Water Archives — Page 81 of 86 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Attraction is hell

February 7, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Rarely does ODC Theater pack them in the way it did Feb. 2 for SHIFT Physical Theater’s first full-evening piece, The Shape of Poison. Manuelito Biag has been making work for close to 10 years, but the buzz has really picked up since 2003, when he presented the anguished Giving Strength to this Fragile Tongue. With Poison, developed as an artist-in-residence project at ODC, he has created a work about the inarticulate, often unacknowledged forces that shape our realities. Watching the dancers in pursuit of endless and often turned-in-on-themselves encounters felt like looking for a cause in all those ruffles, vortices, and surges that continually disturb the ocean’s surface. Poison moves leisurely but doesn’t meander; for all its churning, at its core the piece is quiet and wistful.

Philippines-born and California-raised, Biag has described Poison as influenced by the yogic kleshas — corruptions of the mind that prevent enlightenment. It’s not necessary to know that Poison‘s three sections, which can stand independent of each other, explore three kleshas: ignorance, passion, and anger. It’s quite enough to realize that for each part the choreographer developed a highly charged, intensely physical language that he shaped into fluid, at-times soaring movements, which drop hints of narrative like beads of color into a pool of oil. As he did with Tongue, he turned to Jess Rowland for an inspired score, here partially performed live on piano.

The opening trio (Amy Foley, Damara Ganley, and Tessa Nebrida) began posed like statues facing different directions, until Ganley’s tiny tremor sent out enough waves to animate Foley and Nebrida. Even though each of them developed something of a personality — Foley’s lyric groundedness was particularly lovely — more than anything the dancers created a sense of space through which they were reaching for each other, at times tentatively, at times assertively. One had the feeling they were trying to pierce clouds or curtains that hid something. But whenever a connection or moment of clarity was made, it either evaporated or was cut off randomly. There was blindness to the way their hands reached out; touches became almost accidental. In a kneeling position, two dancers held hands and then simply dropped them. A cupped open hand welcomed another, but no emotional current flowed. Almost animal-like, the dancers nosed up to each other, aware of one another’s presence but rarely reutf8g.

The central duet for Biag and the resplendently fierce Erin Mei-Ling Stuart worked with material already explored in Tongue: the unspeakable tension in a relationship in which two individuals feed off each other’s heat. Here the two people were very much equals. Each emotional punch was matched by one of similar force; the two of them were always at a standoff, trapped with no end in sight. The heartbeat in Rowland’s score at times sounded like water torture as the pair watched wearily, waiting for the next explosion to hit. Biag had a stooped way of yanking his legs up — as if dragging them out of a swamp — and then ever so gently moving them like a tiger on the prowl that was truly terrifying. Though he designed wave after wave of full-bodied confrontations, one of the most telling came through his use of arms, which present very narrow points of contact. When the dancers stood face-to-face, forcing their stretched arms against each other, you could see the hell of this mutual repulsion and attraction. This duet is Poison‘s strongest component.

At this point, Biag has not quite mastered choreographing for his multicast group. In Poison‘s third section he looked at chaos and instability from a communal perspective. While he was wonderfully adept at designing fluid and formally inventive movements, the circle and diagonal lineups that he set in opposition to individual expressions of anger — tiny Tanya Bello was particularly fierce — didn’t quite add up. However, an excellent duet for Ganley and Noel Plemmons that peeled away from the ensemble brought on a finale that teetered between hope and despair. In the context of Naomi Lazard’s existential pessimism in her poem "Ordinance on Arrival" (read on tape), about a bleak world from which "there is no vehicle out," hands repeatedly planting seeds suggest futility. Yet the stricken Plemmons, after being brutally repulsed by Ganley, reached out his hand to receive a drop of saliva from each of the other dancers. Thus nourished, he veered toward a strong Ashley Taylor, who throughout seemed to function as a calm within the storm. Was he able to push through suffering into the light? It would be nice to think so. *

It’s Getting Hot in Here

February 1, 2007

It’s Getting Hot in Here
Sarah Phelan
Hours before all hell broke loose over at City hall over news that he’d been having an affair, Mayor Gavin Newsom showed up at the SFPUC’s Climate Change summit to endorse long overdue efforts to combat global warming.

“God’s delays are God’s denials,” began Newsom, blissfully unaware that his former appointments secretary Roby Rippey-Tourk was about to confess to her husband Alex Tourk about the affair, and that Tourk would immediately confront the mayor–and resign from his post as Newsom’s campaign manager. Ouch.

Looking chill in his trademark ice-blue tie, Newsom remarked that there had been no snow in the Alps during his recent trip to Davos, Switzerland, little suspecting that he’d be quite so red-faced by the end of the day.

In addressing climate change today, observed Newsom, “we’re burdened with mistakes from the past,” adding that this past, and not just the future, must be part of “the next narrative.”
Expressing enthusiasm for tidal wave and solar power, and efforts to measure where we’re at with our carbon emissions’ levels , the Gavsta wrapped up saying, “We’re willing to take great risks in San Francisco.”

And then Newsom was gone, little guessing that while water managers heard incontrovertible evidence that global temperatures and sea levels are rising, bringing a host of nasty side effects and consequences, he’d be finding himself up to his neck in political and emotional hot water as a result of his own past denials and risk takings. Double Ouch.

Tiki wiki

January 31, 2007

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER What exactly does exotica mean to a little brown girl from a tropical island? How does tiki translate to someone who once identified those fierce masks by name, as Lono, Kane, or Ku? To most, exotica tuneage boils down to Martin Denny and Esquivel; tikis, to that last retro revival that surfed in alongside early ’90s alternative culture. But for this wahine from cosmo Honolulu, exotica meant Quadrophenia mods and Italian scooters zipping around a freezing little island on the other side of the globe — and tikis were simply a fact of life, like those special guest appearances by Pele on street corners. Tiki was all around — it was more radically exotic to sport leather motorcycle jackets under the hot Hawaiian sun.

So Bay Area tiki culture’s latest return — in the form of Alameda’s Forbidden Island and Oakland’s Kona Club — is both surreal and heartwarmingly familiar, a roughed-out, kitschy-koo Hawaiian fusion. I always associated the tiki cult of the ’50s and ’60s with World War II vets nostalgic for humahumunookienookie high times, filtered through mediocre Chinese grub and juicy beverages that even a teetotalin’ mom could easily get toasted on. Here it’s all about vintage peeps, ex-locals, and hearty-drinking pirates in search of novel booty. And the Bay Area is the ideal spot for an ersatz islander experience, what with Oakland being the home of the first Trader Vic’s, Alameda’s Otto von Stroheim continuing to roll out the Tiki News zine, San Francisco’s ReSearch spurring an exotica rediscovery with its Incredibly Strange Music volumes, and the area providing ground zero for the San Francisco Bay Area Tiki Weekend.

The aforementioned gathering is thrown by Forbidden Island co-owner Martin Cate, and the loving care he and fellow big kahunas Michael and Emmanuel Thanos (who also own the Conga Lounge in Oakland) lavished on the nine-month-old lounge is obvious. On this frigid, drizzly Saturday night there’s something vaguely subversive about retreating to a tiki-strewn fantasy island when it’s colder than a sea lion’s tittie outside. Forbidden Island is a fruity-drink lover’s fever dream, boasting fresh-squeezed juices and stealth quantities of silver rum that sneak up and slam you in the puss. Cocktail umbrellas spear dollars to the cork ceiling over an early ’60s back bar, bamboo-sheltered booths, and a dramatically lit Polynesian god overseeing the grizzled locals, water cooler refugees, and fresh- and Fog Cutter–faced collegians, downing spicy grog and Scorpions by the bowl. As I suck down a delish Banana Mamacow of coconut, cream, and rum, my bud Dr. B points out the bodacious, bare-chested native maid in the black velvet masterwork by the bar: "If I had that in my room when I was a teenager, I’d never have left the house." My only disappointment: nary a note of bird whistles, a bongo beat, nor a wisp of exotica in earshot, though the jukebox is said to be crammed with the stuff. Where’s the mai tai moment for the mind’s ear?

Next up on the relative newbie list is the year-old Kona Club on a silent stretch of Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, just a stagger or so away from Trader Vic’s founder Victor Bergeron’s final resting spot at Mountain View Cemetery. Love the tapa cloth–covered walls decorated with ukuleles and old wooden surfboards; the smell of dried lauhala; and the unduutf8g hips of the life-size hula-girl robot. And I’m told the smoke-spewing volcano behind the bar is da bomb. As the Pixies blast over the sound system and Dr. B fetches more Macadamia Nut Chi Chis, I sprawl over a corner table — the sizable crowd appears to be simultaneously more hipster and fratty. Maybe it’s the quiet village of Piedmont that binds us together — the burbies outside are tucked in early while we belly up in our mini-wacky-wiki-Waikiki inside the onetime British brew pub King’s X. Who doesn’t want to recapture some mongrel carefree vacation sensation — in a silly-shack adult Disneyland of thatched straw?

I get rummy and restless, and a clutch of drinkers nearby watches raptly as I manage to make barfly magic and balance a saltshaker on its tip, bolstered only by a teeny mound of grains, for 20 minutes until a barmaid stomps by in a huff and it falls. "Now that’s amazing," the bouncer gathering glasses around me says. The tiki gods are smiling.

GOOD TIMES, OLD TIMEY You can’t toss the tikis out with the tepid bathwater, and you can’t count out bluegrass and old-time music with hoedowns like the San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival around. Affiliated with the Northern California Bluegrass Society, the completely volunteer-run, nonprofit eighth annual shindig runs from Feb. 1 to 10; showcases up-and-coming locals such as the Earl Brothers, Circle R Boys, Squirrelly Stringband, the Deciders, Jimbo Trout and the Fishpeople, the Crooked Jades’ Jeff Kazor and Lisa Berman, and the Wronglers (with Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival founder Warren Hellman); and closes with a square dance at the Swedish American Hall. This year’s fest also shines a light on a slew of Portland, Ore., combos, summing up a West Coast scene that’s younger than those in other parts, publicity volunteer Elizabeth Smith tells me. "I think that there’s an interest in roots music that’s pervasive in the Bay Area," she explains. "If you go back and look at the hippie scene in San Francisco and the fact that folks in the Dead were involved in bluegrass, you can see an evolution over time." Old times don’t have to mean bad times. *

FORBIDDEN ISLAND

Tues.–Thurs., 5 p.m.–midnight; Fri.–Sat., 5 p.m.–2 a.m.; Sun., 3–10 p.m.

1305 Lincoln, Alameda

(510) 749-0332

www.forbiddenislandalameda.com

KONA CLUB

Daily, noon–2 a.m.

4401 Piedmont, Oakl.

(510) 654-7100

SAN FRANCISCO BLUEGRASS AND OLD-TIME FESTIVAL

Feb. 1–10

See Web site for info

www.sfbluegrass.org

Missed connections

January 31, 2007

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My new favorite songwriter is my old friend NFC, which BTW stands for "new friend Catherine," not National Football Conference. Of course, I sometimes call her Ms. Conference or National or Nat just to confuse matters. And to confuse matters further, I’m rooting for her in the Super Bowl.

So while these people are going, "Go, Colts!" and those ones are going, "Yay, Bears!" I’ll be sandwiched between them on the sofa, with my fingers crossed and my knees all a-rattle, going, Catherine, Catherine, Catherine, come on, Catherine!

Probably under my breath — in case anyone still wants to invite me to their Super Bowl party.

Confession: I’ve been neglecting my old friends in order to meet new people. And the more new people I meet, the more I love my old friends. I can’t decide whether this makes me a people person or a misanthrope, so let’s just stick with chicken farmer for now.

NFC, my new favorite songwriter, only has three songs. For as long as I’ve known her, she has had the same three songs, and we sit in her heater room with coffee and guitars and a cat named Juicy Toots, rewriting and rewriting them. She rewrites. I close my eyes and concentrate on having an opinion. This one used to be a folk song. Now it’s the blues. That one has a slightly different melody. The other has a new, improved bridge, retrofitted to withstand earthquakes and open mic jitters.

By the time she dies, NFC will have either the three most exquisitely perfect musical compositions ever written or a very bad headache. My money, as usual, is on both. But that’s not what I wanted to tease her about.

I wanted to tease her about a certain evening we spent together recently. It was the coldest Thursday on record. Ever. Anywhere. Many of my dearest, warmest, longstandingest loved ones were gathering out at Gaspare’s to break pizza in honor of our prodigal pal One-Cents. I chose instead to accompany NFC to a house concert in Oakland. Where I wouldn’t know anyone.

Which is how I like it, my top priority in life these days being my unreasonable, hopeless, quixotic quest for romance, the kind with nudity in it. And that just ain’t going to happen between me and my friends, I’m afeard. (And they’re relieved.)

So: new people, I’m thinking. Girls! Boys! Boths! Couples with a sense of adventure! Single people with a sense of humor! Sensitive artists with a sense of worthlessness! House concert! Yay!!!

Come to find over preshow dinner at Manzanita that our hostess, NFC’s friend, is 80 and that everyone else at the party will be senior citizens, except us.

"Oh," I said. I love old people. "What about the bands?" I asked.

"Only one. My friend’s son," NFC said. "He’s visiting from Nashville."

Mind you, this news is broken to me at Manzanita, which is an organic vegan macrobiotic joint, two big cities and a cold, cold bay away from Gaspare’s, where all my other friends in the world are just then deciding what all to put on all their extralarge pizzas. Sausage, I’m thinking.

Cheese.

"Yum. Aren’t these whole grains and unseasoned greens delicious?" my new favorite songwriter asks, sprinkling a shaker of almost tasteless toasted brown things all over her plate, in lieu of salt and pepper.

I’m thinking: olives, pepperoni. Salad with salad dressing on it. "Yes! Delicious!" I say. And I really do clean my plate and enjoy it. And feel pretty good, kind of.

I love my friend NFC, and I love old folks and country music. But it turns out Ms. Conference had the wrong night. The house concert wasn’t until Saturday. I probably could have gotten across town, over the bridge, and across town again to the Richmond in time for a glass of wine and some crust, except that NFC’s friend invited us in anyway, bless her heart, and her son, bless his, played a whole set of his new country originals, by way of rehearsal.

We sat on the couch with cookies and water and watched and listened with big, big smiles on our faces, and I wouldn’t trade this cracked, cold Thursday for any Thursday in the world. *

MANZANITA

Lunch: daily, 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: daily, 5:30–9 p.m.

4001 Linden, Oakl.

(510) 985-8386.

Takeout and catering available

No alcohol

AE/MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Newer skin

January 31, 2007

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Readers:

Who would have thought that the column with the letter from the guy who was contemputf8g gluing his dick shut to spare his wife contact with his precome would have garnered so much attention?

Mainly, I got suggestions for changing the flavor of semen (nobody but me seemed to notice that it was not semen but Cowper’s gland fluid that was bugging them), most involving pineapple juice. This subject has been covered and covered but suffice it to say that some people get good results with pineapple juice or parsley or figs wrapped in prosciutto or whatever the experts are suggesting these days, and others diligently down the stuff and remain pretty gamy. The last time I wrote about this I made fun of Yum-Cum or whatever, that powdered stuff that was hawked all over the Web a few years ago; I heard back from some indignant executive for Yum-Cum who wanted to send me a sample, but my lab partner wasn’t having any of that.

Precome is pretty near flavorless, and if someone’s were actively raunchy, I’d be sending that dude straight to urology. I assumed that the wife was just an unusually delicate flower, a princess and the pee hole, if you will, but when body fluids are a little too piquant, I recommend starting with lots of water and fewer bitter alkaloids such as nicotine and caffeine before making any dire dietary changes. Ingesting lots of fresh, sweet fruits and vegetables is rather nice, though; so by all means, eat up if the spirit moves you.

After the pineapple juice people, the next guy suggested a thumb cot, which is pretty much the same suggestion as a condom rolled down to cover only the head, except nobody seems to carry (or make?) thumb cots. Finger cots, sure. The only thumb cots I could find were wool-lined, and that just cannot be good. I did find a rather startling product, though: Finger Gloves. They are eight to ten times thicker than a finger cot, so are probably not ideal for our purposes, but they "snugly conform," and the Web site, www.fingergloves.com, is strangely alluring — rather beautifully designed and given to eccentric but persuasive pronouncements of product virtue: "Can be utilized during virtually any circumstance. A contingency where rigid inflexible tools awkwardly struggle." I’m not at all sure to what sexual purpose Finger Gloves might properly be put, but I urge someone to figure it out.

And then there was this guy, whose letter I present chopped to bits, as it was about eleventy billion paragraphs long.

You missed one suggestion that’s perfect for this guy, and it’s a big miss — from Mantak Chia’s book Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, "External Locking: the Three Fingers Method."

A man can press an area near the perineum right before the point of ejaculation. [Complicated instructions, etc.] He still has wonderful orgasms, except this external pressure blocks the semen from shooting out the penis and into his wife’s mouth. It gets reabsorbed into the body (and doesn’t leave a man in that worn-out, must-sleep post-come state, either). I did this for a few months, and it was amazing — come without the mess.

You can get to the point where you can do it with your internal musculature, but that takes a lot of training. There are more amazing benefits to it, but one of those will be keeping his foul-tasting semen from his wife’s mouth. I’m sorry, but it sounds like you’re not empathizing with how much a layer of latex decreases the sensitivity of a penis. He wanted uncovered penis solutions, not creative condom usage.

Anyway, he should practice it solo before giving it a try with the partner.

You must know about Chia’s The Multiorgasmic Man. I’ll assume you have ignored his earlier works because their Taoist approach brought you horrid visions of new age, aikido-practicing, vibing, oversensitive, and completely unfuckable men.

Yep, right on the money there, chum. I’m not opposed to Taoist-tantric-shamanistic-kabbalistic-woohooistic ways of knowing, as long as I don’t have to practice them myself. I do know people who have learned some pretty advanced tricks (sorry, I do think of them as tricks, like eating light bulbs or squirting water out your eye) that way. I do believe this writer when he claims to have successfully cultivated a habit of retrograde ejaculation, the only remaining question is, why bother? All the theories about the benefits of conserving precious bodily fluids kind of fall apart when you realize that the body is saving exactly nothing — no calories, no nutrients, no effort — by depositing semen into the bladder instead of into a wad of dirty laundry. It’s a little less messy is all. The other "amazing benefits" are ineffable as well as unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, being more in your head than in your pants. But hey, you go. It still won’t help our guy, though, since it wasn’t semen. It was precome, and I dare you to stop precome by humming at it and poking yourself in the perineum.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

The mystery of La Contessa

January 30, 2007

› steve@sfbg.com

La Contessa was a Spanish galleon, amazingly authentic and true to 16th-century design standards in all but a couple respects. It was half the size of the ships that carried colonizers to this continent and pirates through the Caribbean. And it was built around a school bus, designed to trawl the Burning Man festival and the Black Rock Desert environs, where it became perhaps the most iconic and surreal art piece in the event’s history.

The landcraft — perhaps like the sailing ships of yore — wasn’t exactly easy to navigate. It was heavy and turned slowly. The person driving the school bus couldn’t actually see much, so a navigator sitting on the bow needed to communicate to the driver by radio. Those sitting in the crow’s nest felt the vessel gently sway as if it were rocking on waves.

Inside, it was a picture of luxury: opulent, with a fancy bar, gilded frames, velvet trim — a cross between a fancy bordello and a captain’s stateroom. And adorning its bow was a priceless work of art, a figure of a woman by San Francisco sculptor Monica Maduro.

The ship and its captains and crew — most of whom are members of San Francisco’s popular Extra Action Marching Band — hit more than their share of storms in the desert, developing a storied outlaw reputation that eventually got them banned from Burning Man. By 2005 much of the galleon’s crew was dispirited and unsure if they’d ever return. The ship was no longer welcome at the Ranch staging area run by the event’s organizers and unable to legally navigate the highways without being dismantled. So it returned to its berth on Grant Ranch, on the edge of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, where Joan Grant had welcomed La Contessa and two other large artworks since 2003.

Then late last summer someone looted the ship, stealing Maduro’s work, which was stored in a special box and hidden deep within the ship’s hold. Maduro and others have kept the theft a secret until now in the hope that they might find it, fearing that publicity and police involvement might drive the piece further underground, particularly after the reported sighting of a photo of the figurehead on Tribe.net, with a caption indicating it was the latest addition to someone’s living room.

And in early December, apparently without warning, prominent local landowner Mike Stewart set La Contessa on fire and had her charred remains hauled away.

It was a sad and unceremonious ending for La Contessa, a subject of ongoing legal actions, and an illustration of what an explosion of creativity leaves in its wake — a challenge that Burning Man faces as it seeks to become more environmentally responsible as it grows exponentially.

It was also a sign of the lingering tension between the giant countercultural festival and the residents of Hualapai Valley, who endure the annual onslaught of tens of thousands of visitors to their remote and sparsely populated region, along with the cultural and economic offerings they bring.

Grant had recently sold her 3,000-acre spread (although she retained a lifelong lease of her ranch home) to her neighbor, Mike Stewart, a landlord who didn’t share Grant’s love for the annual Burning Man event and its colorful denizens. In fact, Stewart led a legal and regulatory battle against Burning Man in 2003, trying unsuccessfully to shut down the Ranch and thus kill the event.

"I’ve been with them since they started out there, when they were just little bitty kids…. I adopted them, and they’ve always been supergood to me," Grant told the Guardian. Although she owned the Black Rock Salloon (which she spelled "like a drunk would say it" and later sold to the Burning Man organization), Grant said she was initially ostracized by many of the locals for supporting the event.

While La Contessa’s creator, Simon Cheffins (who also founded Extra Action), fruitlessly looked for land that might permanently house the galleon, it sat at the ranch, battened down against the elements and interlopers. When a grease fire destroyed Grant’s ranch house last year, sending her into the nearby town of Gerlach, La Contessa had nobody to watch over her.

A QUESTION OF INTENT

Stewart is one of the biggest property owners in the region. In addition to possessing land and water rights that would be lucrative in any development project, he owns Orient Farms, Empire Farms, and a four-megawatt geothermal power plant.

He leased Grant Ranch (also known as Lawson Ranch) for five years before buying it in October 2005; in that transaction he gave Grant a lifelong lease of her house, a provision she believed also applied to the art pieces she stored within sight of her home.

That was before the fire, which police say Stewart set Dec. 5, 2006, around noon.

"My understanding was it was OK to park it there. But I guess he had it burned down," Grant told the Guardian. "As far as I’m concerned, it was arson."

Washoe County sheriff’s deputy Tracy Bloom also told the Guardian that he considers the fire to be third-degree arson, which is punishable by one to six years in prison under Nevada law. Yet Bloom said he believes Stewart thought he had a right to burn and remove the seemingly abandoned vehicle and therefore lacks the criminal intent needed to have charges brought against him.

"According to him, they had attempted to contact the owner to no avail, so he decided to set it on fire," Bloom told us.

He wrote in his police report, "I asked Stewart if he was the one that set the La Contessa on fire and he said, ‘YES, I DID.’ I asked him why he decided to burn it. Stewart said, ‘Because the property was abandoned and left there’ and ‘I was forced to clean it up.’ "

The report indicates that Bloom, who lives in Gerlach, helped organize a community cleanup at that time, in which a scrap dealer named Stan Leavers was removing old cars and other junk. "Stewart said that was the biggest reason for burning the La Contessa so that it could be removed by Leavers," Bloom wrote. Nonetheless, he told us that didn’t give Stewart the right to burn the artwork.

"I told him, ‘You can’t just do that, and if I found any intent or malice on this, you’re going to jail,’ " Bloom told us. "But I don’t believe there was any malicious intent. If I felt like there was any malicious intent, I would have arrested him right there. I thought that boat was really cool. It was one of the coolest things out there."

Many Burners who live in Gerlach — a town with a population of a few hundred people that happens to be the nearest civilization to Burning Man’s summer festival site — have a hard time believing Stewart made an innocent mistake. "I think it was a malicious arson," Caleb Schaber, also known as Shooter, told the Guardian. "He’s the guy who tried to shut down Burning Man, and he associated La Contessa with Burning Man."

Stewart refused to comment for this story, referring questions to his lawyers at the Reno firm of Robison, Belaustegi, Sharp, and Low. Dearmond Sharp, a partner in the firm, belittled the value of the piece and implied Stewart was within his rights as a property owner to burn it.

"What would you do if someone left some junk on your property?" he asked us.

Nevada law calls for property owners to notify vehicle owners "by registered or certified mail that the vehicle has been removed and will be junked or dismantled or otherwise disposed of unless the registered owner or the person having a security interest in the vehicle responds and pays the costs of removal."

"What he should have done is get letters out and make a good-faith effort to find a [vehicle license number] or see who the owner is, little things like that," Bloom told us. Nonetheless, after talking with the prosecutor, Bloom said criminal charges are unlikely. He said, "Chances are this is something they will pursue civilly."

Also destroyed in the fire, according to Schaber, was an International Scout truck with a new motor and a MIG welder inside, owned by Dogg Erickson, which he said he parked alongside La Contessa so it would be partly protected from sandstorms.

"Everything was toast," Erickson said. "I was pretty pissed, both about my truck and La Contessa. It floors me, and I don’t know what to do about it."

Cheffins, mechanical design engineer Greg Jones, and others associated with La Contessa and Burning Man all say they never received any message from Stewart asking for La Contessa to be removed. And Cheffins said he believed he had the implied consent of Stewart to store the ship where it was.

Jones and Cheffins said that while they were securing La Contessa for the winter of 2004–5, Stewart drove by and talked to them but said nothing about removing the ship. "We talked to him about all kinds of stuff, and we were impressed by him," Jones said.

La Contessa caretaker Mike Snook also said that he met Stewart in 2005 while he was with the ship and that Stewart didn’t express a desire to have the piece off the property. Jones said there were plenty of people in town connected to Burning Man through whom Stewart could have communicated: "It’s a visible enough art piece that if he really wanted to get it off his property, someone would have known where we are," Jones said.

Burning Man spokesperson Marian Goodell told us Stewart never contacted the organization and that if he had, it would have facilitated the piece’s removal from the property.

"We were surprised to hear about the fire, absolutely shocked," she said. "It was a very iconic piece, and a lot of people are going to miss La Contessa."

According to Bloom, Stewart also claims to have contacted Grant about removing La Contessa and other items from the property. "He contacted her and said, ‘What are you going to do with it,’ and she said, ‘Do what you want with it,’ " Bloom told us. But Grant (whom Bloom did not interview for his report) told us, "That’s not truthful," adding that she hasn’t spoken with Stewart in a very long time and wouldn’t have given him permission to destroy the artwork.

Sharp did not directly answer the Guardian‘s questions about what specific actions Stewart took to contact the galleon’s owners, but he did tell us, "He didn’t know the owners, and they weren’t identified…. The vehicle wasn’t licensed and had no registration and wasn’t legal to drive on the road. It wasn’t a vehicle."

Whether or not it was a vehicle is what triggers the notification provisions under Nevada law: the section on abandoned vehicles prohibits leaving them on someone’s property "without the express or implied consent of the owner."

"It was dumped there, and there is no written consent or implied consent," Sharp told us, responding to our question about implied consent. "In our eyes, it was a piece of junk."

But Ragi Dindial, an attorney working with the La Contessa crew, said that this "junk" was actually a valuable artwork and that he is working on filing a claim with Stewart’s insurance company, alleging the fire was a result of Stewart’s negligence. If that doesn’t work, he may file a civil lawsuit.

And then there’s the lingering question of the sculpture, which survived the fire because of the theft — but still hasn’t seen the light of day. "It’s one of the greatest mysteries in the San Francisco underground," longtime Burning Man artist Flash Hopkins said. "Where is the figurehead?"

BUILDING A GALLEON

La Contessa’s massive scale has created problems since the beginning, when Cheffins had the idea in 2002 of rejuvenating Burning Man and his own enthusiasm for it by building a Spanish galleon. It was a huge undertaking that created logistical nightmares.

"It was such an ambitious and, I think, exciting idea…. I wanted to do something fairly splashy, and the idea of a ship had always been powerful," Cheffins told the Guardian recently. "I was strong on the fantasy-imagination side of things and stupid enough to want to do it. Luckily, my ass was saved by Greg Jones."

Jones, a mechanical design engineer, had been playing trumpet in Extra Action for a few months when Cheffins pitched the La Contessa project at one of the band’s rehearsals.

"I said, ‘Who’s going to design it?’ " Jones told the Guardian, describing the moment when he took on the project of a lifetime. "That first night I had in my mind a way to do it…. For me, it was a challenge of how do you make it and how do you get it out there."

Hopkins said there should have been another consideration: "You have to build something that you can take apart. Sadly, that was part of its demise."

But that doesn’t take away from what he said was one of the best art projects in the event’s history: "What those guys did when they built that ship was incredible because of the detail of it. It was an incredible feat."

The idea of a ship fit in beautifully with Burning Man’s theme that year, the Floating World, so Black Rock LLC awarded Cheffins, Jones, and their crew a $15,000 grant, which would ultimately cover about half the project’s costs, even with the hundreds of volunteer person-hours that would be poured into it.

Cheffins researched galleons, learned to do riggings as a volunteer at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, directed the project, and insisted on materials and details that would make La Contessa authentic. Jones translated that vision into reality by creating computer-aided architectural designs for the ship’s steel skeleton, a hull that would hang from that skeleton and be supported by an axle and hidden wheels separate from those of the bus, and the decks that would support dozens of passengers and hide the bus and frame — all with modular designs that could be broken down for transport to Nevada on two flatbed trucks.

"In the beginning I thought they were crazy," said Snook, an artist and Burning Man employee who worked on the project and later took control of La Contessa after the Extra Action folks ran afoul of festival organizers in 2003 for repeatedly driving too fast and breaking other rules.

The ship was built mostly at the Monkey Ranch art space in Oakland and a nearby lot the crew leased for three months. "My mom even helped," Jones said; she joined nearly 100 volunteers who pitched in, many of whom brought key skills and expertise that helped bring the project to fruition.

"The idea of the ship is it was a lady that you end up serving, and she took on a life of her own," Cheffins said. "We all came to feel like servants at some point."

Meanwhile, Cheffins commissioned Extra Action dancer, event producer, and sculptor Maduro to build a figurehead that would be the most visible and defining artistic detail on the galleon. Cheffins conveyed his vision — including the need for it to be removable so a live model could sit in her place — and Maduro added her own research and artistic touches.

"We wanted her to be beautiful, sexy, strong, and also unique," Maduro told us.

All the ship figureheads that she researched had open eyes, except one that had one eye closed, purportedly the same eye in which the ship’s captain was blind. That gave Maduro the idea of a figurehead with closed eyes.

"The figurehead is supposed to guide you through the night and see you to safety," she said. "We liked the idea that our figurehead would guide us blindly."

Maduro worked for six months in relative isolation from the ship site in Xian, artist Michael Christian’s Oakland studio. The face was designed from a mold of their friend: model and actress Jessa Brie Berkner. The armature was wood and metal, covered in carved foam coated in fiberglass veils dipped in marine epoxy, with sculpting epoxy over that, and wearing a real fabric skirt dipped in epoxy. The idea was to make it strong enough to stand being dropped by people and battered by the elements.

"This is one of the most emotional projects I’ve ever been a part of," said Maduro, who spent six years creating lifelike exhibits for natural history museums across the country, among other projects. "It was a magical mix of all these individuals that made it happen."

Yet there wasn’t enough magic to allow the shipbuilders to meet their schedule. They weren’t where they’d hoped to be when the trucks arrived to haul La Contessa to the playa, requiring a final push on location under sometimes harsh conditions.

"The intention was to build the whole deck and reassemble it," Jones said. "But we ran out of time."

Instead, the crew spent the final weeks before Burning Man — and most of their time at the event — frantically trying to finish the project, completing it on a Friday night just a couple days before the event ended. Jones recalled, "We stained it Friday afternoon during a sandstorm."

Ah, but once it was finished, it was an amazing thing to behold, made all the more whimsical by the large whale on a school bus that Hopkins built that year. La Contessa’s crew loved to "go whaling" that first year.

"The ship and the whale were the right size, and so it was like Moby Dick and the Pequod," Hopkins said.

Those who sailed on La Contessa insist it had a feel that was unique among the many art cars in Burning Man history. People were transported to another place, and many reported feeling like they were actually cutting through the high seas.

Cheffins said, "It was about creation. It was about inspiration. The whole thing was a gift."

"That’s what we heard a lot after the arson," Jones said. "This was the thing that inspired [people] to come out to Burning Man."

STORMY SEAS

A lore quickly grew around La Contessa — and the ship and crew developed something of an outlaw reputation. There were the repeated violations of the 5 mph speed limit and what looked to some like reckless driving as they pursued Hopkins’s white whale. There were people doing security who Cheffins says "were overzealous and got very rude."

Some thought the Contessa crew members were elitists for excluding some people from the limited-capacity vessel and for making others remove their blinky lights while onboard.

There were minor violations that first year because, as Jones said, "we didn’t have time to read the rules for art cars." And there were stories that La Contessa’s crew insists never happened or were blown way out of proportion. But it was enough to convince Burning Man officials to tell the crew at the end of the 2003 event that it wasn’t welcome to return.

"They thought we were fucking terrorists," Cheffins said.

Goodell insists that the organization’s problems with La Contessa have also been blown out of proportion. "I don’t think we consider our relationship to be tumultuous," she said. "They were banned because they broke the rules on driving privileges…. Following driving rules can be a life or death situation out there."

La Contessa remained at Grant Ranch during the 2004 event, which the Extra Action Marching Band skipped to tour Europe. Snook negotiated with Burning Man officials to allow La Contessa to return in 2005 as long as he retained control and did not let Cheffins, Jones, or their cohorts drive.

The fact that there were inexperienced drivers at the wheel was likely a factor in what happened the Tuesday night of Burning Man 2005.

The crew had made arrangements to take a cruise outside the event’s perimeter and within 15 minutes crashed into a dune that had formed around some object, tearing a big gash in the hull and bending a wheel. The crew was instructed by Burning Man officials to leave it until the following day, and when its members returned, the sound system, tools, a telescope, and other items had been stolen.

It was a dispiriting blow for Extra Action and the rest of the La Contessa crew, one that played a role in the decision not to try to bring La Contessa back to the event last year.

"[Last year] we didn’t take her out because of a lack of enthusiasm on our parts," Jones said.

Yet they checked on La Contessa on their way to Burning Man and discovered that it had been looted again and the figurehead was gone.

INSULT TO INJURY

As mad as she was about the theft of the figurehead and as sad as she was about the fire, Maduro said she feels a sort of gratitude toward the thief. "Assuming we get it back and it wasn’t the person who burned the ship down, then I actually owe this person a debt of gratitude."

Particularly since the fire, Maduro just wants the figurehead back, no questions asked. At her request the Guardian has agreed to serve as a neutral site where someone can drop it off without fear of prosecution; we will return the figurehead to its owners.

"I was really sad, and it surprised me how sad I was because it doesn’t belong to me personally," Maduro said. "I just always thought we would have her."

The mystery surrounding the figurehead grew after Burning Man employee Dave Pedroli, a.k.a. Super Dave, found a photo of it in someone’s living room on Tribe.net — before he knew about the fire and the theft.

"Right after the fire was reported, within a day, I put two and two together and talked with Snook," Pedroli told the Guardian, referring to his realization that the photo depicted the stolen figurehead. "Right after that I started to look for it."

But it was gone and hasn’t been seen since.

"I couldn’t imagine someone walked into that space looking at all the time and attention that went into every detail and wanting to defile it," Maduro said.

But in the world of Burning Man, where most art is temporal and eventually consumed by fire, it wasn’t the fact that La Contessa burned that bugs its creators and fans. It’s the fact that Stewart burned it.

"He still looked at La Contessa as a symbol of Burning Man, and he didn’t know it wasn’t really wanted at Burning Man anymore," said Hopkins, who has heard around Gerlach that Stewart has been boasting of torching La Contessa.

"If it had burned with all of us around it, as a ceremony, it would have been OK," Hopkins said.

That was a sentiment voiced by many who knew La Contessa. Jones said this was the ultimate insult. "If someone was going to burn it down, I wish it could be us." *

Private funeral services for La Contessa are planned for Feb. 2.

Hot Green

January 24, 2007

Kale: what is to be done? Yes, kale has its virtues: it’s good for us (as indicated by its dark green color), it presents a variety of interesting textures, it isn’t too expensive, and it turns up in winter, when our farmers markets are desolate. Still, kale is among the trickier leafy greens to handle. Its flavor — much stronger than that of chard — can put people off, and its texture — much tougher than that of spinach — can result in chewiness if the cook is in a hurry or hasn’t added enough liquid to soften it.

One decent treatment for kale begins with a diced onion and some diced bacon (I use turkey bacon), cooked in olive oil until soft and fragrant. In goes the chopped and still wet kale along with a pinch of salt, and the pot is then covered to promote a combination of steaming and braising. The finishing touch, to be added when the kale has achieved an acceptable degree of tenderness, is a splash or two of good red-wine vinegar, along with additional salt and pepper to taste.

This is a good dish, but I wouldn’t want it every night. A fine alternative is the Portuguese soup caldo verde ("hot green"), which is substantial enough to serve as a main course. Begin with some oil (or butter) heated in a soup pot; add a diced onion (with pinch of salt). When the onion has softened, throw in a clove or two of chopped garlic, stir, and let cook a minute or two. Add a link of spicy sausage (andouille, chorizo, linguica) in chunks; a couple of peeled, cubed potatoes; and four cups of water (or stock or a combination). Simmer, covered, until the potatoes are cooked, about 20 minutes. Puree. (You can do this in a blender or with an immersion wand.) Add a head of kale, cleaned and finely sliced, and another sausage link cut into rounds. Simmer about five minutes more, until the kale and sausage are cooked through. (If your sausage is precooked, you only care that it’s warmed through.) Balance the seasonings and serve. With some warm bread, a green salad, and a bottle of red wine, this makes a fortifying supper on a cold winter’s night. Also, you can warm your hands with the bowls — a nice extra if you happen to live in a badly insulated, freezing house. Anyone?

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

His world or yours?

January 24, 2007

Scarface: The World Is Yours

(Vivendi Universal; Windows XP, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Sony PSP)

GAMER One nice thing about Scarface: The World Is Yours is that although it is a first-person shooter–adventure game, there is no sewer level. It doesn’t matter what the story line is: at some point, dude is going into a sewer and tromping through ankle-deep water with rats skittering around.

Scarface doesn’t bother with that. It’s more interested in having you sell cocaine and brutally murder people, like a good game should do. You peddle so much coke that it’s really astonishing the game hasn’t offended nutty Christian groups. Maybe the makers were able to get around objections because your character, Cuban drug lord and world-class cusser Tony Montana, never kills innocent people. If you point your gun at a civilian, you find yourself saying, "Not in my game plan, bro," or the best one, "I kill one and I go straight to hell." In each case, the gun will not fire.

The game is still unspeakably violent. The story picks up right before the part in the movie Scarface when Ángel Salazar’s killer sneaks up behind Montana and airs him out. Instead of this happening, however, you direct Montana through an epic bloodbath in order to survive, so he can regain his spot at the top. Along the way, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s formula is perfected, the makers take character interaction to a new level, and you end up playing a game that could go on forever.

The scope and game play are very much like those of GTA: San Andreas, but everything’s been streamlined. Montana doesn’t have to fucking work out, eat, and shit, and there is no repetitive dating scheme. Instead, you just sell coke and kill, drive around really fast, spend millions of dollars on useless items, and pick up women.

Interacting with the peripheral people is really fun too. Montana has some standard dialogue, but once in a while an actual unique conversation will occur. When talking to pretty women, he says predictable things, but when he pulls similar pickup moves on elderly women (who give "are you nuts?"–type responses), it’s really funny. He orders his lackeys around like Don Rickles on an f-bomb rampage. When he steals a car, he utters any number of one-liners, from "Um, this is Miami undercover police — I need your car" to "You can keep the puta — I just want the car." And on top of being hilarious, the character is almost perfectly voiced by a guy named Andre Sogliuzzo, reportedly handpicked by Al Pacino for the job. James Woods, Elliot Gould, and many other actors appear.

You have the option to play as three characters other than Montana: the driver, the enforcer, and the assassin. You steal cars, bust heads, or eliminate government officials for big paydays. These missions are inexhaustible. So are Tony’s drug dealing and delivery missions, all of which are chosen from a menu. It’s nuts. This means you are free to select what to do and when you want to do it, but more important, it means there is no real end to the game ever. Even after the extensive story line is completed, there are an endless number of rival gangs for you to tangle with. Once you have defeated all the big bad guys, you sell coke and collect money. It’s like a locked groove.

Sometimes these movie-themed games are really crappy rush jobs. But it is obvious from the very start that the folks behind Scarface not only love the movie — an important factor — but also were interested in making what is potentially the best game of the past year. (Mike McGuirk)

Czar of noir

January 24, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

One doesn’t feel far from the dark, stylized universe of classic film noir in Tosca, a long, obliquely angled bar in North Beach. It is where I am to meet Eddie Muller, the man behind San Francisco’s Noir City festival and corresponding Film Noir Foundation, a self-described "writer and cultural archaeologist" with several spry volumes of film history to his credit — alluring, fanatic titles such as Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, Dark City Dames, and Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema.

"There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain … even in Los Angeles," writer-director Paul Schrader writes in his seminal essay "Notes on Film Noir." Now, as the afternoon darkens, the Columbus Avenue strip is dry, but the Lusty Lady’s neon glows while I wait for the bar to open. Noir’s trademark deep focus would lend itself well to the space inside, filled with the stale smoke of yesterday’s cigarettes and deep red and mahogany: it’s a romantic kind of place, a remembrance of things past. One of the many dizzying plot twists in Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 Out of the Past — perhaps the most knotty and melancholy of the noirs, a preeminent example of the genus — has Robert Mitchum’s heavy chasing after a double-cross in a North Beach bar. I think about this as Muller strides in with an easy gait. We settle in to talk, and the jukebox turns to smoky jazz: "Mood music," he says and then laughs.

Setting the mood is something Muller is exceedingly good at. The first time I met him was at the press conference for last year’s Noir City, staged at the York Hotel’s appropriately named Empire Plush Room — deep red, again, with little flutes of champagne. The nightclub decor of last year’s festival may have been sucked up by the cavernous dimensions of the Palace of Fine Arts, but the attempt to establish a kind of interstitial lobby space was a nice gesture, especially since these films are, if nothing else, about atmosphere.

After two years away, this coming installment of Noir City, the fifth, will be held at the Castro Theatre. Muller’s decision to return to the Castro — made difficult by the theater’s firing of programmer and chief Noir City collaborator Anita Monga — speaks to the emphasis he places on the moviegoing experience, as well as his deep respect for Bay Area audiences. "We struggle to get 200 people to the theater in LA," Muller muses before adding excitedly, "I mean, we get five times that many people out here. The studios can’t believe it…. I always have to be careful when I talk about the numbers." He laughs. "You want it to be great, but you don’t want it to be so great that they’re thinking, ‘Wait a second, why are we giving these guys a break on these old films?’ "

It’s no wonder that studios take note of Muller’s successes. Hollywood’s big players trot out old movies on DVD not so much from altruistic preservation impulses as from an urge to fatten the bottom line, the sense that there’s an extra buck to be made from some old holdings. The studios have a long history of neglecting their archives, but when hundreds of people come out and pay their money for Raw Deal (a tough little 1948 Anthony Mann picture opening this year’s festival), heads turn.

Muller is modest when discussing some of the DVD sets he has helped spark, but this propriety does nothing to disguise his missionary zeal. When he describes a preservation victory, such as an upcoming John Garfield DVD set, he beams. But as he mulls over decaying prints, his countenance turns worried. (Though gussied-up imprints like the Criterion Collection give the sense that the classics are safe, the films they release represent only a small fraction of what’s in the vaults.) Muller details his maneuverings for Joan Crawford films ("She is the force behind these films…. She is the auteur as much as John Waters is an auteur") and how he ended up trading 1952’s This Woman Is Dangerous for 1950’s The Damned Don’t Cry for this year’s fest. The urgency in his voice is from more than just trying to score an outrageous Crawford vehicle. "In these last five or six years," he says, "I’ve learned the possibility is very real that American culture can just decay and slip away."

Muller’s experience runs deep enough that it’s easy to forget Noir City is such a babe. A spree through three venues in five years (the festival has also run at the Balboa Theater) has a way of making a festival grow up fast, though the major renovation to Noir City has taken place behind the scenes. Formed in the autumn of 2005, the Film Noir Foundation was originally conceived of as a means to land the best available prints of rare films, something very much on Muller’s mind after his experience booking Edgar G. Ulmer’s gonzo 1945 B-movie Detour for the second Noir City.

"What I came to realize was that there are prints that are circuutf8g prints and there are prints that are archival prints," Muller says. "When we had [Detour ‘s] Ann Savage as a guest that second year, the only print in circulation of Detour was junk. I knew that the Cinémathèque Française had a print that was good, but they would never ship it to the Castro [a for-profit theater]. So that’s where the San Francisco Film Society stepped in, and they said they’d book it for us…. Altruism wasn’t my initial motivation for doing this. It was about getting the good prints."

In the time since, the Film Noir Foundation has blossomed into a vital preservation group. "It achieved a life of its own," Muller explains, "because it became a viable way to create an entity that presents a united front to the studios to show that there was a reason and a value in saving these films. In the case of The Window [a 1949 film that anticipates Hitchcock’s Rear Window] and Nobody Lives Forever [from 1946, a taut con man picture with a typically strong John Garfield performance], we’ve done the restoration and put them back in circulation, and they show at other festivals, and the film carries the Film Noir Foundation logo. It’s a way of saying [to the studios], ‘Look, if we do this, you’re going to get more bookings out of the film.’ We’re almost like a lobbying group for film noir."

For every victory like those films’ restoration — or, for that matter, bringing celebrity writers such as Denis Lehane and James Ellroy on to the foundation’s board — there are many grueling and perhaps futile battles. The foundation, for example, has located the elements and "contacted the people we need to contact," Muller says, to restore 1951’s The Prowler, an edgy feature about a sociopathic cop. The film might be a key noir, but the Film Noir Foundation hasn’t been able to fund the process (which Muller quotes at $40,000). The ultimate trick would be to get the studios to realize the potential and take on these costs themselves, and that is happening but not necessarily fast enough to keep many prints from disappearing. "Even films by major filmmakers," Muller adds. "There are Billy Wilder ones that are questionable…. [1942’s] The Major and the Minor — is anyone preserving that film?"

Muller relishes talking shop about forgotten films (this year 12 of 20 films in the Noir City program guide are marked, in red type, "RARITY!!! Never on VHS or DVD!" with one, 1949’s Abandoned, emphasized as being "RARE AS THEY COME!!!"). But it’s important to note that his programming is also deeply inclusive. Noir, like any singular, involved body of work, has its cult, but Muller’s aims are broad enough to keep the festival from feeling too much like a Trekkie convention. More important to him than his specific love of noir is his audience’s moviegoing experience.

"This is something that Anita really taught me," Muller explains. "When I was first programming, I’d try to load the program with all these rare, obscure things, and she said, ‘No, what you have to understand is that you appeal to people who get it, but they want to bring their friends and say, ‘You gotta see this! " He continues, "She was absolutely right. Show the traditional thing but book it with something obscure. Right out of the gate … [Noir City] showed The Lady from Shanghai with [the 1950 Ann Sheridan vehicle] Woman on the Run, and Woman on the Run was the rarest of the rare. No one had seen that. We filled the Castro that night, and people went nuts for that film, and that’s still the greatest moment we’ve had doing the festival."

Given Noir City’s emphasis on the big-screen experience, it might be surprising to learn that Muller himself first experienced many of the classic film noirs on late-night television. "I saw Detour for the first time at 3 a.m. on Movies ‘ Til Dawn," he reminisces. "You’re hallucinating these films. It’s great…. To have that be your first experience of Ann Savage: 3 a.m. when you’re 14 years old. You’re, like, ‘Who is this woman? ‘ "

It didn’t take long for Muller to graduate to the burgeoning rep scene in ’70s San Francisco, an era he reflects on in an aching piece ("Noir City, Our City") for Julie Lindow and R.A. McBride’s upcoming essay and photo collection about San Francisco’s dwindling movie theaters, Left in the Dark. "Theaters, as much as movies themselves, were landmarks of my early life," his contribution begins. "Films offered wishes and warnings about the life I could lead, the person I could be, but it was the movie houses that guided me through the streets and neighborhoods of San Francisco, introducing me to every nook and cranny of my 49-square-mile hometown."

It was noir that gave shape to Muller’s passion, and he’s hardly alone in this. I’ve often thought that the way the classic femme fatale seduces her doomed prey is the onscreen equivalent of the way films draw in — and obsess — their audiences. A great many movies are stylish and smart to the point of irresistibility; how many times has the promise of hard shadows and unrepentant fatalism at the theater won out over a sunny afternoon in the real world?

Famous for being vaguely defined as a species — as with folk music or modernism, there are common landmarks, but everyone seems to have their own criteria — the dark crime dramas of the ’40s were first christened film noir by French critics when the films flooded Paris en masse following the close of World War II. This was 1946 and, as it turns out, only the beginning. The grittiest, most whacked-out instances of noir, startling films such as D.O.A. and Gun Crazy (both released in 1950), Pickup on South Street (1953), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), arrived as Americans wrestled postwar demons and Hollywood entered an identity crisis that hinged on both Communism and television.

Most experts close noir’s door at the end of the ’50s, classifying related films following 1958’s Touch of Evil as neonoir (e.g., Chinatown, Mullholland Drive). A college professor of mine considered noir less a genre than a virus: a stylish, fatalistic streak infecting normal melodramas, gangster pictures, and even westerns and comedies. This jibes with the different ways noir announces itself: sometimes in the overall tone of a film, other times in a single character or lighting setup. Definitions aside, one emergent truth is a high benchmark of quality for films under the rubric. This film species has survived the decades better than most, especially those born of Hollywood. Schrader put it this way: "Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better-made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, western, and so on."

Schrader follows this with the observation that "film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters, actors." In other words, film noirs are creditable examples of what the esteemed critic André Bazin referred to as the "genius of the system," that strange mix of artistry, economics, and streamlined collaboration that helped to define the studio era. It’s a point not lost on Muller. "There are business factors as well as artistic factors that are brought to bear," he says. "You can’t look at one without the other." During our conversation an implicit criticism of auteurism (the mode of movie critique that is interested in films in terms of their directors) begins to emerge.

Muller has his favorite directors, of course, but he’s more interested in untangling a film’s production history — the messy business of sorting out who did what — than in pontificating about why one director’s style is better than another’s. (Indeed, auteurist debates often have the quality of those childhood arguments over whether Superman would beat Batman in a fight.) There are, of course, those directors who really did shape their own work, exerting an unusual degree of control, but far more typical is someone like Robert Wise, a by-assignment director who turned in salty noirs such as 1947’s Born to Kill and 1949’s The Set-Up (a superior boxing picture that runs circles around Raging Bull ) in addition to better-known schlock like The Sound of Music.

Considering the fact that so many of noir’s characters are fallen (the forgotten man and the spurned woman), it seems all too appropriate that the achievements of many of the form’s major contributors remain unsung. To take a sterling example, cinematographer John Alton is as responsible for the noir look as any director, doing for the city landscape what John Ford did for the open West. "We always have a John Alton night [at Noir City]," Muller says. "The guy is the uncredited director of some of those pictures…. Every director’s best film is with John Alton." Accordingly, this year’s Noir City will double-feature a pair of Alton-shot films, Joseph Lewis’s top-notch late noir The Big Combo (1955) and a new 35mm print of The Spiritualist (1948).

With Noir City showing additional programs spotlighting other little-known noir luminaries such as screenwriter William Bowers (1951’s Cry Danger and 1949’s Abandoned ) and actor Charles McGraw (1949’s The Threat and 1951’s Roadblock), as well as beefcake-era Burt Lancaster (1948’s I Walk Alone and, from the same year and costarring Joan Fontaine, Kiss the Blood off My Hands), it’s clear that Muller’s emphasis on a broadened sense of film production isn’t an abstract philosophy. It’s about recognizing real people and contributions, something crystallized by the fest’s guest appearances. Actress Marsha Hunt (Raw Deal) and actor Richard Erdman (Cry Danger) will appear this year, and past festivals have featured actors Farley Granger, Sean Penn, Coleen Grey (Nightmare Alley), and, of course, Detour‘s amazing Savage.

"The greatest thing to me about having done these festivals with the original people is that it gives audiences a view of noir that is very blue-collar, on the ground," Muller muses. "They never attached the name ‘film noir’ to it, but [it’s important] to talk with the actresses and to hear firsthand what they thought they were doing, and to get the writers’ point of view, which was by and large more politicized … much more so than the directors or the producers, who are a riot because they always say, ‘We shot it that way because we didn’t have a cent.’ "

When I ask Muller how the old-school talent responds to all this attention decades after the fact, he says plainly, "I can tell you in Ann’s case, it was the greatest night of her life. I mean, she has not stopped talking about it since. In some cases, it’s almost overwhelming." Such events are increasingly a challenge to put together; 60 years outside noir’s prime, it’s not getting any easier to find the genre’s original contributors. Robert Altman, who directed one of the first key neonoirs (1976’s The Long Goodbye), died the day before my meeting with Muller. If he’s gone, one wonders, how many of the original lot can be left?

The talent, of course, isn’t the only thing disappearing. DVDs are a wonderful auxiliary format for digesting cinema, but in the case of studio films from the classical era, it seems silly to contend that something isn’t lost without the full theatrical experience. A couple of weeks ago I went to the Castro to see Casablanca, a classical classic, not an extraordinary one like, say, Citizen Kane. I’d seen the film several times but never on a screen like the Castro’s. The moments when I felt its size most acutely were the most intimate ones: those interminable close-ups on Ingrid Bergman that so revel in the star’s introspective glamour. One cannot really grasp what these close-ups were designed to do without experiencing them on this scale. Everything comes into sharper relief in the theater: the close-ups are more wrenching, the dialogue funnier, the fantasy more complete.

Toward the end of his "Noir City, Our City" essay, Muller reflects on programming Noir City: "We tried to connect the audience, in a sort of cinematic séance, with 1940s era filmmakers and filmgoers," he writes. "San Francisco theaters appropriate to such a concept comprised a short list: the Castro and Balboa were the only ones still standing with even a trace of the old-style panache that once was commonplace." According to Muller, we ought to count ourselves lucky for those two. "It doesn’t really happen anyplace else," he says, referring to the electricity of a capacity crowd at the Castro. "New York has nothing like this. The best they can do is the Film Forum…. The Film Forum fills a need, but New York does not have a venue like the Castro. It does not have audiences like this, honestly."

And so, in the end, it’s about sitting alone together in the dark. Noir films possess the dream logic and stylization that make the theater necessary and, as an added bonus, a cynical sting that disintegrates any of the sloppy moralism or cheesy gentility that might otherwise taint our experience of classical Hollywood cinema (Schrader again: they are "an uneasy, exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism"). The work Muller does with Noir City strives toward many ends, but its most important function is also its most basic — strange and seductive, the films of Noir City often remind us why we fell for the movies in the first place. *

NOIR CITY 5

Jan. 26–Feb. 4, $10 per show, $35 for opening night program and reception, $100 for full series passport

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.eddiemuller.com

www.noircity.com

The devil wears Nolan Miller

January 17, 2007

TRASH TALKING BIO, TAKE ONE There are so many exquisite moments in steward Desmond Atholl’s tell-all that tells all. This ain’t no roman à clef, in other words; it’s a cutting, richly detailed, tension-filled diary of overseeing the Marlo Thomas–Phil Donahue household. Neither my favorite chapter title (“Free to Be … Me Me Me”) nor my favorite existential dilemma (“Each day as I rode up the elevator, I wondered, ‘Will I be greeted by Joan Crawford or Joan of Arc?’ “) comes close to my favorite anecdote, spilled in the ominously titled Chapter 26, “Who’s Got the Cookies?” Seems Marlo’d gathered her posse (which included Gloria Steinem) for a cruise on the couple’s yacht, the Mugsy (named after Marlo, of course). An oversight by the chef results in a snack smorgasbord that omits Marlo’s favorite dessert. “Nooooooo cookieeeesssss!!!” she screeches at Atholl. “No fucking cookies?” His reaction: “I had an irresistible urge to laugh, overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. Standing before me was an adult woman throwing a temper tantrum over some forgotten cookies…. I had visions of her floating through the sound, screaming to the seagulls, the fish — any creature that would listen — about her lost cookies.” After reflecting on his knee-jerk desire to spank her, he punch-lines by referring to the That Girl star as “that cookie monster.” And mighty tasty too. (Eddy)

TAKE TWO For anyone who’s been kicked while down, been laid low by an overbearing boss, or simply had to cope with some behemoth beeyatch, That Girl and Phil is the dog-eared paperback to keep by the bedside. Laugh yourself to sleep — or into a tumescent fantasy state over what you might poison-pen someday. My fave excerpt centers on Atholl’s primo turf — party planning — his sympathy for Thomas’s put-upon hubby, and a post–yacht cruise soiree for staffers on the 20th anniversary of Donahue. A disagreement over whether to sufficiently water the guests with cocktails turns into one of the volume’s more memorable tiffs:

“D-E-S-M-O-N-D!!!”

It wasn’t difficult to locate the source of the scream. Marlo was in the dining room glaring at the buffet, her face pale and contorted. “How dare you serve cold cuts in my house!” she exclaimed. “It’s just so low class and common! And white bread and pickles! And, my God, meat lasagna!! Fucker, you’ve done it again!!!”

Tired of her constant abuse, I replied, “Miss Thomas, please do not use the F word in my presence. It is not a word I am accustomed to hearing. In fact, I find it quite offensive. Phil requested this buffet, and these were his explicit instructions.”

Marlo pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen and loudly announced so that all the help could hear, “Take no notice of Phil! He knows nothing about being graceful! And never, never serve cold cuts in my house again! Even if the guests are common enough to eat them!”

Later, waiters hired for the evening express astonishment that the hollering hoyden could really be that beret tosser they had seen on TV. Atholl’s response: “Television is just a fantasy. This is real life!” Drama queens, start your sheep. (Kimberly Chun)

TAKE THREE I was a Borders book-shelving slave, making certain that Fiction, Mystery, and the all-important Film-TV-Radio sections maintained a sterile, organized-by-robots appearance. I did my time in the pre-Amazon, halcyon early days of the business, before it even chain-snaked out of Michigan, back when there were a mere two or three stores. (Oh woe, the lost income opportunities.) Somewhere up near the top of my overstuffed grab bag of Borders memories is the day the hardcover version of Atholl’s That Girl and Phil arrived. Anytime I was literally on my knees with a new batch of Leonard Maltin guides, I could reach over, and there was that girl — looking like she was going to jump out of her skin and race mad-skulled toward me! Nothing cured the Borders boredom of shifting the same books a few inches up and down the same shelves better than a quick look at Atholl’s huffily related tales of cold-cut and cookie rages and a glance at photos of his subject in full-on maniac mode. The only thing funnier: the day one of Paul Harvey’s mass-market paperbacks arrived with a printing error so extreme that the cover photo made him look like his face was melting from nuclear fourth-degree burns. And that, my friends, is the rest of the story. (Johnny Ray Huston)

Open mind music

January 16, 2007

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Not to misinterpret the question asked by a sneering Johnny Lydon of a San Francisco crowd as his band was self-destructing onstage at the now-defunct Winterland Ballroom almost 30 years ago, but seriously, folks, life seems unfair sometimes. In other words, here’s a sensible afterthought for your musical mind: there are simply too many damn bands at our fingertips, and sometimes we’re only lucky enough to encounter a handful of the really good ones. You might find yourself uttering regrets like "Fuck! I missed them play at that dingy hole-in-the-wall last year," and unfortunately you now have to settle for the mega-rock-star treatment as the same group works its charms on an enraptured crowd arena-style. So the story goes — rock ‘n’ roll can be a bitch.

The Curtains’ Chris Cohen is more optimistic, however.

"I try to let chance determine what I get to hear now because there’s so much music to choose from," the vocalist and guitarist of the Oakland trio confesses over coffee at Atlas Cafe in the Mission District. And though Cohen is reluctant to put his finger on any particular band that might get his musical juices pumping, he does divulge that most of the combos he encounters nowadays are his friends’ groups or supporting ensembles on tour.

"I really like when you don’t have any prior knowledge of the band, because then you can go at it with an open mind," he adds.

Such was my experience with Cohen’s project. My first exposure to the Curtains was on a chilly November night last year when I roamed over to Oakland to catch Mount Eerie’s performance at a packed 21 Grand. With no particular expectations, I leaned against a wall and watched the threesome set up their instruments. But as the band greeted the crowd with chiming keyboards and palm-muted guitar strums, my semi-inebriated attention was held and then kicked into deep interest.

Onstage, Cohen — along with guitarist-percussionist-vocalist Nedelle Torrisi and keyboardist-percussionist-vocalist Annie Lewandowski — exchanged smiles and jammed on quiet, twee pop–imbued ditties. The band’s lighthearted enthusiasm mirrored Beat Happening, while their cheerful harmonies and bubblegum-savvy melodies channeled the Softies and the Vaselines. The mood was buoyant and comfortable as the members sat in place and toyed with electric guitars, a single drum, and a wood block on one song after another.

CALAMITY TAMED

The aural beauty that floats from stereo speakers on the Curtains’ fourth album, Calamity (Asthmatic Kitty), tells a different story. Performed and recorded almost entirely by Cohen during December 2005, the album is drenched with sunny, ’60s-style psych pop and art rock experimentalism. Calamity at times evokes Smile-era Brian Wilson and early T. Rex with songs such as "Green Water" and "Invisible String," while treading into cozier-sounding territory on the opener, "Go Lucky." As intimate piano strides and acoustic guitar glide forth, Cohen’s Neil Young–ish chirp complements the melody: "Go, go, go you lucky one / You, you, you stop anywhere that someone sets you down / No, no, no spots anywhere / You, you, you will just spin me around."

But to Cohen, the Curtains aren’t trapped in a musical time warp. It’s all about what’s accessible to him at the moment.

"For that album I made a conscious decision to make something that wasn’t too fancy as far as the sound goes," he explains. "I wanted to use the sounds that were most easily available to me, which are guitar, bass, and my dad’s piano."

"I wanted it to sound very warm and personal," Cohen continues. "However, the sound of it wasn’t something so much that I had in mind but the effect that I wanted it to have on people, which was to be uplifting and make the listener feel happy. The music I value the most is the kind that takes me out of my life and makes me feel hopeful."

NEW STAGES

Since 2000, Cohen has had the Curtains in his crosshairs. Cofounded by Cohen and Trevor Shimizu, the group went through a couple of incarnations, occasionally including Andrew Maxwell, Satomi Matsuzaki, and Greg Saunier. After releasing three full-lengths, Cohen put the Curtains on hiatus in 2003 so he could join Matsuzaki and Saunier in Deerhoof. After several albums with that band, Cohen left last year to focus on his own projects.

"The Curtains before was something we would do in really brief spurts," Cohen says. "We would have a show, do a tour, and then rehearse for two weeks. I didn’t want to do it like that anymore. I wanted to make it a regular thing."

According to Deerhoof drummer and ex-Curtains member Saunier, Cohen had recorded 99 percent of Calamity before he revealed that he wanted to leave Deerhoof. "We listened to it in the car on tour, and I was stunned. It was like a garden of ideas and melodies — no two alike — everything asymmetrical and ravishingly beautiful," Saunier writes in an e-mail. "Every night I’d go to sleep fantasizing about how great the next Deerhoof record was going to be with all these hits on there. Then Chris shattered my dreams. But it’s OK, the Curtains deserve an album this beautiful in their catalog…. The Curtains are like the Jean-Luc Godard of the SF music scene, everything is so human and exposed, which, of course, takes way more nerve than any hipster’s posturing. The Curtains know no rule book for how you write songs — they write their own rule book from the spasms of the imagination. They have my undying admiration."

Cohen admits that while recording the album, he wasn’t sure whether to stamp the Curtains’ name on it, because his approach to the recording was so different from his past endeavors.

"Everything with the Curtains has always been done out of necessity," he says, going on to explain that he only had a limited amount of time to work on the music, so he played all the instruments himself.

Though Calamity includes guest vocals by Torrisi and Yasi Perera as well as musical contributions from Half-Handed Cloud leader and Sufjan Stevens chum John Ringhofer, Cohen had to rethink the album in terms of its live re-creation. "When I was making it, I wasn’t thinking of anybody else performing the music, which has made it difficult to now perform it as a band," he says. "I didn’t think anyone else would be interested, and then Nedelle was, like, ‘I want to play in a band again. Can I play in your band?’ "

After Torrisi and Lewandowski joined the Curtains, Cohen says he became "excited about playing new music again in a band with new people."

"Something that’s been really fun now is that everybody has been singing and working on harmonies," Cohen says, "and that’s something no other version of the band has done." The band doesn’t have a big repertoire, he adds, so the trio keep throwing out the songs that don’t work.

Cohen also admits that the idea of even having vocals in his band is relatively new. "I really wasn’t interested in vocals for a long time. I felt like I just wanted to make music that was really abstract, and I just didn’t have anything I wanted to sing about."

But Cohen’s vision seems to have changed with the addition of Torrisi and Lewandowski. In essence, the Curtains are starting over from scratch and fashioning Calamity‘s catchy pop into their own.

"To me, the Curtains has always been a pop band," Cohen explains. "I want it to be music that anyone can understand and enjoy. It fits into the limited amount of time that pop music seems to inhabit people’s lives." *

CURTAINS

With Sic Alps and Okay

Fri/19, 10 p.m., $7

Knockout

3223 Mission, SF

(415) 550-6994

www.theknockoutsf.com

Dine Listings

January 16, 2007

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

B Breakfast

BR Saturday and/or Sunday brunch

L Lunch

D Dinner

AE American Express

DC Diners Club

DISC Discover

MC MasterCard

V Visa

¢ less than $7 per entrée

$ $7–$12

$$ $13–$20

$$$ more than $20

DOWNTOWN/EMBARCADERO

Acme Chophouse brings Traci des Jardins’s high-end meat-and-potatoes menu right into the confines of Pac Bell Park. Good enough to be a destination, though stranguutf8g traffic is an issue on game days. (Staff) 24 Willie Mays Plaza, SF. 644-0240. American, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

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

Fleur de Lys gives its haute French cuisine a certain California whimsy in a setting that could be the world’s most luxurious tent. There is a vegetarian tasting menu and an extensive, remarkably pricey wine list. (PR, 2/05) 777 Sutter, SF. 673-7779. French, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Mandarin, though a Gen Xer by birth and a longtime resident of touristy Ghirardelli Square, still offers a matchlessly elegant experience in Chinese fine dining: a surprising number of genuinely spicy dishes, superior service, and wine emphasized over beer. (PR, 9/04) 900 North Point (in Ghirardelli Square), SF. Chinese, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

*Mijita shows that Traci des Jardins can go down-market with the best of them. The Mexican street food is convincingly lusty, but in keeping with the Ferry Building setting, it’s also made mostly with organic, high-quality ingredients. (PR, 4/05) 1 Ferry Bldg, Suite 44, SF. 399-0814. Mexican, B/L/D, ¢, AE/MC/V.

Tlaloc rises like a multistory loft on its Financial District lane, the better to accommodate the hordes of suits crowding in for a noontime burrito-and-salsa fix. They serve a mean pipián burrito and decent fish tacos. (Staff) 525 Commercial, SF. 981-7800. Mexican, L/D, ¢, AE/MC/V.

Tommy Toy’s Haute Cuisine Chinois is a cross between a steak house and The Last Emperor. The food is rich and fatty and only occasionally good. (Staff) 655 Montgomery, SF. 397-4888. Chinese, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

NORTH BEACH/CHINATOWN

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

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

Maykadeh Persian Cuisine is a great date restaurant, classy but not too pricey, and there are lots of veggie options both for appetizers and entrées. Khoresht bademjan was a delectable, deep red stew of tomato and eggplant with a rich, sweet, almost chocolatey undertone. (Staff) 470 Green, SF. 362-8286. Persian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Moose’s is famous for the Mooseburger, but the rest of the menu is comfortably sophisticated. The crowd is moneyed but not showy and definitely not nouveau. (Staff) 1652 Stockton, SF. 989-7800. American, BR/L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Rose Pistola cooks it up in the style of Liguria, and that means lots of seafood, olive oil, and lemons — along with a wealth of first-rate flat breads (pizzas, focaccias, farinatas) baked in the wood-burning oven. (PR, 7/05) 532 Columbus, SF. 399-0499. Italian, L/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Washington Square Bar and Grill offers stylish Cal-Ital food at reasonable prices in a storied setting. (Staff) 1707 Powell, SF. 982-8123. Italian, $$, L/D, MC/V.

SOMA

Hawthorne Lane remains at the top of the city’s restaurant heap after more than a decade. Bridget Batson’s modern California cuisine is first-rate, the ambience a perfection of understated elegance, and the service knowledgeable, friendly, and smooth. It is not possible to ask more from any restaurant. (PR, 9/06) 22 Hawthorne, SF. 777-9779. California, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Julie’s Supper Club and Lounge II preserves the name of a longtime SoMa institution while bringing a new fusion menu to the table. The food at its best is innovative — a sushi-like presentation of somen noodles, an asparagus version of pigs in a blanket — but prices are a little high for what you get. Excellent atmospherics. (PR, 11/06) 1123 Folsom, SF. 864-1222. Fusion/eclectic, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Koh Samui and the Monkey joins a high-value Thai menu with a spare, hip SoMa warehouse look. The sweet-hot food tends more toward the former than the latter but is excellent nonetheless. As for heat, check out the youngish crowd in their crest-of-1999, dot-com finery. (PR, 1/07) 415 Brannan, SF. 369-0007. Thai, L/D, $, MC/V.

Oola gives Ola Fendert his own platform at last, and the result is a modern, golden SoMa restaurant with a menu that mixes playful opulence with local standards. (PR, 10/04) 860 Folsom, SF. 995-2061. California, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Roy’s Restaurant promises "Hawaiian fusion" cuisine, but while there are island touches (macadamia nuts turn up in various guises), the place seems right at home on Mission Street. The cooking, once noted for a certain overwroughtness, has become elegantly restrained, and a three-course $35 prix fixe dinner is one of the better deals of its kind around town. (PR, 12/06) 575 Mission, SF. 777-0277. Hawaiian/fusion, L/D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Salt House offers a nice Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-tours-a-19th-century-factory look and utterly up-to-date California pub food, an entertaining hodgepodge that ranges from a crock of house-picked vegetables to panko-crusted mackerel to an oozingly moist chocolate Bundt cake, still warm from the oven, plus interesting proprietary-blend wines. (PR, 12/06) 545 Mission, SF. 543-8900. California/pub, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

NOB HILL/RUSSIAN HILL

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

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

East Coast West Delicatessen doesn’t look like a New York deli (too much space, air, light), but the huge, fattily satisfying Reubens, platters of meat loaf, black-and-white cookies, and all the other standards compare commendably to their East Coast cousins. (Staff) 1725 Polk, SF. 563-3542. Deli, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

La Folie could be a neighborhood spot or a destination or both, but either way or both ways it is sensational: an exercise in haute cuisine leavened with a West Coast sense of informality and playfulness. There is a full vegetarian menu and an ample selection of wines by the half bottle. (PR, 2/06) 2316 Polk, SF. 776-5577. French, D, $$$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

O’Reilly’s Holy Grail, a redo of the old Maye’s Oyster House that strikes harmonious notes of chapel and lounge, serves a sophisticated and contemporary Cal-Irish menu. (PR, 10/05) 1233 Polk, SF. 928-1233. California/Irish, BR/L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

CIVIC CENTER/TENDERLOIN

Ananda Fuara serves a distinctly Indian-influenced vegetarian menu in the sort of calm surroundings that are increasingly the exception to the rule. (Staff) 1298 Market, SF. 621-1994. Vegetarian, L/D, ¢, cash only.

*Bodega Bistro has a certain colonial formality — much of the menu is given in French — and it does attract a tony expat crowd. The food is elegant but not fancy (lobster, rack of lamb, both simply presented); if even those are too much, look to the "Hanoi Street Cuisine" items. (PR, 11/05) 607 Larkin, SF. 921-1218. Vietnamese, L/D, $$, DC/DISC/MC/V.

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

*Saha serves "Arabic fusion cuisine" — a blend of the Middle East and California — in a cool, spare setting behind the concierge’s desk at the Hotel Carlton. One senses the imminence of young rock stars, drawn perhaps by the lovely chocolate fondue. (PR, 9/04) 1075 Sutter, SF. 345-9547. Arabic/fusion, B/BR/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

HAYES VALLEY

Arlequin offers light Provençal and Mediterranean food for takeout, but the best place to take your stuff is to the sunny, tranquil garden in the rear. (Staff) 384B Hayes, SF. 863-0926. Mediterranean, B/L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Canto do Brasil The draw here is lusty yeoman cooking, Brazilian style, at beguilingly low prices. The tropically cerulean interior design enhances the illusion of sitting at a beach café. (Staff) 41 Franklin, SF. 626-8727. Brazilian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Destino reweaves traditional Peruvian flavors into a tapestry of extraordinary vividness and style, and the storefront interior has been given a golden glow that would have satisfied the most restless conquistador. (Staff) 1815 Market, SF. 552-4451. Peruvian, D, $$, MC/V.

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

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

CASTRO/NOE VALLEY/GLEN PARK

Ararat Mediterranean Tapas affords the view-minded a good setting from which to scope the foot traffic at 18th Street and Castro, along with a Turkish-scented Mediterranean menu rich in small plates and some bigger ones too. The menu’s smash hits include coins of lavash-wrapped beef (a kind of Middle Eastern beef Wellington), an enslavingly good shrimp casserole, and a coil of baklava with lavender honey. (PR, 8/06) 4072 18th St, SF. 252-9325. Mediterranean/Turkish, BR/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Eureka Restaurant and Lounge combines, in the old Neon Chicken space, a classic Castro sensibility (mirrors everywhere, fancy sparkling water) with a stylish all-American menu that reflects Boulevard and Chenery Park bloodlines. Prices are high. (PR, 12/06) 4063 18th St. SF. 431-6000. American, D, $$$, AE/MC/V.

*Firefly remains an exemplar of the neighborhood restaurant in San Francisco: it is homey and classy, hip and friendly, serving an American menu — deftly inflected with ethnic and vegetarian touches — that’s the match of any in the city. (PR, 9/04) 4288 24th St, SF. 821-7652. American, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Toast welcomes families with little children — pancakes from dawn to dusk! — as well as monied young adults, who tend to gather for weekend brunch. The deli-ish menu emphasizes sandwiches, but care is taken in the details, from a bewitching bit of paprika in the lentil soup to generous parmesan shavings and fresh croutons on the Caesar salad. (PR, 1/07) 1748 Church, SF. 282-4328. American, B/BR/L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

2223 could easily be a happening queer bar, what with all that male energy. But the American menu joins familiarity with high style, and the ambience is that of a great party where you’re bound to meet somebody hot. (Staff) 2223 Market, SF. 431-0692. American, BR/D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

HAIGHT/COLE VALLEY/WESTERN ADDITION

*Frankie’s Bohemian Cafe has Pilsner Urquell, a Bohemian beer, on tap for a touch of Czech authenticity, but the crowd is young, exuberant, Pacific Heights, het. Follow the crowd and stick with the burgers. (PR, 2/05) 1682 Divisadero, SF. 921-4725. Czech/American, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Grandeho’s Kamekyo Sushi Bar Always packed, Grandeho serves up excellent sushi along with a full Japanese menu. (Staff) 943 Cole, SF. 759-5693. Japanese, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Hukilau brings a dash of Big Island conviviality — and Big Island (i.e., big) portions — to a wind- and traffic-swept corner of the big city. Spam too, if you want it. (Staff) 5 Masonic, SF. 921-6242. Hawaiian/American, BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

Kate’s Kitchen dishes up the best scallion-cheese biscuits out west. The lines on the weekends can be long. (Staff) 471 Haight, SF. 626-3984. American, B/L, ¢.

Metro Cafe brings the earthy chic of Paris’s 11th arrondissement to the Lower Haight, prix fixe and all. (Staff) 311 Divisadero, SF. 552-0903. French, B/BR/L/D, $, MC/V.

New Ganges Restaurant is short on style — it is as if the upmarket revolution in vegetarian restaurants never happened — but there is a homemade freshness to the food you won’t find at many other places. (Staff) 775 Frederick, SF. 681-4355. Vegetarian/Indian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Tsunami Sushi and Sake Bar brings hip Japanese-style seafood to the already hip Café Abir complex. Skull-capped sushi chefs, hefty and innovative rolls. (Staff) 1306 Fulton, SF. 567-7664. Japanese/sushi, D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Zoya takes some finding — it is in the little turret of the Days Inn Motor Lodge at Grove and Gough — but the view over the street’s treetops is bucolic, and the cooking is simple, seasonal, direct, and ingredient driven. (PR, 12/05) 465 Grove, SF. 626-9692. California, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

MISSION/BERNAL HEIGHTS/POTRERO HILL

Aslam’s Rasoi reinvents a gently fading curry house as a high-powered rival to Dosa, in the next block. The food is fiery and elegant, and the menu strikes a fine balance between fleshly and fleshless choices. Desserts are not bad, particularly kulfi, a house-made cardamom ice cream presented like a frozen sliced banana. (PR, 8/06) 1037 Valencia, SF. 695-0599. Indian/Pakistani, D, $$, MC/V.

Baobab Bar and Grill serves great-tasting West African specialties like couscous, fried plantains, and savory rice dishes for a reasonable price. (Staff) 3388 19th St, SF. 643-3558. African, BR/D, ¢.

Baraka takes the French-Spanish tapas concept, gives it a beguiling Moroccan accent — harissa, preserved lemons, merguez sausage — and the result is astonishingly good food. (Staff) 288 Connecticut, SF. 255-0370. Moroccan/Mediterranean, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Blue Plate has a diner aura — bustle, clatter — but the Mediterranean food is stylishly flavorful. A great value. (Staff) 3218 Mission, SF. 282-6777. Mediterranean, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Bombay Ice Cream and Chaat Stop in for some Indian chaat — cheap, delicious fast food such as samosas and curries. (Staff) 552 Valencia, SF. 431-1103. Indian takeout, L/D, ¢.

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

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

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

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

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

*Little Nepal assembles a wealth of sensory cues (sauna-style blond wood, brass table services) and an Indian-influenced Himalayan cuisine into a singular experience that appeals to all of Bernal Heights and beyond, including tots in their strollers. (Staff) 925 Cortland, SF. 643-3881. Nepalese, L/D, $$, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Lombardo’s Fine Foods is the little café that could, in Mission Terrace. The menu is heavy on pastas and casseroles, many made from owner-chef John Lombardo’s family recipes. The orzo salad is particularly good. (PR, 9/06) 1818 San Jose, SF. 337-9741. Italian/American, BR/L/D, $, MC/V

Maharaja offers romantically half-lit pastels and great spicy food, including a fine chicken tikka masala and a dish of lamb chunks in dal. Lunch forswears the usual steam-table buffet in favor of set specials, as in a Chinese place. (Staff) 525 Valencia, SF. 552-7901. Indian, L/D, $, MC/V.

Maverick holds several winning cards, including a menu of first-rate New American food, a clutch of interesting wines by the glass and half glass, and a handsome, spare Mission District setting discreetly cushioned for sound control. (PR, 9/05) 3316 17th St, SF. 863-3061. American, L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Medjool doesn’t offer much by way of its namesake date, food of the ancient pharaohs, but the pan-Mediterranean menu (which emphasizes small plates) is mostly tasty, and the setting is appealingly layered, from a sidewalk terrace to a moody dining room behind a set of big carved-wood doors. (PR, 11/04) 2522 Mission, SF. 550-9055. Mediterranean, B/L/D, $$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

Mi Lindo Yucatán looks a bit tatty inside, but the regional Mexican cooking is cheap and full of pleasant surprises. (PR, 3/04) 401 Valencia, SF. 861-4935. Mexican, L/D, ¢, cash only.

Moki’s Sushi and Pacific Grill serves imaginative specialty makis along with items from a pan-Asian grill in a small, bustling neighborhood spot. (Staff) 615 Cortland, SF. 970-9336. Japanese, D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Pakwan has a little secret: a secluded garden out back. It’s the perfect place to enjoy the fiery foods of India and Pakistan. (Staff) 3180 16th St, SF. 255-2440. Indian/Pakistani, L/D, ¢, cash only.

Papalote Mexican Grill relieves our Mexican favorites of much of their fat and calories without sacrificing flavor. Surprisingly excellent soyrizo and aguas frescas; sexily varied crowd. (Staff) 3409 24th St, SF. 970-8815. Mexican, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Regalito Rosticeria offers spanking-fresh versions of Mexico City street-cart food in a warm setting of glossy wood, stainless steel, and glass. The long counter, backed by a busy exhibition kitchen, is epic. (PR, 12/06) 3481 18th St., SF. 503-0650. Mexican, L/D, $, AE/DISC/MC/V.

MARINA/PACIFIC HEIGHTS/LAUREL HEIGHTS

L’Amour dans le Four gives a nice local boho twist to classic French bistro style. Many dishes from the oven. Tiny, noisy, intimate. (Staff) 1602 Lombard, SF. 775-2134. French, D, $, AE/MC/V.

Betelnut Peiju Wu is a pan-Asian version of a tapas bar, drawing a sleek postcollegiate crowd with its wide assortment of dumplings, noodles, soups, and snacks. (Staff) 2030 Union, SF. 929-8855. Asian, L/D, $$, MC/V.

Dragon Well looks like an annex of the cavernous Pottery Barn down the street, but its traditional Chinese menu is radiant with fresh ingredients and careful preparation. Prices are modest, the service swift and professional. (Staff) 2142 Chestnut, SF. 474-6888. Chinese, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

Rigolo combines the best of Pascal Rigo’s boulangeries — including the spectacular breads — with some of the simpler elements (such as roast chicken) of his higher-end places. The result is excellent value in a bustling setting. (PR, 1/05) 3465 California, SF. 876-7777. California/Mediterranean, B/L/D, $, MC/V.

Sushi Groove is easily as cool as its name. Behind wasabi green velvet curtains, salads can be inconsistent, but the sushi is impeccable, especially the silky salmon and special white tuna nigiri. (Staff) 1916 Hyde, SF. 440-1905. Japanese, D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Taste of the Himalayas is primarily Nepalese, but the Indian influences on the food are many, and there are a few Tibetan items. Spicing is vivid, value excellent. (PR, 10/04) 2420 Lombard, SF. 674-9898. Nepalese/Tibetan, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

Tortilla Heights brings the Pac Heights, blond-het-frat vibe into the Western Addition and nourishes it with surprisingly good Mexican food. The menu is familiar, but the dishes are executed with care and panache, and there are some regional specialties. Open late. (PR, 9/06) 1750 Divisadero, SF. 346-4531. Mexican, L/D, $, AE/DC/DISC/MC/V.

SUNSET

Bullshead Restaurant offers buffalo burgers in various guises, and they are worth the price of the ticket (about a dollar more). The West Portal location is a slice of Route 66 Americana, while the newer Castro operation has an upstairs-downstairs, creaky-Victorian-staircase aura. The menu boasts good fries and a surprisingly convincing vegetarian burger. (PR, 11/06) 840 Ulloa, SF. 665-4350; 4230 18th St., SF. 431-4201. American/burgers, L/D, $, MC/V.

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

*Dragonfly serves the best contemporary Vietnamese food in town, in a calmer environment and at a fraction of the cost of better-known places. (PR, 8/05) 420 Judah, SF. 661-7755. Vietnamese, L/D, $$, AE/MC/V.

KL Restaurant is a Hong Kong-style seafood house that presents its wide array of creatures from the deep in an equally wide array of guises. Particularly good: the sampan-style dishes. If you’re not in an oceanic mood, the land-based stuff is good too. (PR/ 11/06) 4401 Balboa, SF. 666-9928. Chinese/seafood, L/D, $$, MC/V.

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

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

RICHMOND

*Aziza shimmers with Moroccan grace, from the pewter ewer and basin that circulate for the washing of hands to the profusion of preserved Meyer lemons in the splendid cooking. (Staff) 5800 Geary, SF. 752-2222. Moroccan, D, $$, AE/MC/V.

Be My Guest Thai Bistro offers tasty vegetarian-friendly food in a campy-hip setting reminiscent of an old Woody Allen movie. Tofu larb is surprisingly successful. (PR, 9/06) 951 Clement, SF. 386-1942. Thai, L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

*Chapeau! serves some of the best food in the city — at shockingly reasonable prices. The French cooking reflects as much style and imagination as any California menu. (Staff) 1408 Clement, SF. 750-9787. French, D, $$, AE/DC/MC/V.

Spices! has an exclamation point for a reason: its Chinese food, mainly Szechuan and Taiwanese, with an oasis of Shanghai-style dishes, is fabulously hot. Big young crowds, pulsing house music, a shocking orange and yellow paint scheme. Go prepared, leave happy. (Staff) 294 Eighth Ave, SF. 752-8884. Szechuan/Chinese, L/D, $, MC/V.

Sutro’s at Cliff House has a Miami-to-Malibu feel and offers a "California coastal" menu that appeals to tourists and locals alike. You can get everything from gumbo to seafood red curry to falafel while resting assured that the kitchen is honoring the local-seasonal-sustainable imperative. The setting — a glass house perched at the foamy edge of the Pacific — is timelessly spectacular. (PR, 7/06) 1090 Point Lobos, SF. 386-3330. Eclectic, L/D, $$$, AE/DISC/MC/V.

BAYVIEW/HUNTERS POINT/SOUTH

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

Old Clam House really is old — it’s been in the same location since the Civil War — but the seafood preparations are fresh, in an old-fashioned way. Matchless cioppino. Sports types cluster at the bar, under the shadow of a halved, mounted Jaguar E-type. (Staff) 299 Bayshore, SF. 826-4880. Seafood, L/D, $$, MC/V.

Taqueria el Potrillo serves one of the best chicken burritos in town, if not the best. You can get your bird grilled or barbecued or have steak instead or tacos. Excellent salsas and aguas frescas, and warmer weather than practically anywhere else in town. (Staff) 300A Bayshore Blvd, SF. 642-1612. Mexican, B/L/D, ¢, cash only.

BERKELEY/EMERYVILLE/NORTH

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

Café de la Paz Specialties include African-Brazilian "xim xim" curries, Venezuelan corn pancakes, and heavenly blackened seacakes served with orange-onion yogurt. (Staff) 1600 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-0662. Latin American, BR/L/D, $, AE/MC/V.

Locanda Olmo Fine versions of risotto, gnocchi, and soft polenta pie, terrific thin-crust pizzas, and good traditional desserts have made Locanda Olmo a reliable anchor in the burgeoning Elmwood neighborhood. (Staff) 2985 College, Berk. (510) 848-5544. Italian, D, $, MC/V.

OAKLAND/ALAMEDA

Le Cheval Shrimp rolls and peanut sauce, the fried Dungeness crab, the marinated "orange flavor" beef, the buttery lemongrass prawns — it’s all fabulous. (Staff) 1007 Clay, Oakl. (510) 763-8495. Vietnamese, L/D, ¢, MC/V.

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

Rockridge Café offers bountiful breakfasts, a savory meat-loaf special, and hearty cassoulet. But the burgers, wide-cut fries, and straw-clogging milkshakes remain the cornerstones of the menu. (Staff) 5492 College, Oakl. (510) 653-1567. American, B/L/D, $, MC/V. *

Eat Global

January 16, 2007

› paulr@sfbg.com

As a fellow traveler of the Luddites, I am obliged to treat the phrase "digital arts" — as in the Letterman Digital Arts Center, in the Presidio — with some skepticism. Of course I have a cell phone and a computer, a pair of digital apparatuses, and I do regard them as essential to life as we know it — as essential tools. Tools are servants, and although they are not devoid of value, their value is in their usefulness. Whatever value art has, it isn’t usefulness.

"Digital arts" might be considered an oxymoron in some quarters. The classic example of an oxymoron — Herb Caen’s phrase was "self-canceling phrase" — is "military intelligence." On the slightly more ornate side, we now have "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Interestingly, the word oxymoron includes the word moron. As for digital arts: I have an impression of busy-bee activity in the Pixar–Toy Story school, the use of computers to make more vivid monsters or car crashes or intergalactic Armageddon or other of those visual splendors from which, with the atrophy of plot and character, so much of contemporary cinema is constructed.

But … I might as well be trying to rescue the word hopefully, and that would be a waste of time, especially since there is, in one of the LDA buildings, a brand-new and fabulous restaurant and wine bar, Pres a Vi, that cries out to be described. The restaurant occupies a long, L-shaped space on the ground level of Building D (an unfortunate designation more appropriate to a prison). Part of Pres a Vi’s ceiling consists of wine-barrel ribs, giving one the sense of looking up at a segment of the world’s longest reinforced straw, while its eastern wall consists almost entirely of window glass. Through the dinnertime panes glows the pink specter of the Palace of Fine Arts, afloat on evening’s ink as if in a dream, and proof that not all great views in this city must involve bay or bridge.

Chef Kelly Degala’s menu is "global" and is oriented toward smaller plates, and the question presented is whether this diversity is polymathic or dilettantish. I incline toward the first view, since almost all the dishes are rendered with style and verve. But you can order yourself into incoherence, no question, and the little plates from around the world can start piling up as if at some buffet at an Intercontinental hotel: ravioli here, lumpia there, a hit of Thai papaya salad, some potatoes roasted Spanish-style.

If Degala is a culinary globalist, his heart is clearly in the Pacific. He has spent a lot of time in Hawaii, and his cooking reflects the islands’ mix of tropical and Asian influences. He is also attentive to Filipino cuisine, which doesn’t get much attention in the Bay Area despite a large Filipino population. His lumpia ($10 for four bite-size pieces) are exemplary: rolled cilantro crepes (somewhere between taquitos and flautas in size, and not much cilantro flavor, in case you are passionate either way) filled with rock shrimp and served with a spicy peanut dressing. He also offers a version of another Filipino dish, prawn adobo ($12), with the peeled shrimp braised in a slightly sweet soy-vinegar bath and presented on a pad of electrifyingly tasty fried jasmine rice.

Europhiles will not starve. A set of ravioli ($12), like sand dollars, are filled with duck meat and goat cheese before being gently inundated with an earthy (and gorgeously smooth with a smoothness only butter can provide) wild-mushroom sauce. The kitchen had run out of croquettes on one visit, so we jumped to plan B: jo-jos ($6), a good-size bowl of Kennebec potato wedges roasted with shreds of Serrano ham and topped with romesco, which looked like melted Velveeta (for a potato-nachos effect) and carried a slightly-too-harsh charge of smoked paprika.

Degala even manages a nod in the direction of California whimsy. How about a club sandwich ($13) on brioche, with Dungeness crab salad instead of roast turkey? (And plenty of crisp bacon!) If it’s not quite as fancy as Postrio’s lobster version, it’s at least as good. In a similar vein, there’s an ahi tuna melt ($8), the cooked fish here mashed up with red bell pepper dice and bits of cornichon into a kind of salad.

A few of the dishes seem to hold dual citizenship. An example: lobster bisque ($4), rich and creamy, spiked with brandy, topped with crème fraîche and minced chives, and served in a tall shot glass, like a miniature cappuccino. French? New Englander? Excellent, certainly. No aura of vague cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, surrounds the duck buns ($12). Here we have a classic Chinese treat: shreds of poultry, slow-cooked to moist tenderness, set between halves of little steamed buns, like tiny duck burgers. Versions of this dish aren’t hard to find on menus around town, but Degala’s duck, moist and rich and with unmistakable five-spice breath, is superlative.

Although the restaurant opened shortly after Thanksgiving, service is already at a high level, with bread and water flowing liberally and the staff knowledgeable about specials and shortages. Timing from the kitchen can be a little erratic, though, and this matters more than it might at some other place because dinners tend to be improvised arabesques rather than the more usual first course–main course–dessert ballet. You can never be quite sure which dish will show up next, but that’s not such a high price to pay when it could be coming from any place in the world. *

PRES A VI

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

1 Letterman Dr., Bldg. D, Ste. 150, SF

(415) 409-3000

www.presavi.com

Full bar

Muted noise

AE/DC/DISC/MC/V

Wheelchair accessible

Make a wish

January 16, 2007

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Sockywonk came back from Florida completely bald and we sat in the waiting room at the Kaiser lab, looking at pictures. In fluorescent lights, in the hospital hum, in the stony glare of disease … here was Florida, her Florida friends, her Florida sister, sunshine and tank tops, big smiles, water. Here was Sockywonk sitting in the haircut chair clowning for the camera, yanking fistfuls of hair right out of her scalp, waiting for the shave.

The last two things she did with her hair, when she had it, and knew she only had it for a couple more weeks, was she cut it into a Mohawk and then bleached it blond. Nowadays she wears a Davy Crockett hat with a tail, some kind of animal, and you know that I love her for this.

She took the hat off and showed me. There were lingering patches of black stubble, random and Rorschach. I put my hand there. It was warm and bristly.

I made a wish.

Once when I used to shave my head and people, including me, always wanted to touch it, I told a coworker while she was rubbing my snow dome that she could make a wish and she did and got pregnant. This was 20 years ago, more or less, in another time zone, and I can’t remember the mother’s or the father’s name, but I imagine the child of that wish, now more or less an adult, tracking me down and appearing at my door one day with a basket of fruit or a cheese tray.

"Hi!"

It had been cloudy and drizzly but mild all morning, and when we came out of Kaiser it was brilliantly sunny and freezing. "What do you really really want to eat?" I said. "More than anything in the world right now, for lunch."

"Soup," said Sockywonk. "Japanese."

It’s not like her to be decisive and I was thrilled. Soup, in particular Japanese style, is one of my favorite things in the world. On our way to my car she stepped in one of my least favorite things. I found an old copy of the Guardian in the back of the truck, opened it to Cheap Eats, and laid it out on the passenger floor.

In Japantown Center, sucking down edamame outside of Suzu because there weren’t any open tables inside, we looked at more pictures while waiting for our noodles. One of Sockywonk’s Florida girlfriends is pushing 60, and looks like she’s 35. There’s a big house, a deck, a river. Sockywonk says something about maybe moving back there.

"Would you do it?"

She doesn’t know. She’s been living in a rent-controlled apartment here for 15, 20 years. Has a lot of cool and beautiful San Francisco friends too. Some of whom, if not all of whom, are bigger than her and will chain her to a parking meter, if that’s what it comes to.

Here was a picture of Sockywonk flashing her boobs.

And here was our soup, finally, and oh-sweet-Jesus I have a new favorite restaurant! Not only do they have karaage ramen, which is fried chicken noodle soup, and not only are the noodles homemade and perfect, but the fried chicken comes in a separate bowl on the side so that, for slow eaters like me, you don’t wind up eating sog-monster mush.

I chopsticked a crispy chunk of chicken, dipped and dunked it into the dark, salty broth, and came up with an unexpected spot of ginger hanging on somewhere, a stowaway. Biting into it was like sex, if I remember correctly. Sex, not soup; the soup I remember perfectly, almost tearfully. The most succulent, deliciousest thing you can even imagine.

Fried chicken soup. Sockywonk had a combination plate, tempura over rice, and udon soup. Oh, and we also had shrimp dumplings and they were pretty good too. But how can someone who’s 60 look 35?

Chemo conks you on the head and makes you move a little slow.

Fried chicken does the same thing to me, so I had no trouble keeping step with Sockywonk on our way up the stairs to the restrooms, which of course are gender specific: one for this kind, one for that. But in this case I didn’t mind, ’cause we got to pee in harmony and wash our hands in harmony and look together into the mirror, thinking about Florida. *

SUZU JAPANESE RESTAURANT

Lunch: Mon. and Wed.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.

Dinner: Mon. and Wed.–Fri., 5–10 p.m.; Sat., 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m.; Sun., 11:30 a.m.–9:30 p.m.

1581 Webster, SF

(415) 346-5083

Takeout available

Beer and wine

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Where are the chicks?

January 16, 2007

› amanda@sfbg.com

It’s a warm, blue-sky day in late November, and about 35 people are gathered outside one of the National Park Service buildings in the Presidio, trading tales of where and when they last saw California quail. Point Reyes is named most frequently. The Marin Headlands get a few nods from the bird enthusiasts. Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park raises a minor cheer. Someone mentions "Quail Commons" in the Presidio, and an "Ooh" ripples around the circle, but it turns out the sighting was a while ago.

The enthusiastic volunteers, mostly bird lovers and Presidio neighbors, have turned out for today’s annual Quail Habitat Restore-a-Thon, an event aimed at transforming Quail Commons, the quarter-acre sliver of property located behind the Public Health Service Hospital on the western edge of the Presidio, into the national park’s premier quail habitat.

And the handful of quail that still live in the Presidio will surely appreciate it — although they might have a better time if only there were some ladies around.

Unfortunately, there aren’t. After a long morning of trimming back trees and planting sprouts of native coffee berry and coyote bush, Damien Raffa, a natural resources educator for the Presidio, confirms all the rumors that have been raked up with the weeds: the quail population has reached a new low. There are just six remaining in the Presidio. And yes, they’re all male.

The demise of the local quail population sounds like something only bird nerds would be fluffing their feathers over, but the strange thing is that the birds didn’t just fly away while the binoculars were trained elsewhere. A concerted effort to save the city’s quail population was made by multiple parties, costing thousands of dollars and using hundreds of work hours.

In 2000 the Board of Supervisors named the sociable fowl with the cunning head plumage the official bird of San Francisco. Since the informal inception of the Habitat Restore-a-Thon in the late ’90s, the number of volunteers has increased more than fivefold, and hundreds of park staff hours have been spent restoring habitats to the quail’s particular standards.

The Golden Gate Audubon Society dropped $15,000 on a Quail Restoration Plan and budgets $6,000 a year for the project. In the Presidio education has included a Web site, bright yellow "Quail Area" bumper stickers, and road signs in sensitive areas warning drivers to watch out for the little ground-loving birds. For the past two years biological monitors have been hired by the Presidio Trust to study the precious few remaining quail, with the hopes of pinpointing why they’re disappearing.

So why are the plump little fowl more commonly found trussed in gravy on sterling platters in some of the Embarcadero’s finer eating establishments than nesting under scrubby bushes among the windswept dunes on the western side of the city?

What went wrong? And what does it say about how the Presidio and other natural areas in the city are being managed?

PRESIDIO PRIORITIES

A mere 20 years ago, the state bird of California, Callipepla californica, was so bountiful in the Presidio that the average bike ride down Battery Caulfield or along Land’s End yielded at least one sighting.

"Brush rabbits, wrentits, Western screech owls, and the California quail" are the common wildlife listed off by Josiah Clark, a San Francisco native who spent his childhood scrambling around the Presidio with his binoculars. He’s now a wildlife ecologist and runs an environmental consulting company called Habitat Potential. "Those were once ‘can’t-miss’ species when I was a kid. Now I’m more likely to find a vagrant bird from the East Coast than a wrentit or a screech owl in the Presidio."

Since the former US Army base was decommissioned and opened to the public, the wrentit and screech owl have disappeared, and the quail are flying the coop too, despite the protective national-park status of the city’s largest natural area.

"Sometimes I think about the irony of it," says Dominik Mosur, a former biological monitor for the Presidio Trust who still birds in the national park once or twice a week. "The Presidio Trust was founded in 1998, at the same time habitat restoration for the quail really started happening. The more people got involved in somewhat of a misguided manner, the less successful it’s become."

Having a species of animal disappear from a national park is very unusual, according to Peter Dratch, who oversees the Endangered Species Program for the National Park Service. "It’s a rare event for a species in a national park to become locally extirpated," he says. Just three national parks have lost an animal out of the thousand endangered and threatened species he tracks.

Mosur is concerned that economic interests are trumping ecological needs in the Presidio. "I’m not saying that ecologists who work for the trust want to see the quail extinct," Mosur says. "But I think their bosses wouldn’t mind. Preserving nature and making money are really conflicting things. You can’t make any money off of an open lot of sagebrush with some quail in it, but you can make quite a bit of money converting Letterman hospital into a lot of apartments."

And making money is the bottom line for this national park. The Presidio, unlike any other national park in the country, is forced to fully fund itself, according to a mandate proposed by Rep. Nancy Pelosi in the mid-’90s. Guardian investigations and editorials over the years have raised questions about the viability of this arrangement. The cash cow is supposed to be the abundance of housing and development opportunities made possible by the abandoned army barracks and buildings, which means this national park is in the business of real estate, not natural resources.

While an annual $20 million federal allocation has been meted to the park during its teething stages, the Presidio Trust is tasked with weaning itself off that funding by 2013. Halfway through the 15-year deadline, the 2006 annual report for the trust shows that revenue is up just 4.5 percent while overhead costs have jumped 22 percent from last year’s numbers.

So making money is more important than ever. The doubtful are invited to trawl the Presidio’s Web site, where it’s easy to find information about housing rentals and development opportunities, the new restaurants that have opened, and the free coffee now available at transit hubs, but only a deep search will reveal anything about birds, trees, and flowers. A click on the "Nature in the City" link scores you a picture of the very common and abundant great horned owl. If you want to "read more," you get a blurb about mushrooms. The "Save the Quail" link, which was up as recently as this fall, has disappeared, just like the bird itself.

At press time, spokespeople for the Presidio Trust had not answered our questions about quail habitats or future restoration plans, despite repeated inquiries.

To be fair, the decimation of local quail is a phenomenon not exclusive to the Presidio. The population in Golden Gate Park has also dropped to a dangerous low. Annual citywide "Christmas Bird Counts," conducted by the Golden Gate Audubon Society, show more than 100 quail 10 years ago but as few as 40 just 5 years ago. Last year there were 27. This year promises to have even fewer.

"When a population gets low, it’s easier for it to get really low really fast," Clark says.

Most local bird-watchers and ecologists agree that it’s been a collision of conditions such as increased predation, decimated habitats, and unsavory, incestuous mating stock that has meant the gallows for the quail. But poor management decisions on behalf of the people in power have been the tightened noose.

SAVE THE QUAIL

Mention quail to anyone in management at Golden Gate Audubon, the Presidio Trust, or the city’s Recreation and Park Department, and you’ll be directed to Alan Hopkins, who has lived and watched birds in the city since 1972 and is the most widely regarded local expert on quail.

Initially, it wasn’t one of his favorite species. "They were a little too cute," Hopkins says. "But the more I started to study them, I saw how social they were. They’re fascinating, and they were here way before we were."

It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that he really started making a special effort to look for them during his daily bird-watching. Within a few years he began to worry about the health of the local population as he saw an increase in predators like raptors and feral cats.

At the same time, habitats were decimated by an aggressive campaign to purge the parks of homeless people. This involved cutting back the deep underbrush where quail like to hide out. In addition, the preservation of tall, stoic trees such as cypress, pine, and eucalyptus has meant an increase in habitats for quail predators like hawks and ravens, which prefer to spot prey from a heightened roost. As these factors conspired, numbers continued to drop, and the breeding stock became more and more narrow, until the coveys were rife with incest.

While predation is always a possibility, it doesn’t start having a big effect until the quail take to the streets, driven by disrupted habitats and dismal mating prospects. Though not generally migratory birds, when a spot becomes inhabitable, quail have been known to move around the city using wild property edges for succor until they find another covey or place to roost. And in San Francisco, they really are in the streets. Quail can’t fly long distances, and they travel mostly on foot.

Two birds wearing leg bands left the unpalatable conditions of the Presidio and resurfaced in Golden Gate Park, which means the unappealing mating scenario and disrupted habitat drove them to negotiate several city blocks in search of greener pastures. "They probably went through people’s backyards," Hopkins says. "That’s one of the reasons we think people need to preserve their backyards."

But increased gentrification has destroyed these wild, backyard corridors, which have been the secret highways for wildlife through the city.

Hopkins started an education-and-restoration campaign called "Save the Quail" in the ’90s. His hope was that the more people were aware of the quail and the small things they could do to save them, like preserving certain plants in their yards and keeping their cats indoors, the more it would benefit the birds and the parks.

"If we can restore the quail, it’s a good harbinger of health in the city," says Peter Brastow, director of Nature in the City, a nonprofit group that works to restore biodiversity in San Francisco by encouraging citizens to work and play in natural areas. "If we have great success with them, then we’re probably doing a lot for many other species too."

And that, Brastow argues, is important for the health of the people who live here. "Connecting to nature should be a bona fide recreational activity. Going bird-watching, walking your dog on a leash, [and] doing stewardship are all ways for urbanites to reconnect with these threatened natural areas that need people to sustain them. People need nature. It’s a feedback loop."

But, as is so often the case in San Francisco, for every pro, there’s a con.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

As the quail preservationists beseeched the city’s Rec and Park Department and the Presidio Trust for places to restore habitats, efforts were waylaid by the competing interests of feral cat fans and off-leash dog lovers.

"It really became a polarized issue," says Samantha Murray, Golden Gate Audubon’s conservation director. "Unfortunately, quail have had a lot working against them for the last 20 years, and none of that helped."

As arguments played out in public meetings, time ticked away for the birds, and the population continued to plummet. Eventually, a strip of unused land between Harding Park Golf Club and Lake Merced was granted as a new place for a quail habitat, even though it’s not an area where quail have ever been seen.

"It was a compromise," Hopkins says.

In addition, a quail niche was carved out of a quarter-acre plot in the Presidio where a covey still existed. Dubbed Quail Commons, it became the locus of restoration efforts, with regular work parties weeding out nonnative invasive species and sowing new shoots of quail-approved plants.

It wasn’t long, however, before the plot became more of a poster child for the trust and less a place where effective restoration occurred. Hopkins and other local birders and ecologists proffered regular advice on what might work, but they say the trust depended too heavily on outside studies by experts and seized on a rigid formula rather than a fluctuating plan that responded to unexpected changes in the local ecology.

"Quail are dependent on a lot of nonnative species for food source and cover," Hopkins says. In a burst of antipathy toward nonnative species, much of the Himalayan blackberry and wild radish, two of the quail’s favorite plants, were scourged from the parks. The native plants that replaced them provide a very limited diet for the birds.

"One bad year for those plants," Hopkins says, "and the ability to eat is gone."

He points out that providing water or food where necessary and introducing more birds when the population became so inbred could have been very effective.

"I think it’s naive to think if you simply restore habitat, it’s going to be enough," he says. He admits that contradicts statements he’s made in the past, but that’s the nature of the beast when it comes to ecology. No specific formula is guaranteed to work in every situation, which is what, some scientists say, makes local knowledge so valuable.

"Local knowledge is huge," says Karen Purcell, leader of the Urban Bird Studies project at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, which uses "citizen scientists" from around the country to supplement its bird research. "People who know their birds and what’s going on in their areas contribute information that many times we could never get."

To maintain reliability, the lab gathers as much data as possible from as many sources as are available, so that rogue or ill-informed data is diluted.

"There are so many people like myself who’ve spent so much time watching this place and the animals that live in it. People from as close as Marin couldn’t even say the things that we know," says Hopkins, who’s been hired by the trust to consult for a few projects but not granted any regular position or much compensation for his expertise.

"The people I’ve had to deal with through the Presidio Trust and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy try to do their best, but I always get the feeling there are conflicting interests," he says. "There’s always the budget. There are always aesthetic issues."

When it comes to action, things drag at the federal level much like they do when negotiating with competing interests around the city. "As far as the National Park Service goes, they’ve got to have a study," Clark says. "And the study has to be done by qualified academics. That’s the way the system works."

This past year’s Presidio biological monitor, Chris Perry, describes himself as "not really a birder," even though "99.5 percent of my job was monitoring quail." Perry has a master’s degree, and the bulk of his career has been spent doing a variety of environmental work. "It doesn’t require someone to be a birder to be a good ecologist."

Perry agrees with the locals on one contentious issue: efforts to reintroduce quail into the Presidio are long overdue. Hopkins says he hoped for reintroduction years ago, but politics invaded.

"They hemmed and hawed about it. It costs money," he says. One of the problems with reintroduction, he adds, is that you can’t just "open the cage and let them loose." Quail are social birds, and like any new kid in town, the birds are more likely to succeed if there are some old-timers around who know the local ropes.

That may be a problem for the other primary habitat-restoration area in the city, Harding Park, where no quail have been spotted.

"We’d like to do reintroduction a few years from now," says Murray of Golden Gate Audubon, which for the past three years has been working to establish a habitat there. "If we do it — invest the resources and time — we want it to work."

In the past year the group has decided to ramp up the effort, hiring a part-time volunteer coordinator, Bill Murphy, to oversee the planting of lupine and coffee berry and the weeding out of English ivy and ice plant.

The hope is that "if you build it, they will come," Murphy says of the site. But it doesn’t take an expert to realize that Harding Park is far from being a perfect place for quail. Tall cypresses dominate, and the ground is thick with heavy wood chips and duff, rather than the sand quail prefer.

Brush piles have been another issue, falling into the aesthetics category. Quail experts have long advocated them as an easy way to naturally house species. If done properly, the small mountains of sticks, logs, and branches — resembling something you’d take a match to for a first-class bonfire — can have a screening effect, with openings large enough for a quail to squeeze in and take cover but too small for a pursuing cat or dog.

"At Land’s End I suggested they put up brush piles, which are very beneficial, and they agreed to do it," Hopkins says. "But the landscape architect they hired is complaining because they think these brush piles are unsightly."

In addition to being unsightly, the ones that have been built are too uniform, resembling the neatly laid bare poles of a teepee. According to Clark, they are essentially ineffective.

"The brush piles in the Presidio are like skeletons," he says. "It looks like a brush pile, but it’s not actually serving any purpose. They’re almost analogous to the whole structure of the restoration program."

ISLANDS AMONG ISLANDS

Consider the boundaries of the city: water laps the edges on three sides. San Francisco not only thinks and acts like an island — it practically is one. The parks and natural areas, separated by streets and concrete and scattered throughout one of the most densely populated cities in the country, are oases for humans as they shed the stresses of busy workdays. They’re also habitats for wildlife who began life on this peninsula and have no way to really leave it.

Those interests are sometimes in concert, sometimes in competition.

The Presidio is the largest of the islands, and the fact that the 1,400 acres were once an army base with stringent rules about access, populated by a military with a predictable routine, worked to the advantage of local wildlife for many years.

"There weren’t as many cats, no off-leash dogs, not as much street traffic." Hopkins says. "Army bases across the country are a lot of our best habitats because of benign neglect."

"Military activities are actually easier for many of these species to deal with than an area with wide public access," says John Anderson, a professor of ornithology at College of the Atlantic who specializes in island avian populations. "It serves as a ‘habitat island.’ This is why you have nesting birds at the end of the runways at JFK. As long as you get a jet taking off every 30 seconds, it doesn’t have much impact. On the other hand, if you have a jet making a low pass over a nesting colony once a summer, it is likely to cause a lot of disturbance."

If there’s the equivalent of a jet flying low over the Presidio, it would be the increase of hikers, bikers, park staff, and volunteers regularly traipsing through areas that until recently never saw much action.

And one place that’s stood empty and secluded for years is about to see an enormous influx of people.

The Public Health Service Hospital is slated to become condominiums with 250 to 400 market-rate units. It’s the largest housing development in the park, and the Presidio Trust is relying on at least $1 million in net revenue from the project: it’s a keystone in the overall plan for financial sustainability.

However, the decrepit building is located next to the oldest relic scrub oak habitat in Presidio Hills. "This area has been here since time began," Clark says on a recent tour through that tucked-away corner of the park.

Indeed, the overgrown dunes have an ancient, haunted feel. Listening to the unique song of the white-crowned sparrow, standing among the small scrub oaks and some of the rarest plants in the Presidio, it’s possible to forget the nearby high-rises, highways, and houses and imagine a time when the whole western edge of the city was little more than acres and acres of windswept sand and scrubby brush.

"This is the first place I had interactions with park stewards and saw them doing something that worked," Clark says. "They took down a couple of trees, and people complained, but so much diversity popped up where those trees were. Pines can be great and support a lot of birds, but in an intact, native ecosystem they aren’t very helpful. This area is a relic, and quail are a part of that relic."

It’s clear that this original setting would be perfect for quail and anything else is just a compromise. The soil is loose and sandy, perfect for the dirt baths that clean their feathers. The ground cover is negotiable for their small stature, but there’s good shelter and ample food and water.

We’re just down the hill from Quail Commons, where the last six Presidio quail live, but there’s a lot of unfriendly activity between here and there — a road, a fence, a parking lot, and a dump where construction debris is regularly tossed.

"These two areas would be so much more valuable if they were connected," Clark says.

Through the trees that line the hills, it’s possible to see the back of the old abandoned hospital. It remains to be seen if more quail will be able to live here among more people and all the things that come with them — dogs and cats, trash and cars. Will the new inhabitants take quail education to heart?

As if they’re harbingers of what’s to come, two joggers with a baby stroller and a dog cruise by. As the dog leaps through the scrub, the couple pass by without a glance at the Quail Habitat sign. *

In our cups

January 9, 2007

Although the holiday orgy of gift giving includes the giving of many pointless gifts, I was pleased to score yet more coffee-brewing equipment: a matched set of implements from Vietnam, like little tin cups with filter bottoms. I have a large and unwieldy collection of French presses, stove-top mokas, drip pots, pump-driven espresso machines, grinders manual and electric — but I didn’t have these things, had never heard of them, and did not think I was missing anything until I tasted the coffee they produced.

The cups are something of a cross between percolators, mokas, and drip devices: ground coffee is placed between a layer of filters at the bottom, the cup is placed over the destination vessel, and boiling water is poured in at the top. The water slowly drips through the layer of coffee to whatever you’ve set underneath, and while this can take several minutes, that interval gives a fairly long steep and produces an intense but smooth brew.

The charm factor is raised, at least in Vietnam, by the brewing of the coffee into a small pool of condensed milk, which is (as we bakers of cream pies know) sweetened. I no longer keep cans of the stuff around, but I did discover that a few ounces of scalded milk mixed with a teaspoon or two of sugar produces a pleasantly creamy sweetening.

More important is the use of Vietnamese coffee. We were given, with our cups, a packet of Nam Nguyen brand coffee, coarsely pre-ground and looking quite ordinary. Then we brewed it and found ourselves bewitched by a distinctly chocolately bouquet. The presence of chicory was suspected (as in New Orleans–style coffee), so I ground some Trader Joe’s decaf espresso roast and brewed it in a Vietnamese cup to make sure the brewing method wasn’t somehow producing a miracle. It wasn’t, though the coffee was quite good.

The resemblance of Vietnamese to New Orleans–style coffee isn’t surprising, given the long French tutelage in both places. Chicory root has been used for centuries to stretch coffee supplies and mask staleness, and because it contains no caffeine, its blending with coffee probably helps reduce the nerve-jangling effects of the latter. There is also some evidence that it has a tonic effect on the liver — an encouraging factoid to keep in mind if you seek a coffee to help lift any fog remaining from New Year’s Eve.

Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

New wave on the tracks

January 9, 2007

› johnny@sfbg.com

Hip-hop’s maze is infinite in size, shape, and perspective, but sometimes MCs get trapped at an impasse and start repeating each other like a gaggle of parrots. During times like that — times like now — it takes imaginative minds to break through and open new verbal doors. That’s what the two-brained Bay Area rhyme machine known as Kirb and Chris does on Niggaz and White Girlz (Rapitalism), a mixtape-turned-CD that launches the sound of new wave thuggin’: loops of ’80s hits and obscurities coupled with hard and hilarious truths about sex and race in America.

"We liked to go to the new wave clubs and do our thing," Kirby Dominant says when asked about the inspiration behind the concept. "We’d go out during the week and then on Sunday just compose what we went through, whether it was little chicks fuckin’ with us, kissin’ on us or dudes tryin’ to downplay us. We wanted to come through and fuck with taboos and myths and stereotypes. It’s not necessarily something we take to heart — I’ll fuck anything that moves, first of all, I don’t care what color it is."

Before they began recording, Kirb and Chris tried out the title Niggaz and White Girlz in social situations to see what kind of reactions it provoked. "A lot of people in our crew were, like, ‘Dude, that’s fucking ignorant,’ " Dominant remembers. "I’d say, ‘But if I called it Niggaz and Mexicans, you wouldn’t say anything, huh?’ "

"Or Niggaz with Niggaz," Chris Sinister adds.

Dominant claims some black-on-both-sides (or in clear jewel boxes and on the outs?) big names were up for cameos — until they heard about the subject matter. "I’m not going for these rappers saying they aren’t fucking white girls," he says. "I’ve been on tour, and there ain’t no fuckin’ black girls in Canada. I’m not believin’ it. I’ve been to those towns!"

The truth is calling the shots on Niggaz and White Girlz, and it’s open season on any gender or color that just can’t get enough. Dominant and Sinister sprinkle a ton of pop culture references on top of what one of the album’s characters calls a "Rick James and Teena Marie love" theme that could have been just a gimmick: Hill Street Blues, the Cosby kids, New Kids on the Block, Vampire’s Kiss, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Malcolm Little are all recruited for dissing or boasting purposes.

But dig beneath, and you’ll find track after track that takes post–P.M. Dawn new wave rap in unexpected directions. The keyboard stabs of Gary Numan’s "Down in the Park," for example, are an ideal sonic setting for Sinister to live up to his last name with a realist tale of the hustling that takes over city rec areas at night. Inspirational and even kind of spine-chilling, "In You" keeps Bono’s histrionics on "With or Without You" to a minimum, allowing Sinister and Dominant to spin candidly detailed morality tales with different endings about a greedy promoter and a woman turning tricks to support a habit. "Human" gives Dominant an opportunity to provide the frankly hilarious sequel that LL Cool J never made for "I Need Love." On "Money" the duo get hot but not counterfeit, and DJ Ice Water is at his coldest in revealing what the B-52’s "Legal Tender" has been all along — a prototypical money-stacking rap track, complete with synths and hand claps.

Some of the more obscure musical sources on Niggaz and White Girlz give Kirb and Chris the chance to lay down tracks on which the new wave sound is wholly submerged. "Change Your Mind" might be the album’s hottest cut, with Dominant mocking the "foul quotations and little heart murmurs" of MCs who have a fear of the kind of music made by, say, the Talking Heads. But the most mind-blowing moment is "Doorstep, Girl." There the duo flow over Morrissey — specifically, the Smiths’ single-mom scenario "This Night Has Opened My Eyes." Sinister, whose mother, Diane, gave him a copy of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis when he was young, taps into his own version of Moz’s melancholic and literary approach to lyric writing, addressing a girl who "turned my open heart into an abyss."

"Before the album I really got my heart broke," Sinister says when asked about his words. "I think the best thing is that Kirb really told me, ‘Man, just talk about what’s goin’ on.’ "

"A lot of times, people in hip-hop, they try to tell their whole life in one song," Dominant says. "I study songs, and I’m, like, ‘How come you can’t write a song about just waking up in the morning and how the sun looks while your girl’s still asleep?’ "

Misery and comedy live next door to each other on Niggaz and White Girlz. The many skits that Kirb and Chris create don’t just shame all the wack between-song scripts that have stunk up too many recordings since gangsta crashed Prince Paul’s party — they’re better and more perceptive than most sketches by comedians. On "Don’t You (Take All My Money)," Ice Water scratches and scribbles over the voice of a woman who says, among other things, "Y’all wasn’t playing when you said ’80s dance music shit!" According to Dominant, the woman’s cameo came from club hopping on the block during a typical 16-hour recording session. "We were at Hyde Street [Studios], and I was, like, ‘I need chicks.’ "

"Literally, we pulled those girls out of the club and got them in the studio," Sinister adds.

Dominant: "All we did was play the song and put them in the studio and let them talk over it. Whatever we liked, we took."

Sinister: "We could do outtakes of the shit they were sayin’. And that was a beautiful woman too."

A top contender for funniest skit has to be "Fuck You and White Bitches," in which a Goapele-loving young woman gets heated with Dominant because he took a girl named Becky to see Revenge of the Sith. "It got really strange, because I swear to God, when Kirb was doing that skit with her, she really started feelin’ it," Sinister says, referring to the skit’s actress, the cousin of one of Dominant’s ex-girlfriends.

"You know the part when she says, ‘I bet she can’t ride a dick like I can,’ and the white girl goes, ‘You wanna bet?,’ " Dominant asks. "That was my uncle’s idea."

"At first it just ended, but my uncle was, like, ‘You should add "You wanna bet?" on that shit,’ " he says to general laughter.

Creativity is a family affair in the world of Kirb and Chris. "No one could have made this album but us," Dominant says. "How many hood-ass niggas are you going to find listening to the B-52’s and knowing about them who can rap?" *

KIRB AND CHRIS

With C.L.A.W.S., Matthew Africa, Ryan Poulsen, and Special Fun Ambassador Cims

Sat/13, 9 p.m.

Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

www.kirbandchris.com

www.rapitalism.com

Gentle surrogates

January 9, 2007

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Right now I only have three chickens and a song stuck in my head. "All Her Favorite Fruit," by Camper Van Beethoven. Often I dream I have many, many more chickens than three. They come out of the woods and are colorful, quirky, and wild, but for whatever reason they choose to be my chickens. In my dreams they are welcome both by me and the three real chickens I have. Always they are welcome and weird, these dreamy messengers. I never do figure out what exactly their message is, but my sense is that there is something off about them, like they lay square eggs, are made out of smoke, or cock-a-doodle-don’t.

Whatever the flavor of their surreality, I am charmed and afraid, and invariably (so far) I wake up to exactly how many chickens I have. Which has never been more than nine, at my chicken farmerliest, and is now, as I said, three.

I’m not complaining. Even just one chicken could be a tremendous source of comfort and amusement to me, and if I didn’t have any, which might happen when I move back to the city (I am looking), then I would spend more time than ever with chicken soup, chicken vindaloo, chicken chow mein, fried chicken, barbecued chicken, and so on.

And you would be a little better informed about Bay Area restaurants, I guess … so there’s that.

Right now, however, it’s a warm morning for January, and I’m sitting outside on a log. I’ve been awake for a long time, long enough to feel like I’ve entered another time zone that no one else has ever been in. I’m not tired. I’m drinking black coffee and feeding brown rice to my three exact, awake, real live chickens. I’m feeding them brown rice, chow fun noodles with black beans, red peppers, and cabbage ($6) and spicy green beans without chicken ($8.50).

Last night on my why-why-why way home to the woods I made a wrong turn at Nan King Road in the Sunset. Not that it’s not a great restaurant, and not that it doesn’t have a unisex bathroom, but you know what? I don’t feel like talking about bathrooms or food, and if I did feel like talking about food, I would much rather be talking about bacon, as surely as my three chickens would rather be eating bacon. Rather than brown rice and chow fun noodles.

Bacon is every sensible animal’s favorite food, and the Ebb Tide Cafe, where I’d made a right turn on the morning before, has a unisex bathroom and a bacon platter, which is just that, a platter of bacon, bacon, bacon, just bacon.

And my chickens are looking at me, going, So why are we eating brown rice and chow fun noodles? Tell us again.

I will tell you again and again and again.

My mom and grandma live in the house I grew up in, snow belt Ohio, without electricity or running water. They shit into a bucket. Last time I talked to her on the phone, my mom said, "Don’t put me in your column."

How can I not? This is the stuff I am made of, and anyway she doesn’t read my column. My dad does. He’s a good Catholic and goes to church in Ohio, which I am also made of, and he prays for me and probably all of us. Which is great.

In the woods sometimes when the wind blows real hard at night and the redwood trees creak and crackle outside my window, I fear for my life. I hear every little thing, see absolutely nothing, and wonder how strong this old shack’s walls are.

Weirdo the Cat sleeps under the covers, curled up to my belly. I’m outside now in the dirt, watching my chickens have Chinese. But earlier this morning, like at five, I was in bed on my back with my hands behind my head. Weirdo came up for air, sniffed my lips, rested her little black head on my arm, and sighed and went back to sleep.

Cats!

I laid there, human, for hours, my brain racing like space probes through the void, trying to find intelligent life inside my strange body — or grace or hope or something, my open eyes watching the air around me change ever so slowly from black to gray to pink to clear.

The chickens that I have were starting to fuss, wanting out. It was time, but no way was I getting up yet, not with this cat on my arm like that, snoring pretty much exactly like a man. *

EBB TIDE CAFE

Daily, 7:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

1500 S. Van Ness, SF

(415) 643-4399

Takeout available

No alcohol

Credit cards not accepted

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

Careers and Ed: Bio the people, fuel the people

January 9, 2007

› culture@sfbg.com

Cars suck. I have stickers that say so and a venerable beater of a bicycle that underscores the point. But for every one of the approximately 40,000 bicycle commuters in San Francisco, there are more than 10 registered car owners, and just wishing they didn’t exist won’t make it so. But I’m no hater. I’m sure glad my plumber drives a van, for instance, and my gardener roommate wouldn’t get very far without a pickup truck to haul all that gravel and mulch. Still, the environmental, economic, and just plain moral implications of using anything that relies on petroleum for fuel have become increasingly difficult to justify — especially since interest in and access to alternative fuels are on the uptick. Last year’s mayoral biodiesel directive, when implemented, will make San Francisco the national leader in biodiesel use for municipal vehicles. In fact, the demand for biodiesel in the Bay Area could soon outstrip the current supply, and as far as getting in on the ground floor goes, the time has never been better to be involved with biofuels.

Of course, a lot of people get into biodiesel not as a career move but as a form of activist self-sufficiency that hearkens back to the ’70s return-to-the-land movement. The notion that one can power a vehicle on homemade fuel made from recycled cooking oil and a few bucks worth of drain cleaner is nigh-irresistible to penny-pinchers and political progressives alike, and the accessibility of the technology is such that even the least mechanically minded can pick it up with minimum instruction. Some instruction could be beneficial, though. Considering that two of the three major ingredients of biodiesel are highly toxic and flammable (methanol and lye), it may well behoove nascent home brewers to hone their skills in a structured environment, which local biofuel advocates are conveniently providing.

BIODIESEL 101

Jennifer Radtke knows her biofuels. Despite an incongruous educational background in Slavic languages and poli-sci, she has become one of the Bay Area’s premiere authorities on brewing biodiesel and running a biodiesel station, and she has offered courses and internships in both since 2003. As one of the cofounders of the women-owned Berkeley cooperative BioFuel Oasis (which serves as a station for more than 1,600 regular customers) and an instructor for the Real Goods Solar Living Institute and the Berkeley Biodiesel Collective, Radtke is committed to the biodiesel community. She teaches five different classes covering almost every aspect of the biofuel biz for beginners and advanced users alike. Though many of her classes are held in Berkeley, you can occasionally find her holding forth in Golden Gate Park’s SF County Fair Building.

For tyros to the technology, Radtke teaches a one-day introductory class covering biodiesel usage, sustainability, and home brewing. At a typical class, she opens with a presentation on biodiesel basics, listing the benefits and drawbacks of using biodiesel. Even to a nondriver like myself, the benefits appear to outweigh the disadvantages by a hefty margin.

Lower emissions and a higher rate of biodegradability are things I take for granted when thinking about biodiesel, but I certainly didn’t realize it’s less toxic to the human body than table salt when ingested and less irritating to the skin than a 4 percent soap-and-water solution. Biodiesel’s flashpoint (the temperature at which it ignites when exposed to flames) is over 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the flashpoint of petroleum-based diesel is about 125 degrees. Most interesting to me and my low-to-no-maintenance requirements is finding out biodiesel is a natural solvent that cleans out the fuel tank and filters. (Can I get it to do my dishes too?) With bennies like these, who can fault biodiesel for its unfortunate tendency to burst through rubber fuel lines (discontinued since 1994) or eat through your slick new paint job? Such inconveniences seem minor in comparison to those created by toxic, flammable petroleum-based fuels.

After a comparison discussion of biodiesel to petroleum diesel and SVO (straight veggie oil), Radtke demonstrates home brewing and discusses the chemistry involved. After a lunch break, the students brew their own one-to-two-liter batch. Starting out with a quantity of recycled cooking oil, the class tests for water and free fatty acids, a process known as titration. (When water is present in the oil, the home brewer runs the risk of making soap instead of fuel.) Titration determines whether the used oil is too rancid or has been broken down too much by high fryer heat. If the oil is deemed usable, students concoct a test brew, mixing the heated oil with methanol (wood alcohol) and sodium hydroxide (lye). Here especially is where the presence of an instructor comes in handy.

Unlike the finished product, the chemical components of biodiesel have a very low flashpoint, and their toxicity is much higher. Methanol in particular can be harmful, even deadly, if improperly handled, and for this reason alone, many biodiesel advocates are still skittish about taking the last step toward home production. After walking beginners through a safe mixing procedure, Radtke discusses washing and filtering the biofuel and assessing its quality. She also discusses how to dispose of byproducts and offers additional educational resources. For people who want to practice brewing bigger batches (20 to 40 gallons) and a get a more in-depth overview of the small production industry, a three-day advanced course is occasionally offered, often on an on-demand basis.

ORGANIC MECHANICS

It doesn’t take long for the would-be home brewer to want to start tinkering with processors. For the mechanically unsavvy, Radtke offers an equipment-building workshop for five participants at a time (often in conjunction with co-instructor Alan Pryor of the Berkeley and Alameda Biodiesel co-ops or alternatively through Real Goods). Hoarding industry secrets doesn’t seem to be an issue for biofuel distributors teaching people how to make their product. In fact, a common denominator among backyard biodiesel advocates seems to be their genuine desire to spread the knowledge of their chosen vocation far and wide. Plus, as Radtke points out, most of her processor-builder students actually come from outside the Bay Area, some from as far away as Southern California, where stations like BioFuel Oasis and the SF Biofuel Cooperative have yet to materialize.

This is a paradox that Radtke and Melissa Hardy, also of BioFuel Oasis, hope to address in their upcoming five-day intensive class, How to Start Your Own Biodiesel Station (Feb. 18–23), walking students through the process, from procuring fuel and testing it to applying for the required permits and necessary funding. Other topics of interest to the budding entrepreneur include zoning and taxation laws, equipment building and maintenance, and even market development. By the end of the course, participants should have a clear vision and a working business plan to get them started in the distribution biz.

In addition to that course, BioFuel Oasis holds monthly fuel filter–changing workshops on-site (next scheduled for Jan. 21). Since biofuel has such a solvent effect, cars that have just recently switched over from regular diesel run the risk of clogging from the leftover residue dredged out by the introduced biofuel. For a $10 to $20 sliding scale fee and about 30 minutes of time, attendees learn to replace their filters, a much preferable option to waiting until they clog on the freeway. Registration and information for any of these classes can be found on the following Web sites: www.backyardbiodiesel.org, www.biofueloasis.com, and (for classes connected with the Solar Living Institute) www.solarliving.org.

MASTERS OF THE BREW

Of course, even the acknowledged masters of their craft were once beginners too. For Jennifer Radtke and dozens of other home brew aficionados in the Bay Area and around the country, the force behind their fascination is one Maria "girl Mark" Alovert. With a background in grassroots activism, girl Mark is one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of home-brewed biofuels and the inventor of the ubiquitous appleseed processor, which can be made cheaply from an old hot-water heater and a handful of hardware store components. Her self-published Biodiesel Homebrew Guide is considered the definitive guide to home brewing, and her two- to four-day seminars for beginners and advanced students alike fill up months in advance. In addition to teaching and touring, girl Mark is a member and sometime moderator of several biodiesel forums and the instigator of a peer-reviewed home-brewing and equipment-building Web site known as the Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial (www.biodieselcommunity.org). A schedule of her classes and tour dates can be found online at www.girlmark.com and www.localb100.com.

For San Franciscans who’d like their introduction to biofuel to be a little closer to home, the San Francisco Biofuels Cooperative (www.sfbiofuels.org) offers once-a-month orientation meetings where interested parties can get practical advice on everything from where to buy a diesel car to how to advance the biofuel community’s agenda. More than 200 members strong, the co-op’s pumping station shares a location with Incredible Adventures (www.incadventures.com), a local adventure tour company that runs its biofueled fleet all the way to Baja. Co-op members can pay the premium price for biodiesel at the pump (currently $3.65 per gallon) or volunteer a couple hours per month to purchase their biofuel for less. Hailing from the old People’s Food System, former Rainbow Grocery cofounder and SF Biofuels Cooperative Board of Directors member Bill Crolius is also a driving force (with Ben Jordan and Trevitt Schultz) behind the People’s Fuel Cooperative (www.peoplesfuel.org), a biodiesel delivery operation. Taking the long view on energy sustainability, Crolius envisions a future in which even biodiesel will be obsolete, but for the interim, he and his co-op compatriots believe it serves an essential role in weaning people off fossil fuels.

David Dias, advanced transportation and technology project coordinator at City College, organizes workshops on a variety of alternative fueling technologies, including biodiesel, natural gas, and SVO. He also heads the Biodiesel Conversion Club, an extracurricular group dedicated to converting muscle cars such as El Caminos into biodiesel road warriors. Most of the workshops cost money but are open to the general public. Contact Dias for details at (415) 550-4455 or ddias@ccsf.edu.

For nondrivers this is something of a nonissue, but for people who aren’t quite ready to give up the family car or rely on their vehicle the way contractors do, the siren song of home brewing is a seductive one. It doesn’t take much space either: a corner of your garage or the back of a toolshed will do. In light of our national crude addiction and the wars being waged on its behalf, biodiesel is a compelling product; and while there is a San Francisco–based large-scale biodiesel production company in the works (www.sfbiodiesel.com), the reality is that low-cost biodiesel on demand is still a few years away — a reality that makes home brewing an attractive solution and, in time, perhaps even the ultimate answer. *

Free wi-fi for everyone

January 2, 2007

EDITORIAL Basic municipal infrastructure — roads, water and sewer pipes, train tracks, airports, that sort of thing — has traditionally been owned and operated by the public sector, and for good reason: private experiments with toll roads, profit-motivated water companies, and even city rail companies have typically been disasters. The fundamental building blocks that hold a city together are public goods, paid for by tax dollars, for use by all, either free or at the lowest possible cost.

We’ve argued for years that electricity ought to be in that category, and San Francisco is finally taking some cautious baby steps toward public power. But city officials are about to turn what could be the single most significant new piece of infrastructure in our lifetime — broadband Internet service — over to a private consortium. It’s a mistake, and the supervisors shouldn’t go along with the deal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has made free universal wi-fi a key part of his political agenda, but through a process that’s been secretive and flawed from the start, he has chosen Google and EarthLink to put forward a proposal. As Sarah Phelan reported last week ("Selling Wi-Fi," 12/27/06), the two big tech companies are taking their road show around the city, trying to convince residents and businesses that their plan — which calls for limited free access combined with a fee-based system — will envelop the city in a wi-fi cloud, allowing anyone with a laptop to get instant Internet access anywhere in town, at no cost to taxpayers.

That may be true — but in the process, the city will be giving up a huge part of its future.

Ten years from now, maybe sooner, universal broadband will be as much a part of civic infrastructure as roads are today. Consumers will demand it. Businesses will insist on it. Public education will require it. Providing quality service to everyone — everywhere in town — will be an essential service. Why would we want to leave it to the private sector?

There are all sorts of problems with the Google-EarthLink proposal, starting with its lack of real universal access. Sure, everyone gets a connection — but at 300 kilobytes, it won’t be terribly fast. If you want to be able to quickly download music, videos, or large business files, you’ll need to pay by the month for an upgrade. Low-income folks, in other words, will be stuck in the slow lane. That’s not terribly fair.

It’s also not terribly surprising: these companies are out to make money. And over the years, their bottom line will drive the entire program.

There’s absolutely no need for that to happen. The city’s hired a consultant to look at creating a citywide network of fiber-optic lines under the streets, which is a fine idea, although it would take a few years to build. But even according to the Google-EarthLink consortium’s own estimates, the universal wi-fi network will cost only about $10 million. For a big-city public works project, that’s nothing. Almost every election, we approve another $100 million or so in bonds — for schools, community college buildings, libraries, parks, and police stations, all worthwhile projects. The city’s annual budget is more than $5 billion, and the cost of maintaining the network would run at about $2 million a year. This could turn out to be as important as anything the city ever builds — and it’s chump change.

The supervisors need to put the private wi-fi proposal on the shelf and immediately start plans to place a bond act on the next ballot to build a city-owned wi-fi and fiber-optic system that will offer true universal, free, high-speed broadband access for all. *

Cinema 2006

December 26, 2006

CRAIG BALDWIN’S PRIZED CINEMATIC PEANUTS

Ever wonder why there’s an Automotive section in the newspaper every week … and perhaps consider that the Film section might also be driven by the same industry forces?

And so commercial cinema, dinosaurlike as it is, does continue to lumber along. ‘Tis built on the model of the automobile industry, and hey neighbor, why don’t you get yourself a moped (or an electric bike)?

For me, what’s most interesting in the motion picture arts and sciences is the move to molecularize — smaller, more intimate, even itinerant salons, installations, and interventions, bolstered not by (master-)narrative architectures of the cinema experience but by the satisfaction that the truly curious take in its dismantling, to analyze its history and process, and hell yeah, to repurpose its tropes for the contemporary moment.

Against this year’s model, this molecular filmwork acknowledges rather than erases what is resonant in film history, remediating the genre motifs as Menippean satire and inspired human-scale critical agency.

Speaking of scale, it was the six-inch-small twin girls named the Peanuts who paradoxically topped my list of ’06 epiphanies. While we were ensconced in the veritable bowels of the Artists’ Television Access basement for its life-saving fundraiser, David Cox’s nuanced, obsessively detailed three-hour deconstruction of kaiju — the Japanese rubber-monster idiom — demonstrated oh-so-marvelously how personal (and political) meaning can blossom from the Other-worldly visions of fantasy and exploitation film just like the aforementioned fairies, sprouting from the ferns of a lush jungle tableau. In Cox’s essay-cum-homage, here are dinosaurs (and giant moths, dragons, and smog monsters!) that we can use for allegory and imaginative play, not those that consume us in a vicious cycle of oil addiction and predatory foreign wars.

The Peanuts rhapsodize:

Mothra oh Mothra

The people have forgotten kindness

Their spirit falls to ruin

We shall pray for the people as we sing

This song of love

Craig Baldwin programs "Other Cinema" at the ATA and is the director of Spectres of the Spectrum, Sonic Outlaws, Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies under America, and other movies.

BONG JOON-HO’S TOP EIGHT MOVIES

(1) Family Ties (Kim Tae-yong, South Korea)

(2) In Between Days (Kim So-yong, US/Canada/South Korea)

(3) Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Mexico/Spain/US)

(4) The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, France/Italy)

(5) The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US)

(6) Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)

(7) Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)

(8) Yureru (Miwa Nishikawa, Japan)

Bong Joon-ho is the director of The Host, Memories of Murder, and Barking Dogs Never Bite.

BRYAN BOYCE’S TOP 10 SIGHTS

• Au Bonheur des Dames (Julien Duvivier, France, 1930) at the SF Silent Film Festival on July 15.

• The sauerkraut western Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, US, 1952).

• Guy "King of the Q&A" Maddin presenting a program of his short films at the SF International Film Festival on April 25.

• Rest in peace Shelley Winters, peerless in Larceny (George Sherman, US, 1948), at the Noir City Film Festival on Jan. 15.

• Portrait #2: Trojan (Vanessa Renwick, US).

• Sword of Doom (Kihachi Okamoto, Japan, 1966).

• Not bad for a work-in-progress: Miranda July’s Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About at SF Cinematheque on Oct. 23.

• Stephen Colbert, White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 29.

• Il Posto (Ermanno Olmi, Italy, 1961).

• Crispin Glover’s 1987 Late Night with David Letterman platform shoe karate kick demonstration, on YouTube.

Bryan Boyce is the director of America’s Biggest Dick, Rumsfeld Rules, and other movies.

MICHELLE DEVEREAUX’S 10 BEST AND 10 WORST

• Best walkies: Helen Mirren, black labs, and corgis, The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK/France/Italy)

• Best 1/8th mighty Choctaw: John Michael Higgins, For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, US)

• Best German whore: Cate Blanchett, The Good German (Steven Soderbergh, US)

• Best Russian whore: Vera Farmiga, Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, UK/US)

• Best ex-junkie whore: Amy Sedaris, Strangers with Candy (Paul Dinello, US)

• Best bloodsucking: Stockard Channing, 3 Needles (Thom Fitzgerald, Canada)

• Best unnecessary invention: 3-D glasses for real life, The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, France/Italy)

• Best western: The Proposition (John Hillcoat, Australia/UK)

• Best meltdown: Frances McDormand, Friends with Money (Nicole Holofcener, US)

• Best performance by the artist formerly known as Marky Mark: Mark Wahlberg, The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US)

• Worst performance by the artist formerly known as Marky Mark: Mark Wahlberg, Invincible (Ericson Core, US)

• Worst meltdown: polar ice caps, An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, US)

• Worst nudity: Ken Davitian, Borat (Larry Charles, US)

• Worst role model for Britney Spears (excluding Paris Hilton): Rinko Kikuchi, Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu, US/Mexico)

• Worst date movie: United 93 (Paul Greenglass, US/UK/France)

• Worst love interest for Tom Cruise since Katie Holmes: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, US/Germany)

• Worst stand-in for Margot Kidder: Kate Bosworth, Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, US/Australia)

• Worst reason to become a vegetarian: Barnyard (Steve Oedekerk, US/Germany)

• Worst emoter (someone give this man a lozenge): Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, US)

• Worst excuse for two upcoming sequels: Goal! The Dream Begins (Danny Cannon, US)

Michelle Devereaux is a Guardian contributing writer.

SARAH ENID HAGEY’S PRESCRIPTIVE LOOK AT THE CINEMATIC CRYSTAL BALL

Here is my prediction for the coming year of film. I know I may sound like a new age mumbo-jumboist, but I sense a return to mysticism and spirituality. The age of nihilism is really just some shortchange bullshit. The postmodern, amoral, canned reality period has proved its point and has been nothing more than a carbuncle. What, then, is my prescription? The surreal, detached from reality, psychedelic, hallucinogenic, optimistic fantasy film. In the words of my dear friend Chad Peterson, "Fantasy intoxicates only the strong mind. It is horror and humor, the twin children of their mother imagination, which open a sea chest of all memories, hanging above the heart an anchor and above the plow a star." Fantasy embraces the nostalgia and hope that we’ve spent our angsty years repressing. When you think all hope is lost but then that Giorgio Moroder track starts, you just weep like a very small child.

Sarah Enid Hagey’s short films include The Great Unknown and Lovelorn Domestic.

JESSE HAWTHORNE FICKS’S 10 PICKS*

(1) Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, US).

(2) The New World (Terrence Malick, US).

(3) L’Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France). Be patient with this quiet cinematic poem — along with my first two picks, it will completely break your heart.

(4) Battlestar Galactica (created by Michael Rymer, US). I know, I know, it’s on the SciFi Channel. But seriously, this show is more thought-provoking than most feature films.

(5) A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, US). Creatively hypnotizing and terrifyingly relevant.

(6) The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US). Best performance of the year, easily: Marky Mark.

(7) District B13 (Pierre Morel, France). The Transporter + John Carpenter’s politics = sheer bliss.

(8) Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski, US). It’s embarrassing to connect so strongly to these awkward hipsters attempting to figure themselves out.

(9) Hostel (Eli Roth, US). How satisfying is it to watch a bunch of sexist, homophobic, xenophobic Americans get horrifically sliced and diced? Try multiple viewings.

(10) BloodRayne (Uwe Bol, US/Germany). Another supersleazy, terrifically pathetic video game adaptation by the master of contemporary B-movies.

* Though he hasn’t seen David Lynch’s Inland Empire yet.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches film history at the Academy of Art University and programs "Midnites for Maniacs" at the Castro Theatre.

SAM GREEN’S TOP 10

(1) "The Tailenders," P.O.V. (Adele Horne, US)

(2) John and Jane (Ashim Ahluwalia, India)

(3) Portrait #2: Trojan (Vanessa Renwick, US)

(4) Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, US)

(5) Reporter Zero (Carrie Lozano, US)

(6) Rap Dreams (Kevin Epps, US)

(7) "Lampoons and Eye-tunes," an evening of Bryan Boyce’s short films at the ATA on Oct. 7

(8) Workingman’s Death (Michael Glawogger, Austria/Germany)

(9) "War-Gaming in the New World Order," presentation by film critic Ed Halter at the ATA on Oct. 21

(10) American Blackout (Ian Inaba, US)

Sam Green is the director of The Weather Underground and Lot 63, Grave C.

DENNIS HARVEY’S 10 MOST ALARMING PORN TITLES (NO, HE DID NOT MAKE THESE UP)

• Bareback Twink Squat

• Hole Sweet Hole

• Dirt Pipe Milkshakes

• I Dig ‘Em in Pigtails 2

• Boob Exam Scam 3

• CSI: Cum Swappers Incorporated

• Gorgeous Chloroformed Women!

• A Little Cumster in the Dumpster

• What Happens Between My Tits Stays Between My Tits

• Ass Jazz 2

Dennis Harvey is a Guardian contributing writer and a reviewer for Variety.

RIAN JOHNSON ON THE TELEVISION RENAISSANCE OF 2006

I resisted for a long while. Even as the rising tide of TiVo-wielding friends and coworkers lapped at my doorstep, I stiff-armed them with the dismissive battle cry "I don’t really watch TV." I’m not sure what happened in the past year, but the levee has broken. Big-time. I have no shame. I pimp Lost like no one’s business. I spread box sets of 24 like some modern-day Johnny Appleseed. The scales have fallen from my eyes: any given episode of South Park contains more hilarious and incisive satire than American cinema has offered in decades. Freaks and Geeks is the most painfully true window into adolescence since the glory days of John Hughes. And the new Battlestar Galactica (I swear to God) stands shoulder to shoulder with the best cinematic sci-fi of the past century. So drop your burdens by the coaxial river, all ye high-cultured unbelievers, and join us. The water’s fine.

Rian Johnson is the writer-director of Brick.

JONATHAN L. KNAPP’S TOP 10 CINEMATIC RETURNS AND ARRIVALS

(1) The return of Big Edie and Little Edie, plus the Marble Faun (a.k.a. Jerry Torre), who accompanied the screenings of Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, US, 1975) and The Beales of Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, US) at the Castro on Nov. 22.

(2) The Up series: 49 Up (Michael Apted, UK) may not have been the most eventful chapter, but a new installment is always welcome.

(3) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France) at the Castro Theatre

(4) Scott Walker in the video for "Jesse" (Graham Wood, UK) plus various clips on YouTube.

(5) The Criterion Collection DVD of Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, US, 1939), a film that equals any of the director’s beloved westerns.

(6) The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan), SF International Film Fest screening at the Castro Theatre on April 23.

(7) The Host (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea), opening night SF Animation Festival screening at the SF Museum of Modern Art on Oct. 12.

(8) Brick (Rian Johnson, US).

(9) The Descent (Neil Marshall, UK).

(10) Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, US).

Jonathan L. Knapp is a Guardian contributing writer.

JO&ATILDE;O PEDRO RODRIGUES’S MOST REVEALING MOVIE MOMENT

On Dec. 9 I saw John Ford’s The Searchers in the same theater where I had seen it for the first time when I was 15. It was a Saturday evening; 25 years ago, it had been a Thursday evening. Back then, I had never thought a western could be as moving as a Robert Bresson film.

This time the projectionist oddly forgot to put the VistaVision mask in the film projector, and I (and everybody else that was in the audience, even if nobody complained) saw a film "around" the film that continuously took me out of the tale of revenge happening below. Things that shouldn’t be seen, that usually remain hidden were revealed. I saw the lights, the microphones, the sets. I was outside the drama, but it was as if the film turned inside out in front of me.

How new can an old film be?

João Pedro Rodrigues is the director of Two Drifters and O Fantasma.

JOEL SHEPARD’S 11 FAVORITE FILMS (PLUS RUNNERS-UP AND MEMORABLE ODDITIES)

(1) I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France/Austria).

(2) Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, US).

(3) Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Austria).

(4) "The Dundies" and "A Benihana Christmas," The Office.

(5) Miami Vice (Michael Mann, US/Germany). Except for the lame part where they go to Cuba.

(6) Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski, US).

(7) The Departed (Martin Scorsese, US).

(8) Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea).

(9) United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US/UK/France).

(10) "A Time for Love" segment of Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien, France/Taiwan).

(11) Jackass Number Two (Jeff Tremaine, US).

RUNNERS-UP AND MEMORABLE ODDITIES:

• Shadowboxer (Lee Daniels, US). What? Helen Mirren as a female assassin, Cuba Gooding Jr. as her lover, and lots of nudity and graphic sex? I am in awe of its stupidity.

• Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria).

• The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, Romania).

• Same Day Nice Biscotts (Luther Price, US). Price takes 13 identical, abandoned 16mm film prints and turns them into one of the most emotionally wrenching shorts I’ve ever seen.

• www.sexandsubmission.com. Um, isn’t this illegal?

• Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis (Mary Jordan, US).

• The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (Thomas Clay, UK). Offensive, mean, juvenile garbage, and I’ve never seen a more pissed-off audience reaction at the Rotterdam Film Festival — no small feat against the unshockable Dutch.

• For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, US).

• Sitting alone in a decrepit theater watching a triple feature of generic "pink" films in Beppu, Japan, feeling boredom and pain so intensely that I began to travel through time and space.

• "The Last Wild Tigers," 60 Minutes, Nov. 19.

• Gravedancers (Mike Mendez, US). Delightful old-fashioned horror, from "After Dark Horrorfest: Eight Films to Die For."

• "Evelyn Lin," sigh.

Joel Shepard is film and video curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

SEAN UYEHARA’S COUNTDOWN OF THE 10 MOST OVERUSED DEVICES AND PLOT POINTS IN FILM FESTIVAL ENTRIES

(10) My pet is cute.

(9) To me, "experimental" means playing the same thing 412 times in a row. Crazy, huh?

(8) This old person is kind and sage. Listen to him/her. Or: these old people are kind and sage. Listen to them.

(7) Things are happening to these 10 people. Wait, they all know each other in different ways. Weird.

(6) Someone is following me. I know it because I can hear their echoey footsteps.

(5) I am a struggling writer/director/actor/painter/chef/mime/dancer/sculptor/other, and I smoke cigarettes, and I won’t compromise.

(4) There is a woman. She’s just like you and me, except that she is a prostitute/stripper — and she is so hot. Just watch her.

(4a) It’s hard out here for a pimp.

(3) Strange things keep happening to me. Additionally, I am somewhere where I don’t know where I am.

(2) God talks to me.

(1) You thought this was real? No way, this is a "mockumentary"!

Sean Uyehara is a programming associate at the San Francisco Film Society.

APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL’S 10 FILM-RELATED FAVORITES

(1) The Boy from Mars, film installation by Philippe Parreno.

(2) Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina, Argentina/Paraguay/Netherlands/Austria/France/Germany).

(3) Los Angeles–based Festival Management no longer works for the Bangkok International Film Festival.

(4) Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea).

(5) www.brucebaillie.net.

(6) Quay Brothers — the Short Films 1979–2003 DVD (BFI).

(7) Tokyo Filmex.

(8) Nintendo Wii. It’s sort of new cinema.

(9) The Wave (Kumar Shahani, India, 1984).

(10) Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky, Austria).

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is the director of Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century, and other films.

PINKY AND D. ERIC BECKLES OF TV CARNAGE LOOK BACK AT A LITIGIOUS YEAR

For us, 2006 was the year of the entertainment lawyer. It’s not a year recognized by the Chinese calendar yet, probably because being born during the year of the entertainment lawyer would be the worst thing in the fucking world.

Our year in TV and film was made love to by the word vetting — the process by which people’s thoughts and ideas are raked over, much like hot hands raking over unsuspecting pubes. (Trust me on that one.) When lawyers start examining your phrases and intentions, existence enters another dimension. It’s beyond psychedelic; it’s an assault by litigious wizards on a naive concept of freedom of speech. No matter what your intentions are, they will be examined and altered to a level of incompetence that makes you embarrassed for even having parents who engaged in the intercourse that made you.

Lawyers make work for lawyers. No one is oblivious to this, but the times spent waiting for their responses are the golden moments or the reeking turds of life, depending on the situation.

In the case of a recent situation I was privy to, we waited in real time as lawyers in another city examined the use and placement of words in a sentence to such a horrific degree it was obscene. The problem is these guys and gals (I’m so open-minded I even realize women can be lawyers) are zingless word calculators. They have the comedic timing of a court stenographer reading back testimony. So when they finally rewrite something, it feels like you’re reading an autopsy report. They ruin everything with a fear of being sued that they use to make everyone paranoid so they can get as much money from your fear-induced wallet as they can.

TV Carnage’s videos include A Sore for Sighted Eyes and When Television Attacks.

Heavenly battles and broken skies

December 26, 2006

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In 2006 the global media blitz continued to focus on the three Mexican directors — Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu — who’ve been lured by Hollywood. But a new generation of auteurs, whose approaches to filmmaking range from minimalistic to baroque, are redefining and reinvigorating film and generating debate about a genuinely new Mexican cinema.

Broken Sky (El Cielo Dividido, 2006) proves the Cooperativa Morelos filmmaking team, composed primarily of writer-director Julián Hernández and producer Roberto Fiesco (also a remarkable director of shorts), remains utterly faithful to its contemplative and pictorial film language. The filmmakers are equally dedicated to their die-hard romantic vision of the precipitous highs and lows of young mestizo men in love and lust amid the urban textures of Mexico City. Like their previous projects, Broken Sky — exquisitely shot in color by Alejandro Cantú — works against dominant representations of gay men in Mexican cinema, not to mention the banal, plastic boy-toy tales that dominate many US queer films.

If you can get past bad-boy provocateur Carlos Reygadas’s unsettling sexism and class politics, there is much to appreciate in his just-short-of-astounding urban epic, Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el Cielo, 2005). This audacious second film explores the calvary-like spiritual journey and ultimately futile quest for redemption of an ordinary plump mestizo chauffeur. A maverick, Reygadas again (as in his debut, 2002’s Japón) uses nonprofessional actors and a somewhat grotesque, naturalistic approach to eroticism. He is matched in the sheer irreverence of his perspective on Mexican national icons (from a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Guadalupe to the unfurling of a gigantic Mexican flag in the Zócalo of the National Palace) only by the likes of Arturo Ripstein and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of both its bare-bones visual style — mostly static, head-on takes — and its simple narrative, is the deadpan black comedy Sangre (2005). The debut feature by Amat Escalante, assistant director to Reygadas on Battle in Heaven, Sangre is an absurdist tragicomedy about family ties.

Fernando Eimbcke’s multiaward-winning first film, Duck Season (Temporada de Patos, 2004), is also unexpectedly quirky. A self-conscious black-and-white homage to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, it is set in the historically charged (and massive) Tlatelolco housing complex, near downtown Mexico City. Favoring a minimalistic aesthetic, the film perfectly captures the rhythms of a Sunday afternoon in the lives of two 14-year-old boys, nicknamed Flama and Moko. Left alone by their divorced parents and armed with Nintendo, an extralarge pizza, and plenty of Coke, Flama and Moko are ready to play — until a power shortage and a sudden visitor derail their plans.

Both Duck Seasons‘s tight eight-hour narrative span and its confined space — all but three short sequences take place inside an apartment — remind me of Red Dawn (1989), the independently produced film that boldly inaugurated the current new Mexican cinema by taking on the notorious military massacre of student and civilian demonstrators on the eve of the 1968 summer Olympic Games. Duck Season is otherwise void of obvious political references, but Moko’s homo fantasy of his buddy Flama is endearing. Moko spells his nickname with a k, not a c, since the latter spelling means booger (bugger?). No matter how you spell it, the word still has the connotation of bodily secretions, sexual and otherwise — as does the pato of the original title.

Some other favorites:

• Pink Punch (Puños Rosas, 2004). Beto Gómez’s campy Mexploitation flick packs plenty of fruity juice in a US-Mexico-border action-comedy involving gangsters, boxers, and prison. The delights include always fierce, don’t-fuck-with-me Isela Vega and a knockout performance by Roberto Espejo, again doing drag, as in Gómez’s Caiman’s Dream (El Sueño del Caimán, 2005).

• A Wonderful World (Un Mundo Maravilloso, 2005). Luis Estrada’s excellent follow-up to his polemical Herod’s Law (La Ley de Herodes, 1999) arrived just in time to assess how well the National Action Party fared in bridging the abyss between rich and poor after 71 years of uninterrupted, ironfisted Institutional Revolutionary Party political rule.

• The Citrillo’s Turns (Las Vueltas del Citrillo, 2005). Veteran Felipe Cazals returns to the abuse of power, this time with a tone of picaresque black comedy. Featuring stellar performances by the ever versatile Damián Alcázar, José María Yazpik, and Vanessa Bauche, it’s set circa 1903 and focuses on characters who indulge in alcoholic libations from a pulquería, which gives the film its title.

• In the Pit (En el Hoyo, 2005). Director Juan Carlos Rulfo finally lets his famous father rest in peace while dynamically exploring his own voice. This documentary brings together on-site conversations with workers who constructed the second level of the highway where three million cars circulate daily through Mexico City.

Despite a significant increase in the annual number of feature-length works produced in Mexico since figures plummeted to unprecedented depths in the 1990s, it remains difficult to see Mexican films outside film festivals. Within Mexico, national film protection legislation mandating 10 percent of screen time be allocated to local work remains, to no one’s surprise, unenforced. In the United States, given the interest in Mexican movies since at least as far back as 1992’s Like Water for Chocolate (Como Agua para Chocolate, Alfonso Arau), it is perplexing why more films don’t get a commercial run — especially since French films get theatrical time even though they rarely earn much at the box office. Do I have an ax to grind about this? Hell yeah! *

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