Media

Is Updike obsolete?

0

› publicwriter@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In a recent New York Times Book Review screed, the proverbial old-white-male author John Updike offers a reader’s digest version of the argument against online publishing. For those of us who are genuinely puzzled by the animosity directed against efforts to digitize books (like Google Print or the Internet Archive’s Open Library Project), Updike’s short essay is quite instructive.
Updike offers the usual salvos against the “unedited, unattributed” nature of most online writing, but the true source of his wrath is a profound distaste for the idea of reading as a “community activity.” He’s disgusted by the idea of texts being intermingled and passed around “promiscuously” in electronic libraries. More than that, he’s weirded out by the way readers intermingle online. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, Updike was never called on to make appearances or have his photo on book jackets, and he still longs for the silences and authorial anonymity of that experience. Ultimately, he predicts that the demand for an intimate back-and-forth between author and audience on the Web will lead us back to “the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value.”
Most writers who, like myself, spend their days jabbering online have a tendency to read essays like Updike’s as the rantings of an obsolete Luddite who can’t tell the difference between a wiki and an RSS feed. It’s easy to make fun of the guy for not knowing a whole lot about the technologies he’s criticizing. But let’s take him seriously for a minute and consider what he’s actually getting at beneath his profound misunderstandings of Google Print and bookshelf mash-ups.
The essay begins with a wistful evocation of the bookstores he visited when young: Mandrake’s in Cambridge, where Updike found New Directions paperbacks; the old Doubleday’s in New York on Fifth Avenue, “with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.” He worries about losing the understated beauty of books and the quiet dignity of the stores that trade in them. In short, he feels like he’s losing the public spaces devoted to buying and selling books. And yet what he scorns most in his essay is the idea of a “universal library,” democratically accessible to all and long the dream of techie futurists like Wired cofounder Kevin Kelley and digital archivist Rick Prelinger. Why wouldn’t Updike welcome a new, bigger public space devoted to books?
To answer, let me return for a moment to the complaint made by pretty much every blogger who has argued with an old-school print journalist about the legitimacy of online writing. Typically bloggers upbraid these print writers for fearing new technologies in a sentence that goes something like this: “If you simply replace the word ‘blog’ with the word ‘printing press’ in this argument, you see how the argument against blogs is like arguing against the progress of civilization.”
But there is no evidence that anyone protested the invention of the printing press for destroying writing. Sure, there may have been some angry monks here and there who could no longer make a living writing books out by hand. But in general, writers welcomed the invention of the printing press. It led to a flowering of the writing industry and literacy. Meanwhile, governments liked the printing press because it made propaganda a whole lot simpler. It also made writing easier to censor. Unlike handwritten books, which were labor intensive but hard to regulate, every book made with a printing press could be tracked. In England, shortly after the printing press gained ascendancy, all printers had to register with the state for exactly this reason.
The invention of the printing press is nothing like the invention of the Web, which liberates writers from their dependence on publishers regulated by the caprices of states and markets. And so, for now at least, Updike is right that the Internet takes us back to a pre-Gutenberg era. Until we start seeing major censorship crackdowns on Web publishing — rather than the threat of pervasive surveillance, which is certainly chilling — online publishing will never behave like the printing press. The printing press led to the privatization of reading, but the Web leads to its socialization.
So perhaps what Updike is getting at when he bemoans the rise of digital books is really the rise of an uncensored public space. He’s not afraid of technology, but of the public itself. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who loves libraries and old bookstores.

No end to Pentagon spying

0

EDITORIAL The Department of Defense has released the first installment of records related to Pentagon spying on antiwar groups, and while the documents are pretty limited, they suggest that there are no rules against monitoring peaceful political protests.
The records were made public in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Guardian after evidence emerged that military intelligence agents were monitoring protests at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley.
The records consist largely of documents and memos, dating back to 1982, that outline the rules and procedures for gathering intelligence on activities that the Pentagon might consider threatening to the US military or its personnel (the documents can be viewed in full at www.sfbg.com). The most relevant material relates to the 2003 Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) program, which was created to report and analyze what the Pentagon calls “nonvalidated possible terrorist-related threat information.” A Dec. 19, 2005 memo from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense states that TALON “is the place where the DoD initially stores ‘dots’ of information which if validated, might later be connected to avert an attack.”
Many of the documents discuss media coverage of the TALON program in 2005 and suggest that some policies around the retention of information might need review.
However, nowhere in the documents is there any clear statement that nonviolent protests — protected by the First Amendment — should be kept out of the database or that any limits should be set on the types of activities that are considered worthy of TALON reporting.
In other words, based on what we’ve seen so far, the Pentagon considers it perfectly appropriate to spy on student protesters and to put that information in a terrorist-threat database.
This ought to be an issue in the fall congressional elections. The Bush administration’s level of “intelligence” collection and scrutiny of private information about Americans who have not broken any laws and do not constitute a threat to anyone is astonishing. The fact that the administration can’t even tell its spies to leave peaceful protesters alone is another sign of the alarming erosion not only of personal privacy but of First Amendment rights. SFBG

{Empty title}

0

› tredmond@sfbg.com
Just about everybody in the “respectable” news media is going to call Sup. Chris Daly’s latest charter amendment a crackpot idea, so I might as well join the crackpots right now. I think it’s wonderful.
Daly wants to require the mayor of San Francisco to appear once a month at a Board of Supervisors meeting and answer questions. That’s it — no decisions get made, no policies change. The mayor just has to stand up in public, in front of the district-elected legislators, and explain himself.
It’s a longstanding tradition in England, where the prime minister has to show up at Parliament for “question time.” It makes for outstanding politics and great TV. It’s often pretty rough: The PM gets interrogated by the opposition and fires back. When the smoke clears, the public knows a little more about the government’s policies, and the nation’s chief executive is a little more accountable.
Imagine if G.W. Bush, who doesn’t like press conferences, embodies the imperial presidency, and hates having to answer in public to anything, had to endure question time before the House of Representatives. Imagine Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee or John Murtha asking him about the war. (For that matter, imagine Bill Clinton avoiding impeachment by hashing the questions out in front of a Republican Congress long before it ever got to that.)
There’s a lot to like about parliamentary democracies, and one of the best things is the relatively weak executive branch. Question time in England helps keep the prime minister under control.
And of course in San Francisco mayors are pretty powerful and tend to be pretty aloof. Willie Brown just ignored critics. Gavin Newsom talks to the press but doesn’t get into active debates that much. So it wouldn’t hurt the mayor — any mayor — to have to spend an hour a month in a public session responding to the supervisors’ questions; it wouldn’t hurt the city either. It would do wonders for fighting the inclination toward secrecy in the executive branch. And you know you’d want to watch.
Yeah, Chris Daly is not a fan of Gavin Newsom, and the political consultants working for the mayor will have all sorts of reasons to call this a personal attack and an assault on separation of powers (if not on the very nature of American democracy). But come on — if the prime minister of England can find time to handle this while leading one of the world’s great powers, the mayor of San Francisco can fit it into his tight schedule.
Onward: The deal that gives Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group control over most of the Bay Area dailies is now complete — and already there’s word that Singleton and the Hearst Corp., which owns the ostensibly competing San Francisco Chronicle, will be doing a joint web venture together.
From the June 29 Contra Costa Times:
“MediaNews executives revealed the company is discussing with Hearst Corp. a joint venture to begin a new Web site involving the Bay Area online products of the Times and Mercury News; of the MediaNews publications in the Bay Area; and of the Hearst-owned Chronicle.”
Monopoly marches on.
Funny: I didn’t see anything about this in the Chron. SFBG

FOURTH OF JULY

0

The Fourth of July listings were compiled by Joseph DeFranceschi and Duncan Scott Davidson. All events take place on July 4 unless otherwise noted.

Fireworks Dinner with Jazz Piano Top of the Mark, 999 California, SF; 392-3434, www.topofthemark.com. 7:30pm, $189 per couple. The music of jazz pianist Ricardo Scales and breathtaking views of the city’s fireworks display accompany this elegant dinner of a four-course fixed menu served with a complementary bottle of champagne.
Fourth of July Waterfront Festival Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, The Cannery, SF; 705-5500, www.pier39.com. 1:30-10pm, free. This all-day fair featuring entertainment, arts and crafts, food, and American flags ends with the famed Municipal Pier Fireworks Extravaganza starting at about 9:30pm.
Hornblower Yacht Forth of July Cruises Pier 33, Embarcadero, SF; 1-800-467-6256, www.hornblower.com. Noon, $49; 6:30pm, $119–$219. Spend the afternoon out on the bay with Hornblower’s lunch cruise; or why not watch fireworks and enjoy a buffet dinner ($119), or an all-inclusive, four-course extravaganza ($219) on your evening voyage.
Kayak Trip to 4th of July Fireworks City Kayak, Pier 39, SF; 357-1010, www.citykayak.com. 6pm, $68. Paddle around with sea lions, enjoy the fireworks and sip champagne (included) from the best seat in the house on this unique aquatic experience.
Red and White Fleet Forth of July Fireworks Cruises Pier 43 1/2 at Fisherman’s Wharf, SF; 673-2900, www.redandwhite.com. 7:45pm, $45 ($25 for kids age 1-11). Red and White Fleet will send out four ships to cover this popular event so get your tickets early and don’t forget your Dramamine.
El Rio BBQ and Bandfest El Rio, 3158 Mission, SF; 282-3325, www.elriosf.com. 3-8pm, free admission. Come listen to rock music from the Birds and Batteries, Low Red Land, Mr. Divisadero, and Solar Powered People. Drink beer all day — it’s the American way.
BAY AREA
4th of July at the Berkeley Marina Berkeley Marina, 201 University, Berk; (510) 548-5335, www.ci.berkeley.ca.us. noon-9:30pm, free. Berkeley’s all day, alcohol-free, fair with entertainment, food, games, face painting, and giant waterslide is a great place for families and ends with, you guessed it, fireworks.
4th of July Celebration at Jack London Square Broadway at Embarcadero, Oakl; 1-866-295-9853, www.jacklondonsquare.com. 1-9:30pm, free. With international food, children’s activities, arts and crafts, and fireworks the real highlight of this event is a free two hour pops concert by the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
Fuck the 4th Sale AK Press, 674-A 23rd St., Oakl; (510) 208-1700, www.akpress.org. July 3, 4:10pm, free. In addition to 25 percent off everything in the warehouse (books, CDs, DVDs, clothing), and sale books for as low as $1, there will be entertainment, food, and an atmosphere of summer glee.
Oakland A’s Beer Festival McAfee Coliseum (East Side Club), 7000 Coliseum Way, Oakl; (510) 638-4627, oakland.athletics.mlb.com. Noon-2pm, ticket to the game needed for entry. Sample beers from over 30 breweries before enjoying America’s game on America’s day. Play ball!
Redwood City 67th Annual Independence Day Parade Brewster and Winslow, Redwood City; (650) 365-1825, www.parade.org. 10am, free. Redwood City hosts the country’s largest July 4th parade and their all-day festival features food, entertainment, vendors of all sorts, marching bands, and ends in traditional fashion with a fireworks display at around 9:30pm.
San Francisco Symphony Shoreline Amphitheatre, One Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View; (650) 967-3000, www.livenation.com. 8pm, $15-28.50. You’ll soon forget that Mountain View’s beautiful outdoor amphitheater is built atop a garbage dump when guest conductor Randal Fleisher leads the San Francisco Symphony in a concert complete with fireworks. The program features music and clips from Disney film favorites.
USS Hornet 4th of July Party USS Hornet Museum, 707 W. Hornet, Pier 3, Alameda; (510) 521-8448, www.hornetevents.com. 10am-9:50pm, $20 ($5 for kids). View a F-14 Tomcat and Apollo space capsule among other items on a tour of this aircraft carrier which will have music, games, children’s activities, and a great view of the Bay Area fireworks.
The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 487-2506; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no text attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. We cannot guarantee the return of photos, but enclosing an SASE helps. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone. SFBG

Never mind Brookers . . .

0

› numa@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In the world of weird cultural appropriation that is the Web, nothing can compare to the strange tale of a Moldavian pop song called “Dragostea din Tei.” It began in 2003 as a catchy disco tune by boy band the O-Zone, who sing in Romanian and look like a queer version of Duran Duran (or perhaps a queerer version). The video for the song started circuutf8g on the Web a couple years ago and is full of silly shots in which the band dances on an airplane, its members hugging one another and randomly morphing into cartoon characters.
The infectious song became a hit in Europe and immediately inspired several parody/homage fan videos online. One, by a Finnish artist, depicted an androgynous anime character dancing to the tune, and so many people accessed her little movie that no server would host it. Soon a Japanese cartoon version appeared, in which two cats dance while subtitles supply words in Japanese that sound like the Romanian lyrics, thus producing a running commentary of Japanese nonsense.
The obvious and exuberant queerness of the video inspired many other versions, including one in which three Polish guys dance around with giant dildos and another that aired on Spanish television with the lyrics changed to include the phrase marica tu, which means “you’re queer.” Earlier this year a group of students at the University of British Columbia gave the Web possibly the last (or at least the best) word in gay appropriations of the video: Four nubile Canadian men jump around, take off their shirts, chase airplanes, and frolic by the seashore while mouthing the lyrics to the song. Although this elaborate creation was linked from Collegehumor.com, it’s hard to see the parody in it — it’s a straight homage to the goofy Moldavian original.
While these queer appropriations (or approbations) warmed up the Net, a very different group also played telephone with “Dragostea din Tei,” creating parodies of parodies inspired by a 19-year-old American named Gary Brolsma. Brolsma had recorded himself lip-synching, making faces, and chair-dancing to the song with a Web cam and posted it on his Web site. Within days, copies of the video had made it all over the Net, inspiring people to re-create Brolsma’s hand-waving and nutty facial expressions in their own videos. Over many iterations, this meme was dubbed the “Numa Numa Dance,” in reference to the chorus of “Dragostea din Tei,” which goes “numa numa iei, numa numa iei.” Although Brolsma was embarrassed by the phenomenon and stopped talking to the press about it, his happy, geeky imitators posted Numa Numa Dances from all over the world — including Thailand, Hong Kong, the UK, and, of course, Canada. My favorite was made by a couple of kids in the United States studying for a calculus exam, who dance around to the song and wave printouts of formulas and binary numbers in front of the screen.
Even the US Navy got in on the action with a video that sort of straddles the line between gay and dorky.
Despite its global popularity, few in the media paid any attention to this queer geek meme until a straight white girl named Brookers appropriated it on YouTube.com. Her version, called “Crazed Numa Fan,” shows her doing the exact same thing you see in every other Numa Numa Dance flick: She waves her arms and makes faces in front of her bedroom Web cam. But her video, which is no more or less creatively cute than the hundreds of others out there, was downloaded 1.5 million times. And a couple weeks ago it earned the skinny blond 20-year-old a development deal with former MTV star Carson Daly’s production company.
I know, I know. Predictable as hell, right?
But while Brookers’s fame will flare out, the Numa Numa Dance will continue on its merry digital way. When I watch all those happy imitators bouncing to “Dragostea din Tei” on their Web cams, I feel viscerally the utopian promise of global pop culture. I’m nodding along to a joyful tune in a language I rarely hear, and it’s been mashed up, appropriated, and reappropriated, our pleasure in it shared and reshared until it feels like everybody everywhere is doing the Numa Numa Dance along with me. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who loves any Romance language that retains the neuter, along with several Latin declensions.
For a short compendium of the best in “Dragostea din Tei,” see the online version of this column at www.sfbg.com.]
Original video: video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2294961099056745991

{Empty title}

0

› tredmond@sfbg.com
The local daily newspapers haven’t paid much attention to it, but there’s a ferocious fuss going on in the blog world over political power and journalistic ethics, and it’s all swirling around a 34-year-old who runs the world’s most popular political blog out of his home in Berkeley.
It’s a fascinating story because of what it says about the revolution that’s taking place in media and politics today.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs the blog DailyKos, which started off as just another liberal political blog by a liberal political activist (who used to be a political consultant and worked at one point for Howard Dean). But in the past three years it’s become phenomenally successful: DailyKos.com gets about a half million page views a day, which puts it in the league not with most of the other blogs but with major mainstream news operations. Moulitsas has no staff — no reporters, no editors, no reviewers, no nothing. His readers — or, more accurately, the members of the huge and growing DailyKos community of 92,000 registered users — provide almost all of the content. They write their own personal blogs called diaries, they comment on each other’s stuff, they promote (and dis) candidates, and they have formed the best known place in the country for the Dean wing of the Democratic Party to meet and confer.
The politicians have noticed, big time: Leading Democrats (like Rep. Nancy Pelosi) post on the site. A couple of months ago, a former president (Jimmy Carter) stopped by to blog. When the Kossacks organized an annual convention this summer, Sen. Harry Reid and presidential hopeful Mark Warner showed up.
So now DailyKos is in the big leagues — and not surprisingly, critics are starting to snipe.
The latest: Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, who runs MyDD.com, have written a book together, and are longtime pals. (Moulitsas calls Armstrong his “blogfather.”) Armstrong is an active political consultant, and the candidates he works for sometimes get nice mentions on DailyKos. There’s been a lot of mumbling about how there might be some kind of sordid conspiracy here (hire Armstrong, get plugged on DailyKos), and it all became louder when the New Republic got word that Armstrong had been accused of illegally hyping stocks on the Web several years ago — and that Moulitsas had sent an e-mail around to a private mailing list urging other bloggers to keep it quiet.
The right-wingers (including David Brooks of the New York Times) have had a field day with this, acting as if they’ve finally unmasked the Great Left-Wing Conspiracy. Actually, the fact that it all came out in the open pretty quickly shows what a lousy secret cabal the bloggers make. Mostly, Moulitsas’s e-mail was just pretty stupid. But the whole episode raises the question: At what point do bloggers have a responsibility to be accountable, to have ethics and disclosure standards the way “mainstream” journalists are supposed to?
I e-mailed Moulitsas about it, and he’s pretty clear: “People like you keep trying to pound a round peg into a square hole,” he said. “This is citizen media. It is what it is … Old media might want the media landscape to resemble their old world, but it doesn’t, not anymore.”
Which is absolutely true. And I love DailyKos. And the blog explosion is perhaps the most democratic thing that’s happened to media in the history of civilization.
But at some point, citizen journalism isn’t enough — you need reporters and editors and a real staff to give the public real information about the world. And when that happens in the blog world (and it will soon) a lot of the rules are going to change. SFBG

Shotgun marriage

0

› sarah@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom has garnered media accolades for his San Francisco Health Access Plan, which would provide the city’s 82,000 uninsured residents a package of health care services, including preventative, primary, specialty, and emergency care, lab work, X-rays, pharmaceuticals, and inpatient hospitalization.
All of this sounds good until you consider how the press has glossed over serious flaws in Newsom’s plan, which was coauthored by Sup. Tom Ammiano. And SFHAP could be doomed to fail unless coupled with the more controversial Ammiano-authored health care legislation: the Worker Health Care Security Ordinance (WHSCO).
Ammiano’s ordinance would require employers operating within the city that have at least 20 employees (or 50 employees for nonprofits) to provide health care coverage for their workers. Predictably these mandatory spending requirements have the business community screaming its opposition — and Newsom, who is up for reelection next year, pussyfooting around the issue.
But the truth is that Newsom hasn’t detailed how to fully pay for his plan or avoid its policy pitfalls without the financial and structural boost that WHSCO’s mandates provide.
“There is no separation between the two pieces of legislation except in the way they’ve been presented. They’re joined at the hip, and there will be no funding gap with both pieces of legislation working together,” Ammiano told the Guardian.
Here’s how the plans work: To cover the estimated $200 million cost of Newsom’s sliding scale SFHAP, the city would contribute the $104 million it currently spends on the uninsured, hoping that more preventive care would efficiently translate into lower emergency room costs.
Add that to an estimated $60 million that the city thinks higher income enrollees will pay, plus an additional $10 million in estimated savings from increased federal cost-sharing. But even if all that works out, there’s a $30 million shortfall.
Enter Ammiano’s plan, which would generate an estimated $30 million to $40 million in employer contributions. There’s also another key piece of Ammiano’s plan that saves the one Newsom is touting: Unless Ammiano’s plan becomes law, there’s nothing to stop employers who already offer health insurance from saving money by dumping their workers into Newsom’s newly minted program, thus expanding the number of uninsured and potentially overwhelming the city’s clinics.
While Ammiano’s plan requires businesses with more than 20 employees to cover 50 percent of workers’ health care costs ($1.06 an hour), and those with more than 100 employees to cover 75 percent of those costs ($1.60 an hour), it also offers employers a wide array of health care expenditure options, including providing insurance, creating health savings accounts, or paying into the Health Access Plan.
There’s a reason for these options: the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act. The act prevents cities and states from specifying which health care plan employers must provide. But as Ammiano discovered, municipalities can stipulate how much employers must spend on health care.
Asked why he thinks Newsom isn’t giving Ammiano’s mandatory plan his public blessing, Ammiano waxes diplomatic.
“I asked the mayor, ‘So, what could you live with?’ and the answer was the Health Access Plan, in which everyone is covered, and there are no preexisting conditions,” Ammiano told us.
But the business community latched onto the idea as if it existed in a vacuum. Nathan Nayman of Committee on Jobs helped develop the Newsom plan but continues to slam Ammiano’s ordinance. At a Budget and Finance Committee hearing on June 26, Nayman called Ammiano’s ordinance “a full frontal assault on small and medium businesses.” But when challenged by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi over how killing the ordinance would incapacitate Newsom’s plan, Nayman suggested “putting both plans on hiatus.”
Ammiano said he’s running out of patience with Nayman and his downtown allies.
“They didn’t lift a finger except to come in at the last minute with a proposal that was neither progressive nor legally viable,” he complained, referring to an 11th-hour suggestion that businesses be charged a license fee. The fee would have fallen heavily on businesses with less than 20 employees — which don’t have to provide health insurance — and likely would have been challenged as a tax in disguise, thereby triggering a ballot.
Not that the Ammiano camp is afraid of voters. In 2004, 69 percent of San Francisco voted for Proposition 72, which would have provided employer mandated health care had it not narrowly failed statewide. So while Ammiano anticipates resistance from the business community, he isn’t expecting a “monolithic rebellion.”
“They’ve been doing their own polling, so they know if [mandatory health care spending] goes to ballot, it’ll pass, and they’ll only get much more rigid legislation,” Ammiano told us.
Ken Jacobs, who Ammiano describes as the brains behind WHSCO and who was also part of the mayor’s 37-member Universal Healthcare Council that developed SFHAP, told us WHSCO not only helps workers who don’t have health care access but also serves to stop the erosion of employer-sponsored coverage.
Jacobs — who is deputy chair of UC Berkeley’s Labor Center — said it’s important not to erode the 85 percent of SF-based businesses already providing employee health care benefits. Even Newsom’s health director, Mitch Katz, has publicly said that good health insurance is better than the access plan Newsom is touting.
Crediting San Francisco’s existing clinic system for making SFHAP conceptually possible, Jacobs noted that its estimated $200 million annual cost is based on “a fully ramped-up program in which every uninsured resident is enrolled” — something he believes won’t happen immediately.
Jacobs also points out that if employers who currently don’t offer medical benefits sign up for private insurance because of WHSCO’s mandate, their employees will no longer be uninsured, thus reducing the public system costs. He also believes that because WHSCO makes large employers spend $274 a month, it’s unlikely they’d opt for SFHAP because that plan is limited to care in San Francisco.
Conversely, SFHAP requires participants to be willing to apply for state and federal benefits. They also must pay monthly fees ranging from a nominal $3 for those earning below $19,600 to $35 for those earning between $19,600 and $40,000 to $201 a month for those earning over $50,000.
There’s also one more reason why Newsom will likely to be forced to accept the marriage with Ammiano’s plan, despite the grumbling from his business community supporters: Eight supervisors have now signed on as WHSCO cosponsors, giving it a veto-proof majority.
Newsom’s spokespeople did not return our repeated calls for comment, but Eileen Shields of the Department of Health confirmed that “Ammiano’s legislation supports making the SFHAP a reality financially.” SFBG

Why is Asa Sullivan dead?

0

> gwschulz@sfbg.com

Kahlil Sullivan hasn’t had time to do much lately other than plan for his younger brother’s funeral. He hasn’t even had time to find out exactly why his brother is dead.
“We feel like we’re lost,” he said over the phone a week after his cornered and unarmed brother was shot and killed by the San Francisco Police Department.
The cops have offered two stories as to why officers fired a still-undisclosed number of bullets into the body of Asa Sullivan on June 6. And neither one seems to make much sense or explain why they shot Sullivan.
Meanwhile, the family hasn’t been offered a dime for burial expenses from the Victim Services Division of the District Attorney’s Office. The state won’t spend money to help the families of former felons, but there’s local money available too. That’s off-limits, it turns out, because the SFPD hasn’t classified Sullivan’s death as an “unlawful killing,” according to the DA’s office.
Sullivan’s mother, Kathleen Espinosa, even told us on the day of his funeral, June 15, that the department did not provide a liaison to the family, as the Office of Citizen Complaints two years ago recommended the SFPD do for the families of officer-involved shooting victims.
In fact, Espinosa hasn’t heard a word from the department. Everything she knows has come largely from two stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Espinosa, a short, relentlessly cheerful woman with chestnut hair, held a smile throughout her son’s funeral while hugging Sullivan’s tearful young friends. She said any new information from the department right now hardly matters.
“Let them get their story straight first before they come to me,” she said. “I don’t want another wrong story.”
According to early reports, Sullivan and his friend, 25-year-old Jason Martin, were staying with two tenants at a Villas Parkmerced townhouse, part of a 3,200-unit complex close to the San Francisco State University campus. Sullivan had been in some trouble in the past; his criminal record included an armed robbery, and he was on probation for selling pot. But he’d secured a job at Goodwill and had a six-year-old son to look after.
Martin and Sullivan were helping to clean up the townhouse so their friends could receive their security deposit when they moved out. The tenants were being evicted for not paying rent, but a Parkmerced official told the media that the tenants were still legally living there.
The cops said a neighbor called the police, believing the unit had been taken over by nonresidents. Police Chief Heather Fong insisted in press statements that the complex was having problems with squatters. But Parkmerced public policy director Bert Polacci told the Guardian that the complex had no such problems. If the cops had called him, he might have cleared up the residency status of the occupants of 2 Garces Drive.
When Officers Michelle Alvis and John Keesor arrived, they immediately detained Martin, in response to the neighbor’s complaint. Sullivan, who feared going to jail for a probation violation, fled to a two-and-a-half-foot-high attic space.
The officers attempted to talk him down with Martin’s help but eventually went into the attic. Martin later insisted, according to Espinosa, that he told the officers Sullivan was unarmed before they went after him.
The way the cops tell it, Sullivan — who would have been unable to stand up in the tiny space — took a combative stance from inside the attic, and the officers believed he had aimed a gun at them.
The department first reported that Sullivan had shot at the officers through the attic floor. Further, the cops reported that Sullivan’s gun was found at the scene. The truth is, all they found was the case to a pair of eyeglasses.
SFPD spokesperson Neville Gittens told us only that the first story was based on “secondhand information” and “witness statements.”
The official story changed several hours after the department offered its first explanation of what happened. According to Gittens, Keesor fired first, and a ricochet nicked his partner’s ear, “perhaps” causing her to fire as well. When the smoke cleared, Sullivan was dead. No gun was ever found.
“They got flashlights,” Sullivan’s brother Kahlil exclaimed. “Can’t they see his hands? Why didn’t they ask him questions first? We may never know the truth.”
One of the two officers had their flashlights on, Gittens said, but he couldn’t confirm whether the illumination was enough to identify exactly what was in Sullivan’s hand. Gittens told the Guardian that Fong has not yet made a decision about whether to return the officers to regular duty.
Gittens initially refused on June 9 to release the names of the officers involved to the Guardian, but the day after we asked for them, they appeared in the Chronicle. And the department has not yet responded to a Guardian request for documents associated with the shooting.
In 2004, the police commission voted unanimously to conditionally require the disclosure of incident reports to the families of officer-involved shooting victims as swiftly as possible. That change, and the request that the SFPD provide a liaison to the family, were inspired by the death of Cammerin Boyd, who was shot and killed in the spring of 2004 by SFPD officers following a car chase.
But during several subsequent commission meetings, the recommendations disappeared into the ether. And it’s not the first time that proposed reforms were simply ignored by the SFPD, a fact commission vice president Theresa Sparks readily admits.
“I was a little surprised the chief released the names as fast as she did,” Sparks told us.
Sparks nonetheless said that she is still troubled by the so-far inconsistent stories the department has offered to the public and the commission.
“The first story that came out was totally incorrect, [and] the chief could not tell us why the story changed,” Sparks said. “It’s criminal that these families sit there with no specific knowledge about what happened.”
Sullivan’s funeral was attended by his siblings — Kahlil, brother Sangh, and sisters T-sha Sullivan and Tasha Mosby-Greer — and a capacity crowd of Asa’s friends and other family, all in Duggan’s Funeral Home, right across from the Mission Police Station.
Born on Sept. 8, 1980, Asa grew up in San Francisco and attended Bay Area schools. Friends remembered his playful sense of humor. For a time recently, he stayed with his mom while working at Goodwill, commuting from San Jose at 5 a.m. and returning late.
“He made everybody laugh,” Espinosa said. “He didn’t deserve to be cornered in an attic and gunned down.”
The family has contacted Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who told the Guardian that during his handling of hundreds of officer-misconduct cases, he’s seen families victimized by police denied documents, explanations, and the truth.
“If there’s one thing I’ve found, it’s police agencies do a disservice to the victim’s family when they don’t provide information,” Burris said. “When the families ask questions, they don’t respond.” SFBG

Mr. Big Stuff

0

> a&eletters@sfbg.com

America is unquestionably the land of the large. We well realize that gigantic things generate a sense of awe — along with danger — as it currently applies to presidential hubris and supersized snacks. It’s no accident that the artists who work biggest are United States residents — not to mention men: Think of James Turrell, who transformed a crater in the Arizona desert into a massive temple to natural light; Richard Serra, whose hefty steel sculptures have blocked public plazas and famously crashed through a gallery floor; Christo, whose canvases are world landmarks and entire states; and even Jeff Koons, who effectively inflated a topiary puppy to the size of a mountain. They may have international reputations (and a few peers in other countries), but there is something undeniably American in the desire to realize dreams that large. The trick is to translate that sense of awe into something more than size envy.
Matthew Barney is perhaps the first contemporary artist to translate the idea of that monumental impulse to the media age. His latest venture, “Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint,” which opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week (look for a review in these pages soon), is a sizable, career-spanning project. Like most of his work, it involves a feature-length film, and objects and images that relate to a self-invented universe, one filled with references to the human body, landscapes, and landmarks. Perhaps, as some critics have suggested, Barney’s work extends the enveloping nature of film into three-dimensional space, or synthesizes various art forms into a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk — that total, epic extravaganza of a term that’s frequently attached to Barney. Whatever it’s called, it feels like something major.
A HIGH PRICE TO PAY?
Barney’s Drawing Restraint series — which comprises performances, videos, a feature film, and drawings — is rooted in the idea of struggle, transformation, and creation. The pieces in the ongoing series reflect the artist’s changing means — the earliest of them were done with Barney attempting to make drawings on the wall while shackled with rubber tethers or jumping on a trampoline and inscribing a self-portrait on the ceiling. Drawing Restraint 14, which was recently executed at SFMOMA, involved the artist scaling the building’s tubular skylight and drawing on the curved wall. Drawing Restraint 9, as has been widely reported, costars Barney’s real-life partner Björk, was filmed on a large Japanese whaling ship and employed the full crew as extras (a primary theme of the film is Barney’s identity as an occidental — read: American — in an inscrutable Japanese culture), and was realized on a budget of nearly $5 million.
That seems an attractive sum for an artist to be working with, but not when you compare it to the costs of this country’s greatest cultural exports — Hollywood movies — or even the price of an impressionist painting at auction. It definitely pales before Damien Hirst’s recently publicized bid to make the priciest work of art ever: a diamond-encrusted skull costing some $18.8 million. If Barney could raise those kinds of funds, most likely he’d have little trouble taking his vision to a next level, be it with CGI effects or with greater amounts of his signature material, petroleum jelly.
EXCESS AND RESTRAINT
The SFMOMA exhibition involved casting 1,600 gallons of the stuff, a relatively small amount in Barney terms, in a rectangular mold — a process that was slowed by clogged hoses and a minor rupture on the museum steps. As he did at the Guggenheim with his 2003 Cremaster Cycle exhibition, Barney easily occupies a good chunk of the museum. The show covers the whole of the fourth floor, which has, for the first time, most of its walls removed. The now-vast galleries house a few whale-sized sculptures, all illuminated with hundreds of industrial-looking lightbulbs installed by Barney’s crew. Clusters of sleek flat-screen monitors hang from the ceiling throughout. While it’s not the most expensive show that SFMOMA has mounted — recent ones involving less exotic materials have had much bigger price tags — Drawing Restraint feels deluxe, even if its most used material is cool, white plastic instead of precious stones.
Is Barney’s work gracious or self-absorbed? Is his work fueled by ego, the art market, or artistic drive? These are difficult questions, and although the Cremaster exhibition was accompanied by a telephone book–sized catalog with reams of explanatory text, it’s still difficult to know. Critic Jerry Saltz, in a review of Drawing Restraint 9, described Barney as “a mystic exploring his own inner cathedral.” It seems apt, as that religious edifice is a cavernous container in which to contemplate mystical phenomena, not to mention a form to which museums are often compared. We’re meant to enter them and be quietly wowed, whether we believe the dogma or not.
Those who have tickets to the already sold-out Barney lecture on June 23 — an example of his rock star status — will most likely come away with a sense that the artist possesses a genuine humbleness and an unerring drive to realize his vision. He thinks big, and manages to live up to his ambitions with dignity. Whatever you think of his work, you gotta admire his supersized pluck. SFBG
MATTHEW BARNEY: DRAWING RESTRAINT
June 23–Sept. 17
Fri.–Tues., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.;
Thurs., 11 a.m.–>8:45 p.m.
SFMOMA
151 Third St., SF
$7–$12.50, free for 12 and under and members (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.)
(415) 357-4000
For Drawing Restraint events, go to www.sfmoma.org

Angel of death

0

> cheryl@sfbg.com

“It has to be pretty. Everything should be pretty,” explains Geum-ja (Lee Young-ae), who throughout Lady Vengeance is variously referred to as “a real live angel,” “Geum-ja the kindhearted,” and “the witch.” The fact that what has to be pretty is a gun should surprise no one who’s seen Korean director Park Chanwook’s gruesome Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or his staggering Oldboy. His latest is the glorious female-revenge film Quentin Tarantino wished he could make, ending up with two so-so Kill Bills instead.
And Lady Vengeance has similarities with Kill Bill: a very bad man, a stolen child, and an agonizingly long period of inactivity preceding a fevered, focused pursuit of payback. But Geum-ja doesn’t fall into a coma; at the start of Lady Vengeance she’s exiting jail after serving 13 years for a crime it’s pretty obvious she didn’t commit. Behind bars, she’s been plotting, sweetly luring fellow inmates into her debt so that they have no choice but to help her on the outside. As the film’s intricate story line slowly reveals, she’s most intent on punishing the man responsible for her confinement (a children’s teacher with sinister tendencies, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik), but there are other considerations — including a reunion with her long-lost daughter, now an English-speaking adolescent being raised by a square Australian couple.
Park’s previous revenge films drew some ire for their vicious violence, but they also earned the director a passionate following among genre fans. Lady Vengeance is no less cleverly brutal — granted, nobody cuts off their own tongue with a pair of scissors in this one — but it’s also Park’s most elegant effort, starting with graceful opening titles that introduce a classical, harpsichord-laden score. Overall, the film has a more feminine quality than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or Oldboy — obviously a result of the casting, but it’s a twist that also permeates Park’s visual and tonal style. The film’s obligatory moments of over-the-top nastiness are tempered by an overall mood of delicate, lusciously colored restraint.
A big part of Lady Vengeance’s success is owed to Lee, perfectly cast as a woman caught between the conflicting forces of maternal instinct and the need for sweet, sweet revenge. Her years-ago arrest is chronicled for us by a breathless newscast; it seems Geum-ja became a media sensation not just for her confessed terrible crime (kidnapping and killing a child), but also for her refined beauty (the TV says, “tabloids compared her to Olivia Hussey”). And indeed, Lee is an exquisite actor, slipping between perfectly telegraphed emotions with often-wordless ease.
After prison, Geum-ja reenters society with relative ease, partially because of her skills as a baker (no accident, a stereotypically feminine talent), and her cool good looks. Her transformation into the lady of the title is achieved by applying crimson eye shadow (“People are always saying I look kindhearted”), a kind of superhero disguise that foreshadows the blood she’s hell-bent on spilling.
To fully explain Geum-ja’s motivation would deprive the viewer the pleasure of following Park through Lady Vengeance’s brambly maze of a plot. However, the statement “the kidnapper had kidnapped a kidnapper’s kid” (delivered in complete seriousness, though the film’s not without plenty of gallows humor) sums things up pretty well. Lady Vengeance falters only in its final quarter, when Lee steps back from the action for a few key scenes. Her quest for revenge is what drives the film, and without her red-rimmed gaze front and center, things meander a bit.
By the end, thankfully, she’s back in focus; her mission may be completed, but there’s no Kill Bill–style sense of triumph. “He made a sinner out of me,” Geum-ja says about the man she desperately wants to punish. And he will die, of course, but will Geum-ja ever find atonement? Lady Vengeance ends on that question — as pretty as ever. SFBG
LADY VENGEANCE
Opens Fri/23
Lumiere Theatre
1572 California, SF
Shattuck Cinemas
2230 Shattuck, Berk.
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com for showtimes
www.lady-vengeance.com

Personal surveillance etiquette

0

> trace@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION In an alternate universe, the National Security Agency’s database of every telephone call made over the past five years in the United States is being used in couples counseling sessions to prove that some guy really did say that mean thing his boyfriend says he said. But in this universe, where the government spies on you rather than keeping couples from breaking up over stupid shit, we must rely on our personal phone surveillance logs to preserve social connectedness.
That’s why I’ve been having an etiquette crisis about my smart phone. It’s a Treo 650, the kind that holds a zillion numbers in memory and can therefore identify anybody calling me who has called before. It’s like a just-in-time call-tracing system. Even when people try to block their numbers, I can often tell who they are based on how the block looks. One colleague’s blocked caller ID always pops up as “4321” and another as “9999999.” My phone also maintains a fairly extensive log of who has called me, so I can browse through my own personal phone records for the past year and a half to figure out names, numbers, and times called.
As more people acquire similar phones, I become increasingly alarmed by all this record keeping — not so much because of the mini-NSA feelings engendered, but because I’m not sure what the social rules around it are. For example, I can now be fairly certain that if I call a friend or colleague’s cell phone, they’ll know it’s me before they answer. Even creepier, they’ll know I called, and when, even if I don’t choose to leave a message. And they know that I know the same things about them when they call. Thence comes my etiquette crisis.
You see, the whole practice of calling and hanging up without leaving a message has taken on a new meaning. Calling and hanging up is no longer really an option — even if you do hang up, a record of your actions lingers on. And there’s no benefit in terms of stopping cranks or fraudsters here because caller ID is easy to fake or block. There are at least a dozen services that help you spoof the number on your phone so it looks as if you’re calling from 6969696 or whatever. So this is really only an issue for the casual phone caller who isn’t energetically paranoid enough to go through the trouble of altering her phone number.
All this is an elaborate explanation for why I stood in the street the other day, staring at a missed-call notice on my phone and wondering if the person who called intended for me to call him back. He hadn’t left a message, but then again, he didn’t need to — he’s a pretty tech-savvy person and would certainly have anticipated that I would know he called and precisely when. Was it like a “call me but not urgently”? Was it just a transient sort of request, like an invite to lunch that would time out by the time I got a message, so he didn’t bother leaving one? (In that case, I thought to myself, I really didn’t need to call him back.) Or was it some new form of passive-aggressiveness, in which my decision whether or not to call him back based on the call trace became the measure of my loyalty to our friendship?
Charlie, who watched me staring at my phone, opined that I didn’t have to call the person back. But then I reminded her of a spat we’d had where she cited my cell phone log, saying she could prove that she’d called 10 times before I called back. She conceded, “Well, you should always call me back if I don’t leave a message, but nobody else.”
This seemed to me an awfully arbitrary rule. Miss Manners would be indignant.
Caller ID is causing a politeness aporia in my life. I suspect this is because surveillance and etiquette are both tools that help us monitor and control what everybody around us is doing. Of course, no matter how stringent the etiquette enforcers are, we still have a choice about how and when we choose to adhere to their little rules. With surveillance, there is no choice.
And, in case you’re wondering: No, I didn’t return the phone call. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has a record of every time you called her since late 2004.

Shoot for the contents

0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

"Who is going to tell our stories if we don’t?" asks Madeleine Lim, founder and director of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project. She has a point. After wracking my brain to recall queer women or trans people of color who have graced a movie screen this year outside of a film festival, all I could come up with was Alice Wu’s Saving Face which certainly didn’t play at the multiplex. Lim firmly believes that "as long as we’re not in the studio systems writing, directing, and producing these films, we’re never going to see ourselves on the big screen." Her "little stab" at putting such stories front and center was creating the QWOCMAP program, which offers free digital filmmaking workshops to queer women and trans folks of color.

This weekend brings the Queer Women of Color Film Festival, an official event of the National Queer Arts Festival that Lim organizes and curates along with M??nica Enr??quez and Darshan Elena Campos. "Tender Justice," the first evening’s program (Thurs/8, 7 p.m.), showcases shorts by young women aged 18 to 25. Many deal with issues of violence and assault, some obliquely: In the experimental piece Messages, by Alyssa Contreras, a girl wanders through a surreal red-and-black nightmare listening to hateful cell phone messages left by various family members.

On the second evening, queer Latina filmmakers come together for "En Mi Piel: Borders Redrawn" (Fri/9, 7 p.m.). The event, which includes a panel discussion, is entirely bilingual: "It is political to reclaim spaces that are bilingual, in light of the immigration debate and the backlash and racism that it has generated," says cocurator Enr??quez. There are shorts by Bay Area and Los Angeles filmmakers, as well as a group of Mexican filmmakers who traveled here on a grant from the Global Fund for Women. One highlight is filmmaking collective Mujeres y Cultura Subterranea’s La Dimensi??n del Olvido, a gritty documentary that chronicles the lives of women and startlingly young girls who live on the streets in Mexico. Others include Liliana Hueso’s Las Mujeres de Mi Vida; Aurora Guerrero’s Pura Lengua, which skillfully handles a narrative about a Los Angeles Latina queer woman who deals with a horrific police assault; and Amy André’s En Mi Piel, in which an FTM half-white, half-Chicano trans man named Logan recalls his journey back to Mexico, the search for his roots becoming part of his new identity.

The third evening, "Heart of the Flame" (Sat/10, 7 p.m.), features works by students of Lim’s over the age of 25. One such is Kenya Brigg’s Forgiven, an autobiographical narrative about recognizing her grandmother’s strength of forgiveness, which she observes when the elderly African American woman uses a cake to bury the hatchet with a white neighbor who once signed a petition to keep her from buying a house in their Castro neighborhood. SFBG

QUEER WOMEN OF COLOR
FILM FESTIVAL

Thurs/8–Sat/10

SF LBGT Community Center,
Rainbow Room

1800 Market, SF

(415) 752-0868

Free

www.qwocmap.org

Feminists prefer genetic engineering

0

› procloning@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION I’ve been sorely disappointed by feminists’ responses to genetic engineering. Like many life sciences, genetic engineering has its dark side but that’s no excuse for groups like Gene Watch to claim that the feminist position on genetic engineering should be "just say no." Why the hell shouldn’t feminists seize the means of reproduction and turn them to our own best interests? Why shouldn’t we be at the table when policy makers determine the best ways to regulate cloning, genetic engineering, and new reproductive technologies?

If we turn our backs on the debate, it will just go on without us. And we know how that turns out already. Just look at what happened with birth control pills. The pill was developed and tested in the 1950s entirely by male researchers one of whom, Harvard’s John Rock, was a devout Catholic. Rock pushed for a dose cycle of the pill that would replicate women’s monthly menstrual cycle, essentially so that it could be, like the rhythm method, a God-approved form of birth control. The Pope disagreed, but the monthly pill cycle stuck, despite the fact that the pill could completely eliminate menstruation for as long as a woman wished and there was no evidence that this was any less healthy than a monthly menstrual cycle.

Let’s think here, people if women and feminists had been involved in the process of developing the pill, there is no goddamn way we would have let them take away the possibility of a pill to eliminate our "little visitor." No woman likes to bleed once a month. It’s messy; it’s crampy; occasionally there are embarrassingly stained clothes and sheets. Only men would deem it "better" for us to keep on putting up with this biological annoyance even after finding a cure for it. Luckily, there are now a handful of birth control products on the market, such as Seasonale and Lybrel, that do eliminate periods as well as prevent pregnancy. It only took 50 years.

That’s why any feminist worth her sodium chloride should be charging into the debate on genetic engineering with a list of demands. Hell, yes, we want to change the biology of reproduction and we want to change it now.

The primary goal of a feminist genetic engineering project is to cut the reproductive process loose from patriarchy and male domination. One simple way to do that is to make sure feminist politics are front and center in any discussion about how we will use genetic engineering to eliminate harmful birth defects. I think we can all agree that it would be great to make sure babies aren’t born with holes in their hearts, but what about girl babies born with small breasts? Can’t you just see some clueless researcher claiming that women with small breasts are "harmed" psychologically, and that therefore we should engineer all women to have big ones? Feminists need to shut that shit down right away.

But what do we want? First of all, we want genetic engineering to transform the way families work, perhaps by making it possible for two women to create a baby without male intervention or for more than two parents to create a baby. (Researchers in Japan have already bred a healthy baby mouse out of genetic material from two females, and researchers in England are working on a human baby that will have genetic material from two women and one man.) Either way, you’ve got new parental formations, and hopefully this biological change will lead to childcare being meted out more equally or at least challenge our preconceptions about what it means to be a "mommy" or a "daddy."

We also want artificial wombs, so that women don’t have to stay home from work while gestating their fetuses. We need technologies that will at last close the "baby gap" in workplaces where women fall behind their male colleagues during pregnancies and their children’s early development. Plus, we want men to be able to participate as fully in the reproductive process as possible. That’s why male pregnancy and lactation should be a goal of feminist genetic engineers. We don’t want merely to liberate ourselves from the reproductive process; we want to bring men into it as our equal partners.

New family structures, artificial wombs, and pregnant men are just the very beginnings of what feminists should be demanding when it comes to the genetic transformation of our species. Let’s get out of the streets and into the lab! SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who thinks mpreg stories are the wave of the future.

“Fabulous Fiona”

0

By Tina Rodia
At Fiona Ma party, Irish Cultural Center

At 9:09 p.m., with 17 percent of the precincts reporting, Fiona Ma already had 59 percent of the votes. Supporters at the party, which is about 300 people large, include the Arab Antidiscrimination Association, the organizers for the North Beach Festival, and members of the Outer Sunset community, where Ma is the district supervisor.

The organizers of the North Beach Festival refer to the State Assembly District 12 candidate as “Fabulous Fiona.” With drinks in hand, they are celebrating an early victory.

Approached by members of the media as she entered the room, Ma made statements regurgitating the standard “home ownership and business revenue are what’s good for San Francisco” talking points from her campaign Web site, her political mentor, former state senator John Burton, at her side.

The cable that bind s

0

› sarah@sfbg.com

Oakland, San Francisco, and other California cities have in recent years tried to negotiate maximum public benefits under their franchise agreement with cable television provider Comcast, but all have backed down when the telecom giant threatened costly litigation.

The latest episode played out May 30 at the Oakland City Council meeting when the council voted to repeal an ordinance that would have required franchisees like Comcast to allow workers to decide whether they want to form a union.

Comcast dubbed the “Wal-Mart of Telecom” by the American Right to Work Foundation not only sued Oakland over the ordinance but also decided to void a tentative franchise agreement with the city that had taken three and a half years to work out.

Comcast officials claim the company walked away from the contract because two years had elapsed since major parts of the agreement had been hammered out and during that time the competitive field had shifted.

As for the lawsuit, company officials argue that Oakland’s union ordinance is preempted by federal law and that the city doesn’t have a “proprietary interest” in its franchise.

A proprietary interest occurs when a city has to manage critical public rights-of-way, such as streets, alleys, and utility easements, and must make sure it receives fair compensation for the ongoing use of those public properties by private entities, like Comcast.

In such situations, a city must ensure the efficient and cost-effective management of its public rights-of-way and must maximize benefit and minimize risk, including the risk of a labor-<\h>management conflict that could arise from a union organizing campaign.

That, at least, was the argument the city of Oakland made when it drew up its labor ordinance, and it was the argument that city council president Ignacio De La Fuente continued to make at the May 30 council meeting.

Councilmember Desley Brooks managed to sound like a Comcast apologist by claiming the city had been wrong to pass the ordinance in the first place.

“We knew that when this ordinance was passed, we had no basis to do it,” Brooks said. We can try and justify why we did it, but federal law is settled in this matter.”

But De La Fuente was joined by Councilmember Jane Brunner and Vice Mayor Jean Quan in insisting that the city wasn’t backing down because it was wrong, but because it couldn’t afford to fight with a deep-<\h>pocketed monopoly in court.

That was the same argument that led the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to narrowly approve a four-year contract extension with Comcast last September, rather than negotiate better public access and other community benefits as part of the contract.

San Jose, Walnut Creek, and other cities have also been tied up in expensive litigation with Comcast, which has virtually unlimited resources and a willingness to spend big in court fights and the political arena. But a bill now moving through the California State Legislature has the potential to shake up the cable television playing field some say, in ways that are hard to predict.

The Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act, authored by Assembly speaker Fabian N??ñez, seeks to allow telephone companies like AT&T and Verizon to provide television services through fiber-<\h>optic lines and thereby compete with Comcast and other cable providers.

The landmark bill, AB 2987, cleared the Assembly on a 70<\d>0 vote the day after the Oakland City Council repealed its ordinance. It is now awaiting consideration and possible modification by the Senate.

It is being watched carefully by Communications Workers of America, which represents 700,000 workers nationally, including 2,000 in the Bay Area, and is one of the few labor unions that is growing.

As CWA field coordinator Lisa Morowitz explained, for cities to take on Comcast individually, as Oakland, Walnut Creek, and San Jose have tried without success to do, is like David fighting Goliath.

“It’s one step forward, two steps back,” Morowitz told the Guardian. Nevertheless, she believes Oakland has substantial leverage in future negotiations with Comcast, precisely because of the N??ñez bill.

“CWA supports AB 2987,” Morowitz said, “because we believe it’s going to create conditions more favorable for cities, communities, and workers by bringing competition to video service.”

She acknowledged that the bill won’t directly address the issues raised during Oakland’s ordinance battle, but, she said, “theoretically, it will create more accountability.”

CWA argues that in addition to creating competition in the video services marketplace, the bill will replace city-by-city franchising deals that have led to steep rate increases, protect revenue streams for local governments, and expand local tax bases.

But Sydney Levy of San Francisco<\d>based Media Alliance worries that it will simply help the titans of industry and not the communities they supposedly serve.

“I understand that labor thinks it has a better chance of being able to organize within companies if there’s more competition and AT&T is pitted against Verizon is pitted against Comcast,” Levy told us. “But I disagree with CWA on how to have that competition be fair. It’s like energy deregulation. It sounded cute, but it wasn’t. So, we can’t be stupid this time around. We need to do it in a way that’s good for cities, consumers, and communities.”

The goal of franchise agreements that cities enter into with cable companies is to ensure that providers cover the entire city, provide public affairs programming, and pay for their use of public rights-of-way.

“But with the new bill, there’s no enforcement, no contractual obligations, no timetable,” claimed Levy, who worries that under the proposed arrangement Comcast’s competitors could say, “We can’t put fiber everywhere; we’ll upgrade as we see fit.”

“But that’s not good enough,” said Levy, who also worries that the bill will screw up community media locally and that redlining providing new services in higher-<\h>income neighborhoods while bypassing areas already underserved by broadband services may well occur.

And then there’s the sticky matter of ceding control to Sacramento.

“If we don’t have the ability to complain at the city level, then we’ll have to take all our fights to Sacramento, where we don’t have equal access,” Levy said. “That would be disastrous for local decision making.”

To his mind, AB 2987 is about cable vs. phone companies, and not about what’s best for the public interest.

“Having competition is a good thing for cities, consumers, and communities, but having competition that is unfair to communities and dismantles protections is not. We need to fix what’s in the Senate version,” he argued.

Levy believes that Comcast is playing a wait-and-see game as the N??ñez bill makes its way through Sacramento and that Oakland should continue to negotiate with Comcast for the best franchise deal possible.

“Because it may be the last franchise deal Oakland gets,” he explained, warning that if AB 2987 passes unmodified in the Senate, “we’re going to go from an irresponsible monopoly system to one that’s a system of unfair competition.”

But N??ñez deputy chief of staff Steve Maviglio told the Guardian that without the N??ñez bill, “cities have as much choice as they did in the former Soviet Union…. This bill is a powerful incentive for other providers.” Maviglio said that the bill language could still be modified in the Senate, but that its basic goal is clear.

“We hope this bill will save consumers money, lead to more competition, and prevent redlining,” he said. “We want to make sure under<\h>served communities don’t get left out of the digital picture.”

Comcast is the 800-pound gorilla lurking behind the vote in Sacramento, the force that all cities are looking to find some leverage against.

San Francisco supervisor Ross Mirkarimi told us that the Board of Supervisors had tailored legislation that mimicked Oakland’s union-<\h>organizing ordinance but abandoned it on the advice of CWA and the SF Labor Council because of what was happening to Oakland at the hands of Comcast.

To Mirkarimi’s mind, the best solution is neither piecemeal ordinances nor statewide laws, but for cities to municipalize their telecom and Internet systems.

“We would not be facing these kind of legal challenges if San Francisco was able to municipalize,” he told us.

And that’s precisely what San Francisco is now pursuing. A proposal by Sup. Tom Ammiano to study the creation of a citywide municipal broadband system to be installed as streets are opened up for sewer lines or other infrastructure needs was recently put out to bid.

Ammiano told the Guardian he expects to get some preliminary indications as to whether the system would be viable as soon as this summer, and he’s confident San Francisco will ultimately be in the position to offer television and other broadband services to city residents.

Mirkarimi, who supports the proposal, said it’s the best hope to “redeem our utility democracy as it pertains to our cable industry.” SFBG

Crisis on infinite Earths

0

› omegamutant@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION This is really embarrassing. Last week I started crying while I was reading a comic book on the StairMaster at the gym. I got into this unenviable, geektastic situation because I’ve been reading everything I can find by Grant Morrison the British comic book writer who reinvented the X-Men in the late 1990s with his fantastic New X-Men series and it just so happened that I wasn’t prepared for the plot of Morrison’s "We3," a short series about three cybernetic animals. Frank Quitely’s anime-influenced art on the cover had me lulled into thinking "We3" would be a tale of animal heroism about a cute talking bunny, kitty, and doggy who escape the evil government that made them into cyber-weapons and find their way home.

But no. Instead, it was one of the most horrifying portraits of war I’ve ever seen. Fluffy creatures are mangled. Soldiers are sliced into bits. A senator pats himself on the back for getting animals to do his dirty human work. The animals, who’ve been given the power of speech and turned into highly efficient assassins via cybernetic implants, couldn’t be more tragic as they try to understand what’s happened to them. When the bunny got shot after innocently asking a human to help him fix his broken tail, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Hence, the tears.

The older I get, the more I’m obsessed with comic books. Ironically, this is partly a result of what many call the end of the comic book. These days publishing houses like Marvel and DC are making most of their money on quality paperbackstyle bound collections, rather than on classic, individual issues. This shift is perfect for someone like me, who started reading comics as books rather than as monthly-installment magazines. Plus, collections are really the only way for a late bloomer like myself to get caught up with the soap operas behind four-decade-old titles like The Hulk and X-Men.

Like video games today, comic books were once the objects of intense moral outrage. During the 1950s anticomic book crusader Frederic Wertham condemned the adventures of Batman, Green Lantern, and pals for promoting juvenile delinquency and homosexuality. Now, of course, his accusations sound positively quaint. How could any type of book promote anything among young people? These days it’s "common sense" that games like Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft are to blame for angry kids.

Maybe comic books are the bugaboos of yesteryear, but they still share with video games one subversive characteristic that makes them dangerous to anyone politician, moralist, or other who clings to the status quo. Comic books lend themselves well to fantasies about multiple, parallel universes. Because these are narratives that last over decades and spawn multiple spin-offs by hundreds of different authors and artists, comic books inevitably train readers to imagine how one scenario might lead to several different outcomes. And comics also invite readers to explore how one little change in the present can lead to whole new interpretations of history. There’s even a word retcon, for retroactive continuity that comic book geeks use to describe what happens when a new comic book author changes a character’s history to explain a new present. Like video games, where different characters and players take the game play in new directions, comic books remind us that there is no one perfect path to follow, and that the future can always be changed.

When the retconning and multiple story lines get too complicated, though, sometimes a crisis occurs. Thus the subject of my current obsession: the "crisis on infinite Earths" story lines from DC comics of the 1980s. This was a period when DC decided its authors had created too many parallel worlds containing multiple versions of each character. To solve the problem, DC wiped out all but one Earth and all but one version of every hero, in a plot tangle that spanned several dozen titles. In fact, I don’t claim to understand it all I haven’t read enough from that era. Honestly, it’s probably better in concept than execution.

But I love the concept: the idea that there are many Earths existing in parallel and all of them are having a crisis at the same time. It’s a perfect reminder that our lives are a tangle of possible futures, struggling to extricate themselves from a morass of multiple pasts. Choosing between them, and choosing justly, is what makes heroes out of ordinary people. SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose favorite comic book store is still Comix Experience because Brian Hibbs is a hero.

Newsom loses control

0

› steve@sfbg.com

In the early days, the mayor tried to sound like a practical, hands-on executive who was ready to run San Francisco.

Mayor Gavin Newsom used his inaugural address on Jan. 8, 2004, to emphasize that he was a uniter, not a divider and that he wanted to get things done.

"I say it’s time to start working together to find common purpose and common ground," he proclaimed. "Because I want to make this administration about solutions."

It’s a mantra he’s returned to again and again in his rhetoric on a wide range of issues, claiming a "commonsense" approach while casting "ideology" as an evil to be overcome and as the main motive driving the left-leaning majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

"Because it’s easy to be against something," Newsom said on that sunny winter day. "It’s easy to blame. It’s easy to stop…. What’s hard is to hear that maybe to come together, we need to leave behind old ideas and long-held grudges. But that’s exactly what we need to do."

But if that’s the standard, Newsom has spent the past 17 months taking the easy way.

It’s been a marked change from his first-year lovefest, when he tried to legalize same-sex marriage, reach out to BayviewHunters Point residents, and force big hotels to end their lockout of workers.

A Guardian review of the most significant City Hall initiatives during 2005 and 2006 as well as interviews with more than a dozen policy experts and public interest advocates shows that Newsom has been an obstructionist who has proposed few "solutions" to the city’s problems, and followed through on even fewer.

The Board of Supervisors, in sharp contrast, has been taking the policy lead. The majority on the district-elected board in the past year has moved a generally progressive agenda designed to preserve rental units, prevent evictions, strengthen development standards, promote car-free spaces, increase affordable housing, maintain social services, and protect city workers.

Yet many of those efforts have been blocked or significantly weakened by Newsom and his closest allies on the board: Fiona Ma, Sean Elsbernd, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Bevan Dufty. And on efforts to get tough with big business or prevent Muni service cuts and fare hikes, Newsom was able to peel off enough moderate supervisors to stop the progressives led by Chris Daly, Tom Ammiano, and Ross Mirkarimi at the board level.

But one thing that Newsom has proved himself unable to do in the past year is prevent progressive leaders particularly Daly, against whom Newsom has a "long-held grudge" that has on a few recent occasions led to unsavory political tactics and alliances from setting the public agenda for the city.

Balance of power

The Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors are the two poles of power at City Hall and generally the system gives a strong advantage to the mayor, who has far more resources at his disposal, a higher media profile, and the ability to act swiftly and decisively.

Yet over the past year, the three most progressive supervisors along with their liberal-to-moderate colleagues Gerardo Sandoval, Jake McGoldrick, Aaron Peskin, and Sophie Maxwell have initiated the most significant new city policies, dealing with housing, poverty, health care, alternative transportation, violence prevention, and campaign finance reform.

Most political observers and City Hall insiders mark the moment when the board majority took control of the city agenda as last summer, a point when Newsom’s honeymoon ended, progressives filled the leadership void on growth issues, problems like tenants evictions and the murder rate peaked, and Newsom was increasingly giving signs that he wasn’t focused on running the city.

"Gay marriage gave the mayor his edge and gave him cover for a long time," said Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a queer and tenants rights activist. "About a year ago that started to wear off, and his armor started to be shed."

Daly was the one supervisor who had been aggressively criticizing Newsom during that honeymoon period. To some, Daly seemed isolated and easy to dismiss at least until August 2005, when Daly negotiated a high-profile deal with the developers of the Rincon Hill towers that extracted more low-income housing and community-benefits money than the city had ever seen from a commercial project.

The Newsom administration watched the negotiations from the sidelines. The mayor signed off on the deal, but within a couple months turned into a critic and said he regretted supporting it. Even downtown stalwarts like the public policy think tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association noted the shift in power.

"I think we saw a different cut on the issue than we’ve seen before," SPUR executive director Gabriel Metcalf told us. "Chris Daly is not a NIMBY. I see Chris Daly as one of the supervisors most able to deal with physical change, and he’s not afraid of urbanism…. And he’s been granted by the rest of the board a lot of leadership in the area of land use."

SPUR and Metcalf were critical of aspects of the Daly deal, such as where the money would go. But after the deal, Newsom and his minions, like press secretary Peter Ragone, had a harder time demonizing Daly and the board (although they never stopped trying).

Around that same time, hundreds of evictions were galvanizing the community of renters which makes up around two-thirds of city residents. Newsom tried to find some compromise on the issue, joining Peskin to convene a task force composed of tenants activists, developers, and real estate professionals, hoping that the group could find a way to prevent evictions while expanding home ownership opportunities.

"The mayor views the striking of balance between competing interests as an important approach to governing," Ragone told the Guardian after we explained the array of policy disputes this story would cover.

The task force predictably fell apart after six meetings. "The mayor was trying to find a comfortable way to get out of the issue," said Mecca, a member of the task force. But with some issues, there simply is no comfortable solution; someone’s going to be unhappy with the outcome. "When that failed," Mecca said, "there was nowhere for him to go anymore."

The San Francisco Tenants Union and its allies decided it was time to push legislation that would protect tenants, organizing an effective campaign that finally forced Newsom into a reactionary mode. The mayor wound up siding overtly with downtown interests for the first time in his mayoral tenure and in the process, he solidified the progressive board majority.

Housing quickly became the issue that defines differences between Newsom and the board.

Free-market policy

"The Newsom agenda has been one of gentrification," said San Francisco Tenants Union director Ted Gullicksen. The mayor and his board allies have actively opposed placing limitations on the high number of evictions (at least until the most recent condo conversion measure, which Dufty and Newsom supported, a victory tenants activists attribute to their organizing efforts), while at the same time encouraging development patterns that "bring in more high-end condominiums and saturate the market with that," Gullicksen explained.

He pointed out that those two approaches coalesce into a doubly damaging policy on the issue of converting apartments into condominiums, which usually displace low-income San Franciscans, turn an affordable rental unit into an expensive condominium, and fill the spot with a higher-income owner.

"So you really get a two-on-one transformation of the city," Gullicksen said.

Newsom’s allies don’t agree, noting that in a city where renters outnumber homeowners two to one, some loss of rental housing is acceptable. "Rather than achieve their stated goals of protecting tenants, the real result is a barrier to home ownership," Elsbernd told us, explaining his vote against all four recent tenant-protection measures.

On the development front, Gullicksen said Newsom has actively pushed policies to develop housing that’s unaffordable to most San Franciscans as he did with his failed Workforce Housing Initiative and some of his area plans while maintaining an overabundance of faith in free-market forces.

"He’s very much let the market have what the market wants, which is high-end luxury housing," Gullicksen said.

As a result, Mecca said, "I think we in the tenant movement have been effective at making TICs a class issue."

Affordable housing activists say there is a marked difference between Newsom and the board majority on housing.

"The Board of Supervisors is engaged in an active pursuit of land-use policy that attempts to preserve as much affordable housing, as much rental housing, as much neighborhood-serving businesses as possible," longtime housing activist Calvin Welch told us. "And the mayor is totally and completely lining up with downtown business interests."

Welch said Newsom has shown where he stands in the appointments he makes such as that of Republican planning commissioner Michael Antonini, and his nomination of Ted Dienstfrey to run Treasure Island, which the Rules Committee recently rejected and by the policies he supports.

Welch called Daly’s Rincon deal "precedent setting and significant." It was so significant that downtown noticed and started pushing back.

Backlash

Board power really coalesced last fall. In addition to the housing and tenant issues, Ammiano brought forward a plan that would force businesses to pay for health insurance plans for their employees. That galvanized downtown and forced Newsom to finally make good on his promise to offer his own plan to deal with the uninsured but the mayor offered only broad policy goals, and the plan itself is still being developed.

It was in this climate that many of Newsom’s big-business supporters, including Don Fisher the Republican founder of the Gap who regularly bankrolls conservative political causes in San Francisco demanded and received a meeting with Newsom. The December sit-down was attended by a who’s who of downtown developers and power brokers.

"That was a result of them losing their ass on Rincon Hill," Welch said of the meeting.

The upshot according to public records and Guardian interviews with attendees was that Newsom agreed to oppose an ordinance designed to limit how much parking could be built along with the 10,000 housing units slated for downtown. The mayor instead would support a developer-written alternative carried by Alioto-Pier.

The measure downtown opposed was originally sponsored by Daly before being taken over by Peskin. It had the strong support of Newsom’s own planning director, Dean Macris, and was approved by the Planning Commission on a 61 vote (only Newsom’s Republican appointee, Antonini, was opposed).

The process that led to the board’s 74 approval of the measure was politically crass and embarrassing for the Mayor’s Office (see “Joining the Battle,” 2/8/06), but he kept his promise and vetoed the measure. The votes of his four allies were enough to sustain the veto.

Newsom tried to save face in the ugly saga by pledging to support a nearly identical version of the measure, but with just a couple more giveaways to developers: allowing them to build more parking garages and permitting more driveways with their projects.

Political observers say the incident weakened Newsom instead of strengthening him.

"They can’t orchestrate a move. They are only acting by vetoes, and you can’t run the city by vetoes," Welch said. "He never puts anything on the line, and that’s why the board has become so emboldened."

Rippling out

The Newsom administration doesn’t seem to grasp how housing issues or symbolic issues like creating car-free spaces or being wary of land schemes like the BayviewHunters Point redevelopment plan shape perceptions of other issues. As Welch said, "All politics in San Francisco center around land use."

N’Tanya Lee, executive director of Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth, said the Newsom administration has done a very good job of maintaining budgetary support for programs dealing with children, youth, and their families. But advocates have relied on the leadership of progressive supervisors like Daly to push affordable housing initiatives like the $20 million budget supplemental the board initiated and approved in April.

"Our primary concern is that low- and moderate-income families are being pushed out of San Francisco," Lee told us. "We’re redefining what it means to be pro-kid and pro-family in San Francisco."

Indeed, that’s a very different approach from the so-called pro-family agenda being pushed by SFSOS and some of Newsom’s other conservative allies, who argue that keeping taxes low while keeping the streets and parks safe and clean is what families really want. But Lee worries more about ensuring that families have reasonably priced shelter.

So she and other affordable housing advocates will be watching closely this summer as the board and Newsom deal with Daly’s proposal to substantially increase the percentage of affordable housing developers must build under the city’s inclusionary-housing policy. Newsom’s downtown allies are expected to strongly oppose the plan.

Even on Newsom’s signature issue, the board has made inroads.

"In general, on the homeless issue, the supervisor who has shown the most strong and consistent leadership has been Chris Daly," said Coalition on Homelessness director Juan Prada.

Prada credits the mayor with focusing attention on the homeless issue, although he is critical of the ongoing harassment of the homeless by the Police Department and the so-called Homeward Bound program that gives homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town.

"This administration has a genuine interest in homeless issues, which the previous one didn’t have, but they’re banking too much on the Care Not Cash approach," Prada said.

Other Newsom initiatives to satisfy his downtown base of support have also fallen flat.

Robert Haaland of the city employee labor union SEIU Local 790 said Newsom has tried to reform the civil service system and privatize some city services, but has been stopped by labor and the board.

"They were trying to push a privatization agenda, and we pushed back," Haaland said, noting that Supervisor Ma’s alliance with Newsom on that issue was the reason SEIU 790 endorsed Janet Reilly over Ma in the District 12 Assembly race.

The turning point on the issue came last year, when the Newsom administration sought to privatize the security guards at the Asian Art Museum as a cost-saving measure. The effort was soundly defeated in the board’s Budget Committee.

"That was a key vote, and they lost, so I don’t think they’ll be coming back with that again," Haaland said, noting that labor has managed to win over Dufty, giving the board a veto-proof majority on privatization issues.

Who’s in charge?

Even many Newsom allies will privately grumble that Newsom isn’t engaged enough with the day-to-day politics of the city. Again and again, Newsom has seemed content to watch from the sidelines, as he did with Supervisor Mirkarimi’s proposal to create a public financing program for mayoral candidates.

"The board was out front on that, while the mayor stayed out of it until the very end," said Steven Hill, of the Center for Voting and Democracy, who was involved with the measure. And when the administration finally did weigh in, after the board had approved the plan on a veto-proof 92 vote, Newsom said the measure didn’t go far enough. He called for public financing for all citywide offices but never followed up with an actual proposal.

The same has been true on police reform and violence prevention measures. Newsom promised to create a task force to look into police misconduct, to hold a blue-ribbon summit on violence prevention, and to implement a community policing system with grassroots input and none of that has come to pass.

Then, when Daly took the lead in creating a community-based task force to develop violence prevention programs with an allocation of $10 million a year for three years Measure A on the June ballot Newsom and his board allies opposed the effort, arguing the money would be better spent on more cops (see “Ballot-Box Alliance,” page 19).

"He’s had bad counsel on this issue of violence all the way through," said Sharen Hewitt, who runs the Community Leadership Academy Emergency Response project. "He has not done damn near enough from his position, and neither has the board."

Hewitt worries that current city policies, particularly on housing, are leading to class polarization that could make the problems of violence worse. And while Newsom’s political allies tend to widen the class divide, she can’t bring herself to condemn the mayor: "I think he’s a nice guy and a lot smarter than people have given him credit for."

Tom Radulovich, who sits on the BART board and serves as executive director of Transportation for a Livable City (which is in the process of changing its name to Livable City), said Newsom generally hasn’t put much action behind his rhetorical support for the environment and transit-first policies.

"Everyone says they’re pro-environment," he said.

In particular, Radulovich was frustrated by Newsom’s vetoes of the downtown parking and Healthy Saturdays measures and two renter-protection measures. The four measures indicated very different agendas pursued by Newsom and the board majority.

In general, Radulovich often finds his smart-growth priorities opposed by Newsom’s allies. "The moneyed interests usually line up against livable city, good planning policies," he said. On the board, Radulovich said it’s no surprise that the three supervisors from the wealthiest parts of town Ma, Elsbernd, and Alioto-Pier generally vote against initiatives he supports.

"Dufty is the oddity because he represents a pretty progressive, urbane district," Radulovich said, "but he tends to vote like he’s from a more conservative district."

What’s next?

The recent lawsuit by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Committee of Jobs urging more aggressive use of a voter-approved requirement that board legislation undergo a detailed economic analysis shows that downtown is spoiling for a fight (see “Downtown’s ‘Hail Mary’ Lawsuit,” page 9). So politics in City Hall is likely to heat up.

"There is a real absence of vision and leadership in the city right now, particularly on the question of who will be able to afford to live in San Francisco 20 years from now," Mirkarimi said. "There is a disparity between Newsom hitting the right notes in what the press and public want to hear and between the policy considerations that will put those positions into effect."

But Newsom’s allies say they plan to stand firm against the ongoing effort by progressives to set the agenda.

"I think I am voting my constituency," Elsbernd said. "I’m voting District Seven and voicing a perspective of a large part of the city that the progressive majority doesn’t represent."

Newsom flack Ragone doesn’t accept most of the narratives that are laid out by activists, from last year’s flip in the balance of power to the influence of downtown and Newsom’s wealthy benefactors on his decision to veto four measures this year.

"Governing a city like San Francisco is complex. There are many areas of nuance in governing this city," Ragone said. "Everyone knows Gavin Newsom defies traditional labels. That’s not part of a broad political strategy, but just how he governs."

Yet the majority of the board seems unafraid to declare where they stand on the most divisive issues facing the city.

"The board has really, since the 2000 election has been pushing a progressive set of policies as it related to housing, just-taxation policies, and an array of social service provisions," Peskin said. "All come with some level of controversy, because none are free." SFBG

Cave in

0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Pop styles of the oh-so-rich and silly!

Britney Spears nearly drops her infant son, baby in one hand, drink in the other, while angling through an NYC crowd! And so soon after being bitch-slapped by the paparazzi for misusing her infant car seat! Oops, she can’t do anything right!

Blaming "media intrusion" for his marital breakup, prenup-less Beatle Paul McCartney promises to hit the charts with the most costly divorce in Brit(pop) history at an estimated $188 to $376 million. Most referenced Beatles lyric: "Can’t buy me love"!

Gossip so slight it’s surreal comes and goes. What remains are the exclamation pointfree, consistently sinister talents of Nick Cave now back in form as the screenwriter of John Hillcoat’s bloody, lyrical Australian western, The Proposition. His red right hand extends to yet another film opening this week in the Bay Area, Olivier Assayas’s Clean, which features sometime Bad Seed James Johnston playing a simian-mugged ’80s rock star you rang? whose death by overdose leaves the addict mother of his child, Emily (Maggie Cheung), high and struggling to dry out.

Bathing in bloodshed and unflinchingly embracing the visceral, The Proposition immediately brought to mind the other recent movie by another rocker with punk, metal, and underground roots who hit a commercial peak in the early ’90s and found a temporary home in the arms of an Alternative Nation: The Devil’s Rejects, by Rob Zombie. The two movies might be seen as spiritual kin if not responses to each other and might even be read as thinly disguised metaphors for life on the road in a rock band: Cave’s bespattered, greasy, tangled-haired outback outlaws would blend in fine at Lollapalooza, while the do-you-want-to-stop-for-ice-cream-or-to-disbowel-passing-strangers repartee between Zombie’s killer hillbillies on the lam smells like a kind of sociopathic teen spirit, circa ’92. The fact that the Rejects the very title of the film sounds like a band name torture a C&W band reads as uncensored rock ’n’ roll ribaldry to me.

Cave, on the other hand, takes hellfire, carnage, and, once again, torture scenes seriously: His is a morality play, with a fatalistic acknowledgment of the way race and class operate in an Australian frontier injustice system. Likewise, rather than relying on crowd-pleasing rock akin to that in Rejects, Cave and Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis unveil a shockingly restrained, elegiac, occasionally screeching score for The Proposition, now available on Mute.

Clean wasn’t written by Cave, but his dark yet redemptive residue is all over it. The main flaw in this otherwise graceful tale of a jet-set junk-bird’s descent, flight, then ascent is the fact that the finale falls flat: This movie is all about the hangers-on, the incidental characters orbiting an absent, dark hole of a star, so when Cheung finally takes the mic and dares to fill the void left by her dead lover, her performance should have hit some Marianne Faithfullesque lowlife high. Still, amid Assayas’s detailed, obvious pleasure depicting ex-wife Cheung floundering after her man’s passing, Cave look-alike Johnston gets in a few of the most memorable, candid lines in Clean when he tells Cheung that his latest album is simply mediocre, and while he may make better once again, he’ll settle for whatever he can get to put it out now.

Why Cave now? Perhaps the culture is finally ready for his plain, unpleasant truths; his horror stories; and his scary, survivor’s revisioning of reality. Dubbing him goth is too easy; calling him Johnny Cash’s black-suited successor, facile. He’s proof that one can go to hell and back.

Stealin’ and Gilman Is anyone beginning to feel like Jack White’s voice is a little like squeaky tires doing donuts on chalkboard? No? Excellent, because the Raconteurs, his current band with other mad Midwestern too-cool-for-schoolies, have put out a pretty swell rock record, digging into late-’70s to late-’80s sounds, be they Romantics-style new wave or AOR hair-band histrionics. And by gum, don’t they look like the Replacements in the above promo pic miming a much reproduced Let It Beera ’Mats photo? A tribute to off-the-cuff randomness? … The rock never quite stops Bay Area party starters Rock ’n’ Roll Adventure Kids are back, recording a new album and playing shows once again. This week’s is a doozy: 924 Gilman’s annual Punk Prom for students who can’t afford the high price of dull high schoolapproved entertainment. Costumes, dancing, and like-minded souls sounds like a rock ’n’ roll adventure worth crashing. SFBG

Raconteurs

July 23, 8 p.m.

Warfield, 982 Market, SF.

$27.50–$37.50

(415) 775-7722

Punk Prom

Fri/26, 8 p.m.

924 Gilman, Berk.

$5

www.924gilman.org

Quit moping

Kultur Shock

Gypsy-inspired punk mixes it up with bilingual thrashers La Plebe. Wed/24, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $10. (415) 621-4455.

Tough and Lovely

Garage rock, ’60s soul, and girl group are all within groping distance. Thurs/25, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $6. (415) 923-0923. Sat/27, Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph, Oakl. Call for time and price. (415) 444-6174.

Grind and Glory hip-hop conference

15- to 25-year-olds are invited to get down and throw their hands in the air at this DJ Project music conference with Dead Prez, Amp Live, and Jurassic 5’s Chali 2Na. Sat/27, 10 a.m.–5 p.m., 425 Market, SF. Free. www.grindandglory.com.

Mogwai

That’s Mr. Beast to you. Turge-rockers Earth open. Sat/27, 9 p.m., Fillmore, 1805 Geary, SF. $22.50. (415) 346-6000.

Shoplifting

The band takes punk to the jagged cliffs where politics and art meet and dance a jig. Tues/30, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. $8. (415) 621-4455. SFBG

The NSA’s political fiction

0

› unsealtheevidence@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Here’s what disturbs me: In light of recent revelations that the National Security Agency has been illegally collecting vast databases of information about every single phone call made in the United States since late 2001, only 53 percent of US citizens polled by Newsweek think the government has gone too far in its efforts to stop terrorism. That’s a majority, but not a very large one. And in the same poll, 41 percent said they thought spying on phone calls made to and from everyone in the country was necessary.

This arouses the same sinking feeling I got many years ago when I was a young graduate student at UC Berkeley, grading my very first set of papers. From that sample, and many others in subsequent courses, I learned that 70 percent of college students in an upper-division English course at a top university cannot construct a coherent argument using evidence taken from books they’ve read. That’s what convinced me that most people, even highly educated ones, go through their lives without ever examining the way rhetoric works, and the way evidence is used (or abused) in its service. These people weren’t stupid by any stretch of the imagination. They simply didn’t understand how narrative persuasion works, in the same way that many people who are smart nevertheless don’t understand how their car works.

And just as technical naïveté makes you vulnerable when your car breaks down on a deserted road, so too does narrative ignorance when your nation is breaking down right before your eyes. That such a paltry majority is convinced the government has gone too far with surveillance is a perfect example of this. The Bush administration has cited no evidence to justify snooping on innocent people’s telephone calls. In fact, government analysts have admitted that the reason they didn’t know about the impending Sept. 11 attacks had to do with poor foreign intelligence. You can’t remedy poor foreign intel with domestic spying on the telephone network. Nor do you strengthen your nation’s cohesiveness by allowing the government to break the law, gathering private information from corporations like AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth without any court oversight, without any warrants.

Certainly the government can and will argue that certain interpretations of the USA-PATRIOT Act allow the NSA to snoop on my telephone calls in the name of national security. But where is the proof that it’s necessary to log my telephone calls? When my fundamental right to speak privately is violated in such an extreme manner, along with the rights of all my fellow US citizens, we deserve some hard facts to back up the claim that this unambiguously totalitarian strategy is for our own good.

Instead of evidence, however, we’re given incoherent emotional appeals. We’re told that the danger from terrorism is so great that the government should be allowed to do anything it likes including emuutf8g the blanket surveillance strategies of the now-defunct USSR. We’re told that civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation can’t sue AT&T for handing over personal information to the government without a warrant because examining the evidence in a court of law would violate national security and endanger us all. But appeals to fear are not counterevidence. They do not bolster a logical argument. They simply add punch to what is nothing more than a fictional narrative about how monitoring electronic communications will somehow magically stop terrorism.

Cyberpunk author William Gibson has said that this disastrous episode in our nation’s history is about our struggle to deal with the scope of new technologies. Our vast telecommunications network, including cable, phones, and the Internet, has made it easier than ever for telecom companies to expose our private lives to authority figures with the power to punish us severely even kill us. What the NSA has done, Gibson argues, is the result of evolved but unregulated computer storage and search capacities that make it possible to record, search, and maintain archives of the whole nation’s telephone calls.

Certainly technical evolution has made it easier for the government to place us under surveillance without revealing it and without any oversight by the judicial system. But it’s not technology that’s stoppering the country’s outrage. That’s a problem as old as recorded communication itself. Most people cannot take apart a piece of rhetoric and tell you whether its component parts are facts and evidence or merely seductive fiction. SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who can take apart and reassemble an argument in one minute flat.

Endorsements: The Greens

0

EDITORIAL We’ve long encouraged the California Green Party to focus its energy on local races, and in San Francisco, the Greens have had considerable success: Matt Gonzalez and then Ross Mirkarimi were elected supervisor as Greens (and Gonzalez made a hell of a run for mayor). Sarah Lipson and Mark Sanchez won school board seats. The idea of someone from the Green Party running citywide is no longer all that unusual, and if the party can continue to generate energy and enthusiasm over the next few years, it will become even more of a source of progressive leaders and provide competition to the Democrats who have controlled city politics for decades.

We focused in last week’s endorsements issue on a few contested Democratic primaries for state assembly and senate, but there are several Greens worthy of note who are challenging entrenched incumbents. Our Green primary endorsements:

For US Senate: Todd Chretien

Chretien is one of the most exciting Green Party candidates in the country. He’s trying to turn a nonrace into a referendum on war and abuse of power. This East Bay resident has spent years fighting for social justice, first as a socialist and then as a Green. He’s smart, passionate, eloquent, and right on the issues. He’s clearly not going to beat Dianne Feinstein, but if he gets any media attention, he’ll be able to raise some important issues.

For US Congress, District 8: Krissy Keefer

Keefer, a dancer and Guardian Goldie winner, has long been an active part of the city’s arts community. She’s always been political, and became an antigentrification activist during the dot-com boom. She has virtually no hope of beating incumbent Nancy Pelosi, and her platform is a little, well, abstract. But we’ve always liked Keefer and we appreciate her spirit in trying to hold Pelosi accountable.

For State Assembly, District 12: Barry Hermanson

Hermanson spent 25 years putting his ideals into action as the owner of a small employment agency, where he sought to raise pay rates for temporary workers. His strategy: reduce his own commission, and pay the temps more. He put a bunch of his own money into a successful citywide campaign to raise the minimum wage. If Janet Reilly wins the Democratic primary for this seat, most progressives in town will probably stick with her but if Sup. Fiona Ma comes out on top June 6, Hermanson could emerge as the only alternative. SFBG

Doing the Cannes-Cannes

0

Gary Meyer of the Balboa is at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here is the first of his reports from the Croisette and the theater trenches:

Getting there — No snakes on the plane
The trip to Cannes always starts when I board the plane in San Francisco, looking to see if anyone I know is aboard. The 747 was huge but full exploration didn’t reveal any obvious candidates for the Festival.
Once in Paris things change. On the transfer to Nice I always run into several friends making the final leg of our journey to the south of France and 10 days of movies, morning till dawn. We compare stories about how much sleep we did or didn’t get before leaving and on the plane. And the inevitable jokes about being jet-lagged and surely taking naps in films.
Each year I also spot someone famous getting on my plane. One year I chatted with French superstar Jeanne Moreau. I had been involved in distributing a movie she directed, L’Adolescente. Another time Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) was nervous about the trip. It was his first time in France and he was appearing at the premiere of the movie Unstrung Heroes. He was a nervous wreck. He couldn’t figure out how to use the pay phones, scared of the security and certain he would never find his way to the airport gate at DeGaulle (a reasonable worry). I befriended him and showed the way.
This year as the long line waited to board our flight, Snakes on a Plane‘s Samuel L. Jackson was escorted to the front of the line. A member of the Cannes Jury, he had a hat pulled down so he’d only be half recognized. Someone in the line called out, “I’ll see you in Cannes,” to make sure we all knew where they were both headed.

Opening night
Arriving a day early has it benefits. The crowds haven’t assembled. One can take care of accreditation, press orientation and study the various program books. A press screening of The Da Vinci Code was the only scheduled event. I had already seen it and chose to have dinner with friends.
Film festivals like to open with a high profile movie that is sure to attract big stars, tons of media attention and a major post-screening party that will last all-night. Allowing a film to open a festival, especially Cannes, is taking a big chance. The movie will come under extra heavy scrutiny from critics. The Da Vinci Code is a logical choice to open the 59th Cannes International Film Festival. It is based on a huge best-selling book and largely set in France. Starring a major American movie star, Tom Hanks, and one of France’s most popular actresses, Audrey Tautou, it also features numerous important European actors. As I write this, over my left shoulder I can see them walking up the red carpet for the opening night ceremonies. Thousands of people jam the streets in front of the Palais. TV cameras and photographers catch the face of every person who ascends the steps to make certain they don’t miss anyone of importance.
The press has now seen The Da Vinci Code. The response isn’t too good. But despite the criticism you will read, Columbia Pictures made the correct choice. Director Ron Howard’s last film, Cinderella Man, was invited in 2005 but the producers passed. And the film failed at the box office. This time they aren’t about to miss out on the glitzy stamp of approval that comes with opening the world’s most famous film festival.

Day one
I’ve seen three films the first day of the Festival — all official selections caught at press screenings. I’ll catch a few more tonight.
A good way to start off the morning is with something not too demanding. Paris je t’aime is a collection of 20 five-minute films by an eclectic group of international directors including Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers, Walter Salles, Alfonso Cuaron, Alexander Payne, Gurinda Chadha, Tom Twyker, Wes Craven and many more guiding a superstar cast from Natalie Portman to Gena Rowlands, Gerard Depardieu to Fanny Ardant. (Ben Gazzara, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, and Bob Hoskins also are featured.) Anthology films inevitably are a mixed bag. Each piece is about love in Paris. They are like simple short stories; the best ones aren’t overly ambitious. Paris looks lovely of course and I enjoyed most of it.
Next came a film from Paraguay, Hamaca Paraguaya. At only 78 minutes, this is the kind of movie not to see when still jet lagged. It is all voice-over dialogue (subtitled) with stagnant camera shots. When the lights went up, I asked my neighbor, author Phillip Lopate, if I snored. He said I was a very considerate napper and wanted to know how he did. Just fine, I guess, as he didn’t wake me up. I have no doubt it will be hailed as a work of art by someone.
Much better was Summer Palace, the first competition film. Director Lou Ye (Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly) has constructed a complex film of relationships starting in 1989 China. A student leaves her small town and boyfriend to attend university in Beijing. She discovers both friendship and sex, with the pleasures and confusion they can bring. We journey through the political changes in China and Germany (where some of the characters go) over the next 15 years as the group of friends separate and rejoin. The film is often powerful, vibrant and involving, if a bit difficult to follow at times. It overstays its welcome at 140 minutes; some careful editing would help it become even better.
Summer Palace is the only Asian film in the Competition. It arrives amidst controversy. The Chinese government has complained that the producers didn’t get censorship approval and have broken the law by submitting it to Cannes. But the filmmakers claimed they didn’t submit it to Cannes. (Must have been the sales agent in France.) The Chinese censors turned the film down. Some suspect it is for the highly erotic nature and political reasons. There have been reports that the film has been withdrawn and the director has returned to China. This won’t be the first time claims of censorship by China have garnered attention here. The highest profile case was Zhang Yimou’s To Live.

Overheard
Sitting in front of a sandwich stand a young British woman told her companion that film sales have been tough and that the DVD market has slowed to practically nothing: “We are looking for Video In Demand, computer downloading — anything where people don’t have to leave their homes.”

The Delegate Zero factor

0

 
 

MEXICO CITY — The Marcos Factor has unexpectedly become a wild card in Mexico’s closely fought July 2nd presidential election. 
 
While out of earshot plying the back roads of provincial Mexico with his "Other Campaign," an anti-electoral crusade designed to weld underclass struggle groups into a new left alliance, the ski-masked Zapatista rebel mouthpiece once known as Subcomandante Marcos, now doing business as Delegate Zero, stayed aloof from the electoral mainstream, although he attacked it relentlessly. But Marcos’s arrival in the capital at the end of April has propelled him back into the national spotlight with less than 50 days to go until Election Day.
 
Poll results are brazenly for sale in the run up to Mexican elections and all are equally untrustworthy.  For almost 30 months, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), the former Mexico City mayor and candidate of the leftish Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) led the preferences, sometimes by as much as 18 points. 
 
But by April, under an unanswered barrage of attack commercials labeling him a danger to the nation in big block letters across the television screen, AMLO’s lead had frittered away into a virtual tie with rightwing National Action Party candidate Felipe Calderon. Polls paid for by the PAN even give Calderon a ten-point advantage.  On the other hand, Mitofsky Associates, contracted to produce monthly polls by the television giant Televisa, which tilts towards Calderon, gives the PANista just a one point edge with a two-point margin of error.  All pollsters have the once-ruling (71 years) Institutional Revolutionary Party’s Roberto Madrazo running a distant third with 23-28%of voter preferences.
 
 
AMLO’s diminished numbers were further complicated by Marcos’s arrival in the capitol.  Delegate Zero has blasted the PRD and its candidate unceasingly in stump speech after stump speech across much of Mexico for the past five months.  Although the Other Campaign focuses on the deficiencies of the electoral process and the political parties to meet the needs of the people, Marcos always reserves special invective for Lopez Obrador and the PRD — the Other Campaign is, after all, a battle for the hearts and minds of the Mexican left. 
 
But perhaps the cruelest blow that Delegate Zero has yet struck against his rival on the left came when he declared under the heat of national TV cameras that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would be the winner of the July 2nd election.  Marcos’s "endorsement" is seen in some quarters as being akin to Osama Bin Laden’s 2004 U.S. election eve TV appearance that frightened millions of voters into re-electing George Bush.
 
In truth, Marcos’s appearance in Mexico City at the end of April generated little press interest and numbers at marches and rallies were embarrassingly small.  But two days of bloody fighting between farmers affiliated with the Other Campaign and state and federal security forces at San Salvador Atenco just outside the capitol, which resulted in hundreds of arrests, rampant violations of human rights, the rape of women prisoners, and the most stomach-wrenching footage of police brutality ever shown on Mexican television, put Marcos back in the media spotlight. 
 
Leading marches in defense of the imprisoned farmers and vowing to encamp in Mexico City until they are released, Delegate Zero broke a five-year self-imposed ban on interviews with the commercial media (coverage of the Other Campaign has been limited to the alternative press.)  A three part exclusive interview in La Jornada — the paper is both favorable to the Zapatista struggle and Lopez Obrador — revealed the ex-Sub’s thinking as the EZLN transitions into the larger world beyond the indigenous mountains and jungle of their autonomous communities in southeastern Chiapas.  After the Jornada interviews began running, dozens of national and international reporters lined up for more.
 
Then on May 8th, Marcos startled Mexico’s political class by striding into a studio of Televisa, an enterprise he has scorned and lampooned for the past 12 years and which that very morning in La Jornada he denounced as being Mexico’s real government, and sat down for the first time ever with a star network anchor for a far-ranging chat on the state of the nation and the coming elections that effectively re-established the ex-Subcomandante’s credibility as a national political figure in this TV-obsessed videocracy. 
 
Among Delegate Zero’s more pertinent observations: all three candidates were "mediocrities" who would administrate Mexico for the benefit of the transnationals, but Lopez Obrador had a distinct style of dealing with the crisis down below, and would emerge the winner on July 2nd. 
 
Although observers differ about whether Marcos’s "endorsement" was the kiss of death for AMLO’s candidacy or just a peck on the cheek, Lopez Obrador’s reaction was of the deer-caught-in-the-headlights variety, emphasizing the prolonged animosity between the PRD and the EZLN to disassociate himself from the Zapatista leader. 
 
It was too late.  Calderon, one of whose key advisors is right-wing Washington insider Dick Morris (the PANista is Washington’s man), immediately lashed out at Marcos as "a PRD militant", clained AMLO was under Marcos’s ski-mask, and accused Lopez Obrador and Delegate Zero of being in cahoots to destabilize Mexico. The TV spots were running within 24 hours of Marcos’s Televisa interview.  In the background, the PRI’s Madrazo called for the "mano duro" (hard hand) to control such subversive elements, tagging the farmers of Atenco whose broad field knives are the symbol of their struggle, AMLO’s  "yellow machetes" (yellow is the PRD’s color).
 
Lopez Obrador’s only defense against this latest onslaught was to affirm that the mayor of Texcoco, who had been the first to send police to confront the farmers of Atenco, was a member of the PRD.  Party members who are usually quick to denounce human rights violations here have stayed away from the police rampage in Atenco for fear that speaking out will further taint Lopez Obrador.
 
There are some who question Delegate Zero’s assessment that AMLO will be Mexico’s next president as disingenuous.  After all, calling the election for Calderon after the Other Campaign has done its damndest to convince voters not to cast a ballot for AMLO could only arouse the ire of PRD bases along the route of the Other Campaign.    
 
Even as Calderon uses Marcos to raise the fear flag, Marcos argues that voter fear of instability does not alter electoral results. Nonetheless, in 1994, Ernesto Zedillo parleyed fears triggered by the Zapatista rebellion and the assassination of PRI heir-apparent Luis Donaldo Colosio into big numbers to walk off with the Mexican presidency.
 
Although Delegate Zero equates all three political parties, the conventional wisdom is that a return to power by the PRI would animate elements in the Mexican military who still want to stamp out the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and incite the lust of the PRI-affiliated paramilitaries for Zapatista blood.  On the other hand, repeated violence against EZLN bases in Chiapas by PRD-affiliated farmers’ groups, are not a harbinger of better times for the rebels under AMLO’s rule.
 
Enfrented as the PRD and the EZLN remain, the only avenue of convergence could be in post-electoral protest.  As the close race goes down to the wire, one good bet is that the July 2nd margin between Calderon and Lopez Obrador will be less than 100,000 out of a potential 72,000.000 voters.  If Calderon is declared the victor by challengeable numbers, the PRD, invoking the stealing of the 1988 election from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, is apt not to accept results issued by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) which AMLO’s rank and file already considers partisan to the PAN, and the PRD will go into the streets — most noticeably in Mexico City, where it concentrates great numbers and where the IFE is located. 
 
How embarrassed Roberto Madrazo is by the PRI’s performance July 2nd could determine his party’s participation in mobilizations denouncing the results as well. Madrazo has thus far balked at signing a "pact of civility" being promoted by the IFE.
 
The EZLN has historically been more drawn to post-electoral protest than elections themselves.  In 1994, convinced that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas would not take protests into the streets if he were once again cheated out of victory, the Zapatistas sought to inspire such protest themselves (they were successful only in Chiapas.) 
 
The best bet is that given a generalized perception of a stolen election, the EZLN will put its animosity aside as it did last year when the PRI and the PAN tried to bar AMLO from the ballot, the "desafuero."  But the Zapatistas will join the post-electoral fray calcuutf8g that AMLO, a gifted leader of street protest, will seek to channel voters’ anger into political acceptable constraints.
 
The return of Marcos to the national spotlight is an unintended consequence of the Other Campaign.  Determined to use the electoral calendar to unmask the electoral process and the political class that runs it, Marcos’s posture as an anti-candidate has made him as much of a candidate as AMLO, Calderon, and Madrazo.  Indeed, Delegate Zero’s primetime Televisa appearance has inducted him, voluntarily or not, into the very political class that the Other Campaign detests.
 
John Ross is on his way to California to watch basketball.  His new opus "Making Another World Possible:  Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2006" is in New York being inspected by editors.  Ross will return to Mexico in early June to cover both the final spasms of the presidential race and the continued twitchings of the Other Campaign.  
 
  

   
 

Free kitten?

0

Kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Mother’s Day: the primo time to think about reasons why mom rules. So why did I spend it listening to Grandaddy’s new, possibly last album, Just Like the Fambly Cat (V2)? I also lost about four solid hours watching Amon Duul, MC5, and Scott Walker videos on YouTube and thinking back to my adolescent years, when my household chores fell by the wayside and dear ole mum would threaten to spirit away a sackful of our 20 or so semiferal "fambly" cats and kittens and abandon them by some desolate roadside pineapple cannery. Thanks, ma!

Really, Hallmark and the assorted commercial pressures that guilt you into shuffling to the post office with an annual tribute to motherhood bring out the absolute worst namely, inappropriate memories in me. Though that certain special someone never carried out those acts of probable feline-cide, it’s clear not all of us come psychologically, emotionally, and financially equipped to be parents just as many of us were not well kitted out to be pet owners. We try: Glance through the approximately 17,000 cat videos on YouTube John Lennon’s scant 415 refs are no match against the cuddly-wuddly, flea-bitten hordes. The majority are amateurish, dull, full of "aw-isn’t-she/he/it-cute quick get it on the cameraphone" tumescent adoration.

Still, between the anticlimactic "Puppy vs. Cat" snippets, music fans can kill an entire Mother’s Day watching Magma serenade Catholic padres in some strange French B-movie or study a drowsy Velvet Underground supposedly writing "Sunday Morning" ("They all look so fucked up. Heroin is bad for you," comments one viewer) or check out the most viewed music-related vid that day (perhaps related to the new service that started last week allowing users to upload footage directly from a phone or PDA): a blurry, too-loud, obviously cellie-derived clip of Guns n’ Roses blasting out "Welcome to the Jungle" at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom on May 12.

How perfect then that I stumble across a few Grandaddy videos on my YouTube travels, including a slightly oogy bit showcasing, as its maker puts it, "a slug on a cucumber listening to Grandaddy." A comment on the lysergic lethargy embedded in the Modesto band’s tunes? Animals, or rather people in animal suits, operate as stand-ins for nature in the group’s shared videos, representing a star-crossed love for the junky delights of an infinitely disposable, shareable information culture, as well as the earthly attractions of the Central Cali natural world. I can totally relate, dudes.

Sluggish Grandaddy fans who can’t break away from waxing their own cucumbers will be pleased to know that Just Like the Fambly Cat is a suitably great, elegiac outro for the disbanding band (so says songwriter Jason Lytle). A pop symphony to that final solution to dissolution and aimlessness: death. If Grandaddy always seem to teeter betwixt stoner listlessness and slacker lack of focus, the threat of imminent nonexistence and looming loss has brought a sense of purpose, opening with a child’s repeated, lisping, "What happened to the fambly cat?" and closing with Lytle’s grandiose finale, "I’ll never return!" The act of recording melts into biography, as Lytle angrily mourns his broken engagement with all the infectious pop trappings ("Jeez Louise") and then gets lost in dusty, hermetic yet elegant reveries reminiscent of such peers as Air ("Oxygen/Auxsend"). There are, as Lytle sings, about "fifty percent less words" here, breaking from pop formulae, but the writing is more than up to providing the mental visuals for Fambly Cat‘s aural invocation of the last, sad days of summer.

Nonetheless, YouTube comes through with some Fambly Cat imagery, as Lytle has come out from behind the animal costume on a lo-fi video for the "single" "Where I’m Anymore." He bicycles down orchard and suburban lanes, bridging Modesto’s agri and aggro environs, as a papier-mâché cat head jumps into the frame for the slow-jamz chorus of lost-pussy meows. This shy number may have emerged after Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s similar catcentric number, but Grandaddy’s easy, sensuous paw tracks promise to stick with you longer, even after Lytle supposedly says good-bye to Modesto, a place tied tightly to another dubbed Grandaddy. After all, Magnet magazine recently reported that Lytle has sold his Modesto house and is moving to Montana, with no plans to perform Fambly Cat songs live ("If we go on tour, somebody’s gonna fucking die"). But perhaps this media-lavished long good-bye isn’t what it seems and Grandaddy fans can dry their tears because it appears Lytle will play those tunes after all, at Amoeba Saturday. Like a cat that always comes back, all may not be lost. SFBG

JASON LYTLE OF GRANDADDY

Sat/20, 6 p.m.

Amoeba Music, 1855 Haight, SF

Free

(415) 831-1200

Porn 2.0

0

› pornomovies@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION In downtown San Francisco, if you wander off Fifth Street down a small, twisting alley nestled among the sky-high monuments to money, you’ll find a freshly installed steel door, the glowing numbers affixed to it bearing little relationship to the other addresses on the street. If you’re lucky enough to get past the security cameras and locks, you’ll find yourself at the edge of a huge warehouse space full of stages and sets.

Climb up the stairs that lead away from the "medieval castle" set, and you’re in a huge office space full of computers. People are on the phones, or swapping stories as they return from a trip to the Starbucks around the corner, or gathered in tight huddles around large, flat-screen monitors full of partial layouts. Only the bathrooms offer a hint about what’s really going on here. No ordinary office would stock its toilets with an enormous rack of baby wipes, paper towels, and every feminine hygiene product known to woman. This is Kink.com, home to half a dozen of the Web’s hottest porn sites.

Everyone always asks what porn has done for the Web, but they never ask what the Web has done for porn. A place like this, full of queer hipsters, geeks, and models, would never have existed before 1995. It certainly wouldn’t have looked quite so Ikea.

I’ve come here to visit the set of Fuckingmachines.com, a Web site devoted to images and movies of women having sex with machines. Usually the machine involves some sort of piston and at least one moving part to which a dildo can be attached. The sensibility is perfectly San Francisco: a cross between high-tech fetishism and sexual fetishism. Tomcat, the site’s understated Web master, wears a tie and jeans to the set. With a degree in film and digital media from a large public university, the self-consciously androgynous Tomcat is precisely the sort of hip young professional who is attracted to second-generation Web porn operations like Kink.

Tomcat makes sure the first machine (called "the chopper") is ready to go and picks out a pale blue dildo from a huge, tidy cart that contains laid out with surgical precision an array of silicone cocks in various sizes, a fanned display of condoms, towels, baby wipes, and several lube bottles. Next to it is a pine cabinet full of carefully labeled drawers containing "large dildos" and "small dildos." A tiny table holds some soft drinks packed in ice, as well as a handful of lemon Luna bars.

"Last week we did an alien abduction scene," Tomcat says. "It was great I got to be the alien." Today’s model, a tall brunet with a lascivious smile, named Sateen Phoenix, arrives in a little dress and fuck-me shoes. Like Tomcat, she’s the sort of person who has the education and resources to choose from many careers and has chosen this one because she likes it. "I’m moving to LA to get more work," she says, sipping water. "But I just got into this about six months ago I like having sex in public, so I thought, why not do it here?"

Settling onto the chopper, Sateen poses and reposes, replaying her naughty grin as many times as Tomcat asks. The scene behind the scenes here is all business. PAs discuss the merits of various lubes and dildos; everyone tries to figure out the ideal position for Sateen’s pussy so that everything fits together when the machine starts pumping. Tomcat manages to issue directions in the tone of a nice but task-masterish boss.

"I know it’s awkward with your knees and the handlebars, but go ahead and insert it so that it’s comfortable," the Web master says. "Now just wank a little until you get off."

"I don’t know if I can get off like this," Sateen suggests. "I’m too lubey."

"Get some baby wipes for her to take care of that lube," Tomcat directs the PA.

Eventually, using another machine called "the predator," Sateen starts screaming in a way that marks this whole scene, again, as something that could only happen in the world of Porn 2.0. She’s had a genuine orgasm, the kind of thing you’d almost never see a woman do in porn before the Web took over.

Ten minutes later, still shaking and sweaty, Sateen pulls on a robe and stumbles over to the snack table. She falls into a chair and lets out her breath in a whoosh.

"Hard work, eh?" she sighs, grinning at me. "Having orgasms all day?" SFBG

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who’s never met a machine she didn’t like.