Win tickets by emailing RSVP@sfbg.com with ‘VadimSF’ in the subject line.
Born in Russia and residing in London and Berlin, DJ Vadim aka Daddy Vad has built a reputation as one of the world’s top independent producers. In a career that spans 20 years, he has travelled in over 68 countries, performing and collaborating with established and developing talents across Continents, languages and cultures. Vadim founded his own independent record label, Jazz Fudge in 1994, and signed to Ninja Tune the following year. He sticks to no rulebook, hi musical repertoire encompassing hip hop, trip hop, soul, funk, grime, reggae, dub and bass. Vadim has produced numerous solo and group albums across genres for labels like Ninja Tune, Jazzfudge, Wordsound and BBE., working with artists like DJ Krush, Stevie Wonder, The Roots, Prince, Public Enemy, Dilated Peoples, Kraftwerk, Sly and the family stone, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Super Furry Animals, and Paul Weller. He has formed and produced a number of groups including The Bug, The Isolationist, The Russian Percussion, and One Self and The Electric. In 2002, Vadim was nominated for a Latin Grammy for his work with 7 Notas 7 Colores. Always innovating and pushing the boundaries, he has delved into the broadcasting world. with his own radio show “Around the World in 8 Relays” which is aired by the BBC World Service and was nominated for a Sony Award. His latest release, Dubcatcher, is informed by classic roots music, 80s digital, bashment, original UK 2 step soul, bass culture and features powerhouse vocalist Katrina Blackstone, YT, Demolition Man, Jamalski, Dynamite MC and many others. www.djvadim.com www.soundcloud.com/dj-vadim www.mixcloud.com/DJVadim/
Katrina Blackstone has been singing since she could speak and has not stopped! Whether, it was singing for friends and family, or performing on stage, she had no doubt, what she wanted to do. “I feel more comfortable being on stage than walking down the street” proclaims the Tennessee-born vocalist. Anyone who has witnessed her, on stage would agree. She takes the mic with ease, connects with the audience, naturally, and always delivers a memorable show. Katrina studied vocal performance, with an emphasis on Jazz at the prestigious New School University in New York., Her professional foundation draws from the teachings of such greats as Junior, Mance, Amir Ziv, Bobby Sanabria, and Kate Baker, to name a few. This widely eclectic, group of teachers, along with numerous performance opportunities and unique life, experiences, has enabled her to cultivate her distinctive voice and exceptional, stage presence. Living in NYC, Katrina started her diverse recording career with, Jazz and Soul legends Ron Carter, Brian Jackson, and Mike Clark for the album, “Legba’s Light” in which she is featured on the song “Whisper” with Killah Priest., She has been featured on Bluetech’s albums, Love Songs to the Source (Interchill), and Rainforest Reverberations (Critical Beats), dr Israel’s The Liberation Chronicles, (Dreadtone International), and Live at Dub Mission SF which was recorded at our 14th Anniversary. Katrina has toured with a diverse group of musicians including, Shootyz Groove, the Primo Gomez project, Bluetech, Satori Social, and dr Israel., With her debut 2010 EP, Passing Time, Katrina made a grand entry onto the futuristic, pop-soul scene, as her voice glided effortlessly over multiple genres. Her exquisite, phrasing and passionate delivery still retain an air of mystery. www.facebook.com/katrina.blackstone www.reverbnation.com/katrinablackstone
DJ Sep is the founder, promoter, and main resident DJ at Dub Mission. For 22 years, Sep was also on Bay Area radio: first at college radio station KUSF and later at Berkeley’s public radio station, KPFA. She is the co-compiler (with producer/dj Shockman) of Babylon Is Ours: The USA in Dub, a collection of all-exclusive American dub tracks released on Select Cuts Records. Her latest projects, the Biggering Riddim, an EP of original music featuring dr. Israel and Mista Chatman; the BASSment mix, and Reggae Got Dhol featuring refixes of tunes by Gregory Isaacs and Lady G are all available on www.soundcloud.com/djsep www.facebook.com/DJSep1
Now in its 19th year, Dub Mission is one of the longest-running parties in the world, presenting cutting-edge dub, roots reggae and dancehall every Sunday at the Elbo Room. Voted Bay Area’s Best Reggae Club by S.F. Bay Guardian readers Dub Mission has featured artists from all over the world, including Adrian Sherwood & the ON-U Sound System, Mad Professor & the Ariwa Sound System, the Scientist, Mungo’s Hi Fi, Soom T, Solo Banton, Jahdan Blakkamoore, Zion Train, Prince Fatty Sound System, Twilight Circus Dub Sound System, Nickodemus from Turntables On The Hudson and many many others. Every Sunday at Elbo Room: www.dubmission.com @djsepdubmission www.facebook.com/DubMissionSF www.youtube.com/dubmission www.soundcloud.com/dubmissionsf www.instagram.com/dubmissionsf www.google.com/+DJSEP
OPINION People are disappearing. At least, that’s how it feels on Facebook. Since the suspension of drag queen and activist Sister Roma’s account, more and more users (including drag kings and queens, burlesque performers, and trans people) are getting reported. They’re either dropping off Facebook, or complying with Facebook’s demands — by using “legal” names unrecognizable to their communities.
As much as some of us are slightly ashamed to admit how much we rely on Facebook, we can’t escape how much we use social media these days. Losing access to Facebook means missing invitations to birthday parties and political rallies. It means missing important announcements from friends and family. It can even mean losing contact with some people altogether.
As Sister Roma and others pointed out in a meeting with Facebook officials last week, the consequences of losing the ability to use Facebook with a chosen name are far worse for some. For trans women, who make up 72 percent of the victims of anti-LGBTQ homicide, being forced to reveal their birth names can be deadly. Teens like Daniel Pierce, who captured the violent reaction of his family members to his decision to come out, may want to hide from abusive families — while relying on social media for support.
In fact, the consequences of Facebook’s policy are huge for many groups of users. Facebook is both an important tool and a dangerous one. Being able to use it with a pseudonym is key for many people. But Facebook doesn’t agree.
Facebook states that it requires users to “provide their real names, so you always know who you’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe.” Mark Zuckerberg stated four years ago: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Many people disagree — but Facebook seems committed to maintaining this policy.
Google+ abandoned its real name policy recently, after one of its lead engineers stated: “We thought [abandoning our real names policy] was going to be a huge deal: that people would behave very differently… After watching the system for a while, we realized that this was not, in fact, the case.”
But what’s really absurd about the policy is this: It isn’t even designed very well to do what it’s supposed to. Facebook’s enforcement team isn’t scouring the site looking for people who don’t comply with the policy. Instead, people get their accounts shut down when someone reports them. So with or without the policy, anyone can create a profile with any name they want. And anyone can be reported if they engage in abusive behavior.
The only thing the policy really does is to allow people to anonymously target others, by reporting them. In 2010, a spree of removals targeted accounts with one thing in common: All were critical of Islam. There have likely been other such instances that haven’t received media attention, too.
This is also not the first time Facebook has been confronted over its policies. Digital rights organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACCESS have been “loudly opposed to Facebook’s ‘real names’ policy for years.”
So is Facebook simply determined to hold on to its policy out of stubbornness? Despite temporarily restoring some users’ accounts, Facebook hasn’t offered any long-term solution. With such a flawed policy, a refusal to change it doesn’t seem logical. Instead, it seems as though Facebook has decided that with 1.3 billion users, it can afford to lose a few.
Perhaps Facebook will take Zuckerberg’s more recent words about its policy to heart: “I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things. If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.” Maybe Facebook will recognize that the real burden of the policy ends up falling on communities that have already been unfairly burdened, by discrimination, violence, and political repression. It’s time for Facebook to abandon its real name policy for the outdated, ineffective relic that it is.
Nadia Kayyali is an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Activists engaged in eviction “protection” of a different sort this Sunday at the Folsom Street Fair, as they handed out condoms with packages adorned by the face of Ellis Act evictor, Jack Halprin.
No doubt much boning ensued after the kinky leather fetish fair, and some of those copulations may have utilized the Halprin-condoms. But why are the protesters equating him with a rubber ejaculate receptacle?
Halprin, a Google attorney and head of their eDiscovery division, purchased a San Francisco property at 812 Guerrero two years ago. Eight units in the building were occupied, but Halprin filed to evict the tenants under the Ellis Act. One of those tenants is a San Francisco elementary school teacher Claudia Tirado, who lives there with her 2-year-old son. Like the rest of us, teachers have had a hard time keeping their San Francisco homes as of late.
This put Halprin on Eviction Free SF’s naughty list (remember the Google I/O conference protest? That was Tirado too). But that doesn’t explain the Folsom connection.
Eviction Free SF said in a press release that Halprin regularly frequents Powerhouse SF and is part of the leather community, which we confirmed by checking out Halprin’s “likes” on Facebook (he also digs the Eagle, for the record). The protesters implored the leather community at the Folsom Sreet Fair to denounce Halprin’s eviction of San Franciscans, chanting “sex positive, evictions negative!”
Eviction Free SF protesters at the Folsom Street Fair. Claudia Tirado is pictured, right. PHOTO COURTESY EVICTION FREE SF
Now we were at Folsom, and the shouts weren’t exactly creating a ruckus at the fair (between the delightful bondage demonstrations and Jamie DeWolf emceeing a nun-laden burlesque show, everyone was a bit distracted). But the true condom-breaking moment took place back in June, shortly after the Google I/O conference, which Tirado protested. After Google was shamed internationally the company promised, ahem, protection for Tirado and her fellow tenants.
Now they’ve reneged on that promise, Eviction Free SF claims. We’ve written Google for comment, but find their reply unlikely.
We offer you Eviction SF’s limerick, on the condom package, without comment:
Jack be simple
Jack’s a dick!
Jack’s evictions
make us sick!
Jack Halprin-themed condoms adorn a ledge by posters decrying his eviction of long-time San Francisco residents. PHOTO COURTESY EVICTION FREE SF
Members of the band Vulfpeck describe themselves as a “half-Jewish German-American rhythm section.” Creators of severely catchy, mostly-instrumental grooves, the four-piece — who first met in a German literature class at the University of Michigan — have built a following with their quirky YouTube videos: Each album track is accompanied by a cleverly shot and edited video of its recording. The videos not only capture the band’s camaraderie, loose attitude, and sense of humor, but also their musical cohesion as a group. Each song is endlessly and effortlessly funky.
As we listened to their fourth EP, Fugue State, released last week, a passerby commented on how their music has a distinctly familiar quality. This makes sense, for a group modeled after the great rhythm sections of the ’60s and ’70s: tight-knit groups of studio players like those in Detroit (Motown), Memphis (Stax) and Muscle Shoals (Atlantic, Chess) that played on not only countless soul and R&B hits, but on classic pop and rock records as well.
The LA-based band created a bit of a stir earlier this year with their Sleepify album — a collection of 31-second-long silent tracks that they told their fans to stream on Spotify, on repeat, as they slept. (That’s the minimum song length after which the music streaming service pays bands a small fee.) The group promised to use the Spotify proceeds to fund a tour of free shows, booked around the cities where the album was streamed the most — and that’s just what they did, after raising about $20,000. (Spotify has since removed the album.)
We spoke over the phone with Jack Stratton, multi-instrumentalist, audio/video engineer, and mastermind for the band, ahead of their upcoming performance at Brick & Mortar Music Hall on Mon/15. It’s a free show, of course. Frequent Vulfpeck collaborator Joey Dosik opens.
San Francisco Bay Guardian Do you want to talk a little about Sleepify and how it came about?
Jack Stratton The first time we had talked about touring, we were trying to play live, because there’s somewhat of a demand from our fans of the YouTube videos. So we were just talking about ways to do that, and get information from other groups about what it costs, and it seemed like a losing-money venture.
So we were trying to think up ways for it to make sense, because really we enjoy playing live, and simultaneously we were talking about this demand-funded tour, where you say: If 100 people in any given place say they’ll go, we’ll show up. And we talk about Spotify all the time when we release stuff — whether it hurts sales or has no effect. It’s hard to judge. So all of those conversations kind of collided into this demand-funded Spotify tour.
SFBG Would you consider it a success so far?
JS Oh, absolutely, yeah. Especially since our last release, it’s hard to say how many fans came in from Sleepify. Probably the majority of people were just interested in the Sleepify part of it, but people did end up checking out the band and enjoying it. I think it almost doubled our fanbase since then, so there’s no way to spin it negative, really.
SFBG I know you’re based in LA. Are all the members there these days?
JS No, not right now; we’re all scattered.
SFBG How do you find time to get together and make music?
JS Vulfpeck is a strict Monday-through-Friday workweek, once a year. Our last album we did in a week in Ann Arbor, and definitely the eventual goal is to be doing that way more often, with other artists, like a classic rhythm section. That’s the vision.
SFBG Do you seek out freelance work backing up other singers? It seems like your records could serve as a great demo tape.
JS Yeah, we’ve done a little bit of that. That’s definitely the vision for it, because you can put out a lot more material. Like, you watch any documentary about [classic soul/R&B rhythm sections], and they played on so many hits. Because with any single artist, there’s just a limit to how much new material you want to hear in a year, [but a rhythm section] can just crank it out — and we’re very fast.
The larger concept to start a rhythm section was that — name a band. If you name any band, I could name their dramatic falling out, but all the rhythm sections, they just kinda do their thing. And then there’s a documentary 50 years later and they’re all still hanging out.
SFBGFugue State is your fourth EP; how would you say the band’s sound has evolved?
JS Well, I’ve gotten better at mixing, we’ve all gotten better at playing, we’ve gotten better as an ensemble…so those are hard to quantify. The team is improving. We’ve had a mastering engineer since the second album, Devin Kerr, and that’s really helped the overall sound.
SFBGI saw that you and Devin released a Vulf compressor plugin for other musicians to use. Not a lot of bands can say that. How did that come about?
JS Yeah, I’m very excited about that. That was, man, a long time in the works. Not heavy duty work, but I was really into, at one point, this sound of Madlib and Flying Lotus and J Dilla. Whatever that sound was, that pumping, where the whole track pumps — I was like “What the hell is that?”
And I did some research, and the Internet is a magical thing, and I was directed to these late 90s/early 2000s digital samplers. And the compressors on those, certainly Madlib was using them, so I went to Devin and was like, “Check out these sounds I’m getting with these digital compressors.” And he was trying to replicate it with his plugins and he couldn’t do it at all, so he just did a ton of listening to these characteristics, that were not, I think, programmed.
SFBG Right, they might have been bugs or imperfections…
JS Yeah, and actually they were, because [the manufacturers] started phasing out certain effects that were classics. They just didn’t know. [Devin’s] a dangerous dude because he’s very good at DSP [Digital Single Processing] and he’s a mastering engineer, so he’s very musical and has this very technical side. So he did his thing and we would test it out and it was really thrilling. And then our friend Rob Stenson did the interface with Devin and now its in beta and eventually it’ll be out.
SFBG Do you have a take on analog vs. digital recording?
JS We’re fans of both. We’ll do stuff to tape; we’ll use a nice mixing board and go into the computer or some funky cassette preamp. We’ll do it all — no hangups.
SFBG A lot of your videos are shot in living rooms and bedrooms and they look pretty impromptu.
JS Yeah, I was kind of all about building a nice tricked-out studio for us. But Theo [Katzman, drummer-guitarist] mentioned part of the charm is all of these different locations and how rugged the setups are.
SFBGThe last couple records have each featured a song with Antwaun Stanley [on vocals]. Do you envision more collaboration with him in the future?
JS Oh yeah, I mean, he rules. It’s really fun to work with him. Honestly, not many people could [with us]. It’s not just picking a good voice with us; the person has to be a really good improvisor, like Antwaun, because they have to make it happen on the spot, and there’s no overdubs or background vocals. It’s not just a nice timbre; you have to be a really talented singer and improvisor — a performer.
SFBGDid you write the lyrics or did he?
JS I wrote those. That is one of the greatest joys I wish everyone could experience is having Antwaun Stanley sing your lyrics. Because they go from, like, ridiculousness, to sounding like they were meant to be.
SFBG In general, do you write all of the parts for the band or is it more of a collaborative process as far as the arrangements go?
JS Depends on the tune. I like how versatile everyone is: We’ve done tunes where it’s completely arranged, we’ve done tunes where it’s like: “Do your thing.” Generally, one person comes in with the nugget and they’ll kind of be producer on that track and get to call the shots, but it’s collaborative within that.
SFBG You’ve got some multi-instrumentalists in the band. [Theo Katzman doubles on drums and guitar and Jack plays drums, various keyboards and guitar.] How do you choose who’s going to be on drums, and who’s on keys, etc., for each song?
JS It’s mostly a decision of who will be able to pick up the parts fastest, because it’s all on-the-spot — there’s no rehearsal. Theo’s got a really good ear harmonically. I don’t really, I can’t pick up tunes that quick. If I’ve written the tune on keyboards, I’ll play keyboards, but if it’s someone else’s tune and it’s difficult, he’ll play guitar [and I’ll play drums].
SFBG What does Vulfpeck mean?
JS That was kind of the earliest part of it: It’s “wolfpack,” pronounced by a German, but phonetically spelled out in English. So, if a German saw the word wolfpack, it would probably come out “vulf-pock,” which I screwed up at the time. I thought it would be “peck,” but apparently it’s “pock.”
But that’s the whole idea, and it’s endless joy, because I love the name and it’s great for the Internet, you know? Getting all the [web] addresses. I think there was one military dating profile — that was it — when I first Googled it. I was like “Alright, I think this is open.”
SFBG Search engine optimized…
JS Our Google splash page is — I mean you can’t control these things — but nice, man, it’s all us.
This bill would establish a stealth template for how to gut the California Public Records Act one economic and political sector at a time.
By Bruce B. Brugmann (with a First Amendment Coalition emergency message and a button for readers to request a Gov. Brown veto)
Possibly the bill most damaging to the public interest in years is sitting on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk for signature. It is SB 1300, which amounts to an oil refinery protection bill proposed by Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) and Assemblyperson Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), two legislators living in the shadow of the East Bay oil refineries who ought to know better. It was supported by oil companies, organized labor, and the California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) and was passed by the Assembly on a 68-5 vote and by the Senate on a 34-0 vote. No debate, no discussion, no questions asked.
The gist of the damage is that SB 1300 was amended at the last minute to force a CPRA requester to pay fees if a court rules against disclosure. As the California Newspaper Publishers Association explained in its current legislative bulletin, SB 1300 “would expand the definition of what constitutes a trade secret and erect an insurmountable barrier to any effort by a member of the public to obtain information about DOSH’s performance in its role as a consumer watchdog over a refiner’s conduct.”
Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition (FAC), warned in a special message that “it’s safe to say that no one will ever file a CPRA request for refinery information once it becomes known that a mere request may thrust the requester involuntarily into a costly battle against oil companies.” But just to be sure no one even contemplates filing a CPRA request, Scheer noted that the last minute amendments to the legislation also provide that the requester will have to pay his/her own fees as well as the fees of the oil company’s lawyers if he/she loses the suit.
CNPA General Counsel Jim Ewert and Staff Attorney Scott Merrill worked furiously to try to negotiate with Hancock’s staff and DOSH representatives to eliminate the toxic effect on CPRA requesters. But all CNPA amendments were rejected before the bill was taken up by both houses. Hancock told the CNPA advocates repeatedly that she would rather have the information in DOSH’s hands even if that meant that the public wouldn’t have access to it.
Scheer wrote that “some may say that these changes to existing law, while terrible, are not such a big deal since they only curtail access to information about refineries. (This is presumably the view of organized labor, which cynically backs SB 1300 after getting a special carveout for refineries’ employment and financial data that unions want.)
“Try telling that to the families who live downwind of refineries. But more than that, SB 1300 establishes a template for how to gut the CPRA one economic and political sector at a time. First, it’s information about oil companies; next it will be information about schools or about law enforcement or about water supplies. SB 1300 creates a dangerous precedent for other industries and special interets to follow.
“Don’t let that happen. Tell Governor Brown to veto SB 1300.”
Below is the full text of Scheer’s message on the FAC website with a response button to email, fax, or phone requesting Gov. Brown to veto SB 1300. CNPA is emailing Scheer’s message to its member papers in its Sept.12 Legislative Bulletin, several are preparing stories and editorials, and public access activists are mobilizing opposition across the state. Brown was expected to sign the bill, until CNPA and FAC blew the bugles and started blasting away.
Meanwhile, ask Hancock and Skinner and DOSH how they came up with this abomination and ask your local senators and assemblypersons why they voted for it without gulping. You can start with the San Francisco delegation, all of whom voted for the bill (Assemblymen Ammiano and Ting and Sen. Leno). On guard,b3
P.S. CNPA laid out this Kafkaesque scenario for people who have the gall to request information on emissions from a nearby oil refinery fire:
“ A mother and her family driven from her home by the emissions from a fire at a nearby refinery submits a CPRA request to DOSH for information that she believes is disclosable about the next turnaround at the refinery to determine how safe the refinery is. Because her request could include trade secret information as now defined, DOSH notifies the refinery that a request for the refiner’s information has been received.
“The refinery files an action against DOSH for injunctive relief to prevent the disclosure of the information and, since the bill requires the refiner to name the requester as a real party in interest, the requester is named as a party in the lawsuit filed by the refinery.The requester, who may or may not have been willing to go to court to enforce her rights under the CPRA, now finds that she is an unwilling party in a lawsuit.
” If she decides to participate in the action to pursue the information she believes she has a right to obtain she will have to pay her own expenses for a lawyer and the costs associated with the action. If she decides not to pursue her rights she risks that a default judgment could nonetheless be entered against her.
“If the court denies her request, or a default judgment is entered against her, the court would be required to order her to pay the refinery’s attorney’s fees and costs.
“SB 1300 was also amended to provide ‘the public agency shall not bear the court costs for any party named in litigation filed pursuant to this section.'” Incredible. Simply incredible. b3
For the CNPA letter asking Gov.Brown to veto the bill, click the link below
(The Bruce blog is written and edited by Bruce B. Brugmann, editor at large of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He was the editor and he and his wife Jean Dibble co-founded and co-published the Guardian, 1966-2012.)
In the wake of Urban Shield — the police training and trade show staged in Oakland last week, attracting attendees from 200 law-enforcement agencies — Mayor Jean Quan announced that it wouldn’t be welcome in Oakland again. To exactly nobody’s surprise, the event, timed on the heels of Ferguson in a city where cops are probably less popular than anywhere else on West Coast, drew protests. The police gear fest, which costs $1 million in federal funding, was started by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office.
OILY CARGO
On Sept. 4, environmental activists got up at the crack of dawn to sneak onto a railyard and stage a protest in Richmond. Using U-locks, they chained themselves to a fence where Kinder Morgan operates a shipping facility, where crude oil from North Dakota tar sands is unloaded from trains and sent to area refineries. The enviros said the trains are old and dangerous. But a lawsuit challenging the facility’s operating permit, issued by the air district without any environmental review, was thrown out in court the next day.
AHOY!
Multiple music stages (including a few that float) bring sea chanties, Irish ballads, folk songs about navy battles, and other shipshape styles to the shore at the annual Sea Music Festival, held Sat/13 on the Hyde Street Pier and aboard the historic vessels docked there. The festival also showcases Tahitian and Chinese traditional dancing, living-history performers (including a Victorian-style tea party, and model shipwrights). And yes, there will be sing-alongs, so make sure your “Spanish Ladies” is on point.
NO FREE LUNCH
We’ve heard about the “Twitter ten” — how free gourmet lunch offered by the tech employer can leave its workers with a bit of a paunch. But now that the Internal Revenue Service is taking a closer look at tax-exempt free lunch offered by the likes of Twitter and Google, as the Wall Street Journal reported, there may yet be a pound or two to pay for that perk.
SUNDANCIN’
Two awesome outdoor parties this Sunday prove that our summer is finally here. First up: a pool party? In the Tenderloin? You bet, as Summetime Radness (Sun/14, 1pm-6pm, $15–$20. Phoenix Hotel, 601 Eddy, SF. www.facebook.com/LightsDownLowCA) splashes into golden disco-funk waters with UK DJs Tiger and Woods and beloved groovemaster Dam Funk (pictured). Also that day, SF’s own crazy, lowdown bass kids from Dirtybird Records — Claude Vonstroke, J.Phlip, Justin and Christian Martin, and Worthy — rumble onto Treasure Island for the infamous Dirtybird BBQ (Sun/14, noon-8pm, $40. 401 California, Treasure Island. www.facebook.com/dirtybirdrecords) Free BBQ while supplies last! PHOTO BY JIMMY MOULD
NO BUENO
When the (non-Mexican) owners of Castro gay sports bar Hi Tops announced that they would be opening an upscale Mexican restaurant cross the street called Bandidos, many hackles were raised on those who know “bandido” has been used as a slur against Mexican people in the US. When the menu was unveiled — with items like $9 guacamole — familiar grumbling about high prices and gentrification took over. But the torta really hit the fan when chef Jamie Lauren was quoted on SFGate, saying, “I hate to call it white people Mexican food but it is. And I think the Castro needs a place like that.” Community rage and threats of a boycott ensued. The owners have agreed to meet with Latino and gay community representatives like comedian Marga Gomez to consider a name change and better outreach.
ROOM TO WRITE Kids at Mission High School will be getting a Writer’s Room, a beautifully designed space to inspire the process of writing, in partnership with the tutoring center 826 Valencia. As part of the project, ninth graders will produce a magazine about social justice issues, and San Franciscans can score a copy at the Pirate Supply Store at 826 Valencia.
EVICTION HALTED Benito Santiago, a 63-year-old San Francisco native, recently got word that he wouldn’t be evicted after all from his Duboce Ave. apartment, where he’s resided for 37 years. When he got the eviction notice last December, Santiago had no idea where else he could possibly live. “It was then that I realized, all that I could do, was fight back to stay in my home,” he said. “This is my life.” He got help from Eviction Free San Francisco, housing activists who staged marches, rallies, and even a real-estate office occupation to keep him housed.
For the digitally connected, sometimes it’s hard to remember life without the Internet.
Bills can be paid with a click, calendar appointment reminders pop in our e-mail inboxes, and YouTube lessons teach us mundane tasks like faucet fixing (was I the only one who didn’t know how to do that?). And those are some routine, everyday ways we weave the online world into our offline routines. Some, especially in San Francisco, spin a wider digital web.
Valencia Street is a corridor rife with the technorati, our new digital overlords and neighbors. These folks are the titans that technology built. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lives within spitting distance of Dolores Park, for instance. On any given night, a large swath of drunken revelers sobering up at Tacolicious are the same ones who “change the world” every day, engineering the newest Google spy machine.
But for all its ubiquity, the Internet is not as universally used in San Francisco as one might assume. It is a privilege, and to some, the Internet is a luxury that they cannot afford.
Data on who is connected and who is not is spotty, but taken together, it paints a picture of a stark digital divide.
According to a Field Poll in July, conducted on behalf of the California Emerging Technology Fund, one in four Californians does not have broadband Internet access. The city by the bay fares somewhat better, as local surveys say nearly 10 percent of San Franciscans do not have broadband Internet access at home. No DSL, no cable, no Comcast, no Federal Communications Commission woes. Ask them their opinion on net neutrality, and they’re liable to ask you if you’re a fisherman in need of tightly woven rope.
One commonality stretches across these surveys: Those without Internet are not only the elderly, but immigrants and families, often with children who are at a fundamental learning disadvantage without Internet at home.
A study recently released by the San Francisco Unified School District shows 15 percent of children’s families don’t have broadband Internet on computers at home, and that percentage widens when looking just at African American or Latino families.
To be sure, 10-15 percent of San Franciscans is a small proportion. But percentages can be deceiving, as that translates to some 80,000 people who don’t have home access to broadband.
And as the city slowly builds new wireless solutions to help everyone connect to the web, a nonprofit group, the Mission Economic Development Agency, is working to expressly help families in the Mission connect online.
They’re working one by one, family by family.
CONNECTING TO SCHOOL
Like Zuckerberg, Nixon Sandoval and his family live near Dolores Park. That is where their commonalities end. The Facebook CEO built his empire online, but up until a few months ago, Sandoval and his family could not connect to the Internet at home.
Sandoval is a jovial guy, quick to smile. It’s easy to see why, as he is blessed with two equally sweet daughters, Gabrielle, 11, and Gisselle, 9, and his wife, Jaqueline. As soon as we stopped by, she swooped in with cake and Salvadoran strawberry juice she seemingly whipped up from thin air.
In 2012, Sandoval was in his 12th year working for State Farm Insurance, just before they laid off thousands of workers, including Sandoval. He had a rough time of it, having never been laid off before. His wife took care of the family, and eventually he bounced back. Now, he drives a taxi in the city, but the taxi industry is also going through a rough patch, and the family of four counts every penny.
Signing up for Internet seemed like a luxury they could not afford. The first time they tried it, this year, they had to make sacrifices.
“I was worried about the monthly payment,” Sandoval told us. “When I found out from AT&T that it was going to be $48 a month, I switched the policy on my car. I lowered the insurance to be just liability. I used to have full coverage.”
But even that didn’t help. After two months, Sandoval had to pull the plug. That’s when he met Leo Sosa, the Mission Economic Development Agency’s technology training coordinator.
Sosa hooked Sandoval up with an Internet plan through Comcast, part of a deal MEDA helped craft. The cable giant offers a $10 a month plan, with six months free, for residents who live within the Mission Promise Neighborhood, a section of the Mission targeted for aid by the federal government. The federal government funnels grant money straight to the Mission Economic Development Agency, which trains hundreds of local Mission residents in entrepreneurship skills, English, and digital literacy.
MEDA’s newest endeavor is signing folks up with the Internet, and it’s off to a fast start.
Since MEDA started the project in April 2013, it has connected 362 Mission Promise Neighborhood families to the Internet.
Families with children in specific schools are eligible: John O’Connell High School, SF International High, Cesar Chavez Elementary, Bryant Elementary, Everett Middle, George Moscone Elementary, Edison Charter Academy, and Marshall Elementary.
Some families may have Internet access through smart phones, but a July survey by the SFUSD shows less than 40 percent of Latino and black families have an Internet-enabled computer at home. The numbers are only slightly better for Asian families.
The problem, educators and advocates say, is smartphones aren’t enough to get an Internet-powered boost in school.
“It’s an incredibly adaptive use of technology to write a paper using a smartphone,” Richard Abisla, who has worked for three years at MEDA, told us, “but we don’t want there to be two classes of kids: ones with access to educational tools and ones without.”
Abisla worked to connect many of these families, aiming to give children better computer access. For Sandoval’s family, that’s already happening. The Internet and the subsequent computer he bought help his kids write their homework at home, and he said their grades have started to improve.
“We just started!” Gabrielle told us, excited to use computers in school for the first time. “We’re going to do our work and use our flash drive, and take it home to finish.”
This is the nature of school today: Those with Internet-connected computers can connect to the world’s knowledge, those without are in an information blackout. And how you connect to the Internet dictates what information you seek. Surveys from the CTEF show people connected to the Internet at home through computers, rather than phones, are more likely to seek government services (like health care), to take online classes, and to help their children research schoolwork.
Internet access through a computer, then, is a big lift to economic mobility. Until a few months ago, the Sandoval sisters would not have had that luxury, a clear scholarly disadvantage.
Gabrielle pulled up a YouTube video explaining PEMDAS: Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction, the order of mathematical operations. Gabrielle told us the teachers on YouTube sometimes explain things in a way her teachers at school may have missed, and the videos also let her get a jump on lessons to help prepare her for what’s to come.
And we couldn’t help but smile as she and her younger sister explained how Giselle learned spelling by Googling different animals, then tallying the number of vowels and consonants in a word puzzle for school.
Word to the wise: Giselle really loves koalas. “We researched what they eat, and what they do,” she said, though she didn’t remember the word eucalyptus. She scrunched her tiny face as she tried to remember the word, recalling, “They eat…plants?”
They now access the Internet at home mainly through an iPad. But we would not do our journalistic duty if we did not ask the girls to level with us. Honestly, we asked, “Why did you want the tablet?”
“Games!” the two sisters shouted, smiling, before launching into a treatise on a fashion app that would put scholarly papers to shame.
The Sandoval family and many others in the Mission are connected thanks to MEDA, but the effort to help others in San Francisco do the same is far from over.
WIRING THE CITY
Fiber optic cables are remarkably advanced examples of technology. Strands of glass the thickness of human hair beam pulses of light carrying digital information across miles, all under the cement we walk on. San Francisco’s city-owned high-speed fiber optic network has long delivered Internet to City Hall, police stations, firefighters, and other local government agencies.
Now, the pulses of light will deliver the net to our parks, and other city residents, in new projects set to be completed in the next few months by the city’s Department of Technology.
As spokesperson Ron Vinson is quick to point out, there is now free city-provided wifi access all along Market Street.
“Market Street was a focus because we have residential units, nonprofits, small businesses, banks and corporations, the homeless and people just recreating, and tourists,” Vinson told the Guardian. “It’s the full gamut of everyone in SF.”
Vinson admits there are gaps in the city’s service at this point, but he has much hope that they can be bridged. In the coming months, San Francisco will complete its newest city survey, in which the Department of Technology hopes to zero in on remaining San Franciscans without Internet access.
The agency has already made much progress. Through partnerships with single room occupancy hotels, elder care homes, and other neighborhood hubs, many low-income San Franciscans are now web-connected, thanks to the city.
The technology department’s newest project has Vinson talking like a giddy tech geek.
“We’ve got a five megabit upload and download coming,” he said, of the city’s newest project: connecting city parks to wifi. More than 30 of San Francisco’s green spaces will now be connected to the web, a project that should be finalized in the next few months.
“Especially in the park, man, you have kids taking photos and families using their tablets and the whatnot, but now they don’t have to use those expensive data plans,” he said.
Its also a boon to the homeless and anyone who is out in a public park using wifi. Though Golden Gate Park will not be one of the connected green spaces, Vinson said, because “that’s a project in itself, with its own complex topography.”
That aside, the park wifi “benefits everyone,” he said. “Until the day when everyone can get online, we won’t stop.”
Vinson is thankful for MEDA, which he’s worked with for 15 years, because the nonprofit’s employees feel much the same way.
“I remember showing someone Yahoo for the first time,” Abisla told the Guardian. “I said type whatever you want. People say ‘What do you mean?’ We’re going over searching in the browser. I say, ‘Name a celebrity.’ They say ‘Britney Spears,’ I say fair enough. Then a search comes back and there’s writing about her in Spanish.”
“People really realize, wow, I can look up anything in the world.”
Although there are five seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors up for reelection this fall, incumbents face few contenders with the requisite cash and political juice needed to mount a serious challenge. The one race that has stirred interest among local politicos is the bid to represent District 10, the rapidly changing southeastern corner of San Francisco that spans the Bayview, Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, Dogpatch, and Potrero Hill neighborhoods.
Sup. Malia Cohen, who narrowly beat an array of more than a dozen candidates in 2010, has raised way more money than her best-funded opponent, progressive neighborhood activist Tony Kelly, who garnered 2,095 first-place votes in the last D10 race, slightly more than Cohen’s, before the final outcome was determined by ranked-choice voting tallies.
For the upcoming Nov. 4 election, Cohen has received $242,225 in contributions, compared with Kelly’s $42,135, campaign finance records show. But Kelly, who collected the 1,000 signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot and qualified for public financing, has secured key progressive endorsements, including former Mayor Art Agnos, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Sups. David Campos and John Avalos, and the Potrero Hill Democratic Club.
Others who’ve filed to run for this office include Marlene Tran, a retired educator who has strong ties to families in the district, especially in Visitacion Valley, through her teaching and language-access programs (she’s known by kids as “Teacher Tran”); Shawn Richard, the founder of a nonprofit organization that offers workshops for youth to prevent gun violence; and Ed Donaldson, who was born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point and works on economic development issues. DeBray Carptenter, an activist who has weighed in on police violence, is running as a write-in candidate.
But the outcome in this dynamic district could be determined by more than campaign cash or political endorsements. That’s because the D10 supervisor faces the unique, unenviable challenge of taking on some of the city’s most intractable problems, which have disproportionately plagued this rapidly changing district.
Longstanding challenges, such as a high unemployment and crime rates, public health concerns, social displacement, and poor air quality, have plagued D10 for years. But now, fast-growing D10 is becoming a microcosm for how San Francisco resolves its growing pains and balances the interests of capital and community.
MIX OF CHALLENGES
While candidate forums and questionnaires tend to gauge political hopefuls on where they draw the line on citywide policy debates, such as Google bus stops or fees for Sunday parking meters, neighborhood issues facing D10 have particularly high stakes for area residents.
While other supervisors represent neighborhoods where multiple transit lines crisscross through in a rainbow of route markers on Muni maps, D10 is notoriously underserved by public transit. The high concentration of industrial land uses created major public health concerns. A Department of Public Health study from 2006 determined that Bayview Hunters Point residents were making more hospital visits on average than people residing in other San Francisco neighborhoods, especially for asthma and congestive heart failure.
Unemployment in D-10 hovers near 12 percent, triple the citywide average of 4 percent. Cohen told us efforts are being made on this front, noting that $3 million had been invested in the Third Street corridor to assist merchants with loans and façade improvements, and that programs were underway to connect residents with health care and hospitality jobs, as well as service industry jobs.
“The mantra is that the needle hasn’t moved at all,” Cohen noted, but she said things are getting better. “We are moving in the same downward trend with regard to unemployment.”
Nevertheless, the high unemployment is also linked with health problems, food insecurity — and violence. In recent months, D10 has come into the spotlight due to tragic incidents of gun violence. From the start of this year to Sept. 8, there were 13 homicides in D10.
Fourth of July weekend was particularly deadly in the Bayview and D10 public housing complexes, with four fatal shootings. Cohen responded with a press conference to announce her plan to convene a task force addressing the problem, telling us it will be “focused on preventing gun violence rather than reacting to it.”
The idea, she said, is to bring in expert stakeholders who hadn’t met about this topic before, including mental-health experts and those working with at-risk youth.
“I think we need to go deeper” than in previous efforts, Cohen said, dismissing past attempts as superficial fixes.
But Cohen’s task force plan quickly drew criticism from political opponents and other critics, including Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, who dismissed it as empty rhetoric.
“How many people are cool with yet another task force?” Kelly said in a press statement challenging the move. “We can’t wait any longer to stem the deadly tide of violence in District 10. Supervisor Cohen’s task force won’t even propose solutions till 2017. We can’t wait that long.”
Kelly told us he’s formulated a five-point plan to tackle gun violence, explaining that it involved calling for a $10 million budget supplemental to bolster family services, reentry programs, job placement, and summer activities aimed at addressing poverty and service gaps. Kelly also said he’d push for a greater emphasis on community policing, with officers walking a beat instead of remaining inside a vehicle.
“How do you know $10 million is enough?” Cohen responded. “When you hear critics say $10 million, there is no way to indicate whether we’d need more or less.” She also took issue with the contention that her task force wouldn’t reach a solution soon enough, saying, “I never put a timeline on the task force.”
Cohen also said she wanted to get a better sense of where all of the past funding had gone that was supposed to have alleviated gun violence. “We’ve spent a lot of money — millions — and one of the things I am interested in doing is to do an audit about the finances,” she said.
She also wants to explore a partnership with the Guardian Angels, community volunteers who conduct safety patrols, to supplement policing. Cohen was dismissive of her critics. “Tony was not talking about black issues before this,” she said. “He hasn’t done one [gun] buyback. There’s no depth to what any of these critics are saying.”
Tran, who spoke with the Guardian at length, said she’d started trying to address rampant crime in Visitacion Valley 25 years ago and said more needs to be done to respond to recent shootings.
“There was no real method for the sizable non-English speaking victims to make reports then,” Tran wrote in a blog post, going on to say that she’d ensured materials were translated to Chinese languages to facilitate communication with the Police Department. “When more and more residents became ‘eyes and ears’ of law enforcement, community safety improved,” she said.
Richard, whose Brothers Against Guns has been working with youth for 20 years and organizing events such as midnight basketball games, said he opposed Cohen’s task force because it won’t arrive at a solution quickly enough. He said he thought a plan should be crafted along with youth advocates, law enforcement, juvenile and adult probation officers, and clergy members to come up with a solution that would bolster youth employment opportunities.
“I’ve talked with all 13 families” that lost young people to shootings this year, Richard said, and that he attended each of the funerals.
CHANGING NEIGHBORHOOD
Standing outside the Potrero Terrace public housing complex at 25th and Connecticut streets on a recent sunny afternoon, Kelly was flanked by affordable housing advocates clutching red-and-yellow “Tony Kelly for District Supervisor” campaign signs. The press conference had been called to unveil his campaign plan to bolster affordable housing in D10.
Pointing out that Cohen had voted “no endorsement” at the Democratic County Central Committee on Proposition G — the measure that would tax property-flipping to discourage real estate speculation and evictions — Kelly said, “This is not a time to be silent.”
While Cohen had accepted checks from landlords who appeared on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s list of worst offenders for carrying out Ellis Act evictions, Kelly said he’s pledged not to accept any funding from developers or Ellis Act evictors. Asked if any had offered, Kelly responded, “Some. They’re not knocking down my door.”
Cohen told us that she hadn’t supported Prop. G, a top priority for affordable housing advocates, because she objected to certain technical provisions that could harm small property owners in her district. As for the contributions from Ellis Act evictors, she said the checks had been returned once the error was discovered. Her formal policy, she said, is not to intentionally take money from anyone involved in an Ellis Act eviction.
Speaking outside Potrero Terrace, Kelly said he thought all housing projects built on public land should make at least one-third of their units affordable to most San Franciscans. He also said renovation of public housing projects could be accelerated if the city loaned out money from its $19 billion employee retirement fund. Under the current system, funding for those improvements is leveraged by private capital.
Mold, pests, and even leaking sewage are well-documented problems in public housing. Dorothy Minkins, a public housing resident who joined Kelly and the others, told us that she’s been waiting for years for rotting sheetrock to be replaced by the Housing Authority, adding that water damage from her second-floor bathroom has left a hole in the ceiling of her living room. She related a joke she’d heard from a neighbor awaiting similar repairs: “He said, Christ will come before they come to fix my place.”
Lack of affordable housing is a sweeping trend throughout San Francisco, but it presents a unique challenge in D10, where incomes are lower on average (the notable exceptions are in Potrero Hill, dotted with fine residential properties overlooking the city that would easily fetch millions, and Dogpatch, where sleek new condominium dwellings often house commuters working at tech and biotech firms in the South Bay).
Home sale prices in the Bayview shot up 59 percent in two years, prompting the San Francisco Business Times to deem it “a hot real estate market adorned with bidding wars and offers way above asking prices.”
One single-family home even sold for $1.3 million. Historically, the Bayview has been an economically depressed, working-class area with a high rate of home ownership due to the affordability of housing — but that’s been impacted by foreclosures in recent years, fueling displacement.
Although statistics from the Eviction Defense Collaborative show that evictions did occur in the Bayview in 2013, particularly impacting African Americans and single-parent households, Cohen noted that evictions aren’t happening in D10 with the same frequency as in the Tenderloin or the Mission.
“When it comes to communities of color in the southeast, it’s about foreclosure or mismanagement of funds,” explained Cohen.
She said that a financial counseling services center had opened on Evans Street to assist people who are facing foreclosure, and added that she thought more should be done to market newly constructed affordable units to communities in need.
“There’s an error in how they’re marketing,” she said, because the opportunities are too often missed.
But critics say more is needed to prevent the neighborhood from undergoing a major transformation without input from residents.
“This district is being transformed,” Richard said. “A lot of folks are moving out — they’re moving to Vallejo, Antioch, Pittsburg. They don’t want to deal with the issues, and the violence, and the cost.”
At the same time, he noted, developers are flocking to the area, which has a great deal more undeveloped land than in other parts of the city.
“The community has no one they can turn to who will hold these developers accountable,” he said. “If the community doesn’t have a stake in it, then who’s winning?”
Heavens to Betsy! An earthquake hit wine country, and the upper-middle class are dealing with spilled rivers of their favorite cabernet. While everyone scrambles to pack their earthquake survival kits, we have a few suggestions to go alongside your trail mix and water bottles:
Whiskey (because blackouts are boring)
Brass knuckles (defend your powerless Macbooks)
Condoms (again, blackouts are boring)
Gas masks (for the inevitable Ferguson-like police response to looting)
Hand-crank portable generator (how else to power that iPhone for earthquake Facebook updates?)
Feather boa and MDMA (San Francisco at a standstill is essentially Burning Man + drag show)
Two of the world’s most acclaimed military bands, the 1st Battalion Pipes and Drums Scots Guards, and the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing Band, will be setting the tone at Pleasanton’s 149th Scottish Highland Gathering and Games this weekend. (The tone will involve lots of bagpipes.) The event also features the brawn of the 40th US Invitational Heavy Event Championship, and the grace of the Western US Open Highland Dancing Championship. Plus, it goes without saying, enough living-history re-enactments to satisfy even the most diehard Outlander fan. www.thescottishgames.com
BURNING MAN PILE-ON
We seem to have tapped into the meme of the moment with last week’s cover story, “Burning Man jumps the shark.” The SF Weekly also had a Burning Man cover story, a more uncritical piece written by an event insider that nonetheless slammed the organization’s deceptive transition to nonprofit status. The same day, The New York Times published “A Line is Drawn in the Desert,” a scathing indictment of how rich, clueless tech titans an undermining the event’s stated “Participation” and “Radical Self-Reliance” principles. And the on-playa publication BRC Weekly threw several great articles onto the pile-on, including the searing satire “Ten Principles of Earning Man.” Meanwhile, Burners could have been dodging actual fish, as the playa was flooded with rain at the start of the festival, and entrance gates were closed for a day.
GOOGLED OUT
Activists blockaded a Google bus in April to cry foul over an eviction initiated by a Google employee, lawyer Jack Halprin, who’s using the Ellis Act to clear tenants from a seven-unit building he owns in the Mission District. Claudia Tirado, a third-grade teacher, is one of the tenants about to be forced out. She made an appearance at Google’s I/O Conference to try and enlist the tech giant’s help, but according to an interview posted on Mission Local, her search yielded no results. Tirado said she got word back from Google that the company won’t be doing anything to intervene.
NERD FEMINIST RETURNS
San Francisco based video game critic Anita Sarkeesian is back with a new video showcasing the industry’s awful treatment of women (surprised?) in “Women as Background Decoration (Part 2).” She defines the background women trope as video games showing women whose “sexuality and victimhood is exploited as a way to infuse edgy, gritty, or racy flavoring into game worlds, designed to titillate male players.” Trigger warning: the video shows many minutes of women mutilated, raped, and otherwise killed in grittily gruesome ways. You know, because X-box and Playstation games are “mature” nowadays. Can’t we all just play Tetris?
BOOTS FREAKS FOX
Local Bay Area artist Boots Riley is known for his radical activism and his penchant for fighting entrenched political power. Cleveland’s local Fox News affiliate apparently didn’t get that message, however, when they asked him onto their show last week before his group, The Coup, jammed for a local music fest. On air, he told Fox “we’re a punk, funk slash communist revolution from Oakland, California. We make everyone dance while telling them about…how exploitation is the primary contradiction in capitalism.” As he spoke, the Fox hosts looked at each other with increasing worry. Afterwards, the Fox anchor ripped into the festival’s organizers, saying the segment wasn’t the time for Riley to “go on a political rant” and that it hurt “the station’s credibility, and the festival’s.” The organizers shook it off, and so did Riley, reminiscing that it wasn’t a surprise to hear the corporate capitalist media rattled by the truth.
HOT CLAWFEE
The claws might come out, as the Bay Area is about to see dueling cat cafes open this fall — Cat Town in Oakland (www.cattownoakland.org/cat-town-café) and KitTea in SF (www.kitteasf.com). Just kidding: As the wildly popular Japanese trend has shown, there’s plenty of room for spaces where people can come play with cats in need of love and adoption while enjoying a latte.
REDEMPTION SONG
Ms. Lauryn Hill, she of difficult off-stage antics but usually on-point politics, released a new recording of her song “Black Rage” last week, in dedication to Michael Brown. With couplets like “Threatening your freedom / to stop your complaining / poisoning your water / while they say it’s raining,” the sing-songy tune — modeled on The Sound of Music‘s “My Favorite Things” — has been in Hill’s live repertoire for a while, but takes on especially heavy meaning in the context of the recent police brutality in Ferguson, Mo.
The Coup‘s new multimedia project Shadowbox was at least partially inspired by bandleader/MC Boots Riley’s experience walking into a Theater Artaud performance as a child. The performance was a treatise on AIDS, but Riley was more frightened than enlightened by the giant sets and writhing actors around him. Its influence on Shadowbox primarily manifested itself in the sheer scale of the project — three stages, eight performers, artwork on all sides. It’s thus fitting that I walked into the world premiere of Shadowbox at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts feeling overwhelmed — and walked out of it very un-enlightened.
The audience was given a full 20 minutes before the performance to examine Jon-Paul Bail’s artwork. Drawn on massive posterboards that towered almost to the ceiling, Bail’s drawings depicted San Francisco in the midst of a class war. Skyscrapers were adorned with words like “GREED” and “SEX” alongside the names of big tech companies and startups (Google, Twitter, Uber). A Google bus was shown on fire, coasting between houses half-converted into cafes and foodie restaurants. Perhaps most poignant were the words “WE IN HERE” written on the top window of a house about to turn into an American Apparel.
It was an engrossing artwork, frequently affecting and certainly overwhelming. I still hadn’t fully digested it by the time the Coup appeared, pounding away at the riff to their recent cut “Gods of Science.” On a musical level, they couldn’t have opened their set with a better song; that song’s pounding, bludgeoning riff is every bit as angry and apocalyptic as Bail’s artwork. But as soon as Riley took the microphone, the show’s weak link made itself fully clear — his lyrics were barely understandable.
I suspect this mainly had to do with the mixing. When I saw the Coup perform at Outside Lands in 2008, I could understand most of the lyrics, and the band sounded crisp and clear. At Shadowbox, Riley struggled to fight back the wall of sound the band around him was creating. The sound guy also had trouble with the Coup’s various collaborators. The band’s cross-stage collaborations with Extra Action Marching Band and neo-classical quartet Classical Revolution were marred by at least one of the acts always sounding louder than the other. At one point, Riley had to literally implore the sound guy to turn up Snow Angel leader Gabby La La’s sitar. He didn’t seem to comply.
Whatever the cause, the incomprehensibility of Riley’s lyrics sent the exhibit into freefall. The audience had already seen Bail’s artwork, and without Riley’s lyrics grounding the performance, the political aspect of the show began to drift away. It’s a shame, because the anti-greed treatise of “Gods of Science” should have resonated with anyone still reeling from Bail’s work.
The songs the Coup performed at Shadowbox must have been selected for a reason, and perhaps they continued in a narrative arc that tied the show’s disparate polemics together. But without the help of Riley’s lyrics, the performance started to seem more like a live-band showcase assisted by a progression of seemingly unrelated political images — Palestinian flags here, drones there, Guantanamo Bay detainees dancing around over in that corner. By the second appearance of the Extra Action Marching Band, the politics had all but disappeared from the performance, and Shadowbox seemed like little more than a particularly raucous hip-hop show.
Anyone who knows the Coup’s songs shouldn’t have had this problem, leading me to suspect that Shadowbox is primarily geared towards hardcore Coup fans. But if this is the case, Riley is essentially preaching his political message to the choir — and he (or his sound guy) ought to rethink their approach if they want to enlighten anyone else.
In case you don’t stay tuned to the comings and goings of the fearful, hate-filled, how-is-this-a-real-thing-and-not-a-caricature-of-extreme-right-wing-lunacy shitshow that is the Westboro Baptist Church, your favorite homophobic nut jobs are in the Bay Area today to protest outside several tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more.
Why, you ask? Because of God. Because, according to the WBC, apparently riffing on the widespread success of hating “fags,” Jews, Muslims, and Obama, God has decided to also hate the media. Yes, that’s a new website for the WBC, one which details God’s fury toward the likes of Mark Zuckerberg (“a fag enabler, and a little cry baby in many respects”), Betty White (“famous for being an old whore”), Mother Jones (“Why not investigate your hatred of God?”), and Johnny Depp (a “proud adulterer” who — even worse — moved to France for a while).
But buried in the inner workings of this treasure trove of hate-mongering and Web 2.0 aesthetics is the real gem: The music. The Westboro Baptist Church is apparently employing people — or perhaps they’re volunteers? — to cover songs by current pop stars, with all the words changed to be about how God hates everyone. From a few listens, this does not seem to be just one dude sitting in his parents’ basement with ProTools for an hour before heading out to the latest picketing of a soldier’s funeral, either. Someone or a group of someones put a lot of effort into these things.
Sample lyric, from the bridge of their parody of Lorde’s “Royals”:
Cuz every song you sing’s bare-teeth, ragin, sinnin’ in the bedroom / Bloodlust, scoffin’, trashin’ your Creator / You don’t care; you’re really bad-asses in your dreams /But in reality Christ will payback, comin’ in the clouds He’ll / set His throne, then mockers will be screeching /”It ain’t fair!”… we’ll be caught up with Him in the air.
Catchy, right?!
Because the audio player on their website is a little wonky (Internet technology in general: barely tolerated by God?), let’s listen to a few of these ditties right here, shall we? Oh, and if you want to catch these fine folks at their protests today, there’s still time to catch them outside the headquarters of the demonic End of Times symbols known as Pinterest and Reddit.
Here’s their take on Katy Perry’s “Roar”:
And here’s Rihanna and Eminem, if they were both vengeful, science-hating lunatics:
Needs no introduction:
And there are plenty more where that came from. Including the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. I had to hit stop on the Beatles ones within 30 seconds. Look around at your own risk? I’m sorry.
Tammie Jean Bellinger had been unemployed for 14 years, and when she was 48, she decided to enter the tech industry. “My son told me that if I wanted to start my life over, I should do it in San Francisco,” Bellinger said. “He said no one would notice my age, or anything about me.”
She’s Hispanic, Native American, a little bit Ashkenazi, and female. That doesn’t sound like the tech industry, where data illustrates the lack of workforce diversity. Between 60 and 70 percent of employees at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo are men, while 91 percent of U.S. employees at Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are white and Asian.
Bellinger, however, wasn’t setting her sights on the software or programming sectors but rather biotech, where female representation in major companies like Genentech is now over 50 percent, according to Fortune. In 2010, women held 46 percent of all positions in the biological and life sciences. A far cry from the frat boy image often associated with tech, things are different in the science-based field that tinkers with the building blocks of life.
First, though, Bellinger needed a way in. She found it at City College of San Francisco’s Bridge to Bio program, which accepts students who have no prior background in science. And it’s affordable. In-state students pay $46 per unit at City College, far below the $3,000 price tag for a full semester at San Francisco State University. Bellinger found herself learning alongside an eclectic mix of former school bus drivers, cooks, ballerinas, and bartenders. Many were female, people of color, and over 30.
Before long, Bellinger found herself completing internships in science labs where she cataloged human tissue, urine, and blood samples for cancer research.
“I know it sounds stupid, but a light bulb went off. My whole family has been affected by cancer,” Bellinger said. “I’ve been that family member. The doctor is on the other side, and there’s nothing you can do. I just hope that the person reading the tissue has as much passion as I do. That’s all I want.”
FUTURE SCIENTISTS
When Bellinger went to look for jobs, she was concerned about her age, but her worries vanished when she was offered a lab tech position at Genomic Health. “Biotech is different. Pretty much all … the recruiters are all women,” she said. “My knowledge is all new. If I talk the talk, and walk the walk, and it’s all updated, they’ll take me in.”
But even now, she has trouble seeing herself as a scientist. “I feel like an artist,” she said. “If you can stain a perfect nuclei and bring that cell to life when they’re performing cancer treatment, that’s kind of an art. The tissues come alive. They tell a story.”
Bellinger wants all young girls to see themselves as future scientists. This September, she’s going to start a program called Tech Bridge for those in the Livermore area. With a coral reef she built with her son, she’ll teach the Livermore Girl Scouts how to test water and play around with nitrates.
Tech Bridge is mirrored after Nexgene Girls, launched by Bridge to Bio graduates Jeanette Wright and Marlena Jackson. Through Nexgene Girls, young girls in Bayview-Hunters Point complete internships where they work alongside professional scientists and conduct their own experiments, like extracting DNA from bacteria in the salt marshes of Heron’s Head Park. By 2015, Nexgene Girls is looking to take a science field trip to Botswana.
Before Jackson became a scientist, she drove a school bus. In Hunters Point, where she grew up, breast cancer rates among women under age 50 are twice above average.
“I looked around and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do more’,” Jackson said. “You look around at the divisions in Bayview Hunters Point, and science seems like a way you can really change the community. My mother survived breast and cervical cancer. I know the power of medicine.”
After graduating from Bridge to Bio, Jackson got a job at Genentech in 2006. At that time, there weren’t many African Americans employed by the company. “I looked around, and I realized there weren’t many women that even looked like me,” she said. “That was how I started thinking about how I could go and give back to my community. I wanted to inspire young women to see themselves differently.”
Now, when young girls complete NexGene Girls programs, Jackson said, they have a different perception of what a scientist looks like. “They come in with the perception that a scientist is a guy, and he’s white,” Jackson said. “But when they’re done, and they’re asked to draw a scientist, they draw a girl. They’re not even drawing a woman. They’re drawing themselves.”
While Nexgene Girls focuses on inspiring young girls, another women-led biotech organization in the Bay Area — part of a larger, national network — is Women in Bio. For them, the mission is not to introduce more women to biology-related fields, where women already make up a substantial percentage of the workforce, but to bring females to leadership positions. Of the 18 Bay Area life sciences companies that had gone public since the start of 2012, women made up only 12 of the 129 board posts. Ten of the companies have no women on their boards.
Chris Meda, now CEO of medicine consulting firm RxDxLink and the chair of the San Francisco Chapter of Women in Bio, found herself struggling to find female mentors when she entered the industry 30 years ago. “If you look at my resume, you can see how many companies I’ve worked for. I wasn’t willing to wait around. If they didn’t want to give me the opportunity, I would find someone that would,” she said.
Now, her mission is to mentor young women through Women in Bio, which also runs monthly programs including workshops to help women network, start their own companies, and gain technical skills.
CURIOSITY AND GLOWING PLANTS
Others, like Sunny Allen, have found their bridge to biology outside of the industry and within DIY bio hackerspaces, like BioCurious in Sunnyvale. That’s where Allen learned how to make algae glow in the dark.
“I’m the poster child for the kind of girl all these STEM programs are trying to reach,” said Allen, who grew up in Kentucky. “In the seventh grade, I fell in love with the micro-science world. I wanted to be a marine biologist. I applied for this magnet school for high school. I got in. But then I hit a wall. I got kicked out of the program, and I thought, ‘This is too hard for me. I can’t do it.'”
Later, she fell for a programmer and followed him to the Bay Area, where she felt alienated by the male “brogrammer” culture. “You have guys making six figures and taking Adderall to see who can code the most,” Allen said. “And they have these girlfriends who aren’t programmers, because most girls aren’t programmers. Suddenly there’s this imbalance of power. Women take care of them like infants. They’re like coding monkeys.”
But at BioCurious, she said, it was different. “Out there, I finally felt like I could do something. Biology is accessible tech for women,” she said. “For me, what really happened was that a lot of succeeding in biology is not dependent on being able to do the problem sets, like the physics and the math, but a lot of it is reading comprehension. I could get in.”
She soon launched Biomonstaaar, an open source bioreactor project (a bioreactor is an engineered system that supports a biological environment). She now lives in a hacker house in Sunnyvale and has big dreams of escaping the service industry through the world of robotic sex toys. Indeed, she’s now the creative director of a yet-to-be-named robotic sex toy company with a launch date three weeks away and a crowdsourcing campaign on the horizon. She’s in charge of testing the sex toy, and critiquing it. The other two scientists involved are men.
“They needed a woman’s touch,” she said.
This robotic sex toy is like a vibrator that knows exactly what the user wants: It senses pressure and motion, and then reacts to it. After trying out the prototype, Allen wrote to other scientists involved, “Congratulations, we’ve invented a new kind of sex.”
Jihyun Moon is another female scientist who found her place in biology through DIY bio roots. When Moon saw an advertisement calling for scientists who might like to help make a glowing plant, she signed up.
Now, she works at the Glowing Plant Project, a controversial endeavor that uses synthetic biology with DNA laser printing to create plants that glow in the dark. The project raised more than $450,000 on Kickstarter and drew national media coverage, becoming the focal point of a debate over DNA modification. The bioengineered plants are expected to ship later this year. “I’m the scientist here,” Moon proclaimed from her lab in SoMa. “I make DNA.” Her job is to take the enzyme genes from fireflies and marine bacteria, and put those pieces of DNA into plants.
Moon says that as far as she’s concerned, DIY bio is the gateway to biology. For other women, biology is the door to biotech. And that’s the door to a whole lot else.
Schools of suit-clad professionals stream up city sidewalks in San Francisco’s Financial District during the typical morning migration to the office. Near the intersection of Sutter and Montgomery streets, one line of immigrant workers stands still as they wait to submit paperwork in hopes of permanently joining the commuting throngs.
Cox & Kings Global Services, where documents of the Bay Area’s new wave of workers are processed and filed, has a queue stretching down the block to a nearby coffee shop most mornings. Workers from India go here to submit their visas, and their numbers have exploded lately.
As the greater Bay Area’s technology sector has boomed, so has its Indian population. This influx is linked to tech’s practice of employing foreign-born workers, mostly from India and China, using H-1B work visas that are usually valid for six years with the possibility of extensions and eventually citizenship.
“You’re seeing this across the US as tech aggressively pursues immigrants to work here,” Todd Schulte, executive director of FWD.us, told the Bay Guardian. “You even see this in the Bay Area.”
FWD.us advocates for immigration reform on behalf of the tech industry to make it easier for employers to bring foreign workers into the US. It was created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as his first foray into political lobbying. The move has led skeptics to ask an age-old question with a new spin: Are low-cost foreign workers depressing American workers’ wages? Are they occupying jobs an American labor force could have instead?
Although immigration reform is high on the list of priorities for tech companies, they’re spearheading ways to widen the temporary worker visa program without addressing the complicated issues raised by importing more tech-trained workers from lower-wage countries.
A foreign worker in the tech industry certainly does not suffer the same instability as a low-wage immigrant employee who lacks higher education and technical training. But studies show that the pathway to citizenship created by the specialized H-1B workers’ visa program isn’t guaranteed, presenting challenges for all involved.
Click map for a larger version.
H-1B visas are technically known as “nonimmigrant visas,” indicating the workers aren’t expected to remain here permanently. So while American citizens are made to compete for jobs with those foreign workers who usually earn less, nonimmigrant workers encounter high barriers to obtaining the security of citizenship.
For now, the tech companies gaining low-cost workers seem to be the main beneficiaries of this skewed system.
GOLDEN HANDCUFFS
First came the boom. Tech jobs were less than 1 percent of San Francisco private sector employment in 1990, but now make up nearly 8 percent of the city’s private sector jobs, according to research by urban development nonprofit SPUR. The tech boom coincided with a population boom of Indian and Chinese workers, temporary visa holders who may or may not seek permanent US citizenship.
San Francisco saw more than 8,000 nonimmigrant visa applications in the 2012-13 filing year, according to MyVisaJobs.com, which assembles reports on nonimmigrant visas. Employers in the Bay Area as a whole, including San Francisco and Silicon Valley, filed over 29,000 applications for H-1B visa holders. The majority of those workers are from India, and to a lesser extent, China, according to data from the US Department of Consular Affairs.
The H-1B is the golden ticket for foreign workers to work in the US, and the center of much of the controversy. An employer sponsors the worker under an H-1B, tying that workers’ ability to live in the US to the employer. More importantly, the workers’ permanent residence process — and becoming a US citizen — is also tied to that employer.
So not only is nonimmigrant workers’ presence in the US in the hands of the people signing their paychecks, but so is their potential citizenship, creating an imbalance of power.
“[Workers] have the legal right to leave the employer, but don’t dare do so because they would have to start the very lengthy green card process all over again,” Norm Matloff, a UC Davis professor and researcher with the Economic Policy Institute, told the Guardian. “Note that we’re talking about the mainstream American companies and startups.”
Standing in line back at Cox & Kings on Sutter, the Guardian spent a few days speaking to various Indian technology workers as they finished filing their paperwork. None were willing to speak on the record due to their tenuous citizenship status, fearing employer reprisal. But these workers did confirm to the Guardian that their employers effectively hold a huge hammer over their heads: deportation.
What do employers have to gain with this sizable leverage? A paper by Ron Hira, “Bridge to Immigration or Cheap Temporary Labor?” catalogued systemic underpayment of foreign workers, sometimes by as much as 25 percent less than their US counterparts. Of course, the pay is handsome in Silicon Valley, even when taking a hit compared to US citizen peers. The average salary of an H-1B visa worker is $99,000, according to MyVisaJobs.com.
“H-1B rules place most of the power in the hands of the employer at the expense of the guest worker,” Hira wrote, “creating sizeable opportunities for exploitation … many have described this employment relationship as indentured servitude.”
This is done legally, the study found, because of substantial loopholes in federal labor and guest worker laws.
We asked Matloff if it was possible to measure the impact of depressed nonimmigrant Silicon Valley workers’ wages on the overall wages of the Bay Area, and we were told this would be “very hard to quantify.” But his research leads him to believe tech worker wages in the Bay Area are depressed as a result of nonimmigrant visas.
The nonimmigrant visa workers wear what Matloff calls golden handcuffs: under the thumb of their employers, but perhaps comfortably so. And all of this would be worth it for them, if the visa-holders could stay in the United States.
Uncritically, the tech industry is going to great lengths to defend its ability to hire nonimmigrant workers, who are cheaper than their citizen counterparts.
QUESTIONABLE ADVOCACY
Rishi Misra came to the US for college, and pushed his way through startups and biotechnology companies. Now he works at Archimedes Clinical Analytics, located in the South of Market area. He still is not, as of yet, a US citizen.
“My wait to become a US permanent resident continues, more than 16 years after I first came to this country as an undergraduate student,” Misra wrote in a FWD.us testimonial, “more than 10 years after I started working, paying taxes, and more recently, helping build start-ups that are making a positive impact on the US economy and society.”
Misra’s struggle for citizenship mirrors Hira’s study on H-1B visa holders. “A nonimmigrant visa can be an important first step toward permanent residence for many skilled foreign workers,” Hira wrote. “But most never make it.”
The federal government doesn’t keep explicit conversion numbers of temporary work visas to permanent residency, we learned after contacting the Department of Labor and the USCIS. But Hira’s study estimates that only 1-5 percent of H-1B visa holding temporary workers gain citizenship status.
To be sure, there are some exceptions in the tech community. Google and Microsoft historically have sought to assist most of their immigrant employees in gaining full residency, while Cisco and others have only converted about a quarter.
But many tech companies outsource work to offshore firms, often based in India, and federal data shows they employ the most H-1B visa holders, and offer citizenship the least often. Still, as they also fight for permanent residency, advocacy groups focus on bringing in H-1B workers in greater numbers.
According to the government transparency group Open Secrets, FWD.us put as much as $900,000 to the cause of trying to open the door for high-talent tech workers like Misra, here in San Francisco, but not necessarily towards reforming workplace rights.
The tech companies claim there’s a technology employee shortage, but Matloff and the Economic Policy Institute strongly disagree, saying no study that wasn’t sponsored by the tech industry has ever demonstrated a US tech worker shortage. But what can’t be argued is the swelling number of nonimmigrant workers vying for a spot in the US. The cap for new nonimmigrant visas is currently set at 65,000 by the federal government. In only the past two years, applications for those slots filled up in less than five days from the filing date.
It is on behalf of tech companies that want to hire those nonimmigrant workers that FWD.us brought thousands of dollars to bear against key progressive causes.
FWD.us, led by Zuckerberg and a cadre of tech cohorts, has come under fire for much of its advocacy. Notably, the group supported national Republicans’ efforts to build the Keystone XL pipeline, supplying them with ample support for TV ads.
The backlash from environmental groups, many of whom hail from the Bay Area, had the tech community and other supporters of FWD.us running for the hills.
“As a startup founder, former Senatorial intern, and director of an amateur documentary about racial inequality in public schools, I cannot tell you how excited I was to hear about Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us,” wrote Branch co-founder and CEO Josh Miller, in an editorial on Buzzfeed. “In service of noble causes, FWD.us is employing questionable lobbying techniques, misleading supporters, and not being transparent about the underlying values and long-term intentions of the organization.”
If ever there was a cause to unite tech workers and other progressive San Franciscans, it would be decrying Zuckerberg and FWD.us’ backing of massive oil pipelines on US soil. Many liberal political groups pulled their ads from Facebook after the Keystone XL ads aired.
Moving forward, Todd Schulte said FWD.us would need to change its strategies, after being handed decisive losses in Congress by Republicans blocking immigration reform. “We’re going to keep pushing,” Schulte told us. “One thing that we’ll do better is to make a broader coalition.”
But rules pertaining to depressing nonimmigrant worker wages aren’t on their agenda, and Schulte said this was not a problem in the tech industry. He claimed the cost would be too great to bring workers in from overseas and train them, simply to save a few dollars.
The workers we talked to told a different story.
IN LIMBO
The Guardian went back to the line at Cox & Kings, intent to check out Schulte’s stories of the glamour of nonimmigrant visa holders working in the tech industry. We asked a few folks in line what working for US tech companies under a nonimmigrant visa was like.
One man, clad in a lime green shirt with a messenger bag slung over his shoulder, had much to say. Not wanting to be named, again due to tenuous citizenship status, he wagged his finger in our face strongly with each point. Firstly, coming to the Bay Area for some Indians is a no-brainer, he said.
“The typical guy loves his vegetarian food and loves his [Hindu] temple,” the man told us. “They realize the Bay Area is not so different than home.”
But the man, who described himself as more affluent than the average nonimmigrant worker here (“My family owns temples in Bombay, plural!”), said he was often treated like a second class citizen in the US. He worked for tech companies in the past, and his brother works for a prominent and long-standing Bay Area tech company. His nephew works for a prominent Seattle-based tech company.
“There and [in India] it’s like a fucking sweatshop,” he said. “Some come here and they’re cheated!”
He was referring to the wage-fixing some US companies engage in. Matloff told us those most vulnerable to this practice were those seeking US citizenship. “The handcuffing is clearest in the case of those H-1Bs who are simultaneously being sponsored by their employers for green cards,” he said.
Those who did speak on the record about wage fixing were those who already achieved the dream: former H-1B workers who are now US citizens.
For ten years Manish Champsee was on the Board of Directors at WalkSF, a pedestrian advocacy group in the city. In his day job, he owns a web development company, after a long stint as an H-1B visa nonimmigrant tech worker.
A Canadian citizen, Champsee first flirted with computers in the fourth grade. The young Champsee taught himself programming in BASIC, a coding language. In college he strayed a bit, learning to be an actuary, but soon realized technology was his passion.
Ten years ago, he came to San Francisco on an H-1B as a systems programmer analyst, and experienced the golden handcuffs firsthand. At first, he didn’t realize the precarious position he was in, until he unwittingly angered one of his bosses.
“I started off thinking about it once in awhile. At a certain point I started thinking about it a lot more,” Champsee said. “I pissed off the wrong person in the company. It was a game of chicken.”
All of a sudden, the threat of restarting the citizenship process, or even deportation, entered his workday thoughts. His employers’ power over his future was suddenly very real.
“They can hold it over your head,” he said.
But he stuck it out. The day Champsee realized he wanted to be a US citizen, he was sitting in the natural beauty of Yosemite.
“I was camping a few days and did some hikes with a friend,” he said, and started thinking about all San Francisco had to offer. The walkability, the natural beauty, the charming local mom and pop stores, the food, and the people. “It all came together there.”
Champsee made it, and gained his citizenship in 2012. But despite all the tradeoffs the US has made in hiring swelling numbers of temporary workers, fewer are able to follow his path into citizenship.
“I am a survivor of the AIDS epidemic,” Daniel volunteered, beginning to tell us his very San Francisco story.
He was diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s. Working in fine dining rooms of San Francisco hotels at the time, he had health insurance, and had gone to Kaiser for an unrelated procedure. That led to a blood test — and then wham.
“They just bluntly, without any compassion, just told me: You have it,” Daniel said. “Like telling you that you have a pimple on your nose or something.”
All around him, friends were dying from the disease. “I didn’t freak out, because that’s just my personality,” he recalled. “I know a lot of people who have been diagnosed, and they want to take their lives or whatever.”
Today, he’s unemployed and living on a fixed income. He lost his left eye years ago to an infection linked to HIV; he now has a prosthetic eye.
“I’m single, disabled, and low-income,” reflected Daniel, who didn’t want his last name printed due to privacy concerns. Originally from El Salvador, his family came to the U.S. when he was 10 and Daniel has permanent resident status. But despite the disadvantages he faces, Daniel still isn’t freaking out. His medical needs are met.
He got on MediCal after having to drop Kaiser. “And then I ended up at SF General,” he said, “with some of the most professional staff, doctors rated worldwide. It has some of the most professional health care providers for HIV, all in one place.”
Daniel is one satisfied San Francisco General Hospital patient, and he might as well be a poster child for how public health is supposed to work in big cities. Rather than being deprived of primary care and then showing up at the emergency room with preventable complications stemming from his disease, he’s keeping everything in check with regular doctor’s visits — and he can access this high level of care even though he’s on a very tight budget.
There’s a concerted effort underway in the San Francisco Department of Public Health to give more patients precisely the kind of experience Daniel has had, while also expanding its role as the region’s go-to trauma center.
But a difficult and uncertain road lies ahead of that destination, shaped in part by federal health care reform. The new course is being charted amid looming financial uncertainty and with more patients expected to enter the system and the doors of SF General.
Not every General Hospital patient is as lucky as Daniel. For scores of others, SF General is the last stop after a long, rough ride.
EMERGENCY CARE
Craig Gordon and Dan Goepel drive an ambulance for the San Francisco Fire Department, regularly charging through congested city streets with sirens blaring as they rush patients to SF General and other care facilities. They see it all: Patients who are violent and psychotic and need to be restrained in the back of the ambulance, folks who’ve just suffered burns or gunshot wounds.
Sometimes, in the thick of all of this, SF General’s Emergency Department is closed to ambulances — in public safety lingo, it’s called being “on diversion” — so the medics will have to reroute to different hospitals.
SF General might go on diversion because the Emergency Department is too slammed to take on anyone new, or because it’s too short-staffed to take on new patients without pushing nurse-to-patient ratios to unsafe levels.
For serious trauma cases, strokes, heart attacks, or traumatic brain injuries, however, the doors are always open. Patients with less-serious cases are the ones to be turned away when the hospital is on diversion.
Patients who wind up en route to SF General in Gordon and Goepel’s ambulance might be living on the margins. “If you’re kind of living on the cusp … you’re not likely going to pursue getting a primary care physician,” Goepel pointed out. “When something comes up, then you find yourself in the emergency room.”
Or their patients might be getting rescued from a spectacularly awful situation, like a plane crash. In this densely populated, earthquake-prone region, there is only one top-level trauma center between Highway 92 and the Golden Gate Bridge: SF General. Anyone in the city or northern San Mateo County unfortunate enough to experience a life-threatening incident — a car wreck, shooting, nasty fall, boating accident — winds up there, regardless of whether they’re rich or poor, indigent or insured. Ranked as a Level 1 trauma center, SF General is equipped to provide the highest level of care.
“In the summer, when school is out, we have a high season of gunshot wounds and stab wounds,” explained Chief Nursing Officer Terri Dentoni, who recently led the Guardian on a tour of the Emergency Department. “When it’s really nice outside, you have a lot of people who get into bike accidents, car accidents. … Last week, we were just inundated with critical care patients.”
Around 100,000 patients flow through SF General’s doors each year, and more than 3,900 need trauma care. On July 6, 2013, when Asiana Airlines’ Flight 214 crash-landed at San Francisco International Airport, more than 60 crash victims were rushed to SF General with critical issues ranging from organ damage to spinal injuries.
“It was a very big tragedy,” Dentoni said. “But it was amazing how many people we took care of, and how well we took care of them.”
Aside from being the sole trauma center, SF General is also designated as the county’s safety-net hospital, making it the only healthcare option for thousands who are uninsured, poor, undocumented, homeless, or some combination thereof. This makes for complex cases. Patients might require translators, be locked in psychiatric episodes, or need a social worker to help them get to a medical respite facility after being discharged if they’re too weak to fend for themselves and don’t have anyplace to go. There isn’t always a place to send them off to.
“We’re seeing people who are dealing with poverty, and often homelessness, in addition to mental health issues,” explained Jason Negron, a registered nurse in the Emergency Department. “You’re seeing patients who often have a number of things going on. Someone who has multiple illnesses — HIV, heart failure, Hepatitis C — even under the best of circumstances, they would be juggling medications. So what happens when they’re out on the streets?”
San Francisco ranks high on the list of health-conscious cities, a haven for organic food aficionados, yoga addicts, and marathon runners. It’s also a world of high stakes struggles and mounting economic pressures. With the city’s skyrocketing cost of living, sudden job loss can spell disaster for someone without a financial cushion. SF General is the catchall medical care facility for anyone who’s slipped through the cracks.
But while rank-and-file hospital staff must tackle grueling day-to-day problems, like how to juggle multiple patients with complex health issues when all the beds are full and the hospital is understaffed, hospital administrators face an altogether different challenge.
For the past several years, the city’s Department of Public Health has been preparing for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, the federal policy that is reshaping the health care landscape. Since public hospitals are mandated to provide safety-net care, they are uniquely impacted by the ACA.
Even with a sweeping new rule mandating health insurance for all, some segment of the population will nevertheless remain uninsured. But they’ll still need medical care — and when health crises come up, they’ll turn to SF General. Trouble is, no one knows exactly how much funding will be available to meet that need as the financial picture shifts.
FUNDING CUTS LOOM
Even as ACA aims to increase access to medical care, it’s also going to trigger major funding cuts at the local level. With both state and federal funding being slashed, San Francisco’s county health system stands to lose $131 million in financial support over the next five years, a budgetary hit totaling around 16 percent.
That’s a significant shortfall that will directly impact SF General — but the cuts are being made with the expectation that these gaps will be filled by reimbursements riding in on the waves of newly insured patients enrolled in ACA. Before federal health care reform took effect, around 84,000 San Franciscans lacked health insurance. At the start of this year, 56,000 became eligible to enroll in a health insurance plan.
SF General serves most of the area’s MediCal patients, the subsidized plan for people living on less than $16,000 a year. And since the county gets reimbursed a flat rate for each patient, the expansion of MediCal under federal health care reform will presumably help San Francisco absorb the state and federal funding losses.
“There’s a certain set of patients who previously were not paid for, who now will have MediCal,” explained Ken Jacobs, an expert in health care policy and professor at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
But there’s a catch. Since MediCal and insured patients will be able to choose between San Francisco’s public system (called the San Francisco Health Plan) and a private medical provider, SF General also runs the risk of losing patients. If too many decide to go with Anthem Blue Cross instead, the system could veer into the red.
“There’s some question of what share of those we’ll keep,” Jacobs noted.
Asked about this, hospital CEO Sue Currin sounded a note of confidence. “Because our outcomes and our quality of care has been so high…75 percent of everyone who’s enrolled in MediCal managed care default to the Department of Public Health,” she told us.
But the journey toward ACA has only just begun, and things are still falling into place. Costs are projected to rise if nothing is done to improve efficiency, while at the same time, the pending state and federal funding shortfalls could take a toll.
Retaining and attracting insured patients is the only way to avoid a resource crunch — but patients could always walk away if they’re dissatisfied. This uncertainty “makes financial planning and management of risk even more challenging,” according to a report issued by the City Controller.
“We don’t know yet today how the Affordable Care Act will impact the safety net,” acknowledged Erica Murray, CEO of the California Association of Public Hospitals, which represents 21 public safety-net institutions throughout the state. “How are these health care systems evolving to be competitive? How do we continue to fulfill our core mission of being the safety net? That is the fundamental challenge. And we don’t know today, and we can’t be certain, that these public health systems will have sufficient funding.”
It’s all “very dynamic,” Murray said. “We don’t have sufficient data to be able to draw any definitive conclusions. It’s just too short of a time to be able to make any predictions. It will take several years.”
For all the newly insured patients under ACA, a certain segment will continue to rely on the safety net. Undocumented immigrants who don’t qualify will be left outside the system. Some individuals can be expected to outright refuse ACA enrollment, or be too incapacitated to do so. Others will opt out of Covered California, the ACA plan for people who make more than about $29,000 a year, because their budgets won’t stretch far enough to afford monthly payments even though they technically qualify. They’ll need safety-net care, too.
Yet under the new regime, “We can’t, as a safety net, go forward only with uninsured patients — because there won’t be funding to sustain the whole organization,” explained hospital spokesperson Rachael Kagan. “We will still have uninsured patients, always. But it won’t be sufficient to serve only them.”
Mike Wylie, a project manager in the Controller’s Office, worked on the city’s Health Reform Readiness project, an in-depth assessment performed in tandem with DPH and consultants. “The million dollar question is: Are we going to be on target with the projections?” Wylie asked.
Instead of standing still, San Francisco’s health system must transform itself, the Health Reform Readiness study determined. Ask anyone who works in health care management in the city, and they’ll tell you that DPH has been working on just that. The idea is to focus on network-wide, integrated care that runs more efficiently.
“We need to switch from being the provider of last resort, to the provider of choice,” Wylie noted, voicing an oft-repeated mantra.
This could mean fielding more patient calls with nursing hotlines, or using integrated databases to improve communication. There’s also emphasis on increasing the number of patients seen by a care provider in a given day. The report urged the department to ramp up its productivity level from 1.5 patient visits per hour, where it currently stands, to 2.25 patient visits per hour. Currin noted that the hospital has also been looking into group patient visits.
“Part of getting ready for health care reform was creating more medical home capacity,” Currin said, referring to a system where multiple forms of care are integrated into a single visit, “so we knew we needed to have better access to primary care.”
If no changes are made, the Health Reform Readiness study found, the city’s General Fund contribution to DPH is projected to rise substantially — to $831 million by 2019, up from $554 million in 2014-15.
“We’re a little concerned about this rising General Fund support,” Wylie noted. And even though staffing represents a major expenditure, “They didn’t assume cuts in staff,” while performing the assessment, he said. “What they’re trying to get is more outputs, more efficiency. The managers went over this and said: in order for us to survive, we’ve got to get more out of our system. We may have to cut money — we may have to cut later, if city leaders don’t commit to this rising General Fund. We’ve got to do all these best practices.”
Throughout crafting this road map, he added, “There were some uncomfortable meetings and uncomfortable moments. But I think [DPH Director] Barbara Garcia got everyone to agree to these strategies.”
Talk to rank-and-file hospital staff, however, and some will tell you that getting more out of the system is a tall order — especially when the system already feels like it’s busting at the seams.
SPACE CRUNCH, STRESSED STAFF
“We hit capacity every single day,” said Negron, the RN in the Emergency Department. Patients are regularly placed on beds in the hallways, he said. Wait times for the Emergency Department can last four to six hours, or even longer. The hospital is working on limiting those waits, not just because it’s better in practice, but because timely patient care is mandated under ACA.
“Now, we have 26 or 27 licensed beds in our Emergency Department,” Negron said. But in reality, on a regular basis, “We function with 45 to 50 patients.”
A nurse who works in the Psychiatric Emergency Services unit described her work environment as “a traffic jam with all lanes blocked. This is totally business as usual.”
The workload is on the rise, she added. “The psych emergency room used to see 500 patients a month,” she said. “Now we see 600 patients a month, sometimes more. People are moving faster and faster through the system.”
Her unit is the receiving facility for anyone who is placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a 5150, for individuals who are a danger to themselves or others or gravely disabled.
“It doesn’t matter who they are,” she said. “We get homeless and destitute. We get CEOs. And we have had CEOs — it’s an experience for everyone involved.” Some patients have been involved in criminal activity. “I’ve had high profile people in my unit; people who have done things that, if I tell you what they did, you would easily be able to Google them.”
Patients who come to her wing need to be evaluated, because someone has determined that they are dangerous. It could be that they are “eating rotten food, or running naked in the street, or suicidal, or want to jump off Golden Gate Bridge, or their family thinks they’re out of control.” Sometimes, patients have to be let go once they’re no longer deemed to be a threat, but they still aren’t altogether recovered, she said.
In the psychiatric inpatient unit, meanwhile, the total number of beds has declined from 87 to 44 in the past five years — leading some staff members to voice concerns.
“There is more to do, and there’s less time to do it,” said another staff member who did not want to be named. This person said one psych unit was essentially shut down and another left open — “but then … a patient climbed up into the ceiling, broke some pipes, and flooded the room” in the open unit, so everything was shifted back to the closed unit.
In part, the daily patient crunch is due to a vacancy rate in the hospital nursing staff that hovers around 18 percent — but steps are being taken to address this problem, caused in part by the city’s Byzantine hiring process.
“The nurses are concerned about how, on a day-to-day basis, they don’t feel they have the support and resources they need,” said Nato Green, who represented the nurses’ union, SEIU Local 1021, in recent contract negotiations. “Staff was expected to do more with less. SF General chronically operates at a higher capacity than what it is budgeted for.”
Currin, the hospital CEO — who started out as a nurse herself — rejected this assertion, saying it is not the norm for the hospital to operate over budget. She added that she would like to reduce the nursing staff vacancy rate down to just 5 percent.
“We have had a fairly significant vacancy rate,” she acknowledged. “But just like any other hospital in the city and the country, you have countermeasures that you put in place to address staffing shortages. And so we use nurse travelers. We use as-needed staff, who work here part-time. We’ve been able to fill those gaps with these other staffing measures. We do want to have a more permanent workforce. We’re working with the city and [DPH] to bring in new hires.”
Roland Pickens, director of the San Francisco Health Network (the patient-care division of the Department of Public Health), said he was working with the city’s Human Resources Department to further streamline operations and get a jump on filling vacancies.
“[Chief Financial Officer] Greg Wagner is working with City Controller’s office and the Mayor’s Office, so everyone is addressing the issue of having a more expedited hiring process,” he said.
Negron, the RN, seemed to think it couldn’t happen soon enough. “For us, at the end of the day, who do we actually have that’s on the schedule, that’s on the floor?” he said. Being fully staffed is important, he added, “so we don’t have any more shortages. So we don’t close beds, or go on divert unnecessarily.”
Staff members, who deal hands-on with a vulnerable patient population, lament that there doesn’t seem to be enough resources flowing into the system to care for people who are at the mercy of the public safety net. After all, San Francisco is a city of incredible wealth — shouldn’t there be adequate funding to care for the people who are the most in need?
“Poor people are not profitable,” Green said. “Without regulatory intervention, poor people would not have adequate health care.”
EVOLVING INTO THE FUTURE
For all the concerns about staffing and the financial uncertainty caused by ACA, SF General still has plenty to brag about. For one, it’s moving into a brand new, nine-story facility in December 2015, which will be equipped with a seventh-floor disaster preparedness center and nearly twice as much space in the Emergency Department.
It will have 283 acute care beds, 31 more than there are now. Most of the patient rooms will be private, and the new hospital will be seismically sound — a critical upgrade in a city prone to earthquakes. The hospital construction was funded with an $887.4 million bond approved by voters in 2008.
“In a new care environment, it will be more comfortable for the patients and the staff,” Currin said. “It’s just a much better environment. We’re hoping with the expansion … the wait times [in the Emergency Department], instead of taking four to six hours, we’re hoping to decrease that by 50 percent,” she said. “There will be more nurses, physicians, housekeepers.”
Pickens, the Health Network director, said he felt that “the stars had aligned” to have the hospital rebuild nearing completion just as ACA gets into full swing, since the new facility can help attract the patients needed to make sure the health system is fully funded.
The hospital has also launched an initiative to reduce patient mortality linked to a deadly infection. “Sepsis is a reaction the body has to a severe infection,” explained Joe Clement, a medical surgical unit clinical nurse specialist. “It causes organ dysfunction, and in some cases death. It’s very common, it’s growing, there’s more and more of it every year, and about a third of hospital deaths have been associated with sepsis in some way.”
In 2011, SF General began implementing new practices — and successfully reduced the hospital mortality rate from 20 percent in 2010 to 8.8 percent in 2014.
SF General was also recently lauded in The New York Times for being a top performer in quality and safety scores for childbirth. In San Francisco, low-income women who may be uninsured and dealing with harsh life circumstances can nevertheless get full access to multilingual doctors, midwives, lactation consultants, and doulas. The World Health Organization has even designated it as “Baby Friendly,” because of practices that support breastfeeding.
As things move ahead, management is projecting a sense of confidence that SF General’s high-quality care will allow the hospital to attract patients and maintain a healthy system that can continue to support the insured and uninsured alike.
“Value, we usually define as improving health outcomes, and optimizing the resources we have, for as many people as we can,” said William Huen, associate chief medical officer.
Speaking about the sepsis initiative, he said, “This is kind of our model program of, how do you focus on one area where you know you can improve health outcomes, with integration throughout the system, education at every level … and then having the data and perfecting the care. That can be applied to anything. So as a system, I think we’ve developed infrastructure to support that type of work.”
But for the staff members who are actively involved in the union, it continues to be a waiting game to see if the promises of new staffing levels are realized. Until then, many have said that the low staffing levels are a threat to patient safety. “They are waiting to see if DPH lives up to its commitment to hire the people they said they were going to hire, and staff it at the level they were going to staff at,” Green said.
It all comes down to providing care for people who really have nowhere else to turn, Negron told us in the Emergency Department. “I’m sure we see the highest portion of uninsured patients in the city,” he said. “We’re doing that in many different languages, with people from all over the world. I feel like it’s a real honor to be able to work there in that context. I feel honored to meet a need — that’s not always able to be met.”
Surprise, shock, flabbergasting awe — these are all completely invalid responses to Twitter’s revelation of its diversity figures, which the disruptive San Francisco tech company released today (in a tweet, of course).
Twitter divided its diversity statistics into three categories: tech, non-tech, and leadership. Guess which area had the most white folks? If you guessed tech, you get a (vanilla) cookie.
Twitter’s tech employees are 90 percent male. Its ethnic figures are more diverse: their tech employees are 58 percent white and 34 percent Asian. Just 1 percent of Twitter’s tech-oriented employees are African American, and 3 percent are Latino.
…we are joining some peer companies by sharing our ethnic and gender diversity data. And like our peers, we have a lot of work to do.”
“It makes good business sense that Twitter employees are representative of the vast and varied backgrounds of our users around the world. We also know that it makes good business sense to be more diverse as a workforce – research shows that more diverse teams make better decisions, and companies with women in leadership roles produce better financial results. But we want to be more than a good business; we want to be a business that we are proud of.
We are keenly aware that Twitter is part of an industry that is marked by dramatic imbalances in diversity — and we are no exception.
By becoming more transparent with our employee data, open in dialogue throughout the company and rigorous in our recruiting, hiring and promotion practices, we are making diversity an important business issue for ourselves.
Twitter is not the only tech company to struggle with its diversity, and it joins Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo in self-reporting its diversity data. In her blog post, Van Huysse points to many efforts made by Twitter to help build a better education pipeline to the tech industry. The number of women and underrepresented (African American and Latino) minorities obtaining Computer Science degrees pales in comparison to their white and male counterparts, a widely recognized problem.
“If they partnered with SFUSD and other local school districts… in a serious, strategic way, we could go a long way in immediately expanding acccess and diversity in their workforce,” Haney said. “I’d love to see the numbers on how many of their workers are SF public school graduates.”
The education pipeline is oft-mentioned in diversity discussions. But less talked about is Silicon Valley’s pervasive “bro” culture, rife with subtle racism and misogyny that pushes out the small number of minorities who make it in. A study of start-ups by an East Bay nonprofit, the Level Playing Field Institute, addressed this head on.
As we reported in our cover story last week “The Age of the Brogrammer,” LPFI surveyed more than 645 engineers, and found underrepresented people of color (Latinos and African Americans), and women were more likely to encounter exclusionary cliques, unwanted sexual teasing, bullying, and homophobic jokes.
Twitter’s diversity figures, by ethnicity. Graphic via Twitter.
The study’s authors also found that white men were the most likely to believe that diversity was not a problem that needed addressing in the tech sector.
LPFI isn’t the only one to point this out. In this article on Slate, an Asian tech worker talks about reverse-bias: people assumed, since he was Asian, that he knew how to program (spoiler: he didn’t). And in this article, an African American man recounts the racism he faced at a tech company. And in this piece, a tech engineer explains how bias pervades the hiring process at many startups.
Yes, the education pipeline to Silicon Valley needs fixing. But as many have shown, Silicon Valley itself needs fixing too.
Building a Twitter we can be proud of – here’s our diversity data to date. https://t.co/Xw2ktU5QQk
Normally the sound of 20 or so artists rattling and spraying aerosol cans would be quickly followed by the sound of sirens. But Sat/19 the fades went up with gusto.
Artists tagged free standing art boards at Precita Park for the Urban Youth Arts Festival, an event that brings the ultimate underground art into a safe space. Attendees munched on burgers and listened to some good tunes at the festival, which is now in its 18th year.
Many of the street style murals paid homage to the Bay Area, from SF to Oakland. “We’re showing our love to the aesthetic of the community,” Xavier Schmidt, a 25-year-old organizer of the event and SF native, told us. One muralist hand painted a robot adorned in SF Giants and 49ers gear punching out a Google Glass-wearing Godzilla.
“We’ve been doing this since 1987,” Schmidt said, speaking to the event’s roots. Even the event’s hosts, the Precita Eyes Muralists Association, have deep SF bonafides: they’ve been around since 1977.
“This is for solidarity, for community,” he said. “It’s a family event.”
Kids sprayed paint and played, adults kicked back and kvetched about youngsters, SF natives complained about tech employees, and many chowed down on burgers, hot dogs, and veggies donated by the local YMCA. Local musicians A-1 and Hazel Rose came out to play too, adding the head-banging element to the day. We’ve embedded one of A-1’s tracks below. Consider it your photo gallery soundtrack.
Names of the artists have been withheld because callin’ them out on the internet would be wack. All photos by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKpwI4aRAzM
This dude’s head was bangin’ as he sprayed. We’re not sure how he managed to make it look so good.
This kid was super into it, which was hilarious.
A San Francisco robot takes down a Google Glass wearing tech-zilla.
Hazel Rose performed a bombastic set that the crowd, below, felt all sorts of love for.
Oakland got plenty of love too.
Xavier Schmidt, one of the event’s organizers, said this high schooler is a real up and comer in the graffiti scene.
Some of the art boards were for everyone to paint, leading to some dooby-ous results. (Get it? Ha!)
LEFT OF THE DIAL Yoodoo Park is the kind of musician who might make some people — people who didn’t find their calling until well into their 40s, or 50s, or 60s, aka lots of people — a little angry.
As GRMLN — a band name he chose when he realized the word “Gremlin” wasn’t Google search-friendly — the singer-guitarist’s new album, Soon Away (out Sept. 16 on Carpark records), is 10 tracks packed into 45 minutes of introspective yet confident, caffeine- and hormone-fueled energy, with nods to power pop and an eye toward the grittier side of the ’90s punk spectrum.
A follow-up to Park’s full-length, 2013’s far dreamier, poppier Empire, GRMLN’s sophomore effort (if you don’t count the self-produced EP he put out in 2011) still contains fairly simple songwriting, is still maybe a little overly concerned with being catchy — but on the whole, the album reads like evidence of maturation, of a songwriter stepping off the suburban curb and tentatively into the street; it’s the sound of someone picking up speed, realizing potential, realizing he’s just getting started. (He’ll debut songs from the record July 30 at the Rickshaw Stop.)
In the meantime, Park turned 21 last month.
“You know, we were in the van driving back from Texas, and it was, like, barren,” says Park, who’s Korean-American, but grew up splitting time between Japan and Orange County, of how he spent the milestone birthday. “I would’ve stopped somewhere to get a couple drinks just because, but there was really nothing.”
If the new weight and levels of distortion on this album (recorded and mixed at a breakneck pace at SF’s Different Fur) speak to the familiar pains of growing up — “Go, go, go outside/be the one you want,” Park urges in the album’s first single, “Jaded,” over the peal of an electric guitar hook that lodged itself in my head the first time I heard it — Park, the person, seems far less angst-ridden. Either that, or he doesn’t believe in showing it.
Still, there’s a musical genealogy here that calls to mind Weezer’s most jagged, honest (best) stuff, a little Teenage Fanclub here and there, with a breezy understanding of pop-punk structure that he seems to have learned by osmosis (Orange County tap water?) and a tone that could maybe be described as “what you sound like when you grow up thinking of Social Distortion as senior citizens and then start a punk band. “
“I guess writing-wise I got way more darker and aggressive on this one,” he muses in the easy, sunny, pseudo-stoned drawl of which only kids who grow up in Southern California are truly capable. “This album is about how a lot of things don’t work out the way you want to, and how in life in general, getting attached to things really isn’t good, emotionally or materialistically. I’ve been reading about Krishna, and how the best thing you can do to make yourself a better person has to do with letting things go…so, yeah.”
What kind of things is he letting go of at the moment? Well, there’s school, for one. He just talked to his counselor from UC Santa Cruz, and it turns out he could graduate in one quarter but he’d have to take a lot of credits, which sounds like a lot on top of touring. So the plan right now is to move to SF and take the whole next year off for playing live, which is, he says, “way more fun” than any other aspect of being a musician (especially now that he and his friends can drink legally). It probably helps that his band is made up of his brother, Tae San Park, on bass, and a friend from high school, Keith Frerichs, on drums.
To be fair, he knows he has it good. “Part of what I wanted with this record was to send a message about how life really isn’t that bad,” says Park. “Life is great in California, but if you pay attention to what’s happening in the world, you watch any documentaries, see how people live other places&ldots;I’m really blessed. I think people take it for granted.”
GRMLN
With Everyone Is Dirty, Mall Walk (Different Fur showcase)
Just like the line for Bi-Rite ice cream on a day when the temperature climbs above 70 degrees, summer festival season seems to be getting longer all the time. This past week brought the announcement of two different festivals that promise solid lineups of local acts alongside serious grub, hopefully warm weather (as is usually the case when fall begins) and, of course, fine excuses for day drinking. The 20th Street Block Party, a free food and music festival brought to you by Noise Pop and the darlings of the SF culinary world (Thomas McNaughton and David White’s love-child of a restaurant group, made up of flour + water, Central Kitchen, Salumeria, and Trick Dog), will take over, yes, 20th Street in the Mission on August 23 for performances by Rogue Wave, Melted Toys (whose new release we highly recommend), Cayucas, The Bilinda Butchers, Myron & E, and more. Oh yeah, did we mention it’s all free? www.20thstreetblockparty.com
And on Oct. 14 – 15, the Culture Collide Fest, a long-running favorite in LA, will debut its first Bay Area event, with a thoroughly international lineup of bands from the US, Korea, the Netherlands, and Costa Rica: Cloud Nothings, Beat Connection, GRMLN, Go Back to the Zoo, Glen Check, Glass Towers, Alphabetics, KLP, and more. Participating venues include The Chapel and the Elbo Room; we’ll have more as the party gets closer. www.culturecollide.com
Next time you head to your neighborhood Apple store to get that smooth and harmonious feel that can only comes with the gentle touch of an iPad air, you might be greeted by an unhappy security officer picketing outside. The officer might share some choice words about the working conditions at Apple’s security guard contractor, Security Industry Specialists.
Over the next few weeks, the SEIU United Service Workers West has organized a series of actions with security guards to demand Apple choose a more responsible security contractor.
Currently, Apple, Google, and Ebay all have contracts with SIS, a firm the SEIU claims has unfairly terminated employees and surveiled union meetings. The SIS denies these allegations, devoting an entire page on its website to confronting what it’s termed “SEIU lies and distortion.”
“The contrast between Apple’s boom times and worker’s decrease in wages is incredibly startling,” said Alfredo Fletes, communications specialist for SEIU. “You would think that a company that has benefited so much from what Silicon Valley has to offer would support the jobs for workers – not just in their engineering department, but at all levels.”
Since the launch of the iPod in 2007 to 2012, Apple saw a 600 percent growth in its stock. Meanwhile, from 2008 to 2012, average worker wages in Santa Clara County dropped by 3 percent. On average, Silicon Valley’s security officers make $15 an hour through SIS.
But the actions SEIU has organized aren’t just about wages, nor are they just about Apple. Walter Redding, for instance, was one security officer working for SIS through Google. He’ll be attending some of the actions, because he’s angry. He was fired for taking a phone call from his girlfriend while she was in labor.
“I thought I was doing great,” Redding said. “But I got screwed. I only got two checks since I got fired. It’s been almost a year. My friends got fired for things, too. Everybody gets treated unfairly. I love the products. I’d buy them everyday. But when it comes to working for Google or Apple, I don’t know about that.”
Bryce Miller-Williams, an organizer for SEIU’s Stand for Security campaign, says that the SIS is harsh everywhere, but Apple is where security officers really don’t want to work.
“There’s a very militaristic atmosphere there,” he said. “One gentleman sat down to tie his shoe. Guards are supposed to be standing at all times, and so he was let go because of that.”
Although Apple doesn’t employ the security guards directly, Fletes said the tech company still has the power to select a better security guard contractor. To him, changes at Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, offers proof. When labor activists launched an outcry following a series of suicides at Foxconn, Apple stepped in. According to a report from the Fair Labor Association last December, working conditions at Foxconn have since steadily improved.
“I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to ask Apple to look into workplace issues for security officers in the Bay Area,” Fletes said. “Or, at the very least for them to meet with security officers who, despite working for one of the most valuable companies in the world, are still struggling to survive.”
Apple does at least give the appearance of wanting to do good. The Cupertino company requires its suppliers meet a “code of conduct” and issues a Supplier Responsibility report to document its progress each year. This past December, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about his company’s code of conduct in a video message sent in a company-wide email urging employees to behave like good, righteous Apple employees.
“As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, the time is always right to do what’s right,” Cook proclaimed. “At Apple, we do the right thing. Even when it’s not easy. If you see something that doesn’t meet our standards, speak up. Whether it’s a quality issue or a business practice, if it affects Apple’s integrity, we need to know about it.”
Fletes said that when SEIU members protested outside an Apple shareholder meeting last February, Cook said he would look into job quality issues. The allegations of unfair treatment by SIS’ security officers have since continued. Apple did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
The actions will continue throughout the Bay Area throughout the summer, ending in San Francisco on August 28th.
“Die techie scum.” Those words are sprayed ominously on sidewalks throughout San Francisco. They’re plastered on stickers stamped on lampposts. They’re even scrawled in the bathrooms of punk bars, the very establishments now populated by Google-Glass-wearing tech aficionados.
Journalists from San Francisco to New York have opined on the source of the hate: Is it the housing crisis? Tech-fueled gentrification? Rising inequality? Those same journalists later parachute into the tech industry to periodically peer at its soul: Is tech diverse enough? Is it sexist? Is it a true meritocracy?
Those issues are often looked at in a vacuum, but perhaps they shouldn’t be. Perhaps those problems are all interconnected, and solving tech’s diversity problem is also part of solving income inequality in San Francisco, giving longtime San Franciscans a chance to join the industry many now view as composed of outsiders and interlopers.
The average Silicon Valley tech worker makes about $100,000, according to Dice Holdings Inc., which conducts annual tech salary surveys. Opportunity in the tech sector may bolster San Francisco’s middle-income earners, vanishing like wayward sea lions from the city’s landscape. Statistics from the US Census Bureau show that 66 percent of the city is either very poor or very rich, showing a hollowing out of the middle class.
Some tech CEOs are addressing their employment needs with a foreign workforce. Mark Zuckerberg and a cadre of tech CEOs have lobbied Senate and House Republicans to reform immigration in their favor, hoping to lure out-of-country workers to fill tech’s employment vacancies. Politico reported Sean Parker gave upwards of $500,000 to Republicans in 2014, all for the cause of immigration reform.
Conversely, a movement is already underway to bring San Franciscans into tech’s fold, based on the idea of a win-win scenario: San Francisco’s public school students are overwhelmingly diverse and lower income, while the tech industry is not.
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo recently released their diversity numbers, showing the companies are mostly white and male. This accusation has long haunted Silicon Valley.
Two years ago, Businessweek heralded the “Rise of the Brogrammer.” The stereotype is as follows: He preens as he programs in his popped collar, his startup funds fuel the city as he hunts “the ladies,” and he is insensitive toward women in the workplace in the most fratboy-like way imaginable.
Biz dev VP of @path just cracked lame jokes re: “nudie calendars,” frat guys + “hottest girls,” “gangbang” at #swsx talk. Cue early exit.
But while outlier brogrammer douche-bros certainly exist, whose classist opinions ignite widespread ire (think Greg Gopman’s statement comparing homeless people to “hyenas”), the real brogrammer threat is more insidious, more systemic.
“The brogrammer is always someone else,” wrote Kate Losse, a freelance journalist, in an April blog post. “He is THOSE Facebook guys who yell too loudly at parties and wave bottles in the air, he is not the nice, shy guy who gets paid 30 percent more because of his race, gender and appeal to the boy-genius fetishes of [venture capitalists].”
The overarching point of Losse’s article was this: There is a subtle sexism, and also racism, in the tech sector, which shuts out women and people of color. The looming stereotype of a douchey brogrammer can obscure the smaller, more indirect ways in which minorities and women are shut out of the industry.
Tech’s disturbing (but unsurprising) lack of diversity is being highlighted amid an economic backdrop that has resulted in widespread displacement of San Francisco’s working class and minorities.
Some are seeking to create opportunities for Bay Area communities of color within tech, as a way to even the scales. A swell of new applicants with programming skills — including people of color and women — may soon come knocking. But in the time it will take school-age coders to cycle through the first generation of new computer science classes, Silicon Valley is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror.
Some of the Bay Area’s hate toward tech may be rooted in a perceived lack of access. Longtime residents see a sea of newcomers, often white, often male, who aren’t pulling up a seat for minorities to join the new gold rush.
The age of the brogrammer is now, and it’s as socially progressive as the paleolithic era, meaning: not at all.
FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT
Talk to anyone in the realm of new technology companies and startups, and they’ll surely tell you this: Tech is an inspiring, creative field, where pure skill is the key to unlocking any job you’d like. The dress style is casual (hoodies, of course) and the perks flow like wine (or energy drinks).
When the Guardian visited the CloudCamp social good hackathon, we saw video game arcade machines in the ground floor and beer flowing throughout. Another company, Hack Reactor, had desks attached to treadmills and a life coach on hand to mind employee health. These are accoutrements de rigeuer, stunningly standard. But tales of true Silicon Valley excess abound: One CEO offers employees free helicopter rides, many offer in-house chefs and extravagant travel.
Interns in Silicon Valley are enjoying huge perks like free meals, massages, swimming pools, nap pods: http://t.co/BdaaOdC95P
Skill and ability alone are the keys to unlocking this lifestyle, the tech industry says. Workers’ fervor can take on an almost cult-like zeal.
“I think the sharing economy is addictive,” said Rafael Martinez-Corina, a panelist at the Share2014 sharing economy conference in May, touting tech’s biggest stars like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber. “Once you get it, you want more and more. You get into car sharing, you want to get into food sharing, time sharing.”
He asked the audience, “Who else is addicted to sharing?”
Almost every hand went in the room shot right up. Cheers immediately followed. Hallelujah!
Mars Jullian, an engineer at AdRoll, told the Guardian that employees of tech companies with name-brand apps tend to exhibit more ego. AdRoll is a big player, but more behind the scenes, she said, giving her perspective on the attitudes of her fellow tech workers.
“Sometimes it seems tech people feel like they own the city,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the right attitude to have. Sometimes it’s more important to be humble.”
One might forgive the tech workers for their enthusiasm. The industry, after all, has ushered in widespread transformation in business and communications, resulting in dramatic economic shifts. But with such a high concentration of wealth and influence in the Bay Area, the question of who gets to participate is key.
Google’s diversity numbers rocked the world outside Silicon Valley, but surprised few in the Bay Area. The behemoth is 70 percent male and 60 percent white, with Asians making up 30 percent of the company’s ethnic representation.
Soon after Google’s numbers were revealed, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn followed suit with their own diversity reports. Their numbers differ a bit from Google, showing more Asian employees, and slightly more women. The numbers look worse, however, when only technology jobs are factored in. The tech worker population among these companies is about 15 percent female.
Hadi Partovi, an early Facebook investor, now adviser, and ex-chief of Microsoft’s MSN, told the Guardian that despite the industry’s challenges, tech’s doors are open to people with skills, regardless of background.
“The computer doesn’t know if it’s being programmed by someone rich or poor, black or brown,” he told us in a phone interview. “A lawyer, for instance, is looked at more explicitly. Tech has the opportunity to be more meritocratic.”
But the tech sector’s pious belief that it functions as a world-changing meritocracy ignores a host of factors that serve to hinder inclusion.
Many have touted the education pipeline as the root cause of tech’s lack of diversity. The number of women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is stunningly low, 24 percent, according to the US Department of Commerce. African Americans and Latinos also lag far behind their white and Asian counterparts in completing their computer science degrees, according to studies by the East Bay nonprofit Level Playing Field Institute.
Considering Asian groups is important: the Level Playing Field Institute draws a distinction between represented and underrepresented minority groups, acknowledging that ethnicity, income and class intermingle in complex ways. It’s those underrepresented groups like women, Latinos and African Americans LPFI identifies as groups lacking in tech.
But the pipeline is only one part of the problem. Subtle (and not-so-subtle) misogyny and racism, often labeled micro-aggressions, pervade hiring.
Level Playing Field is focused on creating opportunity for people of color and women in STEM fields. In an extensive tech-industry study conducted in 2011, called “Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces,” researchers concluded: “Despite widespread underrepresentation of women and people of color within the sector, diversity is not regarded as a priority.”
Surveying more than 645 engineers, the study’s authors found that white men were the most likely to believe that diversity was not a problem that needed addressing in the tech sector. The study also found that underrepresented people of color (Latinos and African Americans), and women were more likely to encounter exclusionary cliques, unwanted sexual teasing, bullying, and homophobic jokes.
Sometimes, these instances blow up for the world to see.
THE MIRROR-TOCRACY
The workday text messages between Tinder’s co-founder Justin Marteen and former VP Whitney Wolfe went public after Wolfe sued Tinder, revealing the ugly waters women must sometimes navigate in tech. Marteen was allegedly harassing Wolfe over her new love interest, and Wolfe asked him to stop.
“Stop justin [sic]. Were at work,” Wolfe asked of Marteen, to which he replied, “Ur heartless… go talk to ur 26 year old fucking accomplished nobody. I’ll shit on him in life.”
He should have ended there. But he continued his rage at his ex-girlfriend.
“Hagsgagahaha so pathetic I even imagined a life w u. I actually thought u would be a good mother and wife. I have horrible judgement. He can enjoy my left overs,” he allegedly wrote. “You’re effecting my work environment,” she replied, “and this is very out of control. Please don’t do this during work hours.”
Besides an awful command of rudimentary spelling, the squabble showed the very real harassment women in tech are exposed to every day. When Wolfe went to Tinder CEO Sean Rad for help, she found herself out of a job.
Tinder is not an outlier, according to studies by Level Playing Field. Nor is it the only company to see its harassment go public. Earlier this year, GitHub’s CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigned after a former employee, Julie Ann Horvath, alleged she was harassed by him, his wife, and engineers.
While Github denied the allegations, Horvath was defiant: “A company can never own you. They can’t tell you who to fuck and who not to fuck. And they can’t take away your voice.”
But for every example of outright sexism or racism, there are multitudes of more subtle biases in the workplace. Level Playing Field’s studies found these biases are pervasive. They start as early as the hiring process.
Carlos Bueno is a former Facebook engineer, now tinkering behind the scenes at memSQL. He is of mixed ethnicity, Irish and Mexican, among others. “My father called us ‘Leprechan-os’,” he told us.
Bueno trained interviewers at Facebook, and like many there, he also conducted interviews. He said Facebook’s interview process was probably one of the best in the industry for screening out biases of the interviewer, but other companies were not as aware of bias as a problem.
“Every startup wants to be a big dog,” he said, describing the process. “But the point of a startup is to grow very large, very quickly. They don’t have time to learn. Some people take rules of thumb or investor advice and run with it.”
Paypal co-founder Max Levchin is looked to as a thought leader in the startup world. He touts the idea that diversity of perspective in a startup’s early phases can actually hurt its chances of success, hindering its speed in “endless debates.”
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel once famously put it this way: “Don’t fuck up the culture.”
Bueno pointed to a real estate startup, 42Floors, as an example of a company adopting Levchin’s philosophy. It looks for potential hires who are a “cultural fit,” i.e., making sure the candidate and employer think alike.
One 42Floors interviewer explained this on the company blog: “I asked her how she was doing in the interview process and she said, ‘I’m actually still trying to get an interview. Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.’ I chuckled. She was clearly confused with the whole matter. I told her, ‘Look, you just made it to the third round.'”
So the interview process for tech may involve coffee dates or “beer with the guys,” and the onus is on the interviewee to figure all of this out. Similar blog posts from 42Floors go on to call out interviewees who wear suits, or act too stodgy for their liking.
We spoke to Bueno extensively over burgers, but he put it best in his blog.
“You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth,” he wrote. “What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.”
Founders back up their faulty hiring practices with faulty logic. “It’s so hard to get in, if you get in you must be good,” Bueno said. “But those two statements don’t support each other.”
Some students of color training to code have already caught a glimpse of how the mirror-tocracy functions.
OPENING THE DOOR
Eight years ago, Kimberly Bryant moved to San Francisco to work in biotech. She moved to the city because she believed it to be more racially and economically diverse. She worked adjacent to Bayview Hunters Point, and has since revised her view of the city as a welcoming multicultural environment.
Instead, she found a city with an African American population dwindling below six percent in a city of over 800,000, and a gutted middle class. Latinos are moving out in greater numbers too. Over the last decade, 1,400 Latinos left the Mission District, according to a recent report on displacement by Causa Justa / Just Cause. In the same time, 2,900 white residents flooded in.
The displacement data reveals a significant parallel: The diverse ethnic groups Silicon Valley lacks in its employed ranks are the very same ethnic groups being priced out of San Francisco.
Seeking to mitigate the ethnic and gender disparity in tech, Bryant formed Black Girls Code, a student mentor and workshop program. It first opened up shop in the Bayview, but has sinced moved on.
“I really saw and experienced the true diversity of the community in Oakland,” Bryant told the Guardian, of the nonprofit’s new home. “It’s just an amazingly incredibly diverse community in terms of race and economy. What San Francisco used to be,” she added, “but is no longer.”
Black Girls Code teaches K-12 students rudimentary coding skills, providing instruction in Ruby and Python. Although companies like Google and others have opened their doors with welcoming arms, she said, convincing her students that the tech world is ready for them has been challenging.
When she brought her young students to an industry event, TechCrunch Disrupt, she dodged a minefield of fratboy-like behavior that made her students feel unwelcome, she said. This is the same event that heralded a prank app called “titstare,” which invited users (presumably male) to upload photos of themselves staring at women’s breasts.
The app was displayed on a stage before some of the most influential players in the tech industry, but Bryant’s students were in the audience too.
“They were shocked, like everyone there. It was disconcerting for the parents and the girls,” she said. Though she’s careful not to overplay the damage done (the girls “laughed awkwardly,” she said), the takeaway of the conference was that women and girls were not the intended participants. “It’s like a frathouse. I thought, ‘oh my god, this is like college all over again. This sucks.'”
At Mission and 19th streets sits MEDA, a nonprofit that has long worked to help Mission residents gain a foothold in San Francisco workplaces. This begins even in the lobby, where a small kitchenette in the corner plays host to a chef who mixes up a mean ceviche, with spices admittedly leaving this reporter in tears. He aspires to open his own restaurant, and MEDA is helping him get there.
The upstairs houses a group of students called the Mission Techies. They seek support in their aspirations to enter the tech industry, but for them the dream may be further off than the chef’s.
Gabriel Medina, policy manager at MEDA, doesn’t mince words. These are the “challenge” kids, he said, but they’ve done him and program manager Leo Sosa proud.
The Mission Techies pull apart computers to learn about their innards.
Sosa described a visit from Google and Facebook engineers who taught his students rudimentary coding skills. One student, Jamar, was so engrossed in programming that one engineer asked: “Is he okay?!”
“Jamar is on the coding program, [and he’s] on fire,” Sosa told the Guardian, while sitting in a MEDA office.
But students like Jamar, an African American San Franciscan, face an uphill battle before they ever get to the step of applying for a job like one at Google.
After visiting some tech offices, the students felt less sure of themselves.
“They were like ‘I don’t see no black guys, I don’t see no Latinos. Leo, do you really think I can get a job here?'” Sosa told us. For them, the mirror-tocracy did not reflect an image they recognized.
By many measures, MEDA’s Mission Techies program is a success, taking kids of modest means and equipping them with digital skills that can aid their employment prospects. Mission Techies, Black Girls Code, and other programs such as Hack Reactor and Mission Bit all nip at the heels of the education pipeline leading to tech industry employment. They also share a common focus: They’re educating largely minority populations, often low-income, and located in the Bay Area.
The solution to tech’s diversity problem and to San Francisco’s displacement may spring from the same well: educate the people who live here to work in the local industry. But in order to do that effectively, afterschool and summer programs alone won’t do the trick.
The schools themselves need disruption.
WORKING TOGETHER
In the midst of the tech hub, the San Francisco Unified School District finds itself surrounded by tech allies. Still, change comes slowly.
Only five of SFUSD’s 17 high schools have computer science courses. Ben Chun, an MIT graduate and former computer science teacher at Galileo High School, told us the outlook is bleak without digital training in schools. Though kids sometimes teach themselves programming at home, most low-income students don’t have that opportunity.
“It’s a privilege thing,” he told us. If you have access to computers at home, you’re more likely to tinker and teach yourself. Those kids are more likely to be the Bill Gates of the future, he said, the self-starters and early computer prodigies.
“If you don’t have those things in place,” he said, “there’s a zero chance it will be you.”
When he first got to Galileo, his computer teacher predecessor taught word processing. But a lot has changed since 2006.
Partovi took his successes at Facebook and Microsoft and parlayed his money into a nonprofit called Code.org. The organization created its own coding classes for kids as young as 6, and compelled 30 school districts nationwide to create computer science courses based on its work.
Code.org’s tutorials have been played by millions of students.
Now it has its sights set on SFUSD’s 52,000 students, potentially solving tech and the school’s problems at once.
“It would for sure level that diversity gap,” Partovi told the Guardian. “All of the data released from Google, Yahoo, and others show a male-dominated industry. The pipeline of educated kids is actually much more diverse.”
But integrating tech in the district is slow, and likely years away. The district needs state standards to require computer science, something SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza has already lobbied Gov. Jerry Brown to change.
“The demand [for computer science classes] is coming from everywhere,” Carranza told us, including parents, students, the tech industry, and city leaders.
“What makes it a game changer is the partnership with our tech partners,” he said. “It gives our students the opportunity to interact elbow to elbow with people doing computer science out in the real world.”
But the tech workers those students are interacting with, though well meaning, remain the domain of the brogrammers. Will they hire SFUSD graduates with computer science skills when and if they’re ready? Will they be the right “culture fit?”
“There’s definitely a libertarian thread, a free market, red-toothed nature of things [in tech],” Bueno told us. “Talking to people in unguarded moments, that definitely leaks out. You’re not going to convince anyone by singing kumbaya and holding hands.”
But logical tech workers need look no further than the current numbers facing Silicon Valley to see the need to reach beyond their in-groups: 1.2 million new tech jobs will be created by 2020, studies from the US Department of Labor show. At the same time, 40 percent of the United States will be Latino and black by 2040.
When the minority is the majority, the brogrammers may become a dying species.
The J-POP Summit returns to Japantown Sat/19-Sun/20, unleashing a riot of Japanese pop culture. We’re talking a fashion competition sponsored by frill peddlers Baby, The Stars Shine Bright (theme: “Toyland Parade”); an amateur dance contest in homage to Japanese meme “ODOTTEMITA” (which means, apparently, “I tried dancing it”); a film festival (heavy on the anime); and musical performances (including girl-group sensation Tokyo Girls’ Style, who also have two movies screening the fest, and the intriguingly-named girl-punk trio Akabane Vulgars on Strong Bypass). Plus: cosplay galore, a scavenger hunt, and a Pocky eating contest — first prize is a year’s supply. www.j-pop.com
PHONO DEL (ACTUAL) SOL
Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down’s performance was a stand-out at this year’s Phono del Sol festival, which went down July 12 in Potrero del Sol Park. Other highlights: Nick Waterhouse with a full backing band, SF’s own A Million Billion Dying Suns, and lots of super-happy little kids and dogs running around on a surprisingly warm San Francisco summer day. See our Noise blog at SFBG.com for more. PHOTO BY ERIN CONGER
FAREWELL, TOMMY
Tommy Ramone, the last surviving member of the original Ramones, died on Friday, July 11 at the age of 65, after battling stomach cancer for the past year. The drummer, whose real name was Thomas Erdelyi, was the iconic punk band’s de facto manager for the early years of their career. In an early press release-bio the likes of which we would be thrilled to receive today, he wrote “The Ramones all originate from Forest Hills and kids who grew up there either became musicians, degenerates, or dentists. The Ramones are a little of each. Their sound is not unlike a fast drill on a rear molar.”
BAY GUARDIAN WINS
Congratulations to Bay Guardian Art Director Brooke Ginnard and her collaborating artists, who took first place for cover design in the annual Association of Alternative Newsmedia Awards. AAN represents all alternative newsweeklies in the country. www.aan.org
ART HERE NOW
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ essential, sprawling seventh triennial survey of the local art scene, Bay Area Now, opens with, what else, a big party Fri/18 (8pm-11pm, $12–$15. YBCA, 701 Mission, SF. www.ybca.org/ban7). BAN7 is even more inclusive than ever this year, with a host of artists exhibiting in a big, museum-like show for the first time, and programming that includes, performance, film and video, visual arts, and community engagement. “BAN7’s core idea is to decentralize the curatorial process, and centralize the public presentation of some of the most exciting artistic voices in the region today,” the curators say. Even Bay Guardian Senior Arts Editor Cheryl Eddy got into the act, programming the eternal Death Wish III on August 9, featuring a score by Jimmy Page.
QUAN VERSUS DOG
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan already faces a small army of rival candidates for November — more than 20! — and her newest opponent may be the strongest (cutest?) challenger yet: Einstein the dog. Yes, this pup is for the 99 percent, and his website claims the furry candidate endured Occupy Oakland’s flashbang grenades “just a few paw-strides” away from him. “Woof!” is a good campaign slogan, right? www.einsteinforoakland.org
GOOGLE NEXT DOOR
Looks like Google‘s newest Street View will be San Francisco’s Embarcadero. The tech giant just bought an Embarcadero high-rise for $65 million, just spitting distance from the One Market Plaza, where they also leased new space. Now that more Googlers are in SF proper, will they ditch the UFO buses for Muni?
PARKER THE REPUBLICAN?
Sean Parker, former Facebook president and Napster co-founder is gearing up for his new title: uncle elephant moneybags. Parker is now throwing gobs of money at national Republicans, Politico reported, giving over half a million dollars to Senate and House conservatives. Closer to home, Parker contributed $49,000 the right-leaning Restore Transportation Balance in San Francisco group, which feels bikes and Muni get too many perks in the city. Yeah, right.
NEW PARK, NO HOUSING
The Francisco Reservoir, located near Russian Hill, has been sitting there unused and taking up space since about 1940. Thanks to a deal between the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and the Recreation and Parks Department, the decommissioned reservoir will finally be converted into a park. Bravo! But there’s one small catch. Apparently nobody ever considered using a portion of this sprawling parcel, considered “surplus property” owned by the SFPUC, for affordable housing. City law mandates this as first-priority use for “surplus” land, but the SFPUC is exempt from the rule. John Stewart, who builds affordable projects but has no interest in the property, said he tried to float the idea of housing for teachers and firefighters as part of the Francisco Reservoir plan. But surrounding neighbors, who raised more than $9 million through their own connections to put toward the park, responded with what he termed “polite silence.” In the area he thought might work for housing, their plan showed a dog run.
Hey there, lovers and haters of the World Cup, if you missed out on the protest of Google and FIFA at Pride, there’s still time on the clock to score that goal: there will be another protest tomorrow [Thu/3] to support Brazilian transit workers and their quest for higher wages.
In solidarity with Brazilian protestors, a group of queer anarchists blocked the joint Google/FIFA float in the SF Pride Parade on Sunday. The group saw the float protest as an opportunity to draw together two issues linking San Francisco and Brazil: gentrification in the Bay Area and the displacement of Brazilians in order to make this year’s World Cup possible.
As the protestors said, “We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to connect issues of gentrification and evictions in the Bay Area with the violent displacement of Brazilians who live in the Favelas. The Google/FIFA float was a perfect target for direct action to raise awareness about these issues!”
According to Al Jazeera and Solidar Suisse, more than 150,000 people were evicted from their homes to create the World Cup arenas, including parking lots. Following the Brazilian government’s pacification initiative, Brazilian police occupied multiple favelas, or slums, housing around 1.5 million people total, near the airport and roads leading to the World Cup stadiums in order to make the communities more presentable. Besides minimizing gang activity temporarily, there are no programs implemented to help favela residents in the long run.
Brazilian transit workers also felt cheated by World Cup preparations. Despite Brazil’s underfunded transit system and low wages for workers, Brazil’s government poured $11.5 billion into World Cup preparations. Protestors with the Subway Workers Union of Sao Paulo were beaten and attacked with tear gas by police during a five-day strike for higher wages.
Brazilian Justice Ministry declared the strike illegal and implemented a $250,000 per day fee, and allowed the Brazilian government to fire employees that continue to strike. The workers suspended the strike before the Cup, but the 42 transit workers fired during the strike have not been reinstated.
The SF protest joins the Subway Workers Union in asking for the 42 fired workers to be reinstated. You can root for that goal Thu/3 outside the Brazilian Consulate, 300 Montgomery, SF. 4-5pm.
Can Silicon Valley tech companies “do better?” With the launch of a new website, the tech industry’s security guards are coming forward with tales of inequality in Silicon Valley, and asking Google and other big tech companies to do just that.
Protesting security guards outside Google’s IO conference last week used the annual developers’ conference to demand tech companies pay them living wages — as well as to broadcast their new website, TechCanDoBetter.org.
“We’re trying to change the conversation, because so much of the narrative is around tech and what good it’s doing,” said Alfredo Fletes, communications specialist for Service Employees International Union. “Our website is a safe space to learn more about workers who face the challenge of making it.”
Fletes said a Google spokesperson recently agreed to meet with SEIU to address the security guards’ concerns, but also mentioned this was the first the union heard from the spokesperson since last year.
Google hasn’t yet addressed the issue head on. The tech giant’s spokesperson wrote in press statement: “Thousands of Googlers call the Bay Area home, and we want to be good neighbors. Since 2011 we’ve given more than $70 million to local projects and employees have volunteered thousands of hours in the community. We’re excited to be expanding that work in 2014 with the recent Bay Area Impact Challenge winners – several of them have even joined us at I/O!”
The spokesperson added, in reference to the protestors’ Darth Vader-themed attire, “May the force be with them.”
Google’s Bay Area Impact Challenge means that Hack the Hood, Health Trust, Bring Me a Book, and Center for Employment Opportunities will all be receiving awards of $500,000 each. But donations aren’t the same as fair pay: The average Silicon Valley Security guard, Fletes said, will be receiving $22,000 this year.
Charles Justin Wilson, a security guard in Silicon Valley, speaks out about pay equity at the Google I/O conference last week. Photo by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez.
In TechCanDoBetter.org’s video game (aptly named Dream Crushers), users are invited to play the role of a struggling security guard. The gameplay forces the player to make tough budget choices. Maybe, for instance, you’d like your security guard to eat. Maybe you’d like him to pay his utility bills. But if you try to do all the basic necessities – transportation, food, utilities, child care – you lose.
“You’re not meant to win. Security officers who played the game said it was frustrating,” Fletes explained. “But they also said their lives were way more difficult.”
It’s not just about wages, either. “Look at at Apple and Google’s security contractor record of harrassment, discrimination, and surveillance,” Fletes said. Those are the kinds of stories security guards are invited to send to TechCanDoBetter.org. Workers can also fill in surveys on the website to help SEIU advocate for them, and sign up to receive text message alerts from SEIU.
Charles Justin Wilson, 31, moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley to build a life for himself. Now he’s a security guard, and he spends his days “dealing with everything from giving someone directions to a [fighting a] knife-carrying nut job.” He said he’d like to see Silicon Valley tech workers “even try to do” what he does. Like many security guards, he makes $12 an hour.
“Anyone who thinks you can survive on $12 in Silicon Valley is either out of touch, really stupid, or just plain evil,” he said.
Google has been the center of a series of protests since January when San Francisco residents began blocking the company’s buses. Google’s profits rose 36.5 percent to $2.9 billion last fall. The average worker wages in Silicon Valley dropped 3 percent even as the cost of basic needs for a family of four in Silicon Valley rose by nearly 20 percent between 2008 and 2012.
“They’re not doing a lot,” Samuel Kehinde, another security guard, said outside Google’s conference. “So, we are just asking them to pay attention to their home and to give back to their community. They cannot turn a blind eye on the community.”
Maybe they can. Or, they could do better. For tech giants, there are options.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.
THEATER The Fourth of July kicked off a revolution once; could it happen again? Each year in Dolores Park the San Francisco Mime Troupe gives it a shot, kicking off its touring season of free outdoor shows with a musical-comical call to arms — an appeal to popular solidarity against the very real forces of oppression on a holiday gleefully synonymous with keg-tapping.
It’s a task the legendary 55-year-old artist-run collective pursues with passion and its own unique flair: a larger-than-life mix of Italian commedia dell’arte storytelling and American-style melodrama, with a smattering of original songs thrown in for good measure. It’s an eye and ear catching spectacle that this year hits close to home, wading into the conflicts and displacement churned by a rapidly transforming high-tech, high-cost city.
Ripple Effect is set in present-day San Francisco, or just offshore in the bay, in a small tour boat where three women of very different backgrounds reckon with one another. The boat’s captain is an ardent but paranoid Lefty activist (played by Velina Brown). Her passengers are a Vietnamese beautician and all-American immigrant (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro) and a newbie tech worker from small-town Nebraska (Lisa Hori-Garcia) whose popular app landed her a corporate job in the big city.
Against the backdrop of a yawning wealth gap, real estate speculation, an epidemic of evictions, Google bus protests, and diminishing diversity, Ripple Effect‘s three protagonists (all played by longtime Mime Troupe members) explore the tensions that divide them and the common ground beneath them. (The Mime Troupe is also linking the play to a series of community forums, at its Mission studio and after select performances, in which various community leaders will facilitate public dialogue around the show’s themes and the growing divide in the city.)
“It’s always tough because we do tour the shows, so we don’t want to make them too specific to San Francisco,” says Mime Troupe actor-writer Michael Gene Sullivan, who plays several secondary roles in Ripple Effect, including a certain wily CEO. “But we feel like there are so many issues going on within the city that people around the state, really around the country, will be able to relate to — not just housing and how the cities are changing, but also the struggle within the working class, the way people are being pitted against each other while the incredibly rich are getting incredibly richer. It’s just that it’s more pointed here.”
There is precedent for SF-centric plays in past Mime Troupe offerings. In fact, the company’s 1999 show, City For Sale, took on the housing crisis of the last real estate and dot-com bubble. But Sullivan says the issue has also changed. “This show, while it touches on [housing], is much more about a change in the culture of the city. Not just what does it mean to be living in San Francisco, but what is San Francisco now?”
Ripple Effect is a departure in some other ways too. It’s a more concentrated drama, less concerned with a particular impending disaster to push the plot than in the precise relationship between the main characters. “In this show the dilemma is, to a large extent, how the characters see each other,” notes Sullivan. To this end, Sullivan, head writer for the collective since 2000, shared the writing this time around with Bay Area playwrights Eugenie Chan and Tanya Shaffer, each of whom explored specific aspects of the characters’ back stories. The show also sports two directors (Hugo E. Carbajal and Wilma Bonet) and comes with a new musical team: composer-lyricist Ira Marlowe and musical director Michael Bello, who together fill roles covered in recent years by Pat Moran.
The Mime Troupe has not been immune to the financial upheaval shaking the city. Last year, the collective had to launch an emergency fundraising campaign called the Cost of Free to make up for a serious budget shortfall that jeopardized its ability to offer its annual show. Velina Brown, Sullivan’s life partner as well as fellow artist, explains that the 2008 economic downturn had reduced the offerings of arts foundations by as much as 40 percent. “Being already a really lean organization anyway, 40 percent going away is huge.” But where another theater might have folded up shop, the Mime Troupe, with help from its audience, bounced back.
“One of the things that’s helped us over the years with all these ups and downs is that we are a collective,” says Brown. “It’s not all on one or two people and if they feel like that’s it, then that’s it — there’s a larger group of people that have to agree that that’s it before the doors close. We also own our building, and that has definitely saved our behinds. We haven’t had to be at the mercy of a landlord — who says, “Hey, I could get 10 times what you people are paying” — and kicked to the curb.”
“Because we’re a collective it takes people a lot longer to get burned out,” agrees Sullivan. “Because we’re worker-owners of our company we are willing to put in more time, do things for a little less pay, come to meetings when we’re not paid to be there. We do get paid; it’s an [Actors] Equity company. But we have a sense of ownership you don’t get at other places, and that also helps the company in the most difficult times.” *
STREET FIGHT With most city officials supporting the accommodation of private transit in some form, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is now vetting where tech workers should board and egress the private corporate commuter buses that ply the 101 and I-280 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley suburbs. A list of proposed bus stops was circulated in June, and the first round of bus stop proposals is set for approval in August.
Short of a proper environmental study, which is the subject of ongoing litigation, the list deserves more scrutiny and deliberation because certain areas of the city — such as Hayes Street in the Western Addition and 18th Street in the Mission — might be effectively made into Google Bus sewers.
I hope SFMTA is open to reconsidering some of these proposed bus stops.
Rather than jamming oversized interstate highway-scale coaches on human-scaled, walkable, and bikeable streets with important Muni routes, SFMTA ought to steer them where they are more appropriate: on the wider, car-oriented streets that bifurcate the city.
For example, the current proposal for private commuter buses in the Western Addition is to have these mammoth and incongruent buses running on Hayes Street using Muni stops at Clayton, Steiner, Laguna, and Buchanan.
This is bad news for passengers on the 21-Hayes, a key neighborhood-serving electric trolley bus that has gotten short shrift in the city planning process. With 12,500 boardings daily, the 21-Hayes is often at capacity every morning before it crosses Van Ness.
Just last week, I was on a packed 21 that was blocked (illegally) by a huge corporate bus on Hayes. With an already dense and slow traffic situation, this added at least 30 seconds to the trip before the 21 could access its stop. Repeat that multiple times in the morning and afternoon and you can see that this will be a mess. It’s not worth the dollar the SFMTA collects for such stops, that’s for sure.
Concentrating the private buses on the 21 line (or the 33 in the Mission) will block Muni where Muni is already slow, unreliable, and overcrowded. It will also diminish walkability and bicycle safety on Hayes and other streets identified in the current list (including the commercial corridors on Divisadero and 18th Street in the Mission.)
Rather than streets such as Hayes, SFTMA should redirect the private buses to the multilane, one-way couplet on Fell and Oak streets, only one block south. Along the corridor, SFMTA could collaborate with the private systems to establish new bus stops (red paint) at Clayton, Masonic, Divisadaro, Fillmore, and near Octavia. This scheme would limit clunky turn movements onto neighborhood streets by oversized buses and contribute to traffic calming.
In the mornings, the buses would pick up passengers on Oak Street, starting along the Panhandle, then travel towards Octavia Boulevard before swinging onto the freeway southbound. In the evenings the buses would exit the freeway at Octavia, and stop at drop-off hubs on Fell, between Octavia and Laguna, and then stop incrementally toward Golden Gate Park.
Additionally, the city needs to consider a space for the underpaid, nonunionized drivers to pull over and rest before and after long segments of freeway driving. We want these buses to be safe.
Similar arrangements should be made to spare 18th Street in the Mission from reverting to a Google bus sewer, with emphasis on private corporate bus stops on South Van Ness or Guerrero-San Jose. Surely there are other examples in other parts of the city.
The urgent affordable housing crisis aside, this could be a win-win from a transportation perspective. Tech workers would no longer get blamed for blocking Muni and they can know that while waiting for their bus, they are contributing to calming erstwhile hazardous streets.
There’s a lot of opportunity to combine these new bus stops with traffic calming at dangerous intersections such as Fell and Masonic or Oak and Octavia, all without mucking up Muni or diminishing the walkable human scale of nearby neighborhood commercial streets. And hey, since this is all a “pilot program,” no pesky and expensive EIR is needed — right?
Thinking long-term, this scheme could be a template to jumpstart making this ridiculous private transit system into a regional public bus system modeled on AC transit or Golden Gate Transit, a service open to all. Our car-centric streets are ripe for express bus service and this would help relieve parallel lines like the N-Judah, while enabling the city to attain its aspiration of 30 percent mode share on transit.
And for Mayor Ed Lee and pro-tech-bus members of the Board of Supervisors, it helps with their “vision zero” rhetoric of increasing pedestrian safety because placing the buses on car-centric one-way couplets can help calm traffic.
With a little cajoling by the mayor, he could get his tech sponsors to underwrite streetscape and beautification at the bus stops along these kinds of streets.
After all, Mayor Lee needs to find the money, because last month he betrayed pedestrian and bicycle safety and Muni when he abandoned support for increasing the Vehicle License Fee locally this fall, all the while misleading the public about the important role of Sunday metering. Perhaps it’s time for a tax or license fee on the ad hoc private transit system?
SLOWING DOWN
Speaking of vision zero, Sup. Eric Mar deserves hearty thanks for proposing to reduce speed limits citywide. This is one of the most effective ideas to come from the progressive wing of the Board of Supervisors in a long time and should be implemented yesterday. Higher speeds maim and kill, and the faster cars go the more voracious the appetite for both fuel and urban space.
With reduced speed, the motorist would still be able to drive, just more slowly, perhaps with less convenience than now. But over time the options of cycling, of walkable shopping, and improved public transit would synchronize more seamlessly as car space is ceded to separated cycletracks and transit lanes.
My suggestion is to make the city navigable by car at no greater than 15 miles per hour, a speed deemed not only to be comfortable on calmed pedestrian streets, but also to minimize injury and fatalities when there are collisions. Ultimately, our efforts to curb global warming, reduce injury and death from automobility, and make the city more livable obliges us to slow down, so looking at speeds is a step forward.
Street Fight is a monthly column by Jason Henderson, a geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco.