Volumes Archives — Page 352 of 431 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Fix Newsom’s bad budget

June 26, 2007

EDITORIAL Annual budgets can seem wonky and impenetrable, but they’re perhaps the most important statements of a city’s values and priorities. That’s why it’s critically important for the Board of Supervisors to make significant changes to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed $6 billion spending plan, which is out of step with what San Francisco should be about.

Ideally, this month’s budget hearings would be informed by an honest and open discussion of what Newsom proposed in his June 1 budget, how it affects residents and Newsom’s political interests, and where the board might want to make some changes.

Unfortunately, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner have failed to offer a substantial analysis of the budget; instead, they’ve focused on sensational headlines about whether the mayor has used cocaine, personality conflicts between Newsom and Sup. Chris Daly (including a pair of over-the-top hit pieces on Daly in the June 23 Chron), and misleading spin coming from Newsom’s office and reelection campaign.

But there’s plenty of good budget analysis out there, thanks to the work of city agencies such as the Controller’s Office and the Board of Supervisors’ Budget Analyst Office, nonprofits like the People’s Budget Coalition, smart citizens like Marc Salomon, and reporting by the Guardian‘s Sarah Phelan ("The Budget’s Opening Battle," 6/20/07) and Chris Albon ("Newsom Cuts Poverty Programs," 6/20/07).

What that analysis shows is that the mayor’s much-ballyhooed "back-to-basics" budget — which prioritizes public safety, cityscape improvements, home ownership programs, and pet projects such as Project Homeless Connect — would make unconscionable cuts to essential social services and affordable housing programs, rely way too much on gimmicks and private capital to address public needs, and offer almost nothing that is innovative or befitting a progressive city at a crucial point in history.

Some specific examples and recommendations:

• Newsom’s 4 percent cut in the Department of Public Health budget — which his appointed Health Commission took the unusual step of refusing to implement because the fat has already been trimmed away in previous budgets — is unacceptable. It would slash substance abuse treatment, homeless and HIV/AIDs services, and other programs that would simply be unavailable if the city didn’t fund them. The board should fully restore that funding and even consider providing seed money for innovative new programs that would help lift people out of poverty. Only after the city fully meets the needs of its most vulnerable citizens should it consider cosmetic fixes like expanded street cleaning.

• The budget should strike a balance on cityscape improvements that is lacking now. Contrary to the alternative budget proposed by Daly, which would have cut the $6.6 million that Newsom proposed for street improvements, we agree with the SF Bicycle Coalition that many streets are dangerous and in need of repair. It’s a public health and safety issue when cars and bikes need to swerve around potholes. But the $2.9 million in sidewalk improvements could probably be scaled back to just deal with accessibility issues rather than cosmetic concerns. And we don’t agree with Newsom’s plan to add 100 blocks and $2.1 million to the Corridors street-cleaning program, which already wastes far too much money, water, chemicals, and other resources.

• As we mentioned last week ("More Cops Aren’t Enough," 6/20/07), the police budget doesn’t need the extra $33 million that Newsom is proposing, at least not until he’s willing to facilitate a public discussion about the San Francisco Police Department’s mission and lack of accountability. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi (a progressive who is strong on public safety and even clashed with Daly over the issue) was right to recently challenge the terrible contract that Newsom negotiated with the cops, which gives them a 25 percent pay increase and asks almost nothing in return.

• Newsom’s housing budget would move about $50 million from renter and affordable-housing programs into initiatives promoting home ownership, which is just not a realistic option for most residents and represents a shift in city priorities that serves developers more than citizens. Some of that change is specific to a couple of big owner-occupied yet fairly affordable projects in the pipeline for next year, but the budget also does little to address the fact that we are steadily losing ground in meeting the goal in the General Plan’s Housing Element of making 62 percent of new housing affordable to most residents, when we should be expanding these programs by at least the $28 million that the board approved but Newsom rejected. Similarly, the board should keep pushing the Housing Authority to apply for federal Hope VI funds to make needed improvements to the public housing projects rather than supporting Newsom’s Hope SF, which purports to magically turn a $5 million expenditure into $700 million in housing — as long as we accept the devil’s bargain of 700 to 900 market-rate condos along with the public housing units.

• Finally, there are lots of little items in Newsom’s budget that could be cut to find funding for more important city priorities. Don’t give him $1.1 million to hassle the homeless in Golden Gate Park or $700,000 for his New York–style community court in the Tenderloin.

The bottom line is that a progressive city should not be pandering to the cops, punishing the poor, and polishing up its streets when so many of its citizens are struggling just to find shelter and make it to the next month. Newsom has forgotten about the ideals that the Democratic Party once embraced, but it’s not too late for the Board of Supervisors to correct that mistake. *

Crazy

June 26, 2007

› news@sfbg.com

Shortly before midnight on April 21, 2001, Jason Grant Garza walked into the psychiatric wing of San Francisco General’s emergency room and said he was having a mental health crisis. A staffer there refused to admit him. When Garza insisted on seeing a doctor, he wound up strip-searched and thrown into jail. Now, after six years of legal wrangling and bureaucratic buck-passing, SF General has officially conceded that Garza was denied proper service. But Garza says he is still waiting for the help he needs and the justice he demands.

As I sat across from Garza on a recent afternoon, it wasn’t hard to imagine a busy hospital worker or government official blowing him off rather than dealing with his frenetic energy. Diagnosed with a so-called "adjustment disorder," Garza was intense, to say the least. Running his hands through his wiry, gray-streaked hair and leaning over the table as he spoke, the 47-year-old Panhandle-area resident railed against "the system" for well over an hour. At one point, he likened his suffering to that of "a starving kid in Africa … [except] the starving kid in Africa still has hope. I have none of that."

Garza’s ire and his penchant for hyperbole might be exasperating at times, but his behavior also seems to bolster his main contention — that he needs help with his mental health, help that he claims a flawed public health care apparatus has failed to provide. He says his attempts to receive care and support have only exacerbated his condition, increasing his isolation and his sense of persecution. "I’m dead right," he said repeatedly. "And yet I’ve gotten nothing for it."

Garza declined to recount specific details of his story or be photographed. Instead, he referred the Guardian to a 2003 deposition he gave to deputy city attorney Scott Burrell. According to the deposition, his ordeal began shortly after his lover and "soulmate" killed himself in January 2001. That April, Garza became despondent over his loss and called a suicide hotline. The phone counselor directed him to visit SF General’s Psychiatric Emergency Services.

Garza took a cab to SF General and told PES charge nurse Paul Lewis that he was "wigging out" and badly needed to see a doctor. According to Garza’s deposition and other court documents obtained by the Guardian, Lewis asked him if he was suicidal. Garza is quoted in his deposition as responding, "If I was crossing the street and fell, I don’t know if I’d get up." Lewis determined that this answer meant Garza was not suicidal and thus not in need of emergency care. He asked Garza to leave. When Garza refused, the hospital’s institutional police escorted him out.

Garza did eventually get into the hospital that night, but not in the way he was hoping. After he was ejected from the premises, he stole back into the main lobby and called city police to help him receive treatment. But hospital cops returned instead and stuck him in a holding room. Sheriff’s deputies arrived four hours later, early in the morning of April 22. They arrested Garza for trespassing and possession of marijuana, even though he had a prescription for medical cannabis in his wallet.

At the city jail, Garza finally got someone to acknowledge that he was experiencing a psychiatric emergency. He says he told jail staffers that he "didn’t care if he lived or if he died," and as a result, he was stripped of his clothes and placed naked in a cell for his own safety. "That nurse [at the jail] classified me as an emergency," Garza told us. "So one says I’m in an emergency, and the other [at SF General] says I’m not…. At what point am I going to get any help?"

To recap: When Garza voluntarily tried to find care, he was told he was not sufficiently distressed. Only when he was arrested and thrown into jail for demanding help was he declared a danger to himself. His "treatment" consisted of a strip search and a jail cell.

But that’s only the beginning of the insanity.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act was passed in 1986 to prevent hospitals from triaging out, or dumping, difficult or impoverished emergency room patients like Garza, a former business owner, cabdriver, and bookkeeper who has been on Social Security disability since 1995. EMTALA mandates that any patient who goes to an ER must be given an "appropriate medical screening examination." After he got out of jail, Garza sued the city, SF General, Lewis, and other city employees, contending they violated his rights under the act. He could not afford a lawyer, so he represented himself.

In one of the strangest twists of this twisted tale, Garza finally made it into the inner sanctum of SF General’s PES as a result of his suit against the city. But as with his night in jail, the circumstances of his psychiatric care were not what he was expecting.

While Garza was giving a deposition at the City Attorney’s Office in March 2003, his behavior prompted staffers to call in the authorities. According to an official report of the incident, Garza made suicidal remarks like "I have no desire to live." He also allegedly said that he "needed/wanted bullets and a gun." These statements are not present in the 168-page deposition. Garza did acknowledge to the Guardian that he became upset that day, especially when questioned about his experiences at SF General and the suicide of his lover, but he claimed that deputy city attorney Burrell "set him up" and that the calls to the mobile crisis unit and police were part of "an attempt at witness intimidation." Whatever the reason for the calls, Garza was detained for a 5150, a procedure under which subjects are involuntarily committed for up to 72 hours. The City Attorney’s Office had no comment on the issue.

Amazingly, police took Garza to the same PES department at SF General where the saga began. This time, though, he made it past the lobby and received a medical screening exam, marked by a report and other SF General paperwork. The mere fact of this report’s existence, Garza claims, proves that he did not receive proper care when he went to the hospital voluntarily in 2001. Deputy city attorney Burrell informed Garza by letter that the only record the hospital could produce from his 2001 visit was a triage report filled out by Lewis, the nurse. EMTALA does not permit triage of a patient without a subsequent medical screening examination.

However, in pretrial motions, the city argued that Lewis treated Garza like any other would-be patient and thus complied with the law: "EMTALA requires hospitals to provide a screening examination that is comparable to that offered to other patients with similar symptoms." In other words, Garza’s treatment may have been poor, but so was everyone else’s, so he had no case, the city contended. Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton agreed and tossed out the suit.

Perhaps the strongest proof of Garza’s "adjustment disorder" and need for psychiatric care, ironically, is the fact that he continued to press his case even after his lawsuit was tossed out, taking on a health care system that could make anyone feel unhinged. For the past six years, he says, he has badgered "10 to 15" local, state, and federal agencies, as well as government officials like Sup. Bevan Dufty and aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco). In the process, he has compiled an encyclopedic collection of letters, petitions, records, and even audiotapes of phone conversations.

"There isn’t a single agency that’s in charge of anything," Garza said of his dealings with the health care bureaucracy. "You’re parsed. You’re sliced and diced and parsed as a medical patient … and it’s designed to fail."

Not surprisingly, Garza’s efforts to find accountability have irked some officials and members of the bureaucratic corps. When he requested a copy of his arrest report from the Sheriff’s Department, he received a mocking denial letter signed "R.N. Ratched," a reference to the asylum nurse in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As the Guardian reported in 2002, Sheriff’s Department legal counsel Jim Harrigan eventually confessed to penning the letter, but only after Garza raised a fuss before the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

At Garza’s urging, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) asked the California Department of Health Services to investigate his treatment at SF General. In a letter dated Nov. 13, 2006, CMS official Steven Chickering informed Garza that the DHS "found no violation of statue [sic] or regulations." Chickering concluded his letter to Garza by warning him to back off. "Your frequent communications have become disruptive, distracting, and nonproductive. Therefore I have instructed CMS Regional Office staff not to accept telephone calls from you in this matter."

Despite his setbacks with the CMS and other agencies, Garza pressed on. He contacted the Office of Inspector General at the federal Department of Health and Human Services and asked it for help. OIG spokesperson Donald White declined to discuss specific details of Garza’s case, but he did tell the Guardian that "Mr. Garza came to [the OIG] directly, and we contacted CMS, and they conducted another investigation."

That second investigation found an EMTALA violation after all.

On April 19, Garza’s relentless — some might say quixotic or even crazy — pursuit of what he calls the truth finally produced some results. Nearly six years to the day after his 2001 visit to SF General’s PES, hospital officials inked a settlement agreement with the OIG in which SF General conceded that Garza had not been examined properly, a violation of section 1867(e)(1) of EMTALA. Section 6 of the settlement states plainly that the hospital "did not provide [Garza] with an appropriate medical screening examination on April 22, 2001."

The hospital agreed to pay a fine of $5,000. But Garza, as White told us, "is not a party to the settlement." In other words, he got nothing.

"That’s the way EMTALA works," White said, meaning that hospitals found in violation of the law pay restitution to the government, not to the victim. "We took the steps required under the law."

Reached by phone, Iman Nazeeri-Simmons, SF General’s director of administrative operations, acknowledged that hospital officials signed the settlement agreement but noted that in the course of the investigation leading up to it, "the state did give us a very thorough EMTALA survey and came out with no problems."

"It has been made clear to Mr. Garza that he is more than welcome to come back and access services here," she added.

Garza denied that he had received any follow-up calls from SF General offering services, and he balked at the idea of returning there: "That’s like sending someone back to the priest that molested them." He told us he would like to pursue further legal action against the hospital and the city but still has not found a lawyer. After the settlement was signed, he claimed, he asked officials at the OIG "where I could go now for legal and medical help, and they told me, ‘That’s not our jurisdiction.’ "

"So even though I’m dead right, I’m still without help because everybody’s pointing fingers … as opposed to getting me the help I need, because they don’t care, they’re unaccountable," Garza said. "Ten different agencies told me I was wrong, and now [with the settlement] I’m right?"

He threw up his hands. "Does that make sense to you?" *

Budget blowback

June 26, 2007

› sarah@sfbg.com

People’s Budget Coalition member Esther Morales says she’s angry that the media obsessed over Sup. Chris Daly’s June 19 comments about whether Mayor Gavin Newsom has honestly addressed allegations that he’s used cocaine yet ignored hours of testimony that hundreds of San Franciscans gave at the very same meeting, a state-mandated hearing on the impact of Newsom’s proposed spending cuts on the city’s neediest populations, including those with drug and alcohol problems.

"There’s been so much press about that hearing, but it’s all been about what’s happening between Sup. Chris Daly and the mayor," Morales said, accurately observing that there has been no coverage by the mainstream media of the addicts who waited for hours that night but only got to talk for two minutes each about how they would have died had it not been for the substance abuse programs that Newsom plans to cut.

Nor has much been written about the folks who pleaded for Buster’s Place, the city’s only all-night homeless shelter, which was to close at the end of June unless the Board of Supervisors saved it from Newsom’s $1.6 million cut. Nor has much mention been made of the organizers from the city’s four single-room occupancy hotel collaboratives that showed up at City Hall a few days earlier to decry Newsom’s proposed $233,000 cut in their combined budgets.

As David Ho of the Chinatown Community Development Center told the Guardian, "These are programs for the poor and for public health, and they are always on the chopping block. The mayor talks about the need to preserve working-class families in the city, and here we are being left out of the budget."

Muna Landers of the Coalition on Homelessness said SRO hotel rooms were originally meant to be single dwellings, but now more than 450 families — 85 percent of whom are immigrants — live in such rooms without bathrooms or kitchens. "When one family moves out, three families move in," Landers said.

Meanwhile, in light of Newsom’s proposal to restore only 50 percent of a $9 million federal cut in San Francisco’s HIV/AIDS programs, San Francisco AIDS Housing Alliance director Brian Basinger accused the mayor of "playing bullshit games."

As Morales told us this week, "What’s really behind these fights between Chris and the mayor is the fact that Chris spearheaded the board’s $28 million affordable-housing supplement…. Without Daly’s footwork the $28 million supplemental would not have passed by an 8–3 majority, and the mayor only refused to sign it because it was Chris’s measure."

Morales works with 60 community-based groups as the organizer of the Family Budget Committee, one of seven committees of the People’s Budget Coalition, which unveiled its annual report June 21 on the steps of City Hall. The group values services for those struggling to get by.

"But this mayor’s budget is a law-and-order, streets-and-potholes, increasingly right-wing conservative budget that is not reflective of what San Francisco is about, and it will drive even more families out of town," Morales told us.

Months ago the Family Budget Committee met with the mayor’s staff to ask for a $30 million package of services, part of the People’s Budget Coalition’s $78 million request from the mayor’s record $6.1 billion budget.

"The mayor’s staff talked to us about how dismal the budget year looked, how the firefighters’, the police[‘s], and the nurses’ contracts are up for negotiations, and so they didn’t know how much money they would end up with," Morales recalled.

So the Family Budget Committee whittled down its needs, first to $20 million, then $10 million, and sent those priorities to the Mayor’s Office for consideration. Ultimately, it said, the mayor found just $1.5 million for its priorities, so it turned its attention to the Board of Supervisors.

Since board president Aaron Peskin removed Daly as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee on June 15 and took the reins himself, the body has restored $4 million in HIV/AIDS funding, and much more is on the way. Peskin told us that he intends to significantly change the mayor’s budget, promising more so-called add backs than the board has ever approved.

"It’s all about priorities," Peskin told us. He said Daly "never intended to actually cut" any of the mayor’s top-priority projects when he introduced his motion to slash $37 million from Newsom’s funding plans. It was simply a negotiating tactic that "backfired majorly" when the targeted constituencies rallied against Daly.

Yet board progressives haven’t been derailed by Daly’s actions, as many pundits predicted. At the same meeting at which Daly mentioned cocaine while making a point about substance abuse program cuts, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi led a challenge of Newsom’s proposed San Francisco Police Department contract on the grounds that it would grant cops a 25 percent pay increase but give the city little in return. And there are still eight supervisors who supported Daly’s affordable-housing plan.

Peskin told us, "I’m hopeful that by the end of the week you’ll be able to write that Peskin took the baton that Newsom handed him, and while it may not have been as pretty as we might have liked, I’m hopeful that after reversing cuts to health care and [making the additions requested by] the Family Budget Committee, we’ll even be able to dump money back into low-income, affordable, family, and rental housing." *

Night on Earth

June 26, 2007

Gus van Sant’s films are as thick as the Oregon sky. Swept with dreamy remove and elliptical narration, his work strikes me as being the cinematic equivalent of shoegaze music (sorry, Sofia). Now that the writer-director seems to have given up middlebrow commercial filmmaking (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) to return to the art house (Elephant, Last Days), it feels like the right time for a revival of his shoestring 16mm debut, Mala Noche. Originally released in 1985, the understated story of a scraggly Portland liquor store clerk infatuated with a Mexican street youth is based on poet Walt Curtis’s novella of the same name, with the author’s beat-tinged style re-created in actor Tim Streeter’s affecting, wise voice-over.

Novellas may be easier to adapt than poems, but it’s still important that van Sant is working from a poet’s material, as he possesses a penchant for pure lyricism that puts him in league with Terrance Malick. Mala Noche has the woozy, restless rhythm of hanging around, playing hard to get. A couple of voice-overs on white privilege aside, van Sant’s rendering doesn’t feel like it’s about anything in particular — not inconsequential, considering its chronicling of a gay, biracial love triangle (Streeter’s Walt loves Johnny but ends up sleeping with his friend Roberto). Instead of identity politics, we get longing, laughter, working-class blues, weather. There are dramatic elements here, to be sure — disappearances, lockouts, even death — but they float by, washed out in wistfulness. The narration inevitably sags in places, though John J. Campbell’s low-key black-and-white cinematography is frequently stunning, imbuing van Sant’s handheld close-ups with surprising depth (reason enough for the new print from Janus Films). With a crooked smile and a purring voice, Streeter’s character is every bit the likable asshole, and the object of his desire (Doug Cooeyate) is magnetic. It’s easy enough to see Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho coming, though one doesn’t necessarily want to leave this Mala Noche.

No scrubs

June 26, 2007

› cheryl@sfbg.com

Michael Moore is a divisive character, but he’s not the most controversial man in the United States. The first image in Sicko, the director’s first doc since 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, is of George W. Bush. But the liar in chief is only one of Moore’s targets this time around. In Sicko he goes after America’s entire health care system, examining how even folks who have health insurance are routinely screwed over by corporations that care more about profits than lives. Of course, he does it in typical Moore fashion, with big gestures, occasionally overwrought voice-overs, and a snarky humor that balance out what’s otherwise a gloomy tale.

There’s so much dejection here — babies dying because hospitals won’t treat them, Ground Zero volunteers being denied care, the exposure of corrupt insurance-company tactics, and worse — that comic relief is essential, Moore explained during a recent whirlwind visit to San Francisco. He’d just come from Sacramento, where the film was screened for enthusiastic members of the California Nurses Association.

"I’ll bet you that there are as many laughs in this film as some of my other films, but it doesn’t feel that way because there are so many sad moments," he said. "But you need that. The humor helps lead you from the despair to the justifiable anger."

Gimmicks like a Star Wars crawl to illustrate the hundreds of diseases insurance companies won’t cover lighten Sicko‘s tone, as do scenes in which Moore puts on his gee-whiz persona and travels to other countries (Canada, England, France) where emergency treatment comes quick and free and prescription drugs practically grow on trees. In France, he discovers, the government supplies nannies to do chores for new mothers — although I’m too cynical to totally accept that perk as the truth, especially since the mother interviewed is white and middle-class. Or is it my disgust with America’s shortcomings that clouds my judgment?

Disgust is what Moore is after, because it’s the kind of strong emotion that might actually motivate action. "I have to hold out some kind of hope that [change] is possible," he said. "[In Sicko, an American woman living in France] says, ‘The reason things work here is because the government is afraid of the people. In America the people are afraid of the government.’ So I’m hoping that people will stop being so afraid and apathetic and get involved."

One of Sicko‘s unlikely targets is former universal-health-care advocate Hillary Clinton — now among Washington’s top recipients of health-care-industry donations. In the film, the senator (and aspiring prez) is praised, then slammed, for her stance on the issue.

"I’ve always liked her. I had a chapter in my first book called ‘My Forbidden Love for Hillary.’ I always thought that she got a raw deal on the health thing that she tried to do. I could see instantly, as soon as she was in the White House, men were very threatened by her. There were whole Web sites devoted to her — hateful, hateful stuff," Moore said. "I have kind of a broken heart because of her votes on the war. And it was really sad, the discovery that she [later became] the second-largest recipient of health-care-industry money."

Moore, who said he’d lost 30 pounds in the past three months ("One way to fight the man!"), has high hopes for Sicko‘s long-range impact. "The whole system needs to be upended. If the American people actually listen to what I’m saying here, that we need to start rethinking everything in terms of how we treat each other and how we structure our society, a whole lot of other things are gonna get fixed, and we’re gonna be a better people. And I think the rest of the world is gonna feel a hell of a lot safer with a change of attitude."

Of course, Sicko wouldn’t be a Michael Moore movie without at least one moment that stays true to his prankster instincts. His controversial visit to Cuba has been well-documented elsewhere, so I won’t go into the details here. But I will say he was pretty delighted to ask, "Have you ever seen anyone sail into Guantánamo Bay?"*

SICKO

Opens Fri/29 in Bay Area theaters

See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com

I love Lucio

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June 26, 2007
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› johnny@sfbg.com

"I was sad when he died and sad to have never been able to meet him and tell him how much he had done for me," Amedeo Pace of Blonde Redhead writes in the liner notes for Water’s reissue of Amore e Non Amore, a 1971 album by Lucio Battisti. Pace then closes his brief yet poignant tribute — one that describes growing up in a household unified by a love of Battisti’s music — with a simple but effective declaration: "Amore e Non Amore is one of the greatest albums."

The fact that one of Blonde Redhead’s twins acknowledges Battisti as a font of new and familiar ideas should intrigue English-speaking listeners who’ve never heard Battisti’s music. But there’s also an elliptical quality to Pace’s plaintive wish that he had met the man behind Amore, an album that shifts from propulsive beat rock to soundtrack-ready flamenco flourishes and sweeping string arrangements in its first two songs, setting the tone and rhythm for a richly seesawing display of vocal and instrumental tracks.

With Amore, Battisti established himself as an Italian corollary to Scott Walker, a singer with a brighter if just as seductively handsome tenor voice who, not content with mere stardom, was ready to chart the outer limits of popular music. Just as the late ’60s — the era of Scott through Scott 4 (all Fontana) — saw Walker move from the mainstream pleasures of Burt Bacharach to the ribald, poetic, and pun-laden chansons of Jacques Brel as well as his own imaginative landscapes, so Amore and 1972’s Umanamente Uomo: Il Sogno (also recently reissued by Water) saw Battisti use his position as a favorite voice of his nation to take its people to musical places they may not have expected to discover. In Battisti’s case, those were deeply emotional places; it was no accident that the album he’d completed before Amore was Emozioni (Ricordi), a 1970 collection that boasts a title track as gorgeous and reflective as the enigmatic, sunlit silhouette cover photo of the bushy-haired man behind its music.

As the years went on, Battisti, much like Walker, retired from public life, becoming even more of an enigma. He died in 1998, 14 years after the release of his final album, Hegel (Alex, 1994) — a title so blatantly philosophical, so nonpop, that the avant-leaning Walker of today, draped in references to Pier Paolo Pasolini, again comes to mind. It’s here that Pace’s sadness that he’d "never been able to meet" Battisti becomes something more than personal; many Italians wish they could have known the man whose recordings they found so moving on an elemental level.

"After E Già [BMG, 1982], Lucio disappeared from view," Stefano Isidoro Bianchi of the Italian magazine Blow Up wrote when I e-mailed him to ask about the Battisti enigma. "After the early ’70s, he didn’t appear on TV — the one exception was a German TV show in 1978 — and never gave interviews. And after 1982, he really became invisible: no interviews, no TV, no pictures. We knew he lived in London for some time, and then for the rest of his life in a county called Brianzia, in Lombardia (north of Italy). The further he vanished, the more he was loved because of his songs. He was a presence on the Italian music scene. We knew that when Lucio was back with another album, it was a strike. And it was."

In the wake of his heyday, Battisti truly struck, according to Bianchi, in 1974 with Anima Latina (BMG) — which, though it was unreleased in the US, he rates as highly as Amore — and with E Già and 1986’s Don Giovanni (BMG), which included lyrics by surrealist poet Pasquale Panella. But Water has chosen wisely in selecting Amore and Umanamente to rerelease. "These albums are unique in the way they combine string-heavy European crooner pop with prog rock grooves and psychedelic guitar," notes Michael Saltzman, who penned the liner notes for the label’s Umanamente reissue. When I ask Saltzman to name a favorite period in Battisti’s career, he chooses Amore and Umanamente as peak examples of the stylistic cross-pollination that was occurring on other continents — via Tropicália, perhaps most notably — during the late- and initial post-Beatles years. Indeed, they are "comunque bella," to quote the chorus of one of Umanamente‘s hymnlike highlights, only in the sense that Battisti adds dissonant elements to counterbalance the abundant beauty of his voice and compositions.

Perhaps at my suggestion, Bianchi isn’t averse to likening the deep artistic connection that Battisti had with his Amore and Umanamente lyricist, Mogol, to one that existed between a certain American troubadour and his wordsmith: "Mogol was the inner voice of Lucio like Larry Beckett was the inner voice of Tim Buckley," Bianchi observes. But in the end, he’s insistent — apologetically so — that "no one but the Italians can understand" the "magic" of Battisti in full bloom: "In the early ’70s, Battisti released his best albums, and the way he approached something we can call progressive was peculiarly Italian and peculiarly Battisti-like. If you know the other Italian progressive bands, you know that Battisti wasn’t part of the scene. He was a great musician because he changed the face of Italian pop music."

To which I say, "Pace, Pace," or "Pace, pace." The most musical of all languages might float through Battisti’s songs, but their space — shadowy, sacred, alternately melancholic and frenzied — is open to anyone who listens, Italian, American, Italian American, and otherwise.

After all, the glorious anthemic harmony at the close of Umanamente‘s "… E Penso a Te" speaks the universal language of pop, repeating variations of "la-la" until shivers shoot up the spine and tears form at the corners of one’s eyes.*

For an e-mail Q&A with Amedeo Pace about Lucio Battisti, see the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com/blogs/music.

Dream girl

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June 26, 2007
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

"I used to joke sometimes that I’m Judee’s last boyfriend," concedes Patrick Roques, producer of Dreams Come True, Water’s two-disc 2005 compendium of Judee Sill’s unreleased 1974 third album and demos. "I don’t mean to sound egotistic or anything, but I loved this woman like I’d love a girlfriend or wife."

Sill has that effect on listeners. Over the past few years, the onetime hooker, junkie, armed robber, bisexual reform-school girl, and all-around archetypal bad apple has realized the revelation visited on her while incarcerated in the Sybil Brand women’s prison: her music has been etched into the consciousnesses of passionate followers around the world who know her as a singer-songwriter of uncommon musical and metaphysical power. Even 27 years after her death from a cocaine overdose, it seems like Sill still hasn’t quite passed. Water has done its part to keep her musical reveries alive with the landmark Dreams Come True, mixed by Jim O’Rourke and including Roques’s obsessively researched, invaluable 68-page booklet and a 12-minute QuickTime movie of rare performance footage; reissues of her two Asylum studio albums, Judee Sill (1971) and Heart Food (1973); and the newly released Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973, an impeccably recorded document of Sill performing solo on acoustic guitar and piano, chatting with the audience and an interviewer, and in the process revealing snatches of a nervy yet nervous urban cowgirl in her blue-collar SoCal drawl.

For too long, before her rediscovery in recent years by a generation falling back in love with the folk songs of their parents’ youth, Sill was simply the lost girl from an age of singer-songwriters, a victim of her lack of stateside commercial success — though she’s been covered by artists ranging from the Turtles to the Hollies, Warren Zevon to Bonnie "Prince" Billy — and her will to transcend the bounds of the earth and everyday troubles, growing up in her father’s rough Oakland bar and later sexually abused by her stepfather. Clues to map out her art — or potential escape routes, which included a brief stay in Mill Valley’s Strawberry Canyon — were found in the sacred texts and music of Rosicrucianism and other forms of Christian mysticism, her studies of Pythagoras’s music of the spheres and occult modes like numerology, or simply the moment’s drug of choice, whether it be a daily tab of acid or the $150-a-day heroin habit that led her into prostitution and eventually check forgery.

Her decision in prison to devote her creative efforts to songwriting led her to truly reach for the sublime, in the form of songs that still touch listeners’ cores. Always-immaculate intonation, a deft sense of harmony, and elegantly composed songs informed by AM radio, folk, R&B, blues, gospel, and classical music were framed by Sill’s own arrangements, leading competition like Joni Mitchell to stop by and check out the Heart Food sessions. "I defy anyone who’s a high school dropout ex-junkie reform-school person to do that," Roques declares. "This woman was brilliant and plugged in — she had the energy, and it flowed through her." If you want to know and love Sill, she is, remarkably, still available — her spirit can be found all over her music.

So why didn’t Sill become a household name like Asylum labelmate Jackson Browne? "Judee didn’t get along with [Asylum head] David Geffen, and David Geffen isn’t someone you give shit to," Roques says. After recording two moderately successful LPs, "she was in debt to him, and Jackson Browne came along, and he was just easier to deal with, I think, from a corporate perspective. Browne hung out in the close inner circle and had hits. She didn’t hang out with the Asylum record crowd too much. She hung out a little with Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and she had a lot of strange friends that she had had for a long time in LA."

One of Sill’s exes and old pals, musician Tommy Peltier witnessed the disconnect between the worlds Sill ran in and remembers accompanying her to a Warner Bros. Christmas party right after her debut came out. "We went in my beat-up old car to the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that was first time I saw her cringe," recalls Peltier, who first met Sill onstage at a 1968 jam session ("It was love at first song"). "Here she was the new starlet — there were all these Rollses and limos, and then this clunker drives up, and the new starlet comes out! That was the only time I saw her really uncomfortable, but she just went in there and took over the room."

But as difficult or out of her element as Sill could be, she was within her rights to complain about her handling when she went from opening for kindred souls like Crosby, Stills, and Nash to fronting rock bands. "If you listen to the BBC sessions, she talks about lower chakras and people who just want to boogie, and it’s true," Roques explains. "The rock crowd just wanted to drink wine and take mescaline and get fucked up and party, and there’s Judee singing ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’ and making references to esoteric literature. People who went out for a Friday night didn’t want to hear that, just like they didn’t want to hear Charles Mingus. Americans just want to partay — that’s cool — but that’s why she did better in England."

It’s no surprise, then, that Sill obsessives like O’Rourke and Roques still feel protective of her, careful about sharing their love for the dark lady of a sunlit Topanga Canyon whose revelations were forged on the grittily glamorous, sadly battered streets of Los Angeles and who, ironically, seems a perfect fit for yet another turn through Hollywood. "She was out there on the edge," Roques says, "and though I don’t think she ever talked about women’s lib, she was a very ballsy chick and knew what the fuck she wanted and just went and did it. And she evolved into a fantastic person — there’s no one like her" — although, apparently, listeners keep looking. "I search for tapes and talk to musicians endlessly," he continues. "And if you go on these sites, you’ll see everyone wants to find the next Judee Sill — and none of them can even touch Judee Sill." *

Something in the Water

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June 26, 2007
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Franco Battiato’s 1972 album Fetus, reissued by Water, is the kind of recording that transcends a record-store genre category such as Italian prog rock. For starters, the keyboard freak-out at the close of the title number is something today’s army of Kraftwerk drones should covet.

Beginning with the sound of a heartbeat and moving through transmissions from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin about purple rocks on the moon, Fetus repeatedly journeys from micro to macro and back again with ease. The spiraling keys of "Meccanica" could spook Goblin — or for that matter Alan Sorrienti, whose cronelike cackles and cries on another Water reissue, 1972’s Aria, presage Devendra Banhart’s running for the hobbit hills. And a ceaselessly splendid song such as "Energia" could teach Os Mutantes a lesson in mutation: it keeps moving from bambini babble to folk passages and gleaming synth vistas until it’s formed an exhilarating circular pattern — all in four and a half minutes.

Marvelous in form while Battiato’s lyrics marvel at the wonder and horror of life, Fetus has eight compositions. But they contain countless rich passages that flow into one another so seamlessly that the whole thing only seems to have one beginning and a single end that arrives too soon, after a truly epic half hour. One year later, with Pollution (also reissued by Water), Battiato brought the world the loveliest song ever recorded about plankton and a 20-second audio version of Y2K that proved to be more frightening and interesting than the real thing. But he still might have been at his best in Fetus form. (Huston)

The hot rock

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June 26, 2007
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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It’s strange taking on a profile of a band so steeped in a musical language with which you were once not just fluent but even obsessed. I would have adored New York City rockers Battles when I was 19, their power-through-precision métier appealing to my penchant for all things prog and post, the words "ex-Helmet drummer" (that would be the band’s John Stanier) acting as foolproof elixir. But if I’m not so easily impressed by intensity and general hugeness these days, that only makes my response to the evident dynamism on Mirrored (Warp) seem all the more incontestable.

Not that anyone ever doubted Battles’ credentials: in the school of rock, these guys are definitely PhDs. Beyond Stanier’s heavy days with Helmet, Ian Williams’s guitar tapping was a cornerstone of Don Caballero’s pioneering math rock. Guitarist Dave Konopka put in time with Lynx. Multi-instrumentalist Tyondai Braxton still gets tied to his dad — avant-garde jazz colossus Anthony Braxton — though it’s worth noting he’s done lots of compelling work on his own, including 2002’s History That Has No Effect (JMZ).

There’s plenty of firepower here, though Mirrored doesn’t sound like the work of a typical, ego-fueled supergroup. Reflecting on the ensemble’s beginnings in 2003, Williams relates, "It was about starting from scratch rather than having it be the guy from Helmet doing what he’s supposed to do and the guy from Don Cab doing what he’s supposed to do and so on." Battles’ music is certainly cohesive, to the point of being migraine inducing. Williams is on the road between shows in Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta when we talk, and he sounds a bit mystified that some people still view Battles as a side project. "The reality is this band has taken up all of our time these past few years."

Part of this lingering getting-to-know-you talk clearly has to do with the group’s measured ascent: Battles took four years to release their first album, after all. While Williams says that part of why Mirrored took so long is simply a matter of the logistics of England’s Warp Records repackaging the band’s 2004 EPs — EP C (Monitor) and EP B (Dim Mak) — it’s clear that there were designs to build from the ground up. "One thing about the EPs was that they originally came out in the States on three separate small indie labels, and it took people a while to find out about it, and that was a conscious thing … just to have it be more word-of-mouth," Williams explains. "Another purpose of taking our time was in wanting to find our own sound, our own reason for being a band."

That sound — fractal, propulsive, profoundly stimulated — is mapped out in Mirrored‘s opening minutes. A tightly wound snare part rides the rails of muted guitar runs before "Race: In" blooms into a giant, Tortoise-size crescendo. The quartet then doubles back on the core rhythmic elements, which are projected through a half-dozen modes during the song’s five prismatic minutes. The video for the full-length’s glam-inflected single, "Atlas," offers a spot-on visual approximation: the band members play in a mirrored cube, their bobbing, duplicated forms angling in on one another as their respective parts interlock in so many different combinations.

"I guess it is a tension between enjoying far-out music that can sound inaccessible … but at the same time not thinking it should be unnecessarily difficult," Williams says of Battles’ strategy. "I think our approach is that there’s no reason it shouldn’t hit you on a primal level … even though you can take it in a thinking way too." I think it’s safe to say plenty of people are, none more than the 19-year-olds surely losing their minds to Battles and Mirrored this very minute.*

BATTLES

With Ponytail

Mon/2, 8 p.m., $15

Slim’s

333 11th St., SF

(415) 255-0333

www.slims-sf.com

The fundamentals of Fucked Up

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June 26, 2007
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You needn’t be too wary of the dialogue surrounding Fucked Up, Toronto’s jewel of esoteric hardcore punk. The members’ beliefs and their names are hidden, but they’re not out to brainwash anybody. And they’re certainly not hiding anything in the songwriting department: the melodies are blistering and as uninhibited as the band, which has a knack for subverting punk conventions.

"For hardcore bands especially, politics are often made out to be black-and-white," rhythm guitarist 10,000 Marbles says on the phone from Toronto. Critics and listeners have puzzled aplenty over this pseudonyms-only band in their attempts to pin down Fucked Up’s political allegiances. Before releasing its debut, Hidden World, on Jade Tree last year, the band had spent the prior five years releasing 17 vinyl singles with artwork and lyrics that cited magick, anarchism, the Spanish Civil War, and André Gide. These may look to be the makings of a bizarre cult agenda, but Fucked Up’s "culture of confusion" and conflicting political ideas — the most bizarre instance coming in the form of a photo of a Hitler Youth rally on the cover of its 2004 split single with Haymaker on Deep Six Records — are more about kick-starting independent thought than advancing any specific, concrete ideas.

"We originally wore the anarchist tag pretty proudly," rhythm guitarist Gulag says, also calling from Toronto. "But now we’re more interested in leapfrogging cultures and ideas. It’s a more fulfilling way to live, if a little unprincipled." As amorphous as the members’ personal beliefs may be, Fucked Up doesn’t express any disdain for punk as a sound: Mustard Gas’s bass lines and vocalist Pink Eyes’s deep growl-howl are quite reverent toward the ghosts of hardcore past, and surprisingly enough, the band’s new 12-inch, Year of the Pig, marks its first waltz with rhetorical clarity and straight-ahead activism. The A-side title track examines the ongoing problem of violence toward women through the lens of prostitution, which is legal in Canada. It’s the culture of repression and guilt surrounding these subjects that has inspired the unusually pointed song, 10,000 Marbles says: "It’s taboo issues like sex work that people like us have a responsibility to talk about."

"Year of the Pig" is pretty daring stylistically and structurally, but to Fucked Up’s great credit, it’s also fantastic. Eighteen minutes long and starting as something of a twee shuffle before shifting into organ-backed operatic bellows from Pink Eyes, the song deftly delves into pummeling, psychedelic kraut rock riffage the likes of which might make Earthless or Major Stars jealous. Fucked Up’s sheer disregard of genre pigeonholes is especially evident in its recent doings. "We’re trying to bring in the electronic crowd now," Gulag says. "We just recorded a cover of [French dance duo] Justice’s ‘Stress.’ "

Venturing into Daft Punk–related territory: there’s a first for hardcore! It’s this staunch avoidance of cliché and political boundaries that very nearly makes Fucked Up punk for the Reading Is Fundamental set. More than anything else, the imperative is to ignore convention and get informed, which isn’t a fucked-up MO at all.

FUCKED UP

Sat/30, 8 p.m., $7

924 Gilman, Berk.

(510) 525-9926

www.924gilman.org

Also July 4, 9 p.m., $8

Hemlock Tavern

1131 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Ask Dr. Rock

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June 26, 2007
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ASK DR. ROCK Say you’ve done a lot more practicing than primping. Your bandmates are starting to bore themselves with their uniform of New Balance kicks and give-away T-shirts with busted-dot-com logos. So how are you supposed to come up with a look or even, jeez, a show?

Dr. Rock feels your fashion-free pain and took up the issue with the party starters of Gravy Train!!!! Not for nothing did the Bay Area raunch peddlers title a tune off their new album, All the Sweet Stuff (Cochon), "The Hair Stare."

1. "Making the audience uncomfortable is a good place to start," vocalist Chunx says. "All the bands that were most memorable to me growing up were either awkward or androgynous or exuded something that made me so uncomfortable that it led me to become intrigued. Rock stars should always seem superhuman. Or alien. If you can imagine them eating breakfast, you’re probably not doing it right."

2. "I would start with fashion," says keyboardist Hunx, who also styles hair at Down at Lulu’s in Oakland. "You need to get a look down or matching outfits or at least have a theme." Absorb the high-camp retro swank of artists like the Bay City Rollers and Slade on DVD and study old dance shows to cop ideas and moves. "We don’t get inspiration from new bands," he adds. "People just dress like their neighbors. But even matching T-shirts is a start."

3. "I always like props," Chunx raves. "I think Alice Cooper beheading people on stage was genius!"

4. "This probably comes as no surprise, but I’d always advocate any overt sexuality," Chunx says. "It’s the cheapest way to go, but people like to see people get naked and overtly, crazily sexual onstage. No one’s going to want to look away — even if it’s the car-accident syndrome!"

GRAVY TRAIN!!!! July 7, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

We got the answers to your burning music biz questions. E-mail Ask Dr. Rock at askdrrock@sfbg.com.

Panisses, chez toi

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June 26, 2007
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› paulr@sfbg.com

Oh irony: summer — meaning August, fog, cold wind — has arrived weeks ahead of schedule, and the bluster has slammed shut the grilling window. We huddle around the stove instead, warming our hands over bubbling soups and stews. Additional irony: tomatoes are starting to turn up at the farmers market. Luckily, the Provençal seafood-stew recipe I’ve been using for years calls for tomatoes. Irony overload averted.

What to serve the stew with or over has long been an issue. Rice is an obvious choice, while mashed potatoes are nice and wintry. White beans and polenta have seen service. Toasted bread would work. But … how about panisses? These are the french fry–like chickpea sticks of Provence that for some reason have never found much of an audience here despite their many attractions.

Panisses are quite easy to produce. They are, essentially, chilled polenta cut into thin bars that are then fried up until golden crispy. The twists are that you use chickpea flour instead of cornmeal, you must allow an hour or two for the batter to chill and stiffen in the refrigerator, and you need some parchment paper and, ideally, a large nonstick skillet.

Make the faux polenta by putting one cup of chickpea flour in a heavy saucepan with a pinch of salt and a splash of olive oil. Slowly whisk in one cup of water until you have a smooth batter. Add two more cups of water, turn on the heat to high, bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and simmer, stirring, until the mixture is quite thickened. Pour it into a rectangular pan lined with parchment paper (I use a meat loaf pan), let it cool, then chill in the refrigerator. When you are ready to make the panisses, remove the slab from the pan and slice into narrow bars. Heat about an inch of vegetable oil in your skillet and put in the panisses. (They will be geutf8ous but should hold together if handled gently.) Turn after five minutes or so to crisp them all over. Remove from the skillet and drain briefly on paper towels.

As for the stew: you’re on your own, but if you can’t be bothered, the panisses are magnificent on their own.

Rock ‘n’ read

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June 26, 2007
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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Anyone who’s thumbed through the oodles of zany organ, squealing chipmunk, and queasy-listening albums from the ’50s onwards knows this to be true: every generation has its version of Muzak, whether its members like it not — thanks to clueless parental units. And the class of 2025 will undoubtedly have vibe ‘n’ synth instrumental renditions of "About a Girl," "D’yer Mak’er," and "Cherub Rock" dancing in their heads — no thanks to the Rockabye Baby! series on Baby Rock Records that appears to be multiplying like bunnies monthly. What next — sleepy-time Mentors? But what would baby lend an ear to once he or she started dabbling in books, student-body politics, and witchcraft? In other words, WWHPLT — what would Harry Potter listen to?

Boston’s Harry and the Potters have been working off that premise for the past three years, touring the country’s finest libraries. After outgrowing San Francisco’s main library and drawing several hundred to their show at the Civic Center last year, they’ve decided to get booked, adult-style, at Slim’s, alongside Jurassic Park IV: The Musical, which dares to pick up where the last dino blockbuster left off.

So, I tease, you’re doing a real tour this time? "Why is playing libraries not a tour?" the older, seventh-year Harry, Paul DeGeorge, 28, retorts by phone as he hauls T-shirts into the cellar of the Tucson Public Library, the site of that night’s show. "It’s actually a lot more work, because we set up our sound system every day."

He may be playing in a basement, but DeGeorge and his brother Joe, who appears as fourth-year Harry, aren’t playing to our baser instincts. "I thought this would be a great way to play rock to a whole new audience that doesn’t experience that," he explains. "If Harry Potter had the cool effect of getting kids to read more, maybe we can get kids to rock more too!"

The proof is in his now-20-year-old sibling. DeGeorge started feeding his younger brother Pixies, Nirvana, They Might Be Giants, and Atom and His Package CDs when the latter was nine, and apparently the scientific experiment paid off. "I could see the effect immediately. By the time Joe was 12, DeGeorge says, "he was writing songs about sea monkeys that referenced the Pixies" — and popping up in the Guardian in a story about early MP3.com stars.

And what about the silly kid stuff on Baby Rock Records? "I’d rather hear the original songs," DeGeorge opines. "Instead of Nine Inch Nails for babies, I’d just make a good mixtape for my baby. You can do ‘Hurt’ and just lop off the ending. It’s supereasy — anyone can do it!" Read it and weep, Trent.

SERPENT SPIT "So the proctology jokes remain." Thus came the news from filmmaker Danny Plotnick that Nest of Vipers, his freewheeling podcast highlighting the wit and storytelling chops of such SF undergroundlings as Hank VI’s Tony Bedard, the Husbands’ Sadie Shaw, singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet, and Porchlight’s Beth Lisick, was now officially off the KQED site and fully independent (and available through iTunes). "I had a contract for six episodes to be distributed by KQED," Plotnick e-mailed. "Ultimately they released eight episodes. They didn’t renew the contract because the show was too edgy for them."

Unfortunately, that also means the customer-service episode that triggered those treasured proctology-convention yuks, which was supposed to go up on the public station’s Web site on June 15, has been delayed till July 1 as Plotnick figures out new hosting.

But at least the assembled vipers will continue to writhe unchecked. Inspired by Plotnick’s favorite sports talk shows, Nest of Vipers aims to issue a weekly breath of venomous, randomized air in an ever-constricting radio landscape. "So often on radio there’s a bunch of experts pontificating about whatever," he told me earlier. "This is more about real people talking about real experiences," or like hanging with the gritty raconteurs at your favorite dive bar. The next episode, for instance, sounds like a doozy: Bucky Sinister talks about working the phones at PlayStation on Christmas morning, and Bedard has a yarn about biting into a Ghirardelli chocolate bar and finding a maggot — thinking it’s his big payday, he returns it to the company. You have been served! *

HARRY AND THE POTTERS

With Jurassic Park IV: The Musical

Fri/29, 8 p.m., $12

Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF

(415) 522-0333

www.slims-sf.com

NEST OF VIPERS

www.nestofviperspodcast.typepad.com

www.myspace.com/nestofviperspodcast

GET INTO THE BAND

CAVE SINGERS

Seattle Matador starlets break out the rustic initial Invitation Songs. Wed/27, 9 p.m., $8–$10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

ORGANIZED GRIND

Jamin and J-Dubber combine protest gangsta with ye olde funk and minihyph on Grind Pays (Organized Grind). Thurs/28, 10 p.m., call for price. Fourth Street Tavern, 711 Fourth St., San Raphael. (415) 454-4044

BRIAN ENO’S 77 MILLION PAINTINGS

Partake in the Hot Jet’s imagescape of "visual music." Fri/29–Sun/1, 8 p.m.–2 a.m., $20–$25. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, SF. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org

ALBUM LEAF AND ARTHUR AND YU

Incoming Korg attack! James LaValle’s gorg dream orchestrations cavort with Lee and Nancy–esque vocals. With Under Byen. Sat/30, Slim’s, 333 11th St., SF. (415) 522-0333, www.slims-sf.com

AUDRYE SESSIONS

The Oakland combo parties over its new CD — after vocalist Ryan Karazija spent a very unlucky Friday the 13th in April being brutally mugged and left in a pool of blood with a fractured skull after a Minipop show at Mezzanine. Sat/30, 10 p.m., $10. Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., SF. (415) 621-4455, www.bottomofthehill.com

RACCOO-OO-OON

On Behold Secret Kingdom (Release the Bats), the night critters generate a fine squall of free jazz, noise, drone, and jungle psychedelia. Knocking over trash cans never sounded so intentional. Tues/3, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

The future of paper

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June 26, 2007
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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Twenty years from now, paper will no longer be a tool for mass communication. Instead it will be a substance akin to plastic, a mere fabricated building material with industrial and consumer applications. At least, those were the thoughts that ran through my mind when I received a strange news release last week from a Finnish company called VTT, which trumpeted a business model that included developing new products based on what it called "printing technology" and "paper products." VTT has developed a prototype for bioactive paper that responds to enzymes and biomolecules by changing color. One idea is to use it in food packaging or air filters to get an early warning about toxins.

Weird innovations are great, but the most interesting part of this news release was about markets: "The goal is … to create new business for the paper industry … to introduce new innovations and market initiatives between the traditional ICT [information communication technology] and paper industries by combining IT, electronics and printing technologies."

Let us parse the high-flown language of commerce. VTT is saying the paper industry needs new markets, and high-tech, bioactive paper will help create them. But why? Obviously, paper has its uses — there are newspapers, magazines, notepads, and books to be printed! Why worry about making the stuff bioactive when you can just sell it to Random House or Conde Nast? You already know the answer. Print communication is dying out, and with it goes the paper industry. Over the past few months, I’ve witnessed the two biggest daily papers in my area, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News, announce budget cuts that will slash their staffs by one-quarter. What does that mean for the paper industry? Fewer orders for newsprint.

When Karl Marx wrote that every great historical event occurs twice — "first time as tragedy, second time as farce" — I doubt he had print media in mind. And yet the upset of the paper industry feels to me like the joke that comes after the tragedy of print media’s fast decline. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those people who think that barbarians are storming the gates because anyone can publish their ramblings on MySpace instead of having to get David Remnick’s permission to publish their ramblings in the New Yorker. Still, I cannot help but feel wrenchingly bad when I think about what it will be like in the Mercury newsroom after a quarter of the editorial staff has left the building.

I won’t miss the paper, but I will miss the journalists.

What’s tragic is that print journalism has not tried to diversify its market as methodically as the paper industry has. Right now, VTT is just one of many companies trying to figure out cool new ways to use paper. But who is trying to figure out cool new ways to employ smart, highly trained print journalists? Maybe Dan Gillmor and a few other people running small nonprofits. But mostly, print journalists are having to figure the future out on their own.

Some will do what I’ve done, gradually moving from print media to online. I’ve gone from a print zine to an online zine to a weekly newspaper to print magazines to running a blog. This column you’re reading is syndicated to both print newspapers and Web sites. Nobody gave me guidance. No slick marketing dude from Finland came in and said, "Hey, maybe you should diversify and start creating bioactive journalism." Instead, I fumbled along on my own, trying to find the most stable place where I could settle down and write for a living. Other journalists won’t be as lucky or as willing to change. They may stop writing; they may become shills for the companies they once investigated; they may feel bitter or liberated or panicked. None of them deserve it. Somebody should have helped them get ready for this transition five years ago.

I live in a world where corporations care more about the future of paper than the futures of people who have made their living turning paper into a massive network of vital, important communications. This is not how technological change should work. You cannot discard a person the way you discard a market niche. That’s because people revolt. Especially journalists. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd looking for a few good geek journalists to help her run a blog. Serious nerd experience needed. Inquire within!

When cute animals attack

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June 26, 2007
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(Nintendo; Nintendo DS)

GAMER Continuing my current tendency to gravitate toward games involving cute animals, I recently became addicted to the latest Pokémon installment, Pokémon Diamond. Pokémon Pearl is the same game with some different Pokémon.

My first Pokémon experience came during a long road trip in 2000, when I got hooked on Pokémon Gold. I made myself popular with every grade school kid on the block because I was an adult who knew that Pikachu evolves into Raichu.

In the Pokémon games, you grind to level-up your small army of cute creatures in turn-based battles against random Pokémon who hang out in grassy areas. You also capture new Pokémon. Pokémon are stored in small spheres and are released to fight, after which they get sucked back into their Pokéballs. And you thought non-free-range chickens have it bad.

There’s a plot, something about stopping a team of gangsters called Team Galactic from using the powers of Pokémon for evil, and you shame them into submission by using your small, cute animals to rough up their small, cute animals. You use the same technique to earn badges at the gyms scattered throughout the game’s world.

These titles are all about the exploring and the collection. You collect Pokémon, Pokémon battle techniques, and gym badges. So if you like to play collection games, Pokémon will take over your life.

What’s different between these installments and the one I played when I first got hooked on Pokémon in 2000? About 100 colors. I’m just eyeballing it. Also, a new online mode allows you to trade Pokémon with other users. To be honest, I haven’t gotten the chance to use this, but I’ve heard from one of my coworkers that it is "full of dumb kids who want to trade their level 100 Geodudes for my ultrarare Mewtwo!"

These two are the first non-spin-off Pokémon games on the Nintendo DS, and the series is well served by the platform. Being able to choose moves for my Pokémon by touching the screen is natural. That said, the game could have done a lot more with the hardware. I would like to see the Pokémon world or the battles in 3-D, like in Animal Crossing: Wild World, as opposed to the top-down view. The battles have surprisingly minimal effects and animation. This was OK on the Game Boy Color but seems a bit cheap on the DS. The series hasn’t changed much at all, and that’s good, because the game play is as fun and addicting as ever. But it’s bad in the sense that the latest installments in the series have almost nothing new to offer.

Essencia

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June 25, 2007
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By Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

The name "Anne Gingrass" carries a certain magic in San Francisco culinary circles, but it’s a name that will no longer do. Gingrass was the Spago-trained chef who, with her then-husband, David Gingrass, opened Postrio in 1989, as a prelude of sorts to launching their own place, Hawthorne Lane, six years later. Somewhere along the way, the marriage broke up — not an unfamiliar story among restaurant couples — and earlier this year Gingrass remarried. (She is now known as Anne Paik, according to the Web site of her Desiree café, www.desireecafe.com). Perhaps the hullabaloo associated with this large personal event contributed to the delay in opening her latest venture, Essencia. The new restaurant (in the onetime Pendragon Bakery space in Hayes Valley) was supposed to welcome its first guests on or about Valentine’s Day, but in fact the doors didn’t swing open until May.

One obvious question to ask is: was the wait worth it? The pretty easy answer there is yes. Less easy to answer is the question why Paik, long one of the great apostles of California cuisine, would open a Peruvian restaurant — although, in fairness, it must be said that Essencia’s menu, indeed its gestalt, nods to California as much as to Peru. The place certainly has the modern, metro-California look; it’s surprisingly small, with only a dozen or so tables, and the interior design consists largely of wood floors, mocha paint, and a profusion of large plate-glass windows that look out onto the always bustling intersection of Hayes and Gough streets.

The appeal of Peruvian cooking to a California sensibility isn’t so mysterious, really. We are, either way, in the New World, on the shores of the Pacific, with mountains nearby and a mélange of human heritage — Indian, European, and Asian — on hand to stretch any parochial understandings of food. There are differences between the two Pacific states, of course: while California, when not mountainous, tends toward desert, Peru is junglier and more tropical and the home of — besides potatoes — various fruits (lucana, guanavana) that tend toward dessert. More anon.

But the similarities between the cousins are unmistakable too, and they are the foundation for much of Essencia’s menu. A fava bean salad ($11.50), for example, is a ritual of spring in these parts, and Essencia’s version, with its naps of frisée and its halved cherry tomatoes, could have come right from the kitchen at Hawthorne Lane — except for a scattering of those big, ivory white Peruvian corn kernels that look like teeth. A filet of baked halibut ($23.50), embedded in a pad of chickpea purée, with a handful of whole fried chickpeas tossed over the top like buckshot, also seemed to have a distinct northern edge. (The accompanying sauce, of shrimp and clams, seemed almost classically French.) And a triple chicken sandwich ($11.75) — "a kind of club," we were told by our informative and occasionally overinformative server — had no discernable Peruvian angle at all. Its white bread, trimmed of crust, was like something from an English high tea, while its fillings (of white chicken meat, walnut paste, and avocado slices) could only be described as very tasty regardless of provenance.

Still, aficionados of Peruvian standards will not be disappointed. Of course there is ceviche, although at least one version, of kampachi ($12) — a white-fleshed fish from the Hawaiian islands — was presented to us carpaccio-style, the tissues of flesh laid out on the plate like skins on the floor of a cave dweller’s abode. More striking was the aji pepper sauce slathered over the top; it was the yellow color of French’s mustard and offered a sharp belt of pepper and acid up the nostrils. I liked it, but my companion thought it overwhelmed the delicate fish, and I saw her point.

Potatoes are less commonplace than on other Peruvian menus around town but are used to good effect. The potato and crab salad ($13.75) turned out to be a cross between a napoleon and a sandwich, with the crab meat forming a seam between two oval pads of yellow (and cold) mashed potatoes, which had been fearlessly spiked with cayenne and lime juice. We might have expected some kind of potato preparation with the pork medallions ($19.50), but instead the crusted roulades of meat were plated with tacu-tacu, a tasty legume and rice croquette made here with mashed golden lentils and finished with a sash of bacon. The plate also included a side garden of julienned red and yellow bell pepper.

For me the one irresistible Peruvian dessert is alfajores ($4.50), the butter cookies filled Oreo-style with dulce de leche (sugar caramelized in milk). Essencia’s cookies, to judge from their tender snap, are not only house made (with real butter) but baked daily, and there is a coconut variant to the dulce de leche — a bit darker in color, with definite coconut perfume.

The sweets on the whole strike a light note. Peruvian tropical fruits figure in various mousses and flans, while the workaday but lovable orange turns up — in thin rounds dusted with cinnamon and overlaid like a poker hand — on a plate of madeleines ($7). There is a globe of vanilla ice cream too, just to keep everybody happy. And for a quasi–<\d>petits fours fix, how about a selection of candies ($7), including burnt caramels, nougat, and flavored almonds, from the Miette shop just down the block?

Essencia’s high pedigree suggests that it will grow, somewhere, somehow, but for the moment a big part of the restaurant’s charm is its smallness. And the choicest seats in the house could be at the trapezoidal table for two behind the entryway. It’s the restaurant’s equivalent of the newlyweds’ suite.*

ESSENCIA

Lunch, Mon.–Sat., 11:30 a.m.–2:30 p.m. Dinner: Mon.–Sat., 5–10 p.m.

401 Gough, SF

(415) 552-8485

www.essenciarestaurant.com

Beer and wine

AE/MC/V

Noisy

Wheelchair accessible

The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/22/07)

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June 22, 2007
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The Guardian Iraq War casualty report (6/22/07): 14 U.S. soldiers killed in two days.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Casualties in Iraq

U.S. military:

14 U.S. soldiers killed in Baghdad in two days this week, according to the New York Times.

3,794: Killed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq 3/20/03

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

111 : Died of self-inflicted wounds, according to http://www.icasualties.org/.

For the Department of Defense statistics go to: http://www.defenselink.mil/

For a more detailed list of U.S. Military killed in the War in Iraq go to: www.cnn.com

Iraqi civilians:

98,000: Killed since 3/03

Source: www.thelancet.com

65,880 – 72,165: Killed since 1/03

Source: http://www.iraqbodycount.net

For a week by week assessment of significant incidents and trends in Iraqi civilian casualties, go to A Week in Iraq by Lily Hamourtziadou. She is a member of the Iraq Body Count project, which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq.

A Week in Iraq: Week ending 3 June 2007:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/weekiniraq/47/

For first hand accounts of the grave situation in Iraq, visit some of these blogs:
www.ejectiraqikkk.blogspot.com
www.healingiraq.blogspot.com
www.afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com

Iraq Military:

30,000: Killed since 2003

Source: http://www.infoshout.com

Journalists:

177 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the start of the war four years ago, making Iraq the world’s most dangerous country for the press, according to Reporters without borders.

164: Killed since 3/03

Source: http://www.infoshout.com/

Refugees:

The Bush administration plans to increase quota of Iraqi refugees allowed into the U.S. from 500 to 7,000 next year in response to the growing refugee crisis, according to the Guardian Unlimited.

Border policies are tightening because one million Iraqi refugees have already fled to Jordan and another one million to Syria. Iraqi refugees who manage to make it out of Iraq still can’t work, have difficulty attending school and are not eligible for health care. Many still need to return to Iraq to escape poverty, according to BBC news.

1.6 million: Iraqis displaced internally

1.8 million: Iraqis displaced to neighboring states

Many refugees were displaced prior to 2003, but an increasing number are fleeing now, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ estimates.

U.S. Military Wounded:

50,502: Wounded from 3/19/03 to 1/6/07

Source: http://www.icasualties.org/

The Guardian cost of Iraq war report (6/22/07): So far, $436 billion for the U.S., $55 billion for California and $1 billion for San Francisco.

Compiled by Paula Connelly

Here is a running total of the cost of the Iraq War to the U.S. taxpayer, provided by the National Priorities Project located in Northampton, Massachusetts. The number is based on Congressional appropriations. Niko Matsakis of Boston, MA and Elias Vlanton of Takoma Park, MD originally created the count in 2003 on costofwar.com. After maintaining it on their own for the first year, they gave it to the National Priorities Project to contribute to their ongoing educational efforts.

To bring the cost of the war home, please note that California has already lost $46 billion and San Francisco has lost $1 billion to the Bush war and his mistakes. In San Francisco alone, the funds used for the war in Iraq could have hired 21,264 additional public school teachers for one year, we could have built 11,048 additional housing units or we could have provided 59,482 students four-year scholarships at public universities. For a further breakdown of the cost of the war to your community, see the NPP website aptly titled “turning data into action.”

Politics Blog

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June 21, 2007
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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics@@

War at the remote

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June 20, 2007
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It’s a popular notion: TV sets and other media devices let us in on the violence of war. “Look, nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens,” President Bush told a news conference more than three
years ago. “I don’t. It’s a tough time for the American people to see that. It’s gut-wrenching.”

But televised glimpses of war routinely help to keep war going. Susan Sontag was onto something when she pointed out that “the image as shock and the image as cliche are two aspects of the same presence.”

While viewers may feel disturbed by media imagery of warfare, their discomfort is largely mental and limited. The only shots coming at them are ones that have been waved through by editors. Still, we hear that television brings war into our living rooms.

We’re encouraged to be a nation of voyeurs — or pseudo-voyeurs — looking at war coverage and imagining that we really see, experience, comprehend. In this mode, the reporting on the Iraq war facilitates a rough division
of labor. For American media consumers, the easy task is to watch from afar — secure in the tacit belief we’re understanding what it means to undergo the violence that we catch via only the most superficial glances.

Television screens provide windows on the world that reinforce distances. Watching “news” at the remote, viewers are in a zone supplied by producers with priorities far afield from authenticity or democracy. More than
making sense, the mass-media enterprise is about making corporate profit in sync with governmental power.

Exceptional news reports do exist. And that’s the problem; they’re exceptions. A necessity of effective propaganda is repetition. And the inherent limits of television in conveying realities of war are further
narrowed by deference to Washington.

Styles vary on network television, but the journalistic pursuits — whether on a prime-time CNN show or the PBS “NewsHour” — are chasing parallel bottom lines. When the missions of corporate-owned commercial television
and corporate-funded “public broadcasting” are wrapped up in the quest to maximize profits and maintain legitimacy among elites in a warfare state, how far afield is the war coverage likely to wander?

While media outlets occasionally stick their institutional necks out, the departures are rarely fundamental. In large media institutions, underlying precepts of a de facto military-industrial-media complex are rarely disturbed in any sort of sustained way — by the visual presentations or by the words that accompany them.

“Even if journalists, editors, and producers are not superpatriots, they know that appearing unpatriotic does not play well with many readers, viewers, and sponsors,” media analyst Michael X. Delli Carpini commented. Written with reference to the Vietnam War, his words now apply to the Iraq war era. “Fear of alienating the public and sponsors, especially in wartime, serves as a real, often unstated tether, keeping the press tied
to accepted wisdom.”

Part of the accepted wisdom is the idea that media outlets are pushing envelopes and making the Iraq war look bad. But the press coverage, even from the reputedly finest outlets, is routinely making the war look far better than its reality — both in terms of the horror on the ground and the agendas of the war-makers in Washington.

Countless stories in the daily press continue to portray Bush administration officials as earnestly seeking a political settlement in Iraq while recalcitrant insurgents, bent on violence, thwart that effort. So, with typical spin, a dispatch from Baghdad published in the New York Times on June 17 flatly declared that comments by U.S. commander Gen.
David Petraeus “reflected an acknowledgment that more has to be done beyond the city’s bounds to halt a relentless wave of insurgent attacks that have undercut attempts at political reconciliation.”

Of course, occupiers always seek “political reconciliation.” As the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz observed long ago, “A conqueror is always a lover of peace.”

At the same time, the more that an occupying force tries to impose the prerogatives of a conqueror, the more its commander must deny that its goals are anything other than democracy, freedom and autonomy for the
people whose country is being occupied. In medialand, the lethal violence of the occupier must be invisible or righteous, while the lethal violence of the occupied must be tragic, nonsensical and/or insane. But most of
all, the human consequences of a war fueled by U.S. military action are shrouded in euphemism and media cliche.

Which brings us back to violence at the remote. While a TV network may be no more guilty of obscuring the human realities of war than a newsprint broadsheet or a slick newsmagazine, we may have higher expectations that
the television is bringing us real life. Vivid footage is in sharp contrast to static words and images on a page. At least implicitly, television promises more — and massively reneges on what it promises.

We may intellectually know that television is not conveying realities of life. But what moves on the screen is apt to draw us in, nonetheless. We see images of violence that look and loom real. But our media experience of that violence is unreal. We don’t experience the actual violence at all. Media outlets lie about it by pretending to convey
it. And we abet the lying to the extent that we fail to renounce it.

Artifice comes in many forms, of course. In the case of television news, it’s a form very big on pretense. We’re left to click through the world beyond our immediate experience — at a distance that cannot be measured in
miles. But away from our mediated cocoon, spun by civic passivity, the death machinery keeps roaring along.

The documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death” — based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same name —
is being released directly to DVD this week. For more information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org

Bruce blog

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June 20, 2007
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@@http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/bruce@@

The Queer Issue

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June 19, 2007
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Click below for Pride goodies:

Our complete Pride event listings

Flaming creators: Emerging queer artists who rock our world

Flipping for Pride: Cheerleeding is so gay

Commitment slut: To bed or to wed? A bi girl explores her options

Rainbow retirement: LGBT seniors face the challenge of aging gracefully

Back to the future? Doing the queer time warp

“Out Ranks”: LGBT Historical Society explores queer life during wartime

Are you ready? Can you handle it? The cheers for the dancing Brazilian drag queens, the jeers from the God Hates Fags contingent, the tears welling up in your eyes when the PFLAG contingent marches by? Of course you are. It’s Pride time, and you really have no choice in the matter, do you? For one brief period of time, any objections anyone has about your fabulous queer life are swallowed by the all-engulfing throat of gay love. Gulp.

And what comes out the other end? Questions. What do you have in common with all these people — the leathermen, the trannies, the engaged, the homeless, the activists, the Wiccans, the dykes on bikes, the acrobatic Sunset Scavengers? What basic experience could you possibly share with (you know he wouldn’t miss it) Gavin Newsom?

The marvel of it all, for one. The world’s in a dark, dark place right now, and, as usual, it’s up to us — those hilarious, endlessly creative gays — to come to the rescue, to create a sequined supernova in the black hole of current events and show, yet again, that love unites the world and conquers all. Sigh. Well, if someone has to do it, it might as well be us — it sure as hell ain’t gonna be the politicians or the religious, right?

I’m telling you, we should unionize. Aside from all the overtime, the least the straights could do is give us dental.

Release the rainbow doves! (Marke B.)

Fighting back

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June 19, 2007
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› news@sfbg.com

It was a week of triumph for workers and union activists opposing the conservative agenda of the owner and operators of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites hotel.

The Guardian last week ("Calling in the Feds," 6/13/07) revealed that the hotel called on its owner’s political connections to blow the immigration whistle on housekeepers involved in a campaign to enforce a living-wage law at the Woodfin. That revelation came a day after Emeryville city officials ordered the hotel to pay $125,000 in back wages and $31,500 in fines for failing to show it was paying adequate wages.

The Woodfin chain has fought the living-wage law, Measure C, since even before voters approved it in 2005, originally refusing to comply. Then the Woodfin Suites fired workers who were organizing to enforce the measure, claiming they were undocumented immigrants. After being ordered by the city to reinstate the workers, hotel officials claimed the firings were justified by an April immigration audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The Guardian found that US Rep. Brian Bilbray (R–San Diego) asked ICE to investigate the hotel after a representative of the Emeryville Woodfin Suites — whose president, Sam Hardage, has close ties to Bilbray — contacted his office for assistance Feb. 1. That revelation was at the center of a June 13 rally at the Oakland Federal Building by members of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), which helped pass Measure C and supports the laid-off workers.

"It is now clearer than ever that [the Woodfin’s] real motive was to get rid of workers who were standing up for their rights," organizer Brooke Anderson said through a loudspeaker.

Among those at the rally were Berkeley City Council member Kriss Worthington, Emeryville City Council member John Fricke, and representatives of California Assembly member Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) and US Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland).

Lee’s district director, Leslie Littleton, said Lee was "proud to stand strong with the Woodfin workers in support of their continued fight for the back pay that they are owed," and cited Lee’s "strong opposition to the ICE raids that have been terrorizing our community."

Littleton also said Lee was "deeply concerned by the allegations that another member of Congress — acting on behalf of a campaign contributor — may have gotten a federal agency to intervene in that dispute in a way that hurts workers in my district."

Emeryville special counsel Benjamin Stock told the Guardian that letters between Bilbray and ICE located as a result of our article will be cited in a pending lawsuit charging Woodfin officials with retaliating against whistle-blowing workers. It is against the law for an employer to fire workers for organizing for better working conditions, regardless of immigration status.

In a prepared statement, Woodfin officials said they contacted Bilbray’s office "to be certain we were in compliance with all laws governing our business." They claim that Measure C’s regulations "directly contradict federal immigration laws and violate the Constitution’s due-process clause." Both of the Woodfin’s federal lawsuits challenging Measure C’s constitutionality have been rejected; the last was dismissed June 7.

Emeryville has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars litigating these two federal court cases and a pending state court case and processing worker complaints. The Woodfin now says it will appeal the city’s decision regarding back wages. City officials are urging the Woodfin to accept defeat.

"Please," Emeryville City Attorney Mark Biddle said, "let’s move on with life. Measure C is a pretty simple concept, and all the other hotels seem to be on board." The Woodfin, he told us, can "either keep fighting a useless cause and continue ringing up the bill or pay the workers what the law requires."

True TorrentSpies

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June 19, 2007
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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION It’s no big surprise that entertainment megacorp Columbia is suing more file sharers. But there is something quite shocking about its latest infringement lawsuit against Web site TorrentSpy.com. With this lawsuit, Columbia is attempting to do nothing short of changing the way evidence is gathered via the legal discovery process. That means the entertainment industry has finally figured out a way to screw everybody in the United States — not just the geeks using peer-to-peer software.

Columbia is suing TorrentSpy for infringement because the site makes it easy for people to find information about where to download illegal copies of movies owned by Columbia. TorrentSpy doesn’t make the movies themselves available — it offers a search engine that locates files people can download via the file-sharing program BitTorrent. The suit says the guys who own the site are "inducing" others to infringe, as well as gaining secondary benefits from infringement because the site’s popularity and ad sales are boosted by pirates.

Here’s where things get hairy. During discovery, the period in a lawsuit in which both sides gather evidence, Columbia ordered TorrentSpy to hand over its user logs, electronic records of what people have done on the site. The problem is that TorrentSpy doesn’t keep user logs. So Columbia’s lawyers came up with a freaky, technically dubious argument. They claimed that TorrentSpy had technically been keeping logs anyway because user data passed through the Web site computer’s RAM — the part of the computer’s memory that never gets written to disk and saved. The mere fact that the data had flashed through the RAM was enough to make it discoverable, the lawyers claimed.

But all that stuff in RAM was gone. So how to get it back? Columbia’s lawyers told the judge that the owners of TorrentSpy could start keeping user logs during the discovery process and in essence re-create the missing logs. This was hugely controversial because discovery is only supposed to apply to already existing evidence. You can’t order witnesses or defendants to start gathering data today for you to subpoena in the future. But the judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, went for Columbia’s argument about the RAM: if the data had been in RAM for even a nanosecond, it existed in the past and was therefore subject to discovery.

The ramifications of this decision are far-reaching indeed. If the California ruling holds — it’s in the appeals stage right now — Columbia may have created a legal loophole that allows lawyers to order people to generate new evidence during discovery. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann, who has been following the case, told me via e-mail, "Because the ruling is based on the notion that ephemeral RAM copies are ‘records’ subject to preservation and production in litigation, it reaches deep into many businesses. For example, if you have a VOIP-based phone system (where conversations appear momentarily in RAM in your data center), are you responsible for recording every phone call for potential disclosure in litigation? What about IM conversations? Does everything created by a computer become a ‘producible’ record, just because it’s digital and therefore must rely on RAM?"

While the case is on appeal, TorrentSpy won’t have to start tracking its users. But if the appeal fails, TorrentSpy will have to spy on its customers to produce evidence. There is one hopeful sign: the judge has requested that TorrentSpy not hand over the unique IP addresses of its customers in logs, so the evidence can’t be used to go after individuals. However, the precedent of asking companies to create logs as evidence may remain in place.

Does this mean that the discovery process could become a way to wiretap parties to a lawsuit? After all, as von Lohmann points out, VoIP companies preserve phone conversations in RAM for a few brief seconds. One could easily imagine a plaintiff arguing that a VoIP company should start keeping audio files of all the phone calls between two parties to a case, since those audio files should have existed before. As a result, the plaintiff will have access to everything those parties say to each other after the lawsuit has been brought. Unfair? You bet. Legal? According to Judge Chooljian, yes.

If you’re worried about government-issued wiretap orders, maybe it’s time to start worrying about Hollywood-issued ones too. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who has a hell of a lot of information about you stored in her short-term memory.

A real dialogue on trans issues

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June 19, 2007
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OPINION What I love about the queers in this town is just how messy and offensive we allow one another to be in our unified goal of relentlessly trying to strengthen our community. In some circles, the evolution of dyke space into a multigender population of transsexuals, genderqueers, femmes, tg-butches, bisexuals, lesbians, and men of all birth sexes has led to tension about queer visibility and discussions about misogyny, privilege, and appropriation. I am frequently pissed but never lacking for a group of people who will continue to engage the issues and attempt imperfect solutions no matter how hurt they have become in the process.

And yet, during Pride season there will be countless potentially offensive voices we will not hear. The ex-gay and right-wing Christian movements — arguably homosexual communities in their own right — will not be given unchallenged space at our events, and there won’t be an uproar that these views should be included for the purpose of "fostering dialogue." As many journalists and artists can attest, ensuring the free exchange of ideas often means knowing what to leave out.

Still, it was predictable that supporters of lesbian director Catherine Crouch’s film The Gendercator would claim censorship and blame transgender community allies for "silencing dialogue" when the Frameline International LGBT Film Festival decided last month to pull this film from its June schedule. It was a setup; victims could either remain silent during an attack or speak up and "prove" that they have malicious intentions to take over the world.

For those unfamiliar with The Gendercator, a quick look at Crouch’s film summary and deliberately defamatory director’s note says it all: Trans people are the product of "distorted cultural norms" who uphold antigay values and change their sex "instead of working to change the world." Male-identified trans people are altered lesbians, despite the fact that many have never held that identity. And not even the femme dykes are safe, considering Crouch’s tomboy-or-else definition of acceptable queerdom.

Crouch says the film comes from her anxiety about what she perceives as the loss of gender-variant women and the rise of binary gender norms. But the film itself strikes a different note, depicting trans bodies as sci-fi horrors and trans characters as coercive perpetrators of nonconsensual body invasions — all the familiar rhetoric used to justify antitrans violence and deny basic civil rights.

If there’s a dialogue to be had about our community’s valid anxieties surrounding the spike in sexual reassignment surgeries, it certainly wasn’t raised in Crouch’s The Gendercator. Unlike the creators of other films that have been controversial in the trans community, Crouch is disinterested in the lives of the people she portrays in this work. Imagine making a film alleging an inherent pedophilia in gay people to "spark dialogue" about gay culture’s obsession with eternal youth. As Rae Greiner, a queer woman who launched the Frameline letter-writing campaign, points out, "You can’t foster genuine discussion when you demonize your subjects or when you intentionally forego nuance in favor of stereotypes, false accusations, and outdated perceptions."

In fact, The Gendercator provoked very little dialogue at all until San Francisco activists protested it. Far from trying to silence it, they aimed to call attention to the film and create an actual conversation. They distributed flyers with Crouch’s position and responded with the truth about trans people’s lives: trans people are often queer social-justice activists with a nuanced and feminist view of identity.

The reason nontrans gay people have not seen blatantly antigay or antilesbian films yanked from their festivals is that such movies don’t make it past the selection committee. To decry the ban on The Gendercator is thus disingenuous, particularly when many of the "anticensorship" and "nonbinary" voices support events that ban trans people from attending based on the presence or absence of a penis.

Yet there are some important messages about this film that should not be lost.

First, if our community artists are going to claim dialogue as justification for blatant attacks, then they should expect to have that dialogue. Some of the questions the queer community has posed in its discussion of the film are: Why does Crouch think her views are nonbinary? How do femmes, bisexuals, butches of color, nonop male-identified trans people, and dykes who choose breast cancer reconstruction fit into her limited view of sex and gender? How does the glorification of masculinity in lesbian circles and the sexism in butch and genderqueer communities contribute to this perceived pressure to transition to male?

Most important, if gays and lesbians feel that the growing transgender population means they are under attack, how can we come together to make sure this concern is heard and validated without demonizing one another? Several events exist in San Francisco to deal with such tensions, but perhaps they aren’t reaching the smart and articulate people whose need for real dialogue has been reduced to lamenting the loss of a 15-minute monster movie.

Opposing the inclusion of a deliberately divisive and dialogue-stopping film in an event designed to build community was something we did not do because we don’t want to have a community conversation, but because we do. *

Zak Szymanski

Zak Szymanski is the producer and editor of the short film The Wait.

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Volumes

CAVE SINGERS

ORGANIZED GRIND

BRIAN ENO’S 77 MILLION PAINTINGS

ALBUM LEAF AND ARTHUR AND YU

AUDRYE SESSIONS

RACCOO-OO-OON

By Paul Reidinger