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Feature

Off-Base (Part II)

The most vituperative battle ever fought over the Presidio pits a handful of activists (and a certain weekly newspaper) against a local coalition of environmentalists, business, and the majority of elected officials. Is the congressional compromise to es

By Amy Linn

Published: January 10, 1996

Here's what history says about blessings and curses at the confluence of the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay: For 5,000 years until Europeans arrived, the live oaks and sand dunes were the...

Feature

Off-Base (Part I)

The most vituperative battle ever fought over the Presidio pits a handful of activists (and a certain weekly newspaper) against a local coalition of environmentalists, business, and the majority of elected officials. Is the congressional compromise to es

By Amy Linn

Published: January 10, 1996

This ain't no Yellowstone. It's not the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Badlands, or Glacier, either. In fact, this national park nee military post boasts more bricks than native trees. But on a...

News

Dog Bites

By Paul D. Kretkowski, Jack Shafer

Published: January 10, 1996

The Needle and the Damage Done Seven weeks ago, the AIDS and harm-reduction communities were rocked by the untimely death of UCSF researcher John Watters. Watters had won renown with studies...

News

High Anxiety

Upping the stakes in environmental activism

By John Sullivan

Published: January 10, 1996

The Financial District drones were shuffling out to lunch late that Thursday morning last October when two women in business suits walked into the Bank of California Building and took the elevator...

Letters

Letters

Published: January 10, 1996

Driven to Madness If asked to choose sides on the current Muni debate, I certainly would side with the downtown interests rather than the Transport Workers Union (TWU) after reading "Willie's...

Music

Night Crawler

By Silke Tudor

Published: January 10, 1996

Behind Cat's Grill & Alley Club Saturday afternoon, close to a hundred custom scooters line narrow Clementina Street and a crowd of similarly dressed men and women in dark sunglasses sip beer and...

Music

Samples

By Sia Michel, MonGo Nikol

Published: January 10, 1996

Parallel Worlds As most vinyl junkies will attest, digging through dusty crates of records at thrift shops and garage sales is half the fun of collecting, but there are some rare works that you...

Music

This Is for La Raza

The brown and proud "Latinfest '96" descends on Oakland

By Jesse "Chuy" Varela

Published: January 10, 1996

"Vatos, cholos, call us what you will/ You say we are assassins, truly trained to kill/ It's in my blood to be an Aztec warrior/ To go to any extreme and hold no borders/ Chicano! And I'm brown and...

Music

Recordings

By Tim Kenneally, Colin Berry, Chris Rubin

Published: January 10, 1996

The Folk Implosion The Folk Implosion (Communion) Let's forget, for a moment, the widely subscribed to image of Dinosaur sidekick/Sebadoh honcho Lou Barlow as some sort of pioneer in...

Eat

Dish

By Paul Reidinger

Published: January 10, 1996

A Truffling Matter At a New Year's Day party, Dish caught the scent of sensational scandal: international truffle smuggling! A well-known local restaurateur, it seemed, had managed to bring...

Eat

Oriental to Occidental

The twain meet at Orocco, a supper club for the '90s

By Paul Reidinger

Published: January 10, 1996

Orocco styles itself as an "East-West supper club," but when I made a reservation recently I was in denial about the supper-club part. The supper clubs of my youth were dark roadside joints filled...

Film

Sister of Mercy

By Ellen McGarrahan

Published: January 10, 1996

It was daylight when we came out, I remember that: a light-gray morning -- surprising, somehow, as if what we had just witnessed should have sucked the sun out of the sky. We were riding in the van...

Film

Death and Transfiguration

Dead Man Walking airs both sides in the moral dilemma of capital punishment

By Daniel Mangin

Published: January 10, 1996

Simple faith clashes with complex reality in Dead Man Walking, the second directorial outing of actor Tim Robbins. A naive, bighearted Catholic nun befriends a Louisiana death-row inmate who says...

Film

Private Justice

Sally Field transcends the maudlin underpinnings of Eye for an Eye

By Paul Reidinger

Published: January 10, 1996

Sally Field ought to win an Oscar for her performance in John Schlesinger's new film, Eye for an Eye. She plays Karen McCann, a comfy L.A. burgher whose life explodes when her 17-year-old daughter...

Night&Day;

Night+Day

By Johnny Ray Huston

Published: January 10, 1996

wednesday january 10 Skin Flick Film targets the eyes. Horror targets the body. Georges Franju's 1959 horror film The Eyes Without a Face combines these attacks with its tale of a surgeon...

Halloween

REAL ASTROLOGY For an Unreal World

By Rob Brezsny

Published: January 10, 1996

Aries (March 21-April 19): As millennial fever heats up to epidemic proportions, we find ourselves awash in prophecies of mayhem and doom. Earth changes, alien abductions, viral outbreaks, crime...

Halloween

The Emperors Really Nice Clothes

By Jack Shafer

Published: January 10, 1996

There was nothing Charlemagne liked more than annexing new kingdoms and deposing whatever ineffectual dukes loitered around the places. But even as his power metastasized, Charlemagne -- like our...

Halloween

Slap Shots

By Jack Boulware

Published: January 10, 1996

52 Weeks That Shook the Bay Area -- A 1995 Timeline January, Week 1 An alleged San Jose gang member accidentally shoots himself in the foot during a drive-by and is easily subdued by nearby...

Stage

When Words Fail

A Language of Their Own depicts four gay men's struggle to express love, devotion, and passion

By Mari Coates

Published: January 10, 1996

We seem to be emerging from the days of strictly topical drama: gay polemics in which coming out or coping with AIDS is the dramatic focus, or countercultural pieces that take as their sole theme...

Stage

Aisle Seat

By Deborah Peifer

Published: January 10, 1996

In the Air My short list of reasons for dancing in the street includes Jesse Helms falling into a snake pit, Pat Buchanan falling on top of Helms in said pit, and anything written or performed...