garbage Archives — Page 9 of 11 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Sailing into the plastic vortex

August 12, 2009

rebeccab@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY If a plastic soft drink bottle got tossed into the San Francisco Bay and swept out under the Golden Gate, it might end up in the massive junkyard-at-sea that swirls through a current known as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

Nicknamed the Plastic Vortex, this massive collection of marine debris circulating in a remote area northeast of Hawaii is a sort of watery graveyard for all manner of human refuse. The ocean churns the waste, disintegrating the debris into bits and turning it into something more like plastic soup than a buoyant mass. Ocean experts say it’s a very big problem — the gyre is about twice the size of Texas and taking in more garbage all the time — and is only getting bigger.

This gigantic manmade mess — which exists in international waters not regulated by any particular governmental body — presents a slew of difficult questions. What long-term effects is it having on the marine ecosystem? Is there any way to clean it up? Are minuscule plastic particles and their hitchhiker toxins circulating back to people’s dinner plates via bioaccumulation?

These are just a few of the mysteries that a crew of researchers hope to unravel during an ocean voyage called Project Kaisei. The Kaisei (Japanese for “ocean planet”) is a 151-foot brigantine that sailed out of the San Francisco Bay Aug. 4 for a month-long venture into the plastic vortex.

The tall ship, the second of two research vessels commissioned for Project Kaisei, is operated by the Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito-based nonprofit. Its counterpart, the New Horizon, is operated by the Scripps Institute for Oceanography and departed several days earlier from Southern California.

Project Kaisei spokesperson Ryan Yerkey describes the mission as a multipronged effort. Scientists’ first goal is to get a “snapshot” of the effects the garbage is having on the marine ecosystem. “These materials, they never really dissolve,” Yerkey explains. “They don’t just become part of the ocean. They break down at different degrees. Things like a plastic bag — it breaks down in the heat, and the sun and the water. And a lot of this stuff is so minute that it’s getting ingested by fish.”

Project Kaisei researchers will also test various technologies that might help them chart a course for cleanup. One idea — using reprocessing technology that has never been tested at sea — is to convert the marine debris from trash to fuel. “We’re testing the various reclamation and harvesting technologies,” Yerkey explains. “We’d love to be able to get that technology onboard our future vessels out there so they would be able to fuel future missions with the very trash they’re collecting.” The third goal will be to educate the public about preventive actions like recycling, since an estimated 80 percent of marine debris originates on land.

Algalita, a Long Beach-based marine research foundation, has conducted eight voyages in a 50-foot catamaran to study the Pacific Gyre. “Last year, in February, we were doing a night trawl — that’s when a lot of the marine life come up to feed,” explains Marieta Francis, executive director of Algalita. “We caught hundreds of these small, six-inch fish, so we thought this was the perfect opportunity to study them. And one of those little fish had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.”

Over the course of a decade, Algalita has taken hundreds of water samples from the gyre — and not a single one was plastic-free. There are believed to be two giant garbage patches in the Pacific, but the scope of the problem is only beginning to be understood, Francis says. “Now we feel, along with other researchers and even [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] that there are not two distinct patches, and that in between the two areas where it seems to be accumulating, there is sort of a superhighway that’s also collecting the debris.”

The Project Kaisei team appears to be embracing what its Web site calls “the biggest clean up Earth has ever witnessed.”

Why the rich attack Daly’s voting record on housing

July 31, 2009

Text by Sarah Phelan
Illustration by Jose Luis Pavon

Pavon80%.jpg

Actually, you’ll never see the rich attack Daly’s actual voting record on housing, which you can find here.

That’s because facts don’t concern San Francisco’s well-heeled political elite, who remind me of a high school clique that knows how to demean folks they don’t like. I always wondered what those folks would do when they grow up. Apparently, some of them run for higher office.

“It’s garbage,” is how cartoonist Jose Luis Pavon, describes C.M. Nevius’ and Sup. Michela Alioto’s Pier’s most recent attempt to blame San Francisco’s housing crisis on Daly.

Pavon, who grew up in San Francisco, says his grandparents came here in the 1940s and spent their whole lives working, yet none of their grand kids can afford to hang on.

“And I’m scrambling,” said Pavon, who fears that left to millionaires like Mayor Newsom and Alioto-Pier, San Francisco is destined to become another Venice.

‘Venice was really scary,” said Pavon, who visited the fabled city on a recent trip to Italy. “There is virtually no working class at all. The workers all come in on buses, then go back to their ghettos and suburbs at night. Venice is only for the elite rich.”

And just to be clear, this post is about Daly’s voting record on housing, not his family’s decision to move to Fairfield, which, me thinks, is a whole other story.

Best of the Bay 2009: Classics

July 28, 2009

>>CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LIST ON ONE PAGE
>>BEST OF THE BAY HOME

Organic love: green speed dating

July 13, 2009

By Juliette Tang

It’s an age old story. You meet someone intriguing. The two of you go out, sparks fly, chemistry is so hot and heavy that you end up at your date’s place before the night ends, despite your better judgment. And, once you get there, you realize you were fooled all along. There is not a compact fluorescent light bulb to be seen in the whole apartment, the garbage bags are decidedly not biodegradable, and – horror upon horror – the dish detergent is from Safeway.

If images of landfills, melting ice caps, and being alone for the rest of your life keep you awake with nightmares, maybe it’s time to try Green Speed Dating, a “carbon neutral love” event coming to Temple (540 Howard St) next Monday, July 20. According to the Web site:

Green Speed Dating (or “carbon neutral love”) brings together single people, living in the same area, who care about the environment, believe in sustainability, and would like to meet others who feel the same way.

If you replace “Green Speed Dating” in the above sentence with “San Francisco,” you get quite an accurate description of most people in our city.

The zone

June 10, 2009

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I believe it’s called "garbage time." Can’t speak for soccer, but in American football it’s when the team in the lead runs the ball up the middle, again and again. The game is decided. It’s just a matter of letting the clock wind down.

That’s where we were at. In this case, my team, the good guys, had a big lead. The other team, the bad guys, had just scored but it was way too little, way too late, and we were going to win the championship. In 40 years of playing team sports, three different ones, three cities on two coasts and a cornfield, in two pretty different bodies, it would be my first championship. Well, second. My first since I was 11.

I’m 46. Just to give you some idea how great everyone else on my team is. To win it all, with me on your side, takes 35 years!

My team is an old team, the oldest in our league. We don’t have a lot of subs, none for the women, and it was our third game of the day. The other team had played three games too. You have to, in a tournament, if you keep winning. So everyone on the field was in a similar boat. Outcome decided. Garbage time. Tick. Tick.

I thought: if ever I was going to score a goal, now would be the time, while everyone else was sleeping. And as our goalie returned the ball to midfield, I sneaked myself from my usual position (fullback), right up there too, along the left sideline. I leaned in a slightly droolish way that let our forwards know exactly what I was thinking.

One tapped the ball to the other, and there was my pass, the pass, the one you wait for all your life, perfect and perfectly unexpected by everyone on the field but me. Nobody was there. The ball rolled like a lullaby on a green sea before me. Nobody, nothing, between me and it, and the net. Even the goalie seemed gone, as I hoofed and huffed and entered into "the zone." You know that zone where athletes go, where they are the ball, where the roar of the crowd, the elements, everything else just peels away and you can pretty much do whatever in the world you want?

This wasn’t that zone. It was a different, dreamier one, where everything peels away, including the ball and the goal. I realized in that moment what an intensely, insanely sociable creature I have become. I felt lonely. Actually lonely. Where was everyone? It just seemed all wrong all of a sudden.

What I did … I stopped running and stood there, and the ball just dribbled slowly away from me and over the end line. Then I turned to face my incredulous teammates and the whistle blew. Game over. Winners!

I didn’t know, though.

I touched hands with the other team and said, "Good game, good game," and they said so too. I posed for the team picture. I took off my uniform and put on my jeans and my new championship T-shirt. I checked my cell phone to see if President Obama was trying to call or anything. (He wasn’t.) And then I got in my car and drove over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Brewing Company, because that’s where the team was going to meet for pitchers of not-cold-enough beer and overdone, overpriced hamburgers.

It was three in the afternoon, and I had just played three soccer games on basically a bowl of oatmeal and some cherries. So you can imagine my hunger. Are you imagining? The reverberating weirdness of that breakaway loneliness moment, with all its psychological and philosophical implications — on an empty stomach!

And the guitar duo out on the patio, where we sat, played "Amy," and "Sweet Caroline," and worse.

Boasts the menu: "The Marin County Health Dept. is of the opinion that any meat cooked below medium-well (157 degrees) is undercooked. We proudly prepare your burger to any temperature you request."

"Rare," I said. (Are you still imagining my hunger? My excitement?)

It was one of the deadest burgers I ever ate. It was over well-done, gray, not a drop of moisture to it, save ketchup. Yet I was too insanely hungry, or nice, or sociable, to send it back.

Where would I be without this column?

MARIN BREWING COMPANY

Sun.–Thu. 11:30 a.m.–midnight;

Fri.–Sat. 11:30 a.m.–1 a.m.

1809 Larkspur Landing Circle, Larkspur

(415) 461-4677

Beer & wine

MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Beyond weird

May 12, 2009

Tobacco doesn’t like the Beatles, or the Who. And Pink Floyd is "okay." This makes sense for the man whose prolific mind fuels Black Moth Super Rainbow. The Pittsburgh analog synth sorcerers specialize in prismatic albums that swing seamlessly between sunlit repose and hallucinatory freak-outs. They use an array of vintage beat makers, keyboards, and guitars. Those who pin BMSR’s mercurial sound with the "psychedelia" label aren’t peering deep enough into the looking glass.

"Maybe subconsciously all that garbage is in there and I don’t realize it," Tobacco consents. "I definitely don’t try to make it sound like Pink Floyd or the Beatles, but maybe that stuff’s just stuck in my head and I just can’t get it out."

He’s happier to cite the Beastie Boys’ 1992 mutative alt-rap disc Check Your Head (Capitol) as an influence, one that’s especially evident on his 2008 solo effort Fucked Up Friends (Anticon). He also credits one of the Beasties’ hip-hop cohorts: "I hated music when I was a kid. The first song I ever liked was "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie."

From Biz Markie to prog rock, nothing about BMSR’s sound is straightforward. The group cultivates a mystique that blends the anachronistic with the futuristic. Some surrealistic soundscapes are steeped in bongwater, while others teeter on the glittery edge of acid-trip oblivion. The resulting deconstructed melodies and beats elude most genre epithets. With Eating Us (Graveface) about to drop on May 26, Tobacco, né Tom Fec, is hoping that people will finally stop calling BMSR weird.

"I’ve never thought an album like [2007’s] Dandelion Gum (Graveface) was weird, but a lot of people did, even people who liked it," says Tobacco. Not so with Eating Us: "Everyone’s either understanding what I was going for or they’re just repeating what we’re telling them,"

Tobacco wrote and recorded Eating Us on his own, before enlisting the help of producer David Fridmann, who he says "just sort of pull(s) the gunk out of" BMSR’s sound. In the process, the wonderland of sonic bits and pieces found on albums such as 2003’s Falling Through A Field (Graveface) gives way to an expansive landscape of heady incantations for the electronic age.

If Dandelion Gum saw Black Moth spreading its wings for flight, Eating Us is the sound of the band going airborne. Drums replace beat machines. Layered dream-dipped hums and purrs play hand-in-hand the spooky minor-key trills that are one of the band’s signatures. The melodies are more cogent but no less rainbow-hued. Tobacco’s Vocoder-drenched voice is inhumanly-human on tracks such as the regal "Iron Lemonade."

For bands that continue to put out albums the traditional way, these are trying times. "When I was one of those young whippersnappers in high school, I used to read magazines and that’s how I found out about stuff," Tobacco says when asked about the shifting frameworks for music and music writing. "Now it’s all blogging, [and] no one would have heard of us without it.

"What sucks is that our album leaked a month ago and everyone started reviewing it," he continues. "I’ve been reading things by people who weren’t even done listening to it — they were reviewing as they were listening. That just changes perceptions. It’s not about the album anymore, it’s about the hype that leads up it. When I was a kid, it was all about finding the album when it came out — that’s when its life began. Now, once the album comes out, it’s dead. Who knows, May 26 may be the last time you hear about [Eating Us]."

That isn’t likely. BMSR’s albums are like musical toys, catering to nostalgists who still seek out music in its physical form. Their 2008 EP Drippers (Graveface) was packaged with five scratch-and-sniff scents, and Eating Us includes a 16-page booklet that can be refolded to create different images. Oh, and the cover art has hair.

The best bands constantly change, metamorphosing against sameness, labels, and the death of ideas. BMSR continues to evolve from the dimmest corners of the mind into transcendent swaths of weirdo-pop sensibility. It’s almost like the Beatles, if they got behind synthesizers, went underground, and never emerged from 1967. Almost.

Angels

April 22, 2009

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Not even duck soup can save me now. The children I put to sleep … they want stories.

“I had a black eye,” I began, “a swollen, purple nose, and tears streaming down my face.” I was lying on my back on the floor in the dark, next to their bunk beds.

“No no no,” the voice on top said. “Make one up this time.”

“When I was a little girl,” I began, as I always do when I’m making one up.

The voice of the bottom bunk interrupted. “In this one make the fox eat the chicken.”

“No no no,” said the voice on top. “Make one up where the chicken eats the fox.” He laughed his angelically evil laugh.

“Yeah!” she said, laughing hers. “Yeah, where — ”

“This story doesn’t have any chickens in it,” I said.

The silence was spectacular, my audience mine. I promised the usual: that if neither one said another single word, from that moment on, I would stay right there in the room with them when the story was over, until everyone was asleep. I said that in any case I would see them in the morning, and if anyone had any questions or comments we would discuss them over pancakes. “But if you want me to stay in the room right now,” I said, “you have to put your heads on your pillows, close your eyes, and just listen.”

This they did, the sweeties, but Top Bunk, being a little too eager to please, overshot the pillow and bounced his head off the headboard, necessitating an ice pack. When I came back from the kitchen, Bottom Bunk was cold and wanted me to snuggle with her.

The story I told, finally, from the floor, once everyone was properly iced and snuggled and re-sworn to silence, started with “When I was a little girl, between your age and yours,” and ended last night at the International Terminal of the San Francisco Airport.

In between there was plenty of time for two little children to fall asleep, wake up, go to school, grow into adults, and surrender to the cold, stark reality of make-believe, or — who knows — maybe even experience, just once, the upending shock of true, fiery, electric, and impossible love, the kind where whole worlds, not just bodies, collide.

Kids aren’t angels. They’re kids. They kept their heads on their pillows, their eyes presumably closed, and bravely just breathed. Then afterward I could hear their wheels spinning, the little coughs and sniffs, restless repositioning of arms and legs.

Their questions went without saying, but I knew what they would be, and had marked them all, along the way, for later, for morning, for pancakes …

What does pneumonia feel like? What’s an exchange student? Oxygen tent? How can duck soup taste so dark and good and still be medicine? And why couldn’t you finish it? Can you go to jail for stealing a roll of toilet paper from a ladies room? What does Fung Lum mean? Can people really fly higher than airplanes? If you liked the same stuff and never wanted to stop playing together, why did you stop? How come we wish on stars but not the moon?

Adults aren’t angels. The dishes needed done, the counters wiped, and the kitchen floor swept. It was garbage night. I hadn’t slept since Sunday, bathed since Monday, or changed my clothes since Tuesday. I’d cancelled meetings, missed deadlines, left work early, and concocted a really very unforgivable dinner that no one, not even parents, could quite fathom. That was Wednesday. On Thursday they ordered pizza.

And I lay on the kids’ room floor long after they’d both spun down into differently delicious dreams, forgetting every single thing except and until pancakes. Awake as always, as low, loved, and lonely as the kid-beaten, bent-tailed, poopy-butt cat curled up next to me, I lay with my black eye and almost-broken nose, tears brining my crows feet and basting my ears, thinking soft fingers on faces and wondering how in the world I would answer the one about the moon.

Fung Lum Restaurant

SFO International Terminal, SF

(650) 821-8282

Beer & wine

AE/D/MC/V

L.E. Leone’s new book is Big Bend (Sparkle Street Books), a collection of short fiction.

Everyday wisdom

March 3, 2009

Taking her cue from the oft-cited Socratic proscription that "the unexamined life is not worth living," Winnipeg-born director Astra Taylor returns from the success of her 2005 documentary Žižek! to offer a Lyceum of pontificating sophists. Examined Life finds the 20-something Taylor, a New School graduate turned New Waver, engaging in itinerant tête-à-têtes with some of the most venerated — and occasionally vilified — theorists of the last 40 years.

Interviewees, who appear in roughly 10-minute blocks, include civil rights advocate and cultural historian Cornell West, queer theorist and Gender Trouble provocateur Judith Butler, and Slovene Lacanian Slavoj Zizek, the so-called Elvis of cultural theory. Channeling the philosophic tradition of flânerie, Taylor purposely extracts her subjects from the academic setting in which they are usually immured and films them in mid-stride — at the street corner, boutique and even the garbage dump. The final product has a jet-setting, gonzo aesthetic, as the documentarian shuttles from London to New York to San Francisco to interrogate her subjects.

Butler, Zizek, and Michael Hardt (Duke professor and coauthor with Antonio Negri of several notable Autonomist tomes) are the most fascinating to inspect onscreen, likely because of the contentious aura that surrounds their collective work. Butler’s ambuutf8g meditation on the politics of disability has an introspective subtlety when paired with Zizek’s screed on the ecology movement, delivered amid piles of rubbish — while Hardt’s discussion of revolution is all the more odd set on Central Park’s limpid Turtle Pond. Throughout, Taylor is determined that motility (walking, rowing, driving) is a dominant leitmotif, whether it be languid and reflexive or brusque and pedantic. While the conversations self-consciously aim toward jargon-free transparency and inclusivity, the film’s attempt at hipster populism will probably fall on deaf ears outside of the university circuit.

Examined Life’s choice of celebrity theorists will, of course, provoke questions as to why certain icons were included and others were left out. So, obnoxious as it may sound, where was Paul Virilio or Giorgio Agamben or Michael Taussig? A sequel may be in order.

EXAMINED LIFE opens Fri/6 at the Sundance Kabuki.

Vanishing points

March 3, 2009

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

ESSAY/REVIEW There is a wry but hilarious scene near the very end of Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 912 pages; $30), in which a French literary critic finds a German writer, Archimboldi, lodging at what the critic calls "a home for vanished writers." After checking into a room at the large estate, the elderly vanished writer wanders the grounds, meeting with the other vanished authors, residents whom Archimboldi finds friendly but increasingly eccentric. Gradually it dawns on Archimboldi that all is not as it seems. Walking back to the entrance gate, he sees, without surprise, a sign announcing that the estate is the "Mercier Clinic and Rest Home — Neurological Center." The home for vanished writers is an insane asylum.

As we enter the Obama era, with all its promise of "change," I’ve found it impossible to read 2666 without being haunted by the memory of those who vanished into the lunatic asylum of the long George W. Bush years — not just the nameless and unlucky left to rot in the Bush administration’s secret torture cells throughout the world, but also those who disappeared right here at home. For instance, a guy I worked with a couple of years ago. One day he was training me on the job, and a week or so later he was in a federal prison, labeled a "terrorist" — which in his case meant that he edited a Web site called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty.

There were other ghosts, those who vanished after refusing to speak to grand juries. They were rumored to have gone over the border, or back to the land, or who knows where, their very names now superstitiously verboten to speak out loud, lest we bring the heat down on ourselves. Now that Obama is here and everybody is eager for "change," who will remember the once-bright hopes and dreams of the generation that beat the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the dawn of this decade — the hopes that would later be chased down and gassed and beaten by riot police under cover of media blackout in the streets of Miami, St. Paul, or countless other cities? Of course, there were the suicides and overdoses, and other kinds of disappearances, different but related, too: the abandoned novels, or the guitars taken to the pawnshop. Three people in my community jumped off bridges. Only one survived. The human toll of the Bush years in my life has been enormous.

Watching the celebrations in the streets of the Mission District on election night in November, I could tell all of this was soon to be trivia. I saw a virtually all-white crowd of completely wasted people take over the intersection at 19th and Valencia, shouting "Obama!" and dancing in the street. In one way, this scene was touching: the spontaneous gathering was a product of the true feelings of human hope that people have for a better world. Yet the moment already had the scripted feel of something self-conscious or mediated, like the Pepsi ad campaign it would soon become. I had a sinking realization: those of us who have spent eight years battling the post-9/11 mantra of Everything Is Different Now were now going to soon be up against a new era of, well, Everything Is Different Now.

The narratives we tell ourselves about our country are important. Just when a Truth and Reconciliation Committee is most needed to write a detailed narrative of the Bush era’s torture, spying, illegal war, and swindling, I could already see the opportunity for that kind of change slipping away into the blackout amnesia aftermaths of the street parties taking place all across the nation. The election of a president of the United States from among the ranks of the nation’s most oppressed minorities has offered the country a new triumphant storyline. We have symbolically redeemed our sins against civilian casualties and third world workers, without too much painful self-examination. I could see that Obama’s brand of change was really so seductive because it offered a chance to change the subject.

Like Ronald Reagan, elected while the U.S. was mired in recession and post-Vietnam soul-searching, Barack Obama developed campaign narratives that made the U.S. feel good about itself again. Obama guessed correctly that national morale is low partially because we don’t want to deal with the nameless guilt we feel from the atrocities Bush and company committed in our names. Accordingly, he stated during his campaign that he would not pursue criminal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nor has Obama questioned the preposterous idea that we can win either a War on Terror or the war in Afghanistan. If you think about it, "Yes We Can" — his campaign’s appeal to good old American can-do spirit — isn’t far off in substance from Bush’s faith-based convictions about U.S. power. Both Bush’s crusade to make democracy flower in the desert of Iraq and Obama’s notion that the auto industry could save itself — and the planet! — with electric cars are fantasies that appeal to our sense of pride about being the richest and most powerful.

When a country that is owned by China and is getting its ass kicked simultaneously by ragged guerilla armies in two of the most impoverished and backward parts of the world keeps finding new ways to tell itself that it’s the richest and most powerful country, it is in deep trouble.

When political leaders and journalists seek to generate false narratives for our consumption and comfort, the difficult task of remembering the truth falls to literature.

Roberto Bolaño completed 2666 in 2003, shortly before he died, too poor to receive a liver transplant, at the age of 50. Born in Chile, Bolaño counted himself a member of "the generation who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell," and was himself something of a vanished writer. Briefly jailed during the 1973 coup in which Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the popularly elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, Bolaño wandered in exile from Mexico City to Spain, working variously as a janitor and a dishwasher, entering obscure literary competitions advertised on the backs of magazines, while his generation was consumed by Pinochet’s secret prisons and torture cells.

Fittingly, disappearance is perhaps the main action of characters in Bolaño’s works, from the vanished fascist poet and skywriter in 1996’s Distant Star (published in English by New Directions in 2004) to the entire romantic generation of doomed Mexican poets and radicals followed across the span of decades and continents to its vanishing point in a desert of crushed hopes in 1998’s The Savage Detectives (published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007). In 2666, the terminally ill Bolaño wrote as if in an urgent race against the moment of his own departure, unwilling to leave anything out, as if he wanted to save an entire lost underworld from banishment. Taking on every genre from detective noir to the war novel to romantic comedy in an exhilarating, nearly 1,000-page race to the finish, the book is Bolaño’s epic of the disappeared.

The periphery of 2666 teems with Bolaño’s archetypal lost and doomed, a host of minor characters including a former Black Panther leader turned barbecue cook, various Russian writers purged by Stalin during World War II, a Spanish poet living out his days in an asylum, and an acclaimed British painter who cuts off his own hand. There are the usual obscure literary critics and lost novelists, and we even briefly meet an elderly African American man who calls himself "the last Communist in Brooklyn." This last communist could speak for all of Bolaño’s lost and departed when he explains why he presses on: "Someone has to keep the cell alive."

The book’s action, however, centers upon the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in the fictional Mexican border city of Santa Teresa during the late 1990s, events based on real-life unsolved killings in Juarez, Mexico. The majority of the women murdered in Juarez were workers at the new factories along the border with the United States, the unregulated maquiladoras that have sprung up in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the book’s longest section, "The Part about the Crimes," we learn the names, one by one, of 111 of these murdered women. In terse, police-blotter language, Bolaño describes the crime scenes — the girls’ clothing, their disappearances, and the police investigators’ attempts to construct the last hours of their lives. Their bodies are discovered slashed, stabbed, bound, gagged, and always raped, in ditches, landfills, alleys, or along the side of the highway. Seen from these vantage points, Bolaño’s Santa Teresa is a disjointed place, seemingly patched together from snatches of barely remembered nightmares. Shantytowns and illegal toxic dumps spring up everywhere in "the shadow of the horizon of the maquiladoras." It is a city that is "endless," "growing by the second," a new type of urban zone in a Latin America that has become a laboratory for free trade policy experiments. It is a city made unmappable by globalization.

Bolaño clearly intends the reader to see the disappearances as the inevitable byproduct of the cheapness of life in the maquiladora economy, yet the killings also eerily evoke the disappearances in fascist 1970s Chile and Argentina. These murders are an open secret, virtually ignored by the media. Residents almost superstitiously refer to them only as "the crimes." The Santa Teresa police respond to the killings with a staggering indifference and ineptitude that might suggest complicity. The maquiladoras are ominous, hulking windowless buildings often in the center of town, not unlike the torture cells once hidden in plain sight in Buenos Aires (Bolaño even names one of them EMSA, an obvious play on Argentina’s most notorious concentration camp, ESMA), and many of the women’s bodies are discovered in an illegal garbage dump called El Chile. 2666 suggests that the unrestrained capitalism of the free-trade era is the ideological descendent of the 1970s South America state repression from which Bolaño fled, and that the killings in Santa Teresa are in part a recreation of the Pinochet-era disappearances.

While the scenes Bolaño describes are grisly, his language is clinical, the cold camera eye of the lone detective gathering evidence. The collective impact of story after story starts to accrue into its own profoundly moral force. By giving name and face to hundreds of disappeared women, Bolaño suggests that literature is a political response, a way to make wrongs right by bearing witness. While it would certainly be a mistake to read 2666 strictly as a political tract, Bolaño explicitly ties writing to justice in a rambling digression about the African slave trade. A Mexican investigator of the killings points out that it was not recorded into history if a slave ship’s human cargo perished on the way to Virginia, but that it would be huge news in colonial America if there was even a single killing in white society: "What happened to (the whites) was legible, you could say. It could be written." For Bolaño, the search for justice is partially about who can be seen in print.

At a literary conference in Seville six months before his death, Bolaño joked that his literary stock might rise posthumously. Sure enough, Bolaño the man has, ironically, vanished after his untimely death, lost in the fog of fame in the English-speaking world. Mainstream critics call his work "labyrinthine" — perhaps English-language critics’ stock adjective for Latin American writers — in a rush to "discover" a new Borges. Bolaño was a high-school dropout who bragged of discovering literature by shoplifting books. He claimed to be a former heroin addict who hung out with the FMLN in El Salvador. His genius deserves comparison to the great Borges, but it’s safe to say that, unlike Borges, a literary lapdog of Argentina’s generals, Bolaño would never have addressed the military leaders of the fascist Argentine coup as "gentlemen." Bolaño wrote without a net, over the abyss of atrocity into which his generation vanished. He did so in an effort to make a literature that recorded for all time where the bodies were buried. As a female reporter in 2666 says, "No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them."

The dangers of believing false narratives should be evident by now. In the wake of our current financial collapse, it is now widely understood that the U.S.’s sense of itself as the richest and most powerful nation in the world has been kept artificially afloat in the recent past by the import of cheap goods and credit from China. These cheap goods are manufactured under labor and environmental conditions much like those of Bolaño’s maquiladoras — conditions we tell ourselves we would never allow here at home, yet which are vital to our economic survival. Dealings with China have, instead, spread repressive tactics in reverse back to corporations from the United States, such as when Google memorably agreed to remove all reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from its Google China site.

There is a crucial difference between hope and self-delusion. In its dogged search for uncomfortable truth, 2666 creates a hard-won hope that is different from the way in which that word manifests on the campaign trail. It respects the hope that truth matters, that staring it down can provide the shock of self-awareness that makes real change possible.

In the meantime, there is the hope of literature itself. In 2666, Bolaño devotes a scene to one of his disappeared characters, a Spanish poet who lives out his days in an insane asylum in the countryside. The poet’s doctor — who in a classically deadpan Bolaño twist tells us he is also the poet’s biographer — reflects on the asylum the poet has vanished into. "Someday we will all finally leave (the asylum) and this noble institution will stand abandoned," he says. "But in the meantime, it is my duty to collect information, dates, names. To confirm stories." *

Erick Lyle is the author of On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City, out now on Soft Skull Press.

Ask a Porn Star: Privacy issues, small penises

February 9, 2009

In which super sexy porn people answer questions — each week — from Bay Area locals. View the last installment here.
Mediated by Justin Juul

Fielding your questions this month is local celebrity, Lorelei Lee. Lee specializes in fetish porn (water torture, whips-n-chains, electrocution, etc.) and has a blossoming side-career as a writer. Check out some of her movies/pics here and then stop into The Makeout Room on Valentines Day (02/14/09) to hear her read at Writers With Drinks.

Michelle M: Are you ever concerned about your privacy?

Lorelei Lee: I’m not exactly sure what aspect of my privacy this question is meant to refer to. I’m not that famous. I mean, no one (to my knowledge) is searching through my garbage or anything, although I do occasionally get recognized in the grocery store or at a bar or walking down the street.

Sometimes people will come up to me and say hello or stutter something endearingly unintelligible. Often, people will say, “you look so familiar,” but they won’t be able to remember why they recognize me. They’ll ask me if I’m “on television” and I’ll say, “Sort of.” Recently I was leaving a BART station and a boy riding by on his skateboard actually fell down on the sidewalk and shouted, “Holy shit!” I was startled and looked at him, and he said, “Uh… you’ve been in movies, haven’t you?” I couldn’t help but laugh. I shook his hand and said, “nice to meet you,” and he kind of stumbled off in the other direction.

Transportation bonanza

January 20, 2009

› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The first year of President Barack Obama’s term could see the biggest federal investment in transportation projects since the creation of the interstate highway system, so there’s now a mad scramble to determine where — both geographically and in terms of transportation modes — that money will go.

Transportation activists were already geared up for this October’s omnibus transportation bill reauthorization, the first serious chance in four years to alter federal policies and spending priorities. But now that Congress is considering economic stimulus bills as large as $825 billion — including $71 billion to $85 billion in transportation projects — it’s looking like a potentially even more bountiful year.

Many Bay Area groups and agencies have forwarded their wish lists to state and federal policymakers and transportation officials, from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s $500 million in capital projects to the $1.6 billion "Bay Area Conference of Mayors Transit Infrastructure Wish List," which claims it would create 14,197 jobs.

San Francisco has the biggest chunk of that latter proposal at $713.9 million, including such big ticket items as $200 million for the so-called train box in the new Transbay Terminal project (see "Breaking ground," 12/10/08), $275 million for projects associated with Muni’s Transit Effectiveness Project, and $100 million for the Doyle Drive rebuild.

Randy Rentschler, public affairs directors for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, told us that for too long, the federal government has simply deferred transportation decisions to the states.

"Just having a block grant program to states does not assert a federal interest in transportation," he said.

Yet Rentschler acknowledges the difficulty of creating federal transportation mandates. Unlike programs such as carbon capture, which affect large factories, or fuel standards, which affect automakers, making big changes to transportation policy potentially impacts every citizen.

"When you talk about transportation, what you’re really asking for is the participation of 300 million Americans," he said.

Tom Radulovich, director of Livable City and an elected BART board member, is worried about the political dynamics of the stimulus package.

"Stimulus is sort of garbage in, garbage out," Radulovich said, noting that the federal imperative for "shovel-ready projects" that can break ground in a matter of days or weeks means that road projects that have been lined up waiting for money will get priority over more complicated, visionary efforts to create a green infrastructure and better alternatives to the automobile.

Radulovich and other activists have been focused on the quadrennial transportation bill, and on persuading Congress to shift priorities that reflect the current 80 percent of federal transportation dollars that go to automobile projects.

"The danger is Congress will shoot its wad now on all these highway projects and then say they’re out of money," Radulovich said.

Rod Diridon, executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute and a board member on both the American Public Transit Association and California High-Speed Rail Authority, agrees that a shift in federal priorities is overdue.

"You see a lot more money in the highway and bridge projects than you see for transit," he told the Guardian.

Yet Diridon expressed more hope than Radulovich that Democrats in Washington, DC, particularly Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, are taking the right steps to promote the transformation we need. He said the stimulus bill is a good example.

"Speaker Pelosi has been a real crusader for doing this the right way," Diridon said, noting that she is refusing to allow members to attach earmarks for favored projects; instead she is basing the list of recipients on Department of Transportation criteria.

Quentin Kopp, chair of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, is trying to get more money for the $33 billion first phase of the high-speed rail project that voters approved a $10 billion down payment for in November.

"You don’t want to expect anything. You want to be pleasantly surprised," Kopp said. "I’m not counting on the money, but we will seek several billion dollars on the theory that we can get contracts with people who are threatened or have encountered employment setbacks."

This land was your land

January 7, 2009

Anyone paying any kind of attention has a deep-gut feeling that things aren’t going well for Earth. No matter how fancy or technologically advanced we get, everything humans make and break is fashioned from the resources at hand — water, air, petroleum, minerals, soil and its nutrients, and plants and trees and their fruit. Your MacBook may look space age, but it didn’t fall from the sky. "Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess," Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, and Richard W. Hazlett write in The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery (Oxford University Press, 619 pages, $35)

"Mining is the prow of America’s consumer-propelled ship. Its whole purpose is to dig up resources for transformation to consumer goods," the authors go on to note, with the kicker that such resources are nonrenewable. "A three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom house of about 2,000 square feet, with a two-car garage, central air conditioning, and a fireplace, contains more than a quarter-million pounds of mined metals and other minerals."

The American West at Risk explains the exact effects mining has on Western ecosystems — in other words, the other living things trying to survive alongside humans. Beginning with forests, the authors outline the history of logging and how the right to do it on public lands was weasled from a weak Environmental Protection Agency made even weaker over the last eight years. All professional geologists, the three authors draw upon science in their argument for preservation.

An EPA library in condensed form, The American West at Risk presents a coherent survey of forestry, agriculture, water use, outdoor recreation, road building, military operations, garbage disposal, and nuclear power. "Western US public lands, about 47 percent of the region, are this nation’s patrimony — the bulk of its remaining natural capital," the authors observe. In each of the book’s 13 chapters, they study a single major resource and its uses. The chapters are tidy and stand on their own, but read together, they reveal an abuse of public lands and resources for the benefit of a very few. They also reveal how government science has been warped to perpetuate myths — for example, the idea that grazing on rangelands doesn’t harm the soil, or that military testing shouldn’t have bothersome effects on downwind populations.

The conclusions reached by Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett aren’t all doom and gloom — solutions are included — but amid climate change, the authors deserve great credit for not mincing words. The American West at Risk is being marketed as a textbook, and although schools are one ideal realm for its ideas, they aren’t the only one. This book appeals to anyone with an interest in environmental issues, and is essential bedside reading for any environmentalist or activist. It should be read by all Westerners — and by anyone who cares about this great, vast, once bountiful planet, now on the brink of death.

HOWARD G. WILSHIRE, JANE E. NIELSON, AND RICHARD W. HAZLETT read from The American West at Risk. Thurs/8, 7 p.m. at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, SF. (415) 776-1111, www.losingthewest.com

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s interview with the authors here

Hardly art, hardly garbage: Fall Out Boy at Great American Music Hall

December 23, 2008

Fall Out Boy sml 3.jpg

By Michael Harkin

“Why’d they have to do the concert on this day, when they knew it’d be rainin’?” You posed a good question, Mr. Passerby. I arrived at Great American Music Hall at 11:45 a.m. on this damp, overcast Sunday morning, Dec. 22, and 150 people were already lined up around the corner from the club. Mostly teenage girls around, but lots of parents toted umbrellas and blankets – what good sports! – knowing full well that they’d be out there another seven hours with their kids before doors.

My neighbors in line had variously traveled from Stockton, Mountain View, and San Jose, willing to pay far more than the $20 door price to see Fall Out Boy that night. Their health ‘neath those Decaydance hoodies wasn’t quite as important as the close proximity the venue would afford them.

Fall Out Boy sml 1.jpg

I can’t readily provide a sufficient rationale for standing out in the rain this long, especially when the band in question is the embodiment of commercial rock’s absurdity – they headlined the Honda Civic Tour last year, for heaven’s sake – and regularly employ such overwrought, cumbersome song titles as “I’m Like a Lawyer with the Way I’m Always Trying to Get You Off (Me and You).” That said, I like ’em anyway – hard to say why. And this beats paying 60 bucks to see them with some terrible bands at the HP Pavilion next summer, right?

Armed love

November 25, 2008

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW The struggle of young, white activists aspiring to the authenticity, confrontational stance, and street credibility of groups like the Black Panthers has generated some of the most enduring myths and storylines of the 1960s. Among these ’60s groups, perhaps the least documented is New York City’s mythical Motherfuckers, the "street gang with an analysis." Former Motherfucker and current Berkeley activist Osha Neumann’s colorful but uneven memoir Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (Seven Stories Press, 240 pages, $16.95) is the first book-length treatment of the so-called "group with the unspeakable name."

Much like the Diggers (members of the San Francisco Mime Troup who left the stage in 1966 to act out revolutionary change in the streets), the Motherfuckers got their start in art. In January 1967, Neumann attended a meeting for "Angry Arts Week," which called for Lower East Side artists to make politically engaged work against the war in Vietnam. There, he met anarchist painter Ben Morea. Morea and his art group Black Mask had been responsible for a series of actions that brought the heavy street vibe of the Black Panthers to the art world, including an announced "shut down" of the Museum of Modern Art that ended with riot cops ringing the museum. From Angry Arts Week evolved a new group with Morea and Neumann at its core that took its name from a poem by Leroi Jones.

A product of the tenements and rat-infested streets around Tompkins Square Park, the Motherfuckers roamed the Lower East Side in leather jackets, carrying knives and handing out manifestoes. Their political identity, worldview, and brutal tactics were all neatly encapsulated by their first action in January 1968. During a garbage strike in the Lower East Side, they gathered rotten trash from the streets and took it uptown to dump on the steps of Lincoln Center, where they handed out flyers that read, "We propose a cultural exchange: garbage for garbage." Similarly to the Diggers out west, UAW/MF operated a Free Store, and held regular free community feasts for hippies and dropouts. But the Motherfuckers also taught free karate classes; eventually, they stockpiled guns. As Neumann puts it today, "We didn’t fuck around."

Preaching "flower power but with thorns," the group’s politics of escalation anticipated today’s Black Bloc. At the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, while Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies were linking arms and chanting to "levitate the Pentagon," Morea and company tore down a chain-link fence, battled with federal marshalls, and fought their way inside. Although Neumann now mostly dismisses the Motherfuckers’ tactics as macho and ineffective, he skillfully evokes the paranoid, volatile time and place in which they made total sense. Unfortunately for the reader, the group disbands midway through the book, and the back half is devoted to deadly dull soul-searching about the meaning of the ’60s.

Assessing the Motherfuckers’ legacy, Neumann writes, "It is easy to dismiss (their) politics as nothing more than childish tantrums and to profess that a baleful acceptance of the status quo is more ‘mature.’ It is more difficult to disentangle, delicately, as one would a bird caught in a net, the genuinely radical and uncompromising elements in this politics from those which are self-defeating." Though Neumann never satisfyingly solves this challenge for readers or himself, perhaps that’s the point. The group that started out as artists ultimately ended where they began, leaving behind a myth with an irreducible riddle at its core that is perhaps best considered as art. *

F-ing hippies

November 11, 2008

› le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS My friend Hoohoohaha has a son, a daughter, an ex, a small dog, and a hippie. She also has a wood pile, and has recently developed an allergy to fireplaces, poor girl, so I picked up a pizza after work and went over to console, catch up, and steal her wood pile.

So you know, in my first week of owning my first-ever brand new car pickup truck, the subcompact Honda Fit, I hauled: a wood pile, a Dumpster full of kindling, a new bed, a beautiful table and two chairs, a goth sympathizer, and a dump run’s worth of garbage.

Hoohoohaha’s son makes magazines out of magazines, and they are roughly the size of a postage stamp and entirely devoted to the topic of butter. At this rate of brilliance, I project, he will win a Pulitzer before he goes to high school.

The daughter scares me. She’s three.

The dog, a yapper, doesn’t scare me one bit, but wouldn’t leave me alone, either.

"It’s just plain pizza, pup," I tried to explain. "There isn’t even any meat on it. Now get outta here." I’m not a dog person, but I recognize that people like them every bit as much, if not more, than I like my cat. So I resisted the temptation to kick or even tease Hoohoohaha’s stupid new one.

Her hippie pretty much stays in the garage. She’d been talking about him for months and months. At first I suggested that she set traps, but it soon became apparent that Hoohoo actually wanted him there. In fact, she mentioned over pizza that he was moving on, or out, or re-garaging, or whatever it is that hippies do. The implication was that she would be looking for a new one, and the significant look, I gather, was because I live in hippieland and might know somebody. But I didn’t.

I have cats and rats and chickens and bugs. The hippies leave me alone. Except on Fridays, when I go to my tiny town’s tiny little farmers market, and then they try and sell me cucumbers. Maybe it’s the way I dress, or smell … something makes me exude meat-eaterliness. I was checking out these heirloom tomatoes at one booth and the woman hippieing it said, and I quote: "They taste like bacon."

I looked at her. I was holding a tomato and, still looking at her, I brought it slowly to my nose. It smelled like a tomato. "They taste like bacon?" I said.

"Bacon," she said. She was beautiful. "Yep."

"You realize you’re talking to a serious bacon eater," I said. "This is no small claim." I was thinking, I’m going to have to rethink my unreasonable prejudice against hippies. Just because I kind of am one, that’s no reason to hate a whole class of people. Maybe some hippies appreciate life’s more sacred institutions, such as bacon, every bit as much as the rest of us do. Maybe they not only love bacon, but they know how to grow tomatoes to taste like bacon. If so, I want a hippie in my garage too!

"Do you eat bacon?" I said. I don’t have a garage, but I was thinking maybe she could move into my storage shed, or chicken coop.

She said she didn’t, but used to, and now, with her amazing new bacony tomato variety, she could still enjoy a BLT with only the L and the T on it.

This is going to get my head blown off some day in an old Clint Eastwood movie, I know, but I can’t help it. I am one of those people who just has to know. So I bought a lot of tomatoes from this beautiful vegetarian hippie chick, and I left them on my counter for a couple days, like she said, and then ate them and they didn’t taste anything at all like bacon.

Fucking hippies. I’m setting traps in my chicken coop and storage shed, and it’s obtuse, so I’ll tell you: the moral of this seemingly silly story is that if you voted Yes on Proposition 8 here in California, you are, whether you know it yet or not, a homo.

———-

My new favorite restaurant is Gioia Pizzeria for giving me an alternative to what I usually tell transplanted New Yorkers who ask my advice. Now I can choose between "give up" and "Gioia." Super thin, super saucy, and very very similar to actual New York style pizza. Check it out.

GIOIA PIZZERIA

1586 Hopkins, Berk.

(510) 528-4692

Mon.–Sat., 11 a.m.–8 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Land of the free, home of the brave

October 14, 2008

By Cheryl Eddy

> cheryl@sfbg.com

Things I learned while screening a double-wide stack of DocFest discs: there’s a perilously thin line between superfan and super-stalker. Bacon and Miracle Whip wrapped in a tortilla makes a pretty tasty snack. It’s possible to be pro-bird, but not anti-cat. When uttered in the context of The Price is Right, the words "a new car" and "come on down" battle for the title of three greatest in the English language. And there are two passionate schools of thought that divide the Bigfoot-is-real community: flesh-and-blood vs. supernatural.

America may be super-fucked in many ways, but we’ll never be short on weirdos, nor will documentary filmmakers ever tire of recording their antics. DocFest’s 2008 slate is roughly three-fourths devoted to the United States of Oddballs. And why not? Seriously, it’s fascinating stuff. One of the best films is by Swiss filmmaker David Thayer, who travels across the Northwest in search of men who’ve devoted their lives, or at least a good chunk of hobby time, to studying the region’s most elusive life form. Bigfoot: A Beast on the Run is as deadpan as anything in the Werner Herzog canon; it never once mocks its subjects, even when talk strays from giant footprints and muffled audio recordings to men in black and photographs of the creature in "interdimensional orb form."

A different type of hunt is the focus of Andy Beversdorf’s Here, Kitty Kitty (2007), filmed in the trenches of Wisconsin, circa 2005, amid the great should-feral-cats-be-declared-"non-protected" debate. In other words, should you be able to shoot that stray cat that’s been yowling around your garbage cans? In this corner: the slightly befuddled academic who published a study blaming free-ranging felines for the state’s declining songbird population. In the other: kitty-rights activists. Cute, furry peril is also a theme of Bunnyland (2007), in which filmmaker Brett Hanover trails Pigeon Forge, Tenn. resident Johnny Tesar, a.k.a. "Johnny Rock," a singular character who implausibly finds Native American artifacts every time he looks at the ground — and was suspected of slaughtering a golf course’s 73 cotton-tailed mascots, among other misdeeds.

Another strange pocket o’ Americana surfaces in Elvis in East Peoria (2007), which is kind of about Jerry, an unambitious Elvis impersonator, but is also about the platonic yet curiously close relationship he has with his manager, Donna, who truly believes Jerry "oozes Elvis." (In case you’re wondering, this is where I learned about the magic of bacon plus Miracle Whip plus tortillas.) Crave more creepy fandom? Sean Donnelly’s I Think We’re Alone Now, about a pair of obsessed Tiffany fans, is among the more unsettling films I’ve ever seen. Despite a slight whiff of exploitation — one of the subjects has Asperger syndrome, the other is an alcoholic, and both are on disability — the film is a jaw-dropper, filled with trainwreck moments and revelations. Like, did you know Tiffany can time travel and communicate with aliens? More important, does she know?

Lest you think this entire festival focuses only on backwoods crazies, let me assure you that Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, an insider’s look at New York’s storied Chelsea Hotel, presents urban eccentrics galore — plus footage of the burning Twin Towers as shot from the hotel, and much lamenting about how the building’s recent change in ownership has affected its longtime residents. But not every DocFest pick has a dark flipside: Jeruschka White’s Come on Down! The Road to the Price is Right is a joyful tribute to the game show, with most former contestants admitting that their time onstage with Bob Barker ranks among the best in their lives — no matter how embarrassing the Showcase Showdown outcome, or how tacky the consolation prize.

THE SEVENTH SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL runs Oct. 17–Nov. 6 at the Roxie, 3117 16th St, SF and the Shattuck, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. For tickets (most shows $10.50) and more information, visit www.sfindie.com>.

Elsie update

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September 23, 2008
0

Robert Reed, Public Relations Manager for the Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Company emailed me this week, in response to my coverage of Elsie and her missing stuff.

“We share your concerns (posted on the SFBG blog last Friday) about Elsie losing her belongings and confirmed that we did not take her items,” Reed wrote, after questions were raised as to who removed her worldly possessions from a street corner.

Reed further explained that, “Garbage and recycling collectors employed by Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Company do NOT pick up uncontainerized items unless specifically instructed by the Department of Public Works, which oversees abandoned waste, and only then in the afternoons an on rare occasions. The incident in question reportedly took place in the morning near a vacant commercial building. We empty garbage and recycling containers at occupied buildings.”

Reed also confirmed that his company received a call about Elsie’s missing stuff from local resident Paul Skilbeck.

“Our route supervisor investigated the issue and verified we did not touch anyone’s personal items,” Reed wrote. ” Our supervisor then called Mr. Skilbeck and let him know that we looked into the issue thoroughly and we confirmed we did not take Elsie’s belongings. ”

Thanks for the update, Robert. Here’s still hoping that someone will locate Elsie and her things.

ps. This just in from Elsie’s neighbor, Paul SkilbecK:

“Elsie has reappeared one block away, on Van Ness/Washington…., but it is not good news. She has not eaten for days, she has not changed her clothes and smells, her ankles are swollen, which she says happens when she gets upset. And she is still refusing assistance. Recently she removed some rings from her fingers, and says she will give these away. It doesn’t look as though she was able to overcome this setback.”

—

Daddy’s girl

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September 17, 2008
0

› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS My dad was here, and, like a lot of daughters, I tried to impress him. Like a lot of fathers, he worries about me, his far out (and up and away) California girl. I just wanted to show him that, look, I’m fine. I’m doing well. No need to worry. All quiet on the western front.

I moved all my garbage from the front seat to the back of my crumbling, windshield-cracked, transmissionally-challenged vehicle, and went to get him at the airport, calling several times on my cell phone to let him know that, essentially, I had a cell phone. Finally.

I also have an iPod Touch, so before I left I tickled up directions to the airport, even though I knew how to get there, and I wedged this into my ashtray to resemble, as closely as possible, a GPS device.

On our way away from the airport, windows rolled down against the 100-plus degree heat, I made sure to mention quite casually that, although my 22-year-old, three-cylinder pickup truck gets better mileage than his Prius, I am saving money to buy a new car.

I took him to work with me, just for three hours, and while he wasn’t paying attention I quite quietly lost that job. Or found out that I will have, come November. To my credit, I didn’t start crying until much later, after midnight, in the woods, trying to fall asleep in the hammock.

On the way home we’d stolen a chicken from a backyard in East Oakland. My dad had held the flashlight, and I’m pretty sure he was impressed with the speed, dexterity, and fearlessness with which I snatched the beast from its sleep and stuffed it beak-first into a cardboard box.

I know he was impressed with my shack because he said as much. He said he’d pictured it much smaller. And he liked my stuff. He hadn’t taken me up on my offer to stop at a drug store on the way home, boxed chicken squawking between suitcases, and buy a shower curtain for my shower-turned-litter-box-slash-storage-space. He’d take his baths outside on the porch, just like me!

What a dad. Jetlagged and overfed, he fell asleep as soon as his gray hairs touched the pillow on my fold-out futon. I made love to Weirdo the Cat on the carpet for a while, and then grabbed my sleeping bag and went outside. It was too hot for sleeping bags. Luckily, and weirdly, it was too hot for mosquitoes, too.

I lay in the redwood-strung hammock, where I usually sleep very soundly, thank you, and I tossed and turned and sniffed and sobbed and howled, albeit very quietly, at the moon. The chicken, which I’d moved from the cardboard box to a cat carrier on an old rusty oil drum next to me, peeked out of its air holes and tossed and turned and pecked at the moon.

Between the two of us, we woke up squirrels, but not my dad.

Who, when he saw my woods and ways in the refreshing (to him) daylight, was even more impressed! He kinda liked bathing outside, and marveled at my outdoor desk, and complimented my apples, which I love but most people find too tart.

Most impressively, though, and he, being his daughter’s father, elaborated at some (if not chicken farmerly) length … the old man couldn’t stop crapping the whole time he was here.

"I seem to have that effect on people," I said. It’s true. I have friends who call me when they’re constipated. They claim the sound of my voice has a laxative effect. Which I take as a compliment.

My dad, who leans toward constipation himself, attributed it more to my healthy diet. His word: "healthy." What we ate: jambalaya with three kinds of meat and two kinds of seafood in it. Omelets. Barbecued eggs. Smoked chickens. Fried clams. Clam chowder. And a Zachary’s stuffed pizza with anchovies.

And if that’s all health food, you gotta wonder, kind of broken-heartedly, what people are eating in Ohio.

—————————-

My new favorite restaurant is Guerilla Café in Berkeley. They have a waffle-of-the-day, and on this day it was cardamom, buckwheat, and dates. Couple of fresh organic strawberries, three or four thin slices of pear, a bloop of crème, one pat of butter, thimble of syrup … bam! $7.25. And a $2 cup of Blue Bottle coffee with no free refill. Justice, Berkeley-style. Hip, righteous, artsy, and expensive, it’s immersion therapy for a chicken farmer come to town.

GUERILLA CAFÉ

1620 Shattuck, Berk.

(510) 845-2233

Tue.–Fri., 7 a.m.–6 p.m.

Sat.–Sun., 8 a.m.–6 p.m.

No alcohol

MC/V

Raphael’s “Way”

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August 20, 2008
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Who can turn the Dogfather’s head with a tune, bring a melody to Mary J. Blige’s lips, and get Stevie Wonder out of bed in the wee hours? Raphael Saadiq, that’s who. And with good reason: the Oakland-born-and-raised vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer not only found substantial fame back in the day singing alongside bro Dwayne Wiggins and cousin Timothy Christian in Tony! Toni! Toné!, he’s kept his chops honed over the years by lending his ear for stellar R&B and soul. He’s produced Joss Stone, 2Pac, the Roots, John Legend, Kelis, Mos Def, D’Angelo, and the Isley Brothers, among others. He’s collaborated with a who’s who of pop putf8um, including Blige, Snoop Dogg, Whitney Houston, the Bee Gees, Ludacris, and John Mellencamp.

Damn. Little wonder a legend like Wonder will rouse himself at short notice to assist on Saadiq’s fab, hip-shaking old-school soul disc, The Way I See It (Columbia). The way Saadiq, né Charlie Ray Wiggins, tells it — over the phone during a late-morn breakfast in Los Angeles — his protege CJ had just finished singing his part on the sinuous, ready-made hit "Never Give You Up," when he announced, midtrack, "I’d like to invite Stevie Wonder to my album." So Saadiq decided to call Wonder and ask for a harmonica solo: "[Wonder’s] usually traveling around the country, and he asked, ‘When do you need me?’ I said, ‘An hour.’ He goes, ‘An hour?’ And he showed up an hour and a half later at one at night."

Easy for him to ask since Saadiq had already worked with the rock ‘n’ soul icon and Beyoncé on a Luther Vandross tribute, but it’s clearly Saadiq’s down-to-earth charm, disarming ease, and all-too-evident talent that keeps those friendships alive. Oh yes, and Wonder is "his Taurean brother" — born May 13 to Saadiq’s May 14.

That casual vibe runs throughout Saadiq’s immaculately assembled, long-awaited followup to 2004’s Ray Ray (Pookie). "For the most part, I kind of played everything myself on the whole album, but I bumped into certain people," he says. He plucked Rocio Mendoza, the sensuous lead vocalist for "Calling," from his favorite LA breakfast spot and gave her a star turn. Stone — to whom Saadiq has been linked romantically, though he demurs, "We’re just friends" — also guests, on the creamy, dreamy, string-stung mélange "Just One Kiss." But star turns aside, what fully emerges from Way is its sweet, sweet soul songs — living, breathing throwbacks to ’60s Motown, as fleshed-out and vital as anything by current soul revivalists like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson, and Duffy, and crafted by a luminary of the genre’s last resurrection. The cover image of Way, with a besuited, Marvin Gaye–like Saadiq, for instance, was taken two years ago at Oakland’s Sweets Ballroom.

The new album — out Sept. 16 on the heels of Saadiq’s Sept. 11 appearance at KMEL’s House of Soul show at Ruby Skye — began to come together two years ago. "Being away from home so long, on an island [the Bahamas, where he was producing Stone] — the next thing you know, you look down, and the album is done," Saadiq drawls. "But I’ve always heard music like that, since I was seven years old. Some of the first music that ever really opened me up was that music, so it wasn’t a stretch for me."

The R&B vet can also step back and break down why a new gen has gravitated toward old-school bounce. "For artists it’s coming back because a lot of DJs spin a lot of vinyl, and that’s all they’re really listening to," he explains. Nonetheless, he continues, "it never really went away. It’s the only thing that don’t leave the shelf. It’s always been in my player." And that’s the player without and within: "I hear music all day and all night," Saadiq says. "I hear music in my dreams." To get the songs out of his head, he says, "You go through the chords and progressions, play drums. I jump on all the instruments until I hear something I like."

Such mental agility — and such a work ethic — must come from his now-70-something guitar-player father, speculates Saadiq. "He was working two or three jobs since he was 10," says the songwriter, who regularly gets back to East Oakland to see family. "Now he owns some buildings, and he’s always trying to work on them and be helpful to tenants. He’ll say, ‘I gotta get back to Oakland, so I can take out the garbage,’ and I’ll say, ‘What garbage? Are you crazy!?’ He’s a different kind of guy." It goes without question that his pops must be able to relate to Way‘s sound? "It’s music," Saadiq comes back, "that anyone who lives under the sky can relate to right now."

RAPHAEL SAADIQ

Wed/20, 8 p.m., $22

Bimbo’s 365 Club

1025 Columbus, SF

www.bimbos365club.com

Georgia: a neocon August surprise election ploy?

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August 13, 2008
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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Robert Scheer, the journalist who did one of the first major early critiques of the Vietnam War,
today weighed in on the Georgia war.

His lead paragraphs make his point: “Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?

“Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser.” B3

Click here to read Scheer’s op-ed column in today’s Chronicle, Georgia war is a neocon election ploy. Scheer was most prescient on the Vietnam War. Is he as prescient on this one?

Montreal Fringe Festival: on y va le Fringe!

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June 19, 2008
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By Nicole Gluckstern

It’s official, I’ve gone bi. Bi-coastally Fringe that is. The 18th annual Montreal Fringe Festival has begun, and I’m here to play my role. Like the San Francisco Fringe, of which I’m also a part, the Montreal Fringe offers an eclectic array of unjuried theatrical performances, from dance to drama, acrobatics to absurdities, spoken word to shadow puppetry. Unlike the SF Fringe however, Montreal is a major player in the Canadian Fringe Festival circuit, attracting a large variety of international performers, many of whom will spend the entire summer fringing on the road. It’s also one hell of a party. I’m not cheating on San Francisco, I reason. I’m broadening my horizons. If last year’s Montreal Fringe, my first, was but a dalliance, this year’s for real. While normally it’s fringe performers who do the touring, I figure that as a fringe technician, I shouldn’t have to get left out of the fun.

Fringe folk. Photo by Cindy Lopez.

And so it’s started. It’s humid and the air is redolent with cooking grease from nearby fry haven (heaven!), Patati Patata, as the Fringe kicks off in the Parc des Amèriques with a performance from local lo-fi band, The Unsettlers. My new favorite band! Whisky-soaked is such a cliche by now, so I’ll just say the lead vocals rasp purposfully somewhere between Tom Waits, Mark Lanegan, and the Pogues, while the band keeps the shipwrecked melodies trembling and swinging with a variety of duct-tape repaired instruments such as the accordian, the bowed bass, harmonium, trombone, clarinet, a kickdrum made of an industrial plastic garbage can, and a two-foot tall baby grand piano.

I against I

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May 27, 2008
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CULT FILM Nothing exerts quite the same simultaneous attraction-repulsion magnetism like a really world-class vanity project. You know, the kind in which the writer-director-star-editor-caterer-fluffer — usually playing a thinly disguised version of moi in a world that does not at all fully appreciate them — reveals more of their off-screen inner workings than one ever wanted to know.

Typically these things occur just once in a talent’s life, then are never allowed to happen again, like Babs’ 1996 The Mirror Has Two Faces or Los Angeles weirdo Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-surreal cult microhit The Room (2003). Some inexplicably get to make several, like Vincent Gallo, Ed Burns, or such determined wrong-medium meddlers as Bob Dylan and Norman Mailer. It’s possible to strangle whole movies with manifest-destiny egotism even when one merely stars in them. It’s even possible to overexpose oneself without actually appearing onscreen: what are The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Apocalypto (2006) but coded maps of Mel Gibson’s soul?

For full effect, however, the more personal credits, the better. In 1969 Brit multitalent Anthony Newley conceived, cowrote, produced, directed, starred, and pretty much jacked off for the world to see in something called Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? This "erotic" autobiographical musical phantasmagoria cast Newley’s actual then-wife (none other than Joan Collins) and children as his endlessly cheated-on wife and neglected children — not to mention Milton Berle as Satan.

Though it was a major-studio release made for the then not-inconsiderable sum of $1 million, Merkin has since become more rumor than reality, with bootleg TV dupes sought by a few while most simply forgot it existed. Could it really have been that bizarre? Yup. That bad? Well, anything this out-there pretty much transcends ordinary quality measures. An extremely rare chance to taste its unique flavors — indeed, the only revival screening I’ve ever heard of — occurs June 4 at the Roxie when the Film on Film Foundation pairs it with another legendary cliff-jumper, Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971).

Newley conquered the West End and Broadway with shows mixing Chaplinesque whimsical bathos and big-ballad bombast. They gave some critics hives — but not audiences. Covered by every mid-1960s crooner, his songs (like "What Kind of Fool Am I?") topped charts. A ubiquitous variety-show guest, he looked set to become a movie star too. Result: carte blanche for Merkin, the type of freedom that ought to have set off alarm bells from Hollywood to Hampstead.

The film tells the tender tale of an angst-ridden famous writer-singer-actor who, like Newley, was born a "bastard" (at a time when that really mattered), a former child star now on his second marriage — to Collins’ piquantly named Polyester Poontang — while incessantly screwing the likes of Filigree Fondle and Trampolina Whambang. Liberally partaking of Fellini’s 8 1/2 model, this "sum total of my life to date" (as the auteur then stated) operates on many levels, from flashbacks of Merkin’s professional rise to fantasy sequences to onscreen ersatz producers and critics critiquing the movie-in-progress. There’s a zodiac dance, a bestiality number, a mime alter ego, and an acid trip (not to be confused with the black mass) — plus the queasy running theme of Newley-Merkin’s jones for Lolita-esque girls, as personified by Playboy playmate Connie Kreski’s defiled innocent, Mercy. She’s his true love — or as close as it gets for a character who finally admits, "Not only do I have no respect for women, I may well hate them."

In her memoirs, Collins notes, "I had a sick, horrible feeling when I first read the script. Tony seemed to have spelled out the end of our marriage." (Indeed, that event promptly occurred.) The commingled massive egotism and masochism in this "totally revealing picture of his life" (her words) had a similar effect on most real-life critics, a typical notice saying Newley "so overextends and overexposes himself that the movie comes to look like an act of professional suicide … [it] is as self-indulgent as a burp."

Roger Ebert, however, thought it "strange, wonderful, original, and not quite successful," applauding its sheer nerve if nothing else. Indeed, Merkin remains such an oddity and perfect warts-and-all memorial to Newley (who died in 1999, his long, post-Merkin career slide actually highlighted by 1987’s The Garbage Pail Kids Movie) that, like most spectacular follies, it commands a certain awed respect.

CAN HIERONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPPE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS?

June 4, 9:15 p.m., $7

with The Last Movie, 7 p.m.

Roxie Film Center

3117 16th St., SF

www.filmonfilm.org

Renters fight back

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May 14, 2008
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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

A stream of perturbed tenants living in buildings owned by one of the city’s largest landlords, CitiApartments, Inc., converged on City Hall May 12 to testify that in recent years the company has engaged in an alleged campaign of intimidation and harassment against residents living in rent-controlled units.

Attendees, many wearing stickers that read "Tenants standing together for fair treatment," quickly filled to capacity a committee room used by the Board of Supervisors before the overflow was moved to two other large rooms where televisions airing the meeting were situated.

CitiApartments turned out its own army of supporters in an attempt to offset the impression that it’s unpopular among renters in the city. Dozens of people who claimed to back the company’s business practices attended the meeting wearing shirts that stated, "I support CitiApartments."

But a volunteer with the Queer Youth Organizing Project and organizer against CitiApartments complained to the supervisors that the crowd of supporters had either been paid to attend the meeting or were employees of the company. Few CitiApartments supporters filled out comment cards or spoke publicly in defense of the company.

Some CitiApartments tenants said they endured months of lingering construction work that filled their buildings with debris and garbage after CitiApartments bought its buildings, the upheaval intentionally designed to drive them out in frustration and thus give up their stabilized rent rates.

Others said vulnerable tenants like undocumented immigrants and seniors were specially targeted with intimidation tactics by a private security group working for CitiApartments that appeared at their doors asking for personal information. Utilities were frequently shut off, tenants said, or elevators relied upon by the physically disabled were left inoperable for long periods of time, all part of a campaign to scare them away from their apartments.

"This is not simply about a bad landlord," tenant Debbie Nuñez, who lives in a Lower Nob Hill building purchased by CitiApartments in 2000, told the supervisors. "This is about a well-oiled machine."

Sup. Chris Daly sponsored the hearing by the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee to receive an update on the city attorney’s lawsuit against CitiApartments, a.k.a. Skyline Realty. He also wanted to discuss the company’s swift rate of property acquisitions in San Francisco and to hear testimony about mounting alleged building code violations at some of its buildings.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the company and several of its subsidiaries in August 2006 alleging an "egregious pattern of unlawful and unfair business practices," and a "shocking panoply of corporate lawlessness, intimidation tactics, and retaliation against residents."

Five months prior, the Guardian published a three-part series of stories documenting claims by current and former CitiApartments tenants that they had been the victims of persistent, aggressive attempts to oust them from rent-controlled housing units. If such tenants vacate the apartments for whatever reason, CitiApartments can raise the rent on those units dramatically.

A recent report by the Legislative Analyst’s Office shows CitiApartments today owns nearly 300 properties here, which combined hold from 6,300 to 7,500 units and about 12,000 tenants.

Sup. Aaron Peskin, who sits on the committee with Sups. Gerardo Sandoval and Sophie Maxwell, said at the meeting that his office receives a complaint once a week or at least every 10 days about CitiApartments, a figure that has increased over the last three years.

"I don’t recall ever hearing complaints about Trinity Properties in the city," Peskin said. "They own 6,000 units."

Daly pointed to a May 9 New York Times article that reported on the rising phenomenon of "predatory equity," in which private investment funds bankroll the acquisition of a large number of rent-controlled apartments in New York anticipating higher-than-usual vacancy rates. But tenant advocates say achieving such rates requires a concerted effort, either through offering one-time buyouts, finding nuances in the law that allow for an eviction, or harassing tenants until they grow exasperated and leave.

The significantly higher revenue generated from market-rate rental prices then enable building buyers there to repay the equity firms that gave them the huge loans to buy the properties in the first place. Daly wants to find out if CitiApartments is deploying a similar "business model" in San Francisco.

According to the Times piece, developers backed by private equity firms have purchased nearly 75,000 rent-controlled units over the last four years in New York. One company that bought a group of buildings in Queens subsequently filed around 1,000 cases against tenants in housing court during an 18-month period.

A lawyer for CitiApartments, Tara Condon, promised the committee members that the company would investigate the complaints made by tenants at the May 12 meeting. She added that the company increases tax revenue for the city when it improves the conditions and appearances of buildings it purchases. She also declared that the company makes local charitable contributions and has reached out to financially troubled tenants.

"We are a business, but we try to work with [the tenants,]" Condon said. "We want to make sure they can stay in their apartments."

One former tenant, Donna O’Brien, testified that CitiApartments helped her and her husband find a more affordable apartment after the company bought a previous building she lived in at 516 Ellis St. last year. She said CitiApartments also paid for her moving expenses. "Quite honestly, CitiApartments has been very good to us."

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