Water

Year in Music: Long walk home

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Years ago I ended up at a San Francisco Water Department dinner with my father and an old neighborhood friend, eating in the back hall of a half-century-old Italian restaurant in the Excelsior. The room spilled over with thick-armed men who were union, white, and not bad-off and from whom I learned a thing or two about old San Francisco family names and accents that tell you if someone is from the Richmond, the old Castro, or Balboa. It was a return to the blue-collar ‘Frisco that I was raised in: a posthippie, pre-dot-com city with a ubiquitous — and at one time iconic — KFOG, 104.5 FM, playlist composed of harder rockers by the Stones, Creedence, and the Beatles. My earliest memories of the city are tied to those songs, moaning from tiny car speakers, rattling empty cans of Bud, and wafting over garages that smelled of grease.

Yet there was one member of this blue-collar pantheon I could never get too close to. He was too bombastic. His character was too huge. Even before ingesting punk rock ideology via Maximumrocknroll and Epicenter, I felt in opposition to the stadium and the spectacle. Somehow I had internalized a belief that the Boss was my enemy.

Yet this year I found myself buying Magic (Sony), Bruce Springsteen’s latest album, literally on sight. My teenage self would have been horrified to know that at 30 I would be purchasing a Springsteen record not in spite of the E Street Band but because of it, and that after listening to it again and again, my greatest criticism would be that it has too few Clarence Clemons sax solos. The truth is that I’ve moved well past being appreciative of the man and into the realm of the fan — the kind who marks his Slingshot planner with the date and time tickets go on sale for Springsteen’s latest tour.

As with many young men with elitist tastes, it was Nebraska (Sony, 1982) that broke me. With its high-contrast cover, four-track production, and the slap-back reverb echoing of Suicide, the album suggested an almost punk quality, and it subverted all of my assumptions about Springsteen’s gross theatrics. Here was a serious songwriter with compassion for working people, concern for their dignity, and a subtle hint of darkness. Suddenly, I was listening, and, as I began to discover, so were my friends.

What surprised me most was the nonlinearity and consistency of his politics. Springsteen isn’t partisan, pro-union, antiwar, or above it all. He’s for ordinary people and their battles with life, injustice, and the institutions that seem set on killing their dreams, if not destroying the dreamers. It turns out that "Born in the U.S.A." isn’t a nationalist anthem but an indictment. He takes on police, poverty, and racism with "American Skin (41 Shots)," whose title pointedly refers to the slaying of Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department. Springsteen is a humanist who never wanted to choose sides in the process of choosing between right and wrong. Perhaps for good reason — it’s hard not to wonder whether Clear Channel radio stations’ boycott of Magic isn’t linked to his fateful decision to openly oppose George W. Bush during the 2004 election.

My slow-burning appreciation for Springsteen’s moral and political iconoclasm wasn’t what really set my obsession with him into high gear. It was the unexpected but inevitable emotional connection that grew. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the dark listening to The River (Sony, 1980) and crying to its titular masterpiece. Conversion is strange, and when a person goes from being outside the church pews to singing in the choir it’s a hard thing to explain to anyone. I can listen to "Atlantic City," "The Promised Land," or even Magic‘s "Long Walk Home" and feel the agony of every person who’s ever loved or lost. I realize I’m willing to give up being aesthetically correct, intellectually above it all, and emotionally safe just to have something I can share with people who seem to live such different lives. Certainly it’s worth it to be transported back home, which makes Magic less like a throwback and more like a time machine. *

TOP 5 MUSIC TOPPERS


1. Top return to shitty form: Siltbreeze

After many years languishing in the land of the giant question marks, Philly scuzz-and-fuzz merchants Siltbreeze not only have begun releasing new records but also happen to be releasing some of the best records in the American (and Australian?!) underground. Harry Pussy, Charlambides, and the Dead C meet US Girls, Ex-Cocaine, and xNoBBQx.

2. Top new band from my new hometown, Portland, Ore.: Eat Skull

What we’ve got is ear-bleeding garage punk that makes up for a lack of speed with a heavy hand on the treble knob. Presented by members of the Hospitals, Gang Wizard, and Hale Zukas, this is the kind of pop violence that hasn’t hurt this good since Henry’s Dress.

3. Top new band from my old hometown, Oakland: Zeroth

Just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised by anything anymore. A trio of smarter than average weirdos, they’ve produced the kind of strangeness that lends itself to nonsense descriptors like "electric ovarian space prog." My butt shook.

4. Top trend: pop noise albums

Though this is really a trend that started a few years ago with records like Burning Star Core’s The Very Heart of the World (Thin Wrist, 2005) and Prurient’s Black Vase (Load, 2005), 2007 saw some of America’s noise heavyweights releasing major statements with actual production values. Mouthus, John Wiese, and Religious Knives all brought great records, but perhaps most startling were the sweet clarity and depth of Sighting’s Through the Panama (Load/Ecstatic Peace).

5. Top label A&R: Southern Lord

They’ve made a pretty clean sweep of the best of left-field cult metal: OM, Wolves in the Throne Room, Velvet Cacoon, Abruptum, and Striborg. My only question is, where’s WOLD?

For more from Saloman, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Antidepressants

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS In the morning I dropped him off at the bus stop and he jumped out of the car, a big meeting at nine. Work. I smiled and waved through the window, blew him a kiss that I don’t think he saw, and pulled away.

Went to Crawdad de la Cooter’s to see her baby and her, but they were on their way out the door. Inside, her man was in bed sick. I should have stayed and made him soup, or something. We talked a little through the door, and I got back in my car and went.

Stopped at my favorite dumpster for firewood, and the gate was closed. I lingered, looking through the chain-linkage at an inviting overflow of sawed-off two-by-fours and scrapped corner cuts, all with everyone-else-in-the-world’s name on them, not mine.

It was a long drive home. And cold. Oh, the sky was sunny and brilliant, but all that was, like everything else in life, on the other side of my windshield. I turned the heater on and my chest tightened. My breathing became irregular. Goddamn, I hate these little heart attacks. I turned the heater off and rolled down my window.

At the Ping-Pong table in my mind, nothing and Nothing were duking it out, and no one was winning. I was dripping sweat, gritting my teeth, stomping and grunting, darting and lunging. Takes me an hour and a half to get home to the woods. That’s a lot of Ping-Pong. Final score: 0-0. I made a mental note to call my therapist.

Inside my shack it was in the mid-40s. I resisted the temptation to go to bed. Let me rephrase that: I went to bed, but first I got a fire going and only slept for a couple hours. Then, instead of my therapist, I called the feed store. It’s not the next best thing; it’s better. I may be hopelessly hopeless, useless, clueless, and gutless, but I’d be damned if I was going to stay chickenless.

"Got pullets?" I said. And for the first time in six weeks they said yep. So I called Mountain Sam’l. "Mister," I said, "your chickenless chicken farmer is about to be chickenful."

We met down at Western Farm, and after, while the new girls peeped and pooped on my passenger seat, we stopped for my favorite antidepressant, duck soup.

What friends are for: Sam’l talked to me, long after our noodles were all slurped up, and, with poetic patience and kind, country eyes, he reminded me How To Be Crazy. That’s golden. It’s practical, realistic information, especially compared with How Not To Be Crazy. And after way more than an hour, he not only didn’t charge me $60 or even $25 but even insisted on picking up the check.

Next day we went for a hike. He showed me some things you can eat, like cattail root, acorns for mush, and madrone bark for tea. Mountain Veronica made a pot roast and we watched A Beautiful Mind.

The chickens were not still in my car. They were digging their new digs in the redwoods — redecorating, unpacking: you know, settling in. On Sunday I drove down to the city, played three consecutive soccer games for three different teams, then, lunch-breaking only for a slice of pizza and a glass of water, I went and played baseball. Caught four innings, pitched three, and never knew the score, but it was a nine-to-five sports day. Imagine my soreness.

I could barely shift gears on my way back to the Mountains’ for salmon, mashed potatoes, and green beans. When I hit their hot tub at 11 that night, the cure was complete. But Mountain Veronica, ever the big sister, wouldn’t let me drive home.

In the morning, Monday morning, I would go to work: I would sing to and sit with my chickens. Help them paint. I would cook them a coop-warming corn bread with the buggy cornmeal and stinky flour I’d been saving. Welcome home!

And this, from Mr. and Mrs. Mountains: me! — your new, improved chicken farmer, and a can of worms.

My new favorite restaurant is Pizza Orgasmica, not because their thin slices are as good as you can get here in Not–New York. No. Because I play on their soccer team, and that must mean they bought our uniforms. The butts of our shorts say: "We Never Fake It." And we don’t, but we tend to lose anyway. The pizza’s good, though.

PIZZA ORGASMICA

Mon.–Wed. and Sun., 11 a.m.–midnight; Thurs., 11 a.m.–2 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 11 a.m.–2:30 a.m.

3157 Fillmore (at Greenwich), SF

(415) 931-5300

Takeout available

Beer

AE/MC/V

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I don’t like the George Lucas building at the Presidio. I don’t like the idea of an 850,000-square-foot commercial office complex (with a Starbucks!) in a national park, and I don’t like the fact that Lucas got a $60 million tax break for locating in one of the most desirable locations on Earth. But at least the Star Wars man made some effort to ensure his $350 million headquarters looks a little bit like the historic buildings around it.

And by that standard, I really hate the plans for the new Don Fisher museum.

Fisher wants us all to think he’s a great guy because he’s going to spend his own money to build a grand hall to display his own modern art for all of his adoring subjects to see, and he’s hired a fancy architect to design it. But check out the drawings — the thing is an abomination. It looks like something an alien dropped out of another galaxy far, far away and into the parade grounds of an old military base. It has no context, no connection whatsoever to anything that’s already there. I’m sorry, but it’s ugly. Butt ugly.

And it really doesn’t belong in the Presidio.

Think about it for a second: This is a part of the city that has almost no public transportation. The old Sixth Army headquarters was never set up to handle hundreds of thousands of visitors (on the contrary: like most military bases, it was designed around security, with limited, narrow access gates that could be quickly closed down). The roads aren’t wide, the nearby city streets are already pretty crowded, and there isn’t a lot of parking.

So anything that brings large numbers of tourists in large numbers of cars to the center of the Presidio is going to be a problem. It’s nuts that the Presidio Trust is even considering this project — either the museum is going to be a waste of everyone’s time and money because it doesn’t attract visitors or it’s going to be a nightmare of traffic and crowds.

If the great Mr. Fisher wants to put his art on public view, he could offer to donate or loan it to the existing Museum of Modern Art, which is situated downtown, near tourist hotels and lots of transit. But he doesn’t want to do that; the way I’ve heard it, the MOMA folks weren’t quite ready to bow down and let Fisher run the place any damn way he wanted. So he took his art and walked away.

Since he’s worth more than a billion dollars, he could also buy an existing building near MOMA or buy a parking lot and build a museum, but Fisher wants to pollute the Presidio instead. And guess what? He thinks he’s going to get away with it.

See, he helped Rep. Nancy Pelosi create the privatized park, and he was one of the original trust members, and this is how the rich think: We took this land from the public. We’ll do with it exactly anything we please.

Pelosi made sure the San Francisco government has no direct say over this decision, but the supervisors should at least try to fight it. They should hold hearings on this, pass a resolution opposing it, call on Pelosi to oppose it (and blast her publicly if she won’t), refuse to provide municipal water and sewer service, refuse to make traffic improvements … and make it clear what this is: a billionaire’s attempt to stick it to the rest of us.

Pollution for truth? Egads!

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By Benedict Sinclair

SF Tea Party for 9/11 Truth
Dec. 16, 1pm
Pier 39
415-451-8102
www.communitycurrency.org

Hoo, boy — here come the truth fetishists. They’re still groping away at that mirage in the distance where we all get to know what actually happened on 9/11, who was behind it, and how to claim the tragedy for political means in order to replace one lame duck for another in that most outmoded of positions, “American president”. The Boston Tea Party is slated to become another terribly misused reference to successful protest in this, its 234th anniversary, as activists try to gather angry Americans not sold on the media’s representation of the World Trade Center bombings at both Bostonian and San Franciscan docks. Attendants are asked to dress in colonial attire—preferably from the late 18th Century (leave the pith helmet at home, Grandpa)—and to bring fifes and drums, presumably for their distracting novelty value.

tparty.jpg
Not exactly recycling, but ….

“Proclamations” will be made denouncing such garbage as the 9/11 Commission Report, PATRIOT Act, Military Commissions Act, and just the broad, general notion of all-around tyranny. “Genuine” investigation, accountability and impeachment will be called for. The final act of protest will be a mass dumping of cardboard and bleached paper—a series of large, corny replicas of the actual published work being protested—into that precious natural resource: the San Francisco Bay. At least they could make ash of the boxes first, like they’re doing in Milwaukee, and in a slightly more tasteful and harmless move stick to dumping spent carbon instead.

Yes, let’s all wheel a bunch of junk effigies down to the bay and dump them in the water in a game of dress-up, all on the basis that errors can be found in each account given on the attacks, which isn’t exactly the most surprising turn of events since the trial in Rashomon.

Turn up the volume

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER I read the news the other day, oh boy, and the dimming days of early winter appear to have gotten darker: the Xmas lights have begun to twinkle down my street, above the Red Poppy House, but they can’t draw attention away from the little shrine of bedraggled plastic balloons and dampened candles around the corner dedicated to 21-year-old Erick Balderas, who was shot to death at Treat Avenue and 23rd Street on Nov. 18. I hobbled home from No Country for Old Men and a lychee-infused cocktail just a few hours before he was slain only a block away, but I failed to hear the gunshots. Thinking about his death and that of 18-year-old Michael Price Jr., shot near the Metreon box office by, allegedly, another teenager, one wonders why nightlife has grown so deadly for the kids who can really use some fun.

Reading is a safe substitute. When going out seems to be getting more hazardous, who can blame a culture vulture for wanting to stay in and nest with a good book and a CD, preferably the two combined in one? Those in the market for juicy boomer-rock dirt will likely dig this year’s Clapton: The Autobiography (Broadway), ex Pattie Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me (Harmony), and Ron Wood’s Ronnie: The Autobiography (St. Martin’s) — survivor’s tales all. But perhaps this is also the moment to revisit a musician who perished as violently and mysteriously as autumn’s lost boys: Elliott Smith. Photographer Autumn de Wilde manages to skate between the coffee table and the fanzine rack with a handsome tome of photos, many snapped around the time of Smith’s Figure 8 (DreamWorks, 2000).

Figure 8 was a divisive recording, alienating early lo-fi lovers and seemingly reaching out to the "Miss Misery" masses, and Smith looked self-consciously awkward slouching in front of the music store swirl that turned into a shrine after his death. Talking to friends, exes, family, managers, and producers who haven’t gone on the record since Smith’s death, de Wilde gathers snatches of intriguing info — for instance, it was engineer ex-girlfriend Joanna Bolme who gave Smith the sorry bowl haircut that de Wilde documents — and thoughts on the art of capturing spirits like Smith on the fly. Centering Elliott Smith (Chronicle) on images from her "Son of Sam" video, a poignant reworking of The Red Balloon, she finds the innocence that made Smith’s songs — and their anger over quashed hope — possible amid the listener cynicism and the songwriter’s lyrical bitterness. The kicker: an accompanying five-song CD of live acoustic solo Smith tracks, culled from 1997 appearances at Los Angeles’ Largo, including a sweetly screwed-up rendition of Hank Williams’s "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down."

Another volume to really turn down the covers with is Wax Poetics Anthology, Volume 1 (Wax Poetics/Puma), a mixologist’s spin cycle of stories from the great mag. Editor Andre Torres taps interviews with golden era hip-hop knob twirlers Prince Paul, the RZA, and Da Beatminerz, as well as pieces on James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield, reggae producers King Tubby and Clive Chin, salsa giant Fania Records, Henry Chalfant of Style Wars, and much more than you can down in one chill evening. Extensive discographies aside, the only thing that’s lacking here is a soundtrack.

Not so with the much slimmer but no less passionate new issue of Ptolemaic Terrascope zine, once financed by the Bevis Frond. Mushroom drummer and Runt–Water Records consultant Pat Thomas has assumed the editorship. Apparently after 15 years and 35 issues, previous head Phil McMullen was "burned out, for lack of a better word," Thomas told me from his Oakland home, where he was happy to get away from a take-home exam on menstrual cycles. The new editor is even on the cover, looking appropriately put-upon; it’s the Alyssa Anderson photo shot in the Haight that was adapted for Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow (XL). Banhart is so ubiquitous these days that some Guardian staffers are tempted to start a swear jar to gather quarters every time his name is invoked. But he’s a natural cover star, also doing a jukebox jury piece with Thomas and Vetiver’s Andy Cabic within Terrascope.

United Kingdom folk luminaries like Shirley Collins and Davey Graham crop up in interviews and on the zine’s CD, which teems with wonderful unreleased tracks by the Velvet Underground’s Doug Yule, Willow Willow, Six Organs of Admittance, Ruthann Friedman, and Kendra Smith, among others, all playing off the issue’s Anglo-folk orientation, though pieces on Elaine Brown and the Black Panther Party parallel Thomas’s ongoing work assembling a box set for Water on the Panthers’ music and spoken word. The editor already has interviews with Wizz Jones and Ian Matthews ready for the next issue, but he’s tempted to put the zine on hold while he assembles a guidebook to black power music, foreshadowing new turns in Terrascope. "The magazine was always, for lack of a better word, very white," Thomas quips. "I want to blacken it up a little bit." 2

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

THE RUBINOOS BASSIST AL CHAN’S TOP MUSIC BOOKS

•<\!s>The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night: Day by Day Concerts, Recordings, and Broadcasts, 1964–1997, by Doug Hinman and the Kinks (Backbeat, 2004)

•<\!s>The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, by Michael Weldon (Ballantine, 1983)

•<\!s>Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of the Who, by Andy Neill (Virgin, 2005)

•<\!s>Hollywood Rock, by Marshall Crenshaw (HarperCollins, 1994)

•<\!s>The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, eighth edition, by Joel Whitburn (Billboard, 2004). "I can just sit down with that on an eight-hour flight and look at charts. I’m a total music geek!"

The Rubinoos open for Jonathan Richman, Thurs/6, 8 p.m., $15. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.musichallsf.com.

We heart the cranberry tart

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People might grumble about holiday turkey, but even the most disenchanted grumbler will usually choke down a bite or two, just for appearances. Seldom is the same courtesy extended to the cranberry, which often reaches the table as a pretty red relish no one really wants. The cranberry is the orphan of holiday cooking and — a true measure of its lowly state — a punch line for sitcom jokes, from The Simpsons to Frasier.

To say all the neglect, abuse, and humor amount to an injustice is a considerable understatement. The cranberry is one of nature’s superfoods, for one thing, richer in antioxidants than just about everything else and, as the Indians understood, endowed with medicinal properties. (Cranberries were used to treat urinary-tract infections.)

But as food marketers have long known, "good for you" isn’t the sexiest pitch. Better to flash a little thigh — but does the cranberry have any thigh to flash? The answer is yes! Forget about the wretched relish and turn your holiday cranberries into a lovely dessert tart. (By doing this you will also rid the holiday world of at least one pumpkin pie, another deathless perennial no one seems to like.)

If you are truly ambitious, you can make a cranberry version of linzer torte using the recipe in Emily Luchetti’s Classic Stars Desserts (Chronicle, 2007). I made a rustic galette but did start with a version of her filling: basically a 12-ounce bag of fresh cranberries, rinsed, then simmered in a heavy saucepan with a cup of sugar, a few tablespoons of water, and the zest of one orange until jamminess was achieved.

Pastry: a cup of all-purpose flour into the food processor, followed by six tablespoons of sweet butter (in chunks) and a pinch of salt. When it looks like cornmeal, dribble in ice water (machine still running) until a ball forms. Chill briefly, then shape into a 10-inch disk. Lay the disk on parchment paper on a baking tray. In the middle of the disk, spread three tablespoons each of sugar and flour. Spread about half of your jam over this, add five more tablespoons of sugar, and fold up the edges into a rough circle. Brush the pastry with water, sprinkle with a tablespoon of sugar, and bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes. Cool, and give thanks.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

Sleep tight

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am newly married and have a great, fulfilling sex life with my husband. A while ago, I told him that I’m really turned on by the thought of him rousing me out of sleep with sex. Months have passed since I told him my fantasy, and, thinking he just wasn’t interested, I recently asked him why he hadn’t tried it yet. His response was "I have, but every time I do, you mumble incoherent stuff and roll over." I’m really bummed that I don’t remember his advances, and even more bummed that my deep slumber is depriving me of potentially awesome sex! Is there anything I can do about this issue, or is this a fantasy that must remain only in the mind?

Love,

Sleepy

Dear Sleep:

I’m not sure if it’s my job to rate people’s fantasies, but hey, what the heck? Good fantasy. It just ever so gingerly starts to poke a toe into kinkier water: unconsciousness, inability to give consent, a little bit of the more wholesome sort of necrophilia — good stuff! — and yet it’s very sweet, very harmless, and very married. I give it a 9, and I’m sorry it’s been such a bust for you so far. Happily, though, you’ve hardly exhausted the possibilities. Give it here, and let’s see what we can do.

Your poor sweet husband is doing the equivalent of the would-be dom who, when the disappointed bottom complains, "You had me all tied up! You had a flogger! Why didn’t you whip me?" says, "Um, you said, ‘Please don’t!’<0x2009>" That’s why we have safe words: not so much so the top will stop as so he or she will start. The main problem, obviously, is that you have not worked out with your husband what you mean by rousing, nor have you determined just how awake you have to be in order to for him to continue his ministrations. If you’re going to push it toward my (admittedly, liberally editorialized) version above, then you hardly need be conscious at all. You’ve also apparently failed to give him explicit permission to wake you up. Which was sort of the point, wasn’t it? Your husband is simply being too considerate, and if he’s to take the role of the sort of brute who would rouse a lady from her slumbers just to satisfy his base lusts, he’d better get with the program: either he wakes you or he has his way with your somnolent self. Either way, he has to press the issue. He can’t just let you snore on! Talk about unclear on the concept. Apparently he needs express permission to pester you, so grant it and go to bed.

As I was answering this, something about it began to seem familiar, and after a while I realized I was remembering that long, deeply strange period in Alt.Sex.Column’s history (starting, I think, in 2004) when sleep sex and sleep rape simply would not go away and leave us alone. There was the guy who’d mounted his male partner in the latter’s sleep; there was the story of the woman who’d get in her car, drive to bars, and pick up strangers for sex, all in her sleep; and there was this guy who claimed he’d had accidental anal sex with his wife in her sleep and is still kind of freaking me out at several years later:

Since then I have done this again, with a growing sense of excitement. She will stir and wake up … so I always get out before she wakes. I want to do it when she’s awake but I don’t know how to tell her…. [February 2004]

He didn’t wait for my answer ("She will kill you!") before he confessed to her and then seemed a little surprised when she nearly killed him. And there was the molesting priest who had the boy sleep over repeatedly, got him drunk, took him out to bars and parties, and did who knows what to him under cover of night, then blamed it all on some sort of parasomnia. What I don’t think I ever followed up on, though, was whether those stories about sleep-driving, sleep-slutting around, and so on, were ever tied retroactively to use of Ambien and similar sleep drugs, which, it was revealed last year, can certainly have that sort of effect on the poor, hapless, really tired people who take them. If Ambien can (and it can, it can) cause people to wander down to the kitchen in the wee hours to stuff their faces, why couldn’t it make people stuff other things as well, all unawares?

None of which has anything to do with you, Nice Married Lady. You simply want to be roused by something, well, arousing. And you have every right to be, if you ask me.

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.

I’m dreaming of a green Christmas

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› culture@sfbg.com
In the words of Rev. Billy, mock evangelist and star of the newly released documentary What Would Jesus Buy?, the dreaded “shopocalypse” is upon us. If he and his Choir of Stop Shopping had their way, we would all be blissfully exchanging simple gestures of peace and love for the holidays rather than heaps of overly packaged plastic stuff.
But if you already know deep in your gut that peace and love just aren’t going to cut it for your demanding sweetheart, whining child, or needy pet, procuring green gifts from local Bay Area shops is the next best thing. Consult this well-edited list to help you navigate the buying frenzy, thrill your giftees, and sidestep some of the residual guilt. For extra points, pass on the parking pandemonium and try riding your bike or taking public transit to your shopping destinations.
ADULTS

  • Treat your pals or paramour to a rejuvenating treatment at Evo Spa (216 Strawberry Village, Mill Valley; 415-383-3223, www.evo-spa.com), a green, holistic beauty and wellness haven in Mill Valley. Evo also carries paraben-free and organic skin care products.
  • Keep everyone on your list well hydrated with SIGG nontoxic, ecofriendly water bottles (Lombardi Sports, 1600 Jackson, SF; 415-771-0600, www.lombardisports.com). They’re crack-resistant, reusable, and recyclable, and their lining is 100 percent leach free, ensuring all your giftee will taste is their favorite libation.
  • Help those busy parents in your life clean up their act with a visit from Greenway Maid (415-674-3266, www.greewaymaid.com), a local, worker-owned green cleaning service that uses only ecofriendly cleaning products.
  • Get your honeybunch a Gremlin clutch (Eco Citizen, 1488 Vallejo, SF; 415-614-0100, www.ecocitizenonline.com) to help her tackle those San Francisco hills in style. Made from recycled car upholstery fabric from 1975 AMC Gremlins, this hot-rod handbag will sizzle on your lady’s arm.
  • Invite your family and friends to hop on the localvore bandwagon with a subscription to Farm Fresh to You (1-800-796-6009, www.farmfreshtoyou.com). Each box contains seasonal organic produce — grown at small, local, sustainable farms and delivered right to your door.
  • Wrap your darling in a Flow Scarf (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com) by Hiroko Kurihara, handcrafted in the East Bay from European Union–ecologically certified virgin wool. For each scarf sold, one is donated to help those who are homeless or in transition.

KIDS

  • The Recycled Plastic Radio Flyer Earth Wagon (Green Home, 850 24th Ave., SF; 877-282-6400, www.greenhome.com) is the ultimate gift for that budding environmentalist in your life. The body of the wagon is made from 100 percent recycled postconsumer high-density polyethylene. More than 230 plastic milk jugs were diverted from landfills to make each Earth Wagon.
  • Bundle your baby in Kate Quinn 100 percent certified organic cotton clothing or entertain your favorite tots with Plan Toys (Lavish, 540 Hayes, SF; 415-565-0540, www.shoplavish.com), made from preservative-free rubber woods and decorated with nontoxic paints.
  • Warm the tootsies of your loved ones with Eco-terric 100 percent organic felt wool slippers from Kyrgyzstan (Green Home Center, 1812 Polk, SF; 415-567-3700, www.thegreenhomecenter.net).

PETS

  • Reduce, reuse, and rewoof with Planet Dog’s RecyleBone and RecycleBall (Bow Wow Meow, 2150 Polk, SF; 415-440-2845, www.bowwowmeow.net) chew toys, made from 100 percent recycled materials.
  • Thrill your kitty with a cat tree by Everyday Studio (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com). Made right here in San Francisco, these modern scratching posts offer good-looking design and a nontoxic paint finish.
  • Help a friend take care of their dog’s dirty business with Business Bags by Spike (Osso & Co., 501 Broderick, SF; 415-447-8543, www.eurocanine.com). These biodegradable poo bags are fully compostable and biodegrade.

STOCKING STUFFERS

  • Reduce your friends’ junk mail by up to 90 percent and have 10 trees planted on their behalf! Sign them up at Green Dimes (www.greendimes.com).
  • Wow them with one-of-a-kind wood rings by Natalie Trujillo (Paxton Gate, 824 Valencia, SF; 415-824-1872, www.paxtongate.com), handcrafted from found wood pieces and garden clippings.
  • Give the gift that keeps giving. Jimi Wallets (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com) are made from 100 percent recycled plastic, come in a variety of colors, and are priced so you won’t burn a hole in yours.
  • Send ecofriendly Night Owl Paper Goods holiday cards (Lavish, 540 Hayes, SF; 415-565-0540, www.shoplavish.com), made from sustainably harvested wood.
  • Surprise someone special with a super Kobo soy candle (Spring, 2162 Polk, SF; 415-673-2065, www.astorecalledspring.com). Each has a burn time of 70 hours and is healthier for indoor air quality than petroleum-based candles.
  • For the person who has everything, there’s Plant-Me Pets (Branch Home, 245 S. Van Ness, SF; 415-341-1824, www.branchhome.com). These squeaky toys have seeds for eyes and are made from compostable natural latex rubber. Should they ever outstay their welcome in the home, their owners can simply plant them in soil and watch ’em sprout.

Cut the cleaners

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In stories on the $229 million budget deficit that San Francisco could be facing next year, both the Chronicle and the Examiner used the same telling quote from Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press secretary, Nathan Ballard: “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.”
Why is this guy so obsessed with street cleaning? As a bicyclist, I get irritated by the wet streets, which they often are since Newsom became mayor. As an environmentalist, I see this city’s manic scrubbing as a waste of water (which will grow more precious with climate change) and money and source of more toxic waste (as the Guardian reported last spring). My sense of social justice is also disturbed when street cleaners become a weapon against homeless loiterers, the working class, and street parties.
But the mayor seems to think daily street scrubbing is more important than the social services that his budget will ultimately target. Hell, his official website still prominent features (under “Recent News”) his “Back to Basics Budget” proposal from last spring, which focused on clean streets. With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, maybe it’s time to stop pandering to the conservatives and the business community and develop some kind of vision and agenda that we can all support.
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Images from SF Department of Public Works website

Shelf help

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› lit@sfbg.com

WISH LIST My family of origin is so nuclear that on smoggy days a mushroom cloud can be seen above the suburb where my parents still reside. During the holidays we gather there to rehearse and stage the roles we will alternately perform and resist in the ensuing year. While Dad tracks holiday cards sent and received on an Excel spreadsheet, Mom dons a pair of felt antlers and holes up in the kitchen. As for me, I revert to fatigued, endless reading, as if by some cruel law of repetition I have returned to that sullen moment in junior high when my only friend suddenly became popular, leaving me with nobody but books as my companions. Without intervention, I might remain in this half-hypnotized state, rereading Flowers for Algernon until the world outside grows dim, like a dream I can barely remember. This year, however, I’m readying myself with an eclectic batch of new books, books that make me want to participate instead of turning into a listless blotch of angst. These titles provide critical frameworks for dissent, suggest avenues for engagement, and probe cultural blind spots — generating new aesthetic possibilities along the way.

I, for one, like to kick off the holiday season with a powerful dose of well-researched feminist analysis, supplied this year by Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 368 pages, $26). It’s akin to taking vitamins to ward off the winter cold that’s going around the office. I read some Faludi, I ask my brother to help out in the kitchen. Faludi argues that a highly gendered mythology reasserted its virulent hold over the national psyche (as writ large by the national media) in the wake of Sept. 11. Drawing from an abundance of sources, she parses out the myth: strong male heroes rescue helpless girls, feminism is dismissed as a frivolous and dangerous mistake, and cowboys and manly men rise again to keep the home soil safe. In debunking this overblown narrative, Faludi demonstrates that it doesn’t actually help those it valorizes, nor does its rehearsal expedite an increase in national security or political accountability.

Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence (Leon Works Press, 167 pages, $15.95 paper) takes up "black presences in European literature, visual art, and film." Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.

Renovating symbolic systems can be hard work, and nothing restores a fatigued body and mind like making changes to the physical infrastructure — such as sawing through your drainpipes to divert "barely used" household water from sewers to gray-water systems for gardening and washing clothes. Sexily linking the macro to the micro, the locally grown junta known as the Greywater Guerrillas has expanded its how-to know-how into Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull Press, 416 pages, $19.95 paper), a collection of essays that examine the global plight of water misuse and attendant broad-scale ecological impacts. I don’t think it undermines the gravitas of the issue to mention that portions of the book are a sheer pleasure to read, especially when editors Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole, and Laura Allen (illustrations were supplied by Annie Danger) detail their efforts to "disengage from the water grid" by taking plumbing into their own hands.

What James Kochalka takes into his hands in American Elf Book Two: The Collected Sketch Book Diaries of James Kochalka (Top Shelf Comics, 192 pages, $19.95) is his life, tidbits of which he transforms into daily diary comics. Visually and verbally, Kochalka risks a silly, reckless sweetness — a sampling of titles includes "Romance of Life" and "Everything was fine until the old wakey wake." The strips are also a little bit perverted and weirdly honest, as Kochalka’s elf-eared stand-in catalogs a receding hairline, farty dairy hangovers, and arguments with his beloved and salty-mouthed wife. As the pages and days pile up, the effect is infectious, such that, while under the diaries’ spell, I began to sense secret fissures of creative potential and magic in the mundane flow of everyday life.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, and the army of flavor lovers they run with have changed the landscape of vegan cooking. In Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (Marlowe and Co., 336 pages, $27.50), Moskowitz and Romero draw inspiration from a variety of international cuisines, without making any claims to authenticity. The resulting recipes (mole, saag, and lasagna, to name a few) are adventures in surprising flavor combinations. A helpful foreword details how to stock a vegan pantry, and tips offered alongside the easy-to-follow recipes instruct on where to find specialty items or how to organize your cooking tasks — advice that, as an unskilled, distractible cook, I found particularly useful. An appendix of menus ranges from rich party foods to low-fat and easy-to-prepare options.

Printed in large type, so it’s easy to read when splayed open next to a bicycle, the repair-manual portion of the illustrated Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance, by Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark (Microcosm Publishing, 256 pages, $12), builds from the ground up. Starting with the ethics and rewards of skill sharing, it moves on to detail parts, tools, and instructions for system-by-system checkups and repairs. The book’s second half comprises reprinted issues of the Chainbreaker zine, originals of which were lost when zinester Jackson’s New Orleans home flooded after Katrina. The zines complement the how-to portions with a wider view of the bicycle’s cultural impact — e.g., the role of bikes in the women’s clothing revolution, the democratizing potential of this low-cost form of transportation. Note: the book hits shelves in February, but aspiring bike enthusiasts can order it now at www.microcosmpublishing.com.

And to come full circle … Sherman Alexie’s first young adult (and graphic) novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers, 240 pages, $16.99), reminds me that a return to YA reading can be the opposite of mind-numbing — when undertaken with a book that’s emotionally spring-loaded, linguistically gymnastic, and devastatingly funny in turns. Drawing from his experiences growing up, Alexie tells the story of Junior (a.k.a. Arnold True-Spirit Jr.), a comic-drawing Indian kid who leaves his reservation to attend an all-white high school. Between racism at school and conflict with friends on the reservation, Alexie nails the ups and downs of a young artist learning to navigate by his own radar, amid competing claims from family and a sometimes encouraging but often deviously indifferent world. Ellen Forney’s inspired illustrations channel Junior’s manic, tell-it-like-it-is sensibility and provide a visual anchor for Alexie’s loquacious narrator.

Eaux d’Anger

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› johnny@sfbg.com

Whither Kenneth Anger? Has his signature hot temper withered into kind, grandfatherly wisdom? If the commentary tracks of the marvelous Films of Kenneth Anger Volume One and Films of Kenneth Anger Volume Two (Fantoma) are to be trusted, this is the case. But one can’t be faulted for suspecting that Anger has consciously decided to favor restraint over verbal fireworks when discussing his films. "There will always be mysteries," he decrees near the end of the second disc’s last moments, just after pointing out smoke from Lucifer Rising‘s burning script in one of the 1981 version’s final shots, a lingering, distant gaze at colossi in upper Egypt.

To say that the DVD issuing of Anger’s films has been long awaited would be an understatement. As months gave way to years, grumbles about what might be slowing or even permanently preventing the process mixed with a chorus of hopes regarding the film restoration efforts of Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Now that the restorations have been screened and the DVDs released, it’s time to rain praise on Lipman. Not only has he directed his and UCLA’s attention toward Anger and Charles Burnett — two filmmakers whose non-Hollywood artistry would have deteriorated and vanished otherwise — he’s delivered superb restorations that will change the way you see classic works. Both Anger collections deserve a place next to the just-released Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection (New Yorker Video/Milestone Cinematheque) as one of this year’s most vital and rewarding DVD collections.

The Anger DVDs seem ordered according to a masculine-feminine divide, with volume one showcasing Hollywood and European pageantry, and volume two gravitating toward motorcycle machismo, rock ‘n’ roll, and the occult. One thing that becomes clear on watching both is that the films that benefit most from restoration aren’t necessarily Anger’s best known or most canonical. In volume one, 1953’s Eaux d’Artifice truly seems born anew: what was once black and blurred now pulses with distinct energy. I once saw Anger berate a projectionist immediately after the movie was screened; at the time it seemed like a peevish diva display, but now I realize what the projectionist (working with an old print) was up against and why Anger was enraged by the overly dim images that had just been projected. By shooting in sunlight on black-and-white film with a red filter, he created a unique, electric blue nighttime hue.

If it were merely crude, Eaux d’Artifice would be the ultimate water-sports fantasy, culminating in perhaps the longest and most gorgeous money shot in the history of film. (After using a totem as a hard-on in 1947’s Fireworks, Anger rendered sexuality through playful metaphor or the more direct hint of nude eroticism.) Simply put, it’s resplendent: in an extended pure-light-and-dark passage that echoes a hand-marked moment in Fireworks, Anger almost allows nature to do the drawing. The streams of water from the baroque fountains of Tivoli Gardens are Anger’s chief material, creating an effect that’s a more dynamic femme foreshadowing or Euroecho of Jackson Pollock’s action painting.

They run hot, then cold, then hot again, but jewel-like strings or streams continuously run and spill through Anger’s films, from the slo-mo-homo(genized) milky money shots of Fireworks — in which fire also blazes next to the reflective surface of water — to the beaded dresses of 1949’s Puce Moment, through Eaux d’Artifice, to the snakelike lava flows and volcanic eruptions of Lucifer Rising. This love of ornamentation in motion might reach a hallucinogenic delirium in 1954’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, in which Samson de Brier literally swallows a series of jewels. While 1964’s Scorpio Rising is partly renowned for its subliminal qualities, trances invoked via overt repetition are another Anger motif, most at the fore in the lunar views of Rabbit’s Moon (1950–71; 1979) and the solar worship of Lucifer Rising.

Fantasma’s volumes of Anger’s films may not expose their mysteries or hocus-pocus, but the DVDs further reveal Anger’s impact on equally iconic but less experimental directors. That Martin Scorsese and David Lynch drew from Anger’s pop soundtracking is obvious — but one could also argue that the all-American family-room surrealism at the climax of Fireworks predates the Christmas tree rampage at the start of John Waters’s Female Trouble. Influence runs both ways, of course, and Aleister Crowley’s on Anger is also apparent, thanks to the presence of Anger’s 2002 slide show appreciation of Crowley’s frankly lousy paintings and drawings, The Man We Want to Hang, in volume two. The same wild eyes and crazed gazes that Crowley loved to draw dominate some of acolyte Anger’s far superior films, Inauguration and Invocation in particular.

Anger’s DVD commentary shares next to nothing about his soundtrack choices or his interpersonal dynamics with the many men who have stepped before his camera lens. But he does utter select camp trivia, witty anecdotes, and even symbolic explanations without giving away magic tricks. He repeatedly praises his interior designer grandmother, whom he considers a sorceress. He says Louise Brooks told him Eaux d’Artifice was his sexiest film, and that the film’s midget protagonist was discovered by Federico Fellini. He gossips that the star of his Puce Moment was a mistress of Lázaro Cárdenas, claims that Inauguration star de Brier "was rumored to be the bastard son of the King of Romania," says Invocation actor Sir Francis Rose is the in-joke inspiration behind a certain famous Gertrude Stein line, and notes with a tinge of irritation that Jimmy Page outbid him at a Sotheby’s auction of Crowley paintings. "Cameron thought she was a witch, and I’m in agreement with that idea," Anger says about the late painter-poet whose flame-haired appearance is the most vibrant of all of Inauguration‘s many grand entrances.

Only Lucifer Rising star Marianne Faithfull seems capable of sparking some off-the-cuff impish remarks from the cozy incarnation of Anger who recorded commentary for Fantoma’s DVDs. During a travel guide’s discussion of Lucifer Rising‘s journey through Icelandic, Egyptian, and Germanic Black Forest sites, Anger takes the time to softly but repeatedly chide Faithfull — perhaps because she mocks him in her autobiography? According to Anger, the mosquitoes of Egypt loved to bite Faithfull’s "tender inner thighs." But that tidbit is nothing in comparison with an anecdote he shares about her disguising heroin as face powder in order to smuggle it into Egypt. Whether this is true or false, it’s impossible not to laugh out loud when Anger states that, had this ploy been revealed, he and Faithfull would have faced a fate far different than — though just as dramatic as — the stories they’ve gone on to live: death by firing squad.

Question of intent

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former mayor Willie Brown, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, and Mayor Gavin Newsom in recent weeks have come out in support of a proposed ballot measure that would allow Lennar Corp. to develop thousands of new homes at Candlestick Point, create 350 acres of parks, and possibly build a new 49ers stadium at Hunters Point Shipyard.

The campaign for the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative just launched its signature drive, but the measure should qualify relatively easily for the June 2008 election, given new low signature thresholds and the campaign’s powerful backers.

The measure would give Lennar, which is also involved in Treasure Island and much of the Bayview–Hunters Point redevelopment area, even more control over San Francisco’s biggest chunks of developable land.

But should San Franciscans really reward Lennar with more land and responsibilities when the financially troubled Florida developer has a track record in San Francisco and elsewhere of failing to live up to its promises, exposing vulnerable citizens to asbestos dust, and using deceptive public relations campaigns to gloss over its misdeeds?

As the Guardian has been reporting since early this year (see "The Corporation That Ate San Francisco," 3/14/07), Lennar failed to monitor and control the dust from naturally occurring asbestos while grading a hilltop in preparation for building condominiums on Parcel A of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

Last month the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s Board of Directors asked staff to pursue the maximum fines possible for Lennar’s violations, which could run into millions of dollars, particularly if they are found to be the result of willful or negligent behavior.

"It’s clear to everyone in the agency that this case needs to be handled well," BAAQMD spokesperson Karen Schkolnick told the Guardian. "It’s in everyone’s interest, certainly the community’s, to get resolution."

The air district gives parties to whom it issues a warning three years to settle the matter before it goes to court. Lennar officials have publicly blamed subcontractors for failing to control dust and leaving air-monitoring equipment with dead batteries for months on end, but the BAAQMD is treating Lennar as the responsible party.

"It’s air district policy to deal with the primary contractor, which in this case is Lennar, although additional parties may be held liable," Schkolnick said.

Accusations of willful negligence also lie at the heart of a Proposition 65 lawsuit that was filed against Lennar for alleged failures to warn the community of exposure to asbestos, a known carcinogen (see Green City, 8/29/07).

Filed by the Center for Self Improvement, the nonprofit that runs the Muhammad University of Islam, which is next to Parcel A, the suit alleges that the construction activities of Lennar and subcontractor Gordon N. Ball "caused thousands of Californians to be involuntarily and unwittingly exposed to asbestos on a daily basis without the defendants first providing the adjacent community and persons working at the site with the toxic health hazard warnings."

Now fresh evidence from another whistle-blower lawsuit filed by three Lennar employees (see "Dust Still Settling," 3/28/07) shows that higher-ups within Lennar reprimanded and reassigned a subordinate who told subcontractors to comply with mandated plans or face an immediate suspension of construction activities at the Parcel A site.

In an April 21, 2006, BlackBerry message that was copied to Lennar Urban senior vice president Paul Menaker and other top Lennar executives, Lennar Urban’s regional vice president Kofi Bonner wrote to Gary McIntyre, Lennar/BVHP’s Hunters Point Shipyard Project manager, "Gary why do you insist on sending threatening emails to the contractor. If you can no longer communicate directly without the threat of a shutdown … perhaps we should find another area of responsibility for you to oversee. Such emails should only be sent as documentation of [a] conversation."

McIntyre says he was just trying to do his job, which involved ensuring that subcontractors abided by the long list of special health and safety criteria that were developed for this particularly hazardous work site, located in an area long plagued by environmental injustice.

The shipyard is a Superfund site filled with toxic chemicals, and although the 63-acre Parcel A had been cleaned up enough to be certified for residential development, it sits atop a serpentine hill full of naturally occurring asbestos, a potent carcinogen. So the Department of Public Health and the BAAQMD both insisted on a strict plan for controlling dust, which Lennar used to sell the community on the project’s safety.

Yet when McIntyre began insisting in writing that Lennar and its subcontractors adhere carefully to those rules, he was removed from his job. In a work evaluation signed Oct. 17, 2006, Menaker described McIntyre as "a good company spokesperson as it relates to Hunters Point Shipyard" but claimed that he required major improvement in his leadership and communication skills.

"As a manager, he needs to focus on achieving his ultimate mission, rather than focusing on details. Poor communication skills have led to incomplete and often incorrect information being disseminated," Menaker wrote.

The ultimate mission for Lennar — which has seen its stock tank this year as it’s been roiled by a crisis in the housing market — was to get Parcel A built with a minimum of problems and delays. And as concerns about its behavior arose, its communication strategy seemed to be more concerned with positive spin and tapping testimony from financial partners than with putting out a complete and correct view of what was happening.

Whether or not McIntyre was a good Lennar employee, he was at least trying to do right by the community, as records obtained through the lawsuit’s discovery process show. As McIntyre wrote in a three-page response to Menaker’s evaluation, "Our BVHP Naval Shipyard project has unique environmental requirements and compliance therewith is mandatory."

But the record is clear that Lennar didn’t comply with its promises, raising serious questions about a company that wants to take over development of the rest of this toxic yet politically, socially, and economically important site.

BUYING ALLIES


So who is really behind the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative, which does not even have the support of the 49ers, who say they’d rather be in Santa Clara?

The measure was submitted by the African American Community Revitalization Consortium, which describes itself as "a group of area churches, organizations, residents and local merchants, working to improve Bayview Hunters Point." Yet this group is backed by Lennar and draws its members from among those with a personal financial stake in the company’s San Francisco projects.

AACRC founders Rev. Arelious Walker of the True Hope Church of God in Christ in Hunters Point and Rev. J. Edgar Boyd of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church of San Francisco are both members of Tabernacle Affiliated Developers, one of four Bayview–Hunters Point community builders who entered into a joint venture with Lennar/BVHP to build 30 percent of Lennar’s for-sale units at Parcel A. TAD is building the affordable units while Lennar develops the market-rate homes.

Neither Walker nor Boyd disclosed this conflict of interest at a July 31 Board of Supervisors hearing where they and the busloads of people Lennar helped ferry to City Hall created the illusion that the community was more concerned about keeping work going on Parcel A than temporarily shutting down the site while the health concerns of people in the Bayview were addressed.

Referring to reports from the city’s Department of Public Health, which claimed that there is no evidence that asbestos dust generated by the grading poses a threat to human health, Walker and Boyd warned that even a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s Parcel A site would adversely affect an already economically disadvantaged community. There is no way to test for whether someone has inhaled asbestos that could pose long-term risks, and Lennar supporters have used that void to claim all is well.

But even if community benefits such as home-building contracts, better parks, and job training opportunities do trickle down to Bayview–Hunters Point residents, will those opportunities outweigh the risk of doing business with a company that has endangered public health, has created deep divisions within an already stressed community, and is struggling financially?

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Minister Christopher Muhammad, whose Nation of Islam–affiliated nonprofit filed the Prop. 65 suit "individually and on behalf of the general public," described Lennar as "a rogue company that can’t be trusted."

"I’m concerned about the health of the community, as well as the other schools that border the shipyard," Muhammad said. "Our contention is that Lennar purposefully turned the monitors off. If you read the air district’s asbestos-dust mitigation plan, it appears that there was a way to do this grading safely. And the community went along with it. The problem was that Lennar was looking at their bottom line and violated every agreement. They threw the precautionary principle to the wind, literally. And the city looked the other way."

And even if Rev. Walker truly believes the June 2008 Bayview ballot measure is "a chance for all of us to move forward together," does it make financial sense, against the backdrop of a nationwide mortgage meltdown, to give Lennar permission to build thousands of homes at Candlestick Point when this measure doesn’t even specify what percentage of the 8,000 to 10,000 proposed new units would be rented or sold at below-market rates?

Lennar/BVHP has already reneged on promises to build rental units at its Parcel A site, and on Aug. 31, Lennar Corp., which is headquartered in Miami Beach, Fla., reported a third-quarter net loss of $513.9 million, compared to third-quarter net earnings of $206.7 million in 2006. Its stock continues to tumble, hitting a 52-week low of $14.50 per share on Nov. 26, down from a 52-week high of $56.54.

On Nov. 2, Reuters reported that Standard and Poor’s had cut Lennar’s debt rating to a junk-bond level "BB-plus" because of Lennar’s "exposure to oversupplied housing markets in California and Florida." And on Nov. 16 the Orange County Register reported that Lennar is shelving a condominium-retail complex in Long Beach and keeping high-rise condos it built in Anaheim vacant until the housing market bounces back.

Redevelopment Agency executive director Fred Blackwell, who was hired Aug. 30, told us his agency’s deposition and development agreement with Lennar wouldn’t let the company indefinitely mothball its housing units: "The DDA gives Lennar and the vertical developers the option to lease the for-sale units for one year, prior to their sale."

While the agency has been criticized for failing to do anything about Lennar’s problems on Parcel A and letting the company out of its obligation to build rental units, Blackwell said it is able to hold Lennar accountable.

"I feel like the DDA gives us all the tools we need," Blackwell told us. "We have opportunities to ‘cure’ whatever the contractor’s default is, but we can’t just arbitrarily shut things down."

But many in the community aren’t convinced. With the grim housing picture and the 49ers saying they’d rather be in Santa Clara, the only certain outcome from passage of this ballot measure would seem to be a mandate for the city to turn over valuable public lands and devote millions of dollars in scarce affording-housing funds to subsidize the ambitions of a corporation with a dubious track record that is actively resisting public accountability.

True, Lennar has promised to rebuild the Alice B. Griffith public housing project without dislocating any residents, and the measure also allows for the creation of 350 acres of parks and open spaces, 700,000 square feet of retail stores, two million square feet of office space, and improved transit routes and shoreline trails.

But although the rest of the shipyard is contaminated with a long list of human-made toxins, would passage of the initiative mean an early transfer of the shipyard from the Navy to the city and Lennar? And with that shift, the requirement that we put even more faith in this corporation’s ability to safely manage the project?

In October, Newsom, who was running for reelection at the time, told the Guardian he was worried about Lennar’s ability to follow through on "prescriptive goals and honor their commitments."

"We have to hold them accountable," Newsom told us. "They need to do what they say they’re going to do. We need to hold them to these commitments."

But how exactly is the mayor holding Lennar accountable?

In March, when the Guardian asked Newsom’s office if he intended, in light of Lennar’s Parcel A failures, to push ahead with plans to make Lennar the master developer for the 49ers stadium and Candlestick Point, the Mayor’s Office of Communications replied by referring us to Sam Singer, who has been on Lennar’s PR payroll for years.

On Nov. 18 the Chronicle reported that Singer was on the campaign team for the Bayview ballot initiative, along with former 49ers executive Carmen Policy, Newsom’s campaign manager and chief political consultant Eric Jaye, Newsom’s former campaign manager Alex Tourk, political consultant Jim Stearns, and political advertising firm Terris, Barnes and Walters, which worked on the 1997 49ers stadium bond and the 1996 measure for the Giants’ ballpark, both approved by voters.

In recent months Lennar has asked the Guardian to send questions to its latest PR flack, Lance Ignon, rather than Singer. In reply to our latest round of queries, about lawsuits and air district violations, Ignon forwarded us the following statement: "The record is abundantly clear that at each and every stage of the redevelopment process, Lennar has been guided by a commitment to protecting the health and safety of the Bayview–Hunters Point community. Lennar has fully cooperated with all relevant regulatory agencies and public health professionals to determine whether grading operations at the Shipyard pose a health threat to local residents. After months of exhaustive analysis, numerous different health experts — including [the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry] — concluded that the naturally occurring asbestos did not present a serious long-term health risk. Lennar will continue to work with the San Francisco Department of Public Health and other regulatory agencies to ensure the health of the community remains safeguarded."

Actually, the ATSDR report wasn’t quite that conclusive. It took issue with the faulty dust monitoring equipment at Parcel A and noted that exposure-level thresholds for the project were derived from industrial standards for workers who wear protective gear and don’t have all-day exposure. "However, there are studies in the scientific literature in which long term lower level/non-occupational exposures (from take home exposures and other areas of the world where naturally occurring asbestos occur) caused a low but epidemiologically detectable excess risk of mesothelioma," the ATSDR-DPH report observes.

It’s not surprising to see Lennar gloss over issues of liability, but it’s curious that Newsom and other top officials are so eager to push a proposal that would give Lennar control of Candlestick Point and perhaps result in a 49ers stadium on a federal Superfund site — without first demanding a full and public investigation of how the developers could have so miserably failed to enforce mandatory plans at Parcel A.

This fall the Newsom administration was peeved when the San Francisco Board of Education, which includes Newsom’s education advisor Hydra Mendoza, and the Youth Commission unanimously called for a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s Parcel A site until community health issues are addressed.

These demands were largely symbolic, since major grading at the site is complete, but the Mayor’s Office shot back with a Nov. 2 memo including the request that city department heads and commissions follow the example of the Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee and the Bayview Project Area Committee, which have said they won’t hear further testimony on the dust issue "unless and until credible scientific evidence is presented to contradict the conclusions of the DPH, CDPH, UCSF and others that the construction dust at the Shipyard had not created a long-term or serious health risk."

Such complex points and counterpoints have been like dust in the air, preventing the public from getting a clear picture of what’s important or what’s happened at the site. But a careful review of the public record shows that, at the very least, Lennar has failed to live up to its promises.

PAPER TRAIL


As records obtained through a whistle-blower lawsuit’s discovery process show, Lennar employee McIntyre was reprimanded for e-mailing a group of Lennar subcontractors including Gordon N. Ball, Luster National, and Ghirardelli Associates and demanding that their traffic-control plan implementation be in place before Gordon Ball/Yerba Buena Engineering Joint Venture "begin using (oversize construction equipment) scrapers or articuutf8g trucks on Crisp Road."

In court depositions, Menaker, who became McIntyre’s supervisor in April 2006, claimed he "never told McIntyre that he should not raise issues related to what he perceived to be deficiencies in Gordon Ball’s dust control measures.

"Rather, I repeatedly advised him that management by e-mail would not accomplish the goal of improving Gordon Ball’s performance and that he needed to communicate with Gordon Ball and others on the project in a more effective fashion. As a result of my observations of his job performance and the feedback from others … on Aug. 1, 2006, we brought in other professionals to assist with duties initially assigned to McIntyre."

But public records reveal that things continued to go awry at the site, long after the bulk of McIntyre’s construction field-management duties were transferred to David Wilkins, an employee of Lennar subcontractor Luster National.

According to a report filed by the city’s Department of Health, on July 7, 2006, the DPH’s Amy Brownell drove to the Lennar trailers and informed McIntye that Lennar was in violation of Article 31, the city’s construction-dust ordinance, after she observed numerous trucks generating "a significant amount of dust that was then carried by the wind across the property line." She even observed a water truck on the haul road doing the same thing as it watered the road.

On Aug. 9 — eight days after McIntyre was relieved of his field-construction management duties and seven days after Lennar declared it could not verify any of its air district–mandated asbestos-monitoring data — Brownell drove to the Lennar trailers and spoke with McIntyre’s successor, Wilkins, about dust problems generated by hillside grading, haul trucks, and an excavator loading soil into articulated trucks.

"Every time [the excavator] dumped the soil into the trucks, it created a small cloud of visible dust that crossed the project site boundary. There was no attempt to control the generation of dust," Brownell observed in her Aug. 9, 2006, inspection notes.

On Sept. 21, seven weeks after McIntyre’s transfer, Brownell issued Lennar an amended notice of violation when it came to her attention that construction-dust monitors hadn’t been in place for the first two months of heavy grading.

On Dec. 8, 2006, five months after McIntyre’s reassignment, Lennar got slapped with another violation after DPH industrial hygienist Peter Wilsey observed on Nov. 30, 2006, that "dust from the work, particularly from the trucks on the haul road, was crossing the property boundary."

And on Aug. 17, a year after McIntyre left, the DPH issued Lennar its most recent violation for not controlling dust properly. But this time the notice included a 48-hour work suspension period to establish a dust-control plan monitor to be supervised by DPH staff, with costs billed to Lennar.

"The issuance of notices of violations shows the regulatory system is working," Brownell told the Guardian. "Dust control on a gigantic project like this is a continuous, everyday process that every single contractor has to do properly. That’s Lennar’s issue and problem. At DPH, we feel we have enough tools to do inspections, which Lennar gets billed for. And if they violate our requirements again, we’ll shut them down again. Or fine them."

So far, the DPH has not chosen to fine Lennar for any of its Parcel A dust violations.

"We considered it for this last violation but decided that shutting them down for two days was penalty enough," Brownell says, adding that while she’d "never just rely on air monitors, a monitor helps when you’re having problems with dust control, because then you can say, ‘Here’s scientific proof.’<0x2009>"

And scientific proof, in the form of monitoring data during the long, hot, and dusty summer of 2006, would likely have triggered numerous costly work slowdowns and stoppages. According to a memo marked "confidential" that the Guardian unearthed in the air district’s files, Lennar stated, "It costs approximately $40,000 a day to stop grading and construction" and "Gordon Ball would have to idle about 26 employees at the site, and employees tend to look for other work when the work is not consistent."

After Rev. Muhammad began to raise a storm about dust violations next to his nonprofit Muhammad University of Islam, Lennar Urban senior vice president Menaker accused him of being a "shakedown artist" when he refused an offer to temporarily relocate the school.

But Muhammad told the Guardian he refused the offer "because I didn’t want the school to be bounced around like a political football. And because I was concerned about the rest of the community."

Muhammad said he’s trying to sound the alarm about Lennar before it takes over all of Hunters and Candlestick points. As he told us, "This city is selling its birthright to a rogue company."

TRIGGER TIME


So what does the BAAQMD intend to do about Lennar’s enforcement record past, present, and future?

At an Oct. 29 hearing on asbestos dust, the BAAQMD Board of Directors unanimously instructed staff to pursue the maximum fines possible for Lennar’s Parcel A violations.

Air district staff tried to reassure the public that the "action levels" the BAAQMD set at the shipyard are health protective and provide a significant margin of safety.

Health impacts from unmonitored exposures, BAAQMD staffer Kelly Wee said, "are well within the guidelines," claiming a "one in three million" chance of developing asbestos-related diseases.

BAAQMD board member Sup. Chris Daly, who as a member of the Board of Supervisors voted July 31 to urge a temporary shutdown of Lennar’s Parcel A site, praised the air district for "moving forward with very conservative action levels.

"But these levels are political calls that are not necessarily scientific or health based," Daly added. "The initial violation, the one that, according to Lennar, CH2M Hill is responsible for, we don’t know what those levels of asbestos were, and that’s when the most significant grading occurred.

"The World Health Organization and [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] scientists are very clear that any level of exposure to asbestos comes with an increased health risk, and if you are already exposed to multiple sources, this becomes more serious," he said, referring to the freeways, power plants, sewage treatments plants, and substandard housing that blight the community, along with the area’s relatively high rate of smoking.

The BAAQMD’s Wee told the organization’s board that Lennar did not conduct proper oversight of its contractors and did not properly document the flow of air through its monitors but did discover and report its lapses in August 2006.

"Lennar exceeded the air district’s work shutdown level on at least 23 days in the post–Aug. 1, 2006, period, which is when the developer was monitoring asbestos dust," Wee observed, noting that the air district has two additional notices of violation pending against Lennar for 2007: one for overfilling dump trucks, the other for failing to maintain enough gravel on truck-wheel wash pads.

BAAQMD spokesperson Schkolnick later confirmed to the Guardian that the air district issued Lennar a notice of violation on Oct. 26 for failing to control naturally occurring asbestos at Parcel A, where grading is finished, but Lennar subcontractor Ranger is digging up the earth again to lay pipes.

"It’s time for the board to make sure the air district is as aggressive as possible to protect residents and sensitive receptors," Daly said. "Asbestos is carcinogenic. The state and federal government knows it. That was why there was an asbestos-dust mitigation plan. The air district asked for air monitoring because of the site’s proximity to a school. The air monitors were sold not just to the city but to the public as the major safeguards to the community, especially sensitive receptors, but during the most gigantic grading period and perhaps the most gigantic exposures, we don’t know what the levels of asbestos were."

Fellow BAAQMD board member Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who was a key swing vote against urging a Lennar work stoppage at the Board of Supervisors meeting in July, is now joining Daly in demanding full enforcement of the law.

"The July 31 resolution had no way to force Lennar or the SFRA to do anything," McGoldrick told the Guardian, explaining why he’s now taking a stronger stance. "It seemed that we’d reached the conclusion that the community didn’t want to shut down the project, since it included 31 percent affordable housing, and that the work was essential in terns of revitalizing the area and that the evidence presented seemed to show that everything is now under control."

But because the coalition of Lennar supporters — who didn’t mention they are on Lennar’s payroll until after the July 31 resolution failed — is now pushing a ballot measure to vastly expand Lennar’s control in our city, McGoldrick is demanding answers and accountability.

"We want to look into whether Lennar screwed up deliberately, and if so, fine them to the hilt," McGoldrick said. "But let’s get the project on Parcel A going, because the grading has been completed and it will be beneficial to the community."

McGoldrick claimed that in July he and Daly knew they had an air district hearing coming.

"And we knew where the strongest action could be taken in terms of sticking it to Lennar and showing them we won’t just be looking over your shoulder, we’ll be standing on it," McGoldrick told us.

"A fine means we have warned you — and we’ve got a gun to your head. It means if you don’t act properly, we can pull the trigger," McGoldrick said, noting that at the time of the July 31 vote the Parcel A grading was essentially done and no one could present any solid evidence that the public health had been harmed.

"So now the question is: did you or did you not do this? [A maximum fine of] $75,000 a day for 383 days, even if it’s not a lot of money to Lennar — it’s a lot of embarrassment," McGoldrick said.

But if Lennar tries to delay settling with the air district to avoid fines until after the June 2008 election, will its perceived unwillingness to face consequences backfire at the ballot box — and soil Newsom’s reputation as a great environmentalist in the process?

As McGoldrick observed, "Some of us are having serious second thoughts about going forward with Lennar. Our feeling is, you should sit down and cooperate with the air district and settle this thing with them. And you know darn well that we are standing there, ready to pull the trigger."

He framed the issue this way: "We’re saying to the Mayor’s Office, you guys have a responsibility [to ensure Lennar is accountable] before you give them another 350 acres — on top of the 63 acres they already have — just to save the mayor’s butt, since he blew it with the Olympics and the 49ers."

LENNAR BY THE NUMBERS

Number of days Lennar Corp. had been in violation of air district monitoring rules, according to the Sept. 6, 2006, citation: 383

Fine, per day, for vioutf8g the air district’s plan: $1,000–$75,000, depending on intent

Maximum fine Lennar faces: $28.7 million

Fine, per day, for vioutf8g the city’s construction-dust plan: $5,000

Number of cited violations of city’s construction-dust control plan: 5

Daily cost Lennar claims for stopping work at Parcel A: $40,000

Amount Lennar paid subcontractors for grading Parcel A: $19.5 million

Amount Lennar paid Sam Singer Associates for public relations work in 2005: $752,875

Amount Lennar paid CH2M Hill for environmental consulting work: $445,444

Parcel A acreage: 63

Acreage Lennar controls on Treasure Island: 508

Percentage of rental units promised at Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island: 27

Number of rental units Lennar is building at Parcel A: 0

Acreage in the Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative: 780

Number of rental or below-market-rate homes in Bayview initiative: Unknown

Lennar’s share price Nov. 26: $14.50 (a 52-week low)

Lennar’s stock’s 52-week high: $56.54

The reel world

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Among the coverage of the horrific San Francisco Bay oil slick, I saw a short video of a fowl gliding through sea glimmering with petroleum. The bird maintained grace in this toxic environment, navigating marbled, paperlike swirls in the blackened water. That image had an indelibly uncomfortable beauty, the sort that occurs in Takeshi Murata’s videos, in which cinema — transferred to digital media — begins to transmogrify into something that slithers like mercury and soaks into our psyches.

His current show at the recently relocated and vastly expanded Ratio 3 gallery is centered on a new six-minute work, Escape Spirit VideoSlime, though the addition of another piece, Untitled (Pink Dot) (2006) creates a satisfying double bill. Both works feature buzzing electronic soundtracks by Robert Beatty, vivid acid-trip color schemes, and not-so-veiled references to environmentalism. Escape, the more narrative of the pair, was created with generic nature footage of chimps in the forest, while Pink Dot appropriates scenes from Rambo: First Blood. In both, Murata deconstructs the imagery. Pixels reveal their capacity to act like paint, then reconfigure into fleeting photographic images of animals, explosions, and consuming, liquefied landscapes. They evoke a morass, an underworld similar to Barbarella’s Matmos, befitting the term VideoSlime and its promise of creaming the virtual.

The pieces are screened in separate stalls, yet if you stand between them they can be viewed simultaneously. Their ominous soundtracks, however, constantly blend together into somewhat overdetermined eeriness. Both are nightmarishly memorable, though the graphic quality and the recognizable but surprisingly earnest use of Stallone make Pink a somewhat stronger work. In totality, Murata’s project fits a contemporary moment in which the digital and the analog are merging in ever more complex and perhaps confusing ways. His work can be seen in context with groups such as PaperRad and a number of young artists who create neopsychedelia from Saturday-morning cartoon detritus and the comforting, rudimentary digital nature of Pac-Man. Murata has mined this territory in earlier works such as Monster Movie (2005), but what set his recent projects apart are the sophistication and complexity of the visions.

His 2006 piece Untitled (Silver) — seen in Murata’s first show at Ratio 3 and in "Cosmic Wonder" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — is a knockout, with its metallic gray footage of horror-film star Barbara Steele floating through a well-appointed goth interior that undergoes Murata’s process of liquefaction. Silver may still be the artist’s benchmark, but these new works reveal he’s got plenty of fuel left in the continually tenuous worlds, both actual and media, that we inhabit.

TAKESHI MURATA: ESCAPE SPIRIT VIDEOSLIME

Through Nov. 30

Wed.–Sat., 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; and by appointment; free

Ratio 3

1447 Stevenson, SF

(415) 821-3371

www.ratio3.org

Sail away

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Jason Lakis is proving to be his own best bandmate. The former frontperson of Bay Area country-slowcore outfit the Red Thread, which split this summer after three stellar LPs, has lately reemerged as Mist and Mast — a solo act, though you wouldn’t guess it. Mist’s eponymous debut, which Lakis released on his Oakland Petting Zoo label, finds the artist playing every part — and sounding sneakily like some well-rehearsed group. On "Green Eyes," say, a sweet spell of country-tinged and harmony-heavy college rock, the so-called group might be the young REM with the vocalist seeming to shy away from the mic. How like the young Michael Stipe.

Being your own full band is becoming ever easier, thanks to increasingly sophisticated home-recording options, but that doesn’t make it any less weird. So when I met recently with the bespectacled, enthusiastic songwriter over Kronenbourgs at Whiskey Thieves in the Tenderloin, these were some of the first things I asked: Is it strange making music by yourself after all that time in bands? Do you even know how to play all the instruments?

"I’m not great…. I could just barely get by," Lakis said, speaking of his virtuosity, not his emotions, and reminding me that he used to drum with the late-’90s Bay Area brooders Half Film. "And I’m a big fan of the lo-fi stuff and, like, old Kinks stuff. They were great. I hate when I hear bands that just play so perfectly." He admitted that it may be a "cop-out" to prefer imperfection as an aesthetic when your skill level doesn’t allow much else. But Lakis seems to come by that taste honestly, and he’s put it to valid use on the record. The Kinks comment struck me because on Mist and Mast I’d heard occasional wisps of an even more affably imprecise ’60s British pop act: Syd Barrett–era Pink Floyd. Though the album has little of Barrett’s essential psychedelia, Mist‘s acoustic chords tend toward early Britpop’s shambling, lullabylike quality. Certainly, Lakis was excited by the notion. "I’m a huge Floyd fan!" he exulted.

On Mist that ’60s brand of slight sloppiness, whether by necessity or intent, makes an intriguing match with the more modern fumbling of Lakis’s native slowcore. Textured, plunky guitars were a Red Thread centerpiece, and they remain prominent in the solo work. The album shows its devotion to the theme by opening with a casually dueling pair. And yet, absent the band, the guitars don’t fix on any standard indie arrangement. They’re as likely to be married to ELO-style organ ("Campfire Went Out") as rollicking folk-rock rhythms ("Eyes Adjust to the Dark").

All of this interdependence stems from a new songwriting style, which Lakis described as a gathering of discrete pieces. "It was the first group of songs where I kind of felt when I was writing like I could hear all the parts," he told me. These arrangements were originally intended for a band, but given that Lakis was conceiving all tracks in advance, the collaborative process that fueled earlier Red Thread work seemed doomed. "I’m not [someone] who can easily tell people, ‘Hey, can you play this?’" the songwriter confessed. The seemingly casual recording he’d been doing in his Oakland home — "I would have my door shut, and my dog would be going grink, grink, grink at the door, and I’d have to put foamcore and a blanket up against the door, and it would get superhot in there" — suddenly became the main event.

Writing and recording piecemeal over an extended period of time and without the keel of a band and a studio can make for a messy album. And Mist and Mast is, at minimum, eclectic. The obvious outlier, "New Water," would surely have seen its programmed beats cut by another label. Lakis was fully aware of this. Rather conveniently, another thing he decided to dismiss — along with being good at everything he played — was having it all make sense together. The Red Thread albums, in contrast, were "really samey-samey," he explained. He chose to be content with Mist and Mast being, as he put it, "far from a concept album."

Was that another friendly cop-out, like calling shoddy playing charming because you "like the first Sebadoh albums"? A little, sure. But Lakis seems to be risking more by distancing himself from any single scene. How much simpler would it have been to play up the latent twang and latch onto an alt-country tag or trim a few bad moods and dub the music psych-pop? Instead, Mist and Mast feels more like a recent history of the man who made it, a trade we should be glad to make. *

MIST AND MAST

With the Dying Californian and the Winks

Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $7

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Praise the lard

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By L.E. Leone


› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS The problem is, I don’t like applesauce. The solution is to start liking applesauce. There is no other way, given the ridiculous bounty of Sonoma County’s apple harvest this year, plus the clanking, cavernous, empty chill I feel every time I open my checkbook.

I have two apple trees in my chicken yard. Since I wandered and roamed all summer and most of the fall, missing blackberries, missing peaches, missing the pears I poach from a tree down the street and the grapes I borrow from all of the vineyards around here, I am especially determined to use my millions and millions of apples — even the ones that have already fallen and have worms swizzle-sticking out of them since there ain’t no chickens yet to see to this.

I don’t like apple cider. I don’t like apple juice. Apple pie is not my favorite kind of pie. I mean, I eat applesauce, but it’s not a thing to get all excited about, like beet greens or getting to ride up front.

What I do like is apples — crunchy, juicy, crisp, ripe apples. In my hand, while I’m sitting in the tree, under it, or on a ladder. So I eat what I can, and I hand apples to people, like on the train. Or at Sockywonk’s art opening, when I went around the room and handed everyone an apple from my tree.

There’s something sexy about handing someone an apple.

I’m not religious, but sometimes a crazy-ass Bible story can point to something worth something in real life too, like how Jesus turned water into wine, and the next thing you know the French are making French toast out of stale bread. I myself have turned cream into butter, and my brother hammered spigots into trees and turned goo into maple syrup.

Voilà: breakfast!

To hand someone an apple is to say, Take a walk on the wild side!

Whereas there’s nothing at all sexy about applesauce. It’s baby food. It’s windfall, it’s "drop," it’s old. It’s easy to make. Just cut ’em up and cook ’em. Last year I made and canned a load of applesauce, and, so I wouldn’t have to eat it, I gave it all away. And no one made love to me. Well, that’s not true, but it was meat related. It had nothing to do with applesauce.

The year before that it was apple chutney, which didn’t go over so well with the Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve made and canned apple barbecue sauce too. It’s okay.

This year I am determined to learn to like applesauce.

Now, the number one tried-and-true all-time best way to start liking a thing that you didn’t like before, everybody knows, is to put bacon in it. I looked online, but none of the applesauce recipes had bacon in them. Cinnamon. Sugar. One said honey, but the closest any of them came to bacon was butter. I didn’t look real close. Anyway, the lesson of Jesus is to not use recipes. I shut down my computer and galloped into town to buy me some bacon.

My mother wonders if the serpent that spoke to Eve in the Bible story was perhaps actually honey, oozing out of a hive and slithering down the tree of life. Never mind that honey is even less likely to learn a language than snakes are — my mother has been wondering this now, she admitted to me recently, for at least 30 years.

I think she’s brilliant. And persistent. Yet flexible. Thirty years ago, for example, she was keeping bees and eating honey instead of sugar. Honey was good for you. Now it’s the root of all evil.

I never liked honey, and I found out recently that neither does Ruth Reichl, and neither did M.F.K. Fisher. So that’s my literary mom and grandma (they shudder and turn over, respectively, at the thought) and now my mom-mom too. My grandma-grandma couldn’t care less, being dead, but I come from a tradition of honey hating, apparently, and not even bacon is going to change that.

As for applesauce …

If there is in fact a root of all evil, I would like to find out what exactly it is and learn to cultivate and cook with it, like carrots, potatoes, beets.

If there is a root of all good, it’s bacon fat. I cooked the apples in it, slow and long, over the wood stove. Sprinkle of water. Speck of cinnamon. When finally I had what seemed like applesauce, I crumbled the bacon back into it, and now, praise the lard, guess who just loves applesauce?

Green City: Solar solutions

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› amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY When Berkeley mayor Tom Bates recently announced a creative city plan to financially assist homeowners who want to dress their roofs in solar panels, people across the Bay wondered if San Francisco could come up with something similar.

It’s happening. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval is working with the City Attorney’s Office on legislation to make solar panels more affordable for property owners. "The idea with my proposal is the city would use its very high credit rating to borrow money at almost zero cost," the District 11 supervisor said. That money would be turned over to citizens as low-interest loans to be paid back through a monthly assessment, similar to a property tax, with a very low interest rate. "It’s going to be a lot cheaper than what homeowners can do on their own."

A photovoltaic array for a typical home can cost the owner as much as $40,000, though state and federal incentives can reduce the cost by about $10,000. Systems are typically guaranteed by the manufacturers for 20 to 25 years, and the cost is recouped over time in reduced energy bills.

But the initial investment is high enough to discourage many would-be solar users. "The main challenge for many homeowners is the substantial upfront cost. It could easily cost you up to $50,000 to upgrade your home," Sandoval said of the bill for items like insulation, solar panels, and wind generators that can help modify a building to use less energy more efficiently.

Under this new financial program, the entire city would be declared a tax assessment district — similar to a Mello-Roos, or community benefit, district — with a resident opting in by deciding to buy solar panels. Both Berkeley and San Francisco are charter cities, which gives them the ability to tweak state laws, like the one that permits the creation of Mello-Roos districts, to meet local needs.

The plan to help private property owners has a number of public benefits. By generating most of their power on their roofs, homeowners will draw less juice from the grid, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels (and is ultimately inefficient, as much energy is lost through transmission from distant power plants).

San Francisco is fast closing in on its 2012 deadline to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels, and a July Civil Grand Jury report found the city would have to triple its current reduction rate to meet that goal. Sandoval’s plan would help. According to a federal study, one kilowatt of solar electricity offsets about 217,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Additionally, the city is aiming to provide 31 megawatts of solar power capacity through Community Choice Aggregation, which Sandoval sees as part of his plan.

"Both programs are about organizing our city to get off the grid and get off fossil fuels," he said, adding that he hopes this financing model will expand to all renewable-energy and efficiency upgrades to homes and businesses.

The plan is still in its nascent stages, and a few administrative and legal questions remain.

It’s unclear which city department would administer the program, although San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spokesperson Tony Winnicker said, "We already have a framework to administer something like this," citing the management infrastructure of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Department of the Environment has also been suggested. Sandoval said, "There are a lot of different city agencies who see benefits of administering the program." He was clear that it should remain in the public sector, with the possible assistance of community-based nonprofits that understand the local needs of their neighborhoods.

Sandoval also sees his proposed program as a way to foster the right kind of industry in San Francisco. The volume of solar business could bring more manufacturing companies, and City College of San Francisco and other educational programs could partner with manufacturers to train consultants and installers.

Barry Cinnamon, CEO of Akeena Solar, a Los Gatos PV installer, expressed enthusiasm and support for the plan. "It’s really commendable that cities like San Francisco and Berkeley are trying to find ways to do this."

Sandoval hopes to see the program up and running within a year, and said, "If no one accuses me of conflict of interest, I’ll be among the first to sign up."

This oil spill — and the next

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EDITORIAL The first headline the San Francisco Chronicle ran after the Cosco Busan crashed into a Bay Bridge protective fender Nov. 7 implied that nothing terrible had happened. It read, almost comically, "CRUNCH!" Initial reports suggested that only a few hundred gallons of fuel oil had spilled from the gash in the 810-foot freighter’s hull. Caltrans assured the public that the system had worked: the fender had absorbed the blow, the bridge had suffered no damage, and motorists had no cause for concern.

It wasn’t until much later in the day that the public learned just how big an ecological disaster was unfolding in the bay. And the most disturbing evidence is only now becoming clear: this was an accident waiting to happen. The regulations and processes in place to prevent a catastrophic oil spill in the bay — where thousands of ships with tanks carrying foul and toxic fuel oil sail through a fragile ecosystem every year — were, and are, tragically inadequate.

Just look at the record so far:

•The Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic Service on Yerba Buena Island, which has extensive radar and electronic tracking devices, was clearly aware that the container ship was heading for a collision — but was unable to stop it.

The fog was thick, and the ship, which had just made a wide S turn out of the Port of Oakland, was far from the center of the 1,200-foot-wide channel under the bridge. The Coast Guard could hardly have missed what was going on.

In fact, according to news reports, a VTS staffer radioed the bar pilot at the helm of the ship minutes before the crash and warned him that he was on an errant course. "Your [compass] heading is 235. What are your intentions?" the VTS staffer asked (essentially saying, in nautical-radio speak, "What the hell are you doing?"). The pilot, John Cota, insisted he was heading right for the center of the span and not to worry, his lawyer told reporters.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if air traffic controllers at San Francisco International Airport saw a commercial jet flying off course in zero-visibility fog and heading for the top of San Bruno Mountain. The controllers wouldn’t ask the captain what his intentions were; they would announce an imminent crash and order him to immediately increase altitude, change course … whatever was necessary. The captain wouldn’t argue that his or her instruments said everything was fine; the airliner would change course at once and sort out the question of instrument accuracy after it was out of harm’s way.

But traffic regulators on the bay operate under different rules. Even a minor course change would have prevented the accident — but according to VTS rules posted on the Web, the Coast Guard has no authority (other than in times of national-security alerts) to directly order preventative action. Under centuries-old rules of the sea, the captain of a ship is in total control and can’t be told what to do, even if a disaster is looming — and modern safety regulations haven’t caught up to that tradition.

•The ship was sailing under terrible conditions, with almost zero visibility, and even some bay captains say running a 70,000-ton vessel in an area like this in fog that thick is a bad idea. But the shipping companies have so much money on the line that nobody wants to slow down the schedules.

•It’s no secret where the fuel tanks are in a ship like this. The moment the ship took a gash that size in the hull, the authorities should have assumed that a sizable and extremely dangerous spill was in the works and begun immediate emergency containment procedures. But somehow just about everyone seemed to believe the initial reports that the crew of the ship had transferred the fuel away from the hole and only a trivial amount had escaped.

Remember, we’re talking about a rip of 100 feet, one-eighth the length of the ship, right in the part of the hull where half a million gallons of nasty bunker fuel were stored. Emergency responders should have known a spill was inevitable and gone into action right away.

Yet hours passed. No public warning was issued. Bay swimmers continued to take their morning natations — and some came back covered with oil. Nobody knew what was going on.

•The day after the spill, when it was clear an ecological disaster was happening in the bay, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom split town and went on vacation.

•So far, the taxpayers are picking up the tab for the cleanup — and in the end, it may prove difficult to get the owner of the ship to pay, even if faulty navigation equipment on the Cosco Busan was at least partly the cause of the spill. The companies that own these big ships use layers of dummy corporations, legal tricks, and secretive contracts to protect them from liability. In this case, the Chronicle has reported, the Cosco Busan is a Chinese vessel owned by either a company in Cyprus or one in Hong Kong and managed by a separate Hong Kong outfit. It’s going to take years to get to the bottom of who should pay for this mess.

Meanwhile, the crab-fishing industry is out of business, and the economic impact will be dramatic.

There are obvious lessons here — and the first is that the public and all of the regulatory and response agencies at every level of government have to stop taking a nonchalant, hands-off attitude toward the ships that represent an ecological time bomb in the bay.

Shipping is part of the lifeblood of the local economy, and everyone who lives in the Bay Area has to live with the fact that giant steel vessels loaded with toxic fluids are going to be passing through a diverse and easily damaged ecosystem every day of every year for the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot that can be done to make it safer.

For starters, the VTS ought to have the mandate and the authority to regulate shipping traffic in the same way that air traffic controllers regulate planes. Among other things, the service should keep ships in port when the fog is that thick and conditions aren’t safe. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is mad about the spill response, and that’s fine — but she and her Bay Area congressional colleagues ought to push for legislation that would allow the Coast Guard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

There’s a desperate need for a bay spill early-warning system, something that could go into effect the moment there’s a possibility of oil fouling the water — and get containment crews on hand quickly and let the public know the hazards. That’s something the State Legislature should move on immediately.

Perhaps Congress should mandate that ships passing through US coastal waters post an accident bond to ensure they don’t escape liability for disasters. But for now, the federal government needs to seize the Cosco Busan, impound its cargo, and make it clear that nothing is going anywhere until the bill for this catastrophe is settled.

And the state and federal governments need to compensate the crab fishers — and then collect the money from the ship’s owners to cover those costs.

Water trumps Bush

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What does it take to override a wartime Republican president’s veto? Water, apparently.

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Thirty five years ago, facing a rising tide of discontent over polluted water, Congress overrode d Nixon’s veto of the October 15, 1972 Clean Water Act. As a result, municipalities were able to apply for federal funds to help build and improve their local sewage treatment plants, and water got cleaner, as a result.

Yesterday, facing a mounting tide of discontent over global warming and rising sea level are real, Congress (unable to end the war or provide health care for kids,) united to reject Bush’s veto of the Water Resources Development Act.

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As a result, 900 water projects will receive federal funds, including restoration in the Florida Everglades and the replacement on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers of locks that farm groups say are crucial for shipping grain.

Here in California, the Act authorizes $1.3 billion for 54 projects, including $106 million to strengthen the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees—a shoring-up project that has profound implications for San Francisco Bay.

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As Will Travis of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission told me this week, one of the central questions now facing this region is, ‘How do we build around a Bay that we know is going to get bigger, but we don’t yet know by how much?

“It’s a bit like seismic safety,” Travis said, noted that the 8-year plan that BCDC is proposing is just a proposal.

“It’s the beginning of a long conversation,” Travis explained. ” What’s not in that proposal yet is how the federal agencies and the business sector and the research facilities and laboratories fit in.”

Travis also admitted that this conversation could be “a struggle.”

“The first reaction of most people when they realize that sea level is rising and that we have a lot of extensive development on low lying areas around the Bay is, ‘Run for the hills!’”

“And that’s a reasonable course, until you realize the implications in an estuary that is the most urbanized in the United States,” added Travis, who believes that what’s needed is “a more nuanced approach.”

Part of that approach, suggests Travis, may involve some counter intuitive steps.

“In some places, we may see the encouragement of more development along the waterfront so we can use the economic engine to protect that development—and the low-lying areas behind it. That’s where it’s going to get interesting.”

As a harbinger of what’s to come, consider the battle that is breaking out over 1,400 acres that Cargill owns in Redwood City. Save the Bay and other environmental groups are urging Cargill to abandon plan to build homes on those acres, while Cargill is committed to developing those lands, and Redwood City is trying to decide what to do.
Fun, huh?

Goldie winner — Visual art: Colter Jacobsen

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Four years ago this month Colter Jacobsen got his biggest break, his most bruising teardown, and his greatest opportunity in one 24-hour period. He’d been tapped to do a project in a much-talked-about exhibition, "17 Reasons," alongside John Baldessari, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, and Chris Johanson, organized by California College of the Arts curator Kate Fowle and Mission gallerist Jack Hanley. Jacobsen worked for weeks on the sort of public art-slash-intervention the curators wanted, "inserting new works into street life," and finally draped the midsize bronze commemorative tablet erected by the state at the corner of Albion and Camp with a sculptural suite of water-stained packing boxes and fruit crates, altered with paint, glue, collage, watercolors, and pencil into a text-laden carousel of raw forms (and, incidentally, a tribute to Kylie Minogue). When the art walk began all was well, but as afternoon wore into evening road workers discovered the desecration, and by morning the piece had been demolished. Luckily, Matthew Higgs, whose work was also in "17 Reasons," had viewed Jacobsen’s project just before dusk and invited him to stage an even grander installation at White Columns in New York City.

And when New York Times reviewer Roberta Smith singled out Jacobsen’s work at the resulting 2005 exhibition, his crew in San Francisco cheered from afar. Since then it’s been one thing after another for our lad. (He appears in and created the titles for The Key of G, Robert Arnold’s 2006 documentary on the struggles of Gannet Hosa-Belonte, who lives with Mowat-Wilson syndrome in the Mission. Jacobsen was one of his caregivers for several years.) Finally, with gallery representation and a growing international fan base, Jacobsen, now 32, can devote himself to his art full-time. In a town rich with brilliant visual and conceptual artists of all stripes, it can be hard to get attention; in some ways Jacobsen’s lucky, and he knows it. You won’t find a humbler guy.

At a recent Jack Hanley Gallery show Jacobsen tried a lot of new things, but you couldn’t get away from the doubling. A found photograph of a baptismal scene in a spooky arts and crafts church hung low on one wall. Across the gallery, just as low, Jacobsen had hung a tiny painting of the same scene — same muddy colors, same dimensions. His delicate drawings seem to be already in ruins, as if commenting on the urban realities of life in the Mission. Many are what he calls memory drawings — each an image taken from life and then matched with an identical one drawn from memory. The work’s sort of scary that way, recalling Mr. Memory in Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, who keeps the terrorists’ secrets locked up in his brain and recites them under compulsion.

Just as impressive as Jacobsen’s draftsmanship is his brilliant infusion of old-school, Mission school, DIY junk assemblage with a sophisticated gay semiotics. When the poet and curator Bill Berkson uncovered a series of texts he’d written 25 years back, he decided, well, Joe Brainard’s no longer around to do the job, so why not ask Jacobsen? (The result, Bill, in 20 panels, was included in the spring exhibit at Hanley.) I wonder if you can judge a person by their artistic heroes; Jacobsen’s wild grab bag includes Brainard, Fran Herndon, Jack Smith, Jess, Kenward Elmslie, Denton Welch, and Jack Spicer — artists and writers with a vision off-kilter and sublime. Just like a burning radio, Jacobsen gives off sparks and a crazy echo of music.

www.jackhanley.com

www.daftalliance.com/artists/colter.html

Preservation

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS On my last night at my mom’s house, Jean Gene the Frenchman brought over a pile of greens from the garden where my sisters live. It was starting to get dark, so I had to wash and chop in a hurry. No electricity. What once was a hard-working, law-abiding kitchen sink is surrounded by white buckets and rust-tinted glass jars of water.

I didn’t ask where the water came from, just poured a couple of cups into a bowl and washed 10 pounds of greens in it, concocting a brackish sort of health food soup for chickens: all bugs and grit.

While I was working, Uncle Sonny and Cher, my mom’s brother, came over to talk about property. In question: 12 acres of swampy scrubland and prickly woods outside Youngstown, Ohio, the poorest place in America (small-city size and up). The property is worth about 85¢. My uncle uses it for hunting deer and harvesting mushrooms.

He bow-hunts — hasn’t killed anything there for years — but the land is important to him. It’s important to my mom because she lives on it. There’s another brother and another sister. Like me, they all grew up there and have strange, dreamy connections to the weeds and ditches, the crippled trees, the smell of mud puddles, and 85¢ worth of security. My guess is that they are going to need lawyers to sort it out.

"Papa said never sell the property," my mom assures or reassures her brother. "As long as you have the property," she says my grandpa said, "you will never starve."

The night before, for dinner, we ate dandelion greens and chicory. For dessert: purple-tipped clover — sweet but calorically wanting. After, I found some old popcorn in a closet, popped it in olive oil over a propane stove in the garage, and ate it at the wood stove, in the dark. My mom wouldn’t have any, on account of salt. Oh, and oil.

It’s very quiet at night. You don’t even hear frogs or crickets, let alone refrigerators, and I slept like a baby in the bed in the living room, which Grandma had just died in. After three nights on a train, sitting up, I was going to sleep no matter what, but my mom, on the couch, lullabied me with a soft, hypnotically cadenced lecture on the health risks of synthetic estrogen. In a nutshell, I was going to die. Blood clots, breast cancer, liver disease … somewhere between a stroke and a heart attack, I lost consciousness. My dreams were untroubled.

Woke up to my mom’s voice complaining to a local politician over the phone about I forget which chemical in the water. Then I knew that she was going to be OK.

Aunt Sonny and Cher, Uncle Sonny and Cher informed me later that day, is jealous of my hair. I took the greens out to the garage and sautéed them in olive oil with garlic, onions, and hot peppers. I found two dusty bottles of homemade wine, one half empty, the other half full, both long turned to something beyond vinegar. I figured this would either preserve my room-temperature greens for three more days on the train or kill me immediately.

If there is one thing that I would like this column to accomplish, it is to dispel the myth that there is anything to eat on trains. Where did this rumor get started? Johnny Cash? ("I bet there’s rich folks eating in them fancy dining cars / Prob’ly drinking coffee and smoking big cigars.")

Well sir, while Amtrak might be one notch above the airlines, eats-wise, it’s many, many notches below your neighborhood greasy spoon. The burger, whether you get it from the lounge car snack counter or sit-down style in the dining car, starts out frozen. Pizza’s limp and lame. Even the grilled-chicken Caesar salad is prepackaged. Why? They have refrigeration.

I did not have a cooler. Without beef jerky and a bag of apples I would have perished on the way out. For the way back I had this 32-ounce container of preserved greens to keep me alive and, ur, regular. They tasted great until day three, until now. Reno just came into view. It’s lunchtime, and I’m afraid of my greens.

Last night, for the sake of argument, I had a half-chicken dinner in the dining car ($12.50). It sucked. Still, I highly recommend train travel. West of Denver the scenery is spectacular. And you meet people.

Guys are hitting on me, for example. Two guys, currently. One drinks beer for breakfast, and the other is wanted in New Jersey. "Nothing serious," he assures me.

I believe him and am charmed.

A polluter could cash in

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to give Mirant Corp. a $2 million credit to shut down its Potrero Hill power plan and is offering to devote two full-time staffers to helping the company move forward a new development for the site, documents show.

An Oct. 30 agreement between the Mayor’s Office and the Atlanta energy company, obtained under the Sunshine Ordinance, lays out a generous city program to encourage the shutdown — even though city officials say the pollution-spewing plant will almost certainly be closed anyway.

Negotiations are moving forward on the city’s plan to construct a new fossil fuel–burning power plant with two "peakers" between the Dogpatch and Bayview neighborhoods — a project that supporters say will make the Mirant plant economically unviable and lead to its closure.

The 145-megawatt single-cycle natural gas–burning power plant, part of San Francisco’s Electric Reliability Project, is necessary to meet a need for in-city energy reliability, according to the California Independent System Operator, a state agency that controls the power grid.

But the city’s Public Utilities Commission argues that the peakers will obviate the need to keep the Mirant plant running — and Cal-ISO has agreed to pull the company’s lucrative contract for providing power and transfer it to San Francisco once the new city-owned turbines are in place.

Critics are worried that the southeast part of the city could wind up with the worst of all worlds — that Mirant would keep its plant open and the peakers would operate too, increasing the level of airborne pollution in a neighborhood that has suffered environmental injustice for decades.

Now it appears the city has secured a solid guarantee that Mirant will shutter its Potrero plant — at a price.

"Mirant is committing to shut down once the plant is no longer needed for reliability," Jesse Blout, chief of staff of the Mayor’s Office of Workforce and Economic Development, told us. "It’s not economic to run that plant once our plant’s in place."

The city is now seeking a legally binding agreement to secure that closure — and offering a sweet deal to get it.

According to a copy of the current term sheet that’s being negotiated between San Francisco and Mirant, in exchange for the company agreeing to close the plant once it’s no longer needed for reliability, the city "will agree to immediately designate a senior staff member from each of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and the Planning Department" and "agree to review and process on a priority basis a completed application for a proposed site plan."

Additionally, the term sheet reads, "In light of the public benefits associated with expediting closure of the Potrero Power Plant, the city will agree that … Mirant will receive a credit of up to $2,000,000 — without interest — against certain city fees and costs, as described below, that would otherwise be payable in connection with review and approval of the site plan and any development project."

Felicia Browder, director of media relations for Mirant, confirmed that closure of the plant is imminent, once the state contract is terminated. However, she would not discuss details of the future use of the 27-acre site, as the deal is not finalized, something that’s supposed to happen this week.

Blout told us a deed restriction prohibits residential use of the land, and he predicted some kind of light industry for the area. The property, located at the bay’s edge between 22nd and 23rd streets, is also home to some of the toxic spoils of industry, which Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the original owner of the site, agreed to clean up to nonresidential standards when it sold its holdings to Mirant.

PUC members expressed satisfaction with the pending shutdown and voted unanimous approval of an Oct. 31 resolution authorizing the commission’s general manager, Susan Leal, to move forward with the plan. The resolution also includes clauses banning the sale of energy for profit from the three combustion turbines at the in-city facility and exploring whether two instead of three CTs could meet reliability needs.

The financing and control of the peaker project is also changing. Initially, the city negotiated a public-private partnership with JPower, a Japanese energy company with an Illinois subsidiary, to finance the $230 million project for two plants — the 145 MW in-city facility and another 48 MW plant located at San Francisco International Airport. Under the original deal, JPower would own and operate both plants for a period of some years before turning them over to the city. Now, however, the city is committing to financing the project and owning it outright, and the contract with JPower will be for operation and maintenance. "It makes more policy sense," Blout said, adding that after 12 to 14 years, "we will own the units free and clear." He said the city plans to issue tax-exempt bonds but at this point was uncomfortable stating how much they would be for.

Though JPower will be staffing the plant for the city, it will not be making a profit. "In the contract it will stipulate they can only run when Cal-ISO calls for them for reliability," the PUC’s Tony Winnicker said.

However, the 48 MW plant located at the airport will still be owned and operated by JPower for a 30-year period, and that plant is licensed to operate for 4,900 hours a year. "JPower will be able to operate that unit up to its limit," Winnicker said. "That’s part of what makes the deal profitable for JPower."

A mixed bag of environmentalists, social justice advocates, and Bayview and Potrero residents who are neighbors of the new and old plants still opposes the city building any new fossil fuel power plants. The Brightline Defense Project is currently representing the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Californians for Renewable Energy, and two citizens in litigation seeking to halt the building of the new plant.

Eric Brooks of Our City, a local public interest group, expressed skepticism of the plan to swap one power plant for another. "We would send the worst possible message to the world by building a fossil fuel power plant in our city limits at the very beginning of what must be a renewable-energy century," he told us. He’s also urging the city to let lapse Mirant’s water and air permits, which are set to expire in 2008 and 2010, respectively.

Other opposition to the city’s power plants has come from PG&E, through the Close It! Coalition, a group the utility company founded and financially supports. "These new plants will further our reliance on fossil fuels and contribute to global warming," the group states on its Web site. However, PG&E has a 20-year contract with a similar peaker plant under construction in Fresno and is building three new fossil fuel plants of its own in Antioch, Eureka, and Colusa. PG&E, of course, also wants to keep any hint of public power out of San Francisco.

Green City: The bay-delta connection

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› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Until recently, politicians and the public tended to view the problems facing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta levees as separate from the problems facing the San Francisco Bay. But now that human-made distinction is beginning to blur as scientists predict that rising sea levels and levee failures could have profound consequences for both ecosystems.

As wetlands scientist Philip Williams explained at the State of the Estuary Conference in Oakland last month, if the levees fail, a hole will open that will cause the northern area where the bay meets the delta (roughly from Richmond to Antioch) to fill with salt water and deepen, thereby eroding the delta’s valuable tidal marsh habitat.

This doomsday scenario has environmentalists clamoring for an increase in tidal marsh restoration efforts in the southernmost stretches of the bay, which are already home to the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project and a broader US Army Corps of Engineers effort to build levees and restore marshlands to protect property from flooding.

As Dr. Letitia Grenier of the San Francisco Estuary Institute said at the SOE conference, people aren’t the only ones who need habitat protection. The mosquito-eating Yuma bat, the California clapper rail, the least tern, and the chinook salmon are just a few of the many species that live around, fly across, or swim through the bay and the delta, and their survival depends on a mosaic of interconnected habitats.

Yet no agency has the clear authority to require that marshland marsh be restored, levees built, development prevented, and greenhouse gas emissions reduced.

In a recent report for the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, executive director Will Travis notes that while the BCDC, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Association of Bay Area Governments are working together as part of a Joint Policy Committee, "none of the four agencies has the authority to prohibit development in flood-prone areas [or] require that levees be constructed to protect low-lying areas, and BAAQMD does not have the authority to regulate emissions from vehicles."

Pointing out that the BCDC was created in 1965 to regulate bay fill and thus prevent the bay from becoming smaller, Travis writes that his agency "is neither legally responsible for dealing with this dramatic change of conditions that is making the Bay larger, nor does BCDC have any explicit legal authority to address this problem."

That said, in an Oct. 29 report posted on the BCDC’s Web site, Travis announced that his agency "has taken the initiative to formulate a broad outline of a comprehensive strategy for addressing climate change in the Bay region and identified changes that are needed in state law so that BCDC can play a productive role in implementing such a strategy."

This strategy includes mapping flood-prone areas, ceasing planned developments in such areas, identifying property that requires protection, and identifying areas that should be allowed to revert to tidal marsh and other types of natural habitat.

"Another probable impact of climate change is that more precipitation in the Sierra Nevada will fall as rain rather than snow, and the snow pack will melt earlier in the spring," Travis writes. This will in turn reduce the amount of late spring and summer runoff into the delta, allowing salt water to extend farther into the delta than it does now.

Travis predicts that sea level rise and higher flood flows resulting from climate change, as well as earthquake risk, will also increase the probability of catastrophic levee failure. Travis also notes that "pulling existing development back from the Bay shoreline and foregoing planned development of low-lying areas can provide an opportunity to expand the restoration of tidal wetlands."

To address these challenges, the BCDC is proposing an eight-year work program with the goal of achieving environmental accountability. "Any proposed new development within the area likely to be inundated by sea level rise should be required to obtain approval both from the local government and from BCDC."

But first, the BCDC or a new regional agency will need state legislation giving it that authority — and public recognition that seriously dealing with climate change means accepting some new regulation of private property.

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

Feinstein’s torture cave-in

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EDITORIAL Sen. John McCain — the right-wing Republican who is the only member of Congress to have been subjected to torture — has the right line on the technique that has the unfortunately innocent-sounding name of waterboarding. It’s not a complicated issue, McCain says; it’s "a horrible torture technique." McCain asks, "How can we condone this sort of stuff?"

Well, the George W. Bush administration’s candidate for attorney general seems to disagree — and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is backing him up. Michael Mukasey hedged and ducked when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked him if he thought tying someone to a board and pouring water over them to simulate drowning was an acceptable and legal practice. He insisted in testimony that he didn’t have access to the specific details of what is being done to prisoners and said that "hypotheticals are different from real life, and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical."

We acknowledge that, as Feinstein wrote in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece Nov. 3, Mukasey is probably the best nominee that Bush is going to put forward. He’s probably better than Alberto Gonzalez. And if the Senate turns him down, Bush will simply fill the nation’s top law enforcement post with an acting AG who won’t need congressional confirmation, won’t do much to solve the paralyzing morale problems in the Justice Department, and will likely be more blindly loyal to the president than Mukasey.

But the Bush administration is winding to a close, and the damage that’s been done to the Justice Department won’t be repaired until a new president takes office. The administration’s treatment of prisoners is not only a huge problem but also symbolic of everything wrong about the way Bush and his allies view foreign policy, the Constitution, and congressional oversight. So the Senate ought to be willing to take a stand on this one and simply say that any nominee for attorney general who isn’t willing to be clear about opposing torture won’t be confirmed.

Feinstein has been awfully friendly to Bush of late; after riding Air Force One to Southern California to view the fire damage, she practically gushed about what a good person the president is. That’s not what the people who elected her expect.

Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Feinstein has not only voted poorly on the war but also refused to block some of Bush’s worst judicial nominees. If she can’t stand up to this administration, she shouldn’t be on the Judiciary Committee. She’s going to be around for another five years, and there’s no procedure to recall a United States senator, but her constituents can let her know, loudly, that her latest cave-in is unacceptable. There’s an e-mail link on her Web site, Feinstein.senate.gov; the message doesn’t have to be long or complex. "I vote against torture" will do just fine. *

Hannah Montana and me

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By Tim Redmond
I suppose Child Protective Services will come and arrest me now that I’m about to admit that I took my kindergarten-age daughter to see a rock concert in Oakland, on a school night, and kept her up until well past 10 pm without a proper dinner … But what can I say: Vivian loves Hannah Montana. She has all the CDs. She watches the TV show. She puts on her best rock-star outfits and sings the songs, over and over, and dances and tells me that she’s going to be a rock star. She was Hannah Montana for Halloween. So when I learned at 4:45 pm Thursday that there were two review tickets available, I grabbed Viv, fed her half a cheese sandwich and loaded her on BART.

For those of you who don’t follow tween-age popular culture, Hannah Montana is a phenomenon. The Chron kind of blasted her a couple of days ago — and for good reason: The hype is out of control. So are the ticket prices.

And yes, we live in a culture where parents will do anything to please the little brats, including shelling out a fortune for a performance that lasted an hour and 15 minutes (almost to the minute; Disney runs a tight ship, and unlike any rock show I’ve ever been to, this one started and ended exactly on schedule).

So I should probably feel bad that I’ve not only allowed my daughter to be exposed to this, but actively encouraged it. I should feel terrible about the materialistic messages in the songs and the over-sexualized image of a 14-year-old girl prancing around onstage with male and female dancers who were all at least five years her senior.

I should feel rotten. I should go seek counseling from some proper-parenting group. I should be ashamed of myself.

And here’s what happened:

The moment Hannah Montana came onstage, after an utterly predictable 30-warm-up by a boy band called the Jonas Brothers, Vivian was transfixed. Her eyes opened like saucers, and she got this smile on her face that I will never forget as long as I live.

And frankly, the kid (the one on the stage, that is) knows how to perform. I’m not a big fan of the Work, as it were, but you have to admit, for a 14-year-old, Ms. Montana has astonishing presence. She sang (I think actually sang, not lip synched) her songs with plenty of energy and managed to dominate and control the stage even when she was surrounded by as many as a dozen other seasoned professional singers and dancers, most of whom looked to be in the early 20s.

At least, when she was Hannah Montana, she did.

Halfway through the show, she went backstage, ditched the wig and the TV persona, and came back out as herself, Miley Cyrus. Somehow, the energy wasn’t the same; I think Cyrus has got the Hannah Montana thing down, but hasn’t quite figured out how to be who she actually is. The last few songs reminded me that the person up on stage was too young to drive a car and barely old enough for high school. For her sake, I hope the Disney thing passes pretty soon and she can stop being a pre-packaged icon and start trying to learn to be Miley Cyrus; she might even turn out to be good at it.

But overall, I have to say, Viv and me had a blast. By a few minutes into the first set, my girl was standing on her chair, dancing madly and singing along. The earplugs I’d carefully installed to protect her young ear drums were ripped out and thrown on the floor (“I’ll put them back in when I WANT to, daddy!”). She’d kicked her cup of soda water into the people behind her, soaking the jacket on the back of her chair. When the rather uptight mom behind me warned that the chairs were tippy and my daughter was in danger and had already spilled her drink, I smiled and said, “it’s all rock and roll;” the woman looked at me in horror.

The place was packed with parents and daughters; our seats were pretty near the bar, so I was able to grab a bud light or two. The tweenage shrieking was almost unbearable, but Vivian didn’t care, and as a veteran of many, many Grateful Dead shows, I have to say it was no more obnoxious than the spaced-out dudes swaying and mumbling “Jerry, man.”

I mean, it was a rock show. In every way that’s right and wrong, for all the best and worst reasons …. And I knew that my daughter would be tired and crabby the next day and her ears will be ringing and she didn’t finish her homework, but fuck it: She danced all the way home.

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