Betsey Culp

Over Labor Day weekend, Slow Food came to San Francisco. That’s Slow Food, capitalized, as opposed to fast food, lowercased. Its arrival was preceded by a petition calling for a “New Vision for a 21st Century Food, Farm & Agricultural Policy,” which begins:

We, the undersigned, believe that a healthy food system is necessary to meet the urgent challenges of our time. Behind us stands a half-century of industrial food production, underwritten by cheap fossil fuels, abundant land and water resources, and a drive to maximize the global harvest of cheap calories. Ahead lie rising energy and food costs, a changing climate, declining water supplies, a growing population, and the paradox of widespread hunger and obesity.

Eric Schlosser describes the foodfest in this week’s Nation.

According to the Slow Food trinity, food must be “good, clean, and fair.” The “good” refers to taste; the “clean,” to local, organic, sustainable means of production; and “fair,” to a system committed to social justice.

Schlosser is impressed with the event, but not blown away.

It earned high marks for the good and the clean but next time could do a hell of a lot better with the fair. At the moment, the majority of Americans — ordinary working people, the poor, people of color — do not have a seat at this table. The movement for sustainable agriculture has to reckon with the simple fact that it will never be sustainable without these people. Indeed, without them it runs the risk of degenerating into a hedonistic narcissism for the few.

But one thing is obvious:

What had previously been considered a slogan — “slow food” — was now a genuine social movement.

“A genuine social movement.” Slow Food is serious business. Not much eating going on —even Schlosser

never made it into any of the taste pavilions at Slow Food Nation, where the ideal of “good” was amply represented.

But hard work and good intentions abound.

The original American foodie, M.F.K. Fisher, would have understood. She would have said it was all because of Queen Victoria. Yes, Her Most Gracious Majesty, By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, Empress of India. That Queen Victoria.

In an article published in 1974, Fisher describes the 19th-century development of what became the preferred mode of cooking in the United States. It apparently all began in 1846 when the queen’s chef published a book called The Modern Cook, and housewives on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to buy a copy. My Yankee mother would have been horrified to learn the origin of her cooking techniques, but they mirrored the ones adopted by these Victorian ladies. From the book, they learned to dine as Her Majesty did, with only two courses — entrée and dessert — instead of the multicourse dinners served on the decadent Continent. They chose simple sauces and used few spices, in contrast to France’ more imaginative cuisine. And in many American households, the specter of Carrie Nation joined Victoria and alcohol was banned, or at least banished to the husband’s study.

Apparently Victoria believed that “household management” was based on the stern curbing of all low animal instincts, so that kindly guidance away from them was both indicated and desirable.

In other words, food was serious business.

M.F.K. Fisher would have understood the Slow Food Movement, but I doubt that she would have joined its ranks. Her position on food was far from serious. New York Times reporter Molly O’Neill writes,

Her first book, Serve it Forth, published by Harper Brothers in 1937, took America by the shoulders and said, “Look, if you have to eat to live, you may as well enjoy it.”

And enjoy it, she did, passionately and sensuously.

Fisher, who would have turned 100 this year, is the current featured writer at the Book Club of California. Biographer Joan Reardon kicked off the exhibition Monday night with a slide show. Fisher’s books are on display in the club’s offices, surrounded by bookcases filled with other examples of fine bookmaking. But Reardon’s talk was held in a larger space usually occupied by the World Affairs Council. To get to it, members of the audience walked down a corridor lined with food — photographs from the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.

For M.F.K. Fisher, food was all about context. What you ate acquired meaning because of the occasion on which you ate it. Randall Tarpey-Schwed, a collector of Fisher books, recalled that in The Art of Eating she

described the “subtle, and voluptuous, and quite inexplicable” pleasure that she derived from eating sections of tangerine that had been warmed on a radiator until plump and then set out on an icy, snow-packed window sill. “I cannot tell you why they are so magical. Perhaps it is that little shell, thin as one layer of enamel on a Chinese bowl, that crackles so tinily, so ultimately under your teeth. Or the rush of cold pulp after it. Or the perfume. I cannot tell.”

In the reminiscence “A Thing Shared,” she tells of a trip she took with her father and sister when she was a little girl. They stopped for dinner.

I forget what we ate, except for the end of the meal. It was a big round peach pie, still warm from Old Mary’s oven and the ride over the desert. It was deep, with lots of juice, and bursting with ripe peaches picked that noon. Royal Albertas, Father said they were.

The pie was good, but the occasion made it extraordinary.

That night I not only saw my Father for the first time as a person…. I saw food as something beautiful to be shared with people instead of as a thrice-daily necessity.

The little girl’s realization remained with her throughout her life.

People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security and about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

For Fisher, eating was like a love affair. Or good sex. It was also like good therapy. In How to Cook a Wolf, written during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II, she says,

One of the most dignified ways… to reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill… and with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves.

Victoria must have turned over in her grave.

But that’s just one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

Hey, guys! John McCain really did a number on you when he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. And he’s been jerking your chains ever since. Why did you let John McCain jerk your chain last week? There’s been a whole lotta jerkin’ goin’ on. And y’all did a cute little dance in response, jumping up and down, back and forth.

I assume that Palin, like many other VP candidates, was chosen to act as party pit bull, leveling attacks at the opposition that might be considered unseemly coming out of the mouth of someone headed directly to the Oval Office. If so, she did a good job, and she did it with a certain kind of folksy panache. That’s what candidates are supposed to do.

But others saw her performance differently.

New York Times columnist Judith Warner’s chain was jerked in one direction:

Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.

But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.

Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?

Snap. Tammy Bruce was jerked in the other direction. Humiliation? Not at all, she wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. Far from it.

For Democrats, she offers something even more compelling — a chance to vote for a someone who is her own woman, and who represents a party that, while we don’t agree on all the issues, at least respects women enough to take them seriously.

Whether we have a D, R or an “i for independent” after our names, women share a different life experience from men, and we bring that difference to the choices we make and the decisions we come to. Having a woman in the White House, and not as The Spouse, is a change whose time has come, despite the fact that some Democratic Party leaders have decided otherwise. But with the Palin nomination, maybe they’ll realize it’s not up to them any longer.

Clinton voters, in particular, have received a political wake-up call they never expected.

Snap again. In Salon, Joe Conason was yanked over to Judith Warner’s side:

It is hard to think of a more cynical and contemptuous political act this year than John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate. Having served as governor of Alaska for less than two years — and as mayor of a small town before that — her qualifications for national office are minimal.

Palin is the epitome of tokenism, exactly what conservative Republicans have always claimed to scorn, until today, as the politics of quotas and political correctness. Even Rush Limbaugh is a feminazi now (at least until Election Day).

But if Palin’s résumé is limited, to put it politely, she possesses the only two qualities that McCain now seems to consider essential: She is a right-wing religious ideologue with female gender characteristics. Suddenly that is all anyone needs to qualify as a potential commander in chief of the world’s most powerful military.

It’s stories that jerk chains. And storytelling was out in full force last week.  Joan Walsh, writing in Salon, noticed it:

By the time Palin took the stage, she no longer seemed like an Alaskan Annie Oakley, a gun-toting, hockey mom biker-gal; she’d become pioneer victim girl, Pauline tied to the train tracks by mean Democrats and the liberal media. But Palin shook off the victim mantle by coming out swinging, first blasting “the pollsters and the pundits” for writing off McCain last year, then tearing into Barack Obama with glee, teeth bared like a Rudy Giuliani in heels.

A doctored photo in my email summed it up: Sarah Palin wearing an American-flag bikini and a big smile, stands beside a swimming pool, cradling a rifle.

In the past week, the world has turned the old Women’s Studies slogan on its head. The political has become the personal. Issues have become anecdotes. The war in Iraq was transformed into a woman’s oldest son, about to head into battle. Teenaged pregnancies turned into a photogenic 17 year old. Birth defects emerged as a beautiful five-month-old boy. Gun control was reduced to moose hunting. And so on. The technique worked well for Ronald Reagan. And it’s equally effective today.

It’s time to flip it back and resume the political debate. The only trouble is that the venerable slogan doesn’t want to stay upright. Sometimes the easiest way to talk about policies is in metaphorical terms. But people can always change the metaphors and thus reframe the discussion.

Take, for example, the most obvious feature of the GOP’s Palin lovefest, the sanctification of motherhood. We can point to the reasoned arguments of NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Or we can pull out a well-worn copy of The Handmaid’s Tale and begin reading:

A shape, red with white wings around the face, a shape like mine, a nondescript woman in red carrying a basket, comes along the brick sidewalk towards me. She reaches me and we peer at each other’s faces, looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us. She is the right one.

“Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.

“May the Lord open,” I answer, the accepted response.

But that’s just one woman’s opinion. Thanks for reading.

I’ve been reading George Lakoff’s new book, The Political Mind. Lakoff set progressive politicians aback several years ago when he told published Don’t Think of an Elephant. He suggested then that the right had learned a lesson that the left had yet to learn: how to dominate political discussions by the way it frames its arguments. The term “tax relief,” for example, immediately characterizes taxation not as a necessary part of running a democracy but as an affliction that we need relief from. Once the phrase is introduced into a conversation, it is hard to argue against tax cuts.

In The Political Mind, he makes the same point. But he carries the discussion farther, embedding it in explorations that have been made in his own field of cognitive linguistics. Forget about the Old Enlightenment view of rationality, he says. Forget about the idea that

If the people are made aware of the facts and figures, they should naturally reason to the right conclusion.

A “rational person,” someone who makes conscious decisions based on logical and unemotional thought processes, doesn’t exist. On the contrary,

Emotion is both central and legitimate in political persuasion….

But if you stop at conscious reason and emotion, you miss the main event. Most reason is unconscious. It doesn’t look anything like Enlightenment reason.

And virtually all of it matters for politics.

In making political points, we use language. Words. That’s where framing comes in.

Words have meaning, of course. But meaning is neither static nor universal. You and I define words according to our own personal contexts — frames. A mother is a female person who feeds you and kisses you good night. Or a mother is a selfish drunk who abandons you in times of crisis.

Our minds connect these rich, lived definitions into even richer metaphors. A caring mother protects her children; the motherland protects its family of citizens. We turn these metaphors into narratives, populated with heroes and villains. We tell other people these stories and they understand, because they have had similar experiences.

Even more important, they understand because a basic human trait is empathy. If we appreciated this,

We would understand that our brains evolved for empathy, for cooperation, for connection to each other and to the earth. We cannot exist alone.

We would embrace the fact that empathy is at the heart of American democracy.

What happened to competition, to the survival of the fittest? Metaphors, Lakoff says. Faulty metaphors.

I was thinking about this recently when I paid a visit to Mission Dolores. When did you go there last? If it was a while ago, you might discover that it has changed. The old, white building is still there, with its brightly painted place of worship. The old cemetery is still there, with tombstones commemorating Franciscans like Father Francisco Palou and San Franciscans like the executed gambler Charles Cora. But something is different. The mission has been reframed. The cast of characters — Spanish priests, Mexican soldiers, and Indian workers — hasn’t changed. But the meaning of their actions has, giving new importance to the Indians. A plaque, dedicated in June 2001, says,

Mission Dolores… Founded in 1776 by Fray Francisco Palou, OFM and built by people of the Ohlone Nation in the Village of Chutchui 1788-1791. To them we pay honor as the founders and first builders of this community and church.

This is not the first time that a reframing has taken place. Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, historian Herbert Bolton constructed a frame that portrayed the missions as civilizing agents, with the missionaries teaching backward pupils much-needed lessons:

The civilizing function of the typical Spanish mission, where the missionaries had charge of the temporalities as well as of the spiritualities, was evident from the very nature of the mission plant. While the church was ever the centre of the establishment, and the particular object of the minister’s pride and care, it was by no means the larger part. Each fully developed mission was a great industrial school…. The women were taught to cook, sew, spin, and weave; the men to fell the forest, build, run the forge, tan leather, make ditches, tend cattle, and shear sheep.

Bolton’s description was reframed a number of years ago, as people realized that the Indians who inhabited California’s missions had paid a high price for their education. These people, once regarded as needy students, became victims of horrible crimes against humanity:

Locked within the missions is a terrible truth — that they were little more than concentration camps where California’s Indians were beaten, whipped, maimed, burned, tortured and virtually exterminated by the friars.

After that, it took a while for scholars to realize that people who are known only as victims are chained to a subservient identity. A master-victim society is defined solely by power relationships, and neither masters nor victims in it can be regarded as human beings. Scholars may also have begun to wonder what was really going on, in a place occupied by more than a thousand Indians and little more than a hundred Spaniard and Mexicans, a place that was obviously a thriving community. A few years ago the mission was reframed yet again:

We must not forget that it was the Indians of the California Missions who created these immense agricultural, ranching, and manufacturing enterprises. Within one generation the Ohlone, Miwok, Patwin, Wappo, and Yokuts peoples of the Bay Area had built several churches and dozens of buildings including housing, workshops, storerooms, granaries, mills, bathhouse, and aqueducts. The material progress of those first thirty-five years is astonishing. The Indian population of the mission went from nothing to over 1,000 persons. By 1810 the Indians had almost one thousand horses, over twenty thousand sheep and cattle, and were growing over 8,500 bushels of wheat, barley, corn, beans, peas every year.

The present curator of Mission Dolores, Andrew Galvan, is a descendant of these energetic people. And some of the changes at the mission have taken place under his watch. But Galvan’s appointment is actually a result of the reframing: the description above, was written by his predecessor, Brother Guire Cleary.

A good frame is flexible, expanding to include new elements as they appear. In the case of Mission Dolores, it’s impossible to ignore or erase the harsh treatment that the missionaries levied on the Indian residents. But it is possible to give new meaning to the mission experience, one that emphasizes the humanity of all the participants. Brother Guire concludes his account:

My personal view is that the missions operated with the best of intentions and with nearly the worst of results. To this day the California Missions represent pride and pain, memory and faith for the First Peoples who built and lived in these twenty-one missions of Alta California.

Pride and pain. The height and depth of human lives. Lives filled with emotions that inspire empathy in other human beings. The basis, says George Lakoff, for progressive politics.

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

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.

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.

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.

When the world was too much with samurai in 17th- and 18th-century Japan, they headed down to the Yoshiwara district of low-city Edo. Last week, in a similar mood, I headed down to the Drama & Desire show at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. There I had to make do with paintings of kabuki actors and courtesans. The samurai had the real thing. But since the paintings in the museum were commissioned by wealthy samurai, they also saw what I saw.

We saw a place gone topsy-turvy. Outside the walls of the Yoshiwara, Buddhist priests talked about the fleeting quality of life in this world. They called it ukiyo, the floating world. Inside the Yoshiwara, ukiyo became the very reason for life:

Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating: caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.

It was a sensuous life, filled with textures and colors, grounded in the sights and seasons of the natural world.

But still, it was topsy-turvy. Outside the Yoshiwara walls, devout painters depicted saints in familiar scenes drawn from the sutras. Inside, irreverent painters depicted popular entertainers in the same scenes. Imagine George Clooney in drag, portraying the Virgin Mary.

Everything was upside down. Outside, Confucian teachers defined social relations as dutiful, and women as good wives and mothers. Inside, social relations were playful, for those who could pay. Women were fascinating, intelligent, cultured creatures, who inspired dreams and works of art. And they were courtesans.

They were sexual beings, as were the men who flocked to their sides. In a country that had only passing familiarity with Christianity, sex was not original sin. It was just sex. It was fun. It was one of the pleasures of the floating world. And it was one of the many visual themes that attracted artists. (At the same time, it goes without saying that life for denizens of the Yoshiwara was risky and restricted. But so was the life of a samurai.)

Many of the paintings in the show are triptychs. On the left is the portrait of a middle-class woman. On the right is a geisha. In the middle, the place of honor, stands a courtesan. In other paintings — often panoramas of an entire street — a courtesan in a bright kimono and obi sits prominently in the center. It’s hard to find a modern, Western parallel. Critics have compared courtesans to movie stars, but they must have been referring to a different era. It’s hard to imagine Paris Hilton, or even Angelina Jolie, inspiring men with the kind of star-struck longing that these women commanded.

Something has gotten lost in translation. And it’s our loss, for both men and women.

There’s an old short story called “Tattoo” (“Shisei,” sometimes translated as “The Tattooer”) by the writer Tanizaki Jun’ichiro that illustrates what I mean. Although known for its elements of obsession and sado-masochism, the story is essentially a tale of transformation. The plot revolves around the elaborate image that a tattoo artist inscribes on a young woman’s back. The image — a spider — changes her from a demure maiden to a powerful, self-confident woman.

A spider. What kind of spider could do that? Surely not the small brown variety that spins cobwebs in the corner of your attic.

The earliest translator of this story into English made an odd choice. I don’t know if he had been inoculated with a deep sense of sin. Or he had a horror of strong women. Or he simply knew nothing about spiders. But he turned this one into a black widow.

The transformation was as extreme as the one that the heroine underwent.

Tanizaki’s spider was a jorogumo — a courtesan spider. (Click on the link & scroll down to see her in all her glory.) Unlike the black widow, its bite is not lethal. Unlike the black widow, it is a beautiful creature. Like its human namesake, it stands out in a crowd, its red, yellow, and black markings resembling the pattern on a richly embroidered kimono.

When “Tattoo” appeared in 1910, the glories of the Yoshiwara had begun to fade. Following its astonishing defeat of Russia in 1905, Japan had taken a position among the major powers. The rest of the world took the country seriously. And many Japanese questioned whether something had been lost in the process.

Tanizaki originally set the story in the present, but then he rewrote it, moving it back to an earlier, less fraught time. “Tattoo” is too bizarre to be nostalgic. Tanizaki was too much a man of his own era to yearn for the past. Like the painters displayed in the show at the Asian Art Museum, his concerns were artistic. Like them, he was excited by the act of creation. And creativity, he must have known, thrived when people were comfortable in their own resplendent skins.

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

WANNA WIN an easy bet? Next time you’re walking down a busy street in SF, wager that most of the people there have never read Herb Caen. Go up to ten passersby & ask ‘em. Easy 20 bucks! Not only will more than half never have read Caen’s columns; they most likely will never have heard of him… A Berkeley friend recently descended from his ivory tower & asked me to describe those columns. They created a whole city, I said, that became the real San Francisco for millions of people. His description wasn’t necessarily true. And it left out a lot. But it was the only picture out there for 60 years… In the 11 years since Caen’s death, the city has changed. Like the rest of the country, it’s gotten a lot younger. Those twenty-somethings who clog our sidewalks weren’t even reading the newspaper when Caen typed his last three dots…. Yes, typed. He was old school. But take a look at any of those antiquarian pieces. Except for their lack of links, they could be postings on the Web, for the Sackamenna Kid had the soul of a blogger.

CAEN RARELY VENTURED South of the Slot. Neighborhoods like the Mission hovered just outside his field of vision, providing what he calls in Baghdad by the Bay

a special flavor — not of San Francisco, but of any small town in any era of the American story.

Imagine Our Town set at 24th & Mission… His idea of Earth Day would have been an afternoon at the ballpark. And his mind would have undoubtedly boggled at the image of his pal Willie Brown in running shorts, carrying the Olympic torch. Toothpicks, for Caen, were meant to hold olives in martinis… He would have missed a terrific show on Saturday. While Northsiders were showing their kids the wonders of composting at Crissy Field, Southsiders took to the streets to celebrate the workers of the earth in the Cesar E. Chavez Holiday Parade.

THE MISSION WAKES UP early, even on weekends. When I wandered down to 24th Street about 8:00 on Saturday morning, the SFPD was already towing parked cars to clear the way. When I went back about 1:00, the procession had just passed & the parking spaces were full again. I wondered where the cars had gone for the five hours in between… The parade, with the usual contingents of union reps & political candidates, made its way to the appropriately named Cesar Chavez School & set up shop in the playground. Outside, on Folsom, SF’s finest leaned on their bikes, chatting with the folks in the street. Just inside the gate, the polished-till-they-dazzled cars of the Boulevard Kings stirred up lowrider memories. Farther inside, the drums of Danza Azteca Ixtlalli set the pavement to vibrating. One tall brown-skinned dancer, his chest bare & muscular above a short white apron, his feet moving with impossible speed, may have set a few pulses to vibrating as well… Mothers & children converged on the scene from all directions. One little girl & her mother walked along, chatting happily in Spanish, until they turned a corner & heard the drums. The girl stopped. Her eyes flashed with excitement. “Come on,” she said in English. “Let’s go.” Only four years old & taking on the world… Above it all, on the wall of the school, the larger-than-life figure of Cesar Chavez hovered, smiling a benediction.

RUMP IN THE AIR, a small terrier trotted ahead of me as I left the festival & walked toward Garfield Park. In tow were a couple of Urban Pioneers at the end of a long leash. When the party reached the park, the little dog decided it was time to head for higher ground. Several men were asleep on the slope near the poolhouse — Caen would have called them “Skid Rowgues,” but these guys just looked tired. The pup marched herself & her people right into the middle of them, squatted & offered them a wet, doggy greeting. The slumberers looked at her, bleary-eyed. The UP’s stood there, oblivious. They didn’t know it was better to let sleeping gods lie.

BACK ON BERNAL HILL, the wind was fierce. It blew the last remnants of the plum blossoms into pink snowdrifts. It must have blown the resident kestrel pair to shelter, because they were nowhere to be seen. Usually, they hang out near Peralta Park, where the folks who live on the hill keep an eye on them. The dogs who live on the hill give their rapt attention to the pursuit of balls & ignore the raptors… On quieter days, the birds follow a regular ritual. They meet on top of a utility pole — you can see white stains covering the sides — where the male turns over his latest catch to the female. She flies off to a nearby treetop & waits a few minutes before heading over to the nest & hungry babies. He flies off in the opposite direction, scanning the skies for predators. Reminds me of some male humans I know, who are happy to bring home the bacon but wouldn’t be caught dead changing diapers.

BACK TO CAEN, who set this train of thought in motion. His vision of SF may have had rose-colored edges. But it was clear-sighted, maybe too clear-sighted for the city he served. Take the end of his very first column:

Painful Thought: On clear days, when Treasure Island is plainly discernible from the mainland, we look somewhat dolefully at the palm trees which have magically arisen on its surface. We don’t like to believe that this is a concession to the Easterner’s idea of California, an idea planted and nurtured by the Chamber of Commerce of Southern California. Come, all ye fogs!

After Caen died, the City of San Francisco set aside a small portion of the Embarcadero as “Herb Caen Way…” (note the three dots). And then, in a fit of ionic injustice, it proceeded to line the thoroughfare with palms. Come, all ye fogs indeed! Sic those palms!

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

Some people would say it’s been a bad month for the truth, especially literary truth.

First Misha Defonseca’s best-selling Holocaust memoir, Misha, turns out to be a fabrication.

Then a gangland memoir, Love and Consequences, published under the pseudonym of Margaret Seltzer, turns out to be another one.

In both cases, the events described in the books could have happened. But they didn’t. Or at least they didn’t to the author, who presented them as autobiographical fact.

The incidents raise several questions. Why did the authors feel the need to present these stories as nonfiction? Why did they — and probably their editors — feel the stories would carry more weight as nonfiction than as fiction? Promoted as novels, they would have avoided criticism, but perhaps they wouldn’t have been gobbled up quite so eagerly. These incidents come on the heels of a series of recent storms over plagiarism and fact-fudging, mostly minor tempests that somehow escaped their teapots and threatened to obscure the entire publishing horizon. Why are we so fixated on facts, often at the expense of the larger truth that only fiction can convey?

I wonder if these concerns are somehow related to the general political climate, in which we have been flooded with lies until our heads are spinning. It’s an issue as old as fiction itself.

The work generally described as the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, recognized the dangerous territory it was entering. In the famous “Fireflies” chapter, Genji finds his beloved Tamazakura in her chambers, surrounded by illustrated stories.

“What a nuisance this all is,” he said one day. “Women seem to have been born to be cheerfully deceived…. I think that these yarns must come from people much practiced in lying.”

Tamazakura sees through him:

She pushed away her inkstone. “I can see that that would be the view of someone much given to lying himself. For my part, I am convinced of their truthfulness.”

Even the skeptical Genji begins to come around, acknowledging that he might have been too literal in his approach:

“There are differences in the degree of seriousness. But to dismiss them as lies is itself to depart from the truth. Even in the writ which the Buddha drew from his noble heart are parables, devices for pointing obliquely at the truth.”

A pretty scary idea — pointing obliquely at the truth. But sometimes the truth, like Zhuangzi’s fish, can only be captured by stealth:

The reason for a fish-trap is the fish. When the fish is caught the trap may be ignored. The reason for the rabbit snare is the rabbit. When the rabbit is caught the snare may be ignored. The reason for language is an idea to be expressed. When the idea is expressed, the language may be ignored.

When people are starving — for food or for truth — they need sustenance. The more fish-traps they have, the more fish they can catch. Why quibble over which kind to use?

Like much of the United States, I am fascinated by the trajectory of Barack Obama’s candidacy. In an odd way, the response of his supporters, particularly his younger supporters, brings to mind the antiwar protesters of the 1960s. A deep current of patriotism ran beneath their marches and sit-ins, for they belonged to a generation well schooled in the lessons of democracy. They had watched with shame as their country besmirched its bright promise of fair play and equal opportunity, and they longed to be proud of their country. Obama’s message of hope summons up a similar desire.

But I am also fascinated by the number of people on the left who feel compelled to chastise Obama for parading under false progressive credentials. Matt Gonzalez’s analysis in Beyond Chron is only one of the latest, although his article turns out not to be wholly disinterested (Go, Matt!).

Barack Obama is obviously a talented man. His first book, Dreams from My Father, eloquently and perceptively chronicles his path to adulthood in terms that resonates with many young people. The second, The Audacity of Hope, is less dramatic. In fact, it’s pretty dull at times. And it could never be accused of espousing revolutionary principles.

This is a man who cut his political teeth in Chicago, who quickly learned to maneuver through the pathways of party politics in order to get elected. He’s running as a Democrat, not a Green. Why should expectations be different for him than for Hillary Clinton?

One clue can be found in a review of The Audacity of Hope by Michael Tomasky, which appeared in the New York Review of Books in November 2006:

He really is not a political warrior by temperament. He is not even, as the word is commonly understood, a liberal. He is in many respects a civic republican — a believer in civic virtue, and in the possibility of good outcomes negotiated in good faith. These concepts are consonant with liberalism in many respects, but since the rise in the 1960s of a more aggressive rights-based liberalism, which sometimes places particular claims for social justice ahead of a larger universal good, the two versions have existed in some tension. Here is another passage from The Audacity of Hope on that decade:

The victories that the sixties generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.

Obama’s success challenges the hard-won victories of identity politics that have characterized the American left over the past several decades and disturbed observers such as Todd Gitlin.

Identity politics. The politics of individual liberty. How do we reconcile this concept with the democratic ideal of equality? The question has plagued the United States since its inception. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized its importance in Democracy in America, devoting much space to disentangling its attractions and dangers:

The taste which men have for liberty and that which they feel for equality are, in fact, two different things; and I am not afraid to add that among democratic nations they are two unequal things.

It may be exactly the uneasy interplay of these two ideals that characterize a true democracy.