› annalee@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION About 18 people were gathered in the San Francisco offices of Urban Mapping, a company whose mild-mannered founder, Ian White, described their business model to me as “selling polygons.” Instantly, I felt at home. I was among the geowankers, a group of high-tech map enthusiasts whose areas of expertise range from making customizable Web maps (often built out of polygons) and geolocation software to map-based online storytelling and handheld devices that provide information about your environment as you walk through it. Imagine getting a tour of the Mission neighborhood via your smart phone, which pops up information about who painted the cool murals you’re looking at in Clarion Alley, as well as which cafés are in the immediate area. Now imagine using that same phone to upload pictures you’ve taken of the cappuccino at Ritual to your blog, complete with a map showing the exact GPS coordinates of this excellent cafe. If anyone is going to invent that device, it’s going to be a geowanker.
All of us had heard about this meeting via the geowanking e-mail list, founded by überdork Joshua Schachter, where map geeks of all stripes have been engaging in banter and mad science for more than three years. Tonight was the inaugural San Francisco geowankers meeting, and it was the first time many of us had had a chance to meet each other in person. The evening was to be an informal eat-and-chat, with presentations from Rich Gibson, coauthor of the astonishing Mapping Hacks, and Mike Liebhold, a brainiac from the Institute for the Future who said (only half-jokingly) that he wants to invent a “tricorder for planet earth.”
Gibson told us that he’s currently thinking about how to use technology to deal with the “probability characteristics of space.” In other words, how do you create an accurate high-tech map that reflects the fact that a given geographical location has a high probability of being referred to as “the Mission,” but at least 10 percent of the time might be referred to as “Noe Valley”?
This kind of question might sound silly if you look at neighborhoods purely as the creation of real estate companies that have rigid ideas about where the Mission ends and Noe Valley begins. But geowanking is all about making maps democratic and creating representations of space that reflect ordinary people’s lived experiences. The idea of letting a real estate agency call the shots on where your neighborhood’s boundaries are is absurd to a geowanker. Why not just build a digital map in layers so that you can see the real-estate-defined neighborhoods, then click into another layer that shows what ordinary people on the street think are the boundaries, then move to another layer to see where all the rivers run underneath the city?
Liebhold pointed out that as more and more people start creating their own maps and putting them online, we’re going to need to invent a system where we know which maps are “trusted” and which are just somebody rambling about how there are many paths to Blue Bottle Coffee from the Haight. Everybody began specuutf8g about a not-so-distant future when you’ll subscribe to somebody’s map data the way you might subscribe to an RSS feed (and in fact, thanks to smarty-pants Mikel Maron and pals, there is a geoRSS format). Some feeds would be trusted and some wouldn’t.
Then we got sidetracked by potential problems. What happens when the map democratization process goes nuts and so many people are tagging places on digital map services that the spatial data is a mess? And what about map spam, where people buy ads on (for example) Google Maps and suddenly your nice map of the Mission is covered with flags advertising Wells Fargo ATMs and places to buy Bud?
When the conversation wound down, we broke for wine and cookies. I got a chance to chat with Anselm Hook, the hacker who prototyped build-your-own-map service Platial.com. Platial is a mashup of Google Maps and allows you build and store customized maps that you share with friends (try it — it’s insanely addictive). Hook said his newest obsession is trying to create maps with “near-instantaneous information,” kind of like instant messaging and Google Maps rolled into one. “Imagine saying to somebody online, ‘I’m here, what should I do?’ and getting an instant reply with a map,” he enthused. “That’s what I want.”
At last it was time to go, and I headed out into the South of Market area, wishing I had Anselm’s device so I could find a local restaurant and wondering what the probability might be that somebody else would call this neighborhood Mission Bay. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who became a geowanker because she’s always getting lost.
Tech
Geowanking
Project Censored on the Will and Willie show at 8:05 a.m. Wednesday on 960 the Quake radio
Why didn’t the Conglomerati Media cover this major local news story?
Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, will make a rare mainstream media appearance at 8:05 a.m. Wednesday morning (Sept. l3) to discuss the l0 big stories the nation’s major news media refused to cover last year, as the Bay Guardian put it in its cover story of the last issue.
Peter will explain lay out the stories and explain why the media
censored the following top l0 stories (in descending order):
l. The Feds and the Media Muddy the Debate over Internet Freedom.
2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technology to Iran.
3. World Oceans in Extreme Danger.
4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the United States.
5. High-tech Genocide in Congo.
6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy.
7. U.S. Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq.
8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act.
9. World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall.
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians.
And then there are the junk food news stories that got far more attention than they deserved:
(l) Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt Got Together. (2) Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson Break Up. (3) “American Idol” Hits an All-Time High. (4) The Runaway Bride who didn’t. (5) Martha Stewart is Back in Town. (6) “Brokeback Mountain” Breaks Through. (7) Britney Spears (it just wouldn’t be a list without her. (8) MySpace Infiltrates our Space. (9) Steroids in Baseball Get Pumped Up. (l0) “The DaVinci Code” ad nauseam.
A tip of the derby to Willie Brown and Will Durst and Producer Paul Wells and the Quake/Clear Channel Radio for being the only mainstream media in the Bay Area to our knowledge to give the proper publicity to this important local story and local project (Sonoma State University).
Memo to Phillips, Will and Willie: ask if anybody has spotted the story in any mainstream media. That proves the censorship point.
I (B3) will appear on the show at 9:05 Thursday morning (Sept. l4) to discuss why the local regional monopoly (Hearst/Singleton/McClatchy/Gannett/Stephens) has not only blacked out this major story but also one of the biggest local censored stories of the year (the regional monopoly). Memo to the editors and city desks of the Conglomerati: why did you black out these major censored stories? B3
WITHOUT RESERVATIONS
› paulr@sfbg.com
We tend to trust what we see, and when what we see is a computer printout, specifying in meticulous detail what we just had for dinner, we tend to trust it all the more. How can such a miracle machine as the computer ever be wrong? Being wrong is a human thing; it is an errant scribble on one of those pale green tablets on which servers write down orders at less technologically advanced establishments (unless they are show-offs working from memory). Or it is bad arithmetic. Most people, I am sure, have had the experience of being delivered a hand-written check they could not decode — and when you can’t decode it, you just shrug your shoulders and pay it, hoping the errors, if any, aren’t too egregious.
Tidy computer accountings of restaurant activity would seem to be altogether an improvement over ballpoint primitivism: a brave new world. And yet, and yet … it behooves us not to fall asleep. Computers might be infallible, and to the extent that computers replace human beings as trackers and toters-up of bills, the likelihood of error is diminished. But it is not eliminated, as I discovered recently when sifting through the bill at one of the city’s more tech-savvy restaurants: a dollar too much for this item, a dollar too much for that one — and, to be fair, a dollar too little for a third.
A dollar here and there would not seem to make all that much difference — just a couple percentage points of the total bill. But any effective strategy of overcharging must be subtle, in amounts small enough not to be noticed or worth disputing, and it should be balanced by the occasional undercharge, to give the impression of randomness or lack of guile. Customers must be granted the occasional victory, so that they do not become disillusioned or even angrily suspicious.
I asked for menus to recheck the numbers, then summoned our server to point out the discrepancies. The matter was quickly straightened out, with apologies. Possibly these were innocent mistakes, bad numbers entered into the machine by some harried human in a hurry. But as we left, I glanced around at a big dining room full of people accumuutf8g charges on an unseen computer somewhere, and I wondered.
THURSDAY
Aug. 17
Performance
SUPER VISION
Between birth and death certificates, our multiple data bodies circulate in a made-up universe called the datasphere, where they are both rigorously and haphazardly constructed, mined, and manipulated beyond the full awareness, let alone control, of the old physical bodies left behind. Not science fiction, of course, just the mundane information age. This weekend its ominous dimensions find sensory expression on a grand scale in SUPER VISION, a multimedia performance by New York experimental theater group the Builders Association in collaboration with high-tech design firm dbox. SUPER VISION is a tale (three actually) of the bit-based shackles made from proliferating consumer “choices” and technological possibilities. (Robert Avila)
Through Sat/19
8 p.m.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
700 Howard, SF
$23-$30
(415) 978-ARTS
www.ybca.org
Theater
True West
Sibling rivalry is a bitch. Being the oldest of five brothers and sisters, I grew up in a semidaft household where the walls buckled with teenage angst and bratty pretensions. I can certainly sympathize with the vendetta the two brothers of Sam Shepard’s True West have against each other. Directed by Gabrielle Gomez, True West depicts the story of Austin – a conservative man with a peaceful life, caring for his mother’s house in Arizona – and his squandering brother, Lee, who unexpectedly visits him. True West marks the debut of the passionate and young Panhandler’s Theater company and features a performance by alt-country musician Jeffery Luck Lucas. (Chris Sabbath)
Through Aug. 26
8 p.m.
Artaud Gallery Theater
450 Florida, SF
$20
(415) 626-1021
www.artaud.org/theater
Help, BizWeek, Help!!! Why the public gets mad at the media, part 2
Below is a letter I have just emailed to the only email address I could find in the Aug. l4th Business Week of Business Week, formally asking for a correction and explanation for three factual errors the magazine made about the Guardian in the first paragraph of the lead story (note my previous blog). Follow along and see how a major communications company (McGraw-Hill) handles reader complaints about factual errors in their stories.
To the good people at
Business Week:
Can you get the questions in my first blog item below (the ones outlining three factual errors in the first three lines in the first paragraph of the lead story with the head: “How this kid made $60 million in l8 months.”) Could you get this message to editor in chief Stephen J. Adler and President William P. Kupper jr and Glenn S. Goldberg, president, information @ media, McGraw-Hill Companies? Or to anyone else locally or in the New York headquaters at Business Week that can help me (a) get an appropriate correction; (b) tell me how such egregious factual errors happened, (c) give me a copy of your retraction and corrections policy on factual errors, and (d) give me the whereabouts and contact information and credits of the two writers of the piece (Sarah Lacy and Jessi Hempel).
I looked extensively through the issue but I couldn’t find any information on how to contact the writers and editors and staff of Business Week, either by phone or by email. How does a reader (or in my case, a reader with a serious complaint) do this? I would appreciate any immediate help that you can give me.
Thanks very much. Bruce B. Brugmann, editor and publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, proud landlord for Digg.Com, but a landlord wrongly identified in your piece (you named our chain competitor) and wrongly characterized as having “grungy offices” that weren’t up to the standard of Business Week. My phone is 4l5-255-3l00, email at Bruce@sfbg.com, Bruce blog at sfbg.com.
P.S. No word back from either the San Francisco or San Mateo offices today on my calls for help on last Friday. I will start in again on the phone, but I’m already beginning to wear out. B3
For more info:
http://www.wordyard.com/2006/08/04/businessweek-on-digg/
http://www.valleywag.com/tech/digg/ripping-on-the-valley-boys-story-part-1-the-cover-192209.php
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/dont_believe_businessweeks_bubblemath.php
Monstrous politics
› monster@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I didn’t want to see it, and then I did. When Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest came out, I was beyond underwhelmed. But then the box office numbers started rolling in — it was the biggest weekend take in movie history — and I was intrigued. I kept wondering how Johnny Depp’s prancing pirate Jack Sparrow could pack more punch than square-jawed Superman. After seeing the flick, the answer was obvious.
Jack Sparrow lives in a world of magic and monsters, a place where half-fish zombies stalk the seas in a mysterious ship and a giant kraken fells merchant vessels with fat, sucker-covered tentacles. His greatest enemies are Davy Jones, an undead sea captain with a squid for a head, and the British East India Company. How can Superman’s boring domestic troubles and a bald, Method-acting real estate mogul ever hold a candle to that? Metropolis is drably realistic compared with Jack’s South Seas. And yet the films’ supreme enemies do have a lot in common. The British East India Company and Lex Luthor’s real estate firm are both ruthless corporate enterprises whose owners mow down human life in search of bigger profits.
It’s only in an overt fantasy like Pirates, however, that we get a story capable of capturing the full horror of uncontrolled corporate greed. Representing Halliburton-size evil is a toady for the British East India Company, who coerces hero Will Turner into hunting down Jack to get the pirate’s magical compass, which points the way to whatever its owner desires. In exchange for this perfect colonizing tool — essentially, a never-ending source of information about where the raw materials are — the king of England promises to grant Jack a full pardon and make him a privateer.
But Jack is a true pirate. He steals and swashbuckles for the love of it and has no interest in working for a boss. Instead of selling out to the British East India Company, he faces down Davy Jones and his zombie crew, who are cursed to spend their afterlives working under the iron discipline of their tentacled captain. As they get older, they literally merge with the ship itself, melting into the wood until they are just flattened, grimacing faces poking out of the bulkheads. Fleeing the British East India Company’s brand of domination, Jack falls right into the path of a boss whose monstrousness mirrors it.
Of course, this is also just a movie about people fighting monsters with goo and suckers and claws. And that’s what makes Pirates both fun to watch and fun to endlessly analyze. Monster stories leave room for interpretation; they allow us to tell stories that are subversive, that question why we should have to take shitty jobs and respect corporate power. At least, some monster stories do.
I just finished writing a book that’s all about how monster stories in the United States reflect often-buried fears about capitalism run amok. The book is called Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, and you can actually buy the damn thing now. It’s in bookstores and on Amazon and crap like that. I don’t want to tell you how long it took me to write, but suffice it to say that before I became a tech and science geek, I was a horror and science fiction geek.
The weird thing is that I learned to excavate the cultural meaning of real-life technologies by analyzing movies about imaginary ones. That’s because the process of innovation is nearly identical to the process of dreaming up a monster. Just as new devices like the iPod or TiVo respond to changes in social norms, so too do our fantasies. I mean, it’s no accident that a horror movie like The Ring came out during the heyday of file sharing. Let’s think about it — the flick is about a haunted videocassette that will kill you unless you make a duplicate copy and show it to somebody else. It’s like a nightmare analog version of BitTorrent. If you do not share your media, you will die. Creative Commons really should do a cartoon parody of The Ring.
There will always be people who want to consume their electronic toys and mass media without having to think about what they mean. Sometimes they’ll even claim that there are no politics of science fiction — or science — because politics only take place in Congress or at the United Nations. But I say that until we understand the monsters in our dreams, we’ll never defeat the ones who run the world. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who just published a book — w00t!
Come hear her read from it (and enter a B-movie trivia contest): Thurs/27, 7 p.m., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus, SF. (415) 362-8193, www.citylights.com.
All Lebanon is collateral damage
OPINION Once again, Lebanese civilians are getting blasted, killed, and bombed by high-tech American weapons because Israel is angry and lashing out. I remember this well; even some of the targets are the same. I spent part of my childhood in Beirut. I remember my mother yelling at me to get off the balcony where I was busy trying to see if it was an American F-4 Phantom Israeli Air Force jet or a French-made Dassault Mirage screaming by our apartment building at rooftop level on its way to bomb the Beirut airport yet again.
My mother wasn’t happy with my plane-spotting endeavors. But Beirut at the time was frequently called the Jewel of the Middle East, and I was lucky enough to go to the American elementary school. I remember Pigeon Rock, the cedars, the beaches — and the Israeli raids. In fact, such raids led to my family being evacuated from Lebanon on more than one occasion.
Whenever the Palestine Liberation Organization conducted a military engagement, US-supplied F-4 Phantoms would bomb the Beirut airport. It became almost a regular Sunday outing for Beirut residents. How many Middle East Airlines jets did Israel bomb today? If the Syrians lobbed shells or anybody else in the region displeased Israel, US-supplied F-4 Phantoms would bomb the Beirut airport. If there was a border incursion, US-supplied F-4 Phantoms would bomb the Beirut airport. Do you see a sadly familiar pattern?
The Lebanese are once again civilians paying for the actions of others. Lebanon is and always has been Israel’s whipping boy. It has become a pawn between Israel, Hezbollah, and possibly Iran. An entire nation is collateral damage. Two-year-old children dying with perforated eyes. Kids blown up when they go swimming in a canal. Are they any less innocent than the children killed in Hamas suicide bombings?
Believe it or not, your elected representatives care what you think, if you let them know in no uncertain terms. The United States supplies billions of dollars of no-strings-attached money to Israel. That money directly and indirectly supports Israel Defense Forces that have, in the last few days alone, killed more than 200 Lebanese citizens. Write your elected officials a personal letter. They pay attention to those. Demand that the United States stop funding Israel’s war — its terrorism with a bigger budget — on Lebanon.
The terror attacks on Israel are hideous, as is the region’s poisonous anti-Semitism. But so are Israel’s bombing raids that are destroying a recently revived Lebanon. Israel will not help its case with tit-for-tat attacks on civilians or the wholesale destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure. The Germans’ bombing attacks on Britain in World War II didn’t break the people’s spirit and make them turn on Churchill; the opposite happened. One would think Israel might learn this lesson and act accordingly at the negotiating table.
War begets war, not peace. Write, don’t e-mail, don’t call — write a personal letter to your congressperson, your senator, your elected officials, demanding that the United States cut its military aid to Israel by half. That at least would get the Israelis’ attention off the bombs they’re dropping on the Lebanese and might even force Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to start negotiating for real. It would level the playing field just a bit. SFBG
Tim Kingston
Tim Kingston is a freelance writer who lives in the East Bay.
Verizon’s tubes
› tubes@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION If you think I’m done making fun of Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska, then you are sorely mistaken. I have only just begun to mock.
In a rousing speech about why he would be trashing network neutrality provisions in the Senate’s version of the new telecommunications bill, Stevens sagely pointed out that the Internet “is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.” Instead, he explained, “it’s a series of tubes.” And those tubes get all gummed up with icky stuff like big movies and things. For example, Stevens said, “An Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet.”
Ultimately, after worrying at length about how “your own personal Internet” is imperiled by “all these things,” Stevens concluded that there is no violation of network neutrality that “hits you and me.” And that’s why he’s pushing to keep net neutrality from being written into law. This is the sort of politician who is deciding the future of Internet regulation — a guy who thinks that he received “an Internet” yesterday, and that it was made of “tubes.”
What’s even worse is that Stevens’s main beef with the Internet is that it moves slowly, and this is a problem that will only be worsened when big companies like Verizon and Comcast start creating prejudiced pipes that privilege certain kinds of network traffic over others. You think your own personal Internet is slow now? Wait until Verizon starts making Disney movies travel faster than e-mail over its, um, tubes.
While Stevens is basing decisions that will affect the future of communications technology for decades to come on trucks and tubes, Verizon is covertly preparing its newest customers for a world without network neutrality. A few weeks ago the telecommunications giant announced it would be installing fancy new routers with its high-speed fiber-optic cable service known as FiOS. Available in only a few places across the United States, FiOS has been drooled over by tech-savvy blog Engadget and CNN alike. That’s because it can deliver a wide range of media (from movies to phone calls) much faster than its competitors — supposedly at a speed of up to 20 megabits per second, far faster than typical DSL’s 1.5.
Sounds great, right? Not so much. The router that comes with new installs of FiOS, according to Verizon’s press release, “supports remote management that uses new industry standards known as TR-069, enabling Verizon to perform troubleshooting without having to dispatch a technician.” Whenever I see the phrase “remote management,” I get antsy. That means Verizon can talk to your router from its local offices, which the company claims is all for the good of the consumer.
However, if you actually read the TR-069 standard, you’ll see that Verizon can do a lot more than just troubleshoot. It can literally reflash all the memory in your router, essentially reprogramming your entire home entertainment system. As a result, Verizon can alter its service delivery options at any time. Even if you’ve signed up for a network-neutral FiOS that sends you to whatever Web sites you like and routes your peer-to-peer traffic the same way it routes your e-mail, Verizon can change that on a whim. With one “remote management” event, the company can change the settings in your router to deliver Fox News faster than NPR. It can block all traffic coming from France or prevent you from using Internet phones that aren’t controlled by Verizon.
Verizon’s new router is also great news for anyone who wants to wiretap your Internet traffic. All a bad guy has to do is masquerade as the Verizon “remote manager” and he or she can fool your nifty router into sending all your data through his or her spy computer. The more people allow companies like Verizon to take arbitrary control of their “personal Internets,” the less freedom they’ll have — and the more vulnerable they’ll be.
Surely even the good Sen. Stevens can understand why Verizon’s antineutral router isn’t desirable. You see, it turns the Internet into a truck. A truck that doesn’t go. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who is powered by trucks.
What’s the Damaged?
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
Look, I tried — as much as any 35-year-old can be expected to try — to get excited by, or even minimally interested in, the Warped Tour. Excuse me — what I mean is the Vans Warped Tour, featuring the Volcom Stage, and the Guitar Center Warp Your Summer with NOFX contest, and the Energizer Encore, wherein you can vote to see your favorite Warped band play 10 minutes longer. Why, if I could only see Davey Havok’s frontal mullet, Cure fan circa ’86 hairdo for one-sixth of an hour longer, I think I’d need to change my underwear. Oh, wait — AFI aren’t playing? Well, I’m sure that haircut will be prominently featured on a good percentage of soul-crushing, woe-is-me, mall-rock bands out there on Piers 30 and 32 on July 8. They’ll be soaking in the ultraviolet-ultraviolent radiation of sun and prepubescent adoration, smashing the state, and killing you softly with their songs and pouty lips.
OK, you got me. For someone with a master’s degree in writing, a five-year-old kid, and a copy of Damaged on vinyl, poking fun at the Warped Tour is like hunting geriatric cows with a shotgun.
Warped just isn’t my thing, nor is it supposed to be. Like it or not, gramps, punk rock — and all of its attendant bastard children, Emo, Screamo, Puddin’, and Pie, and the rest of the seven dwarves — is big business. An uncool outcast who just can’t relate to mainstream society, man is the cool thing to be. The punks are now the jocks. The hipsters are the cheerleaders, and the whole thing plays in Peoria quite well, thank you. It plays in the food court as your little sister and her friends compare the bitchin’ spiked belts they just purchased over chicken nuggets and coconut-banana Frappucinos.
Having graduated from high school in 1989, I missed both the Sex Pistols at Winterland and the Warped phenomenon, and here I am — stuck in the middle with you. I had a couple friends who went one year, mainly to see the Descendents and Bad Religion, and I almost joined them, but discretion is the better part of valor, and the whole circus atmosphere just didn’t seem like it’d be fun. More specifically, it didn’t seem like it would be punk rock in the way that I thought punk rock was fun. It wasn’t a dark, dangerous club with dark, dangerous individuals singing from their dark, dangerous hearts about dark, dangerous things. Of course, all of this dark dangerousness has been an illusion since Iggy rolled around on broken glass during the recording of Metallic K.O. (Skydog, 1976). Nonetheless, punk rock shouldn’t require suntan lotion and plenty of hydration.
But that’s precisely the point. I can’t keep carrying this cross around. It’s covered in Iggy’s blood and Dee Dee Ramone’s track marks. The Warped Tour is not about punk rock. It’s about the kids having fun in the sun, and I’m no longer a kid. Point blank, whoot — there it is. It’s time to put the dharma where my mouth is — no more ignoring reality. I’m not a kid, but I’ve got one, a rock ’n’ roll kid who, like her dad, loves Joan Jett and would go positively ape-shit hearing “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” live for the first time.
Aside from Jett, there are a handful of other acts confirmed or rumored to be playing Warped who are actually worth checking out. Duane Peters’s band Die Hunns is performing, despite his vow to “never play that fuckin’ thing again,” and you know that’s got to be good — the Master of Disaster has no off switch, and his wife, Corey Parks, is a surgically augmented, tattooed, fire-breathing rock Valkyrie.
Peters told me that the Buzzcocks are playing, though I’ve yet to see it in print. They’re probably on a tiny stage in the back, next to the generator truck, the burrito shack, and the roadie break room. You know, where the good artists play. Artists like Mike Watt, God of the Thunderbroom and flannel-flying Pedro (that’s Pee-dro to you, youngster) good guy. And despite how bored you may be with lowbrow prankster punks turned political activists NOFX — the last time I saw them was at the Stone in ’86 — they are guaranteed to be entertaining.
Finally, the Warped tour features some bad-ass BMXers and skaters. I’m not really sure who, as finding a list of the athletes on the tour is harder than finding a complete band list. I will say that Vans sponsors skaters like flowmaster Tony Trujillo and tech king Bucky Lasek, as well as BMX wunderkinder Ryan Guettler and Scotty Cranmer, who can both do front flips 10 feet out of a spine, so it’d be worth it to go on the chance of seeing one of those guys. There’s bound to be enough wheeled heroics and side-stage real rock action that even a crotchety parental type like myself can get something out of the whole fandango. And that’s what I’m gonna do, 5-year-old daughter and 10-year-old niece in tow. Long live the new breed. SFBG
VANS WARPED TOUR 2006
Sat/8, 11 a.m.
Piers 30 and 32, SF
$29.99
(415) 421-TIXS
www.warpedtour.com
Personal surveillance etiquette
> trace@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION In an alternate universe, the National Security Agency’s database of every telephone call made over the past five years in the United States is being used in couples counseling sessions to prove that some guy really did say that mean thing his boyfriend says he said. But in this universe, where the government spies on you rather than keeping couples from breaking up over stupid shit, we must rely on our personal phone surveillance logs to preserve social connectedness.
That’s why I’ve been having an etiquette crisis about my smart phone. It’s a Treo 650, the kind that holds a zillion numbers in memory and can therefore identify anybody calling me who has called before. It’s like a just-in-time call-tracing system. Even when people try to block their numbers, I can often tell who they are based on how the block looks. One colleague’s blocked caller ID always pops up as “4321” and another as “9999999.” My phone also maintains a fairly extensive log of who has called me, so I can browse through my own personal phone records for the past year and a half to figure out names, numbers, and times called.
As more people acquire similar phones, I become increasingly alarmed by all this record keeping — not so much because of the mini-NSA feelings engendered, but because I’m not sure what the social rules around it are. For example, I can now be fairly certain that if I call a friend or colleague’s cell phone, they’ll know it’s me before they answer. Even creepier, they’ll know I called, and when, even if I don’t choose to leave a message. And they know that I know the same things about them when they call. Thence comes my etiquette crisis.
You see, the whole practice of calling and hanging up without leaving a message has taken on a new meaning. Calling and hanging up is no longer really an option — even if you do hang up, a record of your actions lingers on. And there’s no benefit in terms of stopping cranks or fraudsters here because caller ID is easy to fake or block. There are at least a dozen services that help you spoof the number on your phone so it looks as if you’re calling from 6969696 or whatever. So this is really only an issue for the casual phone caller who isn’t energetically paranoid enough to go through the trouble of altering her phone number.
All this is an elaborate explanation for why I stood in the street the other day, staring at a missed-call notice on my phone and wondering if the person who called intended for me to call him back. He hadn’t left a message, but then again, he didn’t need to — he’s a pretty tech-savvy person and would certainly have anticipated that I would know he called and precisely when. Was it like a “call me but not urgently”? Was it just a transient sort of request, like an invite to lunch that would time out by the time I got a message, so he didn’t bother leaving one? (In that case, I thought to myself, I really didn’t need to call him back.) Or was it some new form of passive-aggressiveness, in which my decision whether or not to call him back based on the call trace became the measure of my loyalty to our friendship?
Charlie, who watched me staring at my phone, opined that I didn’t have to call the person back. But then I reminded her of a spat we’d had where she cited my cell phone log, saying she could prove that she’d called 10 times before I called back. She conceded, “Well, you should always call me back if I don’t leave a message, but nobody else.”
This seemed to me an awfully arbitrary rule. Miss Manners would be indignant.
Caller ID is causing a politeness aporia in my life. I suspect this is because surveillance and etiquette are both tools that help us monitor and control what everybody around us is doing. Of course, no matter how stringent the etiquette enforcers are, we still have a choice about how and when we choose to adhere to their little rules. With surveillance, there is no choice.
And, in case you’re wondering: No, I didn’t return the phone call. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has a record of every time you called her since late 2004.
Turfing the Web
ONLINE Recording and computer engineer Damon Todd is perhaps best known as the producer of "Sick Wid It," a song from B-Legit’s Block Movement (Sick Wid It, 2005). Since January, however, with the launch of the social networking site Townturf.com, the young entrepreneur has been hard at work becoming Oakland’s own Tom Anderson. Todd wears many hats in the fledging company, as the site’s cofounder, CFO, chief programmer, administrator, and all-around tech guy, supported by a single silent partner and a staff of four high school interns. Yet membership in the site has already grown to 1,300 on the strength of a two-pronged marketing campaign: a few locally programmed ads on cable stations like BET, E!, and Spike! and a vigorous effort by the interns to get their friends signed up for the free service, which offers the array of features (homepage, e-mail, music and photo uploads, blog) familiar to users of MySpace and other such sites.
"I thought the Bay Area needed its own social network for individuals who fall within the urban demographic," Todd says. "Its social network needs to be a reflection of the actual community for which it exists. The plan is to help people spread awareness about what they’ve got going on here in the Bay Area. With the hyphy movement, there’s a lot of people taking an interest in what’s going on. They can come to Townturf and see what’s happening."
This cultivation of a virtual community rooted in a specific locality may seem at variance with the original "worldwide" associations of the Web. But the Web is worldwide only if you can get on it, and the needs of inner-city users with less-than-optimal access and equipment are seldom considered by site developers. Evoking Oakland hip-hop’s familiar green-street-sign aesthetic in its name and look — the "Town" being synonymous with Oakland — Townturf eschews the latest round of dial-up-crashing flash animation ads in favor of a lo-fi, user-friendly format.
Moreover, in contrast to the April 3 Newsweek cover story on "Web 2.0," which gushed that MySpace and other user content–driven sites represent "the great migration of everyday experience to the Internet," Townturf acknowledges the primacy of real-life motivations for online activity. Sometimes virtual friends aren’t enough: A collection of acquaintances from all over the world, no matter how many interests you share, doesn’t compare to the best bud who is still willing to go to the show with you because you’re best buds.
Similarly, for musicians using such sites to promote their work, there’s no substitute for a local fan base that’ll turn out to see them perform. In its emphasis on the local — and with plans to include event promotion, ticket sales, and a newsletter — Townturf seeks to combine the real-world practicality of Craigslist with the networking ease of MySpace. SFBG
www.townturf.com
Going low-tech
› naturesucks@techsploitation.com
TECHSPLOITATION I had the urge to be low-tech, so I spent a day walking across Manhattan. If you believe that culture is the new nature, my trek was roughly equivalent to an amble through the forest. I bought a bagel and lox at Zabar’s, stuck my earbuds in on the corner of Broadway and West 80th Street, and headed south. Surely a Neanderthal could have had this same experience munching on meat and humming to herself as she wandered through Europe 42,000 years ago.
The Upper West Side — bounded by Central Park on one side and Riverside Park on the other — is actually full of old-school traditional nature. There are trees and slightly stinky bodies of water and birds. I know there’s supposed to be some dramatic cultural difference between the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, but I think my relentlessly Californian senses prevent me from discerning what it is. Both sides of the park are full of well-maintained residences, doctors’ offices, corner stores built in the 1950s, and nannies ambling with baby strollers.
Exiting the park’s south side is pretty much like walking into a really dirty waterfall next to sharp rocks. In fact, scratch that — traditional nature has no metaphors adequate to describe the sheer human hell of this place. Its dense cultural outcroppings and vortices stretch at least to 40th Street below Times Square and create the sensation of being in a crowd that’s just on the verge of rioting in response to a piece of entertainment. This is very different from being in a crowd whose protoviolence is prompted by a desire for food or political freedom.
At the heart of Times Square I made a left and detoured briefly into the Condé Nast building to visit one of my editors. Four Times Square is one of the only high-rise office buildings in Manhattan constructed from eco-friendly materials. Supposedly the windows are specially made to maintain a moderate temperature, and air ducts keep fresh air circuutf8g through the place. I couldn’t really tell whether the building felt any "healthier" than, say, one of the scary buildings near Penn Plaza where I once interviewed a bunch of guys in suits. But it was amusing to try to identify which people in the elevator worked for Vogue and which worked for the New Yorker. After eating a genetically engineered banana with my editor among the translucent plastic structures that bloom like gigantic flowers all over the Condé Nast lunchroom, I returned to Broadway.
I slowed down when I hit 30th Street, moving through each neighborhood and watching the population change gradually the way I would watch a beach becoming forest if I were hiking on the California coast. The closer you get to Union Square Park near 12th Street, the more you start seeing young hipsters and frenetic middle-class people with bags of groceries. Continuing south, I skirted the edge of Greenwich Village and scooted past New York University, where everybody has floppy hair and Converse sneakers and jeans with stitching on the pockets.
Everyone got older and richer briefly in SoHo, but that group dissipated quickly around Canal Street. On Canal it was impossible for me not to examine at least four or five unlicensed pieces of trademarked and copyrighted media. People stuck handfuls of pirated DVDs under my nose; street vendors sold knockoff Hello Kitty and Gucci. If only this crowd could slake the thirst of those protorioters in Times Square, I don’t think we’d have any violence.
The buildings got taller and the air between them colder as I approached the downtown financial district. People in suits with whimsical ties almost distracted me from my favorite part of Broadway downtown: the enormous brass bull statue near Wall Street that celebrates the crude joys of financial power. I never get tired of looking at its huge balls, which hang in remarkably realistic detail between its raised tail and abstract cock. Capitalists have never been a shy bunch, nor do they have any difficulty finding metaphors from nature to explain their peculiar form of culture.
And then, at last, I was at the Staten Island ferry, which brought me to the one place where Manhattanites fear to tread. SFBG
Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who isn’t afraid of Staten Island.
Transjobless
tali@sfbg.com
In the transgender community, to have full-time work is to be in the minority. In fact, a new survey of 194 trans people conducted by the Transgender Law Center (TLC), with support from the Guardian, found that only one out of every four respondents has a full-time job. Another 16 percent work part-time.
What’s more, 59 percent of respondents reported an annual salary of less than $15,333. Only 4 percent reported making more than $61,200, which is about the median income in the Bay Area.
In other words, more than half of local transgender people live in poverty, and 96 percent earn less than the median income. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that 40 percent of those surveyed don’t even have a bank account.
TLC doesn’t claim the study is strictly scientific — all respondents were identified through trans organizations or outreach workers. But the data give a fairly good picture of how hard it is for transgender people to find and keep decent jobs, even in the city that is supposed to be most accepting of them.
It’s been more than a decade since San Francisco expanded local nondiscrimination laws to cover trans people, but transphobic discrimination remains rampant. Fifty-seven percent of survey respondents said they’ve experienced some form of employment discrimination.
And interviews show that job woes are hardly straightforward.
Navigating the job-application process after a gender transition can be extraordinarily difficult. Trans people run up against fairly entrenched biases about what kind of work they’re suited for. Sometimes those who are lucky enough to find work can’t tolerate insensitive, or even abusive, coworkers.
Marilyn Robinson turned tricks for almost 20 years before she decided to look for legal employment. She got her GED and, eventually, a job at an insurance company. The first six months went OK, but then a supervisor "thought he had the right to call me RuPaul," she told us. "And I look nothing like RuPaul." Suddenly the women in the office refused to use the bathroom if Robinson was around. She left within a month.
Once again, Robinson was on the job hunt. She interviewed for a receptionist position, and thought it went well. But on her way out, she saw the interviewer toss her application into the trash with a giggle.
"The reality is, even a hoagie shop in the Castro — they might not hire you," she said.
Still, many activists say the increased attention being paid to trans employment issues is promising.
Cecelia Chung from the Transgender Law Center told us there’s a "silver lining" in the effort the "community is putting into really changing the playing field. We’re in a really different place than we were five years ago."
Activists say true progress will require broad education efforts and the cooperation of business owners throughout the Bay Area. But the project is well under way, with San Francisco Transgender Empowerment, Advocacy and Mentorship, a trans collaborative, hosting its second annual Transgender Job Fair March 22. More than a dozen employers have signed up for the fair, including UCSF, Goodwill Industries, and Bank of America.
HURDLES
Imagine trying to find a job with no references from previous employers. Now envision how it might feel to have interviewer after interviewer look at you askance — or even ask if you’ve had surgery on a fairly private part of your body.
These are just a couple of the predicaments trans job-seekers face.
Kenneth Stram runs the Economic Development Office at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center. "In San Francisco there are the best intentions," he told us. "But when you scratch the surface, there are all these procedural hurdles that need to be addressed." As examples, he pointed to job-training classes where fellow students may act hostile, or arduous application processes.
Giving a prospective employer a reference may seem like a fairly straightforward task, but what if your old employer knew an employee of a different gender? Do you call the old boss and announce your new identity? Even if he or she is supportive, experience can be hard to erase. Will the manager who worked with Jim be able to speak convincingly about Jeanine? And what about your work history — should you eliminate the jobs where you were known as a different gender?
Most trans people can’t make it through the application process without either outing themselves or lying.
Marcus Arana decided to face this issue head-on and wrote about his transition from living as a woman to living as a man in his cover letter.
"It became a matter of curiosity," Arana told us. "I would have employers ask about my surgical status."
It took him a year and a half to find a job. Fortunately, it’s one he loves. Arana investigates most complaints of gender identity–related discrimination that are made to San Francisco’s city government. (Another investigator handles housing-oriented complaints.)
When he started his job, in 2000, about three quarters of the complaints Arana saw were related to public accommodations — a transwoman had been refused service at a restaurant, say, or a bank employee had given a cross-dressing man grief about the gender listed on his driver’s license.
Today, Arana told us, at least half of the cases he looks into are work-related — something he attributes to both progress in accommodations issues and stagnation on the job front.
TG workers, he said, confront two common problems: resistance to a changed name or pronoun preference and controversy over which bathroom they use.
The name and pronoun problems can often be addressed through sensitivity training, though Arana said that even in the Bay Area, it’s not unheard of for some coworkers to simply refuse to alter how they refer to a trans colleague.
Nine out of ten bathroom issues concern male-to-female trans folk — despite the fact that the police department has never gotten a single report of a transwoman harassing another person in a bathroom. One complaint Arana investigated involved a woman sticking a compact mirror under a bathroom stall in an effort to see her trans coworker’s genitalia.
But a hostile workplace is more often made up of dozens of subtle discomforts rather than a single drama-filled incident.
Robinson told us the constant whispering of "is that a man?" can make an otherwise decent job intolerable: "It’s why most of the girls — and I will speak for myself — are prostitutes. Because it’s easier."
The second and third most common forms of work-related discrimination cited by respondents in the TLC survey were sexual harassment and verbal harassment.
But only 12 percent of those who reported discrimination also filed some kind of formal complaint. That may be because of the widespread feeling that doing so can make it that much harder to keep a job — or find another one. Mara Keisling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, in Washington, DC, said that "it’s a common understanding within the transgender community that when you lose your job, you generally lose your career."
ANOTHER KIND OF GLASS CEILING
Most of the trans people we spoke to expressed resentment at being tracked into certain jobs — usually related to health care or government.
Part of that is because public entities have been quicker to adopt nondiscriminatory policies. San Francisco city government created a splash in 2001 when it granted trans employees access to full health benefits, including sex-reassignment surgery. The University of California followed suit last year.
But it’s also because of deeply ingrained prejudices about what kind of work transgender people are suited to.
Claudia Cabrera was born in Guatemala but fled to the Bay Area in 2000 to get away from the constant insults and occasional violence that befell her. Despite her education in electrical engineering and business and 13 years of tech work, it was difficult for her to find a job — even after she was granted political asylum. In 2002 a local nonprofit she had originally turned to for help offered her a position doing outreach within the queer community.
Cabrera doesn’t make much money, and she sends some of it back to her two kids in Guatemala. But that’s not the only reason she would like another job. She wants to have broader responsibilities and to employ her tech savvy.
"There is a stereotype here in San Francisco [that] transgender folk are only good for doing HIV work — or just outreach in general," she said.
Whenever she’s gotten an interview for another kind of job, she’s been told she is overqualified. Does she believe that’s why she hasn’t been hired? "No," she laughed. But she also acknowledged, "Even though there is discrimination going on here, this is the safest city for me to be in."
Cabrera is now on the board of TLC and is working to create more job opportunities for herself and others in the trans community. She often repeats this mantra: "As a transsexual woman, I am not asking for anything that doesn’t belong to me. I am demanding my rights to live as a human being." *
TRANSGENDER JOB FAIR
March 22
1–4 p.m.
SF LGBT Community Center, Ceremonial Room
1800 Market, SF
(415) 865-5555
Class act
With a new full-length on storied UK label Beggars Banquet in their present and a European tour with the National in their recent past, Bay Area band Film School might be assumed to have the world on a guitar string. But think again.
When I last spoke to them two years ago, founder-vocalist-guitarist Krayg Burton was bemoaning his broke state to guitarist-vocalist Nyles Lannon, beneath the posters of Malcolm "By Any Means Necessary" X and the other righteous underdogs at Café Macondo. Film School’s last recording, the EP Alwaysnever (Amazing Grease) had just come out, the tech bubble had burst, and the world was wide open, leaving Burton and Lannon to hawk their Web-related skills on their own.
Now here we are, in early January, tucked into the lamp-lit control room of drummer Donny Newenhouse’s Middle of the Mile basement studio in San Francisco’s Mission District, where Film School recorded about half of the new self-titled second album. The band has been awarded the gift-of-gab buzz at recent SXSWs, praised by NME, and described by BBC 6 host Steve Lemaq as his favorite new band. Next-level stuff. Now if only they can decide how best to approach a set list.
"We fight about the set list every night, every show," the laid-back Newenhouse says from behind the mixing board. He’s the A/V guy of Film School, according to his bandmates. "It’s like the A team – we’re pretty cool, unified, but …"
"We write the set list five minutes before we go on," interjects keyboardist Jason Ruck, Film School’s class clown. So there’s no room for dissention? "But then there is dissention, and we’re discussing it onstage when we’re supposed to be playing. That actually happened once in front of our label head." He looks pleased.
"It kind of ties into going to the next level," bassist Justin LaBo says, curled catlike in an easy chair in the corner. He’s the guy most likely to be expelled from Film School. "Not being, like, I don’t want to say, amateurs or rookies, but having your shit together, being confident and walking onstage knowing what you’re going to play, and not arguing onstage."
You’d be more pro and more polished, but perhaps less … interesting, I offer from the center of the Middle of the Mile booth. "That’s been the argument the whole time," Newenhouse exclaims, miming an irate bandmate. "<\!q>’I don’t want to be one of those fucking bands that has the same set every night and knows what they’re doing when they get onstage!'<\!q>"
"I kind of like winging it a bit," Burton mutters, the "tenured teacher with the vodka in the coffee cup" at this Film School.
"I want to have a rotating set list, written in stone," Newenhouse continues, half-self-mockingly pretending to carry stone tablets engraved with songs to a stage. "<\!q>’Here’s the 10 commandments’ – straight down from the dressing room every night. It’ll be like Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge – we can have midgets dance around them."
Spitballs aside, it’s comforting to know that some things never quite change – be it Film School’s collective, self-deprecating sense of humor or their honest, exploratory doubts – even as one chapter ends and the band appears to be on the brink of graduating into some sort of big time.
GENUINELY GORGEOUS
At first listen, the new Film School is almost off-puttingly polished: It’s one of the best-sounding self-produced, headphones-only albums by a local band I’ve heard of late, blending the poppier hook-and-groove singles-craft of "On and On" and the elastic, massive, 4AD-ish groove of "Pitfalls" with gorgeous wall-of-psych longer pieces such as the airy, multitextured, Floyd-drenched "He’s a Deep Deep Lake," and "11:11," which moves from an almost early U2-like twitch into glitched-up drone before finally ascending into a dervish of guitar noise.
The mixture of tones was deliberate. "We actually value a record that comes from different directions and has a different sound here and there, as long as it’s cohesive, and we spent a lot of time trying to make it cohesive," wise man on campus Lannon says, sprawled in a lounger. "The record actually has, I think, a unique flow to it. It kind of takes you on this ride."
Just don’t call them "shoegazer." "We just like [My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless] because it’s really textured and spacey, not because it’s guys in bowl cuts staring at their shoes," LaBo gripes.
LONG TIME COMING
Much like their six-minute singles, it took a while to get to Film School. The band that began in 2001 as a live ensemble charged with playing ex-Pinq member Burton’s first Film School self-released album, Brilliant Career, has since become a full-fledged collaborative entity, with plenty of production experience courtesy of Lannon, LaBo, and longtime Bottom of the Hill soundperson Newenhouse (who replaced Ben Montesano in Film School when the latter got married about a year ago). Lannon has worked as Azusa Plane and N.Lannon, LaBo has recorded as Technicolor, and Newenhouse has drummed with Holly Golightly and Hammerdown Turpentine.
They started working on Film School in 2004, turning to three different producers before finally deciding to do it themselves in Newenhouse’s studio, where they cut five newer songs and mixed in older dreamier material recorded in Lannon’s bedroom.
"We actually wasted six month’s worth of time on one song," Newenhouse says. "That was a real drag. Technically, it was difficult. I think [the producer’s] idea of what he wanted it to sound like didn’t really mesh with ours. That’s when we realized we should just do this ourselves."
"I haven’t been back here since we recorded," Burton marvels from the corner, a stocking cap pulled over his ears. "I’m starting to remember those eight-hour days, looking round here – it’s like, oh god."
Since the album spans such a long period, one wouldn’t expect the songs to have much in common with each other, though Burton swears they do: "Maybe there’s a little bit of a theme about trying to move forward and feeling a little stuck." And perhaps that has something to do with the long, drawn-out making of Film School? "Maybe!" he says. "I think it might be just getting older and trying to make those next steps in life."
Beggars Banquet first made contact with Film School’s manager two years ago when the band played with TV on the Radio in the UK. It took about a year of e-mails and talk before a deal was struck, around the time when the album was completed. "It took basically all of last year until the dust settled," Lannon says. "Is it even settled yet? I don’t even know. On this last tour we were like OK, it’s official, right? We’re spending money, this advance. I think once the money is in your account, the thing is really happening."
"It’s weird to be working with a label that isn’t worried about going out of business. Not having this dark cloud over you the whole time," Lannon continues, mimicking an imaginary imprint. "<\!q>’Urrrrr, rock music. Records just don’t sell like they used to.’ That’s every other label we talked to. It’s just a recurring theme that you hear as a person in the indie rock world. Every label you talk to has that, starts with that ‘Feel sorry for me, I’m a label’ sob story. But Beggars has figured it out; they’ve been around for a while – it’s a nice situation."
"We can exhale a little," Burton adds gently.
"Now we just have to play well every night!" Ruck cracks.
FILM SCHOOL Jan. 26, 6 p.m. Amoeba Music 1855 Haight, SF Free (415) 831-1200 With Sound Team and Citizens Here and Abroad Jan. 26, 9 p.m. Bottom of the Hill 1233 17th St., SF $10 (415) 474-0365
‘Winner’ takes all
IF YOU CONSIDER it amazing that New York Times best-selling author Augusten Burroughs was able to maintain a lucrative job in advertising while consuming enough alcohol nightly to poison a small town (see the opening pages of Dry), consider the talents of Evelyn Ryan, who, through the ’50s and ’60s, not only supplied America’s merchants with enough advertising jingles to last the century but also raised a family of 10 while avoiding the wrath of a husband who also consumed enough alcohol nightly to poison his own small town. Unlike Burroughs, Ryan never really did get rich off her advertising campaigns – she won just enough prize money to keep her family fed and housed, and her husband never quite made it into rehab. But her daughter, Terry Ryan, did write a winning memoir about her mother’s startling and subversive stay-at-home career conquering the jingle contests popular at the time. And this weekend Ryan’s memoir hits its own jackpot, as the Jane Anderson-directed film of the book, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, opens. Anderson (the TV director of Normal, as well as the 1961 segment of If These Walls Could Talk and When Billy Beat Bobby) turns the perky pre-post-feminist into a model of good-humored heroism.
The leaf doesn’t fall far from the tree. Despite her recent diagnosis with stage-four cancer, Terry Ryan, a tech writer and cartoonist who lives in Noe Valley with her longtime partner, Pat Holt, former book review editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, amiably entertained journalists from a room at the Ritz-Carlton a few weeks back. She said she was incredibly happy with the film, though she can barely remember it; she says she was too amazed by Julianne Moore’s re-creation of her mother to concentrate. The most difficult aspect of the whole project, she says, was the death of her mother, which led to the discovery of the vast jingle archive she used for her memoir research. In her papers, Terry Ryan also found evidence of her mother’s real poetry – witty rejoinders to poems by the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay – as well as the rhymes that paid the milkman and the mortgage, like "For chewy, toothsome, wholesome goodness / Tootsie Rolls are right – / Lots of nibbling for a nickel / And they show me where to bite."
Like her resourceful mother, the younger Ryan is also a poet (published), and, following in family tradition, she too found her way to the contesting world. One of her most memorable wins? A Bay Guardian cartoon contest more than 25 years ago. (Susan Gerhard)
‘The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio’ opens Fri/30 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in film listings, for showtimes.