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Feature

Opening Pandora's Box

Once-secret documents reveal the tobacco industry's battle to gut anti-smoking education in California. Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and former Gov. Pete Wilson helped.

By Bernice Yeung

Published: November 17, 1999

Lee Sanders leans back in a leather chair. An attorney in a prosperous Oakland law firm, Sanders is in the midst of a minitirade on good government, civic virtue, and political integrity. Most...

Feature

Agent Provocative

In the 1960s Anthony Poshepny was a CIA operative whose macabre Southeast Asian exploits drew comparisons with Col. Kurtz, the megalomaniacal anti-hero of Apocalypse Now

By Matt Isaacs

Published: November 17, 1999

Though it is only 1 in the afternoon, the sky is already darkening under an approaching storm when the old man arrives at the hall. Wearing a baseball cap, tinted glasses, and a navy blue suit that...

Dog Bites

Dog Bites

Cut the Deck

As told to Laurel Wellman

Published: November 17, 1999

Mayoral elections, it seems to us, aren't usually national news. So Dog Bites, attending a swanky wedding reception at which we were called upon to make conversation with a number of East...

Night Crawler

Night Crawler

Dog Craze

By Silke Tudor

Published: November 17, 1999

Dog Craze In a rare convergence of nature and desire, the lingering November fog recedes long enough to make brunch near the zoo a seductive, rather than required, engagement; not that rain or...

South to the Future

South to the Future

Military to Form PC Corps

By South to the Future

Published: November 17, 1999

November 17, 1999 WASHINGTON -- A high-tech, heavily armed force descends on a small city in the Pacific Northwest. Its mission: to clean up a chemical spill at an energy research lab. But...

Bay View

Indecent Disclosure

Willie Brown plays hide-and-seek with his tax returns

By Peter Byrne

Published: November 17, 1999

Ever since Willie L. Brown Jr. was elected speaker of the California State Assembly in 1980, rumors of financial improprieties and allegations of conflicts of interest -- rightly or wrongly --...

Music

Solitary Man

Tom Armstrong gave up on punk rock -- and Iowa -- for honky-tonk

By Mark Athitakis

Published: November 17, 1999

Not long after he moved to San Francisco in 1994, Tom Armstrong had something of an epiphany. He was walking home late one night from a concert when -- wait, actually, it's better if he tells...

Music

A Hobo's Progress

U. Utah Phillips, inspiration to Ani DiFranco and card-carrying Wobbly, is Northern California's institutional memory of itinerant folk

By Denise Sullivan

Published: November 17, 1999

Something everlastingly true about riding freight trains is that it's boring," says U. Utah Phillips. Among other disparate and curious credentials, he is a songwriter, a poet, a storyteller, a...

Riff Raff

Riff Raff

Silly Rabbit, From the Guitar Desk ..., From the Turntable Jazz Desk ...

By Mark Athitakis

Published: November 17, 1999

Silly Rabbit Meet Jeff Byrd. Half man, half bunny, no shame. Last Thursday Byrd, clad in a borrowed bunny suit and toting a megaphone, made a slow walk across South Park at lunchtime. Now, there...

Record

Review

Arto Lindsay's Prize

By Ezra Gale

Published: November 17, 1999

Arto Lindsay Prize (Righteous Babe) Arto Lindsay has always been able to evade the many descriptive tags thrown his way over the years. Calling him a noise guitarist, as he was with the...

Record

Review

Various Artists' Totally Hits

By Mark Athitakis

Published: November 17, 1999

Various Artists Totally Hits (Arista) For all the loose talk within the music industry that electronic music -- the bleeps and bloops, the DJs, the well-tempered Roland synths -- would...

House of Tudor

House Of Tudor

Billy Nayer Show, Brendan Perry, and more

By Silke Tudor

Published: November 17, 1999

It was a cold, dismal, casual-beige-Gap-sweater day here in San Francisco when the Billy Nayer Show 's leader, Cory McAbee, packed up his electric tea kettle and sweet pink rice cakes to head for...

Hear This

Hear This

Eddie Gale Quintet

By Sam Prestianni

Published: November 17, 1999

The Bay Area's unsung hero of avant-garde jazz, trumpeter Eddie Gale has the pedigree and the vision to spread the gospel of free thinking to the region's most unlikely audiences. A Brooklyn...

Eat

Battle Sushi

By Greg Hugunin

Published: November 17, 1999

There is nothing on this Earth that I adore more than sushi, or just about any seafood prepared in the tradition of the land of the rising sun. In fact, I have two theories on the matter: that 1)...

Eat

Dinner (or Not) and a Show

By Matthew Stafford

Published: November 17, 1999

My first exposure to jazz was in the form of a Fats Waller record titled Don't Let It Bother You . I was 10 years old, on the brink of God knew what, and the titular sentiment was deeply...

Side Dish

Side Dish

Party.com, Rim Style, Arriba!, Peel Me a Grape, Royal Flush (Continued)

By Harry Coverte

Published: November 17, 1999

Party.com 15 Romolo and Fuse, two of the hippest and newest, have decided to put the old-fashioned pastime of getting drunk in North Beach on the Web. Now you can bid for a New Year's Eve party...

Film

The Feckless Horseman

By Gregory Weinkauf

Published: November 17, 1999

"The spectre is known at all the country firesides by the name of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow," writes Washington Irving in his original fantasy. Thanks in large part to the silly,...

Film

Swiss Cheese

By Andy Klein

Published: November 17, 1999

Poor old MGM -- the once-golden studio that has been battered and abused by ever-changing ownership and management for nearly three decades now -- still has one sure-shot franchise among its...

Reel World

Reel World

Point Blank and A Better Tomorrow

By Michael Fox

Published: November 17, 1999

Point Blank Personal to independent filmmakers: There is an upside to financing your movie with your credit cards. Consider Evan Aaronson's bizarre 1997 "vacation" in Peru after he'd finished...

Night&Day;

Export AA

Ann Arbor Film Festival

By Gary Morris

Published: November 17, 1999

Michigan can add to its list of essential exports the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the nation's oldest experimental film fest. Started in 1963, this one is known for its quality and brevity, traits...