City Living

By Chris Carlsson

The sun breaks through the fog: Time to go outside. On Folsom Street in the Mission District, a beautiful curving path meanders through lush gardens and trees heavy with lemons and oranges, plums and peaches. It's only midmorning, but dozens of my neighbors are in the gardens, some working hard, others enjoying leisurely conversation around the many cozy tables that dot the gardens stretching on for blocks. At a dense marijuana patch some stoners are sampling the crop, whose sticky-sweet smell wafts upward into the clear blue sky. A small biofueled truck rolls up, and a crew unloads bushels of fruit for a nearby juice bar. Meanwhile, a few other neighbors are pulling dry compost blocks from their basement receptacle, where their building's "shit system" processes the household and human waste into ready-to-go fertilizer.

At the corner I grab a local-grown coffee and nab a bamboo bicycle from the veloshack. My friend James works there, so we exchange a few words and make plans to get together later at an outdoor concert. A woman I don't recognize pulls in with a freight bike full of fresh pastries and insists I take one of the steaming croissants to go with my java, an offer I never refuse.

A few minutes later I'm pedaling on a polished wooden thoroughfare that skirts rooftops and soars over creeks and canals, a veloway to the docks at 17th Street and Harrison. I drop the bike at another veloshack (there are hundreds around the city) and jump into a waiting water bus, a wonderfully colorful wooden boat with a canopy of ornate golden branches. Shortly, we're cruising down Mission Creek toward the old UCSF campus, now an island of science studies (tidal control, alternative food production, aquifer repletion, refuse reuse, permacultural urban transformation) partially submerged in Mission Bay, which reestablished itself with the rising oceans. After the global deluge the scientists there finally turned their attention to creative ways to help the world cope with the changes — and fix all the problems that an ideologically perverted, market-driven science had caused. Some hope, after all.

San Francisco holds dozens of such imaginary futures within it. Which one actually comes to pass is both the challenge facing us and the source of our pleasure. The art of city living is our municipal passion; San Franciscans are great cultural explorers, experimenters, imagineers, techno-fantasists, inventors, radicals of all sorts, and contrarians to the monocultural pulse that is destroying the world. People pour into San Francisco with dreams, ideas, experiences, and expectations that nourish the city’s image of itself as the place where things begin, a beating heart of compassion and creativity from which we can contest a world gone mad. On a sunny, warm day in San Francisco anything seems possible.

Today's San Francisco is a rather bucolic and lush urban space, a far cry from the desolate, sandy, flea-ridden, wind-battered peninsula it once was. A large bay still forms the city's eastern shore because early-20th-century plans to fill most of it were scuttled by our forebears. A polluted and ecologically altered bay is much better than an expanse of "made land" covered in shoddy single-<\h>family homes arranged in numbing suburban cul-de-sacs. (One future that never was!) Quake-prone landfill under many parts of town is just one hidden-in-plain-view piece of our natural history that will reemerge to shape our future. The buried creeks and ponds still percolating beneath the cement-covered city are sure to figure in San Francisco's future history too, either because we invite them to join our urban dance or because they insistently crash a party that fails to take them into account. Nothing is as important, in our past or our future, as nature, and the longer we suppress nature in the city, the longer we put off a transformation that will make or break us.

These days, our desires are supposed to be satisfied by personal consumption and private pleasures. Most things are measured in cost, and if it isn't yet, somewhere there's an entrepreneur with a calculator gaining ground. Buying and selling human time strips us of our dignity, but we take that for granted. Worse, when we sell ourselves to a job, we explicitly agree to do what we're told. In that nonbargain we also lose control over the world we make with our collective work every day.

Many of our true aspirations, however, involve sharing a different kind of life, publicly and cooperatively. Perhaps what a lot of us want is simply comfort, security, and modest happiness. Yet our lives are enduring a steady shrinking of security and stability. Our isolated, anonymous-seeming city existences are tenuously dependent on complex and vulnerable systems that could break down suddenly. We'll need our friends, our communities, our fantastically creative capacities — not just to survive any future catastrophes but also to realize any opportunities to extend the delights of our city life into a radically different future.

Luckily San Francisco is a vibrant, stimulating, and fulfilling city based on conviviality, camaraderie, cooperation, and creativity. Sometimes it feels that way even in this darkening time, tickling our deep desires with anticipation. In our city as it should be, characterized by generalized abundance, ecological sanity, and human dignity, there is enough of everything for everybody, and we figure out how to create this common wealth together.

San Franciscans also have many possible futures, paths that open to a much better life for all of us. We could take up the essential reinvention and redesign of our lives on ecologically and socially sound foundations, examining and debating where we get our food, how we get around, and how we allocate our own working time toward the realization of collective needs and wants. We could honor the ineffable joy of a full life shared with friends, family, and neighbors. Instead of doing pointless work shuffling data for corporations or designing stupid Web sites or serving bad food or administering bureaucracies that do nothing but self-perpetuate, we could find countless important ways to contribute to our shared lives. Instead of being imprisoned in "jobs," we could be free to live. We could embrace our fantastically expanded ability to communicate by working together and unleash our ability to design and adapt our lives to an ecological logic that could feed, shelter, and entertain us with far less work and far more pleasure, not as one-dimensional consumers but as fully engaged producers.

One future San Francisco is a prolifically productive urban garden filled with fruit trees, vegetable fields, surface creeks and ponds, and a restored, healthy bay teeming with fish and other life. To promote human connection and conversation, automobiles are replaced with free, frequent, and reliable public transit fueled by local renewable energies. A public bicycle fleet is available to everyone to use on an extensive grid of safe, dedicated bikeways. Dozens of streets are replaced with pedestrian zones and groves of fragrant fruit trees. Permaculture farms start to fill the former streets and backyards. Rings of community-supported organic farms proliferate in the fields that were once slated for suburban sprawl.

We could turn loose our resident population of tinkerers, inventors, brainiacs, and culture wizards to invent new ways of making what we need from junk that's already there, fully utilizing all biological and artificial materials. Planned obsolescence and layers of redundant packaging were stupid from their inception. So let's junk them! And with a Public Department of Crackpot Realism, who knows what the limits of reinvention might be? We could also free ourselves from the idiocy of " USA #1" jingoism by issuing San Francisco passports to ourselves and to all citizens of the world who are with us in our revolutionary project.

In the spirit of the beats, the diggers, the hippies, the punks, commies and anarchists, feminists and queers, all movements with important roots in San Francisco, we will share freely what we learn and invent, beyond borders and markets. A common wealth is a global project worthy of our heritage and our visionary future. As soon as we stop tying ourselves down with obsolete social relations and arbitrary customs that enslave us all to a logic that no one controls and few benefit from, radically different futures open up before us.

Chris Carlsson is an inexplicably optimistic writer in San Francisco. You can connect to his blog and other projects on his Web site, www.chriscarlsson.com.

Editor's Picks

Best Digital Mood Gauge

The fluctuating moods of the Presidio, where periods of blissful sun are abruptly eviscerated by gray buckets of fog, can be strikingly schizophrenic. And if you're among the seasonally affected, you can relate. The digital solar meter in the foyer of the Thoreau Center for Sustainability gauges the power of the building's tic-tac-toe solar panels, and you can compare the photovoltaic harvest to the rise and plummet of your personal energy levels. At peak capacity, the green design system can operate 65 energy-efficient light fixtures, and you might steam through a marathon. On a cloudy day, it manages just a fraction of that, and you can barely budge your butt out of bed. Listen for the mournful exhale of a foghorn or the chatter of fair-weather pedestrians and then chart your swinging spirits via the meter's shifting red numbers. With such a handy DIY mental health monitoring device, who needs antidepressants?

1016 Lincoln Blvd., Presidio, SF.
(415) 561-7823, www.thoreau.org

Best Veggie Oil-Fueled Venue

Jens-Peter Jungclaussen had a dream: Buy a gutted, camouflage-painted school bus on eBay, convert it to biodiesel, and put it to use as a mobile classroom by day and a party on wheels by night, a rollicking omnibus of education, culture, and sustainability. With a few flicks of his wrist, Jungclaussen, a former German windsurfing pro and biology and PE teacher, transforms the bus to suit the need at hand--pulling a movie screen down from the roof; unpacking a buffet table, wet bar, or set of turntables from beneath the seats; or simply switching on the "party lights." Dubbed das Frachtgut ("the good freight"), the bus has hosted dinner parties on Twin Peaks, ecology classes in Muir Woods, sunrise raves on undisclosed beaches, and screenings of The Big Lebowski (complete with bowling and White Russians). It also serves as a mobile billboard for its various local, eco-friendly sponsors and can be rented for field trips and corporate events. As Jungclaussen promises, "What you want it to be, it will become."

www.dasfrachtgut.com

Best Cheap Ride Home for Night owls

Thanks to the extra buck drivers now pay in bridge tolls since Regional Measure 2 took effect last year, people without cars can get across the bay long after BART stops running. A collaboration between five Bay Area transit agencies that was launched in December 2005, the All Nighter Bus Service became fully operational this March, running between 1 and 5 a.m. Not too much has changed with San Francisco’s Muni Owl lines, but the new AC Transit 800 line connects the city with the East Bay, where riders can transfer to other bus lines running along the Richmond, Pittsburgh –Bay Point, Fremont, and Dublin –Pleasanton BART lines as well as to Oakland International Airport and Alameda. SamTrans also runs a predawn line to SFO and Palo Alto. And transfer times at many stops are coordinated so riders can take the fewest number of buses with the fastest connections between them. That's great news for people who want to stay out late and risk missing that last train, as well as for those city dwellers who get the "can I crash at your place?" call when they do.

transit.511.org/providers/night.asp

Best Six-Week Superhero Lessons

In a great disaster (earthquake, flood, terrorist attack) the San Francisco Fire Department can't possibly respond to all emergency calls within the first hours (or possibly days) after the event, especially if the streets are blocked with debris. To compensate, the department is training a corps of citizen superheroes with a free, six-week, 20-hour course of Neighborhood Emergency Response Team instruction. Already 8,000 current residents have completed the training, which includes disaster preparedness, triage and first aid, light search and rescue, and team management to integrate NERTs with the Fire Department's control centers. The training involves both classroom and hands-on work, with additional skill courses and refreshers for graduates throughout the year. At the commencement ceremony, new NERTs leave with a great deal of useful knowledge as well as a spiffy hard hat and vest to identify them as official NERTs in case of an emergency. And a nice bonus is that the classes are held all over the city, so they double as a good way to meet your neighbors--and let them know you've got their backs.

www.sfgov.org/sfnert

Best Place to Get Shot(s)

Where on earth do you think you're going? And why weren't we invited? If your travel plans require a passport, the item on the tippy top of your to-do list should be a visit to the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Adult Immunization and Travel Clinic. While some private travel clinics seem to specialize in the jab-and-run, this attractive nonprofit clinic makes sure you have all the info you need. Whether you're nervous about the side effects of malaria drugs, wondering about altitude sickness, or figuring out which countries require yellow fever vaccination certification, the caring staffers will take the time to answer your questions. So get all your vaccines for a reasonable price, pick up a cache of antibiotics in case of the stomach nasties, and browse the clinic’s library of Lonely Planet guidebooks. Don't wait until the last minute; illness makes a lousy souvenir.

101 Grove, Room 102, SF. (415) 554-2625, www.dph.sf.ca.us/aic

Best Helping Hand for a Living Wage

Support living wage employment while getting some much-needed help around the house or workplace. From its new digs on Cesar Chavez Street, the San Francisco Day Labor Program connects you with workers to paint that dingy room, weed the thicket out back, or maybe spiff up your entire tumbledown crash pad for a respectable family visit. Wage rates are established in advance, so everyone's happy when the job's done. More than a hiring pool, the program is an important voice for immigrant workers in the Bay Area. When deadbeat contractors try to skip out on paying back wages, the Day Labor Program organizes pickets and attracts media attention to pressure for a speedy resolution. And in addition to its advocacy for worker empowerment, the program organizes workplace education forums on leadership development and runs skills trainings and ESL classes. So next time you're up to your elbows, don't despair, it's OK to ask for help.

3358 Cesar Chavez, SF. (415) 252-5375 and (415) 252-5376, lrcl.org/daylabor/daylabor.asp

Best Cute Scooter Reboot

The combination of mild weather, compact geography, and impossible parking makes San Francisco an ideal city for enthusiastic scooterists. And while motor scooter design has made great technical and aesthetic strides of late, the mount of choice for style-conscious scooterists remains the sleek classic Vespas of the ’60s and ’70s. It's not for nothing that you see more old Vespas in San Francisco than in Milan. Of course, sooner or later even the most lovingly maintained Vespa needs attention, and that's where First Kick Scooters comes in. Conveniently located a downhill push from just about every point in the city, First Kick is the oldest scooter shop in town and has a crew of experienced, knowledgeable mechanics and an extensive stock of imported-from-Italy parts to keep your beloved mod-mobile in tip-top shape. If First Kick can't fix it, it's time to send your scooter to that big rally in the sky.

275 Eighth St., SF. (415) 861-6100, www.firstkick.com

Best Hot Pink Makeover

All good drag queens (and a few bad ones) know that the first thing people look at when they meet you is your hair--and then your shoes. You only have one chance to make a first impression. But looking good and staying in the moment is a chore in a city with so many beautiful people. Here's a solution for everyone: Take that tired ol' mess of hair directly to Glama-Rama, the Mission's very own hip-hip-hipster salon. Walk out looking like Gwyneth or Angelina, with the latest mullet, fabulous color, or kicky trim. The talented and eccentric team of (drag queen –heavy) hairstylists provides clients with delicious beverages, relaxing shampoos, and designer products--without cleaning out their wallets. The hot pink walls add hallucinatory flare, accented by fuzzy neon-colored pillows, leopard-print couches, loud music, old-school hair dryers, and a Barbie-themed bathroom. If that's not cool enough, every month Glama-Rama displays new, eye-popping local art on its walls. It's literally like walking into a multimedia piece where your hair becomes a work of art.

417 S. Van Ness, SF. (415) 861-4526, www.glamarama.com

Best Free Dental Raffle

The Berkeley Free Clinic is home to Northern California's only free dental service. Its volunteers do exams, extractions, and fillings at no charge and will even refer you to a specialist who will accept your case pro bono if you require complicated surgery. Sound too good to be true? Well, before you flush your jumbo bottle of Advil down the toilet, read on. As the only show in town, the clinic is insanely popular and cannot possibly cater to each and every one of its die-hard fans. In an attempt to be fair in their selection, the nurses and doctors rely on a "put your name in the hat" style lottery. What that means is your chances of actually getting free work are horrible--about 1 in 60 on a good night. Indeed, as the homeless men with rotting teeth outside the lobby will tell you, "You ain't gonna win on the first night, brother." If you do happen to win, watch your back on the way out.

2339 Durant, Berk. (510) 548-2570, www.berkeleyfreeclinic.org

Best Interactive Stomp Pad

Just inside the Metreon’s east entrance, next to the popcorn booth, there's a weirdly entertaining rectangle on the floor that attracts children by the pack. This is the interactive stomp pad. A projector on the ceiling beams images--say, a bunch of bouncing soccer balls--for different games onto the pastel-colored area underfoot, and the kids run and stamp all over it, trying to kick the soccer balls into the goal, make pieces of popcorn disappear, or complete any of about a dozen other mildly challenging tasks. In between games (and sometimes during) the floor screen shows ads geared to the kids’ custodians, who are so bored after a few minutes that they'll watch anything. But anyone under 10 can have at least half an hour of fun playing games and screaming and pushing other children out of the way while parents have coffee and pretend not to watch. And unlike the nearby Zeum, bowling alley, and ice-skating rink, it's totally free.

Metreon, 101 Fourth St., SF.
(415) 369-6030

Best Gay Way For Baby To Play

Whether popping in for a meeting or support group, attending a social function, or just stopping by to use a laptop at Three-Dollar Bill's Café, parents will kick up their rainbow high heels to learn that free and donation-based child care and supervised group play are available for infants through school age tots at the Charles M. Holmes LGBT Center Kid Space with a prearranged reservation. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. and all day Saturday, mom and mom or dad and dad (or whatever your arrangement may be) can take a load off. The wee one will be cared for by skilled and certified educators and interact with other LGBT-parented kids during arts and crafts, story time, dancercise, and more. After all, we are family, so why not take care of one another's kids?

1800 Market, SF. (415) 865-5553, www.sfcenter.org/kidspace.php

Best New Urban Army

They refuse to ride cars and buses--or even walk. They cruise down side streets, alleyways, and the highway via mopeds. They retain their shadowy image by coming out at night, like Batman, in search of adventure, liberation, and the feel of the wind against their face, all the while anxiously awaiting the social and economic collapse of the United States and the dawn of a nation without gas or oil. If by chance they breeze past you, you've encountered the Creatures of the Loin, San Francisco's version of the Moped Army. The cultlike posse live by the belief that the ins and outs of the city are more memorable via moped, and they’ve been venturing around the Bay Area for more than a year now, seeking out undiscovered ’ped-worthy avenues. The fast-growing group consists of about 60 men and women, all of whom know how to service their own bike. Last year the Creatures took their bikes on the open road, up to Seattle and south of the border, to Mexico. Can nothing stop them?

www.creaturesoftheloin.com

Best Elevation Of A Newscast To A Fever Pitch

The Guardian’s reputation for giving Mayor Gavin Newsom hell is certainly well earned. But ABC 7 reporter Dan Noyes took sensationalizing a doomsday earthquake/terrorism scenario in San Francisco to the next level last September. Led by Noyes, ABC 7’s “I-Team” produced a series of stories portraying Newsom and San Francisco Office of Emergency Services and Homeland Security chief Annemarie Conroy as wildly negligent when it came to emergency preparedness--and took them both out to the woodshed for a savage beating. Not only was Noyes unafraid to ask Newsom and Conroy the tough questions, but he also often included details of the heated dialogue in the body of his stories. From a Sept. 7 transcript: "The I-Team has learned that the city has not completed several essential parts of its own emergency operations plan. And they questioned Mayor Newsom about that fact on Wednesday." Newsom: "The point is, I’m not making excuses to you, Dan. If you want a good story, you got it. And I’m going to be a poster child to say we’re not where we need to be." Noyes went on to reveal that Conroy was wholly lacking in emergency services credentials, and that portions of a costly new citywide siren system were useless, due in part to San Francisco’s topography blocking some of the sound waves. Our sides were splitting as we watched the whole thing go down. Get ’em, Dan!

www.abclocal.go.com

Best Small Green Push

Architect and co-owner of Soularch Design and Gallery, Derek Jacuzzi seeks a way to combine the natural world with indoor spaces in his beautiful architectural designs. And the art exhibits put on in this Outer Sunset space by gallerist Georgia Hodges, his wife, seem to share that vision. Hodges’s gallery shows highlight environmentally conscious art, while the Soularch Design side of things focuses on contemporary architectural plans with an emphasis on sustainable building, including photovoltaic light panels and engineered lumber. The results are buildings with net-zero energy consumption, and good looking to boot. One Soularch show included a procession from Ocean Beach to the gallery, where patrons encountered with hundreds of hanging sculptures; another featured a video installation of an artist hand-hoeing a wheat field in a tract house. Soularch's emphasis is on community building, and Jacuzzi and Hodges are committed to sharing their green vision with their neighbors. Visitors are welcome to stroll into the gallery-office and admire the sculptures and paintings alongside Jacuzzi's blueprints and draft tables.

4033A Judah, SF. (415) 759-4100, www.soularch.com

Best Corporate Smackdown

Corporate watchdog organization CorpWatch operates out of a nondescript ’60s office building in Oakland but its small two-room office has created more trouble for corporate America than some newspaper offices 10 times the size. Helmed by managing editor Pratap Chatterjee, a former reporter for the Economist, the organization is dedicated to shining a light on areas that the rich and powerful would often prefer remained in the dark. With reports on war profiteering and various corporate mischief that have drawn the attention of major news outlets like NPR, CNN, and MSNBC, CorpWatch has served as a beacon of corporate accountability in an era of Enrons and Iraqs. Its site and blogs are constantly updated with new and scandalous information, so check often for the latest blood boil.

1611 Telegraph, Ste. 702, Oakl. (510) 271-8080, www.corpwatch.com

Best Rock To Keep You On A Roll

City life is stressful, and sometimes the only thing that keeps us nail-biting urbanites on an even keel between happy hours is taking a refreshing pause to look inward and outward. For more than a decade, the Buddha-minded have been following the path of enlightenment north to west Marin's best-kept secret, the donation-based insight hub of Spirit Rock Meditation Center, one of the most notable and active organizations of its kind in the country. Everyone from regular yoga practitioners to total beginners can find guidance and something for the soul to chew on. Regular workshops, courses, and group meditations take place on the center's 420 acres of natural splendor, where visitors can happily spend two hours or two months.

5000 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Woodacre. (415) 488-0164, www.spiritrock.org

Best School Of Hard Knockers

Hip-hop, progressive politics, a bit of philosophy and religion, a bit of poetry-- Hard Knock Radio, on KPFA, 94.1 FM, takes over the airwaves every day at 4 p.m., broadcasting the views of voices seldom heard on the radio (as well as those of well-heard celebs like Paris, Chuck D, Sista Souljah, Cornel West, and Rep. Cynthia McKinney). Hosts Weyland Southon, Anita Johnson, Tsadae Abeba Neway, and Davey D Cook engage their community of listeners and promote political action, with fat slices of inspiring music on the side. Recent topics have included the prison-industrial complex, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, Asian-Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and Hip-Hop Appreciation Week. It's great big breath of fresh on the airwaves.

www.hardknockradio.com

Best Way To Cash In On Politics

Cub news reporters inadvertently learn most of what they need to know about the nasty underbelly of election campaigns through local political consultants. Candidates often spend thousands of dollars hiring election experts who advise them on how to stand, how to act, how to dress (more hair gel!), and what planks from their platform to emphasize during public speeches. But most of all, political consultants excel at venomously thrashing their opponents. While talking to reporters "off the record," consultants love to make reporters feel special by divulging all kinds of nasty "rumors" about the other side: "Hey, this didn't come from me, but our opponent totally hates Asian people. I hear he even collects Nazi memorabilia." "Off the record, he's a child toucher. He touches children. And he kills trees, and he removed the catalytic converter from his car just to spite the Sierra Club. It's awful." Amazingly, consultant cross-pollination runs rampant. They're often likely to jump sides for another dollar, regardless of the candidate's ideology. Once the paychecks start rolling in, the game's on. The toughest challenge is finding the sleaziest adjectives to describe the opponent.

Best Local Journalistic Travesty

The San Francisco Examiner doesn't exactly set the standard for groundbreaking local journalism. But still, we can hardly believe the "monarch of the dailies" has managed to turn locally produced advertising campaigns into "news." Each week the paper "showcases an advertising campaign by a local company" in its "New Campaign" feature. Meaning, not only does the city’s cultural landscape get littered with billboards, but we also get to read explanations for why they depict hot Latino women pouring Bud Light down their bikinis. Thanks for getting to the bottom of that nagging question, Examiner! There are few places you can go in the United States without being affronted by an advertisement these days. Maybe a difficult-to-find square-mile section of Montana is free from urinal-vertisements. But don't worry, friends--the Examiner is here to explain how the Goodbye, Silverstein, and Partners advertising firm "brought to life both the Netflix service and the enjoyment of watching movies." We smell a Pulitzer.

Best Antidote To Ann Coulteritis

Deliberately irrational, disjointed, and designed to make you misunderstand correctly, the improv mock Webcasts of Better Bad News use far-left rhetoric, reductio ad absurdum, to balance out the discursive insanity of conservative pundits and to refocus national debates. "Half true more-or-less 100 percent of the time" is a fitting motto for these Colbert Report –type blurts of media blather produced at Berkeley Community Media. A particular favorite of ours is the Jan. 26 segment questioning "compassionate" terrorism. Just when you think it's completely off the rails, a snippet from an Al Gore speech proves otherwise. It has to be seen to be believed--or disbelieved. The blog and podcast are updated biweekly, and the casts also air on public access channel 28 in Berkeley. (Check www.betv.org for showtimes.) Surrealist, Dada, conspiracy theory, truth, or all of the above--call it what you will. But to construct any reality in this crazy, media-saturated world, maybe you have to cunningly blur the line between fact and fiction. Watch it and decide for yourself.

www.betterbadnews.com

Best Alternative to Concrete Pillows

An estimated 10,000 children in California are homeless, and with endless state and federal budget cuts, it looks like there may soon be an estimated 10,000 more homeless adults. Thank goodness Arnold's got that $1 million hybrid Hummer to tool around in, though. While we're all beating our altruistic fists on our foreheads about kids with concrete pillows, one man's really doing something about the problem. The John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes, started by the brother of former Democratic U.S. representative Phillip Burton, is raising millions to give away as grants to the severely anemic nonprofits already in place to serve homeless children. "It's a serious effort," John recently told the San Francisco Foundation. "It ain't gonna change the world, but if we can change the lives of who knows how many kids, then we'll be doing some good."

221 Main, Ste. 1450, SF. (415) 348-0011, www.johnburtonfoundation.org

Best Alphabetic Detour

If your daily commute includes a walk or bike ride through the Mission, a diversion down Shotwell Street could buff up your lagging language skills. Between 22nd and 23rd Streets, an enormous Precita Eyes mural by Juana Alicia and Susan Cervantes decorates the length of Cesar Chavez Elementary School. Titled El Lenguaje Mudo del Alma/The Silent Language of the Soul , the dazzling artwork demonstrates the entire American Sign Language alphabet in a series of brilliantly painted panels. Highlighting the school's bilingual and multicultural Deaf Education program, vivid animals, gestures, and symbols accompany an illustrated hand sign for each letter. From 22nd Street, start your fingers with an a for alphabet and sign your way down the block to the zigzagging z for zebra. Along the way, check out the Hokusai-inspired ocean wave demonstrating the o and keep your fingers crossed for a showering of candy at the p for piñata.

825 Shotwell, SF. www.juanaalicia.com

Best French Connection

Tucked away somewhere among all the disasters of this past year (or decade) is a memory of something ... something in Paris ... oh yes, those giant ethnic riots and the incessant reek of burnt Renaults. Surprisingly, some of the most intense intellectual debate about those incidents was centered here in the Bay Area, courtesy of historical Web archivist, philosopher, and translator Ken Knabb's Bureau of Public Secrets, a virtual abecedarium of French Situationist literature. Knabb's online essay "Reflections on the Uprising in France" and the responses it inspired galvanized the Bay's academic community and inspired a number of fits of worldwide philosophical pique. The bureau is dedicated not only to translations of Debordean literature in several languages but also to preserving key texts in Bay history, such as the entire works of poet Kenneth Rexroth. If you're as addicted to the impish weave and bob of Raoul Vaneigem's strategic writings as we (ever the college sophomores) are, you'll want to check the bureau's site early and often. Society of the spectacle, indeed.

www.bopsecrets.com

Best Fighters For Your Right To Party

Every party is political when the danger of shutdowns, busts, and licensing restrictions constantly hangs in the air. A few years ago the San Francisco Late Night Coalition fought, mostly successfully, for our right to rave all night. Back then, the country was gripped by a moral panic that envisioned a wave of teenage ecstasy deaths and pant legs so big they could smother the wearer. Local conservative wannabes capitalized on that to gain attention, but they ultimately lost the war on clubs. These days, though, there's a new enemy: NIMBYs, the not-in-my-backyarders who whine about noise and congestion. Luckily, the San Francisco Party Party is here to help everyone get down with the party program. A multitentacled Web assault on the NIMBYs that organizes protests, publicizes issues, promotes policy suggestions, and also tells you where the party's at, Ted Strawser's year-old organization does its best to keep the party rollin'--politically and literally.

www.sfpartyparty.com

Best Crackpot With A Forum

We were almost sad when Ken Garcia--so-called Son of the City, the San Francisco Chronicle's chief left-basher, the guy who hates homeless people and loves parking garages--left the Chron in the 2005 buyout. The guy was so radically out of touch with San Francisco, so much a weird throwback to another time, that he was sometimes even, well, fun to read. In a strange kind of demented way. But he's back now, at the San Francisco Examiner, and he hasn't changed a bit. He still finds ways to attack Sup. Chris Daly in almost every single column. He still loves the Golden Gate Park garage, hates neighborhood activists, blasts anyone who is against downtown's idea of progress, and shamelessly portrays himself as a nice Catholic schoolboy. So we're (almost) glad the Ex picked him up. At least now he doesn't have to march up and down Market with a 12 Galaxies sign (no offense, Frank Chu).

www.examiner.com

Best Nautical Commute

It’s hard not to feel smug as you commute to San Francisco on the Alameda-Oakland ferry , which got its start thanks to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the subsequent closure of freeways and the Bay Bridge. Leaving Jack London Square, you pass a row of Star Wars –esque cranes, whose giant claws effortlessly lift and drop stacks of blue and blood-colored Hapag Lloyd and Hanjin containers from the decks of ships like the Shenzhen Monrovia and the Yang Ming. The ferry docks briefly at Alameda Island before speeding past acres of abandoned history at the former military base, which currently houses renters, rabbits, raccoons, and snowy plovers but is destined to be redeveloped one day. Then it's out onto the bay with an unimpeded view of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge and its under-construction replacement span, which involves a dozen bright red cranes. As you sip coffee and read newspapers, the city comes into focus--skyscrapers textured like Chex Mix, silhouettes punctuated by the pyramid-shaped TransAmerica Building, which seems to wink through the fog. Slipping under the western span of the bridge, and toward the hum of a city in full commute, you can glance upward at the poor fools stuck in bridge gridlock and silently say, “Adios, suckers!” as you step ashore at the Ferry Building.

(510) 522-3300, www.eastbayferry.com

Best Beauty Lashing

When Great Lash mascara just won't cut it, one must enlist eyelash falsies for truly gorgeous peepers. But if you're a klutz with the schmutz, your come-hither stare may be upstaged by the spiny little objects. You want drama, not trauma. Shu Uemura's pristine, snow-white, moderne altar to fabulous fakes--ensconced in the makeup company's only boutique outpost in California--is the way to go. Some selections skew au naturel; others are more colorful and “'fun and flirty,” as one of the boutique's managers, Jeccica Robbins, describes them. Translation: speckled feather and real white fur lashes (made from fibers shed by animals that shall remain nameless), for example. The latest line includes half lashes with stones and numbers that sweep out sideways. After you've made your selection, the approachable staff will put them on and teach you how to best reapply the li'l darlings. You're learning from those taught by one of the best: Uemura created the first makeup school in Japan, and in 1955 he became the first Japanese makeup artist in Hollywood, where he transformed Shirley MacLaine in My Geisha. Hey, if it's good enough for Madonna--her widely publicized mink and diamond Shu Uemura lashes are available at SF's Neiman Marcus for a mere $10,000--it should be good enough for you, beautiful you.

1971 Fillmore , SF. (415) 395-0953, www.shuuemura-usa.com

Best Prep For Your State Of The Union Speech

Eyes. On. You. Breathe. Panic! No. Breathe. Moment. Moment ... A frequently cited survey lists death as the second greatest fear people have. The first? Public speaking. The fixed scrutiny of numerous stares can overwhelm even the most battle-tested of speakers to the point of nausea. And even if you're not exactly in line to make the next State of the Union address (unfortunately), learning how to speak off the cuff can be invaluable for interviews, introductions at the bar, schmoozing with your boss, and conversations in general. Lucky for you, the Pan Theater in Oakland offers free introductory improvisational classes to help you overcome that funky feeling in your gut. And with a maximum class size of eight, Pan Theater creates a comfortable, engaging improv experience. So go pick up a few tricks of the trade and feel a little less self-conscious in public environments. Any experienced actor will tell you that improv is all about living in the moment. That sure as hell beats trying to picture your audience naked.

287 17th St., Ste. 200 , Oakl.

(415) 261-1614, www.pantheater.com

Best Agricultural Dig

At the foot of Bernal Heights, nestled near Alemany Boulevard and Interstate 280, lie four pristine acres where, once upon a time, folks dumped their dead car batteries, useless appliances, and lousy furniture. Skip that way these days, though, and you'll find fields of kale, chard, and broccoli; apple, fig, and kumquat orchards; and silhouettes of urban cowboys and cowgirls harvesting the land. Welcome to Alemany Farm-- San Francisco's self-proclaimed “only farm.” Originally cleaned up and seeded by the San Francisco Urban League of Gardeners, the farm lay abandoned in recent years until, two winters ago, volunteers descended to sow and reap it under the banner of the Alemany Farm Cooperative. Using a community-supported-agriculture model, the volunteers have engendered a cornucopia. Now the group is working with the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center and the nearby Alemany Housing Development to expand its community activism--which, says volunteer Christine Pelletier, is “about food justice issues: making people aware of where their food comes from; making organic, healthy food available to everyone; and getting people involved in that cycle.”

Alemany Blvd. near I-280, SF. (415) 577-7980, alemanyfarm.org

Best Herb Caen Column On The Radio

The Keepin' It Real with Will and Willie Show on KQKE, the Quake, 960 AM, is the first thing to come along that catches the spirit and the essence of the late Herb Caen's classic column in the old San Francisco Chronicle. A couple of old pals of Caen, fellow late-nighters Will Durst (comedian) and Willie Brown (former mayor) roust themselves out of bed early every weekday to do the show, broadcast live from Hotel Vitale on the waterfront from 7 to 10 a.m. The show has lots of vintage Caen--wry and not-so-wry humor, famous- and not-so-famous-name dropping, talk of the town, news, and insights and interviews that could come only from "citizen" journalists –talk show hosts who've been intimately connected to the city and a wide swath of sources over a long period of time. But unlike Caen, who had to labor under the yoke of conservative Chronicle family publishers and owners, Will and Willie open up the throttles, make little pretense of being "objective," and do a show from an openly and unabashedly progressive perspective. They regularly blast the Bush administration and the Iraq quagmire, and they interview progressive stalwarts like Noam Chomsky, Cindy Sheehan, and Medea Benjamin and representatives from organizations like New Progressive Coalition, Code Pink, NARAL, Openvoting.org, and Mother's Environmental Health Group (which helped get the toxic Hunters Point power plant shut down). Willie the radio host knows the difference between Mayor Willie and Citizen Willie; he likes to talk about his mayoral policy of "flexible democracy," which somehow seems more humorous now than it was at the time. And the show was created by talented radio veteran Paul Wells, who lines up the talent and helps ensure that the show remains independent and progressive. The irony is that it has become an ornament on, gulp, a Clear Channel station. And so we say with fear and fervor, “Long live the Will and Willie show.”

KQKE, 960 AM. www.quakeradio.com

Best Financial Advice

Published by the DAL Investment Company, NoLoad FundX newsletter has for the past three decades been a champion of the small, independent investor. DAL was founded in l969 by Burt Berry, a native San Franciscan, Stanford graduate, and B-l7 bomber pilot who pioneered the investment philosophy of upgrading no-load mutual funds (funds without commission) back in the days when there were only a handful of no-load funds around. These sorts of funds have always had populist appeal, since they allow small investors to get the best professional management, diversification options, and discount prices, things once available only to the wealthy. Berry and his successor, Janet Browne, have carried the populist appeal even further with their aggressive investment approach and community-mindedness, emphasized in the regular free newsletter they put out. The newsletter advises investors when to sell lagging funds and what better-performing funds to replace them with, and its advice is easy to follow, doesn't take much time to read, and can be implemented through a discount broker. The office staff is friendly and answers questions on the phone. Noload FundX has been the best-performing newsletter for the past l0 years, according to the Hulbert Financial Digest, an independent rating service for investment advisory newsletters.

235 Montgomery, SF. (4l5) 986-7979, www.fundx.com

Best Encounter With Random Foreigners

Is your wanderlust and fiery thirst for life often dulled by the same group of friends voicing the same opinions about the same boss/fashion/war/gossip/reality television show at an interchangeable setting of hipsterclots? Break free of the predictable for a day or two and stay at Hostelling International in Union Square. The Grand Hilton it is not, but roughing it is, after all, part of the point. Share a clean and safe four-person dormitory for approximately $25--we recommend summer or a weekend, when it's likely to be more hopping--and make sure to sign up for the free pub crawl, usually held weekly. While stumbling from bar to bar with your newfound foreign friends, you can drink in the city along with the whiskey. Gaze at San Francisco through their eyes, as if it's your first--and perhaps last--time. (PS: Don't be shy; take advantage of your local knowledge and become the center of attention for a group of nubile French girls or tall, dark, and handsome Spaniards.) Call ahead for weekly events; reservations can also be made online.

312 Mason, SF. (415) 788-5604, www.hihostels.com

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Best Herb Caen Column On The Radio

Best Financial Advice

Best Encounter With Random Foreigners