racism

“The W. Kamau Bell Curve”

-
0

REVIEW Standup comic W. Kamau Bell has reopened his frank, funny, and genuinely thoughtful one-man show at SF Playhouse, and it’s worth catching if you haven’t yet (I took in a recent performance at the Climate).

Subtitled "Ending Racism in About an Hour," Bell’s reflections on the recent election and Proposition 8, among other race-inflected personal and political matters still closer to home, are topical, to say the least, and run considerably deeper than the usual one-liners or simplistic oppositions of much race-based comedy. Meanwhile, Bell’s sure and charismatic stage presence, ready wit, and excellent comic timing ensure that the lines between scripted material, inspired tangents, and eager engagement with both the day’s headlines and his diverse audience remain all but seamless.

THE W. KAMAU BELL CURVE Opens Thurs/8. Thurs.–Sat., 8 p.m. Through Feb. 28. SF Playhouse Studio Theater, 533 Sutter, SF. $25 (bring a friend of a different race, and get in two for one). www.wkamaubell.com

Green and black

-
0

news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY The 2008 San Francisco Green Festival, held Nov. 14-16 at the Concourse Exhibition Center, is a well-established environmentalist event that featured more 1,000 vendors and was overseen by 1,600 volunteers, all united in promoting a greener future.

Yet the event’s keynote speaker, Cornel West, along with Van Jones of the Oakland-based Green Jobs for All and San Francisco-based Muslim minister the Rev. Christopher Muhammad, all conveyed an expanded definition of environmentalism that emphasized social justice and concerns specific to African American communities.

The idea behind this fusion of black and green is that our traditional view of environmentalism, with its focus on the health of ecosystems, needs to be expanded to social systems as well. In that context, Muhammad’s long fight against Lennar Corp.’s reckless approach to developing Bayview-Hunters Point (see "Question of intent," 11/28/07), in which his Muhammad University of Islam was exposed to toxic asbestos dust, takes on new dimensions.

As the first speaker of the day Nov. 15, Muhammad’s speech was geared toward local issues of concern. Muhammad continued to shed light on the "environmental racism" taking place in the Bay Area communities of Bayview-Hunters Point, North Richmond, and West Oakland, referring to the injustice as San Francisco’s "dirty little secret." Environmental racism ranges from citing polluting industries in poor communities of color to inequities in who has access to healthy food and preventive medical care.

Muhammed brought to light the issue of San Francisco’s declining middle class and minority populations, citing rising crime rates and housing costs as culprits. He also commended the Green Festival for bringing people together to hear about an expanded scope for environmentalism. "It’s a place where people can come and be informed about issues that impact them that have historically been left out in terms of this whole [green] movement," Muhammed said.

The last scheduled speaker of the day was prominent social critic and Princeton professor Cornel West, author of the new book Hope on a Tightrope (Hay House). Muhammad has worked with West in the past and praised him as a fellow advocate for social justice: "I’ve met with him on a number of occasions and worked with him on various projects. He’s an ally."

West stressed the importance of addressing social justice by saying, "There’s a need to target [environmental racism]. You need a coalition in order to bring hard pressure to bear, so it can become more of a national issue."

In many ways, the people are showing signs of resistance to change, as with the passage of Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in California, a result he calls "catastrophic." Still, he said, now, after a historic presidential election, is the moment to begin the transition. "It’s the end of an era. Thirty years of a country sleepwalking is over," West proclaimed to the cheering crowd.

He warned everyone not to believe that change will come overnight, reminding the crowd that it is ultimately up to us to push the change that we so desperately crave. "It’s not just about one messianic figure on his way to the White House," West said.

Green energy is the future of this country, West said, and one of the many ways we can foster positive change. The potential to lift up communities of color as part of the transition to new energy sources has been a big focus for Van Jones of Oakland’s Green for All, who spoke Nov. 16 about his new book, The Green Collar Economy (HarperCollins). He said we must "invent and invest our way" out of our current "gray economy" and into the new "green economy."

West also said the American people are still coming to understand the nature of the problems we face. "America has grown old, we’ve grown wealthy, but we have yet to grow up." But he ended his speech on an upbeat note, saying this age of conservation and greater awareness will create what Sly Stone called the "age of everyday people."

This year’s Green Festival exposed attendees to nontraditional environmental problems that pollute our social environment. The take-away from this new focus was that "going green" involves more than just driving a hybrid car and shifting to compact fluorescent lights — it means truly transforming our communities.

Two reviews from 3rd I

-
0

By Kevin Langson

The sixth annual 3rd I: San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival runs through Sun/16. Visit the fest’s web site for additional information.

glow200x300.jpg

With The Glow of White Women, Yunus Valley forcefully and riotously reverses the colonial gaze to comedically consider the erotic imagery of — and actual — white women who have comprised his masturbatory fantasies and his libidinous relationships. Valley, a mixed-race Indian and black artist from South Africa, is an incendiary, unabashed director-subject who races through a confrontation of the sexual racism that made for tense relations and torrid desire during apartheid. With a devious grin and a subversive sense of humor encapsulated in his assertion that apartheid really wasn’t so oppressive because it meant that the black boys could sit at the back of the movie houses and masturbate to the images of white women on the screen, he plays at untangling his voracious appetite and contempt for Caucasian women — as a personal and a cultural phenomenon. Don’t expect conclusions or for every element of this film to be well-realized or logically arranged, but do expect an unusually entertaining social critique. This film exudes the personality of its maker, which is to say it is hyper and playful, with a tinge of artist arrogance. Just as he is perfectly comfortable espousing that women are frivolous and not worth living with/committing to, he seems self-satisfied in the structuring of the film, feeling no need to contextualize or conclude as convention would dictate. And why not, if at the end one has the sense that he is a competent commentator, agitator, and entertainer? In two regards he brings to mind Michael Moore. He is a strong, confrontational personality that will likely earn avid detractors and avid supporters among his audience, and he conjures Roger and Me (1989) with his laughable but rather pointless ambush of a beauty queen. On the flipside, it is a beauty queen (the Miss South Africa pageant is a recurring theme) who provides the most chilling moment of the film, as well. When interviewed about her family’s relationship to the African workers who constitute the labor force of the family business, Miss South Africa is a shocking embodiment of the sort of paternalistic racism that is utterly ignorant of itself.

Rap-erations

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Even if the rest of the "change" he’s been promising remains elusive, Barack Obama’s resounding electoral win is already change — and of a profound kind — given its undeniable impact on racial consciousness among African Americans, Americans at large, and no doubt people around the globe. Of course, nobody thinks racism disappeared overnight Nov. 4. If anything, the day marks an opportunity for a reinvigorated dialogue on the complexities of race and racism in the 21st-century United States. Dan Wolf’s vigorous and inviting stage adaptation of Bay Area author Adam Mansbach’s 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy, might seem like an ideal instance, but in fact, although very entertaining, it rehearses a fairly familiar angle without moving much beyond it.

Mansbach’s satirical but searching story concerns a white Jewish suburban hip-hop enthusiast, Macon Detornay (played appealingly by Wolf), whose guilt-tinged identification with African American culture and corresponding aversion to the white mainstream has him uneasily straddling two worlds, eventually bringing them into comically dramatic collision. Macon’s guilt stems partly from a great-grandfather who, as a professional baseball coach, tormented the only black athlete who dared to hold his own on an all-white team.

Macon’s familial history is also, along with hip-hop, his bridge to dorm-mate and fellow Columbia University freshman Andre (played with laidback poise by Myers Clark), whom Macon arranges to live with after learning that Andre is the great-grandson of the same ballplayer his own ancestor victimized. Andre is bemused but generous in the face of Macon’s attempt to make amends. More skeptical is Andre’s friend Nique (a potent Tommy Shepherd, also supplying the fine original music and soundscape). But Macon, a part-time cab driver, earns street cred when he begins robbing his fares (white dudes played by fourth ensemble member Keith Pinto) at the first sign of idle middle-class racism, becoming a notorious outlaw his victims improbably recall as black. The three new friends form the Race Traitor Project to capitalize on Macon’s ironic celebrity, organizing a "day of apology" wherein white America confronts its racist demons. Naturally, things don’t go as planned, and the pressure brings latent tensions surrounding Macon’s fraught identity to a boil.

While wisely concentrating on the ample humor in a story that’s a bit contrived even for satire, director Sean San Jose and cast (all but Clark are members of hip-hop group Felonious) propel the action through a fluid, combustible mixture of music and movement, with sharp choreography from Pinto. But as staged, the themes are less than provocative, in part because the other characters remain subordinated to Macon’s limited perspective, itself almost too "black and white." Nevertheless, the cohesive, versatile ensemble and Wolf’s sympathetic approach translates, under San Jose’s attentive direction, into an engaging theatrical hybrid, whose punctuations and rhythms carry their own share of emotional content and cultural meaning.

ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY

Through Nov. 23

Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., $15–$25

Intersection for the Arts

446 Valencia, SF

www.theintersection.org

Surrealism’s island

-
0

>a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Since his death in 1966, André Breton has received more than his fair share of knocks. I’ve heard both critics and poets call him "fascist," though if pressed, they can only cite Breton’s sometimes dogmatic leadership of the surrealist movement. Such loose talk is tiresome and ahistorical. A staunch Communist, Breton was nonetheless the first to denounce the totalitarian Stalin when the rest of the French Left turned a blind eye. He never went for Mao like the Tel Quel crowd. As leader of a left-wing movement opposed to Hitler, he was on the Nazis’ Parisian to-do list, and he only narrowly avoided arrest by Vichy authorities in Marseille, escaping to America aided by the efforts of Varian Fry (a sort of Schindler for lefty artists). Breton’s even occasionally criticized for fleeing the Nazis — as if it contradicted his principles — though his accusers tend to lead safe, academic lives. As we see in Martinique: Snake Charmer (University of Texas Press, 96 pages, $19.95), a chronicle of Breton’s stopover between Marseille and NYC, exile’s no picnic.

Breton had his flaws, of course, notably sexism and homophobia, yet even these were complicated, given the number of women and gays within the surrealist group. Most of his positions were politically progressive, particularly his anti-colonialism and anti-racism. Where much of the modernist avant-garde (Pound, Eliot, Marinetti, etc.) was avowedly racist, surrealism was the only movement that welcomed black artists as colleagues and innovators. In Martinique, in reference to the poet Aimé Césaire (who died only a few months ago, at 94), Breton writes: "It is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today is capable of handling it

. . . who is the one guiding us today into the unexplored." (Similarly, Breton would declare the Haitian Magloire Saint-Aude the most important surrealist poet of the post-war period.) Where more sympathetic artists like the Cubists exoticized Africans, Breton identifies with Césaire, "unable to distinguish his will from my own." This might seem naïve in today’s political climate, yet the testimonials by the Martinican and Haitian writers who met Breton in the ’40s — translated in Michael Richardson’s 1996 book Refusal of the Shadow — suggest the feeling was mutual. Maybe it’s not so naïve, for surrealism stretches the limits of the possible.

Like many surrealist books, Martinique is a hybrid work, alternating between "lyrical language" and "the language of simple information," reflecting "intolerable malaise on the one hand and radiance on the other." That Breton could still pursue the poetic marvelous under such trying conditions — on arrival, he’s thrown into a concentration by the pro-Vichy regime and, once freed, is constantly shadowed by police — is extraordinary. He was fascinated by Martinique’s natural beauty, celebrating, for example, the effect of rainfall on the island in surrealist terms: "If the light is the least bit veiled, all the sky’s water pierces its canopy, from a rigging of vertigo, water continually shakes itself, tuning its tall green-copper organ pipes." Not even the uncertainty of his fate could stop Breton’s imagination.

This edition of Martinique — the first in English — is not without drawbacks, the most egregious being the poor reproductions of André Masson’s drawings, seemingly scanned from the French edition. But the translation is admirable. In a society which falsely imagines itself "post-racial," Martinique is essential reading. *

Ammiano on the Mary KayKK

-
0

Today’s Ammianoliner:

Sarah Palin rejects notion of veiled racism but does admit to wearing a special makeup: Mary KayKK. Love your thread count.

(From the home answering machine of Sup. Tom Ammiano on Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, saved for readers to combat pre-debate jitters.) B3

Channel surfers

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Tunde Adebimpe sounds like he’s in good spirits. Four years ago, when the lead vocalist of TV on the Radio was in his first brush with fame, he would snap at false critical judgments — from comparisons of his voice to "Games Without Frontiers"-era Peter Gabriel to race-oriented articles focused on the group’s unusual makeup of Adebimpe, guitarist Kyp Malone, and keyboardist/producer David Sitek — two black men and a white man.

Today, though, as he walks out of his apartment into the streets of Brooklyn, Adebimpe speckles his conversation with chuckles. He jokes about the Gabriel comparisons, noting, "He has a better tailor than I do." And he shrugs off TV on the Radio’s galvanizing success. "It’s encouraging, because we don’t make the most conventional stuff," he says. "We’re not rich off making records."

Though it’s not necessarily an Obama-size achievement, Greg Tate from the Black Rock Coalition probably didn’t imagine a mostly black rock band would become the darlings of the gentrified indie-rock establishment a mere 20 years after he protested racism in rock in the 1980s. But after two albums — 2004’s breakthrough Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch and Go) and 2006’s follow-up, Return to Cookie Mountain (Interscope/4AD) — of brilliant, brashly intellectual and brazenly avant-garde music (three if you count its 2002 self-released debut, OK Calculator), TV on the Radio’s artistic achievement has eclipsed "black rocker" stereotypes.

By now, TV on the Radio’s amalgamations are well-cataloged: a little bit of doo-wop, a lot of Fugazi, and sprinkled with gospel-like choral rhapsodies. Despite or because of its alchemical properties — Adebimpe claims, "We’ve never written an original note in our lives" — a TV on the Radio album sounds wholly different from anything else. Sitek’s heavy-mental production techniques isolate Jaleel Bunton’s drums and Gerard Smith’s bass into echoing timbres. Adebimpe and Malone’s wavering voices tremble as if they were trying to find rays of hope amid the mud and asphalt of everyday troubles. A TV on the Radio recording is full of hardy optimism; it sounds like a triumphant battle for the human soul.

"I think that there has to be something outside of our reality. I genuinely hope and find that it is, because if it’s not … " says Adebimpe, his voice trailing off. Then he adds, "Our reality is pretty good. It’s got its perks. But hopefully there’s more to it. Whether that’s inside of a person or outside of a person, I have no idea. But there’s got to be something that’s less flawed, and sometimes boring and sometimes repetitive, than just us."

Set for release Sept. 23, TV on the Radio’s third full-length, Dear Science (Interscope/4AD), radiates with newfound confidence. Songs like "Red Dress" and "Golden Age," the latter on which Malone sings "Clap your hands / If you think your soul is free," positively bop with funk. Then, on the slightly kooky "Dancing Science," Adebimpe raps in a stutter-step pace about the information age overload. The effect isn’t as laughable as you’d think.

Dear Science‘s playful observations sound like a miracle after the earthwork obduracy of Cookie Mountain (which sold 188,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan). Universally hailed as a watermark on its release, Cookie Mountain refines Desperate Youth‘s ambient guitar lines and protean libido into granite walls of distortion, drums, and lust. On Desperate Youth‘s "Staring at the Sun," Adebimpe sings, "You’re staring at the sun / You’re standing in the sea / Your body’s over me," squeezing his lover in a viselike grip as if to protect the paramour from a world teetering on collapse. Compare that song with Cookie Mountain‘s "Wolf Like Me," where he doesn’t want to smother you, but devour you. The band attacks with ferocity as Adebimpe seduces his Little Red Riding Hood: "You’ll never know / Unless we go / So let me show you."

For all its enigmatic power, Cookie Mountain quavers with tension. Shocked at its success — "I feel like, after Desperate Youth, we were definitely astonished we were allowed to make another record," Adebimpe says— TV on the Radio initially struggled to devise a follow-up. "We were suddenly questioning ourselves about others’ opinion, which is always death," he observes. "But you always get to a point where you shrug it off and you say, I have no idea what anyone else is going to think. I can only do what I’m going to do…. The last record was intense periods of absolutely no fun followed by two months of the best time recording."

If Cookie Mountain closed a chapter for TV on the Radio’s alabaster soul, then Dear Science signifies a new direction. Adebimpe calls it "brighter and cleaner," shorn of the dense layers of distortion of the past. The music is wide open. The future is wide open.

TV on the Radio play at 7:25 p.m., Sat/20, on the Bridge Stage at Treasure Island Music Festival.


>>More Treasure Island Music Fest

The shock of the old

-
0

TV EYED A young lawyer friend recently told me about her most recent, insidious opponent in a courtroom: the otherwise friendly opposition would first ingratiate himself by complimenting her on some part of her presentation and then proceed to take apart every other element of her case, disassembling it and tossing it aside like so many useless Popsicle sticks.

AMC’s Mad Men reminds me of this charming shark — fraught with instant surface attraction, with chaser after chaser of insinuating dis-ease. The shell is handsome: its creamy, dreamy, often cool blue cinematography appears to be seamlessly lifted from the pages of an old Life magazine. The stylized art direction, perched between the mid-century moderne ’50s and the freewheeling ’60s, matches three-martini-lunch-ready, lustily deep-red banquettes with Eames-ish lines and steely spanking-new-skyscraper sleekness. The costuming is equally on point, outfitting every exec at the somewhat hermetically sealed Sterling Cooper ad agency in grey or darker suits — the phallic uniform of seeming masters of the universe. Meanwhile the female characters break down according to character: innocence calls for June Allyson Peter Pan collars; sexual experience, bombshell sheaths; surburbanite, Grace Kelly/CZ Guest flips; with the occasional beatnik looking forward to proto-hippie peasant blouses.

And then there’s the stylized and consistently excellent acting, varying from the eerie, almost polished-plastic, Lynchian figures like privileged account exec Pete Campbell, played as cluelessly out of his body and creepily semi-conscious by Vincent Kartheiser. It’s as if Pete were lost in an air-conditioned nightmare, waiting for the roiling ’60s to rouse him from his slumber. Mixing the artifice of the moment and the romance of a man who clearly has based his persona on cinematic iconography as well as the media imagery he helps to create, the remarkably nuanced Jon Hamm delivers protagonist Don Draper as the sexy dad with a killer smile that often betrays the gaping cracks beneath the stylish facade. Without saying much apart from his face and eyes, Hamm reveals his fear and angst about his hidden white trash background (or is he the stealth Jew in this WASPy, anti-Semitic realm?) and hidden girlfriends — Don has poured himself into this role as smoothly as he might a stiff drink, but will he be able to maintain control as the ’60s knock on Sterling Cooper’s door? Even seemingly minor characters like comedian wife-manager Bobbie Barrett (Melinda McGraw), who takes up with Don with proto-feminist vigor, make an indelible impression, as does the surprisingly good January Jones, portraying Betty, Don’s strangled-by-the-‘burbs wife. She’s too physically and psychologically fragile to truly mimic the era’s sensuously robust femme ideal Grace Kelly, plus she’s positively seething with rage — as season two progresses — at her husband’s infidelities, absences, and secrets. The urgency with which this at-first-cool blonde entreated her hubby to spank their son was genuinely shocking: how could this frail flower of American womanhood be so cruel?

Yet this sense of disjunction yields Mad Men‘s secret weapon: the way it matter-of-factly presents the casual sexism and racism of the pre- and early-’60s office (and otherwise) culture — as when the Sterling Cooper ad agency wolves blatantly ogle and rag on the all-female administrative staff, and when a Jewish department store heiress enters this anti-Semitic boy’s-club picture (the only known Jew and low-level employee in the firm must be hustled up to the meeting to make her comfortable). Here, the sole people of color are found operating the elevator or cleaning the office.

Your eyes widen when the otherwise supremely identifiable Draper calls up his wife’s therapist to get updates on her condition, and at the manner in which he puts the kibosh on her return to work as a model. The ugly extension of its dedication to retro cool, Mad Men‘s edge authentically emerges from the shock of the old, yesteryear’s culture colliding headlong with current values. Rather than sugar-coating the past à la Happy Days — or denuding and repurposing a throwback look simply for effect — creator-writer Matthew Weiner highlights the offhand, everyday brutality of pre-civil rights, pre-women’s lib American life, creating a subtle horror show that lightly dances with both seduction and repulsion. You’re constantly recoiling with fascination at the complacency and assumptions cast by these maddeningly entitled men creating advertising dreams in steel towers. There’s little of the overt action present in the last series Weiner wrote for, The Sopranos. Instead, the violence comes when our values brush up against those of the recent past. Regardless of what some conservatives would like, things have changed. And as the ad chauvinists of Mad Men huddle to discuss their plans for the Nixon campaign of 1960 — they picked a real winner there — they likely would never have imagined that they would be effectively sidelined as a woman and a black man would be duking it out for the Democratic presidential nomination less than 50 years later. (Kimberly Chun)

www.amctv.com/originals/madmen

The filth and the fury

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Apologies to all Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville fans out there, but the American novel didn’t get good until it shook off the last vestiges of Puritanism and risked a certain shock factor. It wasn’t just the authors pushing potentially offensive social-realist (Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair) or unflattering social-elite-portraiture boundaries (Edith Wharton, Henry James, etc.) who made the upstart nation’s lit suddenly comparable to the Old World’s new output. By the dawn of the 20th century, non-rabble-rousing Yank fiction (not to be confused with today’s street-corner favorite tabloid, Yank) had also matured stylistically. Still, it’s those "dirty books" that somehow still stick out in well-read readers’ back pages. American censorship battles in the 20th century were, until well into the sexual revolution, largely fought on literary terrain.

Barney Rosset, the subject of new documentary Obscene, should be canonized by First Amendment fans as the patron saint of key mid-20th-century obscenity cases. As founder of Evergreen Review and Grove Press, this "smut peddler" published everyone from Harold Pinter to Octavio Paz to Kathy Acker, as well as a whole lot of unapologetic porn (mostly the Victorian kind). No wonder Rosset was behind some of the central court struggles against censorious US standards for both literature and movies. He consorted with yippies and Black Panthers, produced close friend Samuel Beckett’s only film (1965’s Film), and was called a "tragic hero" by his own analyst (one of many). He is an interesting enough guy that one wishes codirectors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s admiring portrait was longer — it gets the career highlights down but barely touches on what sounds like an equally colorful personal life.

Weaned on the radicalism of Depression-era East Coast experimental schools, Rosset was an Army combat cinematographer during World War II. He returned home to produce 1948’s virtually unknown Strange Victory — a movie about American racism so incendiary that only one New York City theater would consent to show it. Having been checked out by the FBI as a possible "Communist filth racketeer" while in grammar school, he was on familiar ground when he commenced the first of many legally challenged literary ventures in the late 1950s. Evergreen Press republished Allen Ginsberg’s suppressed epic poem Howl; Grove launched US printings of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, both already decades-old yet still banned on our shores. Other causes célèbres included William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (published just after his assassination), and Che Guevara’s diaries (which angered somebody enough to get Grove’s offices bombed).

As if this wasn’t drama enough, Rosset’s business and personal fortunes experienced considerably more disorder as the turbulent ’60s turned into the oversatiated ’70s. Importing a Marxist quasidocumentary art film from Sweden, 1967’s I Am Curious (Yellow), made cinema safe for sex after protracted court battles. It also made millions, which perversely hurt Grove in the end — forcing an expansion that proved disastrous, particularly when 1968 sequel I Am Curious (Blue) bombed. The CIA put Rosset under surveillance and women’s liberationists assailed his catalog as sexist, yet threatening calls and sniper fire at his home did not exactly discourage his alcohol and amphetamine abuse. He was even fired from Grove itself after a supposedly friendly takeover.

Too bad Obscene just skims over the less-public chapters in its subject’s life, like his four marriages. Now a dapper and delightful old man, Rosset has long since burned through the last of many fortunes made and lost. He’s broke but blithe about it, as if cocooned by admiration — the eccentric lineup of praise-singing interviewees here include Jim Carroll, John Waters, Amiri Baraka, Erica Jong, and Gore Vidal. Perhaps the best testaments to Rosset’s character, however, are priceless excerpts from a cable-TV interrogation in which he responds to actual smut peddler Al Goldstein’s exasperatingly crude questions ("How do you get sucked into marriage?" being the least of them) with charming, earnest self-examination.

OBSCENE: A PORTRAIT OF BARNEY ROSSET AND GROVE PRESS

Opens Fri/5

Nightly at 7, 8:45 p.m. (also Sat–Sun, 3, 5 p.m.), $5–$10

Roxie Theater

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 431-3611, www.roxie.com

Lennar’s lawsuits

-
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

Two years after Lennar Corp. reported that asbestos dust had neither been monitored nor controlled during major grading and earthmoving operations on its Parcel A construction site on Hunters Point Shipyard last year (see "The corporation that ate San Francisco," 3/14/08), the fallout from these failures continues.

On June 19 a dozen Bayview–Hunters Point residents and workers sued Lennar, as well as international environmental consultant CH2M Hill and Sacramento-based engineering consultant Gordon N. Ball, in Superior Court on behalf of their preschool and school-age children. The parents allege that their children suffered headaches, skin rashes, and respiratory ailments during Parcel A excavations, which occurred next to a predominantly African American and Latino community.

The plaintiffs charge Lennar, CH2M Hill, and Ball with public nuisance, negligence, environmental racism, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and battery. They are asking for monetary damages, a jury trial, and court costs.

But Lennar is apparently seeking to deflect the blame for these problems at the site entirely onto CH2M Hill through a new federal lawsuit, despite revelations in the Guardian (see "Question of intent," 11/28/07) that Lennar reprimanded its own staffer, Gary McIntyre, when he tried to bring Ball to heel for the company’s failure to properly control the toxic asbestos dust.

On June 23, Lennar BVHP LLC sued subcontractor CH2M Hill for negligence, negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract, express indemnity, and unfair business practices in connection with its work on Parcel A.

"Lennar seeks to recover for the significant economic harm it has suffered in addressing the ramifications of CH2’s gross and reckless misconduct in failing to provide competent asbestos air monitoring services for Lennar’s redevelopment of a portion of Hunters Point Shipyard in San Francisco," states the suit, which seeks damages, restitution and indemnity, attorney fees, court costs, and a jury trial.

"Lennar’s economic harm vastly exceeds $75,000," the suit notes. "CH2 has provided no compensation to Lennar and no other relief for its failures. Indeed, CH2 has never publicly acknowledged its clear responsibility for these failures."

CH2’s Oakland-based vice president, Udai Singh, who signed a $392,600 contract with Lennar in January 2006 for asbestos dust monitoring services, told the Guardian, "Unfortunately I’m not working on that, so I have no clue what you are talking about.

"I thought I might have seen something about that, but since I have been working mostly on EPA stuff, I haven’t been involved in this one," continued Singh, who has been project manager for remedial projects on Superfund sites for the federal EPA’s Region IX, which includes Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada.

Singh referred us to CH2’s Denver-based counsel Kirby Wright, who referred us to CH2’s public relations director, John Corsi, who did not return the Guardian‘s calls as of press time.

But while Lennar BVHP continues to contract with Gordon N. Ball at the shipyard, local resident Christopher Carpenter has sued the Sacramento-based contractor in Superior Court for whistleblower retaliation, wrongful termination, racial discrimination, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

As the Guardian reported, ("Green City: Signs of asbestos," 8/29/07), Carpenter was fired shortly after he complained about dust that was kicked up by a Ball backhoe excavating the Parcel A hillside on Oct. 2, 2006.

"Carpenter became surrounded by a cloud of dust that was caused by Gordon Ball’s failure to water the ground prior to commencing grading," the suit alleges, noting that Carpenter complained about Ball’s unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, some of which violated Bay Area Air Quality Management District regulations and the city’s Health Code, before he was fired.

At City Hall, Sup. Sophie Maxwell is seeking to amend the city’s Building Code to require more-stringent dust control measures for demolition and construction projects. (The Building Inspection Commission opposed Maxwell’s proposal in December 2007, in a 4–3 vote).

On July 22, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to support Maxwell’s dust legislation.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Christopher Muhammad, who represents the Muhammad University of Islam adjacent to Parcel A, asked the San Francisco Health Commission to investigate why it took until July 14 for the local community to learn of an asbestos-level violation that occurred at Lennar’s Parcel A site just four days before the June 3 election.

Muhammad suspects the infraction was hushed up because Lennar was engaged in the most expensive initiative battle in San Francisco’s history, plunking down a total of $5 million to support the ultimately successful Proposition G, which gives the developer control of Candlestick Point and the shipyard.

Amy Brownell of the Department of Public Health told the Guardian that the violation, which registered at 138,800 structures per cubic meter of air (the city’s work shutdown level is set at 16,000 structures) did not trigger a work suspension because there was no work planned at Lennar’s site May 31 or June 1, which was a weekend.

Testimonies

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Italy seldom figures much in Holocaust studies, as its Jewish population was relatively small (just under 50,000) and only about one-fifth failed to survive the war — even after far more anti-Semitic German occupiers and policies wrested power from Benito Mussolini in 1943.

But statistically limited evil is still evil. Italian (even papal) complicity in crimes against Jewry has weighed more heavily on the national conscience lately, if a recent spate of meditations on the subject in various media is any indication. This year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the 28th, includes a program of films devoted to the subject. Titled "Italian Jews During Fascism," it presents a mix of documentary, historical drama, and contemporary fiction.

As elsewhere, the history of Jews in Italy has run a gamut from bad to worse to tolerable and back again. Propelled by basic racism as well as that "Christ-killer" concept favored by early Biblical-text revisionists and Mel Gibson, sacred and secular powers-that-were targeted Italian Jews (among others) during the Crusades and the Inquisition, then literally walled up their Roman populace in a ghetto for 300 years. By the time the extreme ghettoization was abolished, in the mid-19th century, Italian Jews (at least outside Rome) were fairly well integrated into society. They certainly were by 1938, when Mussolini announced a slew of anti-Semitic laws after years of appearing indifferent to Hitler’s particular racial obsession. ("Il Duce" hadn’t been impressed with the Nazis until his own empire-building ambitions required an alliance.)

Italian Jews were abruptly barred from serving in the military, and from attending or working at schools and universities. Thousands lost their jobs due to knee-jerk reactions from employers anxious to toe the repressive party line. These hard times got much worse when the weakened nation ceded primary control to the Nazis, and "Il Duce" became a mere figurehead for the "Republic of Salo." Mussolini rubber-stamped the mass arrest of Jews, mostly in the occupied north. Nearly 7,000 were shipped off to concentration camps. The question of what ordinary Italians — let alone the Vatican — did to oppose this murderous sweep remains a blot on the country’s 20th-century history.

The Jewish Film Festival’s quartet of related features offer various perspectives on these events. Most direct is Mimmo Calopresti’s 2006 documentary Volevo Solo Vivere (I only wanted to live), a compilation of latter-day testimonies assembled from interviews recorded for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Focusing on survivors (mostly female) of Auschwitz who were between the ages of four and 30 at the time, it provides first-person stories that range from poignant to hair-raising. Meeting a life love on the train en route to the camp, enduring Mengele’s "medical experiments," being forced to walk one’s father to the gas chamber. These precise recollections are illustrated not just by brutally familiar footage of starved prisoners and piled corpses, but also by earlier photo-album glimpses of family life.

Dubbed "the Italian Schindler" when his deeds first won recognition, Giorgio Perlasca was a Paduan former soldier and disillusioned ex-Fascist working abroad to procure supplies for the Hungarian army in Axis-occupied 1944 Hungary. Posing as a Spanish diplomat, he bullied and bluffed his way into rescuing and hiding thousands of Budapest Jews despite a Nazi policy of deportation and extermination. This extraordinary tale is dramatized in Perlasca: An Italian Hero. With an Ennio Morricone score and Luca Zingaretti in the title role, Alberto Negrin’s 2001 made-for-TV film is compelling. Yet it’s also overworked, painting Perlasca as a one-dimensional superhero — albeit a balding and pudgy one. The result lands somewhere between the harshness of Schindler’s List (1993), the hysterical melodrama of Black Book (2006), and the maudlin treacle of Life Is Beautiful (1997).

A fascinating footnote, the 2007 hour-long documentary Tulip Time: The Rise and Fall of the Trio Lescano tells the story of three Dutch sisters who became enormously popular in Italy as harmonizing swing vocalists. Mussolini was a fan, though even that couldn’t save them from abrupt career termination and poverty once their Jewish background was discovered. The 2003 novelistic drama Facing Windows, which had a theatrical release, finds Turkish Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek departing somewhat from his usual gay themes. Giovanna Mezzogiorno stars as an unhappy working-class Roman woman whose husband brings home a disoriented older man (the late Massimo Girotti, a screen veteran since 1940) who turns out to have concentration camp numbers on his arm. *

SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

The 28th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival runs July 24–Aug. 11 at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison, Berk.; CineArts @ Palo Alto Square, 3000 El Camino Real, bldg 6, Palo Alto; and the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. Tickets (most shows $12) and additional information are available at www.sfjff.org

“The Monkey and the Devil”

-
0

PREVIEW Sometimes history has a peculiar way of bringing us full circle. Charles Trapolin’s family owned slaves on their plantation in South Carolina. Joanna Haigood’s family were slaves in the vicinity. The commonality and difference between those two families led to The Monkey and the Devil, a collaboration between Trapolin, the former ODC dancer turned visual artist, and dancer/choreographer Haigood. Taking its title from racial slurs, the world premiere examines a festering wound in the social fabric that has not healed nearly as well as many of us would like to pretend. Haigood started the piece long before Barack Obama’s candidacy but, she points out, it certainly has acquired an unexpected urgency. "Racism," she says, "hurts everybody. It’s a social ill that we need to address and realize that it is connected to economy and class." Formally, the piece is an installation, continuing Haigood’s long-time interest in working with picture frames. It’s a visual motif that works well with Trapolin’s idea to create a house split in two. On the set, two couples — one white, one black — take turns assuming roles. Audiences are invited to stay as long as they like during this four-hour performance. Though she’ll have a collection box, the show is free because Haigood really wants all of us to come see it.

THE MONKEY AND THE DEVIL Fri/28 and Sat/29, 1–5 p.m. Free. Zaccho Dance Studio, 777 Yosemite, studio 330, SF. (415) 822-7644, www.zaccho.org

Shit equity

-
0

› sarah@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY At long last, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission appears to be moving forward with plans to address long overdue environmental justice issues (“It Flows Downhill,” 08/08/06) that are directly related to its sewage treatment plant in the city’s southeast sector.

At a May 27 SFPUC meeting, SFPUC staff recommended that the agency build a new digester facility in the southeast part of town and divert 12 percent of its sewage flow to the west side’s Oceanside plant, (which, incidentally, a current signature-gathering campaign hopes voters in November will rename the George W. Bush Sewage Treatment Plant).

For decades residents of Bayview–Hunters Point have endured foul smells, thanks to the close proximity to their homes of the Southeast treatment plant. The site treats 76 percent of the city’s sewage in facilities that are almost entirely outdoors. By contrast, facilities at the Oceanside plant, in a wealthier side of town, are mostly indoors and/or underground.

It’s an unequal division that has long had southeast residents claiming environmental racism. To make matters worse, the Southeast plant contains nine pancake-shaped digesters that could experience problems in an earthquake, with worrisome corrosion on the undersides of the digesters’ covers.

Cost estimates for a new digester facility range from $700 million to $1.3 billion. This variation depends on the location choice for the new digesters: if the agency builds new digesters on the south side of its existing Southeast plant, the agency is looking at the cheaper end of the scale.

But if the SFPUC follows another option to build a new facility on the back lot of Pier 94, a Port of San Francisco property, it would remove the plant from a residential neighborhood but be left facing a near doubling of the cost.

Replacing the digesters was a pet cause of former SFPUC General Manager Susan Leal, and continues to be a priority for District 10 supervisor Sophie Maxwell, so it’s likely to remain a key focus for former City Controller Ed Harrington, who took over as general manager of the agency after Mayor Gavin Newsom ousted Leal.

"You’ll see immediate work on the digesters," Harrington assured the commissioners. "The PUC is suggesting doing on an environmental impact report on both sites."

That report likely won’t be complete until 2010, when the agency leaders will have to choose an option. PUC project manager Jon Loiacono seems to be keenly aware of the thorny issues at play and told the commission that "staff would like to work with an advisory group and hire a consultant sensitive to community issues to find the best solution."

"It would almost certainly be less expensive to rebuild on the current site, but we don’t want anyone to make the digester decision based on cost," PUC spokesperson Tony Winniker told the Guardian.

"We really want it to be a public health and safety decision," PUC Citizens Advisory Committee chair Alex Lantsberg told the Guardian.

The digester replacement cost represents a significant chunk of the total estimated price tag of the PUC’s proposed sewer system master plan, which ranges from $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion. PUC staff is also outlining plans to send some of the waste westward in what the PUC currently calls "the Upper Alemany diversion."

The plan involves building a tunnel near Cayuga Creek, where runoff water tends to back up, and carrying it to the Oceanside plant. So, is this the return of the dreaded cross-town tunnel, an idea that had irate Bernal Heights residents waving plungers at City Hall three decades ago? PUC staff claim it is not.

"It’s a different concept, but similar," Loiacono said of the current plan.

"This reduces how much waste is treated in the Bayview and shifts it to a plant where there is excess capacity," Winniker explained, further noting that while the old cross-town tunnel would have run under Bernal Heights, this diversion will use city rights of way.

The project would improve drainage for the Cayuga and divert about 10 million gallons of sewage per day from the Southeast plant to the Oceanside plant, PUC spokesperson Tyron Jue told us. The alignment hasn’t been chosen yet, but Jue said, "we’re considering different routes, like Brotherhood Way or Ocean Avenue."

Whatever path the SFPUC pursues, the project won’t be cheap — economically or politically.

Hellarity burns

-
0

› news@sfbg.com

"The angels in the summertime are ashes in the fall. As Eden fell so heaven shall. I will burn them all."

The sign, written in gothic letters on weatherworn plywood with faded red flames, is nailed to the side gate of a two-story duplex off Martin Luther King Jr. Way in north Oakland. Today, the old sign’s words carry a chilling new meaning, greeting visitors to a house whose insides were scorched by an unidentified arsonist.

The charred house has been a cauldron of contention for more than 10 years. It has been the product of two anticapitalist housing experiments, one started by an environmentalist landlord who sought to create an ecotopia, and the other by a group of anarchists who intended to make it their home. In the process, it became a hub for traveling activists and aspiring hobos, and a headquarters for antiestablishment endeavors such as Berkeley Liberation Radio.

"People would hear about it through the grapevine, hop off a freight train, and show up on our doorstep with a backpack, a banjo, and a Woody Guthrie song," says Steve DiCaprio, a tenant who moved into the house in 2001 with his wife after living in a van out front. "We had an open-door policy. Anyone could come in, no questions asked. They just had to abide by certain rules: no hard drugs, no racism, no homophobia, and no violence. We wanted to emphasize equality — it was a reaction to the closed, materialistic, competitive, dog-eat-dog society we live in."

The house originally was part of the green property owner’s attempt to create a network of sustainable, affordable housing. When his project floundered, the residence was slowly taken over by his tenants, a group of people who one-upped his radicalism. Both sides claimed to be avowed anticapitalists, but their strategies were at odds; his was to produce an alternative to the local housing market by creating a nonprofit that would help tenants own their homes as a collective. Theirs was to make space for themselves in a rent-based housing market by seizing property from investors and absentee landlords.

The owner eventually went bankrupt — drowned in the early stages of the current defutf8g housing market — and the property fell into the hands of a small-time real estate investor, despite the tenants’ attempts to buy it themselves. The tenants refused to leave, transforming themselves into squatters, and fought it out with the buyer in court for three years. As the court case bogged down, housing values plummeted, making the landlord’s investment lose value by the day.

On Feb. 28, when one of many hearings was set to take place, the squatters showed up in court but the landlord hadn’t filed the paperwork needed to move the conflict closer to a resolution. The following night, in the early hours of March 1, someone lit three fires in the empty upper apartment, setting the house ablaze as people slept inside.

WELCOME TO HELLARITY


For years the house has been known as "Hellarity," although its original owner never called it that. In fact, he refuses to. To recognize that name would be to legitimize the people who adorned it with the title — a group he sees as thieves, squatters who disrupted a legitimate project he thought would have a small but tangible impact on a profit-driven housing market.

Born on the Sunrise Free School in northeastern Washington State, Sennet Williams — known by most as "Sand" — spent his early years bouncing between Spokane and "environmental and pacifist intentional communities" in the area. A year after moving to Berkeley in 1990, he graduated from UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business. With a degree in urban land economics, he wanted to do his part to turn the tide of environmental degradation by developing "nonprofit car-free housing" in Berkeley.

Williams didn’t see attending business school or investing in property as contradictions of his ideals. For Williams, they were strategic moves. He thought that anticapitalist projects lacked an important element — money — and wanted to be a benefactor for alternative forms of housing.

One week after graduating, his dreamy aspirations came to a crashing halt when an SUV plowed into his compact car while he was on a ski trip at Lake Tahoe, badly injuring him and causing brain damage. His goals would have been quickly destroyed, but Williams sued the driver and convinced the court that the accident interfered with his budding career, winning a settlement in 1993 that he says was "almost a million dollars."

While his money was tucked away in mutual funds and he was living briefly at a student co-op in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1994, Williams solidified his ideas into an ambitious project called the "Green Plan" with some of his housemates. The plan was an elaborate scheme to "end homelessness" by creating "an urban nonprofit dedicated to self-governing and radical environmentalism" that would fund "rural sustainable ecovillages in Hawaii and elsewhere."

That summer, Williams bought five houses on credit in what he calls Berkeley’s "’80s drug-war zones" and brought his Ann Arbor friends to California to turn his rundown properties into co-op material. Over the summer, the Green Plan became an official organization and Williams let its members live in his houses without paying rent. Instead, they were expected to pay monthly dues to their organization — roughly the equivalent of fair market rent — to put toward buying rural land or repurchasing the houses from Williams at cost. Those who couldn’t afford to contribute were allowed to stay free in exchange for working on the houses, doing extra work for the Green Plan, or volunteering in its Little Planet café.

"Sennet (Williams) tried to be clear that he wasn’t a landlord," says former Green Plan member Dianna Tibbs, but relations between Williams and the members quickly disintegrated. Three years after its formation, the Green Plan remained unincorporated as a nonprofit. A former member also said it was still too centered on Williams’ ideas. Williams’ relationship with the tenants soured. "Ultimately there was a rebellion among the people against Sennet," Tibbs says. In 1997 the project disbanded, transferring all of the money they had raised — about $50,000 — to the Little Planet café.

The Green Plan fell apart, but Williams was caught up in the fervor of the mid-90s real estate market. In 1997, he bought the house that would later be named Hellarity for $114,000, with the goal of "making it into a demonstration of an eco-house that would be an educational resource for the city." He says he chose that property in part so it "could be a tribute to the Black Panthers’ goals of providing food in the inner-city," as it was on the same block as the home of Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale.

But shortly after Williams bought Hellarity, he says he became "overextended in real estate." By the time he made his first mortgage payments, he says there were "over 60 people" living in his houses. He owned eight in Berkeley, two in Oakland, and was planning to buy farmland in Hawaii. With Williams tied up in too many projects to fix up Hellarity, he moved in some people to "house sit" in exchange for free rent.

Shortly after people moved in, Williams stopped coming around the house. The housesitters gradually brought in their friends, the walls were slowly painted to suit the eccentric tastes of the occupants, and more people started calling the house theirs. Williams said he didn’t invite them, but admits that he never asked them to leave. He had little contact with the occupants as years passed. "He was just a theoretical person that owned the house," DiCaprio says.

Hellarity took on a distinctly anarchist flavor in Williams’ absence. "People with alternative lifestyles and alternative family arrangements could live without having to dedicate their lives to making money, giving them more time to invest in their homes and their communities," says long-term resident Robert "Eggplant" Burnett, Bay Area punk rock legend, publisher of the zine Absolutely Zippo, and editor of Slingshot newspaper. Hellarity hosted the pirate radio station Berkeley Liberation Radio, a do-it-yourself bike shop, and cooked meals for Food Not Bombs.

It seemed like an anarchist paradise, but it wouldn’t last.

FOR SALE


By 2004, mortgage payments were driving Williams deep into debt, and Hellarity became a burden. The house was being pulled away from him from two sides: by anarchists who increasingly challenged the legitimacy of his ownership, and by creditors who placed liens against his properties.

When Hellarity was eventually sold by the court in a bankruptcy sale, the tenants say the man who would buy the house, Pradeep Pal, had never set foot in it. Pal, who refused to be interviewed for this article, lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Hercules and owned two businesses, Charlie’s Garage in Berkeley and European Motor Works in Albany. He wasn’t exactly a freewheeling real estate flipper — he was a South Asian immigrant who, according to Guardian research of property records, never owned real estate in the area other than his own home.

But to the tenants, Pal was a capitalist trying to buy them out of their home. In a recorded meeting with tenants, Pal admitted he hadn’t been inside the house before he bought it, and Williams tells us the real estate agent who arranged the sale also never toured the house before Pal bought it. "He obviously had no interest in moving into the place or contributing to the community if he didn’t even look at it," future occupant Jake Sternberg says. "This was someone who just wanted to make a profit."

The tenants made it clear to Pal that they didn’t want him to buy the house and would make life difficult for him. As soon as it became apparent that Williams would lose the house, Crystal Haviland and a few other occupants started searching for someone to help them buy the house. In the summer of 2004, the house was slated to go up on foreclosure auction, but the tenants hadn’t found a sympathetic donor.

The auction was set to occur on the steps of the René C. Davidson Alameda County Courthouse, and the occupants showed up banging drums and bellowing chants to warn off prospective buyers. "We wanted anyone interested in buying the house to know that the people who had been living at the house for 10 years wanted to buy it," says Haviland, who is now raising a child, studying psychology at San Francisco State University, and volunteering as a peer counselor at the Berkeley Free Clinic. "We didn’t want people to buy it and turn it into an expensive gentrified thing." While people gathered, Williams showed up and announced bankruptcy, a legal move that cancelled the auction.

With more time to search for financial support, Haviland started talking with Cooperative Roots, an organization that bought a couple of Williams’ other houses — now known as "Fort Awesome" and "Fort Radical" — in foreclosure auctions. Cooperative Roots is a Berkeley-based nonprofit organized in 2003 by members of the University Students Cooperative Association. They received money from progressive donors — mainly the Parker Street Foundation — to buy houses that they turned into "cooperative, affordable housing," says Cooperative Roots member Zach Norwood. Anyone who lives in their houses is an automatic member of the cooperative and makes monthly mortgage payments to the foundation.

For Hellarity, Cooperative Roots was a godsend. "Other people would walk into that house and say, "This place is disgusting," DiCaprio says. "But they said, ‘Wow, this is a work of art.’<0x2009>" The Parker Street Foundation was willing to put down whatever was needed to buy the house, Norwood says, but the occupants were limited by the monthly payments they could afford. On Nov. 4, 2004, the house went up for bankruptcy sale, and Cooperative Roots was prepared to bid up to $420,000. "It was exciting to be there with a bunch of crazy Hellarity people, putting out bids for hundreds of thousands of dollars," Haviland says.

No one expected them to show up at the sale. Williams says they had previously offered to buy the house from him but he "didn’t think they were serious." By the time they had the money, Williams no longer had control of the sale. At the courthouse, the anarchists were playing by the rules, bidding with money up front. The only other party interested in the house was Pal and his brother-in-law Charanjit Rihal, who were placing bids against the occupants. The two sides bid against each other, driving up the price until the occupants reached their limit. Pal and Rihal took the property for $432,000.

OWNERSHIP VS. CONTROL


"This sale was symptomatic of a housing market gone haywire," says DiCaprio. "People like Pal and Rihal thought they could just throw a bunch of money into real estate and it would always be a good investment. I’m glad the market finally crashed, because that kind of behavior hurts a lot of people. It ended up driving the price of housing to the point that normal people can’t buy anymore — and that’s absurd."

Pal soon discovered he owned the property on paper only. The occupants didn’t recognize the sale or his authority to tell them to leave. Three months after the sale, the occupants were still there, refusing to go. Pal took the case to court in an "action to quiet title," demanding that they be ejected from the property and that the title be freed from any future claims against it. He claimed the people in the house were squatters, living on his property without permission. But before the police could drag out the occupants, they countersued, holding themselves up in court without a lawyer for three years and living in the house the whole time.

One of the first cross-complaints came from Robert Burnett who — with his contempt for the computerized, cell phone-saturated consumer culture — wrote his cross-complaint on the back of a flyer on an ancient typewriter. When the document appeared in court, one side advertised a benefit for a pirate radio station at the anarchist info shop at the Long Haul with an image of tiny people being thrown out of an upside-down Statue of Liberty. On the other side, Burnett claims that he is a co-owner of the house, which he acquired through "adverse possession." Two other defendants made the same claim.

"Adverse possession transfers the ownership of a piece of real estate to people occupying the house without payment," says Oakland attorney Ellis Brown, an expert in property law. "In the state of California, you have to be openly living in a place for five years without the titleholder trying to make you leave to win an adverse possession case."

"Adverse possession originated to prevent Native Americans from taking back land from homesteaders, but squatters turned it around, using it to protect people who take possession of unused property," says Iain Boal, a historian of the commons who teaches in the community studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of the forthcoming book, The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure. Boal emphasizes the large numbers of squatters in the world, a figure Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (Routledge, 2004), pegs at 1 billion. "It is only here that squatters are seen as bizarre leftovers from the ’60s," Boal says. "We are in a crisis of shelter, and people need to fill their housing needs."

DiCaprio concurs. Along with Burnett, DiCaprio was the main backer of the occupants’ legal case. As we talk in a dark, live-in warehouse, he sips coffee out of a Mason jar and looks over the court case on his laptop. He says he wants to be a lawyer, but he has never been interested in making lots of money — he says he wants to "fight for housing rights." DiCaprio learned squatter law while cycling through family law court, criminal court, and federal court over a Berkeley house he was squatting and trying to win through adverse possession. The city threw him in jail, and he was released just after Pal sued the occupants of Hellarity.

He says Hellarity was different from other situations he’s dealt with as a squatter. "We never thought of ourselves as squatters [at Hellarity] per se until Pal sued us and start using that language in court," he says. "Before he bought the house, no one was challenging our presence on the property. Sennet [Williams] was either actively or passively letting us stay there. By filing a claim to quiet title, Pal made it apparent the title was in question. By calling us squatters instead of tenants, they lost some claim to the property. So we took the ball and ran with it."

Their use of adverse possession was strategic, DiCaprio says, but they didn’t intend to win the house that way. "We were never under any illusion that we would win ownership of the house in court," he says. "We wanted to use the court as a forum to enable us to buy the house. We were just treading water until Pal got tired and agreed to sell." The occupants say they offered him $360,000 for the house, the price it was originally listed for, but he refused to take a loss on his investment.

DiCaprio says the courts generally aren’t sympathetic to squatters’ cases. "Pro pers tend to be poor, so there is a class bias against them," he says, referring to people who represent themselves without a lawyer. DiCaprio says judges have rejected documents for having dirt on them and refused to give fee waivers to people with no income. "The courts do not like squatters. If you mix pro per and adverse possession, you could not have a more hostile environment against us."

For more than two years, Pal and the occupants played a cat-and-mouse game, dragging out the case and trying to complicate it in hopes the other side would just give up. Pal’s lawyer, Richard Harms (who did not return Guardian calls seeking comment), objected to the terms "documents," "property," and "identify" when asked to produce evidence related to his claim. "Instead of trying to prove their case, they were just waiting for us to trip up and not file something before a deadline," says DiCaprio.

The occupants didn’t slip, but as the case wore on, he and Burnett grew tired of upholding their side in court. By fall 2007, the two cut side deals with Pal. Burnett settled for $2,000 and DiCaprio for an undisclosed amount. "I realized I couldn’t save it alone," DiCaprio says. "I told them to sink or swim."

ENDGAME


When Burnett and DiCaprio settled with Pal, the subprime housing crisis was splashing the headlines. Pal’s investment was starting to seem more like a loss, but for the first time since he bought the property, it looked like it would finally be his. By November 2007, the remaining squatters dropped the battle for ownership and began bargaining with him for concessions.

By mid-February, Pal was ready to start renovations, and all but two of the squatters had moved out. They made their final plea and Pal gave his last compromise: two more weeks, then they had to go. "He was sure he was going to get the house, so he agreed to let us stay," says a squatter called Frank, who asked not to be named because of his immigration status.

What Pal may not have understood was that he was not the only party still interested in the house. The house was becoming a point of contention among the larger community of squatters and anarchists in the East Bay. Fissures broke around a central question: was it up to those living there to decide the fate of the notorious squat, or did the larger community of radical activists have a say in the property?

As Pal was getting rid of the last people occupying the house, the squatters’ conflict came to Hellarity’s doorstep. A new group of people came to the North Oakland house, among them a few who had previously stayed at Hellarity, ready to renew the struggle against Pal. Frank, who had been living in the house for seven months, was unhappy about the new arrivals.

"I told them that this kind of action would make problems for me," he says. "I already made an agreement with this guy [Pal] to leave by the end of the month." The new group saw things differently. "We own this place," says Jake Sternberg, the new de facto caretaker of Hellarity, who has since been pushing for the squatters to renew their court case. The discord between the squatters split up the duplex: the two old squatters stayed upstairs while the recent arrivals occupied the lower half.

Two weeks after the new crew moved in, a fire was lit in the upper apartment that burned through the ceiling and the floor. But who did it? Was it a disgruntled squatter who would rather destroy the house than hand it back to Pal? Or was Pal connected to the arson, losing his nerve as a newly energized group of squatters took over and the value of his investment crashed?

If not for the squatters, Pal might have been less affected by the subprime crisis than most property owners. He had no mortgage on the house — he bought it outright — so he wasn’t under threat of foreclosure, unlike tens of thousands of other California homeowners. But Pal faced a different threat. It seems likely he bought the house as an investment, and as the market crashed, he was stuck with a house he could neither renovate nor sell, and was left to watch its value tank as he slogged through court proceedings.

For an investor like Pal, the numbers weren’t looking good. In March, median housing prices had fallen 16.1 percent compared with those of March 2007, according to DataQuick Information Systems, and home sales declined 36.7 percent from the previous year. In April — for the seventh consecutive month — Bay Area home sales were at their lowest level in two decades, DataQuick reported. And according to Business Week, national home prices will plummet an additional 25 percent over the next two to three years.

On Feb. 17, the day after the new group of squatters moved in, Pal made an appearance at the house. In early March, Sternberg showed me a video he recorded during Pal’s visit. On the screen, Pal is sitting on a couch in the downstairs living room of Hellarity. At the door, a well-built man who looks to be in his 30s and calls himself Tony leans against the wall with two younger men who call themselves Salvador and Ryan. Sternberg tells me that Pal came to the house demanding they leave his property. Sternberg called the police, accusing Pal of trespassing. As they waited for the OPD to arrive, which took more than 25 minutes, they discuss their conflict over the house.

At the beginning of the video, Sternberg tells Pal why he and his friends refuse to give up the property: "People came over here from Europe and they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to take this place.’ Now they sell land to each other. And how did they get it? They took it…. And just because somebody pays for something doesn’t mean that they get it. And just because somebody sells something doesn’t mean they have a right to sell that."

A few minutes into Sternberg’s video, Pal told the squatters he was ready to take matters into his own hands. "You just have to deal with me now because what I’m saying is, it’s person to person…. And you know what? If it’s gonna get dirty, it’s gonna get dirty. I don’t care. Because you know what? That’s the way it’s gonna be, because this is what I need. I need to have it. I don’t have any lawyer. I can’t afford a damn lawyer. So it’s gonna be me and you. One to one. Man to man."

Pal eventually left the property after the police arrived, but the two younger men, Salvador and Ryan, spent the night upstairs. "[Pal] had them stay there because they thought the people downstairs would squat the upstairs," Frank says. "He wanted to protect the house." Frank, who says he was concerned that Pal would try to evict him with everyone else, initially didn’t protest the presence of the two young men.

The next day, at Frank’s request, Pal told Salvador and Ryan to leave, and for the two weeks that followed, Pal didn’t return to the house. The new group of squatters expected to see him Feb. 28, the date set for a case hearing called by Pal’s lawyer prior to the re-occupation of the house. If the defendants didn’t show up, a default judgment could have been entered, granting Pal his request to have the squatters removed and ordered to pay $2,000 per month in back rent. The squatters showed up for court, but Pal’s side hadn’t filed the necessary paperwork to hold the hearing.

Once again the house hung in legal limbo and the day after the hearing, the remaining people upstairs moved out as agreed. Frank says Pal called him while he was at work that afternoon to make sure they were gone. For the first time in 11 years, the upper apartment was empty, waiting for either Pal or the other squatters to seize it.

But someone was committed to preventing that from happening. The night after the people upstairs moved out, at around 3:15 a.m., the squatters downstairs awoke to fire creeping through the floorboards above them.

"Both of the doors upstairs were locked," Sternberg says. "We broke through one of the doors and threw buckets of water on the flames."

After the fire department extinguished the blaze, the squatters called the police to have an investigator search the scene. "It appears that unknown suspects entered the house through unknown means, and then set three fires in an attempt to burn the house," the police report states. According to the report, all three fires were set in the upstairs apartment; two burned out before the fire department arrived. Officer Vincent Chen found two used matches in the bathroom, where the wood around the sink had been burned, and a gas can hidden in the bushes on the east side of the house.

When I first met Sternberg, he told me the Oakland Police Department’s arson investigator, Barry Donelan, was helpful. Two and a half months after the fire, however, Sternberg says: "I regret having talked to the police."

Initially, Donelan didn’t know they were squatters — Sternberg had told him they owned the house. "Once he found flyers for a fundraiser to defend the squat, he became angry," says Sternberg. "He said he submitted the case to the district attorney, and didn’t expect anyone would be arrested."

Sternberg says Donelan also threatened to have him arrested for a traffic-related warrant and that he would turn Sternberg’s name over to the Federal Communications Commission, which had an open investigation on the house for hosting Berkeley Liberation Radio. In March, Donelan told us he wouldn’t comment on the case and at press time, he hadn’t return Guardian calls about the status of the investigation.

EPILOGUE


Although the arson may never be solved, the squatters have strong suspicions about who was behind the fire. But they have a hard time deciding who, ultimately, is most culpable for the blaze. "No one involved in Hellarity is innocent, and no one is completely guilty," says DiCaprio. The one point of view everyone seems to share is that Hellarity has long been a tinderbox of contention, in which property owners struggling in a beleaguered housing market faced off against a group of people who reject the market outright for its inaccessibility to low-income people. Eventually, it all — literally — burst into flames.

When I visit after the fire, people are sitting outside playing guitar, smoking rolled cigarettes, and singing the timeless hobo ballad, "Big Rock Candy Mountain." The sounds drift over the budding vegetable gardens and into the downstairs living room, where a message written on a big green chalkboard suggests that if the fire was intended to drive people out, it was unsuccessful: "WELCOME BACK TO HELL(ARITY). Because bosses, landlords, and capitalists suck, the house has lots of repairs that need to be done before it becomes fully livable."

Upstairs, Sternberg looks up at a charred, gaping hole in the ceiling. "We have to make lemonade out of lemons," he tells me, explaining that they just got a skylight to fill the cavity. "We’re going to continue fighting just like we’ve been fighting. This guy [Pal] has been in court with us for three years. He’s got no case." *

The nightmare pastors

-
0

I’m sorry to see Barack Obama’s campaign in so much trouble over the latest comments of Rev. Wright, but you have to admit: This is a great argument for the separation of church and state.

Religious figures say all kinds of strange things — and frankly, while I (obviously) don’t agree with Wright that AIDS is a government plot, it’s pretty well established that the Reagan administration’s failure to respond to the epidemic in the crucial early years was, if not a government plot to kill anyone, certainly a government plot not to save the lives of gay men.

But here’s the question: Why so much media attention on Obama’s religious albatross — and so little on John McCain’s? McCain, lest we forget, is pals with Paston John Hagee, who believes, among other things, that the Catholic Church is a “great whore,” that “all Muslims have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews,” that God wants us to bomb Iran — and that God damns the United States because of gays, Catholics and Muslims.

Me, I’d rather have a guy who rails against the U.S. for racism and imperialism than a guy who says God hates gays. But then, I don’t go to church.

Perspective on the ‘bitter’ campaigns

-
0

By Bruce B. Brugmann

I liked the perspective of Bob Herbert in his April l5 Op Ed column in the New York Times.

Senator Obama, he wrote, ” has spent his campaign trying to dodge the race issue, which in America is trying to dodge the wind. So when he fielded the question in San Francisco, he didn’t say: ‘A lot of folks are not with me because I’m black–but I’m trying to make my case and bring as many around as I can.’

“Instead, he fell back on a tortured response that was demonstrably incorrect…In his San Francisco comments, Senator Obama fouled up when he linked frustration and bitterness over economic hard times with America’s
romance with guns and embrace of religion. But, please, let’s get a grip. What we ought to be worked up about is the racism that still prevents some people from giving a candidate a fair chance because of skin color.”

Herbert also made a key point: “this toxic issue is at the core of the Clinton camp’s relentless effort to persuade superdelegates that Senator Obama ‘can’t win’ the White House. It’s the only weapon left in the Clintons’ depleted armory.”

The race is over. Obama has won. And I will never feel the same about the Clintons.

Click here to read Bob Herbert’s NY Times article Some Perspective on ‘Bitter’.

Superlist: Youth record labels

-
0

› superlists@sfbg.com

Youth record labels are fast becoming one of the most innovative and effective ways to combine job development, skills training, and music production for many working-class youth of color. At these programs, there are no holier-than-thou "back when I was a kid" lectures from out-of-touch old fogies. Instead, kids study DJ’ing under DJ Quest and get stage-presence tips from Zion I. Teens also take an active role in the creation, production, and management of their projects and think about their work as something larger than simply entertainment. From beat-making classes to benefit concerts for immigrant rights, young folks are helping lead the cry for transformation at every level of society — all to an intricately produced soundtrack. What follows are the heavy-hitting youth record labels in the Bay.

The DJ Project (440 Potrero, SF; 415-487-6700, info@thedjproject.com) is a youth entrepreneurship program built on the foundations of hip-hop and community empowerment. As part of Horizons Unlimited, the DJ Project offers classes in DJ’ing, music production, and promotions taught by some of the Bay’s finest independent hip-hop artists. Aside from simply making hip-hop, young artists discuss how such forces as racism, love, homophobia, and anger inform their lyrics. After they record their first CD, the students learn graphic design skills in order to create their own cover art. Recently, the project produced the film Grind & Glory (2007), which showcased local young hip-hop artists competing for a chance to play at the annual hip-hop festival Rock the Bells.

Youth Movement Records (368 24th St., Oakl.; 510-832-4212, contact@youthmovementrecords.org) is one of the more popular youth record labels around. Their program offers classes such as music production and entertainment law and boasts a stellar success rate, with over 90 percent of its graduates earning their high school diplomas. Already, YMR acts have toured the country in support of Amnesty International. The program features tutelage from folks such as Zion I and Brotha Los of Company of Prophets.

Bay Unity Music Project (BUMP) Records (1611 Telegraph, Oakl.; 510-836-1056, bump@bavc.org), a Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) program, is a youth-run record label that gives its participants hands-on experience with music making. BUMP Beats is an introductory music production and composition program geared toward youth with little or no previous experience. Students get the opportunity to perform and distribute their work with local Bay Area promoters.

Cov Records (220 Harrison, Oakl.; 510-625-7800, www.myspace.com/covrecords) is a community-based music and production center serving young adults in Oakland between the ages of 13 and 25. As a project of the Covenant House community center and homeless shelter, Cov Records has produced documentaries, offered classes in video and music production, and teamed up with the Stop the Violence campaign to organize Turf Unity shows, which get young folks from rival neighborhoods to create art together.

Resistance is futile — or is it?

-
0
Resistance is futile — or is it?

It was a time without precedent in American history. The commander-in-chief voiced his intention to take the country to war — a voluntary, preemptive war with no clear catalyst, no faraway invasion or Pearl Harbor or sinking of the Maine — and millions of people shouted their opposition. With plenty of time to avert war, the protesters warned the invasion would be a costly disaster.

They were right. And it didn’t matter.

The war in Iraq was a test of our democratic ideals. It was a test that this country failed, a failure that has been felt by the people of the United States, Iraq, and elsewhere for the last five years. For many, the refusal of the US government to heed the demands of its citizens left them disillusioned and disempowered.

But others say it sparked a political change that woke up an apathetic citizenry, pulled the Democratic Party back to the left, and may have averted war with Iran.

It’s certainly arguable that the presidential campaign of Barack Obama owes its energy and success in part to the antiwar movement — and if Obama wins, he will be the first president in a long time who took office thanks to the support of a strong grassroots progressive movement.

Nowhere was the clash of people power and government will more acute than on the streets of San Francisco, where a series of massive marches, some drawing nearly 100,000 people, filled the streets prior to the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003. The onset of war led protesters to effectively shut down the city, resulting in about 2,300 arrests and millions of dollars in costs to the city.

President George W. Bush dismissed the protests, of course, but he wasn’t the only one. Political leaders such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, then-Mayor Willie Brown and soon-to-be Mayor Gavin Newsom (who didn’t attend any of the marches, unlike progressives on the Board of Supervisors) condemned the peace movement for hurting an innocent city. But with the “battle for San Francisco” making international news, the protesters were more concerned with the global audience.

A month earlier, on the weekend of Feb. 15 and 16, there were coordinated protests against the impending war in about 800 cities around the world, drawing around 10 million people. The peace march in Rome included about 3 million people, earning a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history. People have never made such a loud and clear statement against an incipient war.

Beyond the numbers, the antiwar movement was also right. On every major issue and prediction, the messages from the street proved correct while those from the White House were wrong. The US wasn’t welcomed as liberators. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq after the invasion isn’t a stable democracy or shining beacon to anyone but the new generation of jihadis Bush created.

We can blame a hard-headed president, ineffectual opposition party, failure of the national media, or the national climate of fear following Sept. 11. But rather than refighting that lost battle, now is the time to gain perspective on the events of five years ago and determine what it means for democracy and the post-Bush national agenda.

 

TO THE STREETS

There were two main umbrella groups organizing protests before the war: Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) and International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). ANSWER has remained active and DASW has recently been reconstituted for the fifth anniversary of the war, using direct action in San Francisco as well as other urban centers and outposts like Chevron’s refinery in Richmond, which has reportedly been processing Iraqi oil.

“With the fifth anniversary coming up, we’re going back to direct action on the streets,” said Henry Norr of DASW. “But I don’t have any illusions that it’s going to be like it was five years ago.”

The maddening march to an ill-advised war created a political dynamic in which a broad cross-section of Americans was willing to hit the streets.

“We had a wonderfully diverse group of people, from soccer moms to anarchists,” said Mary Bull, who cofounded DASW, a collective of various affinity groups and concerned individuals formed in October of 2002 as Bush started beating the drums of war.

It was a group fiercely determined to prevent the war — and really believed that was possible. In fact, Bull recalls how she and other members of the group burst out crying at one meeting when a key activist said the war was going to happen.

Richard Becker, who cofounded ANSWER and serves as its West Coast coordinator, said that in the summer of 2002, “we came to the conclusion that [the war] was going to happen.” The group called its first big protest for Sept. 15, 2002, and another one two weeks later. But the movement really exploded on Oct. 26 when almost 100,000 people took to Market Street, much of it a spontaneous popular uprising.

“We were overwhelmed,” Becker said. “We were in a perpetual state of mobilization to keep up with what was going on. But then it didn’t stop the war.”

Did he think they could?

“I think a lot of people thought maybe it was possible to stop it. And we thought maybe it was possible to stop it,” Becker said.

The high point, according to Becker and Norr, was Feb. 17, 2003, when the New York Times ran a front page analysis piece entitled “A new power in the streets” that claimed “the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” But then Colin Powell went to the United Nations to argue for the invasion, and the Democrats in Congress did nothing, and it became clear war was coming.

Norr stayed out there protesting, being arrested several times and even shot in the leg by Oakland police with a rubber bullet during a protest at the Oakland docks. And he thinks some good came from the experience.

“The lesson for people is the political and economic elites are committed to preserving and extending empire. And they basically say as much in their own writing,” Norr said. “Wars are not anomalies.”

Despite being a frustrating and depressing exercise, most saw benefits to the failed movement. “People got an incredible education about how the system really worked,” Becker said. “Building a movement is mostly about a series of setbacks.”

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of both Global Exchange and CodePink and fixture of the anti-establishment peace movement for years, was upbeat about the protests. “We did our job as citizens. We did what we were supposed to do: organize, get people to take action, get people onto the streets,” she said. “We did everything we could think of.

“What you take from it is we don’t have a very well-developed democracy because the people spoke and the government didn’t listen.”

25war2_Lars1.jpg The ever-evolving “Democracy Wall” on Valencia Street, March 2003, helped stir up debate (Photo by Lars Howlett)

 

FACING ARREST

The collective action of five years ago starts with a series of personal stories — tens of thousands of them — so let me briefly begin with mine.

My arrival in San Francisco was closely tied to the march to war. I was living in Sacramento and working as the news editor of the Sacramento News & Review when Bush began his saber rattling against Saddam Hussein, but by the end of 2002 I had a falling out with my boss and found myself jobless.

Like most Northern Californians who opposed the war, I came to San Francisco on Jan. 18 to make my voice heard and experienced a bit of serendipity on my way to Justin Herman Plaza: while reading the Guardian on Muni, I saw their advertisement for a city editor, a job that was ideal for me at a paper I’ve always loved. Needless to say, it was a great day, empowering and full of possibilities.

Less than two months later I was on the job, and on the second week of that job I was back on the turbulent streets of San Francisco, part of a Guardian team covering the eruption of this city on the first full day of war. When I stepped off the cable car just after 7 a.m., people were streaming up Market Street and I joined them.

When a large group stopped at the intersection of Market and Beale, I stopped too, taking notes and bearing witness to this historic, exciting event. I had a press pass issued by the California Highway Patrol that allowed me to cross police lines, so when police in riot gear surrounded us and threatened arrest, I held my ground with 100 or so protesters.

After interviewing about a dozen people about why they were there and that they hoped to accomplish (see “On the bus: Journalists, lawyers, four-year-olds — the cops were ready to bust anyone Thursday morning“), I was arrested with the others and taken to a makeshift jail and processing center at Pier 27 (no charges were filed in my case, and charges against all of the 2,300 people arrested here in those first few days of the war were later dropped).

I recently tracked down a few of the people who appeared in my article, including Daphne and Ross Miller, who were at the center of the most interesting drama to play out during our standoff with the police. She’s a family practice physician, he’s an architect, and they live in Diamond Heights with their two children, Emet, who is almost 9, and Arlen, 12, who was away on vacation when the war began.

“We were genuinely shocked that the war started,” Ross told me. “We were at some of the earlier protests and really thought there was no way [Bush] could do it.”

They woke up March 20, 2003, to news that the war had begun and immediately walked to the BART station with Emet and rode to the Embarcadero station, not really planning for the day ahead but just knowing that they had to make themselves heard.

“We were pissed as hell. I don’t think I’ve ever been so angry in my life,” Daphne said.

They quickly came up with a plan. “We basically decided that if anyone was going to be arrested, it was going to be Ross and I’d stay with Emet. But it didn’t end up that way and I ended up in the arrest circle.”

Daphne had their house keys and threw them over the police line to Ross at one point. A photographer in the circle had gotten shots of a man named Roman Fliegel being roughed up by police as they pulled him off his bicycle, which was towing a trailer with a sound system, and decided to throw his backpack with camera gear out as well. When Ross — who had four-year-old Emet on his shoulders — caught it and refused police orders to give it to them, police grabbed Emet and roughly arrested Ross, leaving a gash on his forehead.

“Rage surged through the crowd, and it seemed as if things might get ugly, but the police kept a tight lid on the situation, using their clubs to shove back protesters who had moved forward,” I wrote at the time.

Emet was delivered into the circle with Daphne as the arrests continued, many quite rough. “At that point, as a mom, I had to exercise the most restraint ever,” said Daphne, who was angry about the situation but fearful about what she was exposing her son to. “Please, don’t let any violence happen here,” she pleaded with the crowd. Eventually, commanders on the scene let the mother and child go.

“The officer who let me go said that if he saw me again out there, he would call Child Protective Services on me,” Daphne said. But two days later, still brimming with outrage at her country’s actions, she ditched a downtown medical conference to rejoin the street protests, this time solo.

The couple say they’ve lost friendships over the war and have become more engaged with politics, coming to believe that Bush and the neocons are malevolent figures who knew how badly the war would go and did it anyway to establish a large, permanent military base in Iraq.

“Since that day, we’ve been far more active,” Ross said. “We realized you can’t just trust the system. You have to push.”

But that determination was mixed with feelings of disempowerment and depression. They attended some of the protests that following year, but the couple — like most people — just stopped going at some point because they seemed so futile.

“There was a horrible sense of resignation and a genuine depression that followed,” Ross told me.

The nadir was when Bush was reelected and they considered leaving the country. But then, Ross said, “we decided we’re not just going to run away and we’re not going to accept this.” Looking back, even with the scare over Emet, they express no regrets.

“It was the right thing to do because it was the wrong war to have. I’d do it again and again and again if I had to,” Ross said

They’re guardedly hopeful that Barack Obama could begin to turn things around if he’s elected. “I think the right president can at least start to dismantle this,” Daphne said. “I think thousands of people marching in the streets is something he would listen to.”

25war3_Charles1.jpg A die-in on the streets of San Francisco in March 2007 marked the fourth anniversary of the invasion (Photo by Charles Russo)

 

WITNESS TO HISTORY

Covering the peace movement in those early days was a heady experience, like reporting on a revolutionary uprising or working in a foreign country where the people are organized and active enough to be able to shut down society and brave enough to risk bodily injury for their beliefs.

I was at the founding meeting of CodePink — which became the most effective group at personally confronting the warmongers and keeping the war in the public eye — one evening at Muddy Waters in the Mission District shortly after the war started.

Looking back, Benjamin rattled off a long list of the alliances the group built — with labor, churches, businesses, and a wide array of social movements — and creative actions intended to build and demonstrate popular support for ending the war.

“We’ve done so many things and what did we get? We got a surge,” she said. “It shows the crisis in our democracy, the crisis of the two-party system, the crisis of a dysfunctional opposition party.”

Yet she said the peace movement has been remarkably successful in convincing the public that the war was a mistake and that it’s time for the troops to come home, even if the Democrats have been slow to respond to that shift.

“The progress we’ve made is turning around public opinion and that’s going to play a big role in the upcoming elections,” she said. For Norr, the role of the news media is a particular sore spot. He was a technology reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who called in sick on the first full day of war and was arrested on Market Street with his wife and daughter, resulting in suspension by editor Phil Bronstein for his actions.

I wrote several stories on the issue, which culminated in Norr being fired and Bronstein unilaterally banning Chron employees from peace protests. I even borrowed CodePink’s guerilla tactics when Bronstein repeatedly refused to return my calls or address why he had singled out antiwar protesters for uniquely punitive treatment. I confronted him during a speech he gave at the Commonwealth Club (see “Lies and half-truths,” 5/7/03). That was the tenor of the times: we were all tired of being lied to and we decided to push back.

Norr was particularly frustrated with his own paper’s reporting of the war and started sending articles by the foreign press to his paper’s news desk, trying to wake his colleagues up to the pro-war propaganda being passed off as journalism in this country.

He was also disappointed with the country and with the Chronicle — both the management and his fellow reporters, who did little to support him — but the experience caused him to return to his roots as a progressive activist.

“The war and losing the job and everything brought an abrupt end to my consumerist phase and dumped me back into the world of being an activist,” said Norr, who serves on the KPFA 94.1 FM local station board and has made three recent trips to the Palestinian territories while working with the International Solidarity Movement.

Benjamin said Americans shouldn’t expect the next president to end the war — not without lots of pressure from a renewed and vocal peace movement. “This is the time to set the stage for the post-Bush agenda,” Benjamin said. “Don’t put your hopes in Barack Obama in getting us out of Iraq. Put your hopes in the people.”

25war4_Lane1.jpg A rally and nonviolent direct action at the Richmond refinery targeted Chevron on March 15 (Photo by Lane Hartwell)

 

THE AFTERMATH

The San Francisco Police Department, which spent more than $2 million on overtime costs responding to peace protests between March 15 and April 16, 2003, generally behaved with restraint and professionalism, but there were several exceptions.

The most costly and disturbing incident came when Officer Anthony Nelson began aggressively swinging his long riot baton at protesters, badly shattering the arm of peaceful protester Linda K. Vaccarezza, who suffered a permanent disability in her career as a court reporter.

Nelson’s incident report falsely stated that Vaccarezza had threatened him with a sign attached to a solid pole, but video of the incident later clearly showed there was no pole and that she was retreating when he teed off on her (see “The home front,” 05/19/04).

Vaccarezza received an $835,000 settlement from the city in November of 2004. On Oct. 5, 2005, two and a half years after the incident, SFPD fired Nelson for lying about what happened that day, and the City Attorney’s Office has been successfully fighting Nelson’s appeals in court ever since, putting in more than $100,000 in attorney time and costs into the Nelson and Vaccarezza cases.

The other significant ongoing litigation from the antiwar protests involved Mary Bull, who was arrested during an early protest for pouring fake blood in front of the entrance to Chevron’s San Francisco office before being allegedly strip searched and left naked in her San Francisco Jail cell for 36 hours.

Ironically, Bull was among those who brought a successful class action lawsuit against Sacramento County after she and others protesting a logging plan were strip searched, setting a precedent and led most counties to reform their strip-search policies. She used her share of the $15 million judgment to buy an organic permaculture farm in Sebastopol.

Her San Francisco case, in which Bull won a multimillion-dollar judgment, is still under appeal and now in mediation. Bull said the protests five years ago did make a difference, something she tells those who fret about its apparent failure. “I tell them to look at what issues the candidates are talking about now and I thank them for protesting then.”

“Even though we had millions throughout the world, we were sort of blocked, but now we’re regaining that momentum,” Melodie Barclay, a massage therapist who was also arrested with me on the first day of the war, told me recently. “We can’t judge it by the fact that we didn’t get the momentum we wanted.”

Norr started his antiwar activism working with Students for a Democratic Society in Boston, protesting the Vietnam War, which he said shares many similarities with the current situation, for good or for ill. He said that people tend to forget that while the protests then were huge and helped end the war, the movement did wane after Nixon ended the draft and substituted massive aerial bombardment for boots on the ground.

“The protests dropped off considerably,” he said. “A lot of the things that drove people to take risks in the late ’60s had faded by the early ’70s.”

He thinks the current administration learned a lesson from those days: it’s easier to maintain a war effort if the average citizen isn’t affected.

But there are other factors as well keeping a lid on the antiwar outrage.

“The culture has changed too. Young people are oversaddled with debt. People in schools seem to be docile. The culture as a whole seems to be more individualist and consumerist,” Norr said.

Yet some young people have woken up and many of them are funneling their energies into a peace group that was formed in the summer of 2005: World Can’t Wait, as in: the world can’t wait for the end of Bush’s second term before we change our direction and leadership.

“We don’t just want them gone, we need to repudiate their program,” said Giovanni Jackson, a 26-year-old WCW student organizer. “If we’re going to change anything, we need the youth.”

Jackson was at WCW’s founding convention in New York City, which came just as New Orleans was being flooded and then essentially abandoned by the federal government.

“When [Kerry] lost, people felt demoralized and World Can’t Wait kind of stepped into that situation,” Jackson said. “There was a lot of demoralization in the antiwar movement at that time.”

The group organized protests and student walkouts on Nov. 2, 2005.

“Everyone has their moments of doubt,” he said, “but I’m motivated by the crimes we see everyday.”

 

THE LESSONS

One of the biggest barriers to galvanizing people and turning the fifth anniversary of the war into something that might make a difference is the presidential election, which is diverting the energy of many potential protesters — and at the same time, offering some hope that a new president may lead to peace.

After all, every single one of the Democratic presidential candidates has promised to withdraw troops from Iraq, with varying timelines and numbers of US personnel left behind. And with enough encouragement, they might be willing to help change the status quo.

Many of the activists who volunteered their time and money to help move the Obama campaign into its front-runner position came out of the antiwar movement, and Obama’s strong stand against the war has been a key factor in his popularity.

Becker and some other activists don’t have much faith that a change in presidents will change the course in Iraq, although he agrees that much of the energy now surrounding Barack Obama derives directly from the antiwar movement.

“There’s been a huge upsurge of hope for Obama and that he might bring about the kind of change we need,” Bull said, adding that she doesn’t share that hope, believing the only path to peace is to pressure Obama and other leaders to commit to more progressive positions.

Norr said, “On one level, people have illusions about the power of peaceful protests. People believe in democracy, as well they should. We feel like the rulers should be paying attention to public opinion.

“It’s a remarkable story how broadly and quickly the American people have turned against the war. Public opinion was certainly ahead of the Democrats.”

And people will only grow more disenchanted with Iraq and its multitude of costs. “The people here are paying for this war, and everyday we have new stories about health clinics being shut down,” Becker said.

Becker was amazed last March as massive demonstrations for immigrant rights seemed to explode out of nowhere. “We think there will be more things like that,” he said.

Because after five years of organizing communities to resist the military-industrial complex’s plans, Becker thinks there’s been some visible progress.

“There isn’t a town or hamlet in the US that doesn’t have activism going on, but you wouldn’t know it from the corporate media,” Becker said. “It’s a mistake for people to feel discouraged.”

One ear to the ground

-
0

>a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Ah, the morality police — you’ve gotta love ’em. At least artists who get free publicity from the overzealous watchdogs should. With freedom of speech still miraculously in decent shape in this country, one might be forgiven for forgetting the unique dilemma of the banned book: once branded immoral, it automatically becomes sought after.

Such is the case with Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s Wolves of the Crescent Moon (Penguin, 192 pages, $14), which was banned in Saudi Arabia by theocratic thought-cops for casting too many spotlights on societal problems that the authorities insist don’t exist. Upon being labeled dangerous and sinful, the book gained a large audience throughout the Arabic-speaking world. It has since been translated into French, and now, into English by Anthony Calderbank. While hardly as inflammatory as Saudi authorities might lead one to believe, the novel paints a troubling portrait of a traditional society embracing and fighting modernity. Government claims notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia is not free from abuse, prejudice, racism, and religious hypocrisy, and the author minces no words in giving voice to the marginalized, the abandoned, and the otherwise ignored. While the titular animal does figure prominently in the story, the main wolves appear to be of the human variety.

Wolves of the Crescent Moon reveals itself in fevered rushes of storytelling that concern three characters: a one-eared bedouin, a eunuch, and a one-eyed orphan. Turad, the one-eared tribesman who has tolerated an endless run of degrading jobs since leaving the desert for the city, arrives at a Riyadh bus station without a plan. Paralyzed by indecision, he finds himself trapped in nightmarish reminiscence and speculation; thus, we are introduced to Tawfiq, Turad’s elderly eunuch coworker, whose life of misery is retold by the bedouin. While trying to decide which bus ticket to buy, Turad discovers a discarded government file involving an abandoned one-eyed baby; from there, the experimental narrative expands to include anecdotes about the orphan’s distressing childhood, as well as reveries imagined by Turad in an effort to fill in the gaps left by the impersonal official documents. His inability to inject even the briefest respite into the child’s conjectured history speaks volumes. For Turad, life is an endless chain of pain and suffering.

Told over the course of an evening, and engulfed by mental fatigue, Al-Mohaimeed’s novel presents a variant of the existential dread found in works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, albeit with more violence. The spellbinding narrative rarely feels anchored to its chief time and place, but instead hangs suspended within a hellish realm governed by fear, agony, and resentment.

In volleying between carefully recalled memories of his own suffering, detailed anecdotes about Tawfiq’s forced slavery and eventual castration, and embellishments about the abused orphan he never knew, Turad takes the role of a downtrodden Scheherazade. He’s capable of spinning 1,001 tales without the faintest hope of saving a single life. But his creator — at least until he was censored — speaks directly to those huddled in the margins of a secretive society. Wolves of the Crescent Moon might remain banned in Saudi Arabia for the foreseeable future; for now, Al-Mohaimeed will receive his well-deserved audience elsewhere in the world.

Oops! They did it again

-
0

› kimberly@sfbg.com

The best comedians always shear close to the bone with their truths, but believe it or not, few are necessarily a gut bust in conversation. Why is this a surprise? After all, the comic is on the interviewer’s mic, not on the clock and on script. Yet W. Kamau Bell plays against type and comes with not only the insights you wish you had spewed first but also the wit, centered on the issues of race that he’s been grappling with since childhood.

The rising incidence of racist cracks that reveal the persistent fissures in a country seemingly disinterested in identity politics — and those emerging from the 34-year-old San Franciscan’s own milieu, the alternative comedy scene — has led Bell to sharpen his attack with The W. Kamau Bell Curve, which focuses on the ugly slurs spilling from Sarah Silverman, Michael Richards, and Rosie O’Donnell, as well as other, unexpected quarters. And the nastiness keeps coming — cue Golf Channel commentator Kelly Tilghman’s recent remark that young players who want to defeat Tiger Woods would need to "lynch him in a back alley" — and spurring Bell to continue updating the show he first performed in October 2007.

According to Bell, racism is on the comeback trail with a crucial difference: "This time it’s coming from liberals and creeping in through pop culture in some weird way. I call it political correctness acid reflux. People are just burping out racism." The comic rose to the occasion to make Bell Curve after reading a story about Southern blackface comic Shirley Q. Liquor in Rolling Stone. He was outraged by the fact that the article even questioned whether the Liquor act was racist, much as he was troubled by the things coming from his own field. "It’s, like, wait a minute — this is my industry, and again, it’s not coming from redneck comics or blue-collar comics. It’s coming from alternative comics who are supposed to be liberal comics.

"It’s, like, ‘Look, you know I like black people, so it’s allegedly OK for me to use a joke with the word nigger in it’ — even though there’s no black people in the audience and you don’t have any black friends!" he continues. "Like I say in the show, the most racist things that have ever happened to me have come from people who were friends of mine. I had a friend who once said to me, ‘Kamau, I like you. You’re black, but you’re not black black.’ What does that mean? I’m black but you still have your wallet?"

The only child of author Janet Cheatham Bell, Bell is all too familiar with that kind of chum, having moved from private to public to private school throughout his life. "A lot of times I would be the only black person in school," recalls Bell, who now teaches solo performance at the Shelton Theater and frequently opens for Dave Chappelle. "And when you’re that person, either they forget you’re black, so things happen and you’re, like, [in a meek squeak] ‘Wait a minute — don’t forget I’m black, everybody,’ or because you’re black they unburden their, you know, ‘Kamau, lemme tell you something about black people I’ve never been able to tell any other black person.’ Oooh, please don’t!"

Be glad, however, that Bell is telling us about it all.

THE W. KAMAU BELL CURVE

Thurs/24, 8 p.m., $20 (bring a friend of a different race, who gets in free)

Shelton Theater

533 Sutter, SF

(415) 433-1227

www.sheltontheater.com

SPORTS: Where’s Tiger Woods?

-
0

And why isn’t he speaking up against golf’s racism?

By A.J. Hayes

tiger.jpg
Tiger’s not talking

For a sport that demands precious silence from its gallery , why is it that pro golf’s shot callers behave like a boisterous drunks every time they are faced with the fact that the sport just might be a tad lacking in racial tolerance within its infrastructure?

The latest racially charged calamity to soil the sport began about two weeks ago when an obscure Golf Channel announcer named Kelly Tilghman proclaimed that the only hope young golfers have in beating the great Tiger Woods was “lynch him in an alley.”

While it was a bizarre statement to make – who uses the term “lynch” so casually in regards to an African-American? – most people, including Woods himself, gave Tilgman the benefit of the doubt that didn’t make the statement with race in mind.

After she apologized she was given a two week suspension.

Then last week, Golfweek magazine joined Tilgman in the sand trap when it ran a picture of a noose on its cover to illustrate a story about the Tilgman. The cover line read: “Caught in a Noose: Tilghman slips up, and Golf Channel can’t wriggle free.”

Of course anyone who isn’t submersed in the world of golf 24 hours a day would know how blatantly offensive such imagery is. Eventually the real world caught up with the magazine and a change was made in their editorial hierarchy.

This fiasco is just the latest racially charged episode to hit golf. If it isn’t the controversy over golf course that holds the Masters Tournament that forbids women from being members, to the racially insensitive remarks about Woods made by golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, golf has a real problem with race.

Compounding the problem is, it never seems to learn from its mistakes.

How Oakland’s fearful politicos enabled waste: Part III

-
0

In 1996, Your Black Muslim Bakery lieutenant Nedir Bey had a wealth of ammunition with which to lobby city leaders for a $1.1 million loan to fund his health care company, E.M. Health Services.

The previous year, the city of Oakland had agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the Oakland Raiders back from Los Angeles, a deal that quickly soured and has cost the city and Alameda County taxpayers more than $20 million a year ever since.

The developers of a new downtown ice rink had defaulted on $11 million in bonds just three months after the facility opened.

The city had also given plenty of money to other businesses, most white-owned. As a result, the City Council was getting a relentless drubbing from bakery members and black business associates who lined up at meetings to speak on behalf of E.M. Health Services and its efforts to obtain the loan.

They argued that white business owners had an easier time obtaining credit, unsecured loans and support from the city while black-owned businesses endured undue scrutiny. Elected officials endured hints and outright accusations of racism if they dared ask questions about the company or collateral for the loan.

Some of those accusations occurred during the June 4, 1996, council meeting where the officials discussed giving E.M. Health an interim start up loan of $275,000 in city funds. The loan was needed because the company’s application for a $1.1 million share of federal Housing and Urban Development funds for job training programs had not yet been distributed to the city of Oakland.

During the meeting, Shannon Reeves, then-president of the NAACP Oakland chapter, accused the city’s black elected officials of forgetting where they came from.

“It’s time to deliver for the people in the community…,” Reeves said. “We need those who look like us to advocate for us.”

Beth Aaron, executive director of the Bay Area Black Contractors Association also testified at the meeting that night. She said the record proved that white-owned businesses had a much easier time getting Oakland to open its purse strings.

“Those who are white or friends of friends get things done very quickly,” she charged. “Those of us who are of color… do not.”

Even Nedir Bey got into the act.

“A few years ago we wouldn’t have been able to come here and ask for anything without getting run out,” he said. “Cut us a check on Friday for $275,000. Compare us to other projects that you have passed.”

A decade later, E.M. Health is just an unpaid debt on the city’s books, its license suspended by the California Franchise Tax Board. Principal payments first due in May 1998 never materialized, and by the time city staff knocked on its doors in October 1999, the offices had been cleared out.

But the story of how the business, a subsidiary of the now-bankrupt Your Black Muslim Bakery, received the money despite a flawed business plan and a disturbing criminal incident in Nedir Bey’s past illustrates the extent politics and pressure played in officials’ decision to approve the loan.

Bakery members have also been linked to several violent incidents, including the shooting death of journalist Chauncey Bailey, as well as alleged real estate and welfare fraud and child rape. ‘Intimidation factor’

“In reality it was political pressure that got them the loans,” said now-City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente, who was a councilmember at the time. “Deep down inside everybody knew it was bull—. No business plan, no records anyone could show. … And they kept saying they were failing because they didn’t get the city’s money soon enough.”

Retired councilmember Dick Spees, who is white, remembers how heated those meetings were, of being accused of racism because he dared question the business plan or ask about collateral or a missing business license. Bakery members would line up along the wall and refuse to sit, he recalled.

“It sounded good (on paper), this training program to help black people who were not getting opportunities,” Spees said recently. “But there was this intimidation factor, it just didn’t feel comfortable.”

Spees said he grew suspicious when Nedir Bey started racking up ineligible expenses even before federal government lenders had determined E.M. Health’s job training program met its criteria for financing.

Spees said he ended up voting for the loan and for several thousand dollars in advances from city coffers after he was assured by city staff on more than one occasion that HUD would approve the loan and that Bey had put up collateral.

De La Fuente, now council president, said he understood that the HUD money was intended for riskier loans, but that was no reason to cave in to pressure and give the money without trying to protect the city’s resources.

“I never got their support,” he said, referring to his black council colleagues, Nate Miley, Dezie Woods-Jones, Elihu Harris and Natalie Bayton.

Kidnap, torture

The city gave Nedir Bey money despite a disturbing incident that occurred on March 4, 1994, when Qiyamah Corporation, E.M. Health’s nonprofit parent company was still in its infancy.

On that date, Nedir Bey and Abaz Bey, another spiritually adopted son of bakery founder Yusuf Bey, were arrested and charged with abducting, assaulting, torturing and robbing a man they believed had cheated them on a real estate transaction.

Abaz Bey and other members of the bakery lived in an apartment building on 24th Street in North Oakland, the same one Nedir Bey wanted to buy with his very first request for city money, that ultimately was reduced in scope. The owner had hired the bakery to provide security after being sued by tenants fed up with rampant drug dealing and other crime.

According to police and court records, three men, led by Nedir Bey, beat the man with a flashlight and burned him with a hot knife. The arrests sparked a tense, full-scale standoff between more than 40 police officers and a similar number of male bakery members.

According to news reports, then-Mayor Elihu Harris agreed to meet the demand of bakery patriarch Yusuf Bey to discuss the standoff and the arrests.

Nedir Bey pleaded no contest to one felony count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced to three years’ probation after a veteran Oakland police officer and members of the community wrote a support letter on his behalf.

The probation report noted that two other prominent Oakland residents acted as character references for Nedir Bey: Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson and Larry Reid, then aide to Mayor Harris. However, Reid, now an Oakland city councilmember, said he never wrote a letter or served as a reference for Nedir Bey.

When Tribune reporters Diana Williams and Paul Grabowicz questioned whether the the arrest should impact his loan application, Nedir Bey said such details were irrelevant.

“Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and he was respectable enough to become president of South Africa,” he was quoted as saying in a June 1996 Oakland Tribune article.

Unapologetic support

Alameda County Supervisor Nate Miley, who was an Oakland council member and pushed hard for the E.M. Health loan, said recently that he never knew about Nedir Bey’s felony conviction or other clashes between bakery members and the police.

“Then-police chief Richard Word and I chaired the Public Safety committee and I didn’t know about it,” Miley insisted. “Clearly, I had a sense that the police had some concerns (about bakery members), but not how it’s been depicted recently.”

Miley is unapologetic about his unflinching support of E.M. Health during his time on the council. He wasn’t overly concerned when the company defaulted, he told his colleagues at the time, because the federal money was intended to fund higher-risk ventures.

He recalled in a recent interview that African-Americans had good reason to believe black businesses weren’t getting a fair share of city contracts or loans. Oakland’s leaders had poured millions in public money into bringing the Raiders home from Los Angeles and bailing out the Ice Center, Miley said, and African-Americans never let them forget it.

It’s also possible that city staff and some council members were intimidated by the accusations of racism, he added.

“I think we were very sensitive (about accusations) of being racist and Uncle Toms,” said Miley, who is African American.

“When E.M. came in to get a loan … on the face of it that looked like very worthy cause, something that would serve the public. So we decided to give them a chance,” Miley said, adding that there was some concern over the money being used for a car and consultants.

“We gave them some technical assistance and guidance rather than pulling the rug out from under them completely,” Miley recalled. “Still, even if it’s federal money they got, it’s still public taxpayer dollars down the toilet.”

Miley said he admired Yusuf Bey and the way he preached self-reliance, spirituality and discipline. Oakland was suffering record homicides and here was someone who was reaching out to ex-cons or those who might otherwise get caught up in the cycle of violence and helping them turn their lives around and earn money legitimately for their families, Miley said.

In February 1996, a smiling, soft-spoken Nedir Bey stood before the City Council and told them as much.

“This is an excellent program and it will target men and women who are not working presently and have no job skills,” Bey said. “We can train them in the home health care field and start them on a better way of life.”

‘Brilliant’ concept

Redevelopment Agency Director Gregory Hunter said the company’s goals were hard to turn down even if E.M. Health’s promises lacked details.

“The concept was brilliant, absolutely brilliant,” he said, adding that the business proposal drew applause from as far away as Washington, D.C. “Unfortunately, the execution fell somewhat short of the expectations the city had.”

Elihu Harris, now the chancellor of Peralta Community College District, was reluctant to discuss the matter recently because he said he did not recall many details. Harris said his dad received home health care from employees of E.M. Health, but it was his mother who handled the contract.

He added that a community loan advisory committee _ a body the federal lenders required _ had voted to fund E.M. Health, and the council debated that recommendation back and forth for many months. He said the council was not provided with a lot of details about the company.

“The (loan committee)… had really done the research,” Harris said. “The council was between a rock and a hard place.

“(E.M. Health) had made some mistakes and they were going to try and rectify those mistakes,” Harris said. “There was a lot to be concerned about, but they had strong community support.”

One supporter who turned out early and often to lobby for Nedir Bey was Theodora Marzouk, an administrator for Oakland-based Community Care Services, Inc.

She testified more than once about the shortage of training programs for nurses’ aides and said her own company couldn’t supply enough of them. She urged Oakland’s leaders to fund E.M. Health.

But Marzouk ended up on E.M. Health’s payroll for the last two quarters of 1996 earning more than $20,000, city records show.

Marzouk refused to comment for this story, but she sounded surprised to hear that she’d once been listed as an employee.

In any case, by 2000, the company’s business license was suspended, and by 2003, Alameda County records show, state and federal tax officials during the intervening years had imposed tax liens on the company’s assets totalling nearly $200,000.

But today, E.M. Health’s motto “Big enough to serve, small enough to care” is little more than a failed promise.

MediaNews investigative reporters Thomas Peele and Josh Richman, KQED reporter Judy Campbell, and radio reporter Bob Butler contributed to this report. Cecily Burt is a MediaNews staff writer. G.W. Schulz is a staff writer at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

New Hampshire: The ‘Bradley Effect?’

-
0

B3 note: “Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?” was the headline over today’s New York Times column by Maureen Dowd. Dowd wrote that “the Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the weekend but watched it slip away…in the end, she had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim, both of Obama and of the press. Hillary has barely talked to the press throughout her race, yet the Cllintons this week whined mightily that the press prefers Obama.”

I liked the line by an interviewee on Quake radio who mentioned an Ellen Goodman column in the Boston Globe earlier on. Goodman argued that, if the men piled on Hillary, the women would vote for her. But I mainly liked the fact that the voters of New Hampshire, not the pollsters and the pundits, decided the outcome and surprised everyone. That is good news.

Then there is “The Bradley Effect,” which is a reason why many thought Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a gubernatorial election in l982 after having a substantial lead in both the pre-election and exit polls. Will Durst
wonders if “The Bradley Effect” kicked in in New Hampshire and if it won’t be a major factor in the campaign.

SHADOWS TRUMP HOPE.

By Will Durst

Listen my friends and you will hear a tale of a
fateful night. It’s a tale no other dare speak of. Not
a matter of political correctness. It is shame. Of
which I have little. If any. Okay. None. So here goes.
What follows is the real and true story of how Hillary
Clinton overcame a double digit same day deficit and
won the New Hampshire Primary. A tale of a race and of
race.

We all know what happened, but like the knickers of a
Guatemalan nanny bent over a laundry basket in the
room just off the kitchen, we pretend not to notice.
Tom Brokaw knows. John King knows. Okay, maybe Laura
Ingraham doesn’t know, but how is that different?
Hillary knows. Barack not only knows, he feels it in
his bones like a creeping worm of osteoporosis every
day of his life but he’ll never say a word.

It was not a polling glitch. It was not co- opting the
mantra of “change.” It was not Hillary’s vulnerability
in Saturday’s debate or her moist eyes in that
Portsmouth coffee shop. It was not Bill turning into a
60 foot George Bailey Transformer rampaging through
Bedford Falls. It was a little bit of the teeniest
kind of invisible fear. A form of prejudice detritus
known as “the Bradley Effect.”

In 1982, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-
American, was 10 points ahead in the polls the day
before his California Gubernatorial election against
George Deukmejian. 10 points ahead. Day before the
election. He lost. Sound familiar? Ding. Ding. Ding.
Give that man a kewpie doll.

To add insult to injury, Bradley led in the EXIT
polls. Which means people not only lied about how they
were going to vote, they lied about how they did vote.
Proof positive that something crazy happens inside the
heads of white people when they get behind that
polling curtain. But after two terms of George Bush,
that ain’t new news.

Why didn’t the “Bradley Effect” rear its ugly head in
Iowa? Simple. We’re not talking about racism, we’re
talking about nervousness. A fear that attacks your
marrow in the dark. In Iowa, everyone watches you
vote. No curtain to hide behind in a caucus. You bunch
in a corner in full sight of all your neighbors under
a bright fluorescent light. In New Hampshire, it’s
just you and your demons. Your inner New England
demons. And hope tends to dissipate in those lonely
enclosures. No matter how warm the January night, it
gets dark at five up there. Northwoods dark, where
shadows trump hope.

The difference was women over 40. Which, forgive me,
but in both New Hampshire and Iowa means white women.
In the Hawkeye State, they went with the black guy in
the wide open. In the Granite State, behind the
curtain, they chose the white woman. I know. I know. I
know. Sacrilege! Implying discrimination exists in
America today. Blaspheme! Accusing DEMOCRATS of
possible prejudice. Heresy! But its not bigotry so
much as it is dread. Obloquy! “What?” Never mind.
Suffice to say that in the last six years, we’ve been
taught to fear. Bang! Salivate.

One can only hope the Clinton campaign understands
this and doesn’t convince themselves it was their
wacky emotional leakage weekend strategy that turned
the tide, because that would mean 10 months of Bill
shrieking and Hillary keening, and nobody wants that.
The only thing worse would be to go on pretending this
Effect does not exist, because future opponents are
already drawing up plans to ramp it up.

Comic, actor, writer, Will Durst had to look up
“obloquy.” It means the same kind of stuff the other
words do.

will durst
wing commander
durstco
“you want the best, so do we”
2107 van ness ave
suite 402
san francisco 94109
877 SATIRIST service
415 441 3669 office
415 298 1874 cell
durst@willdurst.com
willdurst.com

Year in Music: Long walk home

-
0

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Years ago I ended up at a San Francisco Water Department dinner with my father and an old neighborhood friend, eating in the back hall of a half-century-old Italian restaurant in the Excelsior. The room spilled over with thick-armed men who were union, white, and not bad-off and from whom I learned a thing or two about old San Francisco family names and accents that tell you if someone is from the Richmond, the old Castro, or Balboa. It was a return to the blue-collar ‘Frisco that I was raised in: a posthippie, pre-dot-com city with a ubiquitous — and at one time iconic — KFOG, 104.5 FM, playlist composed of harder rockers by the Stones, Creedence, and the Beatles. My earliest memories of the city are tied to those songs, moaning from tiny car speakers, rattling empty cans of Bud, and wafting over garages that smelled of grease.

Yet there was one member of this blue-collar pantheon I could never get too close to. He was too bombastic. His character was too huge. Even before ingesting punk rock ideology via Maximumrocknroll and Epicenter, I felt in opposition to the stadium and the spectacle. Somehow I had internalized a belief that the Boss was my enemy.

Yet this year I found myself buying Magic (Sony), Bruce Springsteen’s latest album, literally on sight. My teenage self would have been horrified to know that at 30 I would be purchasing a Springsteen record not in spite of the E Street Band but because of it, and that after listening to it again and again, my greatest criticism would be that it has too few Clarence Clemons sax solos. The truth is that I’ve moved well past being appreciative of the man and into the realm of the fan — the kind who marks his Slingshot planner with the date and time tickets go on sale for Springsteen’s latest tour.

As with many young men with elitist tastes, it was Nebraska (Sony, 1982) that broke me. With its high-contrast cover, four-track production, and the slap-back reverb echoing of Suicide, the album suggested an almost punk quality, and it subverted all of my assumptions about Springsteen’s gross theatrics. Here was a serious songwriter with compassion for working people, concern for their dignity, and a subtle hint of darkness. Suddenly, I was listening, and, as I began to discover, so were my friends.

What surprised me most was the nonlinearity and consistency of his politics. Springsteen isn’t partisan, pro-union, antiwar, or above it all. He’s for ordinary people and their battles with life, injustice, and the institutions that seem set on killing their dreams, if not destroying the dreamers. It turns out that "Born in the U.S.A." isn’t a nationalist anthem but an indictment. He takes on police, poverty, and racism with "American Skin (41 Shots)," whose title pointedly refers to the slaying of Amadou Diallo by the New York Police Department. Springsteen is a humanist who never wanted to choose sides in the process of choosing between right and wrong. Perhaps for good reason — it’s hard not to wonder whether Clear Channel radio stations’ boycott of Magic isn’t linked to his fateful decision to openly oppose George W. Bush during the 2004 election.

My slow-burning appreciation for Springsteen’s moral and political iconoclasm wasn’t what really set my obsession with him into high gear. It was the unexpected but inevitable emotional connection that grew. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the dark listening to The River (Sony, 1980) and crying to its titular masterpiece. Conversion is strange, and when a person goes from being outside the church pews to singing in the choir it’s a hard thing to explain to anyone. I can listen to "Atlantic City," "The Promised Land," or even Magic‘s "Long Walk Home" and feel the agony of every person who’s ever loved or lost. I realize I’m willing to give up being aesthetically correct, intellectually above it all, and emotionally safe just to have something I can share with people who seem to live such different lives. Certainly it’s worth it to be transported back home, which makes Magic less like a throwback and more like a time machine. *

TOP 5 MUSIC TOPPERS


1. Top return to shitty form: Siltbreeze

After many years languishing in the land of the giant question marks, Philly scuzz-and-fuzz merchants Siltbreeze not only have begun releasing new records but also happen to be releasing some of the best records in the American (and Australian?!) underground. Harry Pussy, Charlambides, and the Dead C meet US Girls, Ex-Cocaine, and xNoBBQx.

2. Top new band from my new hometown, Portland, Ore.: Eat Skull

What we’ve got is ear-bleeding garage punk that makes up for a lack of speed with a heavy hand on the treble knob. Presented by members of the Hospitals, Gang Wizard, and Hale Zukas, this is the kind of pop violence that hasn’t hurt this good since Henry’s Dress.

3. Top new band from my old hometown, Oakland: Zeroth

Just when I thought I couldn’t be surprised by anything anymore. A trio of smarter than average weirdos, they’ve produced the kind of strangeness that lends itself to nonsense descriptors like "electric ovarian space prog." My butt shook.

4. Top trend: pop noise albums

Though this is really a trend that started a few years ago with records like Burning Star Core’s The Very Heart of the World (Thin Wrist, 2005) and Prurient’s Black Vase (Load, 2005), 2007 saw some of America’s noise heavyweights releasing major statements with actual production values. Mouthus, John Wiese, and Religious Knives all brought great records, but perhaps most startling were the sweet clarity and depth of Sighting’s Through the Panama (Load/Ecstatic Peace).

5. Top label A&R: Southern Lord

They’ve made a pretty clean sweep of the best of left-field cult metal: OM, Wolves in the Throne Room, Velvet Cacoon, Abruptum, and Striborg. My only question is, where’s WOLD?

For more from Saloman, go to www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

1...10111213Page 11 of 13

48hills.org is the official publication of the non-profit San Francisco Progressive Media Center.
Contact us: info@48hills.org