Betsey Culp

Friday is the Fourth of July. The day, in 1776, when thirteen little American colonies in completed a document announcing that they,

are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.

The Declaration of Independence set off a series of events that changed the world.

But so did another document, proclaimed on another Fourth of July.

On July 4, 1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially ended the Mexican-American War and attached “Upper California” to the United States. The new U.S. Territory on the Pacific Coast might have remained a sleepy outpost for years, perhaps for decades, except for another event that occurred in the same year. In January 1848, James Marshall noticed some shiny pebbles near John Sutter’s sawmill in Coloma. Yes, you guessed it. Gold! Rumors of the discovery gradually drifted east, exciting thousands of people eager to make their fortune. But it wasn’t until December that the news became official, when President James K. Polk said in his State of the Union speech,

The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.

(The president also went on at enthusiastic length about benefits of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in general, adding the prescient statement, “The depot of the vast commerce which must exist on the Pacific will probably be at some point on the Bay of San Francisco.”)

You know what happened next. People — mainly male people — all over the world packed up a few supplies and headed for California. They sailed across the Pacific or around the Horn, braved the mosquito-ridden jungles of Panama, or trudged ever-so-slowly across the North American continent. They transformed the region almost overnight, as Carey McWilliams noted:

In 1849 the population of California was divided into three major groupings: about 10,000 “native Californians” of Spanish-Mexican-Indian descent, concentrated in the southern counties; several hundred “old residents,” who had arrived in California prior to the discovery of gold; and about 100,000 who had flocked to the state to mine for gold. Two out of every three of these newcomers were foreigners.

Polk’s prediction about the port of San Francisco came true more quickly than he had imagined, as ships bearing people and goods sailed into the harbor. Judge Peter H. Burnett, soon to become California’s first governor, wrote:

We have here in our midst a mixed mass of human beings from every part of the wide earth, of different habits, manners, customs, and opinions, all, however, impelled onward by the same feverish desire of fortune-making…. We are in fact without government, — a commercial, civilized, and wealthy people, without law, order, or system.

Ordinarily, a U.S. Territory remained in a tutelary stage for many years, administered from Washington as it gradually acquired residents and local institutions. And ordinarily, a U.S. Territory remained poor, gradually building up its economy. Eventually Congress, in its wisdom, would decide it was time to advance the territory to statehood.

Not so in California.

In less than a year, the Territory of California had the population needed for statehood. And it was rich.  Its residents desperately needed — and fervently wanted — to govern themselves rather than wait for decisions made three thousand miles away. They decided follow an old American custom and take matters into their own hands. But unlike the Founding Fathers, who unilaterally separated themselves from their mother country, the Californians unilaterally bound themselves to it. They created their own statehood and presented it to Congress for approval.

The man in charge of the chaos was the military governor, General Bennett Riley. He had the sense to realize that he was not cut out for civilian government, but also that the region was filled with men who were. Riley called for elections all over the territory on August 1 to choose delegates to a constitutional convention in Monterey. The convention convened on September 1 — 36 American citizens, 7 Californios, and 3 foreigners. (Because only two of the native Californians spoke English, an interpreter was provided.)  The delegates worked till October 13, when they gathered to sign what they had created. New York Tribune reporter Bayard Taylor was one of the two observers:

The Chair was taken by the old pioneer [John Sutter], and the members took their seats around the sides of the hall, which still retained the pine trees and banners left from last night’s [party] decorations. The windows and doors were open, and a delightful breeze came in from the bay, whose blue waters sparkled in the distance. The view from the balcony in front was bright and inspiring. The town below — the shipping in the harbor — the pine-covered hills behind — were mellowed by the blue October haze, but there was no cloud in the sky.

They produced a remarkable document, which set the tone for the state’s future. The constitution opened with a “Declaration of Rights” mirroring the U.S. Constitution’s first ten amendments and went on to describe the democratic duties and responsibilities of the three branches of the government. It incorporated the Spanish custom of community property rights in marriage and called for laws to keep a wife’s previously owned property separate from her husband’s. It gave voting rights to “every white male citizen of the United States, and every white male citizen of Mexico, who shall have elected to become a citizen of the United States” over the age of 21. (The question of voting rights for Indians was left up to the legislature; women and other people of color were excluded.) And it outlawed slavery, a hotly contested issue in the rest of the country.

The not-yet-State of California was already roiling the political waters, proposing measures that many Americans found revolutionary. The new constitution was submitted to the voters, who approved it in November 1849. California’s request for statehood created a furor in Congress, which had been dithering over the subject of slavery in new states for years. Result No. 1: the Compromise of 1850, which is credited with calming political tensions and postponing the Civil War. Result No. 2: statehood for California.

The moral of this story: There is no stopping intelligent men of good will when they’re backed by cold hard cash.

Thanks for reading. Have a Happy Fourth of July! I’m outta here till next Tuesday.

Sumer is icumen in, the old song says. And quite a summer it promises to be.

In addition to the usual games at City Hall, there will be June weddings, lots of them, led off by the remarriage of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, this time in a court-sanctioned ceremony.

In the beginning, there were two women. They founded a social club called the Daughters of Bilitis because they wanted a place to hang out with their friends and dance… with each other. They started a magazine called The Ladder to let women like them know that they were not alone.

In case you missed the excitement that these women started more than fifty years ago, it’s good to remember that in 1955, gay bars were illegal. It was even against the law in some places for women to wear men’s trousers. In the eyes of Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering minions, homosexuals were as subversive as card-carrying Communists. In San Francisco four years later, City Assessor Russell Wolden, running for mayor, announced that the Daughters of Bilitis

is a matter of grave concern to every parent. It exposes teen-agers to possible contact and contamination in a city overrun by deviates.

And all because a couple of women were determined to create their own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

On the cultural front, the city’s cup is running over with exciting, “world-class” events this summer. Frida Kahlo has taken up residence at SFMOMA. Dale Chihuly, whose glowing glassworks have been welcoming visitors to the de Young and the Legion of Honor since the beginning of May, will have a full-fledged exhibition at the de Young. The Legion of Honor hosts a group of women Impressionists — Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzales, and Marie Bracquemond.

But the new Contemporary Jewish Museum got a head start on all of them by opening last weekend. The media, here and elsewhere have focused on the building, Daniel Libeskind’s imaginative tweaking of the old PG&E power station on Mission, and only touched in passing on the art displayed inside. Talk about judging a book by the cover! It’s a strange and wonderful building — how often do you see a cube poised on one pointy corner? But don’t they realize it’s a museum we’re talking about? Museums are usually containers for exhibits, not just interesting shells.

What’s inside?

All sorts of good stuff — William Steig’s drawings, assorted explorations in sound, photographs of Bay Area Jews — but especially a collection of art, old and new, gathered under the rubric “In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis.”

You remember Genesis: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” and so on for seven days. A very short section at the beginning of the Torah; a very short section at the beginning of the Bible. But its meaning has fascinated scholars and artists since the beginning of time. And the new exhibition is no exception.

There are old drawings by people like William Blake and Marc Chagall, new installations that include electronic media and oral testimonies. Perhaps most stunning is a room designed by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, which re-creates the Kabbalist creation story of Tikkun Olam, or “Repairing the World.”

In the process of creating the world, the story goes, God made vessels of light and poured a divine substance into them, but the vessels shattered, sending out little sparks that lodged in matter everywhere. The world has been fragmented ever since. Every time a person takes a material object — a desk, a wrench, a floor mop — and uses it for a good purpose, the trapped sparks are freed and reunited.

Ukeles has lined the sides of the room with strings of two-sided mirrors, which catch and reflect the light —- one side to illuminate an individual’s path and the other to “capture the sacred images of Others.” But these mirrors will not hang there forever. She offers a trade: on specified days — the first is July 31 — visitors intending to perform a good deed may exchange their signed promise for a mirror. Then, Ukeles says,

This flow of light, COVENANT, and personal Tikkun into the world will transform the artwork…

By joining me in this journey, your light will be known within here, and then, through your Tikkun action, it will radiate out in the world.

To Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the idea of using service to transform the material world into art is nothing new. In 1969, when she was pregnant, she watched her own body changing at the same time that the social and political worlds around her were being transformed. She felt frustrated by

the image of the “housewife” as someone locked into an irretrievable system of dependency.

She wrote “Maintenance Art — Proposal for an Exhibition,” in which she reframed housework — the “maintenance art” —

as a means to the survival of personal freedom, art and all other social institutions. In other words, maintenance art was a necessary part of the human condition. Through this approach to the problem, Ukeles began to extend the references in her work outside of a purely feminist content in order to reveal the conditions of work, and the stereotypes handed to maintenance workers on all levels, whether in public, private, or corporate enterprises.

The manifesto turned into action in 1973, in an early bit of performance art, when

she washed the floor of the Hartford Art Museum during regular public visiting hours, surrounded by sculpture and painting, as well as its entrance way (Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Inside and Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside). After all, as an artist, the museum was her home away from home. To it she brought her performance art inside and outside — whether as wife and mother or as maintenance worker, ignored as service workers usually are.

It’s only natural that, for the past 30 years, she has been artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. In 1983, she covered a garbage truck with a tempered glass mirror, perhaps anticipating the mirrors she hung in San Francisco.

The reflecting truck is a metaphor for the interrelationship between “us” whose images get caught in the mirror and “those” who collect our garbage.

Now she’s offering us dozens of mirrors to “repair the world.”

And all because a woman was determined to create her own space.

A simple act. A beginning.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here.

As the dust begins to settle from Tuesday’s elections, here and in Montana and South Dakota, a few blurry shapes are becoming visible through the murk of campaign ads and media hype.

The Chronicle’s Bill Whalen seems to have been the only person to notice that we — the State of California — shot ourselves in the foot when we changed the date of our presidential primary from June 3 to February 5. If we’d left well enough alone, we coulda been a contender.

At the risk of over-romanticizing, the Democratic Party scenario would have played out something like this: On the 40th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s storied win here, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton would have come to California in similar dire straits as RFK: a New York senator/presidential underdog long on family legacy but short on delegates, desperately in need of a win to force a favorable outcome at the national convention.

Like Kennedy, Clinton would have forged a coalition of working-class whites and Latinos (RFK had Cesar Chavez as an ally; Clinton has Cesar L. Chavez, his grandson, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in her TV ads). Ironically, Clinton would have slammed her main nemesis, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, much the same way as Kennedy was attacked by his rivals: too young, too brash, too liberal. In the end, she likely would have prevailed - in numbers superior to Kennedy’s (RFK won with 46.3 percent of the vote in 1968; Clinton racked up 51.1 percent in February). Maybe it wouldn’t have cost Obama the nomination, but it sure would have been fun.

When will Californians learn that they should insist on doing things their way instead of trying to follow the rest of the country? Batting clean-up is always more exciting.

In the election we did have, it was the fight over Propositions F and G that was most exciting, at least if the number of mailers sent and dollars spent is any indication. The contenders entered the ring wrapped in layer upon layer of controversy. At heart, of course, they were fighting for the future of Hunters Point. But even though Prop G won on Tuesday, the election was only the first round. This fight won’t truly be settled until the area is built out. Until a slew of issues and a passel of nitty gritty details are worked out, we won’t truly know who won the prize — Lennar or the people of Hunters Point.

One issue that will undoubtedly remain in Round Two is the question of a new stadium for the 49ers. That stadium is beginning to feel like the Flying Dutchman, forever wandering from here to there, with never a place to call home. Maybe it’s time to let it sail off into the sunset. That’s not just my opinion. Ray Ratto, who is far more involved in the pro football world than I am,

knew that the stadium was pure bait-and-switch.

And why did we know that? Because this is the new world of stadium construction, in which ballparks are placed in the middle of grander urban projects (ballpark “villages”) that miraculously come under the control of the owners of the team getting the stadium. That’s why, as one example, the Giants want the development across the cove from the ballpark. It’s Real Estate 101 for the mega-acquisitive.

But these projects are only myths, Ratto adds. And these days, they’re not very helpful ones:

the economy says they are stupid ideas, period. And stupider now than ever.

Lennar’s plans to build thousands of new homes. The 49ers hopes for a new stadium. These were the most visible issues in the Prop F and G fight. But if you read the literature carefully, you discover that there was another theme as well.

Mayor Gavin Newsom explains, in Lennar-sponsored mailer:

Real work on transforming the Hunters Point Shipyard began when Senator Feinstein was mayor. A plan that has been through literally hundreds of meetings and thousands of hours of communitiy input is coming before you as Proposition G.

Community leaders from the Bayview and around the City have spent years to craft the best plan possible.

Then Supervisor Chris Daly came along. With no public input, no community meetings in the Bayview, and no real plans — Supervisor Daly put Proposition F on the ballot.

Another Lennar-sponsored mailer says:

Prop F is a false promise from Chris Daly.

The San Francisco Women’s Political Committee (which mysteriously requires a user name and password to enter its website) says the same thing in almost exactly the same words:

Proposition F is just another false promise to the Bayview. Sponsored by Chris Daly and placed on the ballot without a single public hearing, Prop F overturns ten years of community planning for jobs, parks and housing.

So does the “Official San Francisco Democratic Party Recommendations for the June 3rd Primary Election”:

Proposition F is just anther false promise to the Bayview. Sponsored by Chris Daly and placed on the ballot without a single public hearing, Prop F overturns ten years of community planning for jobs, parks and housing.

Gets a little monotonous, doesn’t it?

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

It turns out that Lennar and the mayor may have won in the Prop G / Prop F fight but, as the Chronicle noted, another prize was also up for grabs on Tuesday — the composition of the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee.

A little-known but highly influential San Francisco political group is about to add some big-name local politicians to its ranks after voters on Tuesday elected three members of the Board of Supervisors to the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee and handed control of the body to the city’s left-leaning progressive forces.

The three supes —Aaron Peskin, Jake McGoldrick, and yes, Chris Daly — are members of the progressive Board of 2000, which turned San Francisco politics upside down. They will be termed out in November. But they obviously don’t intend to ride off into the sunset.

On the contrary. Their move to the DCCC suggests that they intend to strengthen the role of the Democratic Party in city politics, to take it beyond the fundraising and education of political newcomers that have occupied it in recent years. Peskin told the Chronicle,

from time to time you now see the party pass a policy resolution that appears on the mayor’s or supervisors’ desks. You’ll probably see more of that.

And the progressives are sending out a message that they intend to direct those resolutions. That pesky Chris Daly managed to do a successful end-run around Prop G.

Newsom, who unsuccessfully pitted some of his staffers against Peskin, McGoldrick, and Daly, described the battle for the DCCC,

It’s about power and positioning and I think that’s self-evident.

Of course, it is. That’s what politics is all about. And I think that’s self-evident.

Stay tuned for Round Two.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till next Friday.

————————

Tune in to Arthur Bruzzone’s Unscripted this week to hear my not-always-sane-and-sensible opinions on everything under the sun. (Channel 11 in San Francisco. Friday, 8:00 p.m. Sunday, 8:00 p.m. On demand after that at SFunscripted.com.)

Just across Cesar Chavez from the “gritty Mission,” Bernal Hill rises 433 feet into the sky. Perhaps because it has more than the city’s usual allotment of open space, it’s also home to more than the city’s usual assortment of four-legged critters. In addition to the famed coyote, there are raccoons and possums and skunks galore. Several shops on the hill place bowls of biscuits on their counters for the resident dogs. And there are cats, lots of them.

I don’t think anyone has ever conducted a census, but cats seem to be even more numerous than dogs. They sit inside, staring out the window, watching life go by. They wander outside, investigating life in their neighbor’s garden. You don’t see their private interactions, but it goes without saying that some of them have active — and productive — sex lives.

The result became obvious about a year ago when one of the tenants on the east side of Bernal died. It turned out that he’d been generously supporting a whole colony of cats, the offspring of these promiscuous kitties. The now-abandoned cats had never really become domesticated and they quickly set up shop in a couple of vacant lots. The neighbors became concerned for their welfare.

Enter Elaine Perednia.

Elaine owns the Petsitters, one of those services that cares for dogs or cats — or goldfish or hamsters or boa constrictors — while their people are out of town. Her job meant that she was especially attuned to feline needs. She also knew how to get information about taking care of the orphans.

Because the City of St. Francis frowns on harming innocent members of the animal kingdom, the San Francisco SPCA has an active Feral Cat Assistance Program that provides valuable advice in cases like this. Before long, Elaine had recruited several neighbors to help feed the cats. And she herself got busy, trapping the strays and delivering them to the SPCA. Full-grown feral cats are accustomed to being on their own and don’t take kindly to adoption by humans. They were neutered and returned to the lot after a few days’ recuperation.

The cats were characters. One, dark and intense, protested all the way. Elaine named her Moxie. Once back in Elaine’s garage, awaiting repatriation, Moxie went on a hunger strike and refused to eat, no matter what tempting food was placed before her. Elaine feared that Moxie would starve to death and returned her to the lot early. She watched her flee under a fence and wondered if she would survive. But Moxie’s still there. She appears every so often and stares from a safe distance, looking fatter and sassier than ever.

Stella, on the other hand, wasn’t cut out for the outdoor life and knew it. Stella is a beautiful longhair with blue Siamese eyes. She settled into a cage in the garage and eyed Elaine calmly when she came bearing food. Stella had no trouble eating. And she didn’t appear the least bit worried by the presence of humans. Eventually, Elaine decided to move her upstairs into the house instead of returning her to the lot. Day by day, Stella grew more comfortable in her new surroundings. She found a cozy cushion in a corner and watched the other cats in the house, who seemed unthreatened by her presence. Soon she was wandering into the kitchen or climbing onto the bed with them. And before long she began to let Elaine pat her. She’d found a home.

One day when Elaine went down to the vacant lots to feed the cats, she discovered workmen clearing out the brush in one of them. They told her that their employer had just bought the properties and was planning to build on them. They also told her that they had discovered a mother and three kittens under one of the rocks they’d hauled away.

Great consternation! What to do?

But the workmen didn’t return. And the other lot remained overgrown.

Elaine began checking the lots at odd hours, looking for the kittens. For weeks, there was neither sight nor sound of them. Then one day they ventured out, exploring, just as she happened by. She scooped them up — they were each no bigger than a fist — and transported them to the SPCA. Not yet fearful of humans, they’ll easily adapt to human companionship. But the poor mother… she came back to the spot for several days, looking for them, waiting for them to return. Finally she stopped coming.

And still the workmen didn’t return. The brush on the other lot grew high, turning into a jungle. Every day Elaine and her helpers delivered food and water to the cats. Every night the cats crept out of their hiding places to eat and hunt and do whatever cats do at night.

Until last Friday, when the bulldozers arrived.

————————————

Tune in to Arthur Bruzzone’s Unscripted this week to hear my not-always-sane-and -sensible opinions on everything under the sun. (Channel 11 in San Francisco. Wednesday, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 6:30 p.m. Friday, 8:00 p.m. Sunday, 8:00 p.m. On demand after that at SFunscripted.com.)

When I was growing up, my father had a career in mind for me.

Let me put this in context. My father was weird. He also traveled a lot. And he enjoyed the company of attractive women who tended to his creature comforts.

He wanted me to be a stewardess.

He never understood why I didn’t want to be. And I never had the heart to explain it to him. But when I see articles like the one in today’s Chronicle, I remember my father’s dreams for his daughter.

The Chronicle jubilantly reported that even though the American economy is gasping, San Francisco has been attracting record numbers of visitors who are happy to spend big bucks in its shops and restaurants and hotels — $8.2 billion of them. The weak dollar plays a part — more than 10 percent of these tourists are from overseas — but most of these people have traveled here from other parts of the United States.

Joe D’Alessandro, president and CEO of the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, recited what has become a familiar mantra in recent years:

Tourism continues to be San Francisco’s most vital industry.

The city knows how to sell itself. D’Alessandro added,

Thanks to (Mayor) Gavin Newsom and (City Attorney) Dennis Herrera (who argued in favor of same-sex marriage rights) and the California Supreme Court making sure that San Francisco will become the wedding capital of the nation — for everybody.

The Visitors Bureau is doing its bit, by spending “$1000,000 on marketing to gay, lesbian and transgender tourists.”

That’s on top of the $1.1 million that it spends (out of a $15 million marketing budget) on its “Taste S.F.” campaign, designed to remind the world that San Francisco is a “foodie destination.”

Food and romance. Can you say, “Coffee, tea, or milk?”

Now take a look at a description of the entire Bay Area — not simply the City by the Bay — found in a recent report called “Sustaining the Bay Area’s Competitiveness in a Globalizing World,” prepared by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute:

The Bay Area has a productive economy that draws on the talents of a well-educated workforce in one of the most dynamic urban centers in the world. World-class research universities, a vibrant technology and venture capital community in Silicon Valley, and the financial and commercial strengths of the region’s cities combine with the area’s natural beauty and mild climate to form an attractive environment for developing people, businesses, and industries. Bay Area universities receive a substantial share of the United States’ research funds, and the students educated in these schools often go on to develop successful companies that help build industries in biotechnology, software, Internet services and other sectors. In addition to the region’s traditional strengths in these sectors, opportunities are growing in digital media, nanotechnology, and clean energy technologies.

I realize that in times of economic turbulence, we should be grateful for any boost we can get. But tourists come and go. A well-educated and well-appreciated workforce goes on forever.

It’s partly a matter of image management. But only partly. It’s also a matter of how we see ourselves. Tell me truthfully, which place would you prefer to live in — one with yummy food or a productive economy? A theme park or a world-class city?

—————-

On a different note, the nice people at WordPress are very unhappy. It seems that they have spent hours developing a blogging program that allows readers to insert comments easily. But they’re being ignored. Instead, the readers of my columns send their comments to me by email. These readers are witty and insightful, and so are their comments, but their brilliance remains under the bushel of my Inbox, unappreciated by the rest of the world. Maybe they’re shy.

It’s very simple. All they have to do is log in at the bottom of a column, place their cursor in the little box, and type away. People might even respond. And then we’d have more wit and insight, blazing like fireworks, setting the cyber-sky on fire.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Tuesday.

It’s hard for the City of San Francisco to get a fair shake these days, either in the media or among the general American public. Its image precedes its reality. And that image, as we who live here know all too well, is misleading.

San Francisco has its share of unusual people — “fruits and nuts” used to be the customary appellation. New York and Boston have plenty of eccentrics of their own, but they appear on the city’s stage as sweet “characters,” not weirdos. And the oddballs who wander around Capitol Hill in Washington somehow acquire an aura of normality.

Despite their economic prowess, despite their technological know-how, despite their political leadership, the people of San Francisco are usually depicted as grown-up flower children, singing “Kumbaya” and naively sticking daisies into rifles. Images of the Summer of Love die hard.

You can blame it on the hippies. But I blame it on Saint Francis.

Much of Saint Francis’s fame today rests on his sweet interaction with members of the animal world. It was Francis who preached to the birds, who eagerly listened to his sermons. It was Francis who concluded a pact between local dogs and a hungry wolf, so that the wolf was pacified and no one in his town was hurt.

Yet this was the Catholic friar who founded one of the most powerful religious organizations in the world. Imagine that the Dalai Lama had created a cadre of sub-lamas who fanned out over the globe, forming a vastly influential economic and cultural network. And then imagine that the world still insisted on regarding the Dalai Lama as an avatar of peace and harmony. The thought turns the mind topsy turvy.

So why do we continue to allow the distorted reputation of Saint Francis to cloud the image of San Francisco? It’s time for a new patron saint. And I have one in mind.

Let me describe him to you:

[His] jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

A blond Satan. Or perhaps a something more worldly:

The looseness of his lower lip and the droop of his upper eyelids combined with the v’s in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr’s.

Recognize him? Meet Sam Spade. Amazing — he doesn’t look a thing like Humphrey Bogart.

But Dashiell Hammett’s private detective taught Bogie a thing or two. When necessary, he could adopt an air of zen-like detachment:

Spade, propped on an elbow on the sofa, looked at and listened… impartially. In the comfortable slackness of his body, in the easy stillness of his features, there was no indication of either curiosity or impatience.

That’s on good days. On bad ones, he became an avenging angel:

Blood streaked Spade’s eyeballs now and his long-held smile had become a frightful grimace. He cleared his throat huskily…. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly.

Sam Spade also had an image problem. But it was the opposite of Saint Francis’s. It was intentional.

“Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” he said. “That kind of reputation might be good business — bringing in high-priced jobs and making it easier to deal with the enemy.”

Sounds a little like Rick Blaine, discussing his dealings with the Nazis in Casablanca.

In other words, Spade taught Bogart everything he knew.

He could teach the rest of the world a few things as well. About loyalty. About a hard-headed sense of reality. About standing up for what’s right.

And about having fun.

When you get right down to it, Spade is far better qualified to be our patron saint than any old Italian guy. And when the chips are down, he would take the job very seriously, because he was familiar with this city from top to bottom.

Spade’s eyes had lost their warmth. His face was dull and lumpy. “I know what I’m talking about,” he said in a low, consciously patient, tone. “This is my city and my game.”

Wouldn’t you want him on your side? I would.

Dashiell Hammett set the standard for modern crime fiction when he introduced Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (Knopf, 1929). On May 4, the Chronicle ran a piece by Eddie Muller on San Francisco mystery writers. This posting is the third in an occasional series on the authors that Muller discusses.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

Somebody — I think it was Jon Carroll — said once that a good column contained an idea and a half. Here’s the idea.

Sometime, just once, it would be nice if this city decided to do something because it was the right thing to do, and not because it was profitable.

Yesterday’s Chronicle carried a front-page story about Lennar’s proposed development of Candlestick Point and the Hunters Point Shipyard,

the biggest single redevelopment project in San Francisco since World War II, a transformation of a neighborhood that has languished for decades as renewal plans have come and gone.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone in San Francisco doesn’t know what’s at issue here. It’s a huge mixed-use project that the League of Women Voter Pros & Cons Guide describes as

300 acres of public parks and public open space; 8,500-10,000 units of new affordable and market rate housing including rental and for-sale units; 700,000 square feet of retail space; and 2,150,000 square feet of green office space, research space, technology, or other industrial uses.

The project is on a collision course because of two competing ballot measures that will determine how much of the housing is affordable. Proposition F requires 50 percent; Proposition G offers 25 percent as “a guiding principal,” but recent negotiations between Lennar and the San Francisco Labor Council have upped the affordable units to 32 percent. Lennar insists that a 50 percent goal is unworkable. It’s a David-and-Goliath fight: the Miami-based developer has spent $3 million so far to get its plan approved; supporters of Proposition F have spent about $4,000.

Three million dollars is a lot of money. It’s a good indicator of how much Lennar hopes to profit from the project. While the company has its fingers in a number of local development pies, it’s not a charitable organization. It’s here to make money. Any improvement of local folks’ living conditions is incidental. Its website makes this clear:

Lennar offers a wide selection of new homes throughout the Bay Area. Our communities are centrally located to spectacular destinations including San Francisco, Wine Country in Sonoma and Napa Valley, Mount Diablo State Park, Monterey, Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park. The cultural, scenic, and recreational venues across the area are unparalleled, making the Bay Area lifestyle an exciting and rewarding experience. Lennar, one of America’s leading builders of quality homes since 1954, offers single-family and condominium homes in some of the most desired Bay Area locations with easy access to all points throughout the area including San Francisco, the East Bay, Marin County, the Peninsula, and San Jose.

But Proposition G is also being presented to the voters as support for a plan

unifying the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point, and the Bayview neighborhood which would protect the character of the neighborhood.

As such, it

encourages [italics mine] rebuilding and renovation of the Alice Griffiths Housing Development with a one-for-one replacement for existing residents.

On the other hand, Proposition F stipulates that

any rebuilding plan for Alice Griffith Public Housing would provide one-to-one replacement units targeted to the same income levels of existing residents and prevent displacement of current housing residents.

Back to idea Number One:

The question underlying the fight between Proposition F and Proposition G is the old one that governs every whodunit: Cui bono? Who benefits? If the city of San Francisco really cares about the welfare of the people who now live in Bayview/Hunters Point — as opposed to those hardy pioneers who will move into Lennar’s “affordable and market-rate housing” — it will do a little creative financing and make Proposition F work. If not, no abundance of “cultural, scenic, and recreational venues” will be able to compensate for what it has lost.

Now here’s the half-idea.

Proposition G also provides a site in Hunters Point Shipyard for

a new stadium for the San Francisco 49er’s and improvements in transportation and other infrastructure.

Or not.

If not, there will be more “housing, parks, and green office space.”

Development in San Francisco is on a very bland diet. Housing, parks, and office space. They’re like steak, mashed potatoes, and peas — lovely but not at every meal, for Pete’s sake.

Take a look at another shipyard, on the other side of the continent, in Brooklyn. In 1966, when the federal government closed down the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the site seemed slated for the usual boring menu: demolition followed by housing, parks, and office space. Today

its old machine shops and warehouses hum with small entrepreneurs — makers of furniture, clothing, industrial equipment, theatrical sets, and computer software — as well as medical suppliers, fashion designers, printers, carpenters, and artists, altogether employing 5,000 people.

Andrew Kimball, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corp., a not-for-profit that manages the city-owned site, said current plans call for spending $250 million in public and private money to add 1.3 million square feet of space and 1,500 more jobs by 2009. In a decade, he said, there should be 5,000 more jobs.

Last August a commercial real estate broker said in the New York Times,

Every five years, the city is losing approximately 15 percent of its industrial space, because it is being converted into residences, offices, retail. That is why the Navy Yard is so helpful.

Just a thought. Just a half an idea. But sometimes a half is better than a whole.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Tuesday.

In case you were worried, it’s still a man’s world.

In spite of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, sexism is still alive and well in the United States. If anything, Clinton’s visibility on the stump has opened doors for sexist remarks that would probably have remained private a few years ago.

And women have noticed.

In February feminist writer Robin Morgan published a passionate protest against the sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton that said in part:

Goodbye to the HRC nutcracker with metal spikes between splayed thighs. If it was a tap-dancing blackface doll, we would be righteously outraged — and they would not be selling it in airports. Shame.

Goodbye to the most intimately violent T-shirts in election history, including one with the murderous slogan “If Only Hillary had married O.J. Instead!” Shame.

Goodbye to Comedy Central’s “Southpark” featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC’s vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

Goodbye to the sick, malicious idea that this is funny.

In April Joan Walsh took up the thread by posting a video on her Salon blog:

I’d urge people who are minimizing the sexism Clinton faces, or who are trying to argue that racism against Obama has been just as public and disabling, to make a YouTube video that’s comparable to this, and that features media stars — not Clinton surrogates, not Obama critics, but guys paid by major news networks — using comparable slurs against Obama. Maybe it’s possible. I doubt it, but maybe.

Watching the video makes you see Tim Russert and Keith Olbermann in an entirely different light.

In the blogging world, the Washington Post noted, verbal attacks — and physical threats — aimed at women have become common:

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about “the daily ins and outs of being a mom” was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats.

Yesterday the issue reached the pages of the New York Times. In the magazine section, Peggy Orenstein wondered how to talk about the election with her four-year-old daughter:

Contemplating the “Life’s a Bitch, Don’t Vote for One” T-shirts, the stainless-steel-thighed Hillary nutcrackers, the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of “Fatal Attraction,” I struggle over how, when — even whether — to talk to girls truthfully about women and power.

A news story was less dramatic but equally down-beat. Kate Zernike painted a composite picture of the kind of woman most likely to become president:

That woman will come from the South, or west of the Mississippi. She will be a Democrat who has won in a red state, or a Republican who has emerged from the private sector to run for governor. She will have executive experience, and have served in a job like attorney general, where she will have proven herself to be “a fighter” (a caring one, of course).

She will be young enough to qualify as postfeminist (in the way Senator Barack Obama has come off as postracial), unencumbered by the battles of the past. She will be married with children, but not young children. She will be emphasizing her experience, and wearing, yes, pantsuits.

Oh, and she may not exist.

It was in this context that I read Laurie R. King’s A Grave Talent (St. Martin’s Press, 1993) last week. The book is one of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Picks” of contemporary crime books set in the Bay Area. The gender of its main characters turns traditional crime novels — and even traditional literary novels — upside down.

The focus of the book is a painter known to the world as Eva Vaughn, who lives in a back-to-the-earth community in the Santa Cruz mountains. She’s not merely a good painter; she’s a great one. We learn

that her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about “painterly” paintings…. That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.

The power of this female barbarian is also behind a series of cruel murders: four brown-haired little girls have been found nude, strangled. The crimes and the process of solving them are just as insistent as today’s political campaigns in raising questions of gender and power in contemporary American social relations.

One of the police officers assigned to the case is Inspector Kate Martinelli. Yes, a female homicide cop. She knows why she’s there:

She had been assigned to this specific case because she was relatively photogenic and a team player known for not making waves, that she was a political statement from the SFPD to critics from women’s groups, and worst of all, that her assignment reflected the incredibly out-dated absurd notion that women, even those without their own, were somehow “better with children.”

She’s a good cop. She’s also a lesbian. And she understands how the world works. At the end of the book, after the murders are solved and the murderer is safely behind bars, she’s assigned to another case. This one involves the slaying of

one of the country’s most outspoken, most eloquent, most militant, most worshipped, and most vilified radical feminist lesbians.

When Kate realizes what has happened, she dissolves into laughter. “Now,” she says,

“now I’m the department’s representative to the chains-and-leather dyke brigade.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and suddenly the laughter disintegrated and she heaved a sigh. “Ah, well, as they say: only in San Francisco.”

On May 4, the Chronicle ran a piece by Eddie Muller on San Francisco mystery writers. This posting is the second in an occasional series on the authors that Muller discusses.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.

A jubilant Gavin Newsom stood beneath the great rotunda of San Francisco City Hall yesterday, surrounded by happy people celebrating the State Supreme Court’s support for same-sex marriage. His reasons for joy were undoubtedly twofold. Not only had a just cause won, but the event, which the Bay Guardian’s Steven T. Jones calls “the most important civil rights ruling in a generation” had truly established him as a civil rights leader.

Here in San Francisco, Newsom’s public image rests on his role in furthering same-sex marriages. But elsewhere he’s known for his promotion of sustainable cities. Same-sex marriage is rarely mentioned.

He’s elsewhere a lot. Hardly a day goes by when his office and the media don’t announce that he’s just departed for, or just returned from, some far-off destination. At the beginning of this month, he headed off to Israel. He swung by New York City on the way back, pausing long enough to be interviewed by a beaming Dana Goodyear for the New Yorker Conference. No sooner had he touched down in San Francisco than he was off again, this time to testify before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Only a State Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of same-sex marriage in California prevented him from going on from there to Chicago.

In all these trips, his focus is the same: sustainability, green building, fighting global warming at the city level. He’s come a long way from the wet-behind-the-ears mayor whom Tad Friend described in 2004 in the New Yorker magazine. The images that Friend presented in his article were vintage San Francisco stereotypes — he ended with this scene:

A suspiciously serene rally in favor of legalizing marijuana was going on [opposite City Hall], and the air was suddenly pungent with the substance in question.

I tried to counter them with a piece of my own in the San Francisco Call.

That was only four years ago, but it was a very different time. Taking a leaf from the book of his hero, Robert Kennedy, Newsom was attempting to solve the problems of San Francisco’s perennial homeless population. In the wake of 9/11 and the bursting of the dot.com bubble, the city’s economy was reeling. The war in Iraq had begun less than two years before, and the country was about to return George W. Bush to the White House. For the average American, global warming was just a gleam in a few environmentalists’ eyes.

Since then, both the Bush administration and the war he promoted have become festering wounds in the nation’s side. The economy has flown some astonishing loop-the-loops before descending in a frightening spiral. Even most die-hard conservatives consider the issue of climate change to be real, although some of their methods for addressing it remain less than serious.

Here’s where the new Newsom comes in. In the past year or so, he has refashioned his image from the Scourge of Homelessness to the Green Mayor. And the chief executive of the city that Tad Friend described as “an avatar of social rebellion” is now being talked about as the next governor of California. (Can you say “Gavinor”?)

The transition was probably gradual, but Newsom himself credits the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for the change. In the course of his discussions there, he was surprised to realize that

the debate on global warming is over.

The new political theme would be the nexus of economic reform with environmental action. The new political leader would be a combination of Bobby Kennedy and Bill McKibben and Warren Buffet. In an interview at Davos, Newsom said,

How big an issue will global climate change be in the elections? If it’s not dominant, then the American people aren’t doing their job holding us to account. I can’t imagine a more important issue that unites the entire planet around one value. What else does?

He added, in the context of the 2008 election,

The presidential candidate that can link the issues of poverty & job creation to those that have been left behind in the last decade, the last half century, to the issue of global narrative on the environment & sustainability, that’s the person I’ll be electing, or voting for, in this election.

He was also talking about himself.

In his various travels, which the people of San Francisco hear very little about, Newsom presents himself as the mayor of a rapidly greening city. He says he was inspired to travel to Israel because of a plan to institute a nationwide network of electric cars there. His performance at the New Yorker conference included an almost poetic waxing on the subject of composting:

composting in food scraps
& getting into our public schools
& just seeing these little kids run up
& get rid of their little extra pasta or their beans
& then using that compost
& bringing it back to the schools to do edible schoolyards
& to have these kids learn an extended narrative of an urban-rural partnership
& understanding where food comes from, understanding their own environmental connection to food
& slow food movement
& the impact of agriculture as it relates to our waste stream
& the like

In Washington, he was the green businessman, explaining in hard facts and figures how San Francisco’s new building program was created with the support of builders and how it fosters the economy.

For once, the world is seeing a San Francisco that is not a city of kooks and wild-eyed radicals.

As Newsom travels, and as he presents himself to the political world, he must be aware of people’s knee-jerk reaction to the city he represents. It’s a major obstacle to being taken seriously. And in fact, he often jokes about it.

But he does more than that. He actually distances himself from the city of San Francisco, allying himself with his audience. In explaining anti-Israel demonstrations at San Francisco State to the Jerusalem Post, he said,

I think there is a lot of bias and bigotry, and frankly a lot of anti-Semitism.

When Dana Goodyear said that San Francisco had been described as “37 [sic] square miles surround by reality,” Newsom chimed in,

That’s a good way to describe it.

In Washington, he spoke of the city’s early legislation to require LEED certification for municipal buildings.

At the time people thought, “Again another typical San Francisco idea — San Francisco values — sky’s going to fall in — world’s going to come to an end — major tax increases — companies are going to run out of San Francisco.”

All of which, he added, was proven wrong.

It’s a tricky business, introducing yourself as a San Franciscan to the rest of the world. The quirky images beloved by the media can obstruct a clear view of our 47 square miles of reality. And it must be even more risky when the world regards you as “an aggressive progressive” (Dana Goodyear’s term).

What to do?

It seems to me that there are two alternatives. There is the one that Newsom has chosen: Distance yourself by joining the tomfoolery. The local press pays very little attention to the far-reaching scope of Newsom’s green plans and even less to events that occur outside the Bay Area. San Franciscans are unlikely to discover that their mayor has been playing Peter and denying his ties to them. And even if they do, it probably won’t make any difference in his future.

But there’s another possibility, one that’s far more generous and far more constructive. The local press has, for reasons of its own, not been interested in exploring the significance of Gavin Newsom’s initiatives. And the mayor’s office, for reasons of its own, has never spent much time on promoting its activities locally. It’s far more interested in publicizing what it regards as roadblocks erected by an obstructionist Board of Supervisors and the “chattering classes.” But you can’t tell me that our businessman-turned-mayor couldn’t find ways to market himself at home if wanted to.

Imagine what would happen if Newsom took even a portion of the energy he devotes to campaigning away from home and began to publicize his very real achievements to constituents here beyond the business community. Of course, he’d have to acknowledge the contributions of those obstructionist supervisors to the process. But the resulting spirit of cooperation might allow the city accomplish twice as much.

In the broader scheme of things, however, that might damage his prospects for higher office. It could be dangerous to be too popular in a city like San Francisco.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Monday.

Once upon a time, there was a mayoral election. One of the candidates was the mayor’s “hand-picked successor.”

Young and handsome, [the candidate] was a political moderate: he was popular with business — particularly the tourist industry — because of his tough stand on the homeless problem, but he still retained the [present mayor's] affinity with labor, including the big unions in city government like the transit workers.

Another candidate

was a firebrand lawyer from the Green Party who was interested in controlling development and improving the lot of the citizenry in San Francisco’s poorer neighborhoods, like the Mission and Hunters Point. His base was built in those neighborhoods, but he had other supporters throughout the more liberal districts like the Haight and the Castro.

But wait! There was a third candidate,

a conservative businessman involved in retail. He had the support of the “downtown” business interests, including banking and real estate, and was popular in the predominately Chinese neighborhoods of the city, like Chinatown, Sunset, Richmond, and Visitacion Valley.

Did you think I was talking about the Newsom-Gonzalez race of 2003?

I’m not. Nor am I Noodling on the News. But someone else is.

The three candidates are characters in Runoff (Bleak House Books, 2007), a whodunnit by San Francisco mystery writer Mark Coggins. The setting is San Francisco, strewn with bodies. Yes, plural. The book has as many violent deaths as the last act of Hamlet. Maybe more. And private investigator/jazz musician August Riordan is responsible for a number of them.

Riordan channels Sam Spade, even to the point of occupying an apartment on the corner of Post and Hyde. His voice sometimes echoes the master detective’s, as in this description of a cheap motel room on Lombard:

He gave me a key for a first-floor room next to the ice maker and the concrete stairwell. Inside was a carpet with the sort of pattern you see when slime mold grows on split pea soup, and several badly done imitations of the paintings of the kids with big eyes. There was also a bed with a sagging mattress that enveloped your butt like gel in a dental mold and a TV with one of the color guns on the fritz. The stains on the ceiling looked worse than most people’s garage floors.

But Riordan is far more free with his fists… and his knife… and his Glock automatic… and a few stray cleavers… than Dashiell Hammett’s “blond Satan” ever was.

The action takes place between the time of an election and the runoff that followed. At issue is whether the preliminary election was rigged. If it was, who did it? How? And why?

The “why” part is easy. The city’s “most precious resource” is real estate — in other words, housing. And two developers stand to profit if their candidate wins. On the Green side, there’s Ralph Wood, head of the Nautilus Housing Development Corporation, commonly known as NHDC. Supporting the incumbent and his successor is Arthur Calder, pro-development head of the San Francisco Home Builders League. The prize: the key to Hunters Point shipyard.

It turns out that the “how” part isn’t much more difficult. Unlike author Mark Coggins, who’s a Silicon Valley veteran, August Riordan is a techno-klutz, unable to program a cellphone. But he has a friend, Chris Duckworth, who knows better. Duckworth’s alter ego is Cassandra, a jazz-singing

Mae West-like medley of swaying hips, heaving bosom and wafting perfume.

But by day, he’s a font of information about “all matters technical.” And Riordan quickly discovers that

electronic voting machines, or more accurately, electronic voting systems and processes, are vulnerable at many points — when the software is being developed and installed, at the precinct when the votes are cast, when the USB drives are collected from the machines, at election headquarters where the votes are tallied. All of those places.

The “who” part of the puzzle is harder to unravel. And more fun. Particularly when you add in Leonora Lee, “The Dragon Lady of Chinatown.” And Tony “Squid Boy” Wu, who studied at Oxford and heads the San Francisco branch of a major Hong Kong gang. And an anarchist who calls himself Roadrunner. An ex-priest named Maurice Salaiz. A rogue backhoe driver known only as Red. You get the picture. It’s the San Francisco we know and love, writ large.

Who did it? And equally important, who won the election? There’s the rub. You’ll have to peruse the pages of Runoff to find out.

On May 4, the Chronicle ran a piece by Eddie Muller on San Francisco mystery writers. This posting is the first in an occasional series on the authors that Muller discusses.

In preparation for the article, Muller interviewed 30 writers, asking them,”Why do you feel this area has attracted, or bred, so many writers?” Mark Coggins replied:

I think San Francisco has served the same function for literary types roaming the country as a lint collector in a dryer. Writers like Twain, Hammett and Kerouac came to San Francisco as much because they’d come as far west as they could go as any other reason. The fact that San Francisco offered more in terms of culture and appreciation of literature and creative endeavors than the typical western city made it possible to stay — or at least stay long enough to write something of lasting significance.

Thanks for reading. I’m outta here till Friday.