Photo by Kyan Mahzouf

“It’s the story of the city that radically changed itself and then changed the world.”

Thus began an evening with David Talbot, UC Santa Cruz alumnus and founder of pioneering web magazine
Salon.com. Talbot the journalist took a temporary backseat to Talbot the author at a 4 p.m. gathering in Humanities 1 on May 22.

The focus of the appropriately named “An Evening with David Talbot” (“lecture” would have been overly formal) was Talbot’s new book, titled “Season of the Witch.” In slacks and a black polo, Talbot took the lectern after a brief introduction from humanities dean William Ladusaw.

“I mean this as a compliment — it’s a ripping yarn,” Ladusaw said to the group of about 30, comprised largely of baby boomers, before segueing into a YouTube trailer for Talbot’s book.

“Season of the Witch” details the aforementioned city “that radically changed itself”: San Francisco in the late 20th century. Drawing largely from Talbot’s own experiences as a journalist and his interviews with San Franciscans, the book is a study of the city’s tumultuous history and the catalyzing effect it had on the nation as a whole.

“San Francisco was the cradle of the American cultural revolution, but it was also its coffin,” Talbot said. “So-called ‘San Francisco values’ are still hotly debated — gay marriage, a livable minimum wage, universal healthcare.”

But first, Talbot said, San Francisco had to take care of its own issues, and those issues are one of the book’s focuses.

“The city first had to settle its own civil war; savage murder sprees, mysterious bombing campaigns, the largest cult suicide in history, the AIDS epidemic,” Talbot said. “San Francisco values weren’t born with flowers in their hair, but in blood and strife. [San Francisco] went from a rough-and-tumble hierarchy to a progressive’s vision of Oz.”

Talbot graduated from Stevenson College in 1973. During his time at UCSC he worked on a radical student publication, Sundaze, which folded in 1976.

“At UCSC, I was an angry young activist. I investigated slaughterhouses in Watsonville, I investigated drug murders, I investigated the mayor,” Talbot said. “I didn’t have anyone training me, so the journalism was probably pretty sloppy, but no one ever told me, ‘You can’t do that.’”

A few decades later, Talbot founded Salon in 1995. After working for a variety of publications that included Mother Jones, Rolling Stone and The San Francisco Examiner, Talbot said he just wanted somewhere to work that wasn’t in the mainstream media.

“I cherry-picked [the SF Examiner’s] newsroom, and got the hell out of there,” Talbot said of the then-struggling publication. “The state of journalism today is you either have a patron or you get gobbled up.”

Talbot has thus far managed to avoid both fates.

“Salon is my baby. I’ve done everything I could to keep Salon alive as an independent,” he said.

In some ways, Salon’s trajectory is similar to Talbot’s vision of the evolution of the “city by the bay,” which he defended to audience members who expressed concern over a perceived stagnation and sterility pervading San Francisco.

“I still think San Francisco has this cool artistic underground — it’s rough, but it can be done,” Talbot said. “Bohemia has always had a hard time surviving.”

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

There is an appreciation that Santa Cruz cyclists have for rushing down and around hills littered throughout the county. Between beachside ocean views and sun-kissed streets, it’s easy to get lost in the blissful blur that whips beneath and behind a set of handlebars.

In a city that has become host to the Amgen bicycle tour, dozens of bike shops and hundreds of cyclists, Santa Cruz’s cycling community has never been stronger. But the appeal of throttling down the slopes from UC Santa Cruz or cutting through downtown traffic presents local cyclists with their own challenges of responsibility.

On March 29, Chris Bucherre allegedly sped through a San Francisco street intersection at 35 mph, crashing into and fatally injuring 71-year-old Sutchi Hui. The incident, which has sent ripples of discontent among perturbed pedestrians who experienced similar close encounters, casts a hard light on the privileges afforded to cyclists on the go.

There is no denying the harrowing incidents cyclists experience daily from motorized traffic — the U.S. Department of Transportation reported 618 cyclists killed last year and over 51,000 injured from collisions alone. But a sympathetic public demands that cyclicists should extend the same courtesy to pedestrians that drivers extend to cyclicists.

To that end, many local organizations, like the Santa Cruz County Cycling Club, strongly advise their members and other cycling enthusiasts to remain aware of the law.

In the city of Santa Cruz, for example, it is unlawful to ride a bicycle on a sidewalk. At UCSC, Transportation and Parking Services continues to encourage student cyclists to decelerate when heading down the winding paths that cut through campus.

In the interest of protecting pedestrians and cyclists alike, the city and campus should consider a number of projects.

For years now, members of People Power demanded that King Street be converted into a bicycle boulevard, reducing the number of cycling-related accidents along the parallel Mission Street. The county can also approve funding for expanding the bike lanes near schools, such as Calabasas Elementary, where parked cars force cyclists into the road or onto the sidewalk.

In a similar fashion, UCSC can help push better illumination or reflective surfacing along Empire Grade. The university has made no changes to the bike path, despite the deaths of two cyclists in recent years.

While the number of pedestrian injuries and deaths resulting from bicycle collisions are staggeringly lower than those of cyclist injuries and deaths from a car collision, cyclists are not exempt from observing the rules of the road.

If Santa Cruz’s cycling community expects a more bike-friendly city, it needs to keep its own cyclists in check. Bucherre’s negligence can either be a catalytic change for preventative measures or a monument in demonizing cyclists.

But with that revelation must come the temperament and discipline to obey traffic laws.

“The light turned yellow as I was approaching the intersection, but I was already way too committed to stop,” said Bucherre on an online forum. “The light turned red as I was cruising through the middle of the intersection and then, almost instantly, the southern crosswalk on Market and Castro filled up with people coming from both directions … I couldn’t see a line through the crowd and I couldn’t stop, so I laid it down and just plowed through the crowded crosswalk in the least-populated place I could find.”

Losing control of one’s speed on a bicycle can endanger the lives of cyclists and pedestrians alike. Bucherre should consider himself lucky that he is still alive and relatively unharmed.

Valerie Luu doesn’t work at a desk. Underneath a forest of skyscrapers, between the lamp posts and fire hydrants of San Francisco, Luu and others cook and serve food on the city’s streets.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UC Santa Cruz, Luu wanted to be her own boss, and didn’t want to go to graduate school immediately, so she decided to head to one of the world’s biggest bustling centers of diversity — San Francisco.

“I do dishes from my childhood,” she said. “So basically, I recreate dishes that I enjoyed growing up with.”

Luu runs a small pop-up restaurant — a temporary eating facility that “pops” up in a neighborhood ­— called Little Knock. On an April night she is grilling up street food with Katie Kwan, owner of pop-up Kitchen Sidecar, in their joint venture, Rice Paper Scissors (RPS). They are serving up pâté bánh mì buns, sweet sticky rice and tapioca drinks outside of Amoeba Music on Haight Street, in a collaborative event with Cambodian-pop group Dengue Fever. After the band finished their set, Luu and Kwan rushed to meet the after-show crowd outside with woks, grills and red stools. Amid all the food, people and music, Luu’s at home.

Start-up entrepreneurs like Luu are flocking to cities across the United States to try their hand at building small businesses in an industry that has relatively little start-up costs and is fueled by Facebook and Twitter. With a hope and a tweet, vendors like Luu and Kwan head into the city with trucks, tables and grills to make a living.

Phil Carter, a UCSC alumnus eating at Amoeba, said street food is easy to like.

“It’s something different, and it’s quick and its easy,” he said. “It supports people in the community. People like that and want that.”

Now more than ever, pop-up restaurants and food trucks are thriving. Many cater events, have a strategic route and serve unique, gourmet food. These hometown businesses, whether in a truck or behind a table, are a good example of the alternative food revolution that is occurring in the Bay Area, as well as several other major U.S. cities.

And for good reason. In 2007, the Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency of the United Nations, estimated that roughly 2.5 billion people eat street food every day worldwide. One in four people had visited a food truck in the previous six months, a 50 percent jump from the year before, according to an American Express Market Briefing report in July 2010. The New York Times recently wrote an article about the San Francisco Underground Market, a monthly event in which pop-ups collaborate together, and highlights this ever-growing trend.

Besides the struggles of running a small business, street food vendors face other big challenges. Food trucks and pop-ups must carry all the cooking supplies they need with them. As they are mobile businesses, they have to strategize their locations, how often they tweet, and when to collaborate.

“It’s difficult,” Luu said. “It’s made me become a perfectionist, because you need to be on your shit, and you need to know where everything is and what needs to happen before you do it.”

While Luu and Kwan collaborate for RPS, and other pop-ups work side-by-side at the San Francisco Underground Market, food trucks are also finding that it’s helpful to come together.

Many in the food truck community gathered for round two of SJ Eats: A Movable Feast on May 7, a San Jose convention-festival of 20 food trucks, live music and, according to its Facebook page, over 1,600 foodies.

An entire street in San Pedro Square was closed for the event, with trucks lining the sidewalk. It was advertised almost entirely through its online presence on Facebook.

Former UCSC student Valerie Luu serves up some sweet sticky rice at her Vietnamese street food “pop-up” restaurant, “Rice Paper Scissors.” Luu co-runs the business with Katie Kwan in San Francisco. Photo by Sal Ingram.

Ryan Sebastian, owner of ice cream food truck Treatbot, helped organize the event and said most meals street vendors cook are ready to eat, have small portions and are very niche.

“Generally food trucks are small and limited, so you end up making one special thing that’s really good, and people follow you anywhere for it,” he said.

Amir Hosseini, owner of Curry Up Now, an Indian food truck also present at the event, said being online isn’t necessary, but definitely helps.

“We started off pushing Facebook and Twitter to reach out to our fan base,” he said. “We’re in a mobile industry, so our customers need to know where we are.”

He said being online helps, if only because it’s free.

“We’re on Twitter and Facebook, and we don’t spend money on advertising, because every time we post something it’s viewed 5,000 times,” he said. “Definitely most of our traffic comes from Twitter.”

Hosseini explained that at the same time, however, it’s usually one’s dish that makes one successful.

“It’s all about your product,” he said. “With food trucks at an event like this, you’ll get a lot of people who are actually foodies, who will wait in line for an hour to get good food, who are going to try a lot of different things.”

Despite the growing popularity of street food, pop-up restaurants are technically illegal. Unlike food trucks, most pop-ups do not have a business license or health permit.

Sec. 184.81 of the San Francisco Municipal Code states mobile food facilities may not operate without a permit from the health department and fire marshal. Like restaurants, food trucks and pop-ups both need to pass numerous health inspections to run legally. They are highly regulated by the city in which they operate, and to be legal they must pay over $1,000 in fees.

Cabana Dave’s Gulf Coast Catering, a Caribbean-Cajun style catering company based out of the East Bay, opened its first food truck several weeks ago. Owner and head chef David Victor said it has been fun so far.

Photo by Sal Ingram.

“It’s new and exciting,” he said. “You know, everybody’s gotta eat, and it’s cool to be able to talk and interact with your customer.”

He added that he is afraid for pop-up restaurants.

“Us food trucks, we have to pass health regulations, get business permits, rent out our spaces, and pop-ups don’t,” he said. “Someday they’re going to end up hurting someone.”

Many customers don’t see the risk, however. Luu said she thinks street food is the safest food there is.

“It’s very rare to see your food being made in front of you and to look your cook in the eye ­— even at a restaurant you don’t really get that,” she said.

Andrew Strader, Environmental Health Services inspector of Santa Cruz County, said these risks are present but easily minimized.

“The risks associated with street food are the same as those at home,” he said. “These guys are trying to set a working kitchen up, and they have a couple hours to [do it], so they’re hustling. It kind of just depends on the individuals and how much food safety training they have, and how much emphasis that they put on that.”

While they are subject to the same legal and health regulations as any other restaurant, Luu said fines and punishments are scarce.

“I feel fortunate to live in a city where these things happen,” she said. “The city in a way kind of allows it to happen — they’re not cracking down — and customers are supportive and want it. There is a lot of underground food going down in the city, so not everyone has a permit. Not everyone is working out of a commercial kitchen. There is a precedent set that it’s OK for now, or OK until someone gets sick.”

The New York Times article reported the The San Francisco Underground Market helps pop-ups get around these regulations, since it is a club.

“The underground market seeks to encourage food entrepreneurship by helping young vendors avoid roughly $1,000 a year in fees — including those for health permits and liability insurance — required by legitimate farmer’s markets,” Patricia Leigh Brown writes in the Times story. “Here, where the food rave — call it a crave — was born, the market organizers sidestep city health inspections by operating as a private club, requiring that participants become ‘members’ and sign a disclaimer noting that food might not be prepared in a space that has been inspected.”

While street food in the Bay Area is booming, Santa Cruz has seen very little. Apart from a few Spanish ice cream carts and hot dog stands, not much exists.

Gary Willett, of Gary’s Old Fashioned Snappy Dogs, is one of the few street food vendors in Santa Cruz. He will have been at the corner of Younglove Avenue and Mission Street for five years selling hot dogs and sausages come Sept. 19. He said part of the lack of street food in Santa Cruz has to do with the city’s zoning laws.

The SJ Eats Food Festival brought over 1,600 "foodies". Photo by Michael Mott.

“The cities have all different laws,” Willett said. “In Santa Cruz you have to be on industrial or residential property [to sell food on the street], whereas in San Jose you can be almost anywhere.”

Food trucks that follow the proper legislation do exist in Santa Cruz, and pop-ups can exist if they are in some sort of community event, like a farmer’s market, Strader said.

“The problem with setting up anywhere is when you set up just anywhere there’s no consideration for traffic, [or] whether they are blocking access,” Strader said.

Street food is nothing new, though. It’s a cultural phenomenon, one that has its roots in city slums, taco trucks, familiar hotdog carts in New York, and for Luu, in rural Vietnam.

“I get a lot of recipes from my grandmother, and in Vietnam it’s just a way of life,” she said. “It’s about learning about my culture in a way that’s interesting to me, it’s a way [that] I can really delve into it and speak about it.”

Monica Wong, one of the owners of Bay Area Vietnamese food truck Little Green Cyclo, said her business relates to Asia as well.

“Street food is popular in Asia,” she said. “But here we’re highly regulated, [so] it’s on a much cleaner, organic level.”

Andrew Thai, one of the volunteers at SJ Eats and a third-year at San Jose State, said there isn’t a stigma associated with street food, that anyone can jump in.

“In a restaurant you have your own table and you don’t know the person next to you. There’s a boundary there,” he said. “But on the street, everyone’s everyone and there’s nothing stopping you to talk with that person who got the same ice cream as you. It’s great to have that community.”

Hot dog vendor Willett said street food is popular because a restaurant setting isn’t necessary — there are other aspects that are more important to the dining experience.

“Cleanliness and quality food,” he said. “You can sell quality food anywhere, that’s my consensus.”

Photos by Sal Ingram.

Last Saturday, Kwan and Luu got together to hold their third Rice Paper Scissors together in the Mission District. They borrowed a rickshaw from another café as a prop, as the theme was food originally cooked in central Vietnam. They served shrimp chips, sesame jellyfish salad, and a total of 25 fried quail, which customers had to reserve beforehand online. The quail were stuffed with Chinese sausage and bacon sticky rice, and sold out.

“It went really well,” Luu said. “It was hectic! We had about 300 people come through.”

Luu believes street food has room to grow in San Francisco, and the future is bright.

“New people are getting into food every day, just trying it, trying to start their own business,” Luu said. “This trust between consumer and producer is just growing.”

Treatbot ice cream truck owner Ryan Sebastian said it can be scary running a small street food business, but other vendors are there for one another.

“There is a lot of overhead, a lot of uncertainty,” he said. “A truck could break down on you — that’s happened before. But it’s a very positive culture right now in San Jose. It’s a small, tight-knit community where everyone knows each other.”

Above all, street food vendors, whether serving food off a card table or a food truck counter, have a community.

“That’s probably the biggest reason why I do it — I love so many people,” Luu said. “I love interacting with people, and for once I feel like I’m in a community with people that want to be industrious, that want to be creative [and] make good food — we’re all doing it together,” she said.

“It doesn’t feel like a competition, it feels like a community.”

 

Photo by Bill Zarchy

In the twenty-fourth episode of Two Guys, a Glove and a Coke Bottle Thomas and Danny talk injuries, Mike Fontenot’s surprising hot streak, Tweety Vogelsong’s mortality, and some amazing pitching from around the league. Also, some age-related, patriotic trivia.

Click here to listen

Photo by Bill Zarchy

This Team Snow Good

This week on the show, Thomas and Danny chat with Britt and Maiya, the writers behind Snow Woulda Had It, about the stone-cold offense, and what we could hope to see from the Giants young players filling in for injured starters.

Click here to listen

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Although it was designed to foster intellect and produce educated, progressive citizens, the heteronormative American public education system has been most successful in matriculating heterocentrically-minded youth who lack an accurate perception of social relations and civil rights.

A gross affront has been committed against the U.S. public education system, but San Francisco School District officials are attempting to rectify some of this injustice.

In 2008, Bay Area schools approved the inclusion of same-sex representation in sex ed and social studies classes. But in November, this advance was met with opposition from parents and conservative religious leaders who claim that they have lost their right to decide what their children are taught.

Incidents of censorship and historical misrepresentation are rampant in public schools. Last May, the Texas Board of Education ruled in favor of new curricula. The curricula impresses upon students the idea that American capitalism is superior to other models and presents Republican political philosophies in a strictly positive light in addition to revising lessons about the civil rights to emphasize violent incidents.

Because of its size, Texas has a significant influence on the content included in textbooks nationwide.

Diluting history and adulterating reality in an attempt to maintain the status quo is an act that calls into question whose interests policy makers are really trying to serve. It is in the best interests of students to present and complete inclusive education.

Rates of suicide and depression are high among queer youth, who experience a higher than average incidence of bullying and ostracism. Educating youth about queer issues could literally save lives.

It shows great disdain and disregard to discount the participation of gay civil rights activists during the civil rights movement and in our society.

It is not only the privilege but the right of every student to be recognized and represented in national historical accounts. The efforts made and the progress yet to be made should not be canceled out by ignorance.

Schools must champion queer-inclusive curricula. California public schools are asking queer students and the children of queer parents to discount the validity of their lifestyles by omitting any mention of same-sex relationships or gay rights movements from classroom discussion.

It shows even greater disrespect for American students whose personal health and social skills depend on the accessibility of accurate, inclusive information.

Making information available about all of the intricacies of the civil rights movement and of American social relations does not mean sexualizing the kindergarten curriculum.

It means recognizing and normalizing non-heterosexual, non-nuclear families. The way conservatives often characterize gay people by sex acts is an act of desperation to otherize a group they cannot in any other way tangibly differentiate from themselves. No other demographic is identified by sex acts, because it’s just not relevant.

It is not the case that advocates for an inclusive curriculum are calling for funding be reallocated from traditional academics.

Words are free. Instead of spending time and energy rewriting history, educators should focus on inclusion and accuracy.

Little girls grow up taught to behave like princesses, expecting the prince and the princess to live happily ever after. Boys are taught to love football and hamburgers and butts and boobs. And not to love these things means, according to this message, to be less of a man.

But hundreds of thousands of little boys and girls grow up learning that there’s no place for them in the story books.

For every 10 stick-figure family portraits of nuclear families, there is one drawn that depicts instead of one mom and one dad, two mommies or two daddies.

Fear of explaining these stick figure images is what drives this debate.

Homosexuality will not disappear because of denial. Do not elect for bigotry. Do not support hate. And please do not propagate intolerance.

Photo by Prescott Watson.

Story updated 2/18/2011 at 4:11pm

At the end of Penny Terrace, up the hill from the state prison, there is a fence. If you stand on tiptoe, your eyes can just about scale the chain links. After scanning the sprawling prison compound, tracking the path of the Richmond Bridge as it slowly climbs out of the water, your gaze will rest upon some distant mountains, far from the prison’s walls.

But inside the facility, the bridge, the mountains and the bay disappear. Only the manic cries of seagulls that circle above the prison yard remind you that San Quentin Correctional Facility, home to California’s death chamber and its 699 condemned inmates, sits in an affluent suburban neighborhood perched upon this majestic peninsula.

The prison, a half-hour drive from downtown San Francisco, is excluded from San Franciscans’ everyday psyche. This distance mirrors California’s legislatively bound, yet mentally distant relationship with capital punishment.

In the midst of a five-year de facto moratorium, brought on by the February 2006 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy D. Fogel, the death penalty escaped from view. But with the recent release of e-mails documenting the state’s attempts to procure a drug for lethal injection and Fogel’s impending decision whether to lift the moratorium on executions, the debate over capital punishment has reentered the public gaze.

The night of Dec. 12, 2005 was frigid, but body heat protected the mass of protesters from the chilly breeze off the bay. At 12:01 the next morning, the state planned to inject Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a convicted murderer and co-founder of the Crips street gang, with the lethal cocktail.

At first glance, Williams, a gang member and convicted killer, was a perfect candidate for capital punishment. However, his proposed execution aroused large public opposition.

~~~~~~

Behind bars, Williams published eight anti-gang children’s books, received the president’s Call to Service Award for his community service and authored a memoir that was nominated for the James Madison Book Award, a recognition of excellence for children’s books about U.S. history.

The crowd of monks, Richmond teens, middle-aged women and many others who had gathered right outside the prison’s front gate believed that Williams’ rehabilitation would be enough to save his life. But at 12:35 on Dec. 13, while strapped to the death chamber’s pea green gurney, Williams’ heart stopped.

Elisabeth Semel, the director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law, said the visibility of Williams’ rehabilitation caught the public’s attention. But she said that in reality, because of their extended time on death row, all condemned inmates have in some ways changed by the time of their execution.

It takes an average of 18 years between the conviction and execution of an inmate in California, said Judge Arthur L. Alarcón in his May 2007 article in the Southern California Law Review.

“Do we kill someone who may be a totally different person than the one we sentenced to die?” Semel said. “In my experience, these guys are all different. Most of them were in their 20s when they committed their crimes and we are executing them when they are in their 40s, 50s, 60s.”

A little over a month after Williams’ execution, 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen, the second oldest recorded inmate executed in United States history, died by lethal injection.

Then in March of 2006, Fogel made his ruling, staying the execution of convicted murderer

Michael Morales. So began California’s current death penalty moratorium, during which no California inmates have been executed.

Semel said that during moratoriums like the current one, the needless nature of capital punishment is most evident. She said that during the period from 1977 to 1992, California “piled” prisoners on death row but did not execute a single prisoner.

“If we can go that long without executing anyone, why do we need it?” she said. “It doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us a more just society.”

~~~~~~

After the 1992 execution of convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris, defense attorneys rarely were successful in receiving legal or gubernatorial commutation of their own clients’ death sentences. Appeals based on unfair trials, inadequate counsel or that the inmate had rehabilitated while behind bars were infrequently validated.

But in 2006, hours before his execution, Morales’ lawyers saved their client from lethal injection with a different course of appeal. They argued that the process, training methods and facilities used to carry out lethal injection were unconstitutional under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment.

Execution by lethal injection includes three separate injections: sodium thiopental to render the inmate unconscious, pancuronium to paralyze the inmate and potassium chloride to stop the inmate’s heart.

Semel said that for quite some time, correctional departments had expounded the myth that the medicalized death brought on by lethal injection was a more humane method of execution. But as lawyers continued to investigate the procedure, they found evidence that due to the lack of expertise of those carrying out the executions, there was a substantial risk that the inmate could be conscious at the time the potassium chloride was administered.

“If you are not unconscious when the second and third drugs are delivered, everyone on both sides agree that the pain is excruciating,” she said. “First your body is paralyzed, which you feel, but you can’t move, because you are paralyzed. And then, when the third chemical is delivered, it’s like having your veins set on fire.”

Last September, Judge Fogel ruled that the state could proceed with executions if they and the condemned inmate agreed to death by a heavy dose of only sodium thiopental, the anesthetic. The state prepared for a Sept. 29 lethal injection of Albert Greenwood Brown, but Fogel then issued a stay of the execution, on the grounds that the courts needed more time to investigate the new procedure.

It later came to light that California’s supply of sodium thiopental expired at the end of September and that Hospira, the only U.S. company that produced the anesthetic, would not have a new supply ready until 2011.

Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg said that the company has since decided to cease the sale of sodium thiopental. Therefore, there are no U.S. companies that currently produce the drug. He said the company never intended the drug, most commonly used in surgery, to be part of the lethal injection cocktail.

“The drug is used for improving life,” he said. “We never condoned its use for capital punishment.”

In October, the state of California managed to purchase a large supply of sodium thiopental, initially refusing to identify their source of the drug.

Anna Zamora, policy program assistant at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said that the ACLU was troubled by the secrecy under which the state was operating.

“That raised a red flag and that led us to invoke our constitutional right of the public records act request, which we filed,” she said. “And they continued to deny the documents that we are legally entitled to as members of the public, as California residents.”

Because of the ACLU’s legal action, heavily redacted e-mail correspondences have surfaced, detailing California’s attempts to procure the drug. The state attempted to purchase the anesthetic from Texas, Arizona and even Pakistan before successfully obtaining sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma, a manufacturer in Britain.

Zamora said that the haphazard covert mission highlights the dysfunctional nature of the capital punishment system in California. Semel has graver concerns about the purchase of the non-FDA-approved, British form of the drug.

“If you are getting drugs from another country, you have no way of knowing whether the thiopental is constituted the same way as the Hospira thiopental was,” Semel said. “So it is not a specious argument. It’s a real argument, that the risk that something will go wrong is increased.”

Stephanie Faucher, associate director of Death Penalty Focus, a non-profit anti-death penalty advocacy organization, said that doctors have not been willing to participate in the execution because of the Hippocratic Oath. There have been questions about the staff’s ability to correctly inject the drugs even with the FDA approved form of sodium thiopental. She said that the execution of 76-year-old Allen exposed the staff’s lack of qualification.

“He required a second dose of potassium chloride to stop his heart, which indicates to me that there is a lack of understanding on how to use these chemicals to accomplish what they are trying to accomplish,” Faucher said.

Faulty training was one of a handful of factors that led Fogel to rule that the lethal injection protocol created “an undue and unnecessary risk that an inmate will suffer pain so extreme that it offends the Eighth Amendment.” Another concern the judge expressed in his ruling was the cramped quarters and low-lighting in the death chamber.

But over the past four years, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken steps to remedy the judge’s issues with the program. Along with publishing a new set of regulations meant to improve staff training on death penalty procedure, the CDCR has also recently completed construction of a new $853,000 death chamber at San Quentin.

San Quentin’s information officer, Lt. Samuel Robinson, whose pink shirt and tie clashed with the dull greens, blues and oranges of San Quentin’s staff and inmates, joked with guards and prisoners throughout our early February tour. As we walked toward the lower yard, Robinson grinned and said that though he would not say that he was surprised by Fogel’s 2006 decision, he also would not say that decision was valid. However, he said that the CDCR has done enough to quell all of Fogel’s apprehensions.

“We do believe that we have addressed all the concerns of Mr. Fogel and the courts,” he said. “And we are ready, willing and able to implement the law as it dictates.”

~~~~~~

Nina Salarno-Ashford, executive board member of Crime Victims United of California, has been an active proponent of victims’ rights in the criminal justice system since the age of 12, when her oldest sister, Catina, was stalked and murdered before her first day of classes at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. Salarno-Ashford said the death penalty is very much a victims’ issue, because it helps victims regain faith in the legal system, which failed them at the time of the crime. She said that in many cases, an execution is the only way for a victim to truly gain closure.

Salarno-Ashford recounted an experience she had after working for and witnessing the execution of Darrell Keith Rich, who sexually assaulted nine women in 1978, resulting in four deaths, including the death of an 11-year-old girl. As she was leaving the death chamber, one of the surviving rape victims gave her a hug and said, “Thank you.” When Salarno-Ashford asked, “For what?” the victim explained that this would be the first time since the rape that she could go to sleep without worrying Rich would be released on parole and track her down to murder her.

“For these victims, it is the ultimate relief,” Salarno-Ashford said. “Everything has ended, and there is no chance of the person coming back out. From a pure victim’s standpoint, it is the greatest relief that you can give them.”

But Zamora of the ACLU argued that life without the possibility of parole granted finality without the excessive cost — both emotional and monetary — to the victim’s family and the state, respectively.

“Every victim’s family deserves a swift and certain justice, and we believe that the death penalty doesn’t do either one of those,” she said. “The cases drag on for years, thus prolonging the pain and suffering of victim’s families.”

Still, Salarno-Ashford expressed concerns about a justice system that did not include a final punishment. She said that a life without the possibility of parole sentence can always be changed to a more lenient sentence, allowing the chance for an eventual parole.

“Once the death penalty actually has been carried out, [crime victims] tend to move on with their lives,” she said. “It’s almost like they’re frozen in time, otherwise.”

Political argument for the death penalty has mainly focused upon the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent against violent crime. Yet, there has been little evidence proving a correlation between the two.

UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Craig Haney, has spent many years interviewing inmates for his research on the social histories of violent convicts. Haney said that criminals rarely think of consequences while partaking in a capital crime.

“Most people who end up in capital cases either suffer from some sort of mental illness, and there is a fairly large number of those,” he said, “or they have been so damaged by the circumstances under which they have been raised and the circumstances under which they live, that they are responding and reacting to a set of pressures in their life, which undermine their ability to reflect clearly on the consequences of what they are doing.”

Haney said that legislators’ push for the death penalty was part of the same political move that led to the mass imprisonment in the country since the 1970s. He said that politicians have used the capital punishment issue as a political tool — a way to appear tough on crime.

In 1989, Haney took a statewide poll that collected information on Californians’ perspective about the death penalty. He compiled the same data in a 2009 survey.

“In 1989, 50 percent of the population considered themselves strong supporters of the death penalty, and that is down to a quarter of the population in 2009,” he said.

Haney said that, if for no other reason, Californians have begun to question the death penalty because of its excessive cost.

Because of the extra guards needed, the extended appeals process and the cost to individually house each condemned inmate, the state annually pays $100 million more than it would if it eliminated the death penalty, according to the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a group created by a California State Senate resolution.

Semel said that at a time when California continually cuts funds to the UC and other public programs, this expenditure is infuriating.

“To a state that is suffering, an extra $100 million or more a year is a significant amount of money,” she said. “And that is just in a year. This goes on every year. It is an industry, and it is an industry that is just simply not serving the people of this state.”

The recent abolition of capital punishment in New Jersey and New Mexico and the expected abolition in Illinois, pending Gov. Pat Quinn’s signature, displays a trend throughout the country.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico said in a statement after signing the bill that the inability to guarantee guilt swayed his decision.

“The sad truth is the wrong person can still be convicted in this day and age,” he said in a March 2009 news conference. “And in cases where that conviction carries with it the ultimate sanction, we must have ultimate confidence, I would say certitude, that the system is without flaw or prejudice.”

But because California’s death penalty was passed by referendum — a 1972 vote for Proposition 17 — discontinuing capital punishment is out of the legislature’s hands. Instead, the courts would have to rule executions unconstitutional or abolition would have to be passed by popular vote.

But even Semel, an ardent critic of capital punishment, has doubts about the success of abolition by referendum.

“It’s one thing to talk to people about what they think, whether they favor the alternative punishment of life without parole,” Semel said. “But it is another thing to put that in the cauldron of political fire that happens in an initiative battle, when you are talking about people spending tens of millions of dollars to sway the public.”

~~~~~~

San Quentin Lt. Robinson walked my photographer and me to a towering barbed wire fence, through which we could see black double doors marked “East Block Condemned Row II.” He said that he could not take us in. The press had not been allowed on death row for seven years. Instead, we stood next to the gate, trying to position ourselves to sneak a glance in if the doors opened.

“Escort coming through, one time!” a guard shouted, as the metal door swung. “On the wall, gentlemen.”

On our tour, we walked through the Receiving and Release unit, where new arrivals looked past us with empty gazes. We stood by the bird-littered baseball field and watched Robinson make small talk with a passing inmate. We crossed the crowded upper yard where tattooed behemoths cut holes in us with razor-sharp stares.

Now we would finally see the worst of the worst: a man the state had sentenced to die.

But when the handcuffed prisoner emerged from between the black doors, his smallish frame and casual stroll surprised me. The condemned inmate wore glasses over concentrated, detached eyes. His black hair and beard were speckled gray.

I was taken aback as I stared at an inmate who’d been marked a monster. I had not expected him to look like a middle-aged man.

~~~~~~

Judge Fogel toured San Quentin’s new death chamber on Feb. 8 and is set to hold evidentiary hearings in his San José courthouse in the coming weeks. He will soon decide whether the CDCR has done enough to make the process of lethal injection constitutional.

If he rules that they have, the state has everything prepared to restart its capital punishment program. With the judge’s approval, the five-year moratorium will end. 56-year-old Albert Greenwood Brown, a rapist and murderer, will be the first condemned inmate to receive a lethal injection in the new death chamber.

~~~~~~

Driving down Penny Terrace, back toward the Richmond Bridge, you quickly lose sight of the state prison. The high walls that act as endpoints for those inside give way to a much wider horizon. While driving across the bay, it becomes easier to forget that 699 inmates, sentenced to death by our state, live on this majestic peninsula — easier to forget that San Quentin sits a world and 11 miles away from San Francisco.

Illustration by Louise Leong.

Last Thursday, I let my gaze wash down a river of people who ran from Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s Coconut Grove all the way to the wharf. I felt impassioned — my fellow Giant fans were wasting their time waiting in line to get a picture taken with the World Series trophy.

I had urges to play Moses and berate them for their idol worship.

I know I have my memories of Pacific Avenue exploding with every run and every win. I know that Tim Lincecum’s hair, Brian Wilson’s beard and Matt Cain’s striking resemblance to Bobby from “King of the Hill” will forever be burned into my mind. I felt it dishonest to pose by a trophy that could never encompass the magic of a season.

I’m a Giants fan, which means I’m cynical, yet painfully loyal. My relationship with the team is a haphazard clip-show of defeats grasped from the brink of victory. I still can close my eyes and see Scott Spiezio’s three-run homer in 2002, or José Cruz Jr. dropping the can-of-corn fly ball, or J.T. Snow getting thrown out at home plate.

The fact that the team won this year still boggles my mind. It’s the only incongruity in a history of heartbreak.

I’m a Giants fan, which means I felt certain the team would get swept in the final series against the Padres and miss the playoffs. It means I gripped tightly to a whiskey double during every playoff game to ease my nerves. It means I believed no lead was large enough, that Brian Wilson would blow every save.

Perhaps it’s this same mentality that made me doubt the trophy celebration.

But halfway down the line of fans, I met Larry Werner and John Means, and I started to believe there might just be some value to this event. The two 40-something-year-old men were grinning and giggly, and they wore matching T-shirts. The front said, “The Negative Brothers.” The back explained: “Two Negatives Make a Positive.”

Werner and Means are Giants fans, which means they are cynical, yet painfully loyal. They watched every game along with Werner’s brother-in-law, and they have nicknames for each other.

“Our names are Bitch, Whine and Moan,” Werner said, chuckling. “So we were pleasantly surprised this year.”

We stood reminiscing, laughing at tears gone by. Means remembered Willie McCovey’s line drive not quite clearing the leaping Yankee shortstop in Game 7 of the 1962 World Series. I mentioned Steve Finley’s grand slam that knocked the Giants out in 2004. Werner recalled the Loma Prieta earthquake that helped the Giants get swept in the 1989 World Series.

I respected the men, so I had to ask why they would spend hours in line. What did the trophy really mean to them?

“It means a lifetime of waiting for it,” Werner said. “I was 10 years old, and my father was taking me to Seals Stadium in San Francisco. I’ve been around for a long time.”

At first I was confused why these self-proclaimed Negative Nancys would spend their afternoon waiting for a cheesy photograph. But then I started to understand that the draw was less about the gold and more about finally owning a tangible representation of something we’ve always lacked. The picture was a guarantee against forgetting, a safeguard against ever losing sight of the fact that in 2010 we really did win.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” played through the speakers as I walked back towards my car. The music was loud, but I could still overhear a man standing next to a stroller say, “He’s two years old. I felt like I needed the picture. This could be his last chance.”

I realized that every person in that line was a Giants Fan. They were cynical. But they were also painfully loyal.

The scene was festive, with music blasting and every fan wearing their colors proudly, but what really led them to spend an afternoon in line was the nagging thought that the Giants might not win for another 56 years.

Yankees fans don’t wait three hours to take a picture with a trophy. They don’t need a photograph as a safeguard against time. They can rest assured that their team will win again soon.

But we are Giants fans. We know what it feels like to wait 56 years. We’ve watched a team blow games in every conceivable way. We are cynical, yet painfully loyal.

So why not spend a mid-winter afternoon waiting for a photograph and basking in the victory?

Who knows when it will happen again.

From the minute I hailed down this particularly bright yellow cab in San Francisco, I knew the weekend ahead would leave me satiated.  Supplied with it’s renowned undulating streets, incessant visual delights and the opportunity to walk into any number of bookstores and witness a poetry reciting would definitely leave a novice to this city satisfied.  San Francisco is one big visual orgasm for the fervent photographer, and encountering it for the first time was climactic.

I have selected a variety of photos documenting my journey from Santa Cruz to San Francisco.  There is combination of portraiture, still life and architectural photography all approached in an innovative and artistic manner and were shot with a Canon E05 400D SLR.

A forklift moves the Louise Bourgeois sculpture “Crouching Spider.” The metal piece, which stood at the entrance of Pier 14 in San Francisco for 17 months, will be transported to its new home: a private collection in Houston, Texas. Photo by Sam Wilson.

A crowd gathered as the men tackled the creature, ripping off its legs one limb at a time. While the creature did not shriek with pain, its anguish was apparent in the expressions of those watching its destruction. Soon only a barbaric torso remained, with its legs broken apart and stacked neatly in a pile.

The beloved “Crouching Spider” sculpture no longer resides on the San Francisco Embarcadero. 

“Crouching Spider,” a notable piece in artist Louise Bourgeois’ “Spider” series, stood at the entrance of the Embarcadero at Pier 14 for the last 17 months. On leave from the artist’s galleries, Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco and Cheim & Read in New York, the sculpture was dismantled in order to be transported to its new home at a private collection in Houston, Texas. 

Bourgeois’ inspired work was one of her best, said Jill Manton, director of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

“The city was just so privileged to be able to publicly display artwork from someone of her caliber,” Manton said. “Especially something that became so beloved.”

 Bourgeois, 97, moved in 1938 from Paris to New York, where her career as an artist began. Her work has been shown at renowned galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York City, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. 

Bourgeois’ “Crouching Spider” was an artwork close to her heart. It was modeled after the spirit of her mother, said Kate Patterson, project manager of the San Francisco Arts Commission. Bourgeois’ mother, a tapestry weaver, showed the same work ethic as a protective mother spider, spinning her own home and protecting her brood of children. 

“The immense scale of the spider sculptures corresponds to the monumental importance of the artist’s mother to her daughter,” Patterson said in a press release.

“Crouching Spider” was only supposed to be on lease to the city for eight months starting in November 2007, but its stay was extended for another nine months due to overwhelming “Everyone knows about this sculpture,” Manton said. “There are not that many artworks that have this impact. I’ve heard people speaking as they pass the dismantling as if the spider was part of their lives. They’re very protective.” 

As each leg left the spider and made its way into the waiting moving van, passersby on the street paused to watch, murmuring to each other about the sculpture that once stood at the plaza entry. Some, like Janet Schuer, waited and watched all day, documenting the dismantling with their cameras. 

“I’m just one of the many coming by. We’re all sorry to see it going. People of all ages enjoyed this spider and that’s what makes this so different,” Schuer said. “It’s not just museumgoers admiring it. I’m a fan of Louise’s work and I just hope they can replace the sculpture with something as good.”

Currently, there are no plans for what to replace the sculpture with, but Manton said that the Arts Commission is working on gathering funding and acquiring new works to place on public display. 

Another woman in the crowd, Nancy LaBash, expressed her sorrow over the absence of the sculpture.

“It was so absolutely alive,” LaBash said. “You [expected] the spider to come walking toward you, and now I will sincerely miss it.”