› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
Do you think lactation is sexy? My sister just had a baby, and her husband finds the breast-feeding all very erotic, and I told her there was something wrong with him. I said she should tell him to see a shrink, but she told me it didn’t really bother her. I’m worried he is brainwashing her. Do you know of any books I can give her? What should I say to keep her safe? Should I call child services if she doesn’t snap out of it?
Love,
Fretting Sis
Dear Sis:
Yikes! Are you serious? If anyone’s going to do any snapping out of anything, it had better be you. I did mention recently that I don’t find lactation or its accompanying equipment at all sexy, but my opinion here matters barely more than yours does; if it isn’t a problem for your sister, it isn’t a problem, period. I see that you want some drama and to get to be the hero and all, but too bad. Go find a stray kitten to rescue and leave your sister’s family alone.
It’s no surprise to me that the husband, incidental beneficiary of nature’s bounty, should appreciate his good fortune. Men like boobs! News at 11. Nor does it shock me that the occasional woman quite innocently experiences some sexual sensation while breast-feeding. We only have so many body parts and so many physiological responses: breast-feeding, orgasm, and emotional bonding, for instance, all release or respond to the same hormone, oxytocin, which also induces labor. For most people the pleasurable (orgasm) and the nearly unbearable (labor) could not be further apart, but individuals are not “most people.” Susie Bright, for instance, wrote about using a vibrator during labor and (I think) claimed to have had an orgasm while delivering her daughter. Pretty unusual, granted, but hell, it’s got to be better for you than an epidural.
We’ll never know how many women have felt a harmless little buzz while breast-feeding, and considering the attitudes out there (yours, for instance) we never will. It’s not just disapproval, either. Every once in a while there’s a story about a woman who’s admitted feeling something vaguely sexual while breast-feeding actually losing her kids. (OK, in the most famous of these the kid was three, which does change things, but still.)
It may be difficult to establish the requisite distance when there’s a baby involved, but it would behoove you to learn the difference between “I think that’s weird” and “I think that’s wrong and dangerous and I have the responsibility to do something about it.” Or try it this way: if you hear that your brother-in-law is turned on by the baby, then by all means freak out and panic and leap into action. If, on the other hand, you hear that he’s turned on by his own wife’s breasts, well, shut up and go home.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I told my husband that I got hit on at the grocery store. I told the guy I was married and I walked away. Well, my husband apparently felt the need to prove to me he’s desirable too. So he tells me how he was “joking” with this cashier, asking, “Do you want to go for a ride?” “In your truck?” she asked. He replied, “I didn’t say anything about my truck.” She wanted to take him up on it, but she wasn’t getting off work for a few hours. He shrugged and said that he had to go, never once telling her that he was married.
We don’t wear rings; I know I’m married and I make sure any guy who tries to hit on me knows too. I’m kinda upset with my husband now. He doesn’t understand why. What do you think?
Love,
Check Me Out
Dear Check:
I think he’s kind of a tool or was at any rate behaving in a tool-like manner. It isn’t merely that he was playing a nasty little game with you, although I’d think that would be bad enough, but what about the cashier, whom he was using as a cheap prop or pawn? He behaved caddishly toward her as well. One can only hope that she was playing him right back, planning to amuse her girlfriends later with the story of that horn-dog married guy at the store today, what a tool.
It’s not his childish insistence on getting you back that bothers me most, though. He was obnoxious to the cashier and toolish to you, but not understanding why you’d mind these things makes him an idiot, and that is pretty close to unforgivable.
You will forgive him, of course, after explaining one more time exactly what he did wrong. You pretty much have to, since you don’t, I assume, want to have to get a new husband. It’s hard enough to get a new grocery store, and I don’t see either of you going back to the old one, do you?
Love,
Andrea
Planning
Milkbone
How to fix the sewers
EDITORIAL Every time it rains heavily in San Francisco, millions of gallons of barely treated sewage flow into the bay. The city’s ancient sewage system has only one set of pipes — the stuff that’s put down the toilets and drains and the stuff that comes out of the clouds use the same underground pathways — and when there’s too much precipitation, the old pipes and storage tanks get overwhelmed, and there’s no place for the putrid mix to go but into the local waterway.
The raw shit is obviously unhealthy for people and for aquatic life: the bay doesn’t flush well, which means our sewage sticks around awhile. Even in dry weather, the city’s sewage system frankly stinks. Residents who live near the antiquated sewage treatment plan in Hunters Point have to smell it every day. A full 80 percent of the city’s wastewater winds up in a treatment plant in Bayview that everyone agrees is a relic from the 1950s that at the very least needs to be upgraded substantially.
There’s really no way to get around it: the politics of sewage is the politics of poverty, power, and race. As Sarah Phelan reports (“It Flows Downhill,” page 15), the west side of town has a well-constructed treatment center that doesn’t issue any odors at all and handles only a fraction of the city’s sewage. The heavy shit, so to speak, gets dumped on an area that has way, way too much of the city’s nuisances already.
In the meantime, it’s entirely reasonable for San Franciscans to ask why this environmentally conscious city makes such an awful mess of the basic problem of disposing of stormwater and human waste.
So the planning process that’s now underway for overhauling and upgrading the city’s wastewater system is an opportunity to undo decades of environmental racism and take a totally different approach to handling the water that comes into and flows out of San Francisco.
The first step, as Alex Lantsberg points out in an op-ed (page 7), is to stop looking at all that water as a problem. Water is a resource, a valuable resource. This city has constructed an elaborate system to bring freshwater into town from the Tuolumne River, 200 miles away. And yet, the fresh, potable rainwater that falls on the city creates a crisis every winter. There’s a serious disconnect here.
Take a look at a satellite photo of the city and you see a lot of flat rooftops and concrete roadways that together make up a huge percentage of the topographic landmass of San Francisco. These are places that now simply allow rainwater to run off into the storm drains. There’s no reason that those roofs can’t collect that water into cisterns, which could turn that rain into sources of drinking water, water to wash with, water to irrigate plants … water that otherwise would have to be sucked out of a high Sierra watershed.
There are vast amounts of space in the city where concrete — street medians, building fronts, sidewalks, etc. — serve as nothing but conduits for sloshing rainwater. With a little creativity, some of that area could be filled with plants that could absorb some of the rain — increasing green space and making the city a better place to live in the process.
And with modern technology, there’s no reason that all of the streets have to be impermeable concrete. As city streets are torn up, there are ways to look at pavements that are less than watertight, allowing some of the rain to soak in.
There are, in other words, ways to make San Francisco a model city for handling wastewater in an environmentally sustainable way. That won’t be the cheapest way to get the system repaired, but in the long run, it’s the only reasonable approach.
There are also ways to end the injustice that comes from living in the southeast neighborhoods and getting the worst of everyone else’s crap. If the city is about to spend more than a billion dollars upgrading its sewers, a key part of the project must be eliminating both the fecal outflows and the noxious odors that come from the Hunters Point treatment plant. If the more recently built west-side plant can be odor-free and avoid releasing untreated waste, this one can too.
Fixing the sewer system — and rebuilding the Hunters Point treatment plant — isn’t going to be cheap. To its credit, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is pushing to levy new charges on developers whose buildings add to the sewage burden. But in the end, there will have to be some sort of citywide water and sewer rate hike.
There’s going to be a huge fuss when that’s proposed. It ought to be set up so that big commercial users pay more than small businesses and residents, but in the end, it has to raise enough money to do this right. Trying to fix the sewers on the cheap will just leave us with the same stinking mess that the southeast has suffered under for decades. SFBG
Thinking outside the pipe
OPINION Although it’s named the SF Sewer System Master Plan Project, San Francisco’s long-term wastewater program deals with a lot more than sewage. It addresses stormwater runoff as well as the used water that drains out of our residential and commercial sinks, toilets, showers, and washing machines. It offers us a choice between the high road of environmental justice, sustainability, and the emerging green economy and the heavily engineered “pump-and-dump” approach that has defined the city’s sewage and stormwater management practices since San Francisco was first settled.
The high road views the water that we use and that falls on our city as a resource that is too good to waste. San Franciscans now have a once in a generation opportunity to put that idea into practice through a range of innovative technologies, design techniques, and “out of the pipe” thinking. Just a few of the possibilities: building compact facilities to treat our wastewater closer to where it is first generated and where it can be reused, rather than pumping it all into one community where it can become a nuisance; transforming our streets, parks, and school yards into a network of green, healthy corridors that are vital parts of our drainage management system; and harvesting stormwater through green roofs, cisterns, and permeable surfaces.
The high road not only creates jobs for the skilled trade workers who will be needed to rebuild and upgrade the system but also provides opportunities for training and employment for younger and lower-skilled workers to maintain our green infrastructure. While many of the Public Utilities Commission staff have embraced these alternatives, public support will be critical to overcoming the institutional bias for the status quo.
Today stormwater and sewage are considered waste to be made invisible, quickly pumped somewhere for treatment, then dumped. The resulting wastewater system places 80 percent of San Francisco’s sewage treatment burden — and its accompanying problems — in the already mistreated Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood. During rains the water that falls on the streets is quickly routed down storm drains and toward the city’s treatment facilities. Under normal circumstances the stormwater and sewage are treated, then discharged 800 feet offshore into San Francisco Bay and into an “exemption zone” in the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, four and a half miles into the Pacific Ocean.
But rains overwhelm the system between 10 and 20 times every year, resulting in neighborhood flooding and overflows of more than a billion gallons of minimally treated sewage and stormwater along our waterfront annually. Since the rains are diverted into pipes instead of being absorbed into the ground, the west-side aquifer that supports Lake Merced and Pine Lake is starved of water.
The planning process now underway gives us an opportunity to address these problems. The sewer master plan provides a variety of ways for San Franciscans to get involved. They must do so to build the type of wastewater system that we can be proud of. SFBG
Alex Lantsberg
Alex Lantsberg is cochair of the Alliance for a Clean Waterfront (sfcleanwaterfront.org) and chair of the Public Utilities Commission’s Citizens Advisory Committee. For more information, contact him at lantsberg@gmail.com.
NOISE: The immutable Os Mutantes
Guardian art director Mirissa Neff checked out Os Mutantes on Monday, July 24, at the Fillmore and sent back these words and images.
All photos: Mirissa Neff
Reuniting for their first tour since 1973, Os Mutantes were greeted by a ravenous SF crowd ranging from hipster admirers to rowdy Brazilians. Here, Zelia Duncan and Sergio Dias have a moment during the Tropicalia legends’ set at the Fillmore.
The word on the street is that they are planning to put out a new release — perhaps targeting the US market? Maybe that’s why so many songs that were originally in Portuguese were performed in English.
Saving local industry
EDITORIAL It’s almost an axiom in San Francisco planning policy: High-end housing drives out industry. That’s only logical: When people buy million-dollar condos, they don’t expect to get woken up in the middle of the night by delivery trucks or deal with the smell of diesel fuel or look out their windows at barrels of chemicals. When the dot-com boom turned parts of South of Market into a housing mecca for the newly rich and hip, the problem became serious: Businesses (including some nightclubs) that had been around for years and were operating entirely within the law, conducting operations that were well within the existing zoning, found themselves under attack from an influx of residents who considered many of the traditional uses of the area to be nuisances.
As high-end housing creeps farther and farther into San Francisco’s industrial areas and the Planning Department continues to push for expensive housing in the southeast neighborhoods, the potential for even more clashes — which tend to end with an industrial business being forced either to leave or to spend a fortune revamping its operations — just grows.
The simple answer, of course, is to stop building pricey condos in industrial areas. But it’s unlikely that anyone at City Hall is going to put a total halt to housing construction in or near industrial areas, so at the very least there ought to be some protection for existing businesses. Sup. Sophie Maxwell has introduced legislation that would bar newcomers to an area from taking legal action to define existing legal industrial activities as public or private nuisances. That means people who move within 150 feet of a business that’s been around for two or more years and conforms to the local zoning laws would simply have to deal with the regular impacts of living next to industry. The law would also require that anyone selling a housing unit adjacent to an industrial area inform the buyers in clear language that there might be noise, odor, or visual issues. If that brings down the price of condos in the southeast, so much the better.
It’s a simple proposal that makes perfect sense. The supervisors ought to approve it. SFBG
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Wow: A little more drunkenness and a bit of public nudity, and San Francisco could have had a real world-class soccer party Sunday. As it was, things were pretty darn festive: I was too busy chasing the kids around and watching the game to get a good count, but I bet there were 15,000 people at Dolores Park, more than I’ve seen in one place in the Mission for anything short of a big antiwar rally. The sun was shining, the mood was upbeat, people waved French and Italian flags around and cheered when either side scored a goal… what a great event.
And it only happened because a German-born former teacher named Jens-Peter Jungclaussen, who is traveling around in a bus trying to bring the world to local kids, decided to get the permits, line up a big-screen TV and a huge forklift, and pull it off.
And as I stood there and marveled at how one motivated person could create a massive civic event, I had to wonder: Why can’t the Recreation and Park Department do stuff like this?
How hard would it have been for the city to rent the TV screen (or better, three or four screens; there were so many people the ones in the back could barely see), put out the word (Jungclaussen did, as far as I can tell, no advertising — the whole thing was by e-mail and word of mouth), and maybe even do this in half a dozen places around town?
It’s funny, when you think of it: So much of the fun stuff that happens in San Francisco is done by private groups. The street fairs, the festivals, the concerts… the city does almost none of this. Even the Fourth of July fireworks are run by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rec-Park spends a lot of time pissing people off, making dumb rules about permits that make even the private events harder to finance. It’s a nest of bureaucrats without any vision.
This ought to be a wake-up call: There are all sorts of things that can bring people together. There are all sorts of ways to spend the public’s money helping the public have fun (and along the way, reminding people why we pay taxes).
You want to cough up extra money every year to pay someone to tell you that you can’t drink beer in North Beach? I don’t either — but a few events like Sunday’s impromptu festival in Dolores Park, and one of the most loathed agencies at City Hall could become one of the most loved.
Think about it, folks.
Now this: I think just about every Guardian reader in the world has noticed that we’ve had some serious Web problems in the past few weeks. We got hit with something — maybe an attack, we’re still not sure — on Election Day, and whatever it was pretty much fried sfbg.com, and we’ve been limping along ever since.
But we’re back now and way better with a bunch of big changes that we’d been planning anyway. Sfbg.com now has a new design, a (much, much) faster user interface — and several new blogs that will be updated daily and full of everything you need to know about politics, arts, culture, and the unconventional wisdom of San Francisco.
It’s still a work in progress, but it’s going to be a lot easier to tell us what you think. SFBG
No more taxicab cheating
EDITORIAL The embarrassing spectacle of the San Francisco Taxi Commission firing its executive director in a secret 2 a.m. session June 28 demonstrates how out of control the cab industry in this town is. And it shows that the cab companies need much tighter regulation and monitoring.
The commissioners — all but one of them appointees of former mayor Willie Brown, all of them serving despite expired terms — decided to fire Heidi Machen for the crime of actually doing her job: auditing (and often pissing off) the cab companies.
This all happened while the mayor, who had handpicked his former aide Machen for the job, was either not paying attention or not sufficiently engaged (a problem that’s becoming all too common these days). In the end, Newsom replaced two of the commissioners, and Machen is getting her job back — but the message that was sent here was atrocious.
The cab industry in this city operates under unique rules, established almost 20 years ago by then-supervisor Quentin Kopp. Nobody can drive a cab without a permit, called a medallion; that’s standard for most cities. But in San Francisco the scarce and prized medallions are only issued to active drivers, who have to wait as long as 15 years to qualify. They can use the permits only while they still drive a cab. The permits can’t be bought or sold, and revert to the city upon the death of the holder.
But even active drivers only work part of the time, and since cabs are on the streets 24-7, the holders can lease those permits to other drivers for the shifts they aren’t working. The lease fees alone are worth about $70,000 a year; it’s a nice juicy income for the holders.
The idea was to get the benefits of the medallions into the hands of working drivers. In practice, permit holders use all sorts of tricks to keep from actually having to drive a cab — why work when you can earn that much money without lifting a finger? And some companies, like Yellow Cab, manage to hold on, one way and another, to a huge number of medallions; Yellow alone controls one-third of all the permits in the city.
Past taxi commission directors have operated on a friendly basis with the companies and the permit holders, letting some amazing scams go on without any crackdown. Machen took the radical step of auditing the companies to make sure that the medallion holders were people who actually drove cabs. The industry was furious, and has been trying for some time to get her canned.
When the late Arthur Jackson was president of the commission, the companies got nowhere. A principled straight shooter, Jackson supported his staff and took no guff from the companies. After he died several months ago, Martin Smith, who manages Big Dog City Taxi Service, took over the top job, and Machen has been under pressure ever since.
But there were no grounds to fire her — she’s been doing her job, by the book. So the cab companies started getting personal.
Somebody — possibly a private investigator — pulled some old court records and found out that one of Machen’s aides was arrested 15 years ago and charged with burglary. It turns out his conviction was later expunged, and the guy’s had no further run-ins with the law, but no matter: Cab company representatives, including Jim Gillespie, who runs the San Francisco Taxi Association, hand-carried copies of the original charges (minus the later order dismissing them) to several supervisors to stir up trouble. (They showed the same stuff to Commissioner Jackson before he died; he checked the story out and sent them packing.)
Then company representatives showed up at the hearing to toss out vicious, wildly exaggerated allegations that went way beyond anything in the court records in an effort to smear Machen by association.
The mayor, to his credit, supported Machen in public (after the dismissal), and at press time was planning to reappoint her to the job. But he needs to go further: He should denounce the character assassination by the cab companies and publicly endorse a full and complete audit of every single company and medallion holder’s driving record. The penalty for willful and egregious violations of the law should be the permanent loss of taxi permits. And the district attorney ought to open an investigation into whether the cab companies and medallion holders have conspired to cheat ordinary drivers and the public out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. SFBG
Cooler heads
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’ve been dating a beautiful girl, and I mean she is hot. The problem? She’s really jealous and we fight all the time. I can’t look at another girl. She is incredibly possessive and wants to be involved in every element of my life.
I’ve never had any sort of sexual problems before, but I’m having problems orgasming. We have sex all the time. It’s never boring; she has an amazing body and is a great lay. But I just don’t come. I have no problems coming on my own. Can my mental frustration lead to physical problems in bed?
Love,
Feel Free to Come Up with a Clever Acronym
Dear FFTCUWACA:
I don’t do those; that’s the other guy.
I keep reading and rereading and I have yet to find the part of your letter where you say you love, like, or are in any way interested in this girl beyond the purely physical, and that stuff’s not going so well. This lack of any genuine affection makes the solution to your problem pretty simple: Get the hell out and date someone you like next time.
If you were actually planning a future with Miss Hot Thing, I’d be expressing concern about the extreme possessiveness and warning you that little good ever comes of a relationship based on the desire to control and possess, rather than enjoy, the object of one’s alleged affection. You probably know this already, but how hard someone latches on to you and how much control that person wishes to exert over every aspect of your life is not a measure of affection, not by a long shot. At best, it’s about her, not you, and it could and will be easily transferred to the next object of obsession. At worst, well, does the term “bunny boiler” mean anything to you?
Frustration can indeed lead to performance issues, as can just plain not liking the person you’re attempting to perform with. Face it, she drives you crazy, and not in a good way. Your body has noticed this and is refusing to cooperate any longer. Your brain, or what passes for one, is still convinced that a girl who’s “hot” and “beautiful,” “has an amazing bod,” and is “a great lay” ought to be enough. Your other head, on the other hand, has proved itself the smarter for once. I suggest you listen to it.
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
I’m a virgin, though I recently became involved in my most sexual relationship ever. I think we’re nearly ready to have sex, but I’m concerned about not having an orgasm. I hadn’t experienced much penetration before, but now I get a lot. Still no orgasm. I don’t get very far on my own, but when he’s using his tongue or fingers, I occasionally feel close but never experience a release. Is this normal? Does it suggest that I’ll have similar difficulty when it’s his penis instead of a tongue or finger? Or will the difference in size make me more likely to orgasm?
I take an antidepressant but I’ve been on it years longer than I’ve been sexually active, so it’s hard to tell if that’s the problem. I’m working on lowering the dose slightly, but stopping isn’t an option right now.
Love,
Please Release Me
Dear Release:
Are we having That Clinton Problem? You say you’re about ready to have sex, but you’ve already had his tongue and fingers and who knows what else all up in your business, which sure sounds like sex to me. It would also be useful to know where exactly he’s sticking those things. My guess is, nowhere useful.
There comes a time in every woman’s life where she must use the power of the Internet to access a nice vulva diagram. I found an alarmingly colorful but rather nice one at www.vaginaverite.com/diagram1.html, but there are plenty more where that came from. See how there’s nothing inside the vagina, but there are plenty of external structures that look worthy of attention in their own right? The clitoris and related bits in particular? Direct his (or your own) attention there for a change and stop worrying about penetration until you’ve gotten what you’re looking for. Although some women are capable of a purely internal orgasm and far more enjoy penetration, if you were going to find your bliss poking about in there, you probably would have already.
As for the drugs, they may indeed be inhibiting you. Many people find that the effect wears off over time, but you’ve had time and it still isn’t working. I suggest trying the clitoral route (your fingers, a vibrator, a shower massage, his fingers, his tongue … you get the picture) while also putting your doctor on notice that you may need to lower or change your medication soon. Perhaps remind him or her that never ever having an orgasm is a depressant in its own right.
Love,
Andrea
Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. She rarely has That Clinton Problem. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her archived columns.
Put away the cameras
EDITORIAL The rate of violent crime in San Francisco, including murder, is climbing, and it’s way past unacceptable. Progressives aren’t generally known for their crime-fighting plans, but in this case the left flank of the Board of Supervisors, led by Ross Mirkarimi and Chris Daly, has offered a real, functional plan: an increase in community policing and additional funding for violence-prevention programs. However, Mayor Gavin Newsom and the cops are against that, and they helped knock it down on the June 6 ballot.
So what does the mayor want to do? He wants to put surveillance cameras — perhaps as many as 100 new surveillance cameras — all over the city, recording everything that happens in big swaths of public space, 24 hours a day.
The American Civil Liberties Union is urging the mayor to drop the plan. We agree.
For starters, there’s no evidence that cameras deter crime. Studies in England, where crime cameras are ubiquitous, show no decrease in criminal activity that can be linked to the cameras, and even studies in the United States suggest that criminals aren’t deterred by them. It’s possible cameras will help identify killers, particularly in neighborhoods where it’s almost impossible to find witnesses willing to talk — but it’s also possible (even likely) the bad guys will know exactly where the cameras are and either move somewhere else or wear masks.
And in exchange for this dubious benefit, San Franciscans will give up an immense amount of privacy.
We already live in a society where surveillance is an ugly fact of life. Credit card customers, grocery shoppers, cell phone and FasTrak users — almost all of us have our names and other details of our lives in electronic files, controlled by private firms and (as we’ve seen in the post–Sept. 11 era) easily accessible by government agencies.
The cameras offer such a huge potential for abuse. Will local or federal authorities use them to monitor political protests? Will they become a tracking device for people the feds consider a “threat”? Will they be used to monitor and suppress perfectly legal political activities and private associations?
No matter what the mayor and the San Francisco Police Department say, those cameras will be recording in public spaces, and those video files will exist somewhere, and even if they’re regularly erased (and given the SFPD’s record on following its own rules in other areas, we don’t trust that for a second), all it takes is a visit from the Department of Homeland Security to overrule all the safeguards. And anybody who thinks that won’t happen has been utterly out of touch with the state of the body politic in the past six years.
Another possibility the ACLU raises: Those videos could be considered public record in California — meaning stalkers, angry ex-spouses, and people planning violent crimes will have access to the daily movements of their potential victims.
The supervisors have, to their credit, tried to come up with rules to limit the potential abuses. But these sorts of technologies have a way of expanding, and law enforcement agencies have a way of avoiding oversight and scrutiny. There are much, much better ways to deter and fight violent crime. The best solution here is to simply cut the funding for the mayor’s cameras from next year’s budget. SFBG
Blood brothers
› cheryl@sfbg.com
It’s Easter weekend in the Mission District, and despite the rabbit snuffling around Rick Popko’s backyard, Cadbury eggs are the last thing on anyone’s mind. "I think we’ve killed everyone we know," Popko explains grimly, grabbing his cell phone to try and recruit one more zombie for the final day of filming on the horror comedy RetarDEAD. Moments later, Popko and RetarDEAD codirector Dan West survey the scene in Popko’s basement. To put it mildly, it’s a bloodbath: The ceiling, walls, and carpet are dripping with cherry red splatters. A smoke machine sits primed for action near a table loaded with gore-flecked prop firearms.
Waste not
Several weeks later (plus several coats of paint, though a faint pinkness lingers), what had been a gruesome morgue has now reverted to its natural domestic state, save an editing station assembled at one end. A framed poster commemorating Popko and West’s first feature, 2003’s Monsturd, hangs on a nearby wall.
Monsturd is a true B-movie. Thanks to some seriously weird science, a serial killer morphs into a giant hunk of raging poop. Drawn into this sordid small-town tale are an evil doctor, a down-and-out sheriff, and an intense FBI agent, plus Popko and West as a pair of screwball deputies. Toilet jokes abound. After a three-day premiere at San Francisco’s Victoria Theatre, Monsturd found some success on video, most triumphantly surfacing in Blockbuster after the chain purchased 4,000 DVD copies.
Popko and West hope Monsturd‘s cult notoriety will aid RetarDEAD, which happens to be its direct sequel. It starts exactly where Monsturd ended. "Dr. Stern [the mad scientist played by Popko-West pal Dan Burr] rises from the sewer," West explains. "He gets a job at an institute for special education and starts a test group on these special ed students. They become remarkably intelligent, and then the side effect is they become zombies."
"In a nutshell, we kind of liken it to Flowers for Algernon meets Night of the Living Dead," Popko interjects.
"It’s a background gag to get the whole premise of the joke title. People go, ‘Well, why is it RetarDEAD?’ It’s because we needed a gimmick," says West, adding that the title came before the film (and was settled upon after an early choice, Special Dead, was snatched up by another production).
Best friends since bonding over a shared love of Tom Savini, circa 1984, at Napa’s St. Helena High School, Popko and West are so well matched creatively that Burr describes them as "like the left hand and the right hand" on the same body. Both are keen on beguiling titles. Monsturd‘s original moniker (Number Two, Part One) was dropped after being deemed too esoteric; Monsturd, they figured, would solicit more interest in video stores.
"We knew it’s such a stupid title that you would have to rent it just to see if it was as dumb as you thought it was," West explains. And for self-financed filmmakers like West and Popko (who both have full-time jobs and estimate they spent $3,000 on Monsturd and $12,000 to $14,000 so far on RetarDEAD), clever marketing strategies are essential.
"We have to think, when we’re making these movies, what can we sell, what can we get out there, what can we make a name for ourselves with?" Popko says.
"On this level, you go to the exploitation rule, which is give ’em what Hollywood cannot or will not make," West adds. "And they’re not gonna make Monsturd."
Dirty deeds . . .
Monsturd took years to complete and taught the duo scores about the capriciousness of the DVD distribution biz. Though one review dubbed it "the greatest movie that Troma never made," Popko and West actually turned down a deal with the famed schlock house, unwilling to sign over the rights to their film for 25 years. After hooking up with another distributor, they didn’t see any money from their Blockbuster coup. Still, they remain proud of Monsturd and its success.
"We tried to make it the best movie we possibly could, but we had nothing," West explains. "We didn’t piss it out in a weekend. It took a year to shoot it, then it took a year to put the thing together."
"We didn’t just shit out a crappy movie, pardon the pun," Popko says.
Neither filmmaker seems concerned that their trash-tastic subject matter might prevent them from being taken seriously as artists. And it doesn’t bother them that Monsturd‘s joke tends to overshadow the film itself — not just for viewers, but for critics, who were by and large polarized by the killer shit-man tale.
Popko also recalls unsuccessfully submitting Monsturd to a half dozen film festivals intended to showcase DV and underground flicks. Quickly pointing out that the film got picked up anyway, he blames image-conscious programmers: "It’s like, how can you have a respectable film festival when you’ve got a shit monster movie playing in it?"
Though Popko and West live in San Francisco and filmed both Monsturd and RetarDEAD in Northern California, they say they don’t feel like part of the San Francisco filmmaking scene. Again, they suspect the whiff of poo might have something to do with it.
"We’ve kind of been ignored," West says. "We’re not bitter about it, but it would be nice to be acknowledged for what we’re doing — we’re making exploitation films, and we don’t really have any guilt about what we’re doing. It’d be nice for somebody to develop a sense of humor and acknowledge it once in a while."
. . . done dirt cheap
As with Monsturd, RetarDEAD is a nearly all-volunteer effort, pieced together when the responsibilities of real life permit. Despite the obstacles — say, a sudden insurance crisis involving a rented cop car — unpredictability is clearly part of the thrill.
"When you undertake this shit, it’s an adventure: ‘What did you do this weekend?’ ‘Well, I was chased by 42 zombies, and the weekend before that, a bunch of burlesque dancers ripped our villain apart and ripped his face off,’” West explains. "It’s like, how else would you spend your free time?"
This sentiment extends to the film’s cast, several of whom have known Popko and West for years and reprise their Monsturd roles in its sequel. Coming aboard for RetarDEAD were members of San Francisco’s Blue Blanket Improv group, as well as the Living Dead Girlz, a zombie-flavored local dance troupe.
Beth West, who jokingly calls herself a "fake actor," stars in both films as the X-Files-ish FBI agent (Dan West’s former wife, she was roped into the first production after the original lead dropped out). Despite both films’ bare-bones shoots — and other concerns, like trying (and failing) to keep continuity with her hairstyle over multiple years of filming — she remains upbeat about the experience: "I loved being part of such a big creative effort."
Though his character is torn to shreds in RetarDEAD, Burr agrees. "This film is going to be 100 times better than the last one, as far as direction, camera shots — everyone was more serious this time," he says. He hopes that RetarDEAD will help Popko and West expand their audience. "Someone’s gonna notice the talent there. Maybe not in the acting, but this is these guys’ lives. It’s never been my whole dream, but it’s always been their whole dream."
Splatter-day saints
For RetarDEAD, technical improvements over Monsturd, including the introduction of tracking shots, were important considerations. However, first things first: "We knew we wanted this to be gory as fuck," West says. An ardent fan of Herschell Gordon Lewis — notorious for stomach turners like 1963’s Blood Feast — West once hoped to lens a biopic of Lewis and his producing partner, David Friedman. Though it was never completed, he did get the Godfather of Gore’s permission to use a snippet of dialogue from the project in RetarDEAD.
"This whole thing begins with his intro — it’s like that Charlton Heston thing for Armageddon, where it’s like the voice of God — but it’s Herschell Gordon Lewis talking about gore," West says. "It was the one way I could go to my grave saying I finally figured out a way to work with Herschell Gordon Lewis."
Appropriately enough, RetarDEAD pays homage to Lewis’s signature style. "Monsturd had a couple of bloody scenes in it, but it was pretty tame," Popko says. "This here, we’re planning on passing out barf bags at the premiere because, I mean, it’s gross. We’ve got intestines and chain saws and blood all over the place."
Overseeing the splatter was director of special effects Ed Martinez, one of the few additional crew members (and one of few who were paid). A late addition to the production, he "made the movie what it is," according to West.
"A zombie film in this day and age, you can’t do amateur-quality makeup and get away with it — it’ll be a flop," says Martinez, who teaches special effects makeup at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University and is a veteran of films like The Dead Pit. "And [Popko and West] know that."
Though Martinez is used to working on bigger projects, he stuck with RetarDEAD — dreaming up such elaborate moments as a Day of the Dead–inspired man-ripped-in-half sequence — because, as he says, "In a way, I’m a coconspirator now." He also appreciates the directors’ sheer enthusiasm and appreciation. After a killer take, they were "literally high-fiving me. Most low-budget filmmakers are so egocentric they would rarely do anything like that. Good effects are important, but they’re not the only things that are important."
Dawn of RetarDEAD
Though a third movie in the Popko-West canon is already in the planning stages (Satanists!), it’s looking like several months before RetarDEAD — still being edited from 30-plus hours of raw footage — has its world premiere.
"We only get one to two nights a week to do this," Popko explains. Making movies for a living is the ultimate dream, but for now, both men view their films as being in the tradition of early John Waters: made outside the system and laden with as much bad taste as they please. Potential distributors have already advised the pair to adjust RetarDEAD‘s divisive title, a notion they considered "for about five minutes," according to West.
Popko and West’s films may be throwbacks to the drive-in era, but their outlook on the movie biz is actually quite forward-looking. Popko — "the carnival barker" to West’s "guy behind the curtain pulling levers and switching things," according to Burr — anticipates a day when tangling with queasy distributors won’t even be necessary, because many films will simply be released directly over the Internet. Both directors are also very interested in high-definition technology; they plan to upgrade from their old DV camera to a new HD model for their next effort, for reasons beyond a desire for better visual quality.
"What HD has done is bring grind house back," West says. "Now you can make stuff on a level that can compete, aesthetically, with what Hollywood’s doing — almost. As far as your talent, you’ll be able to compete realistically with other movies. Now people can make good horror movies on their own terms."
"If you really want to make a movie, you can," Popko notes, stressing the importance of production values. Though the cutthroat nature of the indie film world is always on their minds, they welcome the new wave of B-movies that HD may herald.
"Now, there aren’t movies like Shriek of the Mutilated that were done in the 1970s, which could compete [with Hollywood]. These movies can now come back into the fold as long as they’re shot on HD — and there will be a shit fest like none other," West predicts, adding that he’s looking forward to the deluge. "The world’s a better place with shitty movies in it." SFBG
The Guardian presents Monsturd
Mon/5, 9 p.m.
12 Galaxies
2565 Mission, SF
Free
(415) 970-9777
Why Conroy should go
EDITORIAL Mayor Gavin Newsom made a weak attempt to deal with the political fallout from the Office of Emergency Services audit last week, appointing Laura Phillips, who appears to have some qualifications for the job, as the head of emergency communications.
But Newsom refuses to follow the most important recommendation from the scathing audit. OES director Annemarie Conroy still has her job.
It’s more than a little bit unsettling: Newsom, who claims to be a competent manager, is sticking with Conroy, the Donald Rumsfeld of San Francisco, an incompetent political crony who won the job only as part of a stupid and transparently political deal.
The audit, by Board of Supervisors budget analyst Harvey Rose, shows why this sort of political chess game is such a bad idea. Conroy, who had no credentials whatsoever for the top disaster planning job, has, not surprisingly, fared poorly. Her office, the audit says, is larded with top management — a full 40 percent of her staff are at the highly paid management level, which Rose called "unacceptable" — while little of the $82 million it’s received in federal and state grants has gone to emergency training. Conroy has bungled efforts at coordinating disaster planning with other departments and hasn’t even applied for federal reimbursement for some $7.6 million that the city is owed.
Conroy, a lawyer and former supervisor, got the $170,000-a-year job largely because Newsom wanted to get Tony Hall off the Board of Supervisors. So he offered Hall a plum job running the Treasure Island Development Authority — but since Conroy was already in that job, Newsom had to move her someplace else, and he chose emergency services. The problem is, this is no sleepy bureaucratic backwater where a hack can rest on a nice salary for a few years without doing any real damage. The OES handles a huge amount of money and is responsible for getting the city ready for things like a major earthquake, which every scientist agrees is overdue, or a terrorist attack, which is certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
This was the sort of game former mayor Willie Brown played all the time, shuffling political allies around to agencies and commissions without much regard for the public policy impact. Newsom promised to do better, but the fact that he’s still standing behind Conroy is evidence that he’s letting old-fashioned politics get in the way of running the city.
Let’s face it: Annemarie Conroy should never have been appointed to the OES and clearly isn’t up to the job. Rose recommends abolishing her position and letting the new head of emergency communications run the whole show. That seems like an excellent idea. SFBG
Prop. D’s misinformation campaign
OPINION Why are Joe O’Donoghue and the Residential Builders Association funding Proposition D on the San Francisco ballot? Could it have anything to do with the RBA’s rapacious hunt for profits?
You bet, because Prop. D would change the city’s zoning laws to potentially allow private development on 1,600 city parcels that are now protected for public use purposes only.
The RBA has modeled its campaign on the current national trend of winning through fearmongering. That’s why the RBA sent San Francisco voters a slick campaign ad featuring an elderly woman (who is not even a Laguna Honda Hospital patient) with a photoshopped black eye, misleading "facts," and not one word about zoning.
But Prop. D is much more than a giveaway for builders — it’s also an assault on San Franciscans of all ages with psychiatric disabilities. It perpetuates stereotypes about people with such disabilities by suggesting that individuals with a primary psychiatric diagnosis are violent. Studies have consistently shown that people with mental illness are not any more likely than members of the general public to commit acts of violence.
If proponents had wanted to keep dangerous patients out of Laguna Honda, they would have proposed banning people with a history of prior violence — the best predictor, by all accounts, of future violence.
Instead, Prop. D guarantees that the stigma of mental illness will continue to dissuade people from seeking help. And it does absolutely nothing to increase safety for LHH residents.
What Prop. D does do is violate nine state and federal laws including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act, which ban discrimination on the basis of disability. Prop. D singles out people with mental illness and mandates that "only persons whose need for skilled nursing care is based on a medical diagnosis that is not primarily psychiatric or behavioral shall be admitted" to Laguna Honda. It endangers more than $100 million dollars in federal funds San Francisco receives each year, since that money is conditioned on city compliance with nondiscrimination laws.
Prop. D would force the eviction of Laguna Honda residents who have age- or HIV-related dementia. The city would be forced to transfer those residents to institutions in other counties, far from family and friends, at an annual cost of $27 million dollars. Moreover, Prop. D puts a Planning Department official in charge of making health care and admissions decisions.
All of this is why nurses, health care workers, and public health officials are opposing Prop. D, as are the members of the city’s Community Alliance of Disability Advocates and the Human Services Network, representing more than 100 organizations serving people with disabilities and those in need of all ages in San Francisco.
The RBA’s campaign for Prop. D is so misleading that one of its major proponents, the Coalition for San Francisco Neighborhoods, rescinded its endorsement when the members discovered the RBA’s lies about Prop. D.
Don’t fall for the RBA’s exploitation of LHH residents for the sake of profits. Support the city’s disability rights community. Vote no on Prop. D. SFBG
Belinda Lyons
Belinda Lyons is the executive director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. This op-ed is also endorsed by Steve Fields, cochair of the San Francisco Human Services Network; Bill Hirsh, executive director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel; and Herb Levine, executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center.
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
The San Francisco Board of Education agreed this month to spend a little north of $1.3 million fixing up some dilapidated bungalows at Rooftop Elementary, which happens to be one of the most popular schools in the district. This sounds like a fine idea. The school has too many kids to fit in the classrooms, and the outdoor bungalows, which handle the overflow, are in pretty bad shape. The school district’s facilities officer, an architect, says the students are in no immediate danger, but seriously: How can anyone be against repairing rotten old school buildings?
Well, I’m against it.
Here’s the thing: The board just shut down a bunch of schools, many of them serving primarily nonwhite populations, to save a few million bucks. The rationale: The district is short of money, and those schools were underenrolled — there were too many empty spaces in the classrooms. So they could be closed and the kids sent to other schools. Closing John Swett in the Western Addition, for example, infuriated a large African American community, but saved around $650,000.
Now think about this slowly for a moment, and see if it makes any sense to you: We’ve got a school that has too many kids, so they’re crammed outside in old bungalows. And we’ve got a school that has empty classrooms, so we’re going to shut it down. Instead of trying to move some of the kids from Rooftop to Swett — which costs nothing — we’re saving $650,000 by closing Swett, then spending twice as much as we saved rebuilding the Rooftop bungalows.
Isn’t there something really screwy here?
Well, of course, there’s an explanation: Rooftop has a long waiting list, and all the upper-middle-class white people want to send their kids there. I understand — it’s got a great program, great teachers, and a parent community that raises a ton of money every year for curriculum enrichment.
And I know I’m not as smart as all the people with advanced education degrees at school district headquarters. But I have to wonder: Why can’t we take what’s good about Rooftop — a couple of the teachers, the overall program approach, maybe even (gasp) some of that fundraising cash — and, you know, export the revolution? Why not make Swett sort of a Rooftop Annex? Save the money, help the kids, don’t close anything — everybody’s a winner.
Sarah Lipson, one of two school board members who opposed the bungalow rebuild (Mark Sanchez was the other) told me the whole deal was crazy. "How can we talk about long-range planning and then do this?" she asked.
The district wouldn’t have to kick anyone out of Rooftop this year — the bungalows aren’t going to fall off the hillside, and they’ll hold up another 12 months. There’s supposed to be a real community-based process to evaluate facilities and school closures anyway; why not make this part of it?
Do I really have to answer that question?
Now this: The attack ads and scare tactics of this spring’s campaign are even worse than usual. The "shocking secret" flyer, with the older woman with a photoshopped black eye, attempting to convince people to vote for Proposition D, ranks number one on the sleaze list. The hit on Mike Nevin for a 30-year-old voter fraud charge is truly special, as is Nevin’s hit on Leland Yee, which purports to show Yee lifting weights with the governor.
Aren’t there any real issues in these races? SFBG
Here’s Bill!
The gluttonous Willie Brown era lead to a city workforce of mangers who earned princely salaries in exchange for their political loyalty, but appeared to have little in the way of clear job responsibilities.
The cries for reform from auditors and other watchdogs eventually fueled the creation of a Management Classification and Compensation Plan designed to both streamline the city’s hiring process and trim a top-heavy class of department managers.
The process has been slow and complex, to put it lightly. But one way to measure its effectiveness so far may be to consider the complaints coming from political hacks bitter about losing status on the city’s totem pole.
In April, the Guardian reported that former board supervisor Bill Maher, now a “regulatory affairs manager” at the San Francisco International Airport, seemed to have difficulty showing up for work even half the time, according to documents we’d obtained that tracked his usage of a complimentary airport parking card included in his compensation package.
Maher was a Willie Brown political ally who earned his $95,000-a-year post at the airport in 1998 under the former mayor. Since then, he’s managed to hang on to the job and sail through more $30,000 in raises, to $128,000, despite a dubious job description.
But when the human resources department set its sights on Maher’s job through an MCCP review, he was knocked back from a Manager V position to Manager III in early 2004.
Maher shouldn’t have had much to complain about; the change did not affect his current salary. But the change did affect his eligibility for certain types of pay raises in the future, so Maher lashed out, warning MCCP Team Coordinator Robert Pritchard in an April 2004 letter that he planned to appeal the decision to the Civil Service Commission. In the letter, Maher valiantly made a renewed attempt to describe exactly what it is that he does for the airport:
“Reporting directly to the airport director, this position serves as a political consultant/advisor to the Airport Director regarding the political climate and assists the Director in the overall management, planning and coordination of highly political, sensitive and politically visible projects as assigned.”
Huh? Wha?
Apparently, the position wasn’t “political” enough, because after further review, Pritchard recommended to the commission earlier this month that Maher’s appeal be denied. According to Pritchard’s findings, “ …the position has no supervisory or budgetary responsibilities typical of the higher level classes.”
As it happens, the city’s budget analyst, Harvey Rose, agreed Maher’s duties seemed vague at best, because he recently made the preliminary recommendation that Maher’s job be eliminated entirely. According to a May 22 report from Rose’s office, the decision was based on “the lack of workload and deliverables information, the duplicative nature of the position’s functions, and the position’s high cost …” (Rose’s final budget recommendations won’t be finished until June 5.)
The Guardian also reported in April that management excess appeared to exist elsewhere at the airport. We noted that sources of ours had complained about the airport’s International Economic and Tourism Development Director, a post created for the politically well-connected Bill Lee under Gavin Newsom after the mayor removed Lee from his job as city manager. (The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier & Ross have published versions of this story as well.)
Lee’s salary and mandatory fringe benefits, including a city car, cost taxpayers nearly $186,000 a year. His job, according to Rose’s report, is to “support international business growth.” But the airport never provided to Rose data that proved Lee had inspired any growth in international cargo or passengers. Rose, subsequently, made the preliminary recommendation that Lee’s position also be eliminated by late September “based on the lack of quantifiable economic benefits and cost savings associated with this position …”
No one at the airport’s Bureau of Community Affairs was available to comment on either Lee or Maher’s positions. But in April, Lee disputed any suggestion that his job was merely a “soft landing,” and insisted that he’s continuing to establish new business relationships between the city and key Asian countries.
Airport Spokesman Michael McCarron also told us in April that Maher spends much of his time off site “reviewing and attending appropriate board, commission and regulatory meetings.”
As part of his explanation, McCarron added at the time, “It is important for the airport to be aware of community sentiment that may impact the airport and the regulatory climate within in [sic] which it must exist.”
Clear as a bell.
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› tredmond@sfbg.com
Look: The Transbay Terminal project is all fucked up, about as bad as anything in city government could be, and a lot of people are at fault.
Supervisor Chris Daly isn’t one of them.
I say this because the No on Proposition C campaign has become little more than a personal attack on Daly, who authored the measure that would change the makeup of the Transbay Terminal authority. I’m not voting for Prop. C — I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem — but I do think Daly makes a very good case that change is needed, and I think he’s making a good faith effort to fix it. I mean, at least he’s doing something.
So why are there flyers and posters all around town attacking Daly and saying he is trying to “hold up” the Transbay Terminal project? Mark Mosher, who is running the No on D campaign, argues that Daly “should be held accountable” for his proposal, but that’s horseshit. The real reason, Mosher agrees, is that attacking Chris Daly wins votes in many parts of town.
It’s a sleazy way to run a campaign, and the mayor — who is really behind all of this nonsense — needs to put an end to it, now.
Onward: much, much ado at the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods meeting May 16. The agenda for a group that has too often been under the sway of Joe O’Donoughue included a proposal to rescind the coalition’s endorsement of Prop. D, the badly flawed Laguna Honda measure.
Joe and his ally, former CSFN president Barbara Meskunas, had pushed for (and won) an early endorsement of the measure, which would use zoning rules to ban certain types of patients from the hospital. Somehow, though, the Yes on D presentation wasn’t entirely complete: Most CSFN members who initially voted to back the plan didn’t realize that it had potentially much more sweeping impacts, and could legalize private development on a lot of other city property.
As news about what Prop. D really meant began to get out, some coalition members demanded a new vote — and after a month’s parliamentary delay, they got one.
The debate, I’m told, was lively: At one point, Tony Hall, whom the mayor appointed to head the Treasure Island Development Authority, accused Debra Walker, a longtime progressive, of being a "stooge for the mayor." Ultimately, though, the vote to rescind the endorsement won, 23–8, with Hall, Meskunas, and Newsom-appointed planning commissioner Michael Antonini in the minority.
Shortly afterward, the members voted on new officers, and a slate of candidates led by Meskunas was roundly defeated. At which point Meskunas stormed out of the room, later resigning from the organization.
"This was a battle for the soul of the coalition," Tony Kelly of the Potrero Boosters told me. "It’s been brewing for a while."
Yeah, it’s just one more San Francisco political group and one more internal battle, but it might mean a lot more. First of all, it shows that Hall and Antonini — both, remember, Newsom appointees — are coming on strong against the mayor, fueling the theory I keep hearing that Hall will challenge Newsom from the right in 2007 (and try to get his friend Matt Gonzalez, who also supports Prop. D, to mount a challenge from the left).
Gonzalez told me he hadn’t heard anything about that plan yet (and he found it quite odd), but (of course) he’s not ruling out another mayoral campaign. SFBG
Moore than words
› kimberly@sfbg.com
Love ballads, boyish harmonies, and a single acoustic guitar — four albums along, with numerous side projects such as Sandycoates bringing up the rear, the Moore Brothers obviously have a sweet streak that’s miles wide and filled with melodies as creamy as custard pie and as dreamy as those steamy, leisurely days of teenage summer.
But even dark thoughts dog nice guys, diligent students, and upstanding Joes like Greg and Thom Moore, holding court on a sunny day at a corner table, next to a picture of Jack London, in Mama Buzz’s concrete backyard. Behold the smiling, prone girl lying in the snow on the cover of their beautiful new album, Murdered by the Moore Brothers (Plain). Cock an ear toward the dulcet numbers within, eerie narratives populated with drowned pals ("Old Friend of Mine"), spiteful lovers ("Fresh Thoughts of You"), cemetery lovers ("Bury Me under the Kissing Teens"), and "good deaths" ("Pham"). Even idle bird-watching has a soft veneer of creepy claustrophobia ("The Auditorium Birds"), counterpointing the Moores’ delectable vocals.
What did we do to deserve this? "Lyrically, it is probably the darkest Moore Brothers record," Thom, 32, confesses. "But it also seemed like a nice idea coming out after Now Is the Time for Love, a more holding-hands record. This could be too, but it’s a little more sinister."
"Like holding a severed hand," Greg, 35, chuckles.
Additionally, Thom says, "We’ve got gothic roots." He goes on to describe his first concert as a 12-year-old, accompanying Greg to the Cure’s 1986 Standing on the Beach stop at the LA Forum. The young brothers watched, horrified, as a man in a cowboy hat, standing on a chair, committed suicide by stabbing himself with a huge dagger as an enormous crowd encircled him. "It really scarred me for life!" Thom says. "I thought, I’m never gong to see another concert again unless it’s the Dream Academy!"
So when Thom found himself thumbing through a book of folk songs, looking for numbers for his next side project, Chicken on a Raft, and he came across one titled "Murdered by a Brother," he knew it would be perfect for the Moore Brothers’ next release. "It’s so mean! It’s awful," he says, smiling. They decided to go with it, although their mother — and Girl George, their "punk rock mother," in charge of the Starry Plough open mic — hated it. The former "is afraid someone will murder us," Thom explains. "She said, ‘What if someone sees the album and wants to murder you or wants to implicate you in a murder?!’"
What if? Family bands — and particularly brother bands like the Moore Brothers’ faves the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, and the Everly Brothers — have always hit a powerful, resonant chord in our pop imaginations, touching off daydreams of thick-as-thieves musical togetherness and nightmares of creepy, smothering … togetherness. After all, the pair does at times finish each other’s sentences, and as Thom offers, their mother can’t tell the two apart on the phone. No wonder rumor in local music circles has it that not only do the Moore Brothers share a house (where, in fact, until recently, songwriting legend Biff Rose couch-surfed), but also a room, an idea that strikes them as natural and practical, although the siblings really haven’t shared a bedroom since they were kids. Back then, though, that closeness played as important a role in their musical development as the obligatory piano lessons. Greg says: "I’d hear all his records, and he’d hear all my records."
"Even back then, we were forced to take turns," Thom continues. "So nowadays we take turns with the set list and album song order — pretty much everything." That sense of fair play extends to their track on the largely acoustic new Kill Rock Stars comp, The Sound the Hare Heard, which was decided with a flip of a coin.
Still, the close living arrangements eases the Moore Brothers’ existence in more ways than one: Songwriters since youth (Thom started writing songs at 10 with Jon B, who later collaborated with Babyface), the pair never needs to rehearse, and they dispense with chitchat during long drives on tour, instead sharing a friendly silence as a CD plays.
And, of course, they’ll always be there for each other. "Things come and go in cycles," Thom says. "The good thing about us is that we’re planning to do it forever.
"We still have hopes for being hip in our 50s." SFBG>
Moore Brothers
With Rose Melberg, the Harbours, and the Lonelyhearts
Tues/16, 9 p.m.
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
$8
(415) 861-2011
How to fight Singleton’s monopoly
EDITORIAL Six members of Congress wrote to the Bush administration last week urging a full Justice Department review of the pending deal that will give one company — the Denver-based MediaNews Group — control over virtually every daily newspaper in the Bay Area. The letter is a signal that federal regulators may be unable to simply duck this merger — but it will take a lot more pressure to block it.
As we reported last week, MediaNews, run by Dean Singleton, is planning to take over the San Jose Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times, the Monterey Herald, and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. That would mean every big central Bay Area daily except the San Francisco Chronicle would be owned by one company. And to make it worse, Hearst — the New York City–based owner of the Chron — has signed on with MediaNews as part of the deal: Hearst will buy the Monterey and St. Paul papers, then immediately trade them to MediaNews in exchange for stock in some other MediaNews ventures.
The implications are staggering. The deal sets the scene for an unprecedented level of local media consolidation — and could lead to a scenario in which all the business, advertising, and even editorial functions of almost every Bay Area daily would be run out of one central office.
Reps. Zoe Lofgren, George Miller, Anna Eshoo, Ellen Tauscher, Barbara Lee, and Mike Honda wrote: "We are concerned that this transfer could diminish the quality and depth of news coverage in a Bay Area of more than 9 million people." That’s a good concern: Singleton, known as "lean Dean," is known for ruthless cost-cutting and is likely to reduce news staffing at all of the papers to save money. He’s also likely to take advantage of a virtual monopoly on daily print to jack up advertising rates, hurting businesses and consumers.
The letter quotes Reps. Mark Kennedy and Jim Oberstar of Minnesota as noting: "A monopoly in the newspaper industry is certainly no less dangerous, and is perhaps more so, than in any other American industry." Which is exactly the point: When control of something as essential as civic information is in the hands of too few people, it’s a direct threat to democracy.
It’s clear that the Internet has made daily newspapers less powerful and less essential. But in the Bay Area (and in most of the country) there’s simply no Web alternative that can do the work of a daily paper. Real watchdog journalism requires a staff — reporters to go to meetings, to challenge politicians, to stay on top of City Hall — and so far, nobody’s found a financial model that allows that to happen purely online.
So the threat of one single entity controlling news and information to such a huge extent ought to be a major issue across the state, particularly in the area where MediaNews has most of its holdings. We’re glad that some members of Congress are pressuring the White House, but we don’t really expect Bush’s Justice Department to mount a full-court press on this one. That effort is going to have to come from the state and from local government.
We’ve asked both Democratic candidates for governor about the issue, and both at least showed some interest. Phil Angelides didn’t seem to know much about it until we clued him in, but he said he was "concerned." He needs to do better: A strong statement opposing the deal would be a good start. Steve Westly is friendly with the Newspaper Guild folks in San Jose and has supported their efforts, but he has also stopped short of a blanket statement that the merger must be derailed. And neither the current attorney general, Bill Lockyer, nor either of the major contenders for the job (Jerry Brown and Rocky Delgadillo) has said much of anything.
However, state senator Carole Migden expressed some interest in holding hearings in Sacramento, and that ought to happen immediately. Lockyer should be asked to explain what he’s doing to stop the deal — and the publishers should be asked to reveal the details of the merger and their future plans (see "A Few Questions for the Publishers," page 7).
Every city in the Bay Area should take this on too, starting with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which should hold hearings and pass a resolution demanding that Lockyer block the deal.
Only serious grassroots opposition can prevent this monster of a media monopoly. There’s no time to waste. SFBG
PS Where were Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos on the congressional letter? We’ve left word with their offices, but haven’t heard back as to why they didn’t sign it.
A strong small-business agenda
EDITORIAL You read the academic journals these days, or peruse economic-development Web sites, and everyone seems to be talking about sustainable urban economics. It’s as if the mantra that was first put forward by Jane Jacobs, David Morris, and a few others a quarter century ago is very much in the mainstream today: Cities function best with diverse economies dominated by locally owned businesses, with money circuutf8g within the community. Cutting-edge restaurants talk about serving locally grown food. Beverage savants want local beer and wine. Just about everyone — including the mayor and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce — wants to participate in a program called Shop Local.
It’s a wonderful, encouraging trend — but if it’s going to make any real difference in this city, it has to become a lot more than lip service. Consider: •Just as Mayor Newsom was proudly signing on to a Shop San Francisco program, the mayor and the supervisors were busy approving plans to allow Home Depot — an anticompetitive out-of-town corporation that destroys local small business and undermines the entire concept of a strong local economy — to build a giant store on Bayshore Boulevard.
•It’s taken legal action by Sue Hestor and the neighborhood leaders to derail (for now) the mayor’s plans to build high-end condos all over the eastern neighborhoods — threatening hundreds of locally owned businesses.
•Downtown business leaders and the groups they fund still push for policies that hurt most of the businesses in the city — and too many small-business people still go along.
Here’s the reality: Supporting small businesses — and moving San Francisco toward a sustainable economy — requires a lot more than a slogan. The people who are behind the Shop Local movement know that. They’re promoting a wide range of national and local policies designed to change not only attitudes but the direction of public policy.
San Francisco, a progressive city known for its wonderful, lively, unique neighborhoods, ought to be a national leader in the battle. But others (Philadelphia, for example) are moving way ahead. This city is still stuck in an ancient (and regressive) economic mind-set.
There are a number of key things the city can do to turn that around and become a truly small-business–friendly place — and most of them go far beyond public-relations efforts and cutting through red tape. The basic approach to policy needs to change; here are a few ways to start:
•Stop allowing big chains to come into town. That’s not exactly rocket science, and it isn’t so hard either: Hayes Valley and North Beach both have "formula retail" laws that restrict the chains, and there’s talk of doing the same in Potrero Hill. But why does this have to be fought block by block? Why not a citywide ordinance that protects every neighborhood commercial district — and, more important, keeps the life-sucking big-box giants away from the city altogether?
•Make small, locally owned businesses part of the planning process. The city’s own (limited) studies have made clear that the type of development the mayor and the current city planning leadership has in mind would damage local businesses, particularly in the repair, distribution, and small manufacturing areas. That alone ought to be grounds to change directions. Why not a checklist for every new project that includes the question: Will this displace existing locally owned businesses? If the answer is yes, the project should be rejected.
•Take progressive business taxes seriously. There’s almost certainly going to be an effort this fall to change the city’s business-tax structure, with one of the goals being an increase in overall revenue. That’s great, and it ought to happen — but the tax rates have to be shifted too, so that a tiny local retail outlet doesn’t pay the same amount as the Gap. (Socking big-box outlets with a special tax or fee — possibly based on the fact that they are by nature car-driven operations — might be a nice way to bring in some cash.)
You can’t be friendly to small local businesses these days without taking sides in the national economic war — and that means coming out against the big chains. Until San Francisco does that, all the talk of supporting local merchants will amount to nothing. SFBG