeves is formally unfettered, mixing conventional 16mm footage with lyrical, associative streams of inner life shot in high-contrast black-and-white. The filmmaker raids her home-movie archive for the film, in addition to using her own apartment and acting as Jarnot’s body double during the extended shooting. This air of transference makes The Time We Killed weirdly transparent, so we feel as intimately connected to Reeves’s isolated work in the editing room as we do to Robyn’s experience in the apartment.

Since The Time We Killed, Reeves has returned to more typically experimental filmmaking. Her 2006–07 Light Work variations strike an ideal balance of abstract and representational visions, in the process cataloging the changing textures of cinema. In the affecting He Walked Away (2007), Reeves dissects, refracts, and abstracts footage from her older movies to create a tri-tipped memorial piece in which the intrinsically elegiac nature of cinema is connected to the dissolution of film technology, which is then tied to the disappearing loves and friendships that shadow personal lives.

As with Guy Maddin — another filmmaker who favors overheated evocations — one has the sense that Reeves could make a hundred interesting movies from the same scraps of footage. "I want to counter the turncoats who say film’s dead," Reeves announces on her excellent new blog. "Try telling a painter that she can only use digital paint on a Mac for the rest of her life. She’d be pissed." But if she were Jennifer Reeves, she certainly wouldn’t slow down.

IMMERSIVE CINEMA: JENNIFER REEVES

Artists’ Television Access, Sat/15, 8:30 p.m.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Sun/16, 7:30 p.m.;
Tues/18, 7:30 p.m.; $6–$8

See Rep Clock for venue information

Beautiful losers

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Great movies stay with you in the oddest ways. In the days after I first saw Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, I was preternaturally attuned to the sound of skateboards dragging the street outside my bedroom window—the slow tug of concrete, the bumping waves of wheels. This ambient strain surrounds Paranoid Park‘s cherubic point of focus: Alex (Gabe Nevins), a sleepy-eyed skater waiting out his parents’ divorce in a Portland, Ore., suburb. He occupies most of the film’s exquisitely composed frames, though he’s more a figure etched in light than a proper protagonist.

Figure-eight narrations and slow-moving Steadicam tracks have underpinned Van Sant’s last couple of films (2003’s Elephant, 2005’s Last Days), though they’re more artfully embedded in Paranoid Park‘s fragrant sprawl, not least because of the visual equivalencies provided by the film’s skateboarding footage. Blake Nelson’s airless young-adult novel presents Alex’s story as an extended confessional letter. Van Sant dissembles chronology and inflects the narration with associative freedom.

Most immediately, Van Sant folds Nelson’s plot to delay the central trauma, which first enters our vision peripherally through a detective’s investigation and a local news report. With that said, narrowing the effect of this organizing principle is a little like trying to get a fix on Phil Spector’s reverb or Gerhard Richter’s gray — Van Sant’s placid puzzling is a textural aesthetic before it’s a device. Where Nelson’s moral tale is a streamlined account, Van Sant’s adaptation aims for something more transparent and sublime. His Alex is at once layered and laid bare.

This channeling begins with a slow-creeping tracking shot as Alex is interviewed by a detective. What begins as a conversation eventually lands as a full-frame portrait of the adolescent, the detective’s words ("What’s your parental situation?") left hanging in the air, irrelevant. As Nevins garbles his lines, the boundary between the nonprofessional actor and his character becomes palpably blurred. Does Van Sant’s MySpace casting call automatically qualify as tawdriness? Not when Paranoid Park maintains its enigmatic distance. Indeed, Van Sant renders the film’s MacBook surfaces — the subdued luminescence, boxy 4:3 aspect ratio, and soundtrack shuffle from Elliot Smith to the Juliet of the Spirits score all evoke a MacBook — as something unique and refined.

Like so many high school boys, Alex is essentially passive (see the film’s hilarious sex scene, with talky girlfriend Jennifer’s blond wisps dissolving Alex’s face like something from Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon). Van Sant captures this state via formal permeability, rigorously designing Paranoid Park‘s memory machine as a head trip. Strips of slow motion, a narrow-depth-of-field, ping-ponging sound, a mumbled voice-over — all these elements serve to cover the largely amateur cast but also to project Alex’s environmental interiority. This tendency reaches a swollen apex during a posttraumatic shower. The camera again draws in, and Christopher Doyle’s typically luscious lensing isolates every droplet; the lighting darkens, and the blistering sheets of water-noise are overlaid with thick forest sounds as Alex drops his head, revealing the bathroom wallpaper’s bird motif.

There’s no buried logic to Paranoid Park, and even though it’s shaped as much like a jigsaw as Donnie Darko (2001) and Rian Johnson’s underappreciated Brick (2005), it doesn’t invite solutions. Whether or not Alex’s withholding aura is read as a symbolic closeting, Van Sant’s direction is some kind of sorcery, especially in those B-roll streams of easy riders through which the film’s story expands to encompass all breathless teenage riots. Paranoid Park ends with these images after cutting from Alex asleep in biology class, dreaming of flying. He never touches the ground, always hovering between idyll and responsibility, the dream and his place in it. (Max Goldberg)

PARANOID PARK

Opens March 21 at Bay Area theaters
www.myspace.com/gusvansant

Ammiano gives Spitzer an out

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

Governor Spitzer blames the water. Who put Viagra in the water?

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano, on Tuesday, March ll, the day after he announced for the assembly in this very space.)

Personal note to Tom: Careful on your diction. Your attentive listeners almost missed the punch word: Spitzer. B3

New soup for you!

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Day is done, gone the sun, and let’s have soup. The sun is lingering a little longer these days, but winter still abides in the garden, it remains damp and chilly inside, and if nothing else, we can warm our hands in the steam that rises from our bowls of soup.

Like all repertoires, the soup repertoire is in need of constant tending. You prune the ones that don’t quite work or show signs of reduced drawing power while being alert to new prospects. Much as I love butternut squash soup, for instance (and its near relation, kabocha squash soup), I’ve stricken it from the list, in part because of domestic unrest and in part because a great many restaurant kitchens turn out some version of it between November and March, and this creates an overkill issue.

Meanwhile, there is the matter of additions. The good soupist craves ideas, and when, for instance, a neighbor told of an excellent broccoli-leek soup she brought home one day from the Bi-Rite deli, the soupist’s ears pricked right up. Broccoli-leek? Could this be just a version of potato-leek with broccoli added? The soupist can’t speak for the Bi-Rite kitchen, but potato-leek with broccoli added does make a lovely, cream-of-broccoli-like soup, except with no cream.

Procedure: Clean a large leek by trimming the root end, removing the green leaves, thinly slicing the white bulb, and separating and cleaning the rings in a large bowl of water. Heat some sweet butter or vegetable oil in a soup pan, add the leek rings (with a pinch of salt), and soften, stirring occasionally. Don’t let the leek turn brown. Add a head of broccoli, rinsed and coarsely chopped, along with a large russet potato, peeled and cubed. Add about four or five cups water or stock — chicken stock is excellent but not vegan — bring to a boil, and simmer, covered, for about 20 minutes. Puree with an immersion wand or in a blender, add some ground or cracked black pepper, and salt to taste.

A nice springtime variation is to substitute green, or fresh, garlic (now showing up at farmers markets) for the leek. You will need three or four green garlic stalks, since they’re much slenderer than leeks. These soups cool very appealingly, even down to room temperature, but if your hands are blue, serve them hot.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Chemicals and quarantines

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› sarah@sfbg.com

As the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) pushes ahead with plans to aerially spray the Bay Area with pheromones to eradicate the light brown apple moth (LBAM), the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has signed onto state senator Carole Migden’s efforts to ask CDFA to put a moratorium on the spraying.

"We haven’t seen this level of concern and debate since the medfly days of then governor Jerry Brown," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told the Guardian. "At this point, spraying sounds premature and reckless, even though I understand this is a nasty invasive pest."

Meanwhile, four members of the California State Assembly, including San Francisco’s Mark Leno, are working collaboratively on a group of LBAM-related measures to address health, scientific, and efficacy issues that remain unresolved since the agency’s multimillion-dollar eradication campaign began last year.

Leno’s part in this collaboration with fellow assembly members John Laird, Loni Hancock, and Jared Huffman involves demanding that CDFA complete an environmental impact report (EIR) before being able to apply pesticide in an urban area for LBAM eradication, which can be a lengthy process.

"By making this an urgency measure, it would take immediate effect," Leno told the Guardian. "We recognize that urban areas are concerned about health and safety, that LBAM is a real threat to the agricultural industry, and that the other side must be considered."

Last year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and CDFA both gave LBAM emergency status after the tiny, leaf-rolling Australian native was found in a Berkeley backyard, the first time it was confirmed in the continental United States.

As the USDA’s Larry Hawkins told the Guardian, the federal declaration of emergency allowed his department to access the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federally owned and operated entity within the USDA that supports and protects farm income and prices.

So far, the USDA has allocated $90 million to cover the costs of what Hawkins called "an expensive regulatory program," along with those of developing suitable pesticides and a nationwide survey to see if the moth has spread beyond California.

Hawkins claims the state separately declared an LBAM emergency — a move that allowed CDFA to go ahead and abate the pest — and that impacted the state’s normal EIR process.

"Emergency status doesn’t relieve [CDFA] of EIR requirements, but it allows them to do it simultaneously," Hawkins explained.

Since then some citizen activists have challenged the moth’s emergency status, claiming that there is no evidence that LBAM has severely damaged or infested local crops. But Hawkins says this purported lack of evidence proves that the government’s eradication program is working.

"We know the insect exists, that it destroys crops in other countries, and now you find the same insect here," said Hawkins, whose department has predicted that LBAM could inhabit 80 percent of the United States and nibble on 2,000 plant species.

"So, we can logically conclude it will cause damage here. The reason you haven’t seen major damage here is because we’ve found it early enough to deal with it before it becomes substantial. And the reason you won’t find reports of major LBAM damage in New Zealand or Australia is because they are constantly using pesticides," Hawkins said.

Asked if the USDA will fully disclose the ingredients of any product the state plans to use aerially, Hawkins said, "We cannot force a private company to reveal all their ingredients. But we have told all those companies that hope to provide products that they should expect to reveal them all."

Critics of the state’s pheromone spraying program observe that Suterra LLC, which manufactured the spray used over Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, refused to release the full ingredients until it was sued — and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger demanded immediate full disclosure.

These same critics also note that Schwarzenegger, who continues to support CDFA’s LBAM-eradication program, received $144,600 in campaign contributions from Los Angeles–based Roll International owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who control Suterra, Fiji Water, Paramount Agribusiness, and the Franklin Mint.

Records show the Resnicks donate broadly, mostly to Democrats — including the gubernatorial campaigns of Steve Westly and Phil Angelides, and US Sens. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama — with a lesser-size donation to Republican presidential front-runner John McCain, proving they play both sides of the fence.

With researchers testing a variety of LBAM-related products in New Zealand, Hawkins hopes to have a product formulated for California by June 1, which is when spraying is scheduled to resume in Santa Cruz and Monterey; spraying in the Bay Area is set for Aug. 1.

"We would like to give communities maximum notice, but we’re also working towards a beginning-of-June date, and as much as we’d like to insert artificial time frames, the insect couldn’t care less. It’s on a biological time table and is multiplying every day," Hawkins said.

David Dilworth of the Monterey nonprofit group Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment, which advocates the use of targeted pheromone-baited sticky traps, conceded that even if CDFA was forced to stop the aerial spraying, the USDA could spray anyway.

"But it would take them several months to organize, and we don’t believe they have the constitutional power," claimed Dilworth, whose organization is preparing a 60-day notice of intent to sue the USDA and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile, organic farmers find themselves in an uncomfortable limbo that continues to shift. Take the Santa Cruz–based California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). Last fall, CCOF supported the aerial pheromone spray after the National Organics Program approved it, meaning sprayed farmers didn’t lose organic certification

But March 4, CCOF spokesperson Viella Shipley told the Guardian that the group is about to release a revised position on the spraying, and could not comment further "because CCOF’s government affairs committee has not yet approved this revised position."

"We lobbied for an organically approved product and supported it last fall when lots of our members were suffering because they were in quarantine and couldn’t sell beyond county lines," was all Shipley would say.

Meanwhile, organic farmers who spoke on condition of anonymity largely supported aerial spraying for economic and environmental reasons.

"If the moth isn’t dealt with now, it’ll become a bigger problem, from both an environmental and toxic perspective," one farmer told us, citing the already high costs of controlling such bugs as coddling moths and medflies.

"This is somebody else’s pest at the moment, a nonnative pest," he said. "If farmers have to start dealing with LBAM as well, they’ll be ruined."

He also cited his belief that there aren’t 40 million pheromone-soaked twist ties on the market, which is what the CDFA claims is needed to blanket infested counties from the ground up with female pheromones to confuse the males.

Nigel Walker, an organic farmer in Dixon, recalled the devastating costs of quarantine thanks to a medfly-infested mango that someone brought back from Hawaii.

"Their vacation cost me $60,000 because of lost sales," Walker said. "So, for God’s sake, don’t bring, mail, or FedEx fruit and vegetables into California, because border inspectors are looking for bombs and terrorists, not produce and moths.

"We live in a global economy, and we have trade agreements that say if one person gets a pest, you have to do something about it," Walker added. "Nobody wants to be sprayed. Even when I spray organic seaweed on my fruit trees, I wear a mask. So I understand the gut reaction. But by refusing to be sprayed, you’re punishing the wrong person — the farmer — who already has to deal with the vagaries of the weather, the marketplace, and pests like the medfly."

Chris Mittelstaedt, who lives in San Francisco with his family and runs Fruitguys, a small business that delivers organic fruit to offices, said he’s personally against the spraying. "But as a company, we are going to wait a few weeks before letting people know what we officially think or endorse as a plan of action," Mittelstaedt told us.

Other city dwellers are less ambivalent. Frank Eggers, a former Fairfax mayor who is organizing a group called Stop the Spray, said, "[World Trade Organization] stuff is driving this so-called moth emergency.

"We’re allowing other countries to quarantine our produce. And with the global economy, climate change, and travel, we’re going be facing this issue continuously. But we can’t keep putting poison on our land, or say we’ll put you in quarantine if you don’t accept our aerial bombardment," he said.

Paul Schramski, state director of Pesticide Watch, worries that the state and federal agencies are still not listening to the people of California.

"If this is not being driven by trade agreements, then I’m not sure what is the driver. We don’t have all the facts. But it’s not being driven by actual crop damage," Schramski said. "We agree that this invasive moth should be controlled, but it’s a false premise to believe that the choice is between aerial spraying or nothing. The state has known since August that the public was opposed to spraying, so why aren’t we producing more twist ties?"

CDFA, which used $500,000 in USDA funds to hire PR agency Porter Novelli last November at the height of public outcry, is currently researching pheromone products that last up to 90 days and is also planning to use pheromone-loaded twist ties, sticky traps, and stingerless parasitic wasps in its LBAM program.

"We believe this to be a biological emergency," CDFA public affairs supervisor Steve Lyle told us. "If we waited a year or two, so we could first do an EIR, we would lose the battle and become generally infested."

Ironically, California’s best hope for not being sprayed ad infinitum may lie in the discovery that the moth has spread to other states.

"It would make a significant impact if we were to find the insect established in other places," the USDA’s Hawkins told us. "It doesn’t mean we would throw up our hands and walk away, but it would remove some of the argument that the rest of America is at risk from California if other states already have it."

But until that time, Hawkins warned that if state legislators demand a moratorium, forced spraying won’t be the federal government’s only option: "Maybe California would have to be quarantined. And now we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars."

Diving into Or, the Whale, Bodies of Water, and Willow Willow

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OrTheWhale 2.jpg
Thar she blows: Or, the Whale. All photos by Brandon Joseph Baker.

Photographer Brandon Joseph Baker checked out Noise Pop’s sold-out Dodos/Or, the Whale/Bodies of Water/Willow Willow show at Cafe du Nord on Feb. 28. The sets were eclectic with Willow Willow quietly starting the evening out. The crowd grew as Bodies of Water took stage and played a fierce yet short set due to time constraints – much to the audience’s dismay. Next, Or, the Whale prepared the listeners for the Dodos’ set with their strong ballad-driven Americana tunes.

OrTheWhale 3.jpg

Elastic band

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRYPTACIZE

With Why? and Dose One

March 6, 9 p.m., $13

Great American Music Hall

859 O’Farrell, SF

www.musichallsf.com

Where to now, SFPUC?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Months after Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his intention to get rid of San Francisco Public Utilities Commission general manager Susan Leal, his appointees on the SFPUC board finally made if official on Feb. 20.

But the reasons for the previously unexplained move that have finally started coming from Newsom and his surrogates have only added to the confusion and concern over why Leal got canned and whether Newsom has compromised this important agency’s work for political reasons.

Leal was terminated without cause and is thus entitled to the $400,000 severance package from the contract Newsom used to convince her to move from city treasurer to SFPUC chief in 2004. Nonetheless, in the days leading up to the Feb. 20 hearing, the Mayor’s Office made a series of unsubstantiated allegations, including the claim that Leal botched negotiations with JPower over combustion turbines in Potrero Hill, that she was too much of a political animal and not enough of a team player, and that she didn’t focus enough on Newsom’s environmental initiatives like tidal power.

At first, Leal tried to handle her termination gracefully: for example, she told the Guardian that tidal power "is really expensive, doesn’t generate much power, and is a difficult process to get approved, environmentally speaking."

But then Newsom told reporters that city officials had discussed terminating Leal for cause, so that the SFPUC could avoid paying her severance, but eventually decided against it to avoid potentially expensive litigation costs. At that point, with the implication that she had done something wrong, Leal’s gloves came off.

"I really wanted to go out on the high road," Leal told us after Newsom’s latest allegations hit. "It’s unfortunate that the Mayor had to resort to 11th hour innuendo to try and justify what he did."

Leal notes that city officials never undertook a performance evaluation of Leal or the SFPUC, which would usually form the basis for an expensive effort to remove a high-profile public official. So why did Newsom really dump Leal?

Was it her creation of public power projects that earned her the scorn of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.? Was it her environmental initiatives, ranging from a biofuels program to a ban on bottled water, which seemed to show up Newsom? Was it the fact that she was a strong and independent woman in a male-dominated political landscape?

One clue can be found during the agency’s Nov. 14, 2007, meeting — just before Newsom announced he wanted Leal gone — in which SFPUC president Dick Sklar ripped into Barbara Hale, the assistant general manager for power, after she made a presentation on the agency’s long-term energy goals.

Sklar objected to Hale’s presentation, claiming, "It implied adoption of principles stating that the SFPUC was going to be in the public power business and take over public power generation in the city, making statement of principles totally inconsistent with anything the commission had adopted."

Equally disturbing to staff was the abusive way Sklar delivered his message.

"It was very painful," Leal told us. "It got so bad I had to intervene. I’m not going to allow my staff to be yelled at."

At issue was the agency’s plan to underground gas lines in Bernal Heights and extend its transmission lines, which Leal described as "a gimme. We have the easement all up the peninsula."

Beyond her openly pro–public power stance, Leal speculated that her friendly working relationship with the Board of Supervisors, including board president Aaron Peskin and Sups. Bevan Dufty and Sophie Maxwell, tweaked the mayor, who at times has seemed to have a personal vendetta against his former board colleagues.

"Maybe the mayor thinks that I’m too close with them. But we did more than just talk about climate change. We actually addressed it," said Leal, who convened a world-renowned climate change conference in San Francisco last year — on the same day Newsom was confronted by his then campaign manager Alex Tourk about the affair Newsom had with Tourk’s wife, Newsom’s commission appointments secretary Ruby Rippey-Tourk.

"Why am I fighting back, not going quietly?" said Leal, whose removal is effective March 21. "Because this is too big not to. I actually really like this job and will be going in to work for the next 30 days."

Addressing allegations that she mismanaged the JPower negotiations, Leal explained that PUC staff drew up a term sheet with JPower and presented it to the commission’s governing body. And it was at that point, said Leal, "that Commissioner Sklar popped off," claiming that the contract’s terms were terrible and should be renegotiated.

In the end, all five commissioners approved a description of the contemplated transaction with JPower, including a brief description of Sklar’s preferred alternative, which, as it turned out, had problems of its own.

"So, there never was a deal," Leal told us. "JPower was pushing the city to pay more money up front because it knows PG&E will do everything it can to make the implementation of JPower’s contract tough, and the city was pushing to pay the money later and so reduce its own risks."

Today, the PUC continues to work with JPower on a contract that has taken years to formulate and that, Leal notes, will ultimately allow the city to own the plant.

"So, if we want to shut it down, or run it on alternative fuel, we’ll have control," Leal told us. "My goal was to make the PUC as viable and green as possible."

She believes Sklar didn’t turn against her leadership until she started to push things that infringed on PG&E’s monopoly. "Did PG&E get me fired? If I was PG&E, I’d want me fired," Leal said.

Maxwell is a strong advocate of the Newark-to–San Francisco transmission line Leal sought, not just because it would help reduce environmental burdens in Maxwell’s heavily polluted southeast district but also because it would give the entire City more ability to bring in cleaner power.

"We could do large-scale solar in the Central Valley, as well as wind and geothermal energy. It would allow us to hook renewable power into statewide grid," Leal said, noting that the link would also allow the city to import the electricity it generates at Hetch Hetchy without using PG&E’s expensive lines.

Leal noted that under her leadership, the PUC tripled the city’s municipal solar generation. "But we don’t control residential solar. PG&E does," she said, noting the city is lagging at getting solar panels on homes but leading at doing in on public buildings. "It’s too bad PG&E couldn’t have made it easier for people."

Maxwell says she’ll miss Leal.

"I don’t think we’re going to be better off without her," Maxwell told us. "Susan is independent, a straight shooter, a grown up woman trying to make a difference and listening to all sides. She knew we had to be involved regionally. She also understood we have to have relationships with both sides of the hall."

Convinced that PG&E had something to do with Leal’s demise, Maxwell also believes the stinky sewage digesters, which sit down the road from her own house, need to be removed, not retrofitted, as Sklar recently advocated.

"The digesters need to go," Maxwell told the Guardian. "No other place in the nation, to my knowledge, has digesters within 25 feet of people’s homes."

Noting that Controller Ed Harrington, whom Newsom has nominated as the next general manager of the PUC, has a financial background, Maxwell says the question of what to do with the digesters should not be about money.

"We need to do the best we can for people, in the most economic and financially prudent was possible, but people must come first, "Maxwell told us.

Maxwell said these recent power struggles at the PUC convinced her to join seven other Supervisors in placing a charter amendment on the June ballot that will make it easier for supervisors to block mayoral appointees to the agency and will also require that PUC nominees have appropriate awareness and skills.

With a proposed $4.3 billion program in the works to upgrade the aging Hetch Hetchy system, which provides water to 2.4 million Bay Area residents, will the newly nominated Harrington be able to address water conservation, efficiency and recycling, without causing further harm to the Tuolumne River — all while dealing with battles over public power and wastewater concerns?

Noting that he began his City Hall career as Assistant General Manager for Finance at the PUC, a position he held for seven years before becoming City Controller 17 years ago, Harrington told us, "This is not the perfect way to walk into a position. Susan and I are old friends, she’s been very gracious, and has made it known that I had nothing to do with her removal. And I’m trying to be gracious. There’s no need to criticize her."

Leal, who calls Harrington a friend, said she believes Harrington "will push a little bit, but how much independence he can take and preserve remains the question."

Neither Sklar nor representatives from the Mayor’s Office returned calls from the Guardian. But Sup. Chris Daly, who saved Sklar’s neck by leaving the board one vote short of the supermajority required to reject a PUC mayoral appointee, told us, "I don’t think Sklar is Newsom’s tool. He’s bigger than that. If I thought he was not independent from PG&E, I wouldn’t have voted from him."

In fact, he said perceived lack of PG&E independence was why he joined seven other supervisors in voting against reappointing Ryan Brooks, who Newsom then nominated to the Planning Commission on the same day Leal was fired.

Noise Pop: Follow those Dodos

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

Meric Long spent a year in chicken heaven or hell, depending on your feelings about charred fowl flesh. For about a year the Dodos vocalist-guitarist-trombonist chopped, baked, and tended as many as 80 signature roasted chickens per night as a line cook at San Francisco foodie institution Zuni Cafe — a day job so intense that plump, juicy birds haunted his dreams. "Whenever I start talking about the chickens, I can’t shut up," he says ruefully now. "It just it ruled my life for a year!"

But honestly, despite those incursions into his REM-scape, Long feels more kinship with his band’s namesake: the Dodo, that incredible, edible, yet now extinct white meat. "They were like chickens," he muses, sprawled sideways on a bench in Mission Creek Cafe on this warm California winter afternoon. The precision roasting of fowl seems far away on this fair day. "They were lonely, though."

"They wanted friends," drummer Logan Kroeber throws in. He’s still shaken and a bit stirred thanks to a too-close-to-personal-extinction-for-comfort encounter between his skateboarding self and a car blasting down a nearby alley.

"And that’s why they got killed off," Long continues. "They weren’t used to visitors, and the English came and were hungry and ate ’em."

Still, it takes a lot of sly chutzpah to adopt the moniker of the highly uncool, not-so-beautiful loser of the animal kingdom. And though they’d never say so explicitly, Long and Kroeber are hoping, humbly, to do the clumsy waddlers proud by adapting and maybe even flourishing. Exhibit one: the Dodos’ compelling second album, Visiter, scheduled to be released March 18 on Frenchkiss. Its 14 songs unfold in three rough parts, beginning with the toy piano invocations of road-weary, lovelorn musicians ("Red and Purple"), then rolling through noise-wracked folk drone ("Joe’s Waltz"), wry, Magnetic Fields–style songcraft ("Winter"), and a ragtag country blues scented with the sun and sand of Led Zeppelin and West African drumming ("Paint the Rust"). A significant evolution from Long’s time as a solo acoustic act and from the Dodos’ self-released debut, Beware of the Maniacs (2006), Visiter is startlingly deep and likely to hold up under repeated plays, catching the listener on the tenterhooks of Long’s insinuating melodies.

So it’s funny, then, to think that Long first dubbed his solo folk act Dodobird because he felt like such a slow goer and has now firmly found his voice with Kroeber and the Dodos. "To be honest, I think back then I used to have a fear that I was kind of unintelligent, like I was really dumb but didn’t know it," Long says bashfully. "I don’t know if I should say it. But I think it had to do with partying too much when I was younger and completely fucking my brain. I also think there’s this plane of understanding that other people seem to be on and I’m still kind of out of the loop on."

As usual, Kroeber jumps into the conversation, to watch his bud’s back, because seriously, dude, in his opinion, Long is nothing like the dazed and confused kids he grew up with down south: "A lot of people can sort of deflect that with ‘You’re thinking too much, man! Keep it simple! Positive vibes!’ You know, that sort of brick-by-brick, build your weed cabin." Kroeber nods sagely. "I grew up in Santa Cruz — it’s a historical place for weed-cabin building."

The Dodos found their endearingly clumsy footing far from the happy yet isoutf8g metaphorical grassy isles of yesteryear. After moving from his hometown of Lafayette, Long had been playing solo around town — occasionally as Mix Tape with vocalist Brigid Dawson of the Ohsees — when Kroeber’s cousin introduced the guitarist to the drummer two years ago. Kroeber started accompanying Long live on a few songs, on a single tom. "Even during those early shows," Kroeber recalls, "that girl Emily from Vervein was still, like, ‘It’s cool — I like what you’re doing, the one drum thing. I’m all about it!’ Even with one drum, people were, like, ‘Keep going!’<0x2009>"

A particularly inspiring Animal Collective show roused Long to offer to pay Kroeber’s way to Portland, Ore., where the singer-songwriter was about to record Beware with engineer John Askew, who owns the Filmguerrero label. Their experience working with Askew was so fruitful that the two returned to Askew’s Type Foundry studio to make Visiter after spending 2006 on perpetual tour, getting tighter, writing songs together, and solidifying their identity as a band. For Visiter, the duo piled on an odd array of instruments — stand-up bass, toy piano, and trombone — while the producer carefully pieced the sounds together in the recording’s aural landscape. "John sits there and closes his eyes and imagines his record as a soundscape and places things geographically," Long says, standing suddenly and patting the air above him here and there. "I think it really helped with this situation, because with two people there’s a lot of sonic space to fill, so where he placed everything really made a huge difference. The drums take up so much sound space on the record."

Loneliness fills the spaces of the songs as well, as Visiter so often seems to revolve around the women who were just passing through Long’s life. "Jodi" and "Ashley" are, naturally, about two such suspects, while "Undeclared" eschews Kanye West collegiate themes to focus on an unrealized crush, and "Red and Purple" captures that "young lady" who fashioned elaborate gifts involving invisible ink that would greet Long at every club on tour. "It was pretty romantic shit," Long says a bit wistfully.

"I was definitely impressed," Kroeber agrees. "I didn’t really know this girl, but later I imagined she was one of those people who sew everything by hand, supermeticulous. It was some next-level spy shit."

As the talk turns to girls who have come and gone, the Dodos grow a mite melancholy, though not enough to throw in the towel and jump in a roasting pan. They recently underwent a minimedia storm in New York City, where they attempted to go uncensored for MTV.com while hungover and sleep deprived after partying with Long’s chef pals the previous night. Fortunately, these days the Dodos are relying on their survival instinct more often than not and seeking out swimming holes rather than new watering holes when on tour.

Not that the drink doesn’t have its uses. "It’s an artificial sort of cryostasis," Kroeber quips. "But as soon as you get done with the tour and go home, it crumbles. The second tour, when I came back, my girlfriend was, like, ‘What the fuck happened to you?’ But it does work! When you’re on the road it’s the one thing that keeps you going."

THE DODOS

With Or, the Whale, Bodies of Water, and Willow Willow

Feb. 28, 9 p.m., $10–$12

Cafe du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016

ww.cafedunord.com

>>Back to Noise Pop page

Solo budgeting

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom is giving his department heads until Feb. 21 to draw up a list of services and positions to be reduced and eliminated, but Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin notes this isn’t how city government is supposed to work.

"Technically, things aren’t being cut," Peskin told the Guardian. "Instead, the mayor is signaling that he is refusing to spend the money that has been appropriated by the board in the budget that was voted on and signed last year."

Last summer the Board of Supervisors used the add-back process to appropriate funds the mayor hadn’t sought, thus funding services such as the Workers Compensation Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital and Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour homeless shelter, until the end of fiscal year 2007–08.

But now these same services are being targeted midyear. The mayor announced last November, shortly after he was reelected, that the city faces a projected $229 million budget, so he was demanding an immediate hiring freeze and across-the-board cuts.

As mayoral spokesperson Nathan Ballard reportedly told the San Francisco Chronicle last fall, "Although he wants to trim the fat, the mayor made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want to see a reduction in people sweeping streets or police officers walking beats."

But while city department heads spent the past few months trying to tighten belts, the mayor apparently expanded his, according to budget analyst Harvey Rose’s Feb. 13 report, which details the monetary impact of changes to Newsom’s staff — changes the mayor first announced Jan. 4.

"Don’t think that the irony of the revelations that have been made over the past few weeks has been lost on anyone," Peskin told us, referring to how Newsom added two entirely new positions, increased the pay of senior staff and newly appointed department heads in the Mayor’s Office, and raided the budgets of other agencies to pay for it all.

According to Rose’s report, the budgetary impact of Newsom’s staff changes amounted to an increase of $553,716, with other city departments funding about $1.34 million in annual salaries and benefits for 10 positions assigned to the Mayor’s Office.

These include two newly created jobs — namely, the mayor’s climate change director, Wade Crowfoot, and the mayor’s homelessness policy director, Dariush Kayhan.

Peskin admits that the spending Rose identified is a relative drop in the bucket, compared to the city’s $229 million deficit. "Yes, it’s not enough to significantly close the gap or save a significant number of services, but it’s symbolic," Peskin said, noting that even as homeless shelters are being fingered for elimination, the Human Services Agency is paying $169,624 annually for the mayor’s new homelessness policy director.

"And when voters approved more money for Muni, the mayor used it to hire people to pound out messages about climate change, when the best way to reduce greenhouse gases is to get people out of their cars," Peskin said, referring to Newsom’s new climate change director, hired at an annual cost of $130,112, using the Municipal Transportation Authority’s Safety and Training funds.

"It’s very frustrating and unfortunate," Peskin said, further noting that the $401,392 to terminate Susan Leal without cause as general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission will come from the city’s water fees.

"This is indicative of the misplaced priorities of the mayor," said Peskin, who doesn’t deny that spending control is required in the face of a looming deficit but resents how the mayor has been trying to do it unilaterally and not in cooperation with the board.

"The budget, by design, is a two-way street," Peskin observed.

Sup. Chris Daly claimed the services being targeted for Newsom’s midyear elimination are "a who’s who of the board’s priorities…. These are human and health services that the mayor has proposed be cut multiple times."

Daly’s legislative aide, John Avalos, who is running for District 11 supervisor, notes that while Daly wanted $33 million for affordable housing, a onetime amount, the mayor took a budget surplus and used it for multiple years, with the police, firefighters’, and nurses’ contracts accounting for his biggest expenditures.

Asked why the city’s deficit has ballooned by $144 million — from the $85.3 million the Controller and Budget Analyst’s offices identified in March 2007 to the $229 million that Newsom’s administration was suddenly projecting last fall — Tom DiSanto, budget and revenue manager for the Controller’s Office, cites an extra $82 million in salaries and benefits.

These include the four-year contracts that nurses and police and fire departments secured last summer, along with five extra police academies, said DiSanto, who also listed $7 million in police crime laboratory debt service, $7.4 million for sheriff inmate housing (required by last year’s Supreme Court order that prisoners can’t sleep on floors), and the $29 million transit set-aside that voters approved last November when they passed Proposition A.

But as DiSanto explains, the city’s budget problem is due not to lack of revenue but to baseline funding and rainy-day reserve requirements, not to mention the political process.

"Right now, with baselines and reserves, 96¢ out of every dollar goes into set-asides, and we’re required to adopt a balanced budget," DiSanto said. "That’s where the cuts come in. If we could access all the city’s revenues, we wouldn’t have a $229 million projected deficit," he added, noting that revenues are up, property taxes are higher than budgeted, and the hotel tax continues to be strong.

Ken Bruce, senior manager at the Budget Analyst’s Office, notes that unlike the federal government, the city of San Francisco has to balance the budget. He also says the current deficit projection comes from the Controller’s and the Mayor’s offices, not the Budget Analyst’s Office.

"In mid-March we get to do a joint forecast," Bruce told the Guardian. "It may paint a better picture, less of a doomsday scenario, but it still leaves us facing difficult policy choices. [The deficit] won’t drop from $230 million to $100 million."

Peskin envisions several long-term solutions, hopefully including positive changes in the White House this fall.

"With every passing year, as the federal government has abandoned the cities, we’ve taken more of a burden, and labor and capital costs have increased," says Peskin, who is mulling changes to the real estate transfer tax and closing a loophole whereby lawyers and accountants in limited liability partnerships have escaped paying payroll taxes.

That said, Peskin sees no easy fixes in the city’s upcoming budget hearings:

"It’s a fluid situation, and it’s all bad."

And now, green waterboarding

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Today’s Ammianoliner:

George Bush supports green waterboarding. “As long as the water’s recycled, it’s not torture.”

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Friday, Feb. l5, 2008.) B3

The Dick and Susan show

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The battle over the future direction of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission took a dramatic turn Feb. 12.

A super majority of the Board voted to reject mayoral appointee Ryan Brooks, but Sup. Chris Daly joined mayoral allies Sups. Michela Alioto-Pier, Carmen Chu, Chris Daly and Sean Elsbernd, thus leaving the Board one critical vote short of the super majority currently required to reject mayoral appointees to the PUC, the city agency that wields control over Hetch Hetchy water and power, and San Francisco’s sewage and waste water systems.

100_2770.JPG
DIck Sklar testifying before the Board, as he battled for his PUC seat

These votes came after Sups. Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty declared it was time for new blood on the board, Sup. Sean Elsbernd argued that the PUC-related charter amendment, which the Board has just placed on the June ballot and which requires only six Supervisors to reject a PUC appointee, is a better way to secure a new commission, and the 73-year-old Sklar, who has been ill with pancreatic cancer, appeared in person to deny, amongst other things, allegations that he is a PG&E flak.

On the waterfront: an epic

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The city of night on a night of rain still offers its spectacles, and one of them must be the Bay Bridge as viewed from Epic Roasthouse, the brand-new restaurant (starring Pat Kuleto and Jan Birnbaum) that, with its sibling, Waterbar, sits on the narrow strip of land between the Embarcadero and the water. The bridge soars through the mists overhead, like the arc of a rainbow, and one has the sense of inspecting it — peeking at its underbelly, as if at a used car that might or might not be leaking coolant.

Not even a generation ago this neighborhood was entombed by an overhead freeway, and when Boulevard opened in the Audiffred Building just a few blocks away in 1993, the Embarcadero consisted mostly of granulated, ghost-town asphalt. But the visionaries could see what was bound to happen — what indeed was already happening, slowly but inexorably, because of the 1989 earthquake — and in that crumbled pavement a farmers market took root. Eventually it found a home in the resurrected Ferry Building, while on other plots of land liberated from elevated-freeway strangulation, hotels and parks and housing developments sprouted; restaurants too. What was an urban wilderland is now a glossy district both commercial and residential, a crown for the city, with a couple of gaudy new jewels.

Like all view restaurants, Epic Roasthouse is bound to attract tourists, both out-of-towners and suburbanites, but it also stands to develop a city constituency. Although parking in the area is hellish, Muni’s T line stops just steps away, and meanwhile, the blocks immediately behind the waterfront are filling up with residential towers, which will soon fill up with people of means who will be able to walk over to the Embarcadero for dinner.

With all due respect to the bicycle lobbies, the great city pleasure is walking — and the great luxury of our time is also walking, since it frees us from the tyranny of machines, at least if we’re not listening to an iPod or yakking into a cell phone as we stroll. Walking to or from work? Priceless! Walking to or from Epic Roasthouse? Also priceless, with appetite kindled on the inbound leg and calories usefully spent on the other.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Shelter shuffle

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EDITOR’S NOTE Guardian reporter Amanda Witherell and intern Bryan Cohen spent almost a week staying in various San Francisco homeless shelters. To get an unfiltered look at the conditions, they didn’t identify themselves as journalists, so some names in this story have been changed to protect people’s privacy. Their undercover reporting was supplemented with extensive research and on-the-record interviews with key officials, providers, and recipients of homeless services.

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s nightly shelter journals, with photos

>>Read Bryan Cohen’s nightly shelter journals, with photos

>>Homeless people share their stories

>>The mayor’s Feb. 14 press conference about homeless shelters

It’s about quarter past seven on a Thursday night, and I’m late for curfew. Not even during my wildest high school days did I have to be home by a certain time, but tonight, 29 years old and sleeping in a homeless shelter, I’m supposed to be in by 6:30 p.m.

Heading down Fifth Street toward the shelter, I wonder what I’ll do if I lose my bed for being late. Can they set me up at a different shelter? Will I have to head back to a resource center in the Tenderloin or the Mission District to wait in line for a reservation somewhere else? Either way, I could be walking the streets for the next few hours, so I adjust my heavy backpack for the journey. Waiting to cross Bryant Street, I stare up at the large, hulking building with its utilitarian name, Multi-Service Center South, and notice there are no shades on the windows in the men’s dorm. Since it’s lit from within, I can clearly see someone standing beside his cot, clad in nothing but blue plaid boxers, obviously unaware that he’s so exposed. I wonder if the windows would be shaded if it were the women’s room. Maybe that’s why we sleep in the basement.

Inside the door I shed my pack and step through the metal detector. The security guard dutifully pats it down and pushes it back into my arms. At the desk I give the last four digits of my Social Security number and am checked in. No questions about being tardy. I’m in.

I’m also late for dinner. A staffer hands me two unwrapped sandwiches from a reused bread bag under the counter. Ham, mustard, and American cheese between two pieces of cheap, sliced bread. After two days in the shelter I still haven’t seen a piece of fruit or a vegetable. I wrap the sandwiches in the newspaper under my arm and head down to my bunk. On the stairs I pass a guy and nod hello. He nods back, then calls out, "Hey, can I ask you something?"

I turn. "Sure."

"What’s a nice girl like you doing in here?"

I shrug and step back, unsure of what to say.

"I’m not trying to mess with you," he says. "I’m not fucking with you. I don’t do drugs. I’m straight. I don’t mess with anything," he goes on, trying to reassure me.

I believe him and dish it back. "Then what’s a nice guy like you doing in here?"

He laughs and shrugs. He tells me he doesn’t really stay here. It’s just for a couple of days. He lives in a $200 per week hotel in Oakland, but if he stays there more than 28 consecutive days, it becomes residential and the rates go up, so he clears out for a few days every month and comes here. The hotel’s nicer than this, he claims. It’s clean and safe, and he has his own space. "I can walk around in my underwear," he says.

We sit on the stairs, talking about how you lose all your privacy when you stay in a shelter, how the regimentation is reminiscent of prison. There are no places to go and be on your own, rest, and be quiet. Once you’re in for the night, you can’t leave except to step out for a smoke.

I ask if he has a job. He tells me he’s a chef for Google. I raise an eyebrow, recalling that the company’s stock is hovering somewhere between $600 and $700 per share right now. The pay isn’t the problem — he gets $16 an hour, but he’s been out of town for a while, caring for a sick family member, and has just returned. He got his job back, but only part-time, and he lost his home.

He’s wary of being on welfare — that’s not the way his mother raised him — but he’s in the County Adult Assistance Program, which gets him $29 every two weeks, a guaranteed bed at the shelter, and a spot on a waiting list for a single-room-occupancy hotel room, the bottom rung on the permanent-housing ladder.

What he really wants is a studio, but his searches haven’t turned up anything affordable. He needs a little boost of cash for a security deposit on an apartment, but when he asked the General Assistance Office if it could help him out with that, the answer was no.

His brow furrows with concern, and then the conversation turns to me. "You got a job?" he asks.

What can I say? I’m a reporter for a local newspaper. I’ve heard that some of the city’s homeless shelters are lacking basic standards, accessing a bed can be complicated, and services are scattered. I thought I’d come find out for myself.

Here’s what I learned: San Francisco has a cumbersome crazy quilt of programs, stitched together with waiting lists and lines. Policies that are written on paper and espoused in City Hall are often missing in shelters. Some rules don’t seem to exist until they’ve been broken. Others apply to some people, but not all. Getting a bed is a major hurdle, and I say that as a stable, able, mentally competent, sober adult.

And once you’re in, it’s sort of like sitting in a McDonald’s for too long. Years ago a friend told me the interiors of fast food restaurants are deliberately designed to make you feel a little uncomfortable. They don’t want you to get too cozy; they want you to eat and leave, making way for the next hungry mouth they can feed.

In other words, shelters are designed to make people not want to use them.

The only information I took with me was a one-page handout I got from a San Francisco Police Department Operation Outreach officer. He said it’s what cops and outreach workers give to people they come across who are sleeping on the streets. I figure if it’s good enough for them, it’s all I need to navigate the system.

The map, as it were, is a cramped, double-sided list of places to get free meals, take showers, store your stuff, sober up, and, of course, get a bed.

For the bed, it instructs, you have to go to a resource center and make a reservation. Some of the resource centers are also shelters. Some aren’t. Some are just reservation stations. They all have different operating hours and are located all over the city, but mostly in the Tenderloin and South of Market.

It takes me a while to puzzle out which ones are open, where exactly they are, then which is closest to me. Phone numbers are also listed, so I assume it’s like making a hotel reservation and dial one up on my cell phone.

The first number doesn’t work. There’s a digit missing. Dialing methodically down the list, I discover that none of the numbers connect me to a person. This is obviously not the way to go.

The way I ultimately get into a shelter is not the way you’re supposed to. In San Francisco’s system, you’re not supposed to just walk up to a homeless shelter and get a bed, but that’s what I do.

At first the woman behind the counter at MSC South tells me the only open beds are across town, at Ella Hill Hutch in the Western Addition. Then another staffer looks at the clock and says he’s not sending me out there. He’ll "drop" beds instead.

The city’s 1,182 beds for single adults are managed through an electronic database called CHANGES. It’s a modern-day improvement on people roaming from shelter to shelter everyday, putting their names on lists for possible beds. Launched in 2004, CHANGES now does that electronically and maintains profiles of people who use the system. If you’ve been kicked out of a shelter, missed your tuberculosis test, or not shown up for curfew, CHANGES knows and tells on you.

Every day around 8 p.m. shelter staff trawl through the reservations and drop the no-shows, cancellations, and reservations that have expired or whose makers have moved on to hospitals, rehab, the morgue, or — less frequently — housing.

MSC is allowed to make reservations for any shelter except itself — that’s against policy. I learn this the next morning, and I’m told it’s because there’s too much corruption and favoritism. MSC is apparently one of the better shelters, so to keep clients from cutting deals with staff, the policy doesn’t allow clients to reserve a bed there.

But after half an hour the staffer hooks me up for a two-night stay, bending the rules to do so. While I’m waiting, he turns away a client who had a seven-day bed but didn’t show up the previous night. The guard confiscates his fifth of vodka, and he gets an earful about drinking.

When the city’s shelter system was born in 1982, it was first come, first serve at the doors of churches and community centers. President Ronald Reagan’s cuts to federal domestic spending landed hard on low-income people, so then-mayor Dianne Feinstein called on local organizations to temporarily house and feed the growing number of street sleepers.

Throughout the ’80s wages stagnated while the cost of living soared: between 1978 and 1988 the average rent for a studio apartment in San Francisco jumped 183 percent — from $159 a month to $450. Twenty years later it’s $1,114. In 1978 the Housing and Urban Development budget was $83 billion. Today it’s $35.2 billion, almost nothing by federal budgetary standards, and almost no new public housing units have been built since 1996, while 100,000 have been lost.

Every year the federal government spends almost twice as much on a single attack submarine as the Department of Housing and Urban Development spends on homeless assistance. State and local governments have been left to pick up the hefty price tag.

San Francisco spends more than $200 million on homelessness, through services, financial aid, supportive housing, emergency care, and shelter beds. There are 13 city-funded shelters, four resource centers, and three reservation stations in San Francisco. The Human Services Agency spends $12.5 million per year on shelters through contracts with nonprofit managers. The Department of Public Health also manages two contracts, for a battered women’s shelter and a 24-hour drop-in center.

But it’s not enough: the nonprofits supplement operating expenses with grants and private donations and recently relied on a special allocation of $300,000 to purchase basic supplies like soap, towels, hand sanitizer, sheets, pillows, and blankets.

James Woods, a spry 51-year-old wearing a red Gap parka barely zipped over his thin, scarred chest, rattles off the places he’s lived: Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, Louisville, Ky., and his hometown, Nashville, Tenn. "Out of all the cities I’ve been in, this is the only city where you have to go and make a reservation for a bed at the rescue mission all the way across the city in order to come back to the place you started," he says, jabbing the floor of MSC with his cane. "I can’t even make a reservation here for a bed here. They’ll send me across the city to another place to do that."

Woods has been pounding the pavement between MSC and the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center for eight months. Every day around 3:30 p.m. he heads to the Tenderloin, where he gets in line for a bed. Woods has a fractured hip and arthritis, pins in his knees and feet, and hepatitis C. He’s been HIV-positive since 2002. He walks with a limp that can transform into a springy, stiff-legged canter when he chases the 27 bus down Fifth Street.

Rather than tote all of his possessions with him, he hides them in the drawer of an emergency bed at MSC, so it’s imperative that he get back there every night. Sometimes he waits hours for an MSC bed to open up.

Though Woods speaks highly of some city services, swooning a little when he mentions his doctor at the Tom Waddell Health Center, the daily bed hunt has left him exhausted and disgusted with the city. "They’ve got the program designed to run the homeless off," he says. "They have it as hard and difficult as possible for you to take a breath, take a rest, get a routine."

While a person can reserve a bed for one to seven nights and, if on General Assistance, make arrangements through a caseworker for 30- to 90-day stays, Woods has rarely been able to procure a bed for longer than one night. "Maybe twice I’ve gotten a seven-day bed," he says.

The inability to connect people with beds is not lost on city officials. Mayor Gavin Newsom’s recently hired homeless policy director, Dariush Kayhan, told me, "I really want to solve the issue of the juxtaposition of vacant beds and homeless people on the streets. That to me is untenable."

However, he only discussed the issue in terms of people who’ve chosen not to use the shelters and are sleeping in the street. To him, empty beds signify that there’s more than enough shelter for people. "At this time there’s no plan to expand any shelter beds, and I think homeless people, in many ways, many of them vote with their feet and have decided that shelter’s not for them," he said.

But the Guardian found that even if you are willing and waiting for a bed in a place where someone can presumably connect you with one, it often doesn’t happen.

According to the 2007 Homeless Count, there are 6,377 homeless people in San Francisco. The nine year-round single-adult shelters have enough beds to accommodate one-third of that population. Other emergency facilities shelter some of the overflow on a seasonal basis. The remaining homeless sleep in jails and hospitals, respite and sobering centers, parks and sidewalks.

People also pile up at Buster’s Place, the only 24-hour drop-in resource center in the city, where they slump all night in chairs, forbidden by staff to sleep on the floor.

It took Guardian writer Bryan Cohen five nights to find a spot at a shelter. He spent Jan. 20 and 21 at Buster’s waiting to see if a bed would open up. None did. According to the shelter vacancy report for those two nights, there were 108 and 164 beds set aside for men that went unfilled. On an average night this January, a month marked by cold weather and flooding rain, 196 beds were empty.

Buster’s does not have access to CHANGES but can apparently call shelters and ask about empty beds. I was at the Providence Foundation shelter one night and overheard a call come through and shelter staff tell whoever rang that no, they couldn’t bring more people here. There were four empty mats beside me.

Laura Guzman, director of the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, said CHANGES was a breakthrough in getting people into beds, but when it was first launched in 2004, things were different. "You had a choice. Shelter of choice was much easier to achieve. Then Care Not Cash happened," she said.

Most of the city’s beds are assigned to beneficiaries of certain programs, like Swords to Ploughshares and Newsom’s signature plan Care Not Cash, or to people with mental health or substance abuse issues who have case managers.

Though beds can be turned over to the general public when they are dropped after curfew, one wonders how effectively that happens.

The challenges are worst for Latinos, refugees, and immigrants, who face language barriers and the potential hurdle of illegality.

As a result, they flood one of the few places they can get in. Dolores Street Community Services reported the second-lowest vacancy rate in January, just 5 percent. The 82-bed program hosts a waiting list and is one of the more flexible in the city — deliberately so, as many of its Latino participants have jobs or work as day laborers. Marlon Mendieta, the executive program director, says, "They have a plan and just need to save up some money to move into a place."

However, rising rents have made moving on difficult. "We have people who are basically just cycling from one shelter to another," Mendieta said. "We see some who exit our shelter, find housing, but might end up back at the shelter if rent goes up or they lose work."

Providence is one of the sparest of homeless facilities and is located in a Bayview church. Unlike at other shelters, there’s no hanging out here. When the doors open at 9:30 p.m. about 90 people with reservations are already lined up in the rain on its dark side street.

We receive one blanket apiece, and the men shuffle into the gym while I follow the other females into a smaller side room, where 12 mats are laid out on two ratty tarps. Several women immediately lie down, speechless.

The cook gives a quick blessing when plates of food arrive on two sheet pans: spaghetti, heavily dressed salad, limp green beans mixed with cooked iceberg lettuce, and a very buttery roll. It’s all heavy and slightly greasy, but also warm and a closer approximation of a square meal than any of those offered by the other shelters I’ve stayed in so far.

Moments after I finish eating the lights are turned off, even though a couple of women are still working on their meals. A shelter monitor comes through and confiscates our cups of water, saying she just refinished the floors in here and doesn’t want any spills. I notice that unlike at other shelters where I’ve stayed, none of the women here have bothered to change into pajamas. Some haven’t even removed their shoes. I follow suit, tucking my jacket under my head for a pillow and pulling the blanket around me.

When the lights come back on at 5:45 a.m., I understand why no one changed: there’s no time to get dressed. Shelter monitors enter the room, rousting sleepers with catcalls to get up and get moving. One turns on a radio, loud. They’re brisk and no-nonsense, grabbing blankets and shoving them into garbage bags, pulling mats into a stack at the edge of the room.

A woman becomes perturbed by being hustled and talks back to the shelter monitor. A verbal battle ensues, with the client picking up her mat and throwing it across the room, scattering her possessions. "What a woman, what a woman," the shelter monitor yells. "We’ll see if you get a bed here tonight."

Another staffer comes through with a toxic-smelling aerosol, which she sprays around us as we get ready to leave. The bathroom, the cleanest I’ve come across in the city’s shelter system, is still a clusterfuck as a dozen women wait to use the three toilets and two sinks. One stall has a broken door, and the only morning conversation is apologies to the occupant.

Even though the contract between Providence and the HSA says the former will provide shelter until 7 a.m., it’s a little after 6 a.m. and all 90 of us are back out on the street, rubbing sleep from our eyes, shivering in the dark dawn, and waiting for the Third Street T line. When the train comes, most of us board without paying and ride back toward the city center to get busy finding some breakfast and making preparations for where to stay tonight. I have four hours before I have to be at work.

Shucrita Jones, director of Providence, later tells me the shelter’s materials have to be cleaned up by 7 a.m. because the church is booked for other activities. "We turn the lights on at 6. The clients have at least until 6:10 to get up. We encourage everyone to be out of there by 6:15 so we can be clear of the building by 6:30," she says. To her defense, she adds that the shelter monitors often let people in earlier than the contracted time of 10 p.m. and that when the weather is particularly nasty she’ll open the doors as early as 8:30 p.m. to let people in out of the cold.

As for the discrepancy between empty mats in the shelters and people going without beds, she blames the reservation system. "CHANGES has a lot of glitches," she says. "It’s got a lot of errors the city and county [are] trying to fix."

What I witness isn’t as bad as what I hear. In the shelters everyone has a horror story — some are about how they got there, others about what’s happened to them since they arrived. Nearly all include a questionable experience with staff — from witnessing bribes for special treatment to being threatened with denial of service for complaining. Their observations echo mine: the administration and certain high-level staffers exhibit genuine concern and an ability to help when you ask, but lower-tier workers aren’t as invested in providing good service.

Tracy tells me she sent her daughter to private school and considers herself a victim of the dot-bomb era and an illegal eviction that landed them at the Hamilton Family Center. "We were given one blanket. It was filthy. It had poo on it, and, I’m not kidding, there were even pubic hairs," she says.

She describes the shelter’s intake process as similar to that of jail bookings she’s seen on television. Six days later she and her child were thrown out. No reason was given, though she’s convinced it’s because a staff member overheard her complaining about a recent incident involving another client sneaking in a gun. When she was told to leave immediately, she wasn’t informed that she had the right to appeal. So she and her daughter hastily gathered their things and hit the dark Tenderloin streets.

A grievance system exists for people who’ve been hit with denial of service, or DOS’d, the colloquial term for kicked out. But the process can take months. Shelter managers I spoke with don’t deny that stealing is rampant, favoritism exists, and complaints occur — the greatest number about staff and food.

General complaints are supposed to be handled within the shelter, though they may be copied to the city’s Shelter Monitoring Committee. The SMC submits quarterly reports to the Board of Supervisors, Mayor Newsom, and the public, which show regular instances of inconsistent and unsafe conditions, abusive treatment, and a lack of basic amenities like toilet paper, soap, and hot water.

Those reports prompted Sup. Tom Ammiano to sponsor legislation mandating standards of care for all city-funded shelters (see "Setting Standards," 1/30/08). The new law would create baseline standards and streamline a complaint and enforcement process.

According to the HSA, many of these standards are already policies included in the contracts with the nonprofits that run the shelters, requirements such as "provide access to electricity for charging cell phones."

During my stay at the Episcopal Sanctuary, I asked the shelter monitor on duty where I could plug in my cell phone and was told I couldn’t. When I asked why not, the only reply was that it’s against shelter policy. At Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, Cohen was told he could plug in but at his own risk — his unattended phone would probably be stolen.

I reviewed all of the contracts between the city and the nonprofit shelter providers, as well as the shelter training manual that’s given to staff. I was unable to find the same list of policies the HSA gave to the budget analyst. I asked HSA executive director Trent Rhorer how these policies have been communicated to the shelter staff, but he did not respond by press time.

While the ability to charge a cell phone seems relatively minor, its ramifications can be huge. The first time James Leonard met with his case manager at Next Door shelter, he knew exactly what he needed to get back on his feet: bus fare to get to and from three job interviews he’d already scheduled, a clothing voucher so he’d have something nice to wear when he got there, and a couple of dollars for the laundry facilities at the shelter. He also needed to charge his cell phone to confirm the interviews. He said he was denied all four things.

The standards of care, if passed, could improve access to those basic provisions, but some in the Mayor’s Office have balked at the estimated $1 million to $2 million price tag. The budget analyst’s final report is scheduled for release Feb. 14, in time for a Feb. 20 hearing at the Budget and Finance Committee.

Deborah Borne, medical director of the DPH’s Tom Waddell clinic, is a proponent of the standards from a public health perspective. "For me, I’m looking at decreased funding and how can I best affect the most population with what remains," she said.

Dirty shelters can help spread disease outside their four walls, as clients leave every day to use municipal services like buses, libraries, trains, and restaurants, which we all enjoy. Borne says this is something that’s been tackled by other facilities that house large numbers of people and is long overdue in the shelters.

"You can argue about whether we should or shouldn’t have shelters, but there are no city, state, or federal regulations for them. There are tons of regulations for the army, for public schools and colleges, but we put people in shelters and there’s none," she said. To her, San Francisco is on the cutting edge of care with this legislation. "I can’t wait until we do this on a state level," she said.

Kayhan said he and the mayor support the spirit of the legislation and have no problems with most of the no-cost items, but the price tag for staffing, training, and enforcement is a concern. "I think when you’re looking at how much money you’re going to spend on homelessness overall," he told us, "I would rather allocate additional resources to create another unit of housing for someone as opposed to enhancing the service model of the shelters."

Every day he’s on duty in the Tenderloin, police captain Gary Jimenez comes across homeless people — or people who seem homeless but aren’t.

"One day on Turk Street, I came by a long line of people drinking. I was walking with a Homeless Outreach Team officer, and he said he knew them all. Only about 20 percent of them were actually homeless. They don’t want to sit in their rooms drinking. We give people housing but we don’t acclimatize them, get them used to being inside. They want to do what they’ve been doing, and they go out on the streets to do it. It’s social," he said.

Larry Haynes agrees. "It’s lonely and depressing in your room," he says. He lost his Beulah Street apartment through an Ellis Act eviction and has been living in the Vincent Hotel for three years, after a nine-month stint in the shelter system. He’s a tenant representative now, advocating for improved conditions in the SROs, which still beat the shelters.

"The criticism I hear from people on the streets is that there are some good shelters but you can’t get in them," Jimenez said. "Then there are shelters that are open that you can go to, but you wouldn’t want to because they’re really bad."

He tells me he’s visited shelters but finds it difficult to get a feel for how valid the complaints are. "I can’t tell without waking up there or knowing what it’s like to be thrown out on the street at 6 a.m. in the cold when there’s nothing open," he said.

The Shelter Monitoring Committee has requested that HSA staff stay in shelters at least once to get firsthand experience, but it’s yet to receive confirmation that this has occurred. When we asked Rhorer about the policy, he said, "There are 1,800 employees who work for HSA, so there is no way of knowing if any of them have been homeless and used the shelter system."

In our first conversation, Kayhan told me he had never stayed in a shelter. In a later interview, when I asked what he thought about the public perception of the shelters, he said, "I’m just not sure that the criticism that I hear around the shelters as being dangerous hellholes — or whatever has been said — matches what I see in the shelters or what I read with respect to incident reports or what I hear at the Shelter Monitoring Committee or at the shelter directors’ meetings. So perception is reality."

"Housing first" has been Mayor Newsom’s modus operandi for handling homelessness, and it’s a good one — the idea being to stabilize people, whatever condition they’re in: drunk or sober, clean or using, ill or able, young or old, alone or with family.

The city’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, released in 2004, recommended 3,000 units of supportive housing to get the chronically homeless off the streets. Kayhan confirms the Mayor’s Office of Housing is on track to meet that goal through master-leasing SROs and building or renovating new affordable units, where occupants will get supportive services.

The chronically homeless, a catchall term for folks who stick to the streets and don’t or aren’t able to use the system, have been the mayor’s target and Kayhan’s priority. This makes sense because they’re the most visible face of homelessness.

Last year’s city budget allowed a tripling of staff for the Homeless Outreach Team, which works diligently to move the most entrenched homeless off SoMa side streets and out of encampments in Golden Gate Park. A special allocation of shelter beds was set aside for them, and those who refused shelter were put directly into stabilization units in SROs, bypassing the shelter system entirely.

For some, this has been great. It’s how Leonard finally started to make some progress. He bailed on the shelters after having his possessions thrown out three times by staff and hit the streets, where HOT found him, deemed him "shelter challenged," and moved him into a stabilization unit.

"I feel almost as good today as the day before I became homeless," he tells me one afternoon in January. The Bay Area native is hoping to transition into a subsidized rental soon.

Twenty-five percent of shelter staff are required to be homeless or formerly homeless. Some shelters hire up to 80 percent. Tyler is one of them — he lives at MSC South but works for Episcopal Community Services, which runs Sanctuary, Next Door, and the Interfaith Emergency Winter Shelter Program. He shows me his pay stub to prove it, and I note that every two weeks he takes home more than I do. "Yeah, I make good money," he agrees.

He’s been looking for an apartment, but rents are high and he hasn’t found anything good. A plan to move in with a family member fell through, so he’s just hanging out on the housing wait list. "What I really want to do is see what they’re going to do for me. I’ve been on [Personal Assistance Employment Services] for six months. Where is my SRO if I can afford to pay for it? So obviously that shit doesn’t work," he says.

He’s bitter about the effect the Golden Gate Park sweeps have had on the SRO stock. "They got SROs right away," he said of the 200-plus people who were removed from the park by HOT, put into stabilization beds, and transitioned to SROs. "They took them right away ’cause Gavin had to clean that shit up," he says.

Tyler, like many people I spoke with, keeps as sharp an eye as possible on City Hall. They read the papers and have opinions informed by firsthand experience about programs like Care Not Cash. They know Kayhan is making $169,000 per year and they’re making $29 every two weeks.

One morning, coming out of the bathroom at Sanctuary, I stop to study a posting for affordable housing on a bulletin board. It’s a studio for $863 per month, more than I pay for my one-room Mission flat. The longer I stay in the shelters and the more people I talk to, the less secure I feel in my economic stability.

Ruby Windspirit has been homeless since Jan. 14, two days before I started my tour of the shelters. The 59-year-old Irish Navajo was attending school in Portland, Ore., studying photography and science, when she became ill with bone cancer. She came to San Francisco to convalesce closer to her daughter, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in the Castro with three other people.

Windspirit knew she couldn’t stay on the couch for too long and made a reservation for a $27 per night hotel in the Tenderloin. Despite the reservation, she couldn’t get in for two days and the bed she was ultimately given was two box springs with a piece of plywood for support. The sheets were dirty. She left after two weeks and entered the shelter system. She says Next Door is "150 percent better" than the hotel. She has a bed off the floor and the extra blanket her doctor recommended, though she was scolded for trying to plug in her phone.

I try to imagine what people like Windspirit would do if there weren’t shelters. But the Ten Year Council also recommended a phasing out of shelters within four to six years, to be replaced by 24-hour crisis clinics and sobering centers.

There are 364 fewer shelter beds in San Francisco than when Newsom became mayor. This year more may go. The city is currently requesting proposals to develop 150 Otis, which serves as a temporary shelter and storage space for homeless people, into permanent supportive housing for very-low-income seniors. About 60 shelter beds will be lost.

The HSA confirmed there are currently no plans to open any more shelters in San Francisco. The last plan for a new shelter — St. Boniface — fell through, and the money that was set aside for the project still languishes in an HSA bank account. Midyear budget cuts proposed by the mayor put that money on the chopping block.

Buster’s Place is also on the list of cuts. By April 15, the only place where someone can get out of the elements at any time, day or night, could be closed for good.

Kayhan, who previously oversaw Project Homeless Connect, Newsom’s private-sector approach to the problem, agreed that shelters will always be needed. What he worries about are the people who become dependant on them and refuse housing offers, although he’s also thinking about ways that shelters could be more amenable.

"I’d like to look at the next step with Homeless Connect to try and institutionalize that in the way we do business specifically in the shelters," he said, imagining a shelter pilot of one-stop shopping for services.

But just three weeks into his new job Kayhan was reaching out to constituents to try to figure out what isn’t working. He told us, "What I’m trying to do since I came into this position is be on the street and measure the impact the system is having on those that are on the street day in and day out and try to see what part of the system isn’t working properly or needs to be resourced differently so that we don’t see homeless people, long term, on the streets."

One night at MSC, in the bathroom before bed, a young woman tells me her story while I brush my teeth and she washes off her makeup. Not too long ago she drove here from Florida to meet up with her boyfriend. They were hanging out on the street one night when a cop came by, cited him for an open container, and discovered he had a warrant. Now he’s in jail in San Rafael.

She started sleeping in her Suburban while she looked for job and a place to stay. One night while she slept, parked at Castro and Market, she was hit by a drunk driver. She lifts a hank of long blond hair and shows me a bright pink tear of stitches above her temple. An ambulance took her and the drunk to the hospital. Her totaled car was towed. When the hospital found out she had no place to go, it sent her here.

"Now I’m in a fucking homeless shelter," she says, genuinely aghast at the situation and truly lost about what to do. She has her bed for five more days.

She could get a job. She says, "I have hella references," from working in restaurants for years. She could sleep in one of her friends’ cars, but it seems like so much work: waking up in the car, going to a resource center or shelter to wash up, then going to work.

We joke about living in the shelter. "Yeah, you can come over," she imagines telling her friends. "Dinner’s at 4:30."

"You’ve got to leave by 10," I say.

"It’ll be fun. We can hang out and smoke on the patio," she says.

I don’t know what else to say, except "Good luck." I know what it’s like to chase a boyfriend to San Francisco. I remember sleeping in my car when I was 21, during a strange time between graduating from college and getting a place to live for the summer in a town where housing was tight. I think about my little sister, packing up her Subaru one day and taking off to Miami, where she didn’t know a soul. You have a little money, a lot of hope, and that youthful sense of invincibility, but sometimes it all comes down to luck.

I bid her good night, pack up my toiletries, and wipe my face with my shelter-issued towel. It smells vaguely of bleach and shit.

› amanda@sfbg.com

Bryan Cohen contributed to this report.

Ecoerotic

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› molly@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY You may be the greenest, most permacultured locavore with a heart made of hemp. You tend your community garden on dates, travel only by biodiesel bus, and make your Christmas gifts from recycled materials rather than contribute to our culture’s overconsumption of resources. But chances are you haven’t thought about how your sex habits are affecting the planet — not to mention your partner. And what better time to think about it than the week of Valentine’s Day, the date when couples feel entitled to sex and singles are saddest about not having any? (Or is that the other way around?… But I digress.)

`Thing is, your favorite dildo may be releasing deadly toxins into the environment. Your discarded butt plug, so small and cute and seemingly innocent, may spend several centuries in a landfill before it degrades — if it ever does. Your vibrator could be the reason for someone else’s unnaturally tiny penis. Really.

The issue with sex toys — one of the more recent industries to be examined through a green lens — is twofold: disposal and toxicity.

The first is the easier, less contentious, and somewhat more obvious issue. Since we’re talking about a variety of objects often made of plastic, PVC, rubber, electronics, and other nonbiodegradable materials, it makes sense that concern has been raised about where sex toys end up and what happens to them when they get there. Just like water bottles and discarded train sets, sex toys made from these materials seem destined to last longer on the earth than any of us will — causing more pain in the long term than pleasure in the short term.

The second issue is whether sex toys are safe for humans, both those who use them and those who may be exposed to them through the environment. The concern here is phthalates, a variety of chemicals most commonly used to soften hard plastics but also found in cosmetics, food wraps, and a number of other ubiquitous consumer goods — and until recently, often used in plastic-based sex toys. There has been substantial research suggesting that phthalates — chemicals not naturally occurring in the human body — are present in 90 percent of Americans’ bodies. Furthermore, scientists believe phthalates can have a detrimental effect on male reproductive development.

"Severe interference can involve incomplete development of the penis, undescended testicles, decreased testosterone levels," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California at San Francisco, told the Guardian. "There can be lifelong consequences."

Are there counterarguments to all of these worries? Sure. For starters, there’s always the issue of how green to go. Should you worry more about your rubber dildo — which you may keep for 10 years — than about your plastic shower curtain, which you’ll throw in the landfill in three months? Or is this just the latest ecofriendly phase our culture (and media) is going through? And as for phthalates, there are lots of different kinds — and no one is exactly sure what they do or how they do it.

But if you’re anything like Coyote Days, buyer for Good Vibrations, you’ll figure safe is better than sorry. Days said the major sex toy retailer has decided to phase out products containing phthalates, just in case it turns out the chemicals really are as bad as scientists suspect. In particular, Days suggested replacement with silicone varieties, if you can afford them.

And if you’re worried about how well a sex toy will biodegrade, you can always opt for a metal, wood, or glass variety.

In fact, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can check out the P Aqua from Love Piece, a dildo made from seaweed and water that, while solid at room temperature, can be boiled to oblivion for Earth-friendly disposal. (Though the company asks you to notify it if the dildo has a sour odor. Ew.)

As for Good Vibrations’ future inventory? Day said, "We’re not quite at the seaweed and water level yet." Me either. But I’m hoping for a sushi restaurant tie-in when this thing gets big. Buy one California roll-in-the-hay, get one seaweed sex toy free? I like it.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Clubs: Trannyshack (fuzzy) memories

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“The truth can finally be told, Marke B.,” said Trannyshack mama bear Heklina when I talked to her about her raucous 12-year-old trash-drag weekly at the Stud going dark in August. “I was gonna shut it down on our 10th anniversary — that’s just such a good, round number — but I was in talks for the past two years with some big time studios about a Trannyshack reality series, so I kept it going. But I guess that’s dead in the water now, so it’s time to move on.” Alas! But hurray for Heklina taking time out to figure herself out. And Trannyshack may return as a monthly, so that would be nice.

There have been so-so-so many disgustingly wonderful Trannyshack moments in the past dozen years to try to remember fully. I think I was at the opening night in 1996, but I was on a lot of meth then, so who the hell knows? Anyway, here are some performances for the ages. I’ll be adding more in the next week as soon as I get off my ass and fight my way out of this paper bag hangover (never huff Aquanet people — it’ll make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth.) And there are a ton of Trannyshack vids on YouTube — except for some reason they’ve taken down clips from “Filthy Gorgeous: The Trannyshack Movie” — I wanted that one where Juanita More and the dwarf get naked for “Put It In My Mouth.” Anyway! Enjoy!

Heklina and Glamamore “All is full of love”

Rentecca and Kim Burley, “Two Trannies, One Cup”

Overdrawn at the sperm bank

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I had a beautiful child via donor sperm from a sperm bank. My partner (female) and I are very happy, but recently I have been having sexual fantasies about the donor. I have not told this to my SO (she would not understand, trust me). I feel an almost spiritual bond with this unknown man and am concerned I may be getting a little obsessed. Have any experience in this minefield?

Love,

A Matter of Sementics

Dear Matter:

Not directly, no, but as we used to say at San Francisco Sex Information when somebody would call looking for a bisexual transman into water sports to answer a question, "We all have the same training! OK if I give it a try?" Of course, we, whoever we are, do not necessarily all have the same training, but if my time in the trenches has earned me anything, it’s an impressive virtual Rolodex of people, many of them good friends, who have done or seen or charged for whatever the experience in question might be. I have produced for your edutainment a professional singer who gives great head without harming her throat, a Realtor who would throw you out on your ear for attempting that "house humping" business, any number of well-spoken hos, a dominatrix who can testify to the fact that men who want to be kicked in the balls never show up for their appointments, and another who can prove otherwise. In other words, here’s your expert, my friend who has worked as a teller at the sperm bank, if you will. Call her Polly. Polly Enmity. She says:

It’s not uncommon for women using sperm banks to get really attached to their donors. No, really attached. When I worked in the semen industry I spent countless hours on the phone with women who wanted to know how hot their donor was, if I would do him (they were asking only hypothetically, I’m sure), what celebrity he looked like, how nice he was, what he wore, if he smelled nice. So yes, it’s supercommon to feel attached. I was offered not insignificant sums of money to divulge donors’ identities (which I never did, and that’s why I’m still broke), and at least one woman asked if we did "live inseminations." In my experience, donor fantasies and attachment are very common, and yours seems to be on the less stalkerish end of the scale.

And even if you never met the guy, you did get some of his most intimate bodily fluids (albeit centrifuged and washed beyond all recognition) inserted into your most intimate parts, so your connection to this donor is, well, pretty understandable. Ever get attached to someone after a one-night stand? It can happen, sure. Now think about a woman who uses the same donor, cycle after cycle, hoping each time to get pregnant and finding out month after month that it hasn’t worked … again. It almost becomes like a relationship, albeit one that involves you picking your partner based on a short description and the kindness of the sperm bank workers who vouch for his character and looks. I’ve seen women feel upset, angry, even betrayed by this person they have never met.

Now, is this just fantasy, or would you want it to play out in reality? Think: Do you really want to know anything more about him? What if he turns out to be your neighbor who had your car towed last week? Or the jerk on his cell phone sitting next to you in a restaurant? If you met him, would you do anything about the sexual feelings, or would they remain in the realm of fantasy? I knew many of these donors, and, well, with a couple of exceptions, many of them were nice, average guys trying to earn a few bucks by selling their genetic material, but most of them weren’t really fertile fantasy fodder. Trust me on this: your fantasy of your donor is probably much better — and hotter — than the reality.

Listen to Polly! She has some hilarious and fairly scarifying stories from the deepest vaults of the sperm bank — tales from the crypt — and many of them involve people or their products not smelling so nice. This is not something you need to think about while cuddling your sweet baby, who I am sure smells lovely. While Polly and I both steadfastly stand by your right to fantasize about any damned thing that pleases you, some fantasies are just inconvenient and ultimately more trouble than they’re worth. You wouldn’t want to fantasize about your boss every morning in the shower, only to have to face him or her and be all professional and not at all sweaty as soon as you got to work, would you? This one isn’t that bad as long as you keep in mind that tracking down the donor would be like suicide, only messier — so that anonymity thing sure was a good idea in this case.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Brad Will and the politics of oil

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MEXICO CITY – Flash back to October 27th, 2006. American photojournalist Brad Will is splayed out on a sidewalk in Oaxaca, Mexico, mortally wounded by the pistoleros of rogue governor Ulisis Ruiz during tumultuous street battles in that southern city. His killers have never been prosecuted.

Now fast forward to this past January 10th. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, the unctuous leader of the once-ruling (71 years) PRI party faction in the Mexican Senate, announces to a gaggle of reporters that the PRI is prepared to back President Felipe Calderon and his right-wing PAN in passing an “energy reform” package that would permit transnational corporations to generate 49% of the nation’s electricity and open PEMEX, the state petroleum monopoly expropriated from its Anglo-American owners in 1938 and nationalized by President Lazaro Cardenas, to such oil titans as Exxon, British Petroleum, and Shell. Beltrones’ personal preference to initiate the proposed “association of private capitals”: Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company which opened itself to private investment back in 1997 and which has extensive experience in deep water drilling.

What is the connection between these two apparently unconnected events? Just this: the cover-up of Brad Wills’ death smoothed the way for the PRI-PAN partnership to privatize PEMEX.

Although his killers were plainly identified as plainclothes police on Ulisis’s payroll, Wills’ inconvenient death was ignored by then-president Vicente Fox despite demands by human rights and journalist protection organizations for a full investigation of the killing, one of 26 perpetrated by Ruiz’s death squads between August and October of 2006. Fox’s successor, Felipe Calderon, followed suit and stonewalled an inquiry into Wills’ murder. Similarly, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico never sought justice for a slain citizen despite the personal pleas of the dead man’s family.

Why such studied indifference?

Because holding Governor Ruiz, a prominent PRIista, accountable for the killing(s) would have upset the burgeoning alliance between the PRI and the PAN to ratify Calderon’s legislative agenda, the most pertinent item of which was “energy reform” i.e. the privatization of PEMEX.

Embassy inaction on Brad Wills’ murder followed the same logic. As U.S. ambassador, Bush crony Tony Garza is charged with representing U.S. interests in Mexico and Washington’s interest in opening up Mexican oil to U.S. transnationals far outweighs its interest in bringing the killers of a freelance anarchist reporter to justice. The U.S. has long contemplated a North American Energy Alliance that would guarantee access to Mexican and Canadian reserves.

To this end, Washington has played an active role in facilitating the impending privatization of Petrolios Mexicanos. Over the past months, U.S. transnationals and their associates in government have orchestrated an extraordinary campaign to hoodwink Mexicans into swallowing the lie that PEMEX is hopelessly broken and must be opened to private capital forthwith for the salvation of the Fatherland.

Last July, ex-Federal Reserve czar Alan Greenspan was beamed into Mexico for a teleconference with the nation’s most exalted business council to deliver an ultimatum: if PEMEX was not fixed quickly, the country faced fiscal crisis. Indeed, the petroleum giant (the 11th largest on the planet) generates 40% of Mexico’s total budget and 100% of a social budget that keeps 70,000,000 Mexicans who live in and around the poverty line, in relative quiescence. By “fixing” PEMEX, Greenspan meant privatizing it.

It should be noted that Alan Greenspan is an expert on fiscal crises – his monetary policies just helped to tripwire such a crisis in his own country, the sub-prime disaster.

The Greenspan game plan was echoed December 13th in a memo issued by the International Monetary Fund urgently counseling legislation to allow private capital into PEMEX before the government went broke. Garza’s embassy chimed in the next day, warning of massive capital flight if the Mexican Congress did not pass Calderon’s “energy reform” package. On December 19th, The Economist, which ironically was founded on the fortune reaped by Anglo oil companies in Mexico that eventually became British Petroleum, opined that “the obvious solution to the disaster of PEMEX is to privatize.” Finally, the U.S. Department of Energy delivered the death knell on January 9th: the lack of investment in PEMEX’s Exploration and Exploitation (PEP) division spelled energy catastrophe – not a good sign for Washington’s North American Energy Alliance strategy. On January 10th, the PRI came on board to back Calderon’s “energy reform.”

Despite the Jeremiads, the putsch for privatization has lost considerable steam globally. In fact, a moderate swing to nationalization seems to be in process. Amidst prognoses of irreparable damage to the Venezuelan economy, Hugo Chavez renationalized sectors of PDVSA, the state oil company, and ran a 12% surge in domestic growth in 2007 in spite of it. Bolivia has renationalized natural gas production and Ecuador is on the brink of doing so. The most successful renationalization has been in Putin’s Russia where Gazoprom and Yukos became major world players overnight.

According to Mexican strategic resource writer Alfredo Jalife, 32% of the world’s petroleum supply is in the hands of private transnationals, 20% is nationalized or in the process of being renationalized, and the rest is held by mixed state-private corporations.

But despite their exaggerated anguish at an energy meltdown if PEMEX is not privatized, the doomsayers do have a point: Petrolios Mexicanos is in deep doo-doo. Daily accidents such as the unquenchable fire that took 21 workers’ lives on a Caribbean oil platform and contaminated surrounding waters last fall, pipeline bombings by the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army, and the failure to modernize infrastructure – no new refinery has been built in 20 years – is stark evidence of corporate corrosion.

Despite 100-weak-dollar-a-barrel prices (Mexican light crude tops out around $80 USD these days) that generated $2.3 billion in enhanced revenues during the first ten months of 2007, lack of refining capacity forces PEMEX to shell out $5 billion Yanqui dollars each year to import 40% of its gasoline needs – which is to say that for every $1 of the increased revenues PEMEX takes in, two bucks go out for gas.

Calderon’s solution? The so-called “Gasolinazo”, the President’s gift to the driving public on January 6th, the Day of the Kings (Mexican Christmas), that will increase prices at the pump incrementally each month indefinitely. Increased transportation costs are expected to impact food prices across the board.

But the bad news doesn’t stop there. The big battle over Mexican oil is really a battle over crumbs. If U.S. Department of Energy calculations are on target, Mexico only has 12.9 billion barrels in proven reserves, depletion of which could turn PEMEX into a net importer by 2018 if no new petroleum sources are uncorked before then – although Mexico is the sixth largest international oil producer, it has only 1% of the planet’s proven reserves.

With the Cantarell field in the Sound of Campeche, the magnum star of offshore production that has motored PEMEX since the 1990s, just about tapped out, the clock is ticking. To exacerbate this doomsday scenario, Mexico is pumping out what it has left at a record clip to capitalize on the booming barrel price – PEMEX now produces about 3.2 million barrels daily, fully 1.7 million of which are sent up the Gulf to the U.S., an export platform that is accelerating depletion and subsidizing Washington’s wars around the world.

Given this bleak picture, most experts concur that the only place PEMEX can go to drill for new reserves is deep water, five miles down in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch is that Petrolios Mexicanos does not have deep water drilling capacity. That’s where Petrobras, as contemplated in the PRI/PAN privatization scheme, would come in handy.

What exactly constitutes privatization? Auctioning off the corporation from the top

to the highest bidder or selling it off piece by piece from the bottom? During 35 years of oil boom and bust, PEMEX has systematically dismantled its Exploration & Exploitation division and handed it over to transnational subcontractors, emphasizes Autonomous National University researcher John Saxe- Fernandez who heads up the UNAM’s Strategic Resources Institute. At the top of Saxe-Fernandez’s list of prominent subcontractors is Halliburton with 159 PEMEX contacts since 2000 worth $1.2 billion USD – Halliburton moved into Mexico in the 1990s during the development of Cantarell when Dick Cheney was CEO.

But subcontracting out choice contracts goes back generations. George Bush pere partnered with PEMEX director Jorge Serrano (who later went to jail) in Zapata Offshore, a drilling outfit that operated in the Sound of Campeche in the 1970s. Today, virtually every major transnational driller has a piece of the Mexican action.

A recent daily La Jornada investigation by energy reporter Israel Rodriguez revealed the signing of a series of secret “pre-privatization” covenants to exploit Mexican fields with Shell (the mysterious “Project Margarita”), Exxon, Petrobras, Nexen (Canada), and StatsOil (Norway.) The contracts, accessed through Mexico’s Freedom of Information Act, contained clauses whose contents cannot be divulged for the next five years.

The PRI/PAN energy scam is currently being hatched in the Mexican Senate’s Energy Commission chaired by Francisco Labastida, a former secretary of energy (as is Calderon) and the PRI’s losing presidential candidate in 2000. Those who have gotten a peek at the details label the energy reform legislation “privatization lite” with foot-in-the-door measures that will allow for the “association of private capital” in such areas as pipelines and refineries. The legislation stops short of amending the Mexican Constitution’s Article 27, which stipulates that the petroleum belongs to the nation.

Skirting a constitutional amendment will deny ammo to AMLO – leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who many believe was swindled out of the presidency in 2006 and who has emerged as the leader of the fight against privatization. This January, Lopez Obrador announced formation of a cross-party Movement In Defense of Petroleum whose battle cry is “Mexico is not for sale!”

The ex-presidential candidate proposes that PEMEX can raise sufficient revenues without opening itself up to private investment by simply cleaning house – the corporation has long been riddled with corruption, bribe-taking, kickbacks and rampant dirty dealing. For decades, the PRI siphoned off millions to finance its electoral campaigns – in 2000, $110 million USD in PEMEX funds were funneled through the gangster-ridden petroleum workers union into Labastida’s campaign coffers, the so-called “PEMEXgate” scandal.

AMLO has also long advocated the construction of three new refineries to offset the escautf8g cost of importing gasoline which he tags “an absurd situation” for the world’s sixth largest oil producer.

In the opposite corner, Lopez Obrador’s archrival Felipe Calderon insists that opening PEMEX to private capital will somehow make Petrolios Mexicanos “more Mexican” (“more productive, more competitive, more Mexicano.”)

“To hand over our natural resources to foreign powers is an act of treason,” AMLO responds, quoting the man who expropriated and nationalized Mexico’s petroleum in 1938, President Lazaro Cardenas. Lopez Obrador’s defense of Mexican oil will be a first test for the grassroots base the leftist has been cultivating since the tainted 2006 election and is sure to frame the next round of his ongoing bout with Calderon and his allies. AMLO, who in the past has been able to mobilize millions, is calling for nationwide protests this March 18th, the 70th anniversary of Cardenas’s expropriation.

Petroleum is a patriotic fluid here. Expropriation of the oil industry from the “extranjeros” (foreigners, literally “strangers”) was the high point of revolutionary nationalism in Mexico. But in a globalized world, the coming battle around the privatization of PEMEX is not just a Mexican matter anymore and, indeed, has far-reaching implications for the future of neo-liberalism in the Americas.

Sprawled in the Oaxaca street, the life blood leaking from him, the last thing Brad Will could have imagined is that in death he would become an accidental pawn to the transnationals’ ambitions to privatize Mexican oil. Tragically, in the end, that may be Wills’ most significant legacy.

“Blindman’s Buff” has opened it lists to new subscribers. Contact the Blindman (his vision is improved) at johnross@igc.org for your lifetime subscription. Warning: there is no way to get off these lists. You will receive BMB until either you or I croak.

Slim’s slimed

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER There are eight jillion stories in the naked, nervous-Naughties city, and one of the increasingly common tales is that of the wannabe slicker who lays out that down payment for a little piece of gritty ‘n’ shitty, gorgeous ‘n’ porous, wild ‘n’ wooly San Francisco. And then supposed slick realizes, "Hey, I’m tired of stepping over panhandlers, looking for parking, and listening to car alarms, building fans, BART musicians, construction blare, and city hubbub in general." Translation: "I actually want to live in Concord, San Carlos, or Corte Madera." So the square spoiler in this happily unholy round hole of a town decides to wreck things for everyone.

That sort of inane, fish-outta-water resolve is, unfortunately, threatening Slim’s, the linchpin of the 11th Street–SoMa club scene since chart topper Boz Scaggs first opened the respected nightspot two decades ago, the site of many a memorable night of music and a venue that, legend has it, bands like Built to Spill have pledged their loyalty to because of its dedication to stellar sound. One of Slim’s neighbors tipped me off last month that the hall — which has consistently passed all sound tests conducted by the city’s Entertainment Commission — was being besieged weekly by a lone complainer living in Juniper Alley. All of this came to a head in December 2007 when the accuser ordered citizen’s arrests of two of Slim’s night managers on three occasions — after, Entertainment Commission industry representative Terrance Alan says, police refused to issue noise-violation citations of their own because they couldn’t hear any vioutf8g sound issuing from Slim’s. The arrests have led the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control to bring an enforcement action against Slim’s liquor license, which may close the club for 15 to 25 days after an April hearing.

"She has been threatening to do this for a while," Slim’s co-owner Dawn Holliday told me. The complaining neighbor and her partner have been registering noise complaints for the past two years, Holliday added, though no other neighbors have complained, and in 2000 all of the area’s condo and live-work residents signed a deed restriction making it clear that the district is a mixed-use neighborhood subject to noise, odors, and other industrial activities 24-7. Nonetheless, Holliday continued, "she calls the police on average four nights a week. The Entertainment Commission has gone into their house and done readings in the house, done readings out in front of house, and we do readings in front of their house every night with a decibel meter on the most sensitive reading you can get, and we are always compliant. It didn’t satisfy them."

One of the charges against a Slim’s manager was dismissed, but both staffers are still due to go to court for the two arrests in February and March. "I’m hoping they let these kids off," Holliday said. "I’ve gone to [San Francisco Police Department’s] Southern Station and asked them to wait for me to come over or Boz to come over and arrest us. It’s not fair that employees get arrested. We’re the two owners that live the closest, and both of us would take tickets before our employees."

Holliday is confident — after going into mediation, consulting with sound guru Charles Salter, and taking actions like installing a new insulated roof and a special four-tiered back door — that a resolution is possible. Still, the idea that one sour grape can pull down another great venue is troubling. "This is a situation where you can see how the system, which was designed to have respect for all the citizenry, can be used by this vexed complainer," Alan said. "They’ve created this history of complaints based only on their complaints. It’s going to cost Slim’s a lot of money and cost their managers a lot of sleepless nights, who want to go on and have a life. And they won’t be able to if they are found criminally liable for this. Imagine, you’re just doing your job …"

And hey, that’s another reason why so many of us come to this cow town in the first place: to work and to cozy up closer to that golden cow pumping pomegranatinis, the raucous crafters of musical ambrosia, et al. Fess up: you didn’t move to SF to feel good about driving a Prius or down Starbucks. What you can’t find regularly in Concord or Corte Madera — and what so many of us continue to crave — is that non-government-regulated minimum requirement of fun: loud, smelly, still safe, inconvenient, sprinkled with homeless parking valets, and still unlike anything you’ll get in the sticks.

For more, see Sonic Reducer Overage at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

HOWLIN RAIN MAKE THEIR MOVE

Howlin Rain and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller has plenty of news about: HR’s superfine new LP, Magnificent Fiend, will be released March 4 on SF’s Birdman label and HR’s new imprint, Columbia Records cohoncho Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Why jump? Miller told me he was enticed by larger studio budgets and the opportunity to be produced by Rubin, whom the frontman praised as someone who "seems to chip away at all those extraneous things and just draw out the essential fluids onto the tape.

"Those are the reasons," Miller said. "This is not the type of record deal where you get a million-dollar check and drive away in a Rolls-Royce, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, cool, man, they bought me a Corvette, and now everyone can just go get wasted on coke and it doesn’t matter now, man!’ And then, whoa, a year later you’re kicked off the label, and you’re, like, ‘Fuck, I blew my $2 million advance now. This sucks! Now I’m a fucking nobody!’ That’s not this."

HOWLIN RAIN

With Black Mountain

Mon/4, 8 p.m., $14

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

www.theindependentsf.com

Running on empty

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› news@sfbg.com

The fourth floor of San Francisco’s City Hall feels remote. Dimly lit and strangely quiet, it conveys a sense of isolation from the powerful people who do their work in the lower levels of the building.

Here, in an unremarkable conference room, is where the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force is conducting its second meeting. Two of its officers are absent, and only one member of the public has turned up to participate. It is an atmosphere that belies the issue’s cataclysmic potential.

The day’s breaking news headlines of oil reaching $100 per barrel for the first time in history is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. One year earlier the price was $58 per barrel. This dramatic increase in such a short span would devastate economies around the world if it continued at anywhere close to that rate.

Chairperson Jeanne Rosenmeier, an articulate, contemplative woman, reiterates the task force’s purpose: "Our charge is to examine how the city is going to handle rising oil prices and possible shortages. That is what we have been asked to do."

The assessment seems like an understatement, perhaps suggesting that the group is merely looking for solutions to how the average citizen could function better without an automobile. Yet in a society built on oil, the consequences of such an energy crisis are likely to be far more sweeping and problematic than merely high gas prices.

While considering models for the study the task force will prepare, Rosenmeier points to Portland, Ore.’s recently completed peak oil report and talks about limiting San Francisco’s effort to outlining the range of scenarios, from small impacts to large. She’s reluctant to acknowledge the extralarge scenario — massive worldwide social unrest and full-scale anarchy in the streets of San Francisco — which she argues would be harmful to the group’s focus.

Jan Lundberg, the task force member in charge of "societal functioning," politely disagrees. Insightful and exuding a sort of deeply ingrained experience, Lundberg has a goatee and a big mane of blond hair that make him look like a Berkeley-ish version of billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson. The resemblance is strangely apt when you consider that Lundberg has defected from more lucrative ventures. His family’s business, the Lundberg Survey, has been one of the premier oil industry research authorities in the world for the past few decades, but today Lundberg is volunteering his time to the task force.

"You have to look honestly at what we are up against," Lundberg tells the Guardian. "Only then can you come up with intelligent responses to what is occurring. If it is a tsunami coming, then you take action for a tsunami."

It might come as news to most San Franciscans that a team of seven relatively unknown, politically appointed volunteers is hashing out the hard realities and dire implications of a potentially massive energy crisis. When the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution (with Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier absent) in April 2006 to acknowledge the looming phenomenon of the global oil supply being exceeded by demand, San Francisco was the first city in the country to do so. It was a precedent that received little attention from the media, perhaps shrugged off as just another wacky resolution steeped in San Francisco values.

For the next 10 months the task force will be preparing a study of mitigation measures to be considered by the city government for implementation into law. Much like the phenomenon of peak oil, their work will also be best assessed in hindsight. For now, some will see them as a team of Chicken Littles sketching a contingency plan for when the sky falls.

Yet if the scientific insights that compelled the Board of Supervisors to form the group prove prescient, then the report that the task force is producing may well be crucial to San Francisco’s very survival.

SLIPPERY SLOPE


Oil has acquired a bad reputation in recent years, as if the resource were not a fossil fuel found in the earth’s crust but a corrupt corporate tycoon spurring international conflicts and gleefully dismantling the ozone layer. Like addicts who blame the substance rather than the habit, we have come to forget that oil is one of the best resources the planet has offered.

"Oil is amazing stuff. The 20th century was basically founded on the wonders of petroleum," explains Richard Heinberg, a professor at New College of Santa Rosa and author of several books, including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (New Society Publishers, 2003). "Oil is very energy dense and can be made into an amazing range of chemicals and products. Our entire way of life is soaked in petroleum," he says.

This point tends to get lost in the shuffle. It is often forgotten that more than just powering our cars, petroleum is deeply woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Adding up to a global consumption rate of about 86 million barrels per day, oil plays a starring role in agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and transportation. It heats our homes, paves our roads, and grows our food.

So what happens when the global demand for oil begins to outpace the supply? That’s the peak oil question.

"Peak oil is not theoretical. Everyone knows that oil is a nonrenewable resource," Heinberg explains, "so at some point our ability to continue increasing the supply will cease. Everyone knows that it will happen. It is just a matter of when."

Peak oil is inherently a geological concept, formulated by renowned geophysicist Marion King Hubbert. In 1956, as a researcher for Shell Oil, Hubbert presented his theory to the American Petroleum Institute, claiming that the oil output in the mainland United States would peak in the late 1960s or early ’70s. Though dismissed by his colleagues at the time, Hubbert was vindicated when US oil production peaked in 1970 and the nation became forever dependent on foreign sources of petroleum to meet its energy needs.

Hubbert had explained that the production of any petroleum reserve — a single oil well, a particular country, or even the entire planet — follows a similar bell-shaped curve (now referred to as the Hubbert curve). The logic is that as the supply is first tapped, there is a steady increase of oil output that ascends to a peak (or plateau), which represents the maximum amount of oil that will ever be produced from the designated source. As production descends the other side of the curve, the supply is not exhausted, but future yields will always be lower and more expensive to obtain.

For the past 10 years — as the price of crude oil has gone from $12 to $100 per barrel on the world market — scientists, geologists, petroleum experts, and concerned citizens have increasingly pondered the point at which the global oil supply will not only begin to wane but fail to keep up with surging demand.

Proponents of preparing for the impending peak in worldwide petroleum output often cite the steady decline of major oil field discoveries since the 1960s and the alarming number of oil-producing countries that have already hit their peaks. Considering the widespread role petroleum plays in the general day-to-day functioning of our society, an impending decline in overall global production is — to put it mildly — severely worrying.

"People assume that the other side of the peak will be an orderly transition," Lundberg tells us, "but we have no other experience to compare it to."

In 2005 the United States Department of Energy completed a study it had commissioned on the topic of worldwide petroleum depletion titled Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management. Popularly known as the Hirsch Report (for principal author Robert Hirsch), the study consulted a wide range of scientific and oil industry experts.

It painted a startling portrait: "The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking."

"It is one of the most important government reports of the last half century," Heinberg explains, "because it clearly indicates that this global event of peak oil is going to change everything."

Unfortunately, the Hirsch Report has been mostly ignored by Congress, the George W. Bush administration, and the DOE itself (which did not even publish the study for more than a year after its completion). However, the most troublesome aspect of the report is the fact that a sizable selection of the scientists and activists concerned with the topic believe that we’ve already hit the peak. They believe peak oil is happening right now.

PITCHING THE PEAK


"Most people in this country are energy illiterate," David Fridley says. "We can’t substitute millions of years of fossil fuels with something that we can manufacture in a factory, like biofuels. So most people don’t get this sense of anxiety about the situation we’re in."

Fridley knows a fair amount about energy. Currently a staff scientist leading the China Energy Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he has spent a large portion of his career working in the Asian oil industry. His deep concern over the implications of peak oil incited him to play a key role in the formation of San Francisco’s task force.

"Having spent a year just thinking about this on my own," Fridley tells us, "and everyone around me telling me I was nuts, I decided to join a local group where I could at least meet up with others and see if we might educate people rather than just talking amongst ourselves."

In 2005, Fridley met Dennis Brumm — a veteran San Francisco activist with an address book containing an A-list of the city’s prime political players — who was looking to raise the city’s awareness of the issue.

Together with local activists Jennifer Bresee and Allyse Heartwell, they set their sights on bringing the issue of peak oil before the Board of Supervisors.

"Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee is a friend of mine," Brumm explains, "so I invited him over to my house one night and had him discuss with us the personalities and quirks of the supervisors and their aides."

Having charted the terrain, Brumm’s small group soon began spending its Thursdays and Fridays for the next six months lobbying the supervisors at City Hall. When technical questions were asked, the group referred to Fridley’s decades-long experience in the industry for expert scientific analysis.

In April 2006, with backing from District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and District 1 Sup. Jake McGoldrick, the board passed Resolution Number 224, recognizing "the challenge of Peak Oil and the need for San Francisco to prepare a plan of response and preparation."

For Fridley, the resolution and the formation of the task force were matters of appropriate preparation. "We have two oil tankers come under the Golden Gate every day to fill up the local refinery tanks to produce the fuels that keep the Bay Area running," he says. "What would happen if those tankers don’t come in? Or they don’t come for a week? The city has no plan for that, but we have the ability to be better prepared."

HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?


When discussing the phenomenon of peak oil, Lundberg prefers to use the term petro collapse. It is a turn of phrase that quickly provides insight into his considerable sense of alarm for the days ahead.

"It is going to be a globally historic event," Lundberg says. "Imagine a nationwide version of [Hurricane] Katrina."

Although ominous in its predictions, Lundberg’s perspective is based on a long road of experience. While he ran the Lundberg Survey with his father in the 1970s, their widely read insider journal for the oil industry predicted the second great oil shock of the decade (in 1979). In the mid-1980s he moved on from the family business to form the Sustainable Energy Institute nonprofit in Washington DC, a move USA Today marked with the headline "Lundberg Goes Green."

As suggested by the title of the online magazine he currently edits — Culture Change — Lundberg has come to view the peak oil phenomenon as being primarily an issue of the American consumer lifestyle.

"We have this crazy way of life based on limited resources that are clearly becoming constrained," he says, "and we’re holding on to yesterday’s affluence without realizing that we have already walked off the cliff."

Chairperson Rosenmeier, one of Lundberg’s colleagues on the task force, is wary that such an explicitly bleak viewpoint may scare public attention away from the matter.

"You have to be careful with peak oil that you don’t immediately leap to ‘We’re all doomed and our economy is doomed,’<0x2009>" she says. "I think there is an intermediate phase, which is what we are being asked to address: the transition from business as usual."

An accountant by trade and a longtime Green Party activist, Rosenmeier ran for state treasurer in 2002, garnering about 350,000 votes. Setting an ambitious pace for her contribution to the report, she recently met with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development to request an analysis of how oil prices are related to the orientation of San Francisco’s economy. For this reason, she appears less concerned with predictions than with producing a heavily researched and well-structured report.

"I have a very strong vision of what I want the report to look like," Rosenmeier says. "I want us to have a uniformity and a more quantitative approach. I do not want to address the disintegration of our society."

The disparity between the views of Lundberg and Rosenmeier reflects the vast spectrum of opinions on how peak oil will manifest, although the extremes go well beyond them: some call peak oil a liberal hoax, while others have converted all of their assets to gold and prepared well-stocked and well-armed bunkers where they can ride out the social and economic storm.

The Web site LifeAfterTheOilCrash.net is now getting as many as 23,000 hits per day. Creator Matt Savinar, a graduate of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, abandoned his law career as a futile concern when compared to the implications of peak oil.

"It is pretty simple," Savinar tells us. "What do you think is going to happen when the oil-exporting countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran say, ‘We cannot export any more because we need to keep it for our own people’? The US will react by starting a war."

Although Savinar gravitates toward the most drastic of peak oil’s potential implications, his concerns are shared by some high-profile figures. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), who has started the small but significant Peak Oil Caucus in Congress, has quoted Savinar’s work in congressional session, while billionaire Richard Rainwater told Fortune magazine he regularly reads Savinar’s site.

Pessimistic about the prospect of mitigating the effects of peak oil, Savinar characterizes the efforts of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force as "throwing a wet rag at a forest fire." In swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum, the vast chasm between opinions on the matter manifests more clearly. Peter Jackson, the senior director of oil industry activity for the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, recently published the results of an in-depth analysis of more than 800 oil fields worldwide, concluding that the declining output rate of established fields is about half as low as originally expected.

"I think the danger of a peak [in global oil production] in the short term is minimal," Jackson tells the Guardian. "I think there are plenty of new developments on the books of oil companies, and the prospects for growth are good."

While Jackson acknowledges that at some point in the future it will be difficult to increase production, his optimistic viewpoint of the current situation helps to flesh out the dynamics of the overall discussion. As Heinberg explains it, "The debate really is between the near-peak and the far-peak viewpoints."

Yet even as Jackson attracts the ire of near-peak proponents such as Heinberg, he still acknowledges the need for swift preparation efforts. "There is still time to think about these issues and plan for the future," Jackson says. "But the sooner we do that the better."

EATING OIL, GROWING FUEL


Toward the end of the task force’s most recent meeting, the group discusses the city’s potential options for producing its own food supply. As Lundberg points out some of the particulars for pulling up pavement to plant crops, the exchange seems like an excerpt from Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia (Bantam, 1990).

"Streets cannot be pulled up as easily as driveways or parking lots," Lundberg explains. "There is soil immediately below a concrete driveway, whereas the earth beneath a street is much farther down."

This talk of tearing up asphalt to transform the city’s urban landscape into a viable agricultural venture may seem strange, until one considers how overreliant modern agribusiness has become on cheap fossil fuels.

"About one-fifth of all the petroleum we use goes into some part of our agriculture system," explains Jason Mark, the task force member focusing on the city’s food supply. "Whether that is through transportation and shipping, tractors and farm machinery, or the making of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides — it all demands oil."

Mark notes that the average American meal travels an estimated 1,500 miles from the farm to the dinner table, a startling figure that can be partly attributed to federal policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement that have encouraged export crops rather than diversified farming for local consumption.

"There is no way that San Francisco is going to feed itself in the short term," Rosenmeier says. "Food is going to be a gigantic issue."

In a larger sense, it already is. This past December the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations urged governments to take immediate steps to mitigate "dramatic food price increases" worldwide. Meanwhile, a recent cover story in the New York Times ("A New, Global Quandry: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," 1/19/08) cited "food riots" in more than half a dozen countries and asserted, "Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it around the world."

In the US, the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index cited a 5.6 percent increase of national grocery store prices in 2007, echoing sizable domestic price spikes in milk, corn, and wheat supplies.

"In a situation where you have sharp increases in the price of fossil fuels, you are going to see spikes in the costs and perhaps even the availability of food," explains Jason Mark, a former employee of Global Exchange and a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s renowned ecological horticulture program.

Mark now splits his time between editing the environmental quarterly Earth Island Journal and comanaging Alemany Farms. In his task force research, Mark plans to focus on two key challenges: increasing food production within San Francisco and improving both production in and distribution from the farms in the Bay Area.

"The city is pretty lucky because we are surrounded by all of this incredibly productive agricultural land," Mark explains. "If you were to draw a 100-mile radius around Potrero Hill, you could still have a pretty amazing diet."

Of course, the situation is far from simplistic. Climate change has proven to be a wild card in the equation, periodically negating dependable food supplies. Most recently, the entire Australian wheat crop collapsed due to a massive drought, affecting food imports around the world.

Less noticeable, though equally problematic, is the strain that biofuels are putting on food supplies. As increases in oil prices are stimuutf8g demands for alternatives, governments must decide whether crops should be used as food or fuel.

"Increasing our production of ethanol or biodiesel means direct competition with the food supply," Heinberg says. "In other words, we may see millions of people around the world going hungry so that a small percentage of the population can continue to drive their cars."

While such factors translate into a predicament as delicate as it is complex, Mark manages to elude pessimism. "I’m not one of these apocalyptic fetishists inciting for some sort of Mad Max scenario," he explains. "[The task force] is going to come out with a document that, although cautionary in scope, will be really optimistic about how SF can exist as an oil-free city."

GLOBAL WARNING


Amid a vast disparity of opinions from scientists and industry experts expounding both sides of the debate, the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force plans to release its final report in October.

As with the issue of climate change almost two decades ago, the task force members face a long climb toward making an impression on an American population that has shown considerable reluctance to alter its lifestyles.

And while the deliberation over the onset of peak oil is likely to see little decline among skyrocketing energy costs and increasing geopolitical hostilities, the underlying truth may already be far less complicated.

"The era of cheap oil is over," Lundberg says. "Period." *

The next meeting of the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force will be on Feb. 5 at 3 p.m. in room 421 of City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF. Members of the public are strongly encouraged to attend.

————————————————————–

OIL ALTERNATIVES

In the event of sudden petroleum shortages, how do the alternatives stack up?

Ethanol: The Republican choice for weaning the nation off oil is a lucrative venture for red state constituents in the Midwest. However, the drawbacks are numerous. Corn ethanol requires almost as much oil energy to produce as it is meant to replace. Furthermore, it will require 4.8 billion — yes, billion — acres of corn to match the world’s current rate of annual oil consumption.

Hydrogen fuel cells: Touted by conservatives as some kind of miracle fuel because its tailpipe by-product is simply water vapor, hydrogen is a long way from being a viable fuel for cars, if that’s even possible. It takes even more energy to produce than ethanol and can explode in collisions.

Nuclear: Expensive and unpopular, nuclear power faces numerous logistical hurdles (particularly safety and long-term waste storage) that make it infeasible in the short and middle terms.

Natural gas: A major source of current United States energy consumption (25 percent nationally), natural gas is extremely difficult to ship, making importation from far-off sources impractical. Its supplies are running low in the US, and this nonrenewable fossil fuel is likely to parallel oil in its decline.

Wind: This clean power source is being quickly developed around the world as a major generator of electricity. Currently in the US, it accounts for about 1 percent of domestic electricity production, so offsetting the loss of fossil fuel plants would require a massive commitment. Downsides include the danger to migrating birds and the fact that sometimes the wind doesn’t blow.

Solar: This is Marion King Hubbert’s choice for replacing fossil fuels. It is a renewable generator of electricity, yet the shortcomings so far have been with finding more efficient and less toxic battery technology to store it. But improving research and strong consumer demand for solar panels point to a promising future.

Setting standards

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Toilet paper. First aid kits. Drinking water. These are just a few of the essential supplies one might expect to find in high-traffic facilities owned or paid for by the city that serve more than a thousand people per night.

But San Francisco’s homeless shelters, which have been around for about 25 years, have repeatedly fallen short of meeting basic standards or even living up to the policies outlined in their city contracts.

Since 2004, regularly scheduled and surprise spot checks conducted by the 13-member Shelter Monitoring Committee have turned up a range of deplorable and deteriorating conditions in regard to cleanliness, nutrition, and humane treatment of residents — from bloody shower curtains and broken toilet seats to clogged drains and kitchen counters cluttered with dirty dishes. A survey of health and hygiene conditions — from functional sinks to the posting of proper hand-washing techniques — found that only 6 of 19 facilities met basic requirements.

"The Shelter Monitoring Committee makes reports to the Rules Committee, and their reports about conditions in the shelters were very, very disturbing," Sup. Tom Ammiano told the Guardian.

To fix that, Ammiano and a cadre of city staff, homeless-rights advocates, and Shelter Monitoring Committee members are drafting legislation that would require shelters to meet basic standards of care, force compliance through $2,500 fines, and formalize a swifter complaint process.

The Health Services Agency last year had $69 million to spend on housing and the homeless, a portion of which funds nine year-round single adult shelters and four family shelters, as well as four resource centers where homeless people may not find a bed but should be able to access other services, like showers, laundry, phones, and the shelter reservation system.

The management of the facilities is contracted out by the HSA to different nonprofit organizations, including some well-known national groups like the St. Vincent de Paul Society and Episcopal Community Services. The Department of Public Health also handles two of the contracts.

Those contracts stipulate a number of policies, including providing clients with access to electricity for cell phone charging, a guaranteed eight hours of sleep per night, toiletries and feminine hygiene products, first aid supplies, and Spanish translations of printed materials; and a mandate to treat all clients with "dignity and respect."

That doesn’t always happen, and the monitoring committee isn’t the only watchdog saying so.

The Coalition on Homelessness has been fielding complaints from shelter residents for more than 20 years. A recent increase prompted it to investigate deeper. In May 2007 the group published Shelter Shock, a report based on surveys of 215 shelter residents. The findings: 55 percent of people reported some kind of physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. One-third had no access to information in their native language. Thirty-five percent had nothing to eat.

"The Mayor has actually pointed to these problems as reasons to close the shelters," the report states. "Responsible bodies — the Board of Supervisors and the HSA — have failed to take corrective action. There has been a silence around shelters, giving the impression that shelter residents have been forgotten by the administration and the public at large."

Mayor Gavin Newsom, in his Jan. 8 inaugural speech, identified chronic homelessness and panhandling as high priorities of his second term and promised he’d be "redesigning our city shelter system so that they are no longer just refuges of last resort but spaces where homeless San Franciscans can find job training, drug treatment, and encouragement they need to exit homelessness. We’re getting out of the shelter business." At no point did he mention implementing shelter health and safety standards.

James Leonard, a member of the Shelter Monitoring Committee who has spent the past 18 months homeless in San Francisco and San Diego, won’t stay in the shelters anymore. All of his possessions were stolen three times. He missed several job interviews because he couldn’t charge his cell phone. Frustrated, he hit the streets again. The Homeless Outreach Team found him, officially dubbed him "shelter challenged," and gave him a stabilization bed, which he hopes will eventually transition into a lease in a single-room-occupancy hotel.

He told us the lack of standards contributes to the problem of chronic homelessness because more people would stay in the shelters, off the street, if they were safe and treatment were consistent from facility to facility.

"People keep looking at what’s wrong with those homeless people and keep skipping over what’s wrong with those shelters and some of those staff members," he said. "It’s a system set up to fail unless it has standards."

The issues extend beyond each shelter’s four walls. It’s a matter of public health for all San Franciscans. "Even if the shelters exist for a minute, they have to be healthy and humane," said Dr. Deborah Borne, medical director of homeless programs at the HSA’s Tom Waddell Health Center. "Because if they aren’t, they’re a danger to themselves and to others."

She cited the example of sitting on a Muni bus beside someone whose bag may be carrying bedbugs. "Everyone in San Francisco is affected by the fact that we have health issues in the shelters."

Borne moved from New York to San Francisco about a year and a half ago. On her fourth day on the job at Tom Waddell, a resident died at Next Door, which houses about 250 people per night and is one of the city’s largest shelters. She said the death was not the fault of any specific department, agency, or person, but it could have been avoided if some basic health and hygiene practices were standard for shelter staff and residents.

She brought together several key people, secured $300,000 in funding through HSA director Trent Rhorer, and launched the Shelter Health Initiative, a pilot project that included some of the standards that are part of Ammiano’s legislation specifically targeting health and hygiene.

Next Door and Hamilton Family Center participated, were surveyed on needs, and received adequate supplies of things like soap, hand towels, sanitizer, and gloves. "Up to the date of the training, they still didn’t have available the basic equipment required to protect themselves," said Jill Jarvie, a public health nurse from Tom Waddell who ran the pilot program.

It’s not enough to have cases of rubber gloves and hand sanitizer. They have to be used, and used properly. "Something like a cold virus can stay alive for a couple of days," Jarvie said. Close conditions in shelters compound the risk. "When you’re working in a place that sees 300 people a day, how you wash your hands can really make a difference," she added.

Thorough hand-washing techniques and procedures for cleaning up bodily fluids taught to staff trickle down to residents, and so far, it’s working. According to Jarvie, Next Door has reported a decrease in illnesses. "It’s been exciting to see we can actually do this," she said. The price of the pilot was about $15,000, a cost that would fall over time through bulk purchasing of supplies and as training becomes more standardized. Soon public health officials will be launching another phase, focused on bedbugs and scabies.

An initial budget analyst’s report, based on information provided by the HSA, predicted a $6.2 million price tag to fully implement standards throughout the city’s shelter system. Many say it’s an overinflated estimate based on assumptions that need more vetting.

"We were all stunned by the budget analyst’s report," said Quintin Mecke, secretary of the Shelter Monitoring Committee and head of its subsidiary work group on the legislation. "When you look at some of the assumptions, they’re just not true." For example, the HSA interpreted security to mean staffing all the shelters with full-time guards, when other mitigations like locks and staff training could be implemented instead.

Mecke and the work group believe that although there will be hard costs associated with the legislation, many are onetime and others are simply the price of complying with what’s supposed to exist already. Ammiano’s aide Zach Tuller said, "We expect the cost to come in under half a million because HSA claims so many of the services are already being provided. We’re looking to prevent slippage."

Dave Curto, head of contract compliance for the HSA, said the department agreed with some of the legislation and was still talking through specifics. He confirmed that policies do exist and shelters are provided with training manuals to enforce them.

"I think they are happening," he said of the HSA policies. "That’s why we’re a little confused."

A list of those policies is included in the budget analyst’s report, which Mecke said sent a conflicting message. "It creates the impression that things in the shelter system are other than what we found," he told a recent meeting of the standard of care work group, which is redrafting some of the legislation in preparation for a February hearing of the Budget and Finance Committee. "We want to be very clear at the Board of Supervisors that they don’t come away with the impression that these things exist, because they don’t."

Ammiano said this is a necessary first step toward making the shelters more humane, at a time when many assume they already are.

"I think one of the most annoying things that I read was C.W. Nevius [in the San Francisco Chronicle] taking this rather orchestrated Disneyland tour with Trent Rhorer and saying how wonderful the shelters were and then blaming the homeless for not wanting to be in them," Ammiano said. "But obviously C.W. Nevius and Trent Rhorer have something to wipe their ass with."

Reject Sklar and Brooks

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EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom’s pledge to bring new ideas into his second administration apparently doesn’t include public power. Not only has he ousted Susan Leal, the (modestly) pro–public power director of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission; he’s also reappointed to the panel two commissioners who have been Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s best friends. Ryan Brooks and Dick Sklar can only be rejected if eight members of the Board of Supervisors vote against them, and that’s what needs to happen.

For years the PUC has been a less-than-stellar panel dominated by political allies of the mayor, which is crazy: The agency is overseeing a $4 billion plan to reconstruct the city’s entire water system (which requires a certain degree of management). And it’s in the middle of a growing move to build a sustainable, environmentally sound power system for the city. The PUC is overseeing San Francisco’s move to community choice aggregation. It’s managing the installation of city-owned power plants. And it could be involved in a long list of renewable-power projects, from wave generation to solar.

That last thing the city needs is PUC commissioners who are opposed to (or weak on) moving into the energy business.

Unfortunately, Sklar (who served as ambassador to the United Nations under Bill Clinton) and Brooks (a vice president of Viacom Outdoor) have shown such reluctance to promote public power that they might as well be on PG&E’s payroll. Their reappointments, announced Jan. 15, are a sign that Newsom will not tolerate any move by his commission to get San Francisco into the retail electricity business (although a federal law — the Raker Act — requires the city to run a public power system).

It may be that public power advocates will ultimately have to go around the PUC; as long at the mayor controls that panel, it’s unlikely that anyone who wants to promote real energy alternatives will be appointed. And it’s essential that the supervisors move forward on a City Charter amendment that would give the board the right to appoint three of the five commissioners.

But in the meantime, it’s crucial to send Newsom a message: his ouster of Leal and his attempt to ensure a PG&E-safe PUC are not acceptable.

The appointments don’t require board approval — but the supervisors have the right to veto them with an eight-vote majority. Sups. Aaron Peskin, Sophie Maxwell, and Bevan Dufty have vowed to introduce a resolution to reject Sklar and Brooks, and their colleagues should join in. We don’t expect Newsom to suddenly turn around and name active public power supporters in the place of Sklar and Brooks, but if the board sends the message that PG&E allies aren’t OK, the next two appointments might be a little better.

The supervisors should reject Dick Sklar and Ryan Brooks as quickly as possible.

The thaw

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I was so afraid he was going to say, "I love you." I was terrified, and I sweated during sex, insisted on leaving the lights on after, and peed with the door open. During dinner I made sure there was always parsley between my teeth and onions hanging out of my mouth.

We did romantic things together, like watching football, and I tried to keep my head in the game, but it was killing me. He loved me, I could tell. At home I only listened to jaded music, like Liz Phair and Kathleen What’s-Her-Name, the Canadian. We’d been seeing each other for months, and the sweet things he said were getting sweeter — like, we were talking about a steak house, and I said, oh, it was a special occasion place, like maybe for his birthday.

"Every time I see you is a special occasion," he said.

I almost peed my pants. I almost moved to Alaska. His birthday was a couple months away. I tried real hard to get more dates with different people.

Meanwhile, the things that I said and felt were sweeter too. I meant and felt them, but love is another story, right? So I dreaded the word and feared the sentence with such focused attention that I was almost always saying it myself, by accident. The words I, love, and you pitched three little tents on the tip of my tongue, and I found myself using more hot sauce than ever.

At one in the morning on New Year’s Eve night, in his car, before a beautiful view of the city, he said, "I just can’t get used to the fact that it’s 2008."

I was still smiling New Year’s Day night, at the Thai restaurant. I’d ordered something spicy. He likes it mild. And he doesn’t much go for duck. So after the check was paid and the leftovers were all packed up for me for lunch the next day, we got into one of those talks.

I’m not ashamed of my neuroticness. My brain swirls and imagines more actively than my body might want. So? So I’m going on about what about this, what about that, you know, intangibles, unmentionables, unusualness, and the unpredictable places it inevitably leads us to, like Thai food.

There wasn’t any parsley between my teeth, but you would think … I don’t know, cilantro?

"Alls I know," Mookie said, and I quote, "is I love you."

He said this casually, offhandedly (like I like it), right while we were standing up to go, and I did pee my pants. I did move to Alaska. I blinked and was delighted to find that I was still standing. Right there! I did not die of impossibility, or freak and run, or even kick and scream.

Nor did I say, "I love you too." My tongue was empty. I squeezed him a little harder than usual, and we walked out of the place about as close together as two people can get with big coats on.

It felt quite nice to be loved. It felt casual, easy, and cellular — or the opposite of neurotic. Alls I wanted to do was get back to his house, sit on the couch with him in the dark, and watch airplanes, other people’s living room lights, and whatever else the night sky that night might have to offer.

We were almost there before I realized we’d left my leftovers on the table at the restaurant. Aaaaaaaaaah!!!!! This must be what people mean when they say love hurts. I’ll write a jaded love song about it. Every day ever since I have thought about those leftovers and missed them and mourned them and craved Thai food.

What I’ve been eating instead is everything in my freezer, because it all thawed out. In the woods, when the wind blows, my power is the first to go and the last to be restored. Five days now.

My coffee water, soups, and stews, all of it I cook on and in the wood stove, because that’s all I have. And love. You know me. I love to camp. I love to eat. I eat by candlelight, alone, and it’s pretty fucking romantic, sipping wine straight from the bottle.

My new favorite restaurant is Toomie’s. It’s cold, slow, crowded, and not as good or as great a place, placewise, as Amarin, Alameda’s other noted Thai restaurant, but the red curry has decent kick to it, and the peanut sauce works, and … I don’t know, it just kinda conjures nice connotations for me — who knows why? 2

TOOMIE’S THAI CUISINE

Mon.–Thurs., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5–9:30 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.–2:30 p.m. and 5–10 p.m.; Sat., noon–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9:30 p.m.

1433 Park, Alameda

(510) 865-8008

AE/MC/V

Beer/wine

Christian Fennesz returns to shore

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fennesz_fishsmall.jpg

By Erik Morse

After a long musical sojourn with former Yellow Magic Orchestra electronics magus Ryuichi Sakamoto on 2007’s Cendre (Touch), an extensive live collaboration with Mike Patton and a nomination for Best World Album by the Ethic Multicultural Media Awards (EMMA), Christian Fennesz returns to the sonorous shores of his past with a new 7-inch entitled “On a Desolate Shore a Shadow Passes By.”

Released as a part of Touch’s vinyl-only Sevens series – which includes singles by Phillip Jeck, Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson, and Biosphere – “On a Desolate Shore” finds the Austrian laptop composer working within his métier as the digital scion of Brian Wilson, Kevin Shields, and Jim O’Rourke. Using his patented Mac patches to splay, splice, and caress a Stratocaster, Fennesz produces layer upon layer of compressed guitar feedback and processed glitches that spread out like a beach blanket on the windy sands of the Mediterranean. When a few chords suddenly appear from the whirring microtonal din, the noise musician-turned sculptor conveys with a Proustian flourish something truly magical: the distant memories of aquamarine sunsets and tawny sand dunes seem to emanate from the speakers.

Fennesz’s greatest strength has always been in his keen ability to formulate soundscapes that capture equally the coldest blasts of alien feedback and the most summery mosaic of acoustic guitar strums, chimes, and keyboard drones. Or rather, his compositions are at their most transfixing when they seem to play in music’s littoral zones, where the shallow grounds of textural play might suddenly give way to vast oceanic harmonics. In fact, the cover of the new release – a closeup of a sand path leading to the water’s edge – is once again supplied by photographer Jon Wozencroft and most likely comes from the same rustic-meets-glossy series that provided the cover for 2004’s Venice (Touch). And it does appear after a three-year divagation, Fennesz has returned there for inspiration. While “On a Desolate Shore” might be difficult listening for some, its affecting blend of digital minimalism and seaside dreams reaffirms why Fennesz is the most extraordinary ambient composer since Brian Eno.

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