Volume 45 [2010–11]

Musical alchemy

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MUSIC I’ve never defended the idea of a “best of” record. Some anonymous curator is typically given the task of sifting out a musician’s hits from the misses, of establishing an artist’s definitive compilation once and for all. A fairly daunting project for judging something as fickle and varied as musical taste. So I have to admit I was skeptical when I picked up The Best of Quantic album put out by the British imprint Tru Thoughts earlier this month.

Best of? Quantic, a.k.a. William Holland, is only 31-years-old. And the talented producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist is hardly through with making music. Quantic has completed eleven records on Tru Thoughts in the span of a decade, ever since the label flipped his demo into The 5th Exotic, a fluid recording of instrumental grooves crafted from the percussive roots of hip-hop and the beat experiments of Brighton’s downtempo electronic scene. A track culled from that record, “Time is the Enemy,” launches the new retrospective into a geography of sound that Quantic has persistently navigated in unexpected ways — between the contemplative and the effusion of the dance floor.

Few musicians are as prodigious as Quantic, as methodical, as ready to throw away conventional formulas and risk leaping into the wandering spirit of rhythm. A couple years after his solid debut, Quantic abandoned strict sampling techniques in favor of forming a break driven funk group: the Quantic Soul Orchestra. Powerhouse songs like “Pushin’ On” and “Don’t Joke with a Hungry Man,” respectively featuring vocalists Alice Russell and Spanky Wilson, stamps The Best Of with the frenetic pulse of deep-in-the-pocket soul.

With a crate digger’s fervor, Quantic traveled to Ethiopia and throughout the Caribbean, absorbing and researching and translating the diaspora of the polyrhthm. Four years ago, he relocated to Santiago de Cali, Colombia — a city built from second wave 1950s Art Deco and the more typical mass concrete structures of the ’60s — where the radio still broadcasts Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz, and the boogaloo of 1968 saturates the air.

“I see Cali as a crossroads, almost like a test tube, or a gateway from the Pacific Coast [of Colombia] to Bogota,” Quantic tells me from his home, trucks rumbling in the background. “It’s a very creative place, although fairly unbeknown to the outside world.”

Once settled in Cali, Quantic reforged his orchestra into his Combo Bárbaro. In 2009, Quantic and his group released perhaps his most exhilarating album yet, Tradition in Transition, a testament to the vitality of percussive heritage on the fringes and yet in the subterranean core of the Americas.

“I wanted to really explore the side of music from Barranquilla and Panama City where you have bands playing soul, funk, salsa, cumbia, boogaloo … not necessarily one genre,” Quantic says. “What I appreciate in this music is that there’s tremendous diversity — culturally, ethnically, racially — and so many different rhythm experimentations.”

For his Combo Bárbaro, Quantic tried to synthesize precisely this kind of musical alchemy. He paired British drummer Malcolm Catto with frenetic Colombian percussionist Freddie Colorado; Peruvian pianist Alfredo Linares weaved the melodies, and folklore singer, Nidia Góngora, from the Afro-Colombian region of the Pacific Coast, wrote and delivered the lyrics. What comes out of these creative tensions is a brilliant and resonating song like “The Dreaming Mind,” which also features lush string arrangements from the often overlooked Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai.

After a few rotations, the best of record won me over. It’s more of a stitched together mapping of Quantic’s rhythmic wanderings — musically and physically — than a set of highlights towards a destination. “The traveling of my own life as a musician is intertwined with the music I make,” he says. “It’s like looking at the rings on the tree; there’s a pattern to it, but it just develops naturally without so much of a plan.”

Quantic hopes to redraw a bit of that map during his performance this Friday at SOM. Without his bárbaros on tour, he’ll spin some 45s to chart out influences, and then bring the studio on stage, mixing recorded sessions live while adding dubbing and keys. 

Quantic

With Guillermo and Wonway

Fri. 9/30, 10 p.m., $10–$15

SOM

2925 16th, SF

www.som-bar.com

Channeling darkness

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM One of the longest and most unsung stretches of film noir’s half life as an enduring aesthetic sensibility has played out on television. From such former Nick at Night staples as Dragnet and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, to The Twilight Zone, to the neo-noir of Twin Peaks, and more recently, AMC’s drama The Killing, TV has long been home to those lawbreakers, revenge-seekers, and poor souls tormented by unexplained phenomena and sinister plots who once populated the black and white cinematic pulp of the 1940s.

In fact, Hollywood’s fingerprints are all over “TV Noir,” a highly detailed survey of the various types of malfeasance and mystery one could find on television sets during the medium’s golden age. The series’ seven nights of double bills, which kick off at the Roxie Fri/30, are packed with small screen rarities that frequently feature big Hollywood names (or soon-to-be big names) behind or in front of the camera for episodes of now forgotten shows with catchy titles such as Suspense, Danger, Checkmate, and Tales of Tomorrow.

Series curator and Roxie resident noir expert Elliot Lavine has dug deep, unearthing such treasures as Blake Edwards’ unsold 1954 pilot for Mike Hammer, a series that was to be based on Mickey Spillane’s famous hard-boiled detective, which screens opening night. Things get more highbrow with Saturday night’s showcase of “Great Directors.” The aforementioned Hitch is present, directing and producing the tense Cornell Woolrich-inspired “Four O’Clock” from his program Suspicion, which stars E.G. Marshall as a clockmaker who becomes the unwilling victim of his plot to blow up the wife he thinks is cheating on him. I doubt you will squirm through a tenser five minutes than during the episode’s penultimate scene, which showcases Hitchcock’s uncanny ability to manipulate the viewer’s emotions through editing. Also of note is 1951 Danger episode “The System,” an early scorcher by a pre-Hollywood Sidney Lumet, who directs a terrific Eli Wallach.

Of course, a survey of the darker side of the small screen would be incomplete without Rod Serling. Serling, who had catapulted his TV career with Kraft Television Theater’s live 1955 live broadcast of his screenplay Patterns, was in high demand and turning out top quality work pre-Twilight Zone, as evinced by the John Frankenheimer-directed 1958 episode of Playhouse 90, “A Town Has Turned to Dust,” which confronts racial prejudice in a poor, drought-ridden town in a way that Mad Men really has yet to do.

Like “A Town,” the other two Serling-scripted episodes in “TV Noir,” “Nightmare at Ground Zero” (a live drama from 1953) and “The Arena” (1956, from Studio One), hold up a cracked mirror to their times, reflecting growing anxieties over nuclear annihilation and the gradual erosion of the established political order.

These themes are given a less refined treatment in some of Lavine’s campier sci-fi selections showcased on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, in which extraterrestrial is more often than not an anagram for communist. Although, the 1958 pilot for Now is Tomorrow offers a more psychologically taut portrayal of the men entrusted to push “the button,” which is paired with the odd Edward R. Murrow-hosted docu-drama “The Night America Trembled” (1957, from Studio One) — a recreation of the night of Orson Welles’ infamous radio broadcast of War of the Worlds with a cameo by Welles himself. Five years later America would face down the threat of annihilation via broadcast during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“TV Noir” also packs in a few outliers that aren’t to be missed. In the 1954 episode “Bond of Hate,” from British series The Vise, a bitter married couple realize their only recourse is to kill each other. Pamela Abbott’s performance as the harpy-like wife stands next to the late Ann Savage’s turn as the powder keg hitcher in Detour (1945) as an example of how to completely own nearly every second of screen time. Another must-see is the bizarre quiz show, The Plot Thickens (1963); it features an older, but still randy Groucho Marx as part of an “expert” panel that attempts to solve a short whodunit penned by Robert Bloch of Psycho fame. It even had its own mascot: a black cat named Lucifer, which guests were instructed to pass around for good luck. Also of note: television’s early years were also the golden age of sponsorship, and many of episodes in “TV Noir” include each show’s original commercials — including a very young Mike Wallace shilling for Revlon lipstick.

 

“TV NOIR”

Sept. 30-Oct. 6

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

Counting calories

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caitlin@sfbg.com

HERBWISE An old factory sits in the outskirts of Oakland. In decades past, this building produced name brand snacks, but the smell of baking still permeates the factory air.

And weed. It smells like weed too. Bhang Chocolate churns out medicinal marijuana sweets here, bars that are smartly packaged in Bhang’s sleek black, orange, and green boxes that are a far cry from the plain wax envelopes and saran wrap that most marijuana edibles used to be sold in. The company is part of the current expansion in edible products — these days, patients can buy medicated cheesecakes, and even savory trail mix.

Adjacent to Bhang’s factory floor, about ten marijuana edibles producers are listening to a man talk about quality control for weed food. Robert Martin, Ph.D., worked for years in corporate food product development and quality assurance. He tells the class his specialty was frozen foods.

Martin is the co-founder of C.W. Analytical, a business that consults marijuana producers and has cannabis testing facilities. A patient himself, he says that marijuana-medicated foods are technically subject to all the same guidelines for commercially-produced non-pot products, although actual enforcement is sparse. C.W. offers these classes for free to interested entrepreneurs. They teach professional skills and serve as an introduction to the for-sale services the business provides.

The students are being treated to quality assurance fail stories from Martin’s career in the corporate world. A sherbet producer he once knew bought a wildly expensive machine to make fudge bars, but when he failed to make the proper tests on his treats, they caused a nasty spate of diarrhea in consumers and he ended up losing his shirt.

“That’s the kind of crap that can happen to you guys,” cautions Martin, and starts reading from a tongue-in-cheek guide to how you can tell food has gone bad. “Flour is spoiled when it wiggles,” he reads. This is quality assurance humor. “I love this stuff!”

One of the day’s students Lacey (not her real name) says she learned a lot from the class that she’ll be able to implement in her own business, Laced Cakes Bakery. She’s been making prettily iced cannabis cookies and brownies since 2007 and has seen the industry requirements shift dramatically.

“Years ago, you could just bring down a tray [to a dispensary] and drop it off,” she says. Nowadays, to sell in San Francisco she has to package the sweets in opaque material and make sure that the design can’t be interpreted as too appealing to kids. “The laws keep changing.”

She had heard about C.W. Analytical at some of the cannabis expos she’s been a vendor at — the firm will have a booth at next weekend’s West Coast Cannabis Expo as well — and was happy that the class was offered for free. She hadn’t finalized her opinion, however, on Martin’s suggestion that producers get their foods analyzed by the company so that they can put nutrition labels on their packaging. “It seems like they might just be trying to make money off of us,” she mused. 

WEST COAST CANNABIS EXPO

Oct. 7-9. Fri/7, 3-9 p.m.; Sat/8, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun/9 11 a.m.-7 p.m., $18 one day/$45 weekend pass

Cow Palace

Geneva and Santos, Daly City

(650) 591-0420

www.westcoastcannabisexpo.com

 

The sight of sound

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arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL “Home taping is killing music”, declared the 1980s anti-copyright infringement campaign waged by British music industry trade group, the British Phonographic Industry. History has proven BPI’s concerns to have been mis-targeted, with cassettes becoming an increasingly irrelevant medium in the ensuing decades, even as the music industry still struggles to respond to ever-mercurial forms of bootlegging and pirating. The cassette tape, however, has—perhaps unsurprisingly— re-emerged in recent years as both an object of nostalgia and a more exclusive format for more out-there musicians to release their small, home-made batches of black metal, experimental electronica, or noise out into the world for listeners for whom Tumblr is not enough.

Composer and musician Christian Marclay’s visual art often engages with our complicated relationship to outmoded technologies of audio-visual reproduction, particularly vinyl records. The photograms in his current show at Fraenkel Gallery continues this line of inquiry, playfully condensing the cassette tape’s arc from boon to perceived threat to obsolescence to fetish object.

For the gorgeous 2009 photogram “Allover (Dixie Chicks, Nat King Cole and Others),” Marclay exposed photo-sensitized paper to light after he had strewn over it the magnetic innards of cassette tapes and fragments of the broken plastic shells that once contained them that had been coated in a photosensitive solution. The resulting sprawl of tangled white lines on blue brings to mind the splatter canvases of Jackson Pollock or the chalk squiggles of Cy Twombly (associations Marclay’s titular “allover” winks at). In other photograms, such as “Large Cassette Grid No. 9,” also from 2009, Marclay has arranged plastic cassette cases in block-like patterns that cover the entire paper, with each cases’ accumulated wear and tear providing subtle variations.

That cyan-like blue color is what gives Marclay’s chosen process, the cyanotype, its name. Discovered by English scientist Sir John Herschel in 1842, the cyanotype process was historically used to make blueprints. I’d like to imagine that this irony isn’t lost on Marclay. By using an outmoded photographic technology to make visual art out of an outmoded audio technology, Marclay underscores the eventual obsolescence of all reproductive technologies. His cyanotypes aren’t blueprints so much as headstone rubbings.

In “Looking for Love” (2008), a single channel video shown in the gallery’s backroom, Marclay’s stationary camera stays zoomed-in on a well-worn phonographic stylus, as his giant hands roughly skip the needle around record after record searching for any utterance of the word “love.” The film’s exaggerated scale combined with Marclay’s increasingly impatient and roughshod sample hunting can be read as a parody of the audiophile as techno-purist. But the film also speaks to our enduring investment in music—be it the Dixie Chicks, Nat King Cole, or any of the other inaudible “others” that went into the making of Marclay’s cyanotypes—even as our experience of listening to it becomes more and more immaterial.

 

HOMETOWN GIRL

Fran Herndon was not a name I was familiar with, so I’m glad to now be acquainted with this largely unsung player in San Francisco’s artistic firmament of the 1950s and 1960s (and all around bad-ass) thanks to the eye-opening selection of early oil paintings and mixed-media collages organized by Kevin Killian and Lee Plested currently on view at Altman Siegel.

An Oklahoma native, Herndon moved to San Francisco in 1957 with her husband, the California teacher and writer Jim Herndon, who she met while traveling in France. She quickly fell in with the likes of the Robin Blaser, Jess and his partner Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer, with whom she formed an intense intellectual and aesthetic bond. Together, they founded the mimeographed poetry and art magazine J, and Herndon created lithographs for poet Spicer’s 1960 master-work The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. All the while, Herndon continued to produce her own varied body of work that was as much a response to her newfound creative circle of friends and collaborators as it was to the times in which they were making art.

The series of sports themed collages she made in 1962 are especially representative of Herndon’s gift for exploding the hidden currents of emotion contained in her source material—in this case, images clipped from popular magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Life are transformed into near-mythological tableaux of victory and defeat in which race and the volatile racial climate of Civil Rights era-America are front and center (Herndon, who is of Native American heritage, has said “[America] is no place for a brown face”).

In “Collage for Willie Mays” the baseball legend is depicted hitting a homer out of a Grecian colonnade whereas in the decidedly darker and Romare Bearden-esque “King Football” an actual mask has fallen away from the titular ruler, revealing a skull-like visage wrapped in a cloak of newspaper clippings about the 49er’s then-scandalous decision to trade quarterback Y.A. Tittle for Lou Cordilione. The headlines about devastation and death speak to other off-field losses, though.

Other pieces resonate on a more emotional level. The gauche-smudged greyhounds in “Catch Me If You Can” bound past their bucolic counterparts like horses in a Chinese brush painting—all speed and wind—and are as much signs-of-the-times as the more politically overt anti-draft and anti-war collages Herndon made later in the decade.

Certainly, there was no time to wait. So much of Herndon’s art seems to come from an urge to document her “now” with whatever tools she had on hand, a present being lived and produced in the company of so many extraordinary others, from Spicer to Mays. Even her paintings seem to have been worked on only to the point at which their subjects just emerge distinct from their swirled backgrounds of color. Nearly fifty years later, Herndon’s urgency is still palpable.


CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: CYANOTYPES

Through Oct. 29

Fraenkel Gallery

49 Geary, Fourth Floor

(415) 981-2661

www.fraenkelgallery.com


FRAN HERNDON

Through Oct. 29

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary, Fourth Floor

(415) 576-9300

www.altmansiegel.com

Twang on

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cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Hillbilly horror is nothing new. Some might mark its heyday as the 1970s, a decade containing Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), and I Spit On Your Grave (1978). Others might point to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ immortal Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), probably cinema’s most persuasive example of why Yankees road-tripping below the Mason-Dixon Line should never, for any reason, detour off the main highway.

Twenty-first century hillbillies are still scary, at least on the big screen; this is one stereotype that’ll never die. Any number of recent horror films — most of them remakes of the films noted above (or directed by Rob Zombie) — have drawn their clichéd plots from a checklist that always includes city slickers, cars that break down, cell phones that don’t work, and inbred locals. The lesson remains the same: stay the hell out of the backwoods, yuppie!

But what if, asks Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, you were totally misjudging those sinister-seeming whiskey-tango yokels? What if, despite being a little unwashed and fond of sharp objects and power tools, they happened to be really nice guys? The film — about a couple of blue-collar dudes (Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) hanging out at their mountain cabin who unwittingly terrify a group of vacationing college kids — finds a sense of humor in the tired genre. The result is blood-spattered comedy gold.

“The initial premise was: what if Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre was really just a good guy with an unwieldy chainsaw? It’s the good-looking college kids that have been terrorizing him!” explains first-time feature director Craig (he also co-wrote the script). “In order to pull this off, there has to be a series of misunderstandings. My writing partner, Morgan Jurgenson, and I made a rule that Tucker and Dale would never hurt the college kids. They just kept on accidentally killing themselves and leaving their mangled corpses in Tucker and Dale’s yard to deal with.”

The accidental suicides (most memorably, via wood chipper) are gruesome enough to please genre fans — but are also pretty goofy. The label “splat-stick” has rarely been so aptly applied.

“The film satirizes and often pays homage to the clichés of the slasher-horror genre. So it has the look and feel of a horror film, but I think of it as a comedy,” Craig explains. “I always erred on the side of big laughs, and for the stuff that was meant to be more horrific, I tried to push it into a realm where it was so big that it wasn’t quite believable, and hence allowed people to still laugh.”

Horror comedies may not traditionally rake it in at the box office, but they often become cult sensations — see: 1985’s Re-Animator and 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. For Craig, whose film is firmly in the midnight-movie tradition, the lasting appeal of the genre (which goes back even farther than hillbilly horror — see: Abbott and Costello) is obvious.

“To me [horror comedies are] a subcategory of black comedy which basically deals with the farce that is human existence,” he says. “We are all stuck within these hopeless limitations — we can only see life through one pair of eyes, and we will all face our own demise. But to laugh at it all, to see that the world is both cruel and hilarious, to find joy in the hopeless, that allows us to transcend our problems. Good horror-comedy is about laughter amid despair, [which] really is the best option we have sometimes.” 

 

TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL opens Fri/30 in Bay Area theaters.

Not new, but renewing

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arts@sfbg.com

THEATER New plays are usually big selling points for theaters, and they have a certain pizzazz for audiences too, but their power to renew interest in theater is a different matter. The best play seen on a local stage so far this season is not a new play, as it happens, but an old one, with a big name attached and a Pulitzer in tow. But Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance (1966) reminds you why people go to the theater in the first place.

Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre opens its 20th anniversary season with a terrific revival of this invigorating play, set amid the deceptive comfort of an upper-class drawing room (realized in unfussy but suitably expansive detail by scenic designer Richard Olmsted) and never far from its well-appointed and well-loved liquor cabinet. Here, aging richies Agnes (a serenely superior Kimberly King) and Tobias (a gently affable, subtly perplexed Ken Grantham) have settled into a tentative bargain called marriage, the chop on the otherwise placid surface coming only from Agnes’s tippling live-in sister, Claire (a strong, almost swaggeringly tough Jamie Jones), and the couple’s spoiled serial divorcée of a daughter, Julia (a vital, nicely wound-up Carrie Paff).

Into their collective, quotidian sniping and maneuvering comes, unexpectedly, a touch of the paranormal in the form of old friends Harry (a quietly overwhelmed Charles Dean) and Edna (Anne Darragh, projecting an eerie combination of panic and power), who arrive on their doorstep as supplicants fleeing an unknown terror. Suddenly, hard on the heels of peacemaker Tobias’ anecdote about a cat he once had put down after it stopped liking him, the patriarch confronts a supreme moral challenge: what to do with Harry and Edna? What to do, for that matter, with the whole family?

Enduringly interesting and moving, A Delicate Balance (and its dream cast of veteran actors shrewdly helmed by artistic director Tom Ross) revels in the niceties and byways of language even as it limns the ineffable breach between individual and other, madness and sanity, unforgiving fact and accommodating memory — the whole teetering “balancing act” that plays out across a pair of long evenings into a flat, hazy dawn.

Albee’s mode here is a sort of torn naturalism: a naturalism into which something incomprehensible intrudes, making the artificiality of received reality suddenly, disturbingly apparent. For the terror that descends on scared, and vaguely scary, Harry and Edna — driving them and their “plague” into the midst of Tobias and Agnes’ home — that terror emerges from the same waters Tobias and Agnes inhabit. It swarms the land and then, just as unexpectedly, it recedes, like a tsunami that leaves things more or less as before, at least on the surface.

You could call this word-drunk, witty, and boldly imaginative drama an endlessly engaging exploration of the phrase “domestic harmony” — in all its fear-bound resignation, calculation, and codependency. You could also call it a philosophical musing on the problem of community and the obligations we social animals owe one another. But definitions are almost beside the point with a great play because it’s too alive for any label, always sliding out from under it.

What is certain is that a play like this leaves you awake and wandering around the world you share with it. It also, less happily, makes a regular theatergoer realize how these days many new plays (those being produced locally, that is) have been forgettably thin, however clever or amusing. Even Aurora, which does an admirable job with the Albee play, last season premiered one called Collapse full of the typical vices: a play whose bid for social relevance, lacking any significant insight or imagination, remains only superficially meaningful. Comfortable platitudes and conventional tricks substitute too often for intellectual and aesthetic daring. Who could say that about A Delicate Balance

 

A DELICATE BALANCE

Through Oct. 23

Tues. and Sun., 7 p.m. (also Sun., 2 p.m.); Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m., $10-48

Aurora Theatre

2081 Addison, Berk.

(510) 843-4822

www.auroratheatre.org

Time and space pilot

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MUSIC Pioneering electronic composer Pierre Schaeffer used a specific word to describe his work, which took ‘common’ noises and manipulated them into music — acousmatic: “referring to sounds that one hears without seeing the causes behind it.”

Every sound on genre-defying musician Amon Tobin’s latest album is a mystery. The 2007 album Foley Room utilized cinematic studio techniques, reaching back to the roots of electronic music. Now Tobin has shot that line of inquiry into the other direction, seemingly returning from the future with ISAM, an album as alien as it is familiar. “As technology develops, you can go one of two ways,” Tobin says in a phone interview. “You can do the same things that people did ten years ago just with less stress involved, or you can take that tech and try to get more out of what it was designed to do — things other people haven’t figured out yet.”

Tobin occasionally lets people peak behind the curtain. A video earlier in the year showed his hands at work, recording light bulbs (they make sounds, if you know how to play them), plugging them into a high-end, triple axis, pressure sensitive MIDI controller. This last instrument, a Haken Continuum, comes with enough of a learning curve to exclude most people from duplicating what Tobin does with it: morph conventional sounds into conceptual instruments that only exist in the artist’s mind. When it came time to post ISAM online, Tobin annotated the album, revealing sonic origins. The enchanting female vocals that appear on tracks like “Wooden Toy,” for instance, are his own, gender-modified.

There was also a warning: “anyone looking for jazzy brks [sic] should look elsewhere at this point or earlier :). it’s 2011 folks, welcome to the future.” A clear statement, breaking away from the sample heavy style that Tobin was once known for, material tailored for DJ sets, in a club. With ISAM, that’s not the whole story. “Electronic music isn’t always dance music, in fact dance music is just a section of electronic music,” Tobin says. “This record isn’t dance music, its not about raving or any of that stuff.” It’s the kind of album that might make you want to put on headphones and let the mind run wild. For all its meditative qualities, though, it’s hard on the bass and expressive, with a range that begs to be heard in a louder arena.

Thinking of a tour, Tobin “had the problem that all electronic musicians have, which is how the fuck do you present electronic music, which is so not to do with performance, as a live thing that’s engaging?” The solution, a next-level stage set created by L.A.’s V Squared Labs, Chicago’s Leviathan, and S.F.’s Blasthaus, has Tobin cast as the pilot of a space-going vessel in a narrative that the artist admits is “not War and Peace, not a brilliant epic thing, but it’s enough to give meaning and direction to the visual content.”

A 25-foot-long, multi-dimensional structure of giant pixel cubes resembling a game of Tetris going very badly, the ISAM installation comes to life via a system that allows multiple projectors to transform every surface into a screen. It’s effectively 3D without the need for dorky glasses and eye strain. (A promo video released on YouTube surely sold more tickets than a hundred articles like this.) Tobin’s place on stage is within the piece, positioned like a magician or contortionist: inside a box. Which, perhaps, is just where he’d like to be. “I always kind of put myself in the corner of a stage if I can,” Tobin says, “because there’s nothing worse than standing in front of a thousand people who are all staring at my every minute movement and feeling like maybe I should just turn the lights off, because there’s nothing to see here.”

The unconventional choice of positioning the artist more like ghost in the shell than man on a pedestal has its limit. Alex Lazarus, the creative director on the project says in conceptualizing the performance Tobin “wanted people to focus more on the actual music and visual representation as opposed to focusing on him.” But Lazarus says “he can’t just not be seen, so I had to open my big mouth and tell him that we could use this smart glass in his cube, which can be turned on and off to see inside. It’s cool and all, but it’s extremely expensive and every single time we have to touch it I’m petrified that we’re gonna break it.”

Seeing the wizard at work alleviates the creeping possibility of a Milli Vanilli situation, but still, like Brad Pitt in Se7en, I want to know what’s in the box. (What can I say? I’m no fun — I also want to know how magicians do their tricks and how Pepperidge Farms draws the little faces on Goldfish crackers.) Is Tobin manning extra controls to sync the visuals? Is it all automated? Specific details, however, are generally off limits, as both Lazarus and Tobin invoke “proprietary technology.” Which is fair. Considering how many people worked on innovating the project, a trade secret is valuable. (Years after debuting, the similarly impressive LED tech behind Daft Punk’s ‘pyramid’ paid off again when its designers essentially reshaped it into deadmau5’s ‘cube.’)

Tobin says there’s absolutely no compromise musically. Even when he does a more traditional DJ set, he has it all worked out ahead of time. “When I go and see a show I don’t want to see people wanking off on their equipment,” Tobin says. “I love to watch things that have been really well thought out and practiced.” Whatever he’s doing in that box, he’s enjoying it. “I feel like I’m in an Apollo 13 capsule. The whole thing is based on the idea of it being a spaceship and the funny thing is I come into the cube and it literally looks like a cockpit from the inside.”

I ask him if this means he doesn’t have to pretend for the part. “Well,” Tobin says, “if I was pretending I’d probably have a band up there trying to play the record. Kind of a waste of every one’s time.” His voice is deadpan, but sounds like he’s grinning, just a bit. *

 

AMON TOBIN

Sat/1 (sold out) and Sun/2, 8 p.m., $29.50–$39.50

The Warfield

982 Market, SF (415) 345-0900 www.thewarfieldtheater.com

Legends of the underground

5

emilysavage@sfbg.com

MUSIC “There are people like us who decide we no longer want to deal with what is fed to us through commercial forces,” says infamous hardcore singer Mike Apocalypse, “We strive to create new things — if I couldn’t create new music, I would fall apart in a month’s time.”

It’s wretchedly hot on a Sunday afternoon at Mission bar Laszlo when Apocalypse, 37, makes the above statement while ordering a shot and a Red Stripe. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, he orders many more shots and beers, and excitedly bumps into a cadre of fellow music-maker friends.

With a broad grin, his sea-green eyes widen as he recalls the early 90s origins of Gehenna, his longstanding hardcore-black metal band. He folds his tattooed fingers (one reads “83%” in ode to Gehenna’s first song) over a beer with a mention of the upcoming chopped and screwed Gehenna mixtape.

In addition to his role as Gehenna’s singer, Apocalypse is also a respected local DJ. He beams while giving me the rundown on his daily routine: recording music at home in the Excelsior District every morning, DJing at Laszlo, Showdown, or Argus Lounge every late night; recently spinning disparate tracks by the likes of Infest, Stone Roses, and Nipsey Hussle.

This, his openness and agreeable demeanor, are in direct contrast with his fabled persona. Mind you, he’s only a legend in the underground, in small pockets of cities like San Diego, Orange, Calif., and Reno, but within certain crowds, the rumors are alive. If you’ve heard of him — and chances are, you haven’t — than you’ve heard the drama.

The rumor mill: Apocalypse stabbed a guy at a punk show. He punched someone in the face at a record store. He contributed to another musician losing his mind. And so becomes a legend. There have been outsized rumors and half-truths, tattooed cupped hands whispering circles around Apocalypse, also known as Mike Cheese or DJ Apocalypse, for decades.

“You know more of the rumors than I do, and you know more of the falsehoods than I do,” he says. Without addressing any specific incidents he lays it out: “The rumors also come from people who have attacked me physically and they thought they could fuck me up. Fact is, I don’t bullshit. If you think you’re going to fuck me up, unfortunately, I’m pretty good at handling my hands, I’ve got some good fist game because I grew up in Detroit.”

That last part is unquestionably true, he lived in Detroit until age 14, when he moved to San Diego alone. By age 17, he was straight-edge and on a cheeseburger diet (hence the name “Cheese”). He met fellow musicians through the hardcore scene and formed Gehenna. With its pummeling drum beats, black metal riffs, droning breakdowns, and Apocalypse’s tortured, growling vocals, it brought something new to the 1993 hardcore table.

“I brought in some of the more metal elements, Mickey [Rhodes Featherstone] brought in 70s proto-punk and DC [Grave] brought in the really fucking heavy stuff and the straight thrash — we were able to incorporate all the things we liked into one sound.”

Through 17 years, the band has self-released seven-inches, splits, and a few full length LPs — most recently, 2011’s re-issue of Land Of Sodom II/Upon The Gravehill — and moved from San Diego to Phoenix to Orange to Reno. Apocalypse, far from straight edge, settled into San Francisco in 2008, but since the other members are spread elsewhere, Gehenna only plays SF once a year. “San Francisco, is one of the greatest cities in the United States. This is the most open-minded city I’ve ever been in.”

He seems pleased with his current lot in life; it might be the alcohol or recreational drugs talking, but he’s truly inspirational in his takes on art, music, life. Truth to those whispered rumors or not, legend or not, Apocalypse is a man of convictions.

“[Gehenna] is not making money, we’re not going to ever sign with a major label, we’re never going to do anything that’s outside of our realm of control. It’s always been about control.”

 

GEHENNA

With Hoax, Neo Cons, and Neighborhood Brats

Wed/28, 8 p.m., $8

Sub-Mission

2183 Mission, SF www.sf-submission.com

Editor’s notes

1

tredmond@sfbg.com

Every mayoral candidate who wants the progressive vote showed up for the Guardian forum Sept. 21. Everyone except Mayor Ed Lee.

Yeah, the mayor’s a busy guy. But state senators and city attorneys and public defenders and city assessors and supervisors are busy, too, and those people managed to get to the LGBT Center, where more than 100 people were packed into the fourth floor room.

Jeff Adachi made a point of talking about “showing up” — and everyone knew exactly what he was saying. Where was Ed?

Well, maybe the mayor isn’t interested in votes from the city’s left, but I kind of doubt he’s written off such a huge sector of the population. In fact, by that standard, he would have written off most of the neighborhoods, and most of the political clubs. Because the mayor isn’t showing up much at all.

There have been more than 50 forums, debates and candidates nights over the course of the election season. Sure, some of them happened before Lee got in the race — but since the day he filed his papers, the other candidates have gone to between 12 and 15 events. Lee has made it to maybe two or three — and when he does show up, he often answers one question then leaves.

I get the strategy: Lee is pretending to be above the political fray. He’s the incumbent in the Rose Garden, refusing to lower himself to the level of all that riffraff out there trying to communicate with the voters. He’s making sure nobody gets to ask him any embarrassing questions; that way he won’t make any mistakes. And his entire reelection will be one big scripted event, paid for with big corporate money and managed from behind the scenes by the same slick operators who brought you Gavin Newsom.

Do we really want four more years of that?

Tony Winnicker, who was Newsom’s press secretary, is now handing the media for Lee. He’s just as hostile and dismissive of legitimate journalistic inquiries as he ever was, just as full of spin and vinegar. He acts as if campaigning — you know, the stuff all the others are doing — is beneath the dignity of His Honor.

Come on, Mr. Mayor. Come out and campaign like everyone else. We’re starting to wonder what you’re trying to hide.

The attack on public finance

0

EDITORIAL The two most important political reforms in modern San Francisco history were the restoration of district elections and the creation of a public-finance system for mayoral and supervisorial elections. Both give candidates who lack big-business support a chance to win elective office. Both give independents a chance to compete against the downtown interests. Both have improved local government considerably in the past decade. And now public financing is directly under attack.

The Board of Supervisors was slated to meet in closed session Sept. 27 to discuss amendments to the public disclosure law — allegedly, according to Supervisors Mark Farrell and Sean Elsbernd, to avoid legal liability. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down in July that an Arizona law giving increased public money to candidates who were being badly outspent by well-financed opponents. One aspect of the city’s law, which allows extra public money for candidates once their opponents break the spending cap, might fall under the high court’s ruling.

But the city’s right in the middle of a heated mayoral election, and all of the candidates entered knowing the current rules — and more important, nobody has come forward to sue, or even threaten to sue, over the city’s law. So there’s no urgent reason to rewrite the ordinance.

The very fact that so many qualified candidates are in the race is an argument for public financing. Many of the current candidates would be unable to raise the vast sums required for a serious campaign without the help of public finance — and that opens up the field to more ideas, more debate, more policy discussions. It also gives the voters more of a choice — which, is, after all, what democracy is about.

Besides, as activist Larry Bush pointed out to us, “you have two choices with money in elections — you can pay up from with public funding or you can pay afterward with sweetheart contracts. And we all know which one is cheaper.”

Mayor Ed Lee, who has refused to take public money (because he doesn’t have to — he’s got plenty of rich and powerful backers) is attacking the campaign law, complaining in a TV ad that his opponents are “using taxpayer money” for “attack ads” — and that’s spurring discussion about whether there ought to be limits on how public money can be used. Any move in that direction would undermine the whole point of the law — if candidates can’t do negative ads (which, like it or not, are part of the modern campaign world) with public funds, they’ll raise outside money instead.

There are plenty of ways to improve the city’s public finance law (increasing disclosure requirements for late money and expanding the restrictions on donation by city contractors would be a good start). But amending the law in the middle of a campaign when there are no existing legal threats is a bad idea, and the supervisors should scrap it.

PS: If Lee wants to be mayor, he needs to start showing up — at debates and forums. That’s part of the job.

Fair muddling

2

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS Tell you what I’m not eating this week: I’m not eating funnel cake, Amish whoopie pies, fried pickles, or fried macaroni and cheese. I’m not eating Running Deer potato pancakes, Grotto’s pizza, May’s barbecue, Mootz’s fudge, Hewlett’s hot sausages, Bowman’s French fries, Cain’s chicken and waffles, Top-of-the-Beef’s pit-roasted sandwich, or fire-roasted sweet corn. I’m not washing all these things down with three different colors of birch beer.

The river crested at 32.75 feet and the Bloomsburg Fair was cancelled. First time ever, 156 years. We cooked for two days until we had filled Hedgehog’s mom’s freezer with frozen lasagne and wedding soup, and then we got the hell out of Dodge while the gettin’ was half decent. There was a couple-hour window of opportunity between the interstate being reopened and all the surface streets being closed on account of barns and tool sheds floating down them.

We splashed right through that window to Ohio, to my nephew’s wedding and to C. Staples, the last-standing of Youngstown’s locally famous fried barbecued chicken joints. Where, craving smoke, I got ribs on the side; but the ribs weren’t true barbecue either. They were just ribs. And barbecue sauce.

Hedgehog failed to see the humor in this.

“You have to grow up with it, I guess,” I said, glorying in my sauce-soaked white bread. It’s a good sauce, sweet and strangely gritty, but Hedgehog couldn’t keep her head in the game. She kept going on line and looking at pictures of her hometown’s washed-away bridges and half-underwater homes. The whole time we were in Ohio she’d be eating chickens with one hand and

Twittering and Facing Book with the other.

I said, “Okay. Maybe we should go back, see if there’s anything we can do to help …”

Of course, at that time they hadn’t officially cancelled the fair yet, so we were planning to go back anyway, eventually, the last week of the month.

That’s this week! And the only reason I even know what I’m missing in Central Pennsylvania, friedwise and otherwise, is because all year this year, probably since before I met Hedgehog, she’s been telling me about the fair the fair the fair. Even her friends in New Orleans, New Jersey and New York were talking about it. The fair! They were going. They had been. They all had favorite stands and strategies: what to eat first. What to save room for …

Argh, talk about wait till next year!

Anyway, it took us a few days back in the state-of-emergencied disaster area to find anyone to help. First we joined a mud-out crew and went around with shiny donated shovels and brand new five-gallon buckets looking for work, but the only useful thing I did that day was help carry a soggy box spring to the curb.

See, the thing about God- and neighbor-fearing people, it turns out, is that no matter how sunk they are, they would rather help than be helped. Everyone wants to volunteer — and no one needs anything. Their whole first floor and basement are in pieces on the curb, yet they feel pretty lucky, somehow, and at any rate don’t need sandwiches.

We soon realized the only way to be truly useful to these strong, good people was to accept their help. And then was the chicken farmer in national disaster area heaven, going from church to church to fire department trying to look pathetic and eating their bean soup, corn chowder, and chopped ham sandwiches before they went to waste.

On the third day we had the advantage of actually being muddy and exhausted for one of these meals, on account of our friend Sue’s brother had gotten soggy up to his kitchen cabinets — the up-high ones. When we left there, the curbside pile of drywall, soggy insulation, cracked linoleum, etc., was almost as high as the roof.

Next morning, to fuel us up for the long drive back to California, friend Sue drove us to D.W. Moss’s farmhouse, which is your typical off-the-grid middle-of-nowhere suspender-grandpa’d dirt-road no-menu pay-what-you-want weekend breakfast joint, with sausage and bacon that taste like they just went out back and scraped it off the pig. It’s not a restaurant. It’s my new favorite restaurant.

Seriously, if you ever accidentally find yourself out Benton way, Pennsylvania, of a weekend morning, go find Moss’s farm. It’s on Moss road. Look for cars and kittens.

Standing up for Troy Davis

0

news@sfbg.com

OPINION We were all standing there in different states of hegemony — some of us bought in to the lie of security and police, believing we had done wrong or fucked up and some of us not. It was Wednesday, September 21, the day of the state-sponsored legal lynching of Troy Anthony Davis, and there were easily 210 of us standing in a line snaking out of the building. We were in the Cop Store the Police Bank, the building known simply as the Hall of (In)Justice, 850 Bryant.

In the last six months since budget cuts have sliced deeper wounds in society’s collective flesh, yet more cops roam the streets issuing more tickets. The line for traffic tickets outside room 145 has begun to expand like a python ready to strike, like an unchecked levy after a storm. The people are piling up and the workers to help them diminishing.

I was there standing in that line. I was rocking my hand-made, life-size, “Yo Soy Troy Davis … I am Troy Davis” shirt/body patch. It was 11:00 am and I was tweeting, calling, petition signing, and calling again. My heart had dropped to the bottom, heavy as a boulder crashing through the window of my soul. And then I remembered, I had a voice. Maybe that’s all I had, but I had a voice and I could speak up and then….

“Excuse me, can I get everyone’s attention…..”

I had waited until the halls were clear of police and the only sound you heard was the silent tapping of fingernails on touch screens — and then I did it. I stepped outside of excepted norms of behavior, violated all those unseen, unsaid demands on speech, the rules on when it’s okay to speak up.

“They are about to execute an innocent man in Georgia in less than five hours, and you all can do something about it, right now, from right here…”

I went on to explain a little back ground about the case of brother Troy and fact that seven out of nine witnesses recanted their testimonies and how so many people, including several politricksters in power, have stood up to say this is wrong.

“I have the number on my phone that you all can call. I have the link to the petition that you can sign. Please consider it. We aren’t doing anything else for at least the next hour, right?”

And then it was over. I finished speaking and people looked away. They continued ticking on their meta-keyboards, and looking at their nails, and reading their papers, and looking at their feet. And it was if I have never said anything. Or was it?

My brother in my POOR Magazine family of poverty scholars and reporters told me he did a similar thing on the evening of the S-Comm threat of deportation his family had just had to deal with in Oakland.

“I looked around, it was a crowded BART train and no one was saying anything or doing anything. We were all just standing there. I knew no-one else would say anything so I decided to speak up. I busted out with my poem about the criminalization of immigrants.” He said that when he was finished with the piece, no one said anything — but the air was heavy with his words.

Some organizers and conscious folks talk about moving on — but at POOR Magazine, will not move on. We will continue to speak up in places we are not supposed to about things we are not supposed to mention, and we will make art and cultural work about things and people that never get art made about them and we will work daily to make sure that all silenced, removed, deported, lynched, incarcerated, criminalized, harassed and abused peoples are heard and loved and remembered — and we hope you all do the same. Even when its uncomfortable. 

Tiny, aka Lisa Gray Garcia, is an editor at POOR magazine.

Gin, with wings

0

virginia@sfbg.com

APPETITE For those who have been following my Guardian Appetite column, you know I’ve been there since the beginning of 2009, reviewing food and drink, cocktails and wine, restaurants and hole-in-the-walls, both in the Bay Area and on my travels. I am delighted to share a myriad discoveries with you each week here, from my daily meals, tastings and adventures, ranging from whisk(e)y releases to stand-out dishes at new restaurants. Here are four intriguing tastes this week:

 

HOT SAUCE AND PANKO

One of my favorite openings in recent weeks, and my top wings spot in San Francisco, is Hot Sauce and Panko (1545 Clement St., (415) 387-1908, hotsauceandpanko.wordpress.com). Not only is the hot sauce collection — reaching from the deep South to Japan — about the best around, but its blog reveals the owner’s quirky hilarity. As a chicken wing take-out shop selling a wide range of hot sauces, a good 20-plus are available to sample at any given time, so prepare for some serious heat (and note that they sometimes sell out of wings early in the day).

I walk away with a tub of cooked-to-order wings for $19.99, or plenty for two at $14.99. What makes me giddy is they let me choose as many of their appealing preparations as I want in one order. There’s a regular menu offering classic buffalo, honey mustard, or kuzu salt and pepper wings. Wings and waffles come together as a combo ($5.99) or just add a waffle onto your order for $1.99. The specials menu gets crazy with tequila-chipotle-raspberry jam wings or one-week-aged cognac-habanero-lime-bitters wings(!) These aren’t typical menu offerings. Favorites are creamy Thai peanut sauce wings, KFC (Korean fried chicken wings), and a “Pucker Your Mouth” special of wings in lime, fish sauce, garlic, blue agave, and red pepper flakes. A side of spicy slaw ($1.99) further pushes your heat tolerance.

 

ST. GEORGE’S TERROIR GIN

St. George Spirits (also Hangar One) consistently wears the crown for renegade inventiveness. Master distiller Lance Winters and distillers Dave Smith and Chris Jordan lead the way in out-of-the-box creativity. Never have I seen the like of their test tube apothecary of experimentation where they’ll try anything, from foie gras and beef jerky, to carrots and Dungeness crab, to see what works as a spirit.

I love all three of their brand new gins, including Botanivore to Dry Rye Gin. If I had to choose a favorite, however, it’s the Terroir. A true Golden State tribute, this gin reflects the glories of Northern California, with hand-harvested juniper berries, Douglas fir (from Mt. Tam), coastal sage, fennel, California bay laurel, cinnamon, cardamom, lemon — to name but a few of the ingredients. Plus, a portion of sales go to support California wilderness, preserving our mighty state’s nature as the gin reflects its diversity. To me, this is the most striking of the three, with a fresh, pine-y essence… a unique expression, unlike any other spirit out there. You can purchase online at www.stgeorgespirits.com. By the way, Bar Agricole (www.baragricole.com) is making beautiful cocktails with St. George Gins, including a Dry Rye Old Fashioned and Botanivore with Riesling and stonefruit bitters.

 

DRINK OF THE WEEK: POTRERO PINOT AT MICHAEL MINA

It was a privilege recently to have lunch with Franco Luxardo, a sixth-generation member of the Luxardo family of the famed liqueur company. In Northern Italy, Luxardo facilities are surrounded by 20,000 cherry trees from which the company makes its legendary Original Maraschino Liqueur. What particularly stood out over lunch was sweet-yet-dry Cherry Liqueur Sangue Morlacco, made from their Marasca cherries. Full and round, it expresses sour cherry tart while remaining smooth. Michael Mina’s lead bartender Carlo Splendorini crafted exquisite drinks for each of our courses, utilizing Sangue Morlacco. He serves it in a wine glass with VSOP cognac, Old Potrero Rye and his own pinot noir gum syrup, flaming off the alcohol for a whisper of Islay Scotch peat. With the look of deep red wine, it is tart, smoky, lush. Splendorini just added this cocktail to the menu and I helped him name it. Ask for the Potero Pinot. You won’t be sorry.

 

CAN’T MISS EVENT: SUNDAY SUPPER

On Sunday, October 2 at 6 p.m., CUESA’s Sunday Supper Fundraiser (proceeds go to CUESA’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market) starts with a pre-Supper reception and guests as noteworthy as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Cowgirl Creamery’s Peggy Smith and Sue Conley. Following is a four-course dinner at communal tables upstairs in the Ferry Building under white lights. The chef line-up is stellar, including Michael Tusk of Quince and Cotogna. Chefs like Frances’ Melissa Perello and 4505 Meats’ Ryan Farr carve sustainably raised whole beasts (beef, boar, lamb, etc.) tableside. $200, tickets and full chef line-up: www.cuesa.org/events/2011/sunday-supper *

Subscribe to Virgina’s twice monthly newsletter, The Perfect Spot, www.theperfectspotsf.com

 

Censorship — or something else?

8

Project Censored highlight stories that didn’t make the national mainstream news media. And in this issue, we’ve got a story that shows something about how news judgments are made in two of San Francisco’s largest newsrooms.

Journalist Peter Byrne (who once worked at SF Weekly and wrote some critical stories about us) shares the tale of what happened to a story that the San Francisco Chronicle assigned him — but never published. The people at the Chron and the Bay Citizen (a nonprofit whose work runs in the New York Times) have different perspectives on what happened in this case — and whether powerful people like Richard Blum influence whether critical stories end up in print. Readers can decide for themselves how to see this situation.

But what was striking to us at the Guardian — and why we chose to print both Byrne’s account and the final story that the Chronicle chose not to print below — was that the suppressed story was actually quite tame and well-balanced after Chronicle writers, editors, and lawyers spent months working on it (Bay Citizen also invested weeks of work and never published anything relating to the story).

It simply raised the issue of whether the University of California should be doing private equity investment deals that are overseen by wealthy, politically connected people like Blum, whose own funds were also involved. It ultimately wasn’t a screaming indictment or accusation of illegal activity, but just a modest peek behind the curtain of an important institution whose focus has strayed from its core mission of serving college students.

We reviewed email exchanges that confirm the basic outline of Byrne’s story, conducted some interviews that guided our editing of this story, and included responses from the Chronicle and Bay Citizen at the end of the story. Ultimately, whether this is a case of censorship or something else, we thought it deserved to find its way into print. (Steven T. Jones)

 

BlumGate

Why two Bay Area newsrooms dismissed my story about conflicts of interest in UC investment deals

 

By Peter Byrne

news@sfbg.com

In September 2010, the journalism website Spot.us published my investigative series, “The Investors Club: How University of California Regents Spin Public Money into Private Profit.” It detailed how members of the UC Board of Regent’s investment committee oversaw the investment of nearly $1.5 billion of UC’s money into business deals in which they themselves held significant stakes.

One of the conflicted regents was Richard Blum, the financier husband of U.S. Sen., Dianne Feinstein (D-CA); another was Paul Wachter, a business partner of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is also a regent).

The story caused a stir, particularly at a time when student groups were protesting draconian cuts and tuition hikes. Several newsweeklies published the series. The Los Angeles Times ran a story about my findings. And the investigation was honored with journalism awards by several local, state, and national organizations. So I was not surprised when Nanette Asimov, the higher education beat reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, called me last October.

“I know it’s a Herculean task, but is it possible to charbroil your opus down to 800 words?” she asked. The paper offered to pay me $350 for the story.

Intrigued, I squeezed the investigation that Spot.us had paid $7,000 to produce into a few paragraphs. Little did I know that Asimov and I would be expanding and cutting and tweaking this story for the next eight months, as publication was delayed again and again by foot-dragging editors.

But I was patient. Even after Metro Editor Audrey Cooper told me that Blum had “threatened” Chronicle editors if they ran the tale, I waited several more months before going public. It is my belief that journalists must as accountable for what we do not print as for what we do print.

When Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, a staff writer at the Bay Citizen, inquired about the delay in publishing the story, I told her what I knew and gave her dozens of emails between myself and Chronicle staff. Ironically, the Bay Citizen never ran the story about the story.

 

THE GORY DETAILS

It quickly became obvious that the complex financial story would not easily squeeze into a few paragraphs. But since the Hearst Corporation had cut the Chronicle’s reportorial throat several years ago by laying off its investigative enterprise staff, there appeared to be no one left capable of editing it. Asimov had to constantly badger editors to work on the story.

Shortly before Thanksgiving 2010, Chronicle business reporter Tom Abate got involved. He sent me an outline indicating places where I should insert a “FIRE BREATHING QUOTE” and then a “QUOTE OF OUTRAGE.” The idea of daily news writing, he told me, was “make the readers spit up their coffee.” Okay! I dreamed that the streets of San Francisco would soon flow with rivers of regurgitated java.

By early January 2011, Asimov and I had worked up a coherent version, focusing on Blum and Wachter’s conflicts of interest. On January 31, Assistant City Editor Terry Robertson emailed, “I’m aiming to get it in the paper by the end of the week.” A few days later, he backtracked, “Well, I just found out that the story needs to be lawyered. That throws a bit of a wrench into the works. Sorry.”

By mid-February, Robertson had evidently lost interest. Determined to see it in print, Asimov recruited a veteran Chronicle reporter, John Wildermuth, to edit it. He whipped it into shape at 1,600 words. Now it was time for Asimov to call Blum for comment, since he refuses to talk to me.

According to Asimov, Blum was “spitting nails.” He called the allegations of conflicts of interest made by an array of ethics experts “obscene.” He said, “Nobody has ever told me that we had to ask UC for an OK before we invested in something. I wouldn’t be on the Board of Regents if I have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom.” And I was told he threatened the Chronicle with legal action if the story was published.

In late March, the copy was again sent to Cooper. On April 11, she decided it needed yet more attention from the lawyers.

 

COOPER GETS MAD

On April 14, the Daily Nexus, which is the student newspaper at UC Santa Barbara, reported on a group of students who had gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition to the state Attorney General asking for an investigation based upon the conflicts of interest identified in the Spot.us investigation. In the article, UC scholar Gray Brechin opined that the Chronicle was failing to print my story due “to the political influence of Blum and Feinstein.”

Shortly after the story was posted online, Cooper called Daily Nexus Editor Elliot Rosenfeld. She complained that Brechin’s comment about the Chronicle was “libelous.” The student editor removed the quote from the newspaper’s website.

When I asked Cooper about this, she emailed, “As for the Nexus, I think it’s a learning experience for them. As I told the paper’s editor and Dr. Brechin, I have never been intimidated into publishing anything—nor to refrain from publishing an article. And it won’t happen in the future, regardless of whether the pressure comes from a scientist, another journalist, or a senator.”

Then Cooper stopped responding to my emails.

 

THE PLOT THICKENS

On May 6, I received an email from the Bay Citizen’s Stevens. She had been at a dinner party with Brechin. She asked me why the Chronicle story was languishing. She said the Bay Citizen might publish it. I told her I was not ready to go public.

On May 18, I emailed Asimov about the status of the story. She said the lawyer had it.

I called Cooper. She told me, “I would like to get [the story] in for Memorial Day because we need the copy. … I am not responding to emails because I don’t want any of this shit in print. … Dick Blum can go fuck himself! Excuse my language. I don’t know the guy. I am not afraid of him. If he is doing something shady I want to publish that … [but] I am not going to be bullied into not printing it by Dick Blum and I’m not going to be bullied into printing it. … The fact that he’s called the editor and has an attorney in waiting makes us want to do it more. … I absolutely want to run it. I would like to run it next weekend.”

I asked if Blum was threatening the newspaper.

Cooper replied, “Yeah. The only people who know that are me and the executive editor and the managing editor. I don’t think Nanette knows that. So you are now like the fourth person that knows that besides Dick Blum. … People threaten to sue us all the time. But if we are going to mess with, you know, a billionaire, we are going to be a little cautious.”

A few weeks later, on June 2, I asked Asimov if she knew about Blum’s threat. She replied, “Of course, I knew. Heck, Blum told me as well. The presence of Blum’s lawyers won’t influence whether we run the piece, however. But this is getting increasingly ridiculous, and I’ve asked someone to find out the status for us.”

On June 27, Asimov told me that the “final version” of the story would “run over the weekend” and that it had been cut to 1,200 words. It did not run.

On July 6, I asked Asimov what was going on. She replied, “What happened is that the lawyer looked at it, and made some tweaks. Most were minor, but a small number of them struck me as simply wrong—like he didn’t understand the point. So I told Audrey, and its been the big chill ever since. So I don’t currently know what’s happening.”

That same day, July 6, the Chronicle ran a profile of Feinstein praising her as “the most effective politician in California.” Her well-documented conflicts of interest with her husband’s various businesses were not mentioned.

A week later, July 12, the Chronicle printed an op-ed by Blum in which he said online education is the future. He did not mention that Blum Capital has a multi-billion-dollar stake in two of the nation’s largest for-profit education corporations, each with a growing online component. Nor did the oped note that UC had invested $53 million in these companies after Blum joined the investment committee in 2004.

On July 19, Asimov told me, “The story was re-sent to the attorneys last night with the latest edits.” She said that nothing was likely to happened for at least two weeks since people were going on vacation. She said she would “leave [Cooper] a note saying that if the lawyer approves it, you must approve the final version.” And that was the last time I heard from anyone at the Hearst Corporation.

A few days later, Stevens contacted me again. She wanted to write about my story for the Bay Citizen’s section in The Sunday New York Times. Not being gifted with second sight, I did not know if the Chronicle would ever run the story, but they damn sure had let it get rigor mortis. So, I gave Stevens the email trail. I warned her that she might run into a similar problem at the Bay Citizen, which was founded by Wall Street financier Warren Hellman. It turns out that Hellman sits on the Board of Directors of the Berkeley Endowment Management Company, which controls half a billion dollars in UC Berkeley Foundation investments. Public records show that Hellman’s investment bank is partnered with the same two private equity funds that count both UC and Blum Capital as limited partners. And one of the Founding Patrons of Bay Citizen is the Blum Family Foundation. And one of the board members of the nonprofit Bay Citizen is Jeffery Ubben, a former managing partner of Blum Capital. But I digress.

[Editor’s Note: The Bay Citizen’s newsroom is run independently of its board members, and journalists there say none of the funders have influenced the selection or editing of news stories.]

A week later, Stevens informed me that the story was being pushed to the following week. And then she went on a month-long vacation and the story died. Go figure.

But Stevens did alert the Chronicle staff to my complaints, and the fact that I had provided her with emails and documentation to back up my claim that the Chronicle had bowed to Blum’s threat.

On August 8, Asimov emailed a UC instructor, Kathryn Klar, who had inquired about the status of my story. Asimov recounted, “I worked for nearly a year to get Peter Byrne’s—frankly awful—story in good enough shape to run in the Chronicle. It was poorly written and confusing. He will tell you how hard I worked to get that thing ready for publication. … By the end of July, the story was in great shape and the lawyers were taking a final look.

“And then Peter did the unthinkable. He forwarded a year’s worth of my private correspondence to another journalistic organization—not a newspaper—who then contacted me and others at the paper threatening to write a story about how the Chronicle had suppressed Peter’s story. … They behaved like blackmailers. Of course they had no story to write, and they didn’t. Needless to say, Peter’s story will not run in the Chronicle now. But it was his actions, not ours, that led to its death. We, my editors included, liked the story and were pleased that it was finally in great shape. Even the lawyers agreed.

“Its such a shame.”

Editors note: We asked Chronicle Managing Editor Steve Proctor for his response. He told us:

“The decision not to publish the story was made by the paper’s two top editors, me and Ward Bushee. After reviewing Mr. Byrne’s previously published articles and his interactions with the Chronicle, we decided that we were not comfortable publishing his work.

“The story was brought to the Chronicle after having been previously published on a journalism web site. The editors here who worked with Mr. Byrne decided that his reporting would need to be double-checked if the piece were to appear in some form in the Chronicle. This was done intermittently, over a period of time, as there was no urgency to publish given that a version of the story had already appeared.

“We want to be clear on one point. The Chronicle is never intimidated by threats made prior to the publication of a newspaper story — and they are hardly infrequent. We make all of our decisions about publishing stories based on the high standards for journalism that we seek to uphold in the newspaper every day.” Bay Citizen reporter Elizabeth Lesly Stevens told us: “After much reporting we ultimately decided that Peter’s story was a lot less interesting than he thought it was, and wouldn’t make for a very worthwhile column in the NY Times.”

Editors note: This is the final version of the story that was supposed to run in the Chron:

By Peter Byrne

news@sfbg.com

The University of California has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in business deals in which two regents who have helped oversee UC’s investment portfolio also had financial interests, records show.

Since 2003, UC has invested in five private equity deals in which Regent Richard Blum also had investment interests, according to federal, state and university documents. Regent Paul Wachter had a substantial financial interest in one of those deals.

In such cases, Blum and Wachter were in a position to benefit — or lose — from university investments they oversaw. Blum served on the investment committee from 2004 to February 2010. Wachter joined in 2004 and is its current chairman.

Both regents deny any wrongdoing. The university’s chief attorney has examined the investment overlap and concluded they were likely coincidental.

Yet some ethics experts say the overlapping investments create an appearance of conflicted interests. Critics say the deals may violate state and UC ethics guidelines.

Blum, an investment banker and financier who was appointed to the regents in 2002 by then-Gov. Gray Davis, is the husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Wachter is CEO of Main Street Advisors,?a financial management company. He was named to the board by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004.

The regents’ 10-member investment committee sets policy for and oversees the management of UC’s $70.8 billion as of March 2011 portfolio of investments, which includes the retirement, endowment and campus foundation funds. UC’s chief investment officer, Marie Berggren, regularly reports to the committee, explaining where the money is being invested and how well the investments are doing.

The investment committee’s conflict-of-interest policy prohibits committee members from telling the investment officer what specific funds to invest in. But they can, and do, direct her to invest greater or lesser amounts in certain categories of funds.

Committee members must also adhere to conflict-of-interest guidelines established by the state and UC, both of which prohibit officials from influencing or voting on matters in which there is even an appearance of a personal conflict of interest. In particular, UC’s policy says a conflict exists “if it is reasonably foreseeable that the decision will have a material financial effect on one or more of your economic interests.” A material interest is defined as being worth more than $2,000.

DEALS EXAMINED

Blum had investments of more than $1 million in a number of the business partnerships that UC put money into, while Wachter had up to $1 million invested in one of the deals.

UC’s general counsel, Charles Robinson, examined these investments in 2010. Robinson concluded that the investment overlap was probably coincidental, and that neither Blum nor Wachter improperly steered public funds.

“Any overlap is substantially more likely to be the result of independent decisions by like-minded investors than the result of coordination,” Robinson reported.

Blum called the idea that he would coordinate investments and profit from UC’s financial dealings “ridiculous” and even “obscene.”

“Nobody has ever told me that we had to ask the UC for an OK before we invested in something,” Blum told The Chronicle. “I wouldn’t be on the Board of Regents if I have to ask for permission to go to the bathroom.”

Wachter also dismissed the idea that the overlapping investments represent a conflict. “It just doesn’t make sense at all,” Wachter said, adding that he’s surprised that he and Blum had so few overlapping investments over the years, given the extent of their holdings. “The key thing is that you’re not telling each other what to do.”

But ethics experts say conflict of interest laws and regulations do not allow for such overlaps. “The regents’ overlapping investments pose clear conflicts of interest,” said Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “It is really striking that members of the investment committee stood to gain so significantly from co-investing with UC.”

Robert Weissman, president of the government watchdog group Public Citizen, was more direct: “A third-grader can see that what the regents on the investment committee were doing is unethical.”

FINANCIAL DETAILS

Minutes from committee meetings show Blum and Wachter consistently voted to instruct the investment officer to increase the amount of money invested in private equity funds, a sector in which the two regents have substantial financial interests.

More importantly, some of those investments were tied to private equity deals in which Blum and Wachter held financial stakes.

In one example, Blum, Wachter, and UC all invested in private equity funds that partnered to buy the Las Vegas casino corporation Harrah’s Entertainment in 2008.

It worked this way: The regents’ investment committee oversaw an investment of $199 million in four private equity funds that helped finance the $30 billion Harrah’s deal, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and UC financial records.

Blum held “more than $1 million” in one these funds, called TPG Capital V, according to Feinstein’s economic disclosure statement. Wachter owned “up to $1 million” in two of the funds that financed the Harrah’s buyout, according to his financial disclosure statements.

Blum denied any conflict. He said the money resulted from a 2006 merger between Blum’s Newbridge Capital and TPG Capital. Newbridge became TPG Asia, with Blum as its co-chairman.

As a result of the merger, “I wound up having some extremely minor — less than 1 percent — interest in some of (TPG Capital’s) funds,” Blum said, referring to his $1 million-plus asset.

Blum said he did not engineer the arrangement, and is never consulted on matters concerning TPG Capital, which did the deal with Harrah’s.

“You couldn’t pay me to invest in a casino,” he said. Wachter agreed that the Harrah’s case presents no conflict. “With investors, there will always be overlap. The point is, if one of the regents told the UC to invest in a particular fund, manager or company, that would be a different conversation. But that’s what our policy prohibits.”

OTHER DEALS

During his six years on the investment committee, Blum had a financial interest in four other deals in which UC was involved, according to SEC filings and UC records.

They involved Univision and Freescale Semiconductor in 2007, Sungard Data Systems in 2005, and Kinetic Concepts in 2004.

Blum said he had no control over any of the deals involving TPG Capital, but said his firm, Blum Capital Investments, was very involved with Kinetic Concepts.

He scoffed at the idea that he engineered any UC investment to enrich himself. “This is how ridiculous it is,” Blum said. “So someone’s going to whine because of $1 million? And somehow I’m taking advantage of the UC? I probably give away a bigger percentage of my net worth” than many people.

Private equity, in any case, has not been a cash cow for the university. In February, investment officer Berggren reported that the 10-year rate of return on the private equity portion of the UC retirement fund was averaging less than 1 percent annually, far less than the 6.5 percent return of UC’s fixed-income portfolio during the same period. Nanette Asimov contributed to this report.

The Sex Issue 2011

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Well howdy — it’s Folsom Street Fair time again, and that means our annual steamy, dreamy Sex Issue. Check out the contents before, and play wild!

>>PRESENTING THE HOTTEST ASS IN THE BAY

The winner of our Bay Buns 2011 contest

>>BECAUSE PRINCESS SAYS SO

The mastermind behind Kink.com’s “Wired Pussy” and “Public Disgrace” sites finds power in perversion

>>SAN FRANCISCO SMUT MAP

A peep at our fair city’s filthy-gorgeous history

>>“AND THAT’S WHEN I CAME”

A steamy tale of SF sex from Bawdy Storytelling

>>WARM LEATHERETTE

Our nightlife column rounds up some smokin’ hot parties for this weekend

>>HIDING THE CONDOMS

Safeway’s decision to move condoms into locked cabinets worries public health advocates

 


Presenting the Hottest Ass in the Bay

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Hundreds of you voted for almost two dozen Bay Buns 2011 contestants — but there could only be one fine-paired derriere that cracked the competition (and will strut away with a goodie basket from Good Vibrations).

Ladies, gentlemen, and others, a drumroll and cued up copy of “Baby Got Back” for … MIKAELA of the Excelsior. W00T! Thanks to all our wonderful contestants — and get that butt of yours ready for bay Buns 2012!

 

 

 

San Francisco Smut Map

3

culture@sfbg.com

SEX ISSUE 2011 In 1969, San Francisco became the first city in the country to permit the exhibition and sale of hardcore pornography. Although “permit” isn’t exactly right. The city’s vice squad (with the help of Supervisor Dianne Feinstein) fought it every step of the way. But by the time a rag-tag band of hippies with cameras began harnessing the Free Speech movement to challenge obscenity laws, San Francisco had already become, in the words of the New York Times, “a sort of Smut Capital of the United States.”

Earlier this year, director Ben Leon and I produced Smut Capital of America, a documentary short about San Francisco’s flesh-filled reign as the center of U.S. hardcore. (The skin flick industry didn’t move down to San Fernando Valley until the 1980s, when VHS took over and Los Angeles stopped arresting filmmakers.) The film industry itself may have been shaved and plucked, but San Francisco never lost its filthy patina, thank god.

Here are a few of the filthy great places, classic and new, that any self-respecting San Francisco pervert and/or fan might want to map.

1. The Condor Club

560 Broadway

The first topless dance took place in 1964 at the Condor when Carol Doda took to the stage in designer Rudi Gernreich’s revolutionary “monokini.” The bathing suit never really caught on, but topless dancing became an export that would become synonymous with San Francisco.

2. The Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre

895 O’Farrell

The good ol’ boys from Antioch made a fortune with movies like Behind the Green Door, but when obscenity busts began taking their toll, they moved to live shows. The place still give a great lap dance, but the days when you could eat a girl out for a dollar are long gone.

3. The Strand

1127 Market

I once heard it referred to as a stop on the underground gay railroad — and for good reason. While this theater showed big Hollywood movies and noir retrospectives, the balcony was the cruisiest, bleachiest-smelling place in town.

4. The Magazine

920 Larkin

This still-operational vintage magazine shop has never shied away from porn. And since few museums find it palatable to save smut, it’s a living archive of the sexual revolution, balls, and all.

5. The Screening Room

220 Jones

In 1970, the Screening Room became the first theater in America to show hardcore pornography, with a law-skirting documentary about the free-loving Danes called Pornography in Denmark. Director Alex deRenzy set off a cinematic revolution, and earned a profile in Time magazine. Perhaps fittingly, it’s now the Power Exchange sex club.

6. The Roxie and the New Follies

3117 16th Street and 2961 16th Street

Long before it was an indie movie rep house, the Roxie showed soft-and hardcore 16mm loops shot by the Mitchell Brothers, then just out of college. The New Follies, just down the street on then smut-filled 16th Street (it’s now the Victoria), pioneered bottomless dancing, and later, live sex shows.

7. The Sutter Theatre

369 Sutter

Arlene Elster and Lowell Pickett plotted the International Erotic Film Festival at their theater off Union Square in 1970, when the area was still known as the downtown Tenderloin. The films themselves screened at the prestigious Presidio Theater in the Marina with a red carpet covered by KPIX. Even smut-opponent Dianne Feinstin showed up to rant against the duo’s “very depraved wares.”

8. Le Salon

1118 Polk Street.

“There out to be a plaque on the building,” says Bay Area Reporter porn critic John Karr, who went to this bookstore to cruise and flip through dirty magazines. Store owner Roland Boudreaux eventually opened a non-smut operation next door with a connecting doorway so that customers could leave and enter without attracting stares from high-society queens.

9. The Lusty Lady

1033 Kearny

The original Lusty Lady showed 16mm films, but by the early ’80s this North Beach smut center had live dancers as well. In 1997, the dancers organized an Exotic Dancers Union to make it the first unionized sex club business in the United States. In 2003, they bought the business, making it a worker-owned cooperative.

10. The Gordon Getty Mansion

2050 Jackson

During the ’80s and ’90s, this Pacific Heights mansion was the home of smut merchant and Falcon Studios honcho Chuck Holmes, whose name now graces the LGBT community center on Market Street. In the afternoons, he shot gay porn in the basement. In the evenings, he hosted spectacular galas to raise money for visiting politicians.

11. The Armory

1800 Mission Street

Does anyone not realize that this former munitions warehouse now houses an arsenal of dildo-equipped robots and that the National Guard training hall is used to film “Wired Pussy” episodes? Thanks, Kink.com for making sure San Francisco is still known as the Smut Capital of America.

On Guard!

1

news@sfbg.com

 

CENTRAL SUBTERFUGE

While supporters of the controversial Central Subway project — from Mayor Ed Lee and his allies in Chinatown to almost the entire Board of Supervisors — dismiss the growing chorus of critics as everything from ill-informed to racist, they refuse to address the biggest concerns about the project.

In a nutshell, the main concerns center on serious design flaws (such as the lack of direct connections to either Muni or BART), the city’s responsibility for any cost overruns on this complex $1.6 billion project, its estimated $15.2 million increase to Muni’s already strained annual operating budget (a figure used by the Federal Transportation Administration, well over the local estimate of $1.7 million), and the city’s unwillingness to implement its own plans for improving north-south transit service on congested Stockton Street rather than relying solely on such an expensive option for serving Chinatown that doesn’t start until 2019.

Judge Quentin Kopp, a longtime former legislator, called this summer’s grand jury report, “Central Subway: Too Much Money for Too Little Benefit,” the best he’s ever read and one that should be heeded. He recently wrote a letter to top state officials urging them to reconsider the $488 million in state funding pledged to the project. As we reported last week, mayoral candidate Dennis Herrera is also challenging a project that he supported before its most recent cost overruns and design changes.

But supporters of the project pushed back hard on Sept. 14, using taunts and emotional rhetoric that avoided addressing the core criticisms. “Beneath the unfounded criticism about costs is actually a disagreement over values. The grand jury report relied upon by critics makes a only brief and superficial criticism about costs,” Norman Fong and Mike Casey wrote in an op-ed in last week’s Guardian.

Actually, the 56-page grand jury report goes into great detail about why it believes cost overruns are likely, citing the myriad risks from tunneling and SFMTA’s administrative shortcomings and history of mismanagement, including on this project’s less-complicated first phase, the T-Third line, which was 22 percent over budget and a year and half late in completion. Even with the contingencies built into the Central Subway budget, the report notes that a similar overrun would increase the local share of this project from $124 million to more than $150 million.

Mayor Lee purportedly addressed criticism of the project during the Question Time session in the Sept. 14 Board of Supervisors meeting, prompted by a loaded question from Sup. Sean Elsbernd offering Lee the “opportunity to move beyond the clichés and one-liners of political campaigns.”

But Lee’s answer was classically political, touting the estimated 30,000 jobs it would create, praising those who have pushed this project since the 1980s, offering optimistic ridership estimates (that exceed current FTA figures by about 9,000 daily riders), and ignoring concerns about whether the city can cover the ever-increasing capital and operating costs.

“Now is the time to support the Central Subway,” Lee said, flashing his trademark mustachioed grin.

We called the normally responsive Elsbernd, who prides himself on his fiscal responsibility, twice, to ask about financial concerns surrounding the project and he didn’t call back. During their mayoral endorsement interviews with the Guardian last week, we also asked Sups. John Avalos and David Chiu to address how they think the city will be able to afford this project, and neither had good answers about the most substantive issues (listen for yourself to the audio recordings on our Politics blog).

Once Congress gives final approval to $966 million in federal funding for this project sometime in the next couple months, the city will be formally committed to the Central Subway and all its costs. It’s too bad that, even during election season, all its supporters have to offer to address valid concerns are “clichés and one-liners.”(Steven T. Jones)

 

BLACK AGENDA

Mayoral candidates faced tougher questions than usual at a Sept. 15 forum hosted by the Harvey Matthews Bayview Hunters Point Democratic Club. Whereas debates hosted in the Castro and Mission Bay, for instance, featured questions on how candidates planned to clean up city streets, what they thought about AT&T’s plan to place utility boxes on city sidewalks, or how they’d promote a more business-friendly environment, residents brought a thornier set of concerns to the Bayview Opera House.

One question pointed to an alarming statistic based on U.S. Census data and cited by racial justice advocates, showing that residents of the predominantly African American Bayview Hunters Point have a life expectancy that’s 14 years lower, on average, than that of residents of the more well-to-do Russian Hill.

Someone else asked about improving mental health services for lower-income community members struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). High unemployment figured in as a key concern. And one member of the audience wanted to know how candidates planned to “improve the behavior of the police,” alluding to the mid-July officer-involved shooting that left 19-year-old Seattle resident Kenneth Harding dead, triggering community outrage.

Mayor Ed Lee attended the beginning of the forum but left early to attend an anniversary celebration for the Bayview Hunters Point Foundation; other participants included Terry Joan Baum, Jeff Adachi, Bevan Dufty, Dennis Herrera, David Chiu, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Joanna Rees.

Answers to Bayview residents’ sweeping concerns varied, yet many acknowledged that the southeastern neighborhood had been neglected and ill-served by city government for years.

“There is no economic justice here in Bayview Hunters Point,” Adachi said. “There never has been. That’s the reality.” He pointed to his record in the Pubic Defender’s Office on aggressively targeting police misconduct, and played up his pension reform measure, Prop. D, as a vehicle for freeing up public resources for critical services.

Dufty, who has repeatedly challenged mayoral contenders to incorporate a “black agenda” into their platforms, spoke of his vision for a mayor’s office with greater African American representation, and emphasized his commitment to improving contracting opportunities for minority-owned businesses.

Herrera, meanwhile, was singled out and asked to explain his support for gang injunctions, an issue that has drawn the ire of civil liberties groups. “I only support gang injunctions as a last resort,” he responded. “We shouldn’t have to use them. But … people should be able to walk around without being caught in a web of gang violence. I put additional restrictions on myself to go above and beyond what the law requires, to make sure that I am balancing safe streets with protecting civil liberties.”

Herrera asserted that gang violence had been reduced by 60 percent in areas where he’d imposed the controversial bans on contact between targeted individuals, and noted that the majority of those he’d sought injunctions against in Oakdale weren’t San Francisco residents.

Baum brought questions about a lack of services back to the overarching issue of the widening income and wealth gaps. “Right now, the money is being sucked upward as we speak,” she said. “We have to bring that money back down.”

She closed with her signature phrase: “Tax the rich. Duuuuh.” (Rebecca Bowe)

 

DUFTY REMEMBERS

The selection of Ed Lee as interim (or not-so-interim) mayor of San Francisco was one of those moments that left just about everyone dazed — how did a guy who wasn’t even in town, who had shown no interest in the job, who had never held elective office, suddenly wind up in Room 200?

Well, former Sup. Bevan Dufty, who was going to nominate Sheriff Mike Hennessey and switched to providing the crucial sixth vote for Lee at the last minute, told us the story during his mayoral endorsement interview last week.

Remember: Lee, as recently as a few days earlier, had told people he didn’t want to be mayor. “An hour before the meeting, Gavin (Newsom) called Michela (Alioto-Pier) and me into his office and said Ed Lee had changed his mind,” Dufty told us. He walked out of the Mayor’s Office uncommitted, he said, and even Newsom wasn’t sure where Dufty would go.

After two rounds of voting, with Dufty abstaining, there were five votes for Lee. So Dufty asked for a recess and went back to talk to Newsom — where he was told that the mayor thought the reason the progressives were supporting Hennessey was that the sheriff had agreed to get rid of about 20 mayoral staffers — including Chief of Staff Steve Kawa, “who had engineered Ed Lee running.”

So Kawa, with Newsom’s help, preserved his job and power base. “It’s all turnabout,” Dufty said. “I figure Mike Hennessey’s had a couple of beers and a couple of good times thinking about my vote. But that’s politics.” (Tim Redmond)

 

ALMOST FREE?

Friends and supporters of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal were kept in a state of agonizing suspense over whether the two men, both 29, would be released from the Iranian prison where they’ve been held for more than two years following an ill-fated hiking trip in Iraqi Kurdistan.

On Sept. 13, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated publicly that Bauer and Fattal could be freed “in a couple of days.” The announcement brought hope for family and friends who, just weeks earlier, had absorbed the news that the men were sentenced to eight years in prison after an Iranian court found them guilty of committing espionage, a charge that the hikers, the United States government, religious leaders, and human rights advocates have characterized as completely baseless.

Reports followed that the Iranian judiciary would commute the hikers’ sentences and release them in exchange for bail payments totaling $1 million. But by Sept. 16, when supporters gathered in San Francisco in hopes that of an imminent announcement, they were instead greeted with new delays.

The constantly shifting accounts hinted at internal strife within the Iranian government, and contributed to the sense that Bauer and Fattal were trapped as pawns in a power struggle. By Sept. 19, their Iranian lawyer remained in limbo, awaiting the signature of a judge who was scheduled to return from vacation Sept. 20.

“Shane and Josh’s freedom means more to us than anything and it’s a huge relief to read that they are going to be released,” the hikers’ families said in a statement Sept. 13. “We’re grateful to everyone who has supported us and looking forward to our reunion with Shane and Josh. We hope to say more when they are finally back in our arms.” (Rebecca Bowe)

Hiding the condoms

3

news@sfbg.com

“All Condoms primary location at Customer Service” reads a small sign surrounded by empty shelves that once held condoms, pregnancy tests, and other important sexual health products at the Safeway on Potrero Avenue.

Because of concerns about theft, the condoms now sit among the Nicorette and razors in a row of glass cases near Customer Service, amid the chaos of hurried shoppers headed to and fro. Although Safeway’s recent condom lock-up may have reduced theft, it has also reduced accessibility, and may have deterred customers from buying a product crucial for the prevention of pregnancy and STD’s.

The increased security measures are not contained to the Potrero store, or even San Francisco’s Safeways. “There are a number of products (Oil of Olay for example) that we’ve had to secure under lock and key because of theft,” Susan M. Houghton, Safeway’s Northern California spokesperson tells the Guardian. “It varies by store and city, but yes, condoms were recently added — due to theft.”

Houghton would not go into any further detail about when or why the condoms were locked, but the move has raised concerns by public health advocates.

“We fully understand the position that Safeway is in, but we really would advocate for people having pregnancy tests, condoms — anything that really helps people manage their lives better — to be much more accessible,” Adrienne Verrilli, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood in San Francisco tells the Guardian. “Accessibility is often key, especially for young people.”

Kyriell Noon, executive director of San Francisco’s STOP AIDS project, says he believes locked cases could deter people from buying condoms, “especially for young people who are shy or could be embarrassed about asking for help…Condoms should be as easy for people to access as any other item available for purchase on the market. When there are barriers between people and condoms, I think many people will shrug and give up. But if they’re easy to access there’s no excuse to not use them.”

STOP AIDS knows the importance of condoms in the prevention of HIV, and distributes free condoms to 90 locations throughout San Francisco.

Safeway representatives and staff members refused to say which Safeways have moved condoms behind glass, but a visit to four San Francisco Safeways found condoms locked in cases at each of them, some even locked behind the Customer Service counter.

At the Safeway at Church and Market streets, we found that there is often a line at Customer Service, which customers must now wait in to purchase condoms. The process of acquiring condoms requires requesting the case be unlocked, making a selection under the watchful eye of an employee, and having the employee remove it from the case and walk it back to Customer Service where it can be purchased. Ten minutes had passed before I was leaving with my $8.99 12-pack of Trojan ENZ.

This challenge could affect teenagers more than adults due to embarrassment, hassle, or the now public process of choosing and purchasing condoms at Safeway. “It puts young people in a very awkward situation,” says Leah LaCroix, president of the San Francisco Youth Commission. LaCroix says she does not believe condoms should be locked up, even if it means a company loses profits.

“I think public safety is more important than that,” she tells the Guardian. LaCroix and the rest of the Youth Commission are currently urging the San Francisco Unified School District, “to reevaluate and come up with a new curriculum for health education,” she said. “I’m sure safe sex will be a component of their new curriculum.”

A 2009 Center for Disease Control survey found that 43.5 percent of high school students did not use a condom during sex, and 85.6 percent did not use birth control pills the last time they had sex, making sex education and birth control availability increasingly vital.

“I’m not sure you can criticize Safeway for protecting their merchandise,” says Beth Brown, manager of San Francisco’s New Generation Health Center. “I think there’s a larger issue of a lack of resources and lack of resourcefulness.”

Brown says she believes the Department of Public Health is responsible for providing these resources. One resource that is available is a service called Family PACT, which provides reproductive health services to low-income residents.

“The state of California pays for young people who need confidential services…and you can get all the birth control you want,” she tells the Guardian. The New Generation Health Center enrolls teenagers and young adults in the service, and gives away free condoms to non-enrolled teenagers as well.

“The state of California is actually a very good place to be if you’re young and sexually active,” says Brown, “because they will pay for it.”

“What’s interesting about that,” Verrilli said of Safeway’s condom lockup, “is that it’s kind of going backwards to where we used to be as opposed to moving forward to where we are.”

Today, with condoms available to purchase for any age, public health clinics in most cities, and sexual education available on the Internet, making birth control readily and publicly accessible seems to be the next logical step. Besides preventing pregnancy, condoms are crucial in preventing the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“I think we should all be in the practice of increasing access to condoms rather than decreasing it,” Noon said. “I don’t know that Safeway’s decision alone would make a huge contribution to the spread of HIV, but they could be setting a precedent that other stores that sell condoms might follow. If it were the case that Walgreen’s and Rite-aid, etcetera, also began to follow this practice, I think we would have a problem.”

SFBG’S CONDOM BUYER’S GUIDE FOR THE YOUNG AND SHY

A wide variety of unlocked condoms are sold at:

Planned Parenthood — 1650 Valencia St. off Mission

Price: 30 cents each, come individually and in strips of 8 or 10.

Plus: offers STD testing and other health services

Walgreens — 200 West Portal at 15th

Price: 12 count $14 and up

Walgreens — 3201 Divisadero at Lombard

Price: 12 count $8.99 and up

Plus: open 24 hours a day

Walgreens — 3400 Cesar Chavez at Mission

Price: 12 count $13.99 and up

Walgreens — 1496 Market at Van Ness

Price: 12 count $15.99 and up

CVS/Pharmacy — 731 Market at 3rd

Price: 12 count $12.99 and up

CVS/Pharmacy — 2025 Van Ness at Jackson

Price: 12 count $12.99 and up

Plus: open until midnight every day

Free condoms are available at:

New Generation Health Center — 625 Potrero at 18th

Plus: offers bags of 20 at a time

STOP AIDS — 2128 15th at Market

Plus: also distributes free condoms to restaurants and stores in the city including:

Marlena’s — 488 Hayes at Octavia

SOMA Health Center — 551 Minna at 6th

Crossroads — 1519 Haight at Ashbury

LBGT Center — 1800 Market at Octavia

Books Inc. — 2275 Market at Noe

(Oona Robertson)

Consequences of inaction

8

news@sfbg.com

The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance, although it sounds bright and cheery, remains shrouded in a cloud of inaction. Meant to increase transparency in city government, it hasn’t emerged from the bureaucratic fog since its establishment in 1994. Cases wait years to be heard and even blatant violations go unpunished, due to infighting and power disputes between the commissions that are supposed to enforce government compliance.

The Sunshine Ordinance outlines citizen’s rights to request document and information. Citizens can take their complaints about request denials to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, an 11-member committee appointed by the Board of Supervisors to ensure government compliance. If the task force decides a violation has occurred the case is handed over to the Ethics Commission, a five-member appointed board that will supposedly enforce the rulings with fines or ordering documents to be made public.

George Wooding, reporter for the Westside Observer and president of the West of Twin Peaks Central Council, is the complainant in one of the task force’s most recent cases. This spring Wooding requested emails from the Recreation and Park Department multiple times but was told the documents did not exist. What RPD didn’t know was that Wooding had the emails all along.

The task force unanimously found RPD guilty of withholding emails. This is the third major sunshine violation by RPD in three years. Even more surprising, not one RPD employee has been fined, suspended, or faced any kind of punishment or corrective action.

The episode is a case study in the total eclipse of sunshine enforcement in the city, and how one embattled department — the RPD, which has come under heavy scrutiny for efforts to monetize park resources (see “Parks Inc.”, July 12) — used that dysfunction to stifle dissent.

 

DILUTING DISSENT

George Wooding v. RPD began when Wooding was asked to be a panelist at a Commonwealth Club event on May 11. The event, titled “Golden Gate Park Under Siege,” was to be a discussion about possible development projects in the park. Other panelists were representatives of environmental and anti-development groups who claimed they were not given time to voice their concerns in Board of Supervisors meetings, and wanted a forum to do so.

Wooding says that the Commonwealth Club was bombarded with phone calls and emails weeks before the discussion.

“They were saying our panel was one-sided, which is really unusual, and the Commonwealth Club told us they were getting a lot of heat for such a little panel discussion,” Wooding said. “It was not going to be a big deal, in all honesty.”

The emails that Wooding had and the department denied include correspondence from Sarah Ballard, RPD’s director of policy and public affairs, to Kerry Curtis, co-chair of the Commonwealth Club Environment & Natural Resources Forum, indicating she had phoned the club as well and asked that the discussion be canceled due to its “deeply biased panel that has no interest in discussing facts.”

There are also emails between Susan Hirsch, director of the City Fields Foundation, a private group that has been installing artificial turf in public parks, from her business email address to the panel moderator Jim Chappell’s private email, urging him to reconsider the event.

“You and I discussed this project years ago; the private sector is contributing far more than $20 million to provide safe, accessibly, and yes, environmentally sound fields for kids all across San Francisco to use. We have a unique private/public partnership with Rec and Park; it’s too bad the focus is on something negative, rather than the positive impact,” Hirsch wrote.

Mark Buell, president of the Recreation and Park Commission, also emailed Greg Dalton, Commonwealth Club’s COO, from his private email address: “I find the title inflammatory, the participants biased, and the fact that no one from the Rec and Park Department invited hard to understand. As president of the Commission I would like to urge the club to both alter the title of the event to ‘issues facing the park’ and have the club ask a representative of the department to be on the panel.”

Shortly thereafter, Buell was added to the panel and the event was renamed “Golden Gate Park Under Siege?”

Buell says the situation has been blown out of proportion. “I got on the panel because I’ve been active with the Commonwealth Club for years and all of a sudden I read a very slanted title about something tantamount to the ruination of Golden Gate Park, and a panel of people who are all critics,” Buell told us.

Wooding says the panel went smoothly, but he was unsettled by the last minute changes. He asked around for any information about what happened and got the emails through a knowledgeable source close to the RPD.

“[RPD] has pissed off a lot of people because they came in with a hammer when they didn’t need a sledge hammer. One of the people they pissed off was really upset and ended up giving me the correspondence,” Wooding told us.

As a journalist, Wooding said, “I was thinking, ‘this is a great story but wait, I can’t use any of this information,’ so I thought about how I could get the information legitimately?”

Wooding immediately emailed Olivia Gong, a RPD secretary, making clear that he was requesting the emails in accordance with the Sunshine Ordinance. Gong replied that the department did not have any documents matching the request.

“Imagine how amazed I was when they claimed they didn’t exist,” Wooding said.

After a second request turned up nothing, Wooding knew they were hiding the emails. He then asked Gong how she had determined the emails did not exist. Gong forwarded emails she had sent to department members who replied they did not have responsive documents.

Wooding then filed a complaint with the task force, which voted unanimously that RPD was in the wrong. Not only did it claim the emails did not exist, but when it became clear that they did, the department said that members deleted the emails because some were sent on private accounts and did not directly pertain to RPD affairs.

“I just delete everything,” Buell says. “It’s not that I did anything, it’s just that I didn’t know the rules that you’re supposed to keep everything.”

Task Force Chair Hope Johnson says she was shocked by this argument. The California Public Records Act, which is more lenient than the Sunshine Ordinance, clearly lists emails as a form of government document that must be handed over on request. The Sunshine Ordinance covers emails as well, and all officials who serve on city boards were required to undergo sunshine training last year, outlining what public documents are and noting that it’s illegal under state law to destroy them.

“Just switching over to another email address lends itself to the idea that this is something they knew was underhanded and would not be received positively by the public,” Johnson said.

She says this is becoming a problem throughout city government.

“There’s not a lot of specificity about keeping emails. They need a retention policy,” Johnson says. “Obviously I think that they prefer it to be as vague as possible.”

 

POSSIBLE PUNISHMENT?

Although the task force found RDP in violation, punishment is up to the Ethics Commission, a separate entity at City Hall.

Enter bureaucratic gloom and doom.

Since 1993 the task force has given the Ethics Commission 19 sunshine violation cases. Only one has even been heard. The other 18 were dismissed or are still “pending investigation.” Government officials are therefore under no serious threat if they disobey the law.

Richard Knee, former chair of the task force, says there is obvious animosity between the task force and commission staff. Rather than enforcing punishment, the Ethic Commission staff claim that cases can be dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, or require additional investigation, which stalls the process indefinitely.

“I don’t think there’s any confusion, I think it’s merely resistance,” Knee said. “We are not asking the Ethics Commission to re-adjudicate something we have already adjudicated. When we refer a matter to the Ethics Commission we are asking them to tack some kind of enforcement action on a violation we have already found exists.”

In the one case Ethics did hear, it turned the punishment decision over to the mayor as the “appointing officer,” who did nothing. It has, therefore, never enforced a penalty on any government official that the task force found guilty.

A report released in August by the Civil Grand Jury, entitled “San Francisco’s Ethics Commission: The Sleeping Watchdog,” criticizes the body’s record of inaction on both sunshine and campaign finance complaints.

“Because of the Ethics Commission’s lack of enforcement, no city employee has been disciplined for failing to adhere to the Sunshine Ordinance. The Commission has allowed some city officials to ignore the rulings of the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force,” the report says.

Johnson says that since the report came out, her correspondence with the Ethics Commission has shifted slightly.

“They used to send us letters back saying they dismissed it, but recently we’ve sent over two cases and they agreed that there had been a violation,” Johnson said. “But they said they wouldn’t be able to do enforcements of any kind.”

She says that the Sunshine Ordinance won’t be taken seriously until the very people it is meant to monitor begin to enforce its stipulations.

“It’s difficult with the Ethics Commission because they keep all of their investigations secret,” Johnson says. “There is no external oversight, it is all the politicians, all of the people who appointed them, they are the only people who monitor what they’re doing.”

In response to the report, Johnson hopes the Ethics Commission will be urged to actually hear sunshine cases, and Wooding’s could be one of the first.

“The George Wooding case is a good example of how the Sunshine Ordinance can reveal oppression of a group of people who wanted to come together and have a constructive analysis,” Johnson said. “That should be something that’s allowed, and here’s the very entity that they want to have an analysis and discussion about shutting them down. And here are some documents that prove it.”

Wooding’s case will be heard once more by the task force on Sept. 27. It will almost certainly be sent to the Ethics Commission, but Wooding may be waiting awhile for any resolution.

“It’s probably going to take forever,” Wooding says. “Either I’ll just end up being another file in a cabinet somewhere, or this may even become an example, if it moves through, of how things should be done. There might be a lot more life in this than anyone ever imagined.”