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Jon Bream | (TNS) Star Tribune

With his arms wide open — and that radiant smile — Tony Bennett welcomes you to San Francisco.

The larger-than-life statue of the late, legendary crooner — microphone in hand, smile as warm as California sunshine — basks outside the posh Fairmont hotel, on a block named Tony Bennett Way.

Bennett famously left his heart in San Francisco — and left his mark on the Fairmont. In the lobby, a large heart sculpture by Bennett beckons, finished with his painted expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge. In the hotel’s Heritage Hall, there’s the unofficial Tony Bennett Corner, featuring old photos, a huge plaque for the million-selling “Duets II” and signed sheet music for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

This display is around the corner from the ornate Venetian Room, where Bennett first performed his signature song in 1961.

The Fairmont and Bennett are inextricably linked, from a photo portrait of the singer made up of hundreds of tiny album covers to the Tony Bennett Suite, all 1,125 square feet on the 22nd floor. Rates start at $3,000 per night.

On this year’s Valentine’s Day, there was a heartfelt tribute to Bennett as a San Francisco cable car was named for him, the first time this has happened for a person. He died in July 2023.

Since the proud native New Yorker is so closely identified with the City by the Bay, we wanted to know his favorite places there. His widow, Susan Benedetto, sent us a list.

Restaurants

Benedetto would always call ahead to make sure Sotto Mare, an Italian seafood bistro in the North Beach neighborhood, was featuring her husband’s favorite dish, crab diavolo.

It’s a long, narrow trattoria with a 20-seat counter and a handful of tables inside and outside (with heat lamps for those wimpy Californians). The cluttered decor is nautical, with giant mounted fish, antique angler gear and pictures of previous diners smothering the walls. Tony Bennett merits three photos, including one with the restaurant’s owners.

The crooner had his favorite table, a four-top near the front. He didn’t have to get on a waiting list, owner Rich Azzolino told me. C’mon, he’s Tony Bennett! People recognized him, always dapper in a suit or sports jacket, but Azzolino wouldn’t let people bother him.

The main attraction at Sotto Mare is the “best damn crab cioppino,” for $54.95 and enough for two people. Azzolino and his wife, Laura, will provide a special bib if you order it. They offer clam chowder with bacon, as well as many kinds of seafood — from lobster ravioli to salmon in lemon caper sauce — plus wine and beer but no dessert or coffee. There are plenty of options for those in North Beach.

Also on Bennett’s list is the oldest restaurant in San Francisco, the 175-year-old Tadich Grill. It’s an old-school steak and seafood joint with white-jacket waitstaff. The Tadich evokes Murray’s in downtown Minneapolis except it has a staggering 75-plus entrees, ranging from filet mignon to halibut in soy ginger broth.

A few times a year, Bennett would sit in one of the secluded booths, perfect for a romantic, autograph-free lunch or dinner. The singer favored the petrale sole filet, according to general manager Jose Maxmilian Paredes.

For breakfast, the Bennetts frequented Sears Fine Food, a few blocks downhill from the Fairmont. It’s a comfy old-fashioned place, decorated with photos and posters from other eras, reminiscent of the long-shuttered Becky’s Cafeteria in Minneapolis. Order the 18 Swedish pancakes, the house specialty.

Places

An exhibited painter who traveled with his tools, Bennett had two favorite San Francisco spots to inspire his artwork — the Japanese Tea Garden and the Palace of Fine Arts.

Located in spacious Golden Gate Park, the Japanese Tea Garden was established in 1894 for the California Midwinter International Exposition, aka the World’s Fair. Since remodeled, it features a series of paths, ponds and plants as well as a five-story pagoda, a moon bridge and, of course, a tea house. The oldest Japanese garden in the United States is serene and relaxing even when it’s overrun with tourists.

What’s a Roman-like ruin doing in the middle of a San Francisco neighborhood? The Palace of Fine Arts was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. What’s left after renovations is an open-air rotunda around a lagoon. Designed as a restful place between the expo’s exhibits, it remains tranquil and picturesque, a spot where locals take photos to commemorate graduation or quinceañera.

Bennett also recommended visiting:

— Coit Tower, which affords a 360-degree view of the city as well as historic social realism murals along the climb (the elevator hasn’t worked since 2022 so you have to negotiate 234 steps).

— Alcatraz, the former federal prison that is a considerable time commitment (no pun intended) because it’s on an island accessible by ferry.

— Oracle Park, the baseball stadium by San Francisco Bay where, after the Giants win, a recording of Bennett singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is proudly played.

No visit to Bennett’s San Francisco would be complete, his widow says, without having a drink in the Tonga Room, the anomaly in the opulent Fairmont hotel. Opened in 1945 to welcome World War II servicemen back from the Pacific, this basement tiki bar is hopelessly kitschy, from its thatched roofs over tables to a live band playing on a boat floating in a swimming-pool-turned-lagoon. It thunders and rains into the pool while the band in un-matching Hawaiian shirts plays “Uptown Funk,” “Friends in Low Places” and other hits, Wednesday through Saturday.

The vibe is festive, whether it’s 20-somethings celebrating a birthday or a wedding party doing a conga line. The crowd is lots of locals and tourists willing to pop $20 for fruity cocktails garnished with flowers.

“This place is a cross between the Rainforest Cafe and Disneyland,” Natalie Dameron, 24, a local movie production assistant, told me on her first visit. “It’s an experience.”

The music stops at 10:45 p.m. on weekends, and the Tonga Room shuts down 15 minutes later. It’s out of respect for hotel guests, who, like Tony Bennett, might prefer a more sedate lifestyle.

________

©2024 StarTribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Fewer American teens smoke cigarettes today than 20 years ago. And taxes on cigarettes are much higher, too. For a while, these two trends were related, because teens wouldn’t pay the high price of a pack, but not anymore. Young people are no longer responding to higher cigarette taxes by smoking less.

Some perspective is important: More than one in three teenagers smoked in 1997, but fewer than one in four did in 2013. And within the past decade, 31 states have jacked up their tax on cigarettes, especially after the Great Recession strained many governments’ budgets. Although reducing teen smoking often wasn’t the main justification for raising cigarette taxes, old research using data up to 2005 had shown that a $1-per-pack tax increase could reduce teen smoking by nearly 10 percent.

But new research, using updated data through 2013, suggests that the association between the price of cigarettes and youth smoking rates has become weaker in recent years. According to a new working paper, not yet peer-reviewed, a $1 increase in cigarette taxes from 2007 to 2013 was linked to a very slight increase in teen smoking (albeit one statistically indistinguishable from zero). The working paper was written by three economists, Benjamin Hansen, Joseph Sabia and Daniel Rees, and was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

There are several possible reasons why taxes no longer affect teen smokers. Nowadays, “the only remaining smokers are the die-hards,” said Kitt Carpenter, an economist at Vanderbilt University. Smoking among young people has fallen so far that the remaining core isn’t affected by price.

Another possibility, raised by Hansen and his collaborators, is that teens are more adept at using the Internet to evade cigarette taxes. Other research has shown that online searches for “cheap cigarettes” spike when new taxes are implemented. High schoolers, either through social connections or online vendors, might be better at getting those less-expensive smokes, thereby nullifying the tax hike.

In 2008, with co-author Philip Cook, Carpenter published work showing that cigarette taxes discourage teen smoking. It was the strongest study to date, but it used data through only 2005. Although the new research replicates Carpenter and Cook’s estimates through 2005, the relationship breaks down in the subsequent period through 2013. Carpenter supports these new estimates: “I think it’s interesting, and the analysis seems right,” he said.

Both studies used data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys (YRBS), a massive biennial effort that surveys thousands of high schoolers. Directed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state education departments, the surveys reached more than 150,000 high school students in 48 states from 1991 to 2013 and asked them about risky behavior such as smoking.

The 2007 to 2013 period is also interesting because, during the recession and slow recovery that followed, it became, in Hansen’s words, “smoking-tax-hike season” for many state governments. For instance, Massachusetts raised its tax by $1 in 2008, and Minnesota’s went up by $1.60 in 2013.

The trend isn’t uniform; states have different smoking and tax patterns. The states raising cigarette taxes are probably the ones with the greatest anti-smoking sentiment; politicians, after all, are probably raising cigarette taxes in accord with public opinion. But this sentiment is hard to observe directly, and so Hansen and his co-authors did extra work to analyze trends by controlling for state-level variables. When they did so, higher cigarette prices had no effect on teen smoking.

The YRBS data sets underpinning these studies are not perfect. They can’t survey youths who aren’t in school, and those who have dropped out might smoke more. Some researchers worry that high school students won’t answer about their smoking honestly in a school-administered survey. Both sets of researchers controlled for student demographic variables released by YRBS, such as race, sex, age and grade. Some variables — such as income — are not collected by the CDC or the states. Carpenter admitted that the information on the students is limited — “they are really, really poor measures,” he said. But it’s still the best data available to study this question.

It’s not clear what the policy response should be if this represents a new normal of youth smoking behavior. Hansen would like to see more research into the effectiveness of other anti-smoking interventions: high school health classes, for instance, or informational campaigns.

One option is to do what Hawaii recently did: raise the minimum smoking age. It’s 18 in most states, but Hawaii changed it to 21. Unfortunately, the YRBS doesn’t collect date of birth (only age). Hansen speculates that raising the minimum purchase age by just one year, from 18 years old to 19 years old, could have an impact on teen smoking. There are many high school seniors who are 18, but not many who are 19. Now that a previously effective weapon against teen smoking appears to be blunted, states will have to look elsewhere.

He took her image. She undercut him by 99.9 percent. Ladies and gentlemen, the genius that is Missy Suicide.

Painter and photographer Richard Prince is known (and notorious) for appropriating images from celebrities or even fellow photographers, tweaking the photos ever so slightly, and then slapping a knee-buckling price tag on it.

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Woe be to anyone actually planning to use an Apple Watch. 

According to sources cited by Apple blog 9to5Mac, the still-unreleased iOS smartwatch’s battery life lasts only for a couple hours of heavy use. 

See also: What You Can Do With The Apple Watch

Standby time looks better; it can hang on for up to 2 or 3 days. But that presumes you don’t actually use anything that makes the gadget “smart.” 

A Dismal Power Play

Apple never willingly discloses the battery capacity of its mobile devices. Typically, those specifications and more come to light after an Apple product launches and gets autopsied—er, a proper teardown—by the tech community. 

So it's no surprise that the company didn’t specify details about its upcoming smartwatch's power cell. At its press conference last year, the only thing the company would say was that it would require nightly charging. 

The latest report seems to dig in a bit more. Its unnamed sources, whose relationship to Apple (if any) was not disclosed, said the company tested the device in various scenarios. Through steady standard app use, the device lasted up to 3.5 hours. Intensive gameplay hammered the battery more, yielding 2.5 hours of life. Ultimately, the device’s energy-swilling processor and beautiful, but power-hungry display are some of the key reasons for the drain. 

Apple supposedly thinks fitness-tracking features could somehow yield better battery life. As illogical as that sounds, the company supposedly targets almost 4 straight hours of exercise tracking. 

A Gadget That Dies Before Lunch?

Battery life for wearables is a fundamental problem. The 5-to-7 day battery life of Pebble—with its e-paper, non-touchscreen—sits on one end of the spectrum, while rivals like Android Wear’s growing army of wrist devices sat on the other, thanks to limited life typically in the 1-to-2 day range. But if there's any truth to this report about the Apple Watch and its scant few hours of functionality under actual use, that could represent a new low for smartwatches. 

Fast-charging could help ease the situation. The site also reports that Apple could be in the throes of refining its MagSafe charging connection to allow for speedier juice-ups. 

Although tech circles seem to be hot on wrist gadgets, the public at large hasn't quite made them a mainstream trend yet. Previously, the Apple Watch looked like it could've gone a long way toward sparking consumer demand. Now, it's unclear if customers, particularly those used to seemingly endless battery life from traditional watches, will embrace a wearable that could die before lunchtime. 

The Apple Watch is expected to launch some time around the end of March. 

Photo courtesy of Apple

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Please join us for this special discussion on December 12 at Burning Man Headquarters!

Crowdfunding: Trends in the Sharing Economy

The crowd at Distrikt, 2013 (photo by Jared Mechaber)

The sharing economy is taking off – whether it’s peer-to-peer rentals, skill sharing, crowdfunding, ridesharing or unused parking spots. Spawned by a confluence of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the social web coming of age, the sharing economy is quickly becoming the hottest trend in economic paradigms.

We in the Burning Man community are particularly interested in the dynamics and the future of the sharing economy, since it reflects our principles of gifting, communal effort, civic responsibility and decommodification.

Please join us for a panel discussion focused specifically on the future of crowdfunding, one of the fastest-developing areas in the sharing economy. We will explore the role it plays in creative community development, and how it’s being applied to entrepreneurial endeavors in the form of spaces (local real estate) and support for small businesses (micro loans).

When: December 12, 7-9pm
Where: Burning Man HQ
Address: 660 Alabama Street, San Francisco

Panelists:
Daniel Miller, Fundrise
Harry Pottash, Kiva
Kate Drane, Indiegogo

Moderator:
Will Chase, Burning Man Project

Please RSVP to attend.

This program is part of an ongoing series of events produced as part of the non-profit Burning Man Project’s Educational Program, supporting its cultural, philosophical and educational initiatives around the world. For information about past or upcoming events, or to propose one, click here.