Bay Guardian Archives Archives — Page 103 of 1098 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Shit happened

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

Exploratorium layoffs raise questions

A round of recent layoffs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco has taken the museum staff by surprise and sparked questions about the institution’s focus, an unexpected turn of events on the heels of the institution’s splashy reopening at its refurbished 330,000 square foot facility along The Embarcadero.

In mid-August, just a few months after the Exploratorium opened the doors at Piers 15/17, some 80 full-time-equivalent positions were eliminated without warning. The cuts included 35 layoffs, 35 positions that went unfilled, and eight reductions from full time to part time, according to spokesperson Leslie Patterson, a 14-year Exploratorium employee who was among those affected. The total staff is composed of 290 full-time-equivalent positions, according to its website.

Roughly three quarters of the impacted staff members are represented by SEIU Local 1021, and union members are now gearing up to launch a social media campaign in response to the sudden staffing cuts, featuring the community-minded vision of founder Frank Oppenheimer, with the hashtag #ourcommunitymuseum.

Officially, the cuts were made to solve a budget shortfall created when attendance at the new facility failed to reach anticipated levels. “They had very, very aggressive projections for attendance,” noted Eric Socolofsky, an exhibit developer who has been representing unionized museum staff at the negotiating table.

“We worked so hard to get in these doors and open this place,” Socolofsky said of the new waterfront spot. “People have given so much,” but in the weeks since layoff notices were issued without warning, “there’s a lot of disillusionment.”

Patterson emphasized that “our crowds have grown” since the new facility opened, despite the uncertain financial picture. June attendance was triple that of June in the previous year, she said, but the overall attendance figures still failed to hit necessary targets. “We needed to reduce the workforce to offset a budget gap,” she said.

Yet several museum employees told the Guardian that there is more to the sudden staff reduction than just solving a simple budget gap. There appears to be a reorganization effort afoot to promote business development, Socolofsky said, and that has some staff members concerned about a shift in priorities that could detract from efforts geared particularly for Bay Area patrons.

Socolofsky said more energy had been going toward “client services,” or contracting with outside institutions to build exhibits, and rent or sell portable exhibits developed at the Exploratorium. And even as the layoff notices have been issued, the Exploratorium is hiring for a dozen or so new positions.

“One of our concerns is that it’s moving toward a profit model,” Socolofsky said, adding that it was his understanding that some positions had been eliminated because they did not fit into the new organizational structure.

Its board of directors includes representatives from prominent businesses including Google, Twitter, eBay, Bechtel, Disney, PG&E, and a host of prominent venture capital firms with investments in the tech sector. Exploratorium Board Chairman George Cogan is a director at Bain & Company, Inc., a firm that specializes in restructuring, which gained notoriety during the 2012 presidential election due to GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s history of involvement there.

“It just seems like the pendulum has swung more toward the business aspect,” said David Barker, a graphic designer with the Exploratorium’s Institutional Media Group who was forced into an early retirement as a consequence of the staffing cuts.

Pamela Winfrey, a senior artist who started working at the museum in 1979 and just had her hours scaled back, said the Exploratorium has always felt like a family. “I think there are new directions in the wind as well as a budget shortfall,” Winfrey said. “It’s a complicated picture.”

And across the board, she added, the Exploratorium must contend with the fact that there’s a steadily eroding pool of funding for arts and science. “Funders are really having to think about whether they want to feed starving children,” she said, “or feed the mind.” (Rebecca Bowe)

Prisoners end hunger strike

Bay Area legislators Tom Ammiano (D-SF) and Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) — who chair the Assembly and Senate Public Safety Committees, respectively — played pivotal roles in the Sept. 5 decision by California prison inmates to end their hunger strike (see “Hungry for reform, July 3) after 60 days.

The legislators called for legislative hearings to consider implementing some of the reforms that the prisoners and their supporters have been calling for, including changes to solitary confinement policies that critics say amount to illegal torture under international law.

“I’m happy that no one had to die in order to bring attention to these conditions,” Ammiano said. “The prisoners’ decision to take meals should be a relief to CDCR and the Brown administration, as well as to those who support the strikers.”

The question now is whether the legislative hearings, set for next month, can persuade the executive branch to finally take action, despite the fact that both Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken a hard line on prison issues, even resisting federal court orders to reduce the population in the severely overcrowded prison system and to improve substandard health care.

Ammiano spokesperson Carlos Alcala told the Guardian that the end of the hunger strike could help end that stalemate: “Mr. Ammiano is hopeful that CDCR’s intransigence has been directed at negotiating under the hunger strike pressure, but that they will now be open to making some changes that are meaningful.”

CRCR head Jeffrey Beard issued a public statement saying, “We are pleased this dangerous strike has been called off before any inmates became seriously ill.”

Issac Ontiveros of the Oakland-based California Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity group said the hunger strike generated international attention and support, waking the public up to horrific conditions in the prisons and putting pressure on the CDCR to implement reforms.

“Their demands are legitimate and they are pointing out human rights violations in California’s prisons,” Ontiveros told the Guardian, noting that Amnesty International and a long list of other groups are putting pressure on California to reform its prison practices. “What made them call off the strike was the political gains that they made…It was a thoughtful civil rights strategy.” (Steven T. Jones)

SFPD handling of cyclist fatalities probed

In the wake of revelations of shoddy and insensitive police work related to the Aug. 14 death of 24-year-old bicyclist Amelie Le Moullac, who was run over by a commercial truck driver who turned right across her path as she rode in a bike lane on Folsom Street at Sixth Street, Sup. Jane Kim has called for a hearing on how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities.

The issue has lit up the Bay Guardian website with hundreds of reader comments after we wrote a series of blog posts and an editorial (“Anti-cyclist bias must stop,” Aug. 28), revealing that SFPD failed to obtain video of the crash even as its Sgt. Richard Ernst showed up at an Aug. 21 memorial to Le Moullac to denigrate cyclists and make unfounded statements about the fatal collision.

Police Chief Greg Suhr later apologized for Ernst’s behavior and the flawed investigation and said that surveillance video unearthed by cycling activists led to the conclusion by a police investigation that the driver who killed Le Moullac was at fault, according to Bay City News and SF Appeal, which also reported on Kim’s call for a hearing. “We’re really thankful to Jane for bringing this forward,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Director Leah Shahum told the Guardian, saying she hopes the hearing results in changes to how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities. “We want to make sure there is ongoing accountability.” Meanwhile, as the San Francisco Examiner reported Sept. 5, Le Moullac’s family has filed a civil lawsuit against the driver who killed her, Gilberto Oriheaula Alcantar, as well as the company that he was driving for, Daylight Foods Inc., alleging that he was negligent in driving too fast and failing to pull into the bike lane before making a right turn from Folsom onto Sixth Street. (Steven T. Jones)

Street Fight

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

218

(Editor’s Note: Welcome to our new monthly transportation column by Jason Henderson, an urban geography professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco (UMass Press, 2013). Onward!)

San Francisco is in a mobility stalemate that is becoming increasingly inequitable.

In this supposedly “transit-first” city, the political establishment can’t bring itself to just say “no” to vocal minorities of over-entitled motorists. In the process, it is breaking decades-old promises to improve Muni, enhance bicycling, and make the city more walkable — creating dysfunction on the streets of San Francisco.

This dynamic is on vivid display in several planning initiatives now underway, including the SFMTA’s Transit Effectiveness Project (for which public comments on the EIR are due Sept. 17) and the overly complicated efforts to establish Bus Rapid Transit on Van Ness Avenue and Geary Boulevard and cycletracks on Polk Street.

In each case, officials are dancing around the sensitivities of a handful of motorists and merchants — even to the point of ignoring actual data showing that San Franciscans just aren’t as dependent on the automobile as some believe. For example, studies show 85 percent of people arrive to the Polk Street corridor without a car.

Not only does this disconnect leave San Franciscans stuck in traffic, it is making our city less equitable for car-free households (which make up 30 percent of the city), as well as bicyclists and transit passengers who own cars but use them sparingly.

On Van Ness Avenue, buses crawl along at 5.2 miles per hour, on average. Mixing with cars slows buses, causes bunching and irregular reliability for the 16,000 passengers boarding along this two-mile corridor, and the 38,000 who ride the 47 & 49 routes daily.

Half of the households on Van Ness between Market and Lombard are car-free, yet they have poor transit service and are saturated with other people’s car traffic and pollution.

Franklin and Gough are car sewers and Van Ness is not much better, as the city historically prioritized moving cars over all else. Now the city plans to modernize the corridor by creating bus-only lanes in the middle of Van Ness, providing extensive pedestrian improvements and landscaping, and large, visible bus stops that dignify the transit experience.

Buses will be faster and more efficient, carrying 36 percent more people than each mixed traffic lane and cutting operating costs by 30 percent. Giving a lane to buses will also smooth traffic flow for cars and trucks, because buses would no longer be shifting in and out of mixed traffic in the third outside lane, a classic win-win solution.

But for the plan to work, it also comes with a tradeoff of limiting left turns from Van Ness (except at Broadway) and removing 105 parking spaces, causing a small minority of car activists to howl.

Yet these are the sorts of tradeoffs it takes to become a functional city. Will San Francisco prioritize the wishes of a few dozen drivers over tens of thousands of transit riders? That’s the choice, along this and other key corridors.

On the 5-Fulton, it now takes 50 minutes to go from the Transbay Terminal to Ocean Beach, about the same time it takes to get from San Francisco to Pittsburgh/Bay Point on BART. During rush hour, the buses are often jam-packed, so the 20,000 daily passengers on that line receive less than dignified service.

Muni proposes to fix the 5-Fulton with a practical, modest approach to re-allocate street space. By reworking bus stops and removing some curbside parking, the 5-Fulton pilot proposal will improve reliability and make the bus 10 minutes faster, and add 20 to 30 percent more capacity to the route during rush hour.

Improving the 5-Fulton would relieve traffic on the parallel Fell and Oak corridor. Like Van Ness BRT, this is the transit we were promised when the Central Freeway was removed and the city approved massive amounts of new housing in its place.

The 5-Fulton pilot is critical for the 60 percent of households in the Western Addition that are car-free, and the project would remove just 30 parking spaces. Assume that each of those parking spaces turns over four times per day (a generous assumption considering that cars sit for days in some parking spaces), that’s 120 car owners. Compare that to the 20,000 bus passengers on the 5-Fulton, and we start to see the glaring inequities in the effort to preserve street parking.

At two recent public meetings on improving the 5-Fulton, motorists predictably protested the lost parking. Like the “Save Polk” debacle that sank cycletracks on that street, some of the opponents of the 5-Fulton plan tried to block the Fell-Oak bicycle improvements last year and are currently trying to sink safety improvements on Masonic.

The city will likely bend over backward to placate these motorists. Already it has considered introducing angled parking, as was done at the Panhandle on Baker, to ensure no motorist is inconvenienced. But that makes no sense given the goals that the city has set for itself of 30 percent of all trips by transit and 20 percent of all trips by bicycle in the next decade.

The city should consider the tens of thousands of car-free households and hundreds of thousands of transit passengers before caving in to the automobile extremists.

If the city caves to a minority of parking enthusiasts, as it did on Polk Street, there really is no hope for improving Muni for the majority. Ask any parent, rewarding whiners only leads to more whining — and in this case, more gridlock.

Pumped up

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

3

marke@sfbg.com

ON THE MOVE The epic Pacific Crest Trail winds 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada, through sun-roasted desert expanse and snow-covered mountain pass, past rushing waterfalls and over wildflower-studded Alpine plateau, roughly tracing the Sierras and Cascades, always out of sight of civilization. It takes most hikers roughly half a year to make the whole trip, an isolating, immersive communion with nature that foregrounds self-reliance, endurance, and more than a little ingenuity when it comes to where you’re going to sleep and what you’re going to eat.

On June 21, Alex Falcioni, a massage therapist and teacher, took to the 1,230-mile leg of the trail running from Tuolumne Meadow, Yosemite, to Portland. In high heels.

“I’d always dreamed of doing the trail — but the most I could take off would be three months, so I knew I couldn’t do the whole thing” he told me over a “beat-up” phone from Ashland, hitchhiking his way back to the Bay Area after completing his high-heeled hike on Aug. 31st at Cascade Locks, Ore. “And then I heard that my dear friend Sarah had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was having trouble covering her medical bills, so I decided to make the hike a fundraiser.

“I needed a gimmick, though, to draw attention. And that’s where the pumps came in — it really just came to me one day. I’d start in Yosemite, and wear the pumps to Portland. Mostly for the alliteration, ha ha.”

Falcioni’s project, Pumps 2 Portland, was partly inspired by Hiking26, a 2012 performance art piece by Ron Ulrich, who completed the entire PCT wearing 26 wedding dresses along the way. So far, Falcioni has managed to raise over $2,500. (Interested parties can still donate and read firsthand about Falcioni’s adventures at www.pumps2portland.com.)

The first obvious question: What kind of pumps were they? “Oh, a strappy white pair of size-12 slingbacks from a drag queen shoe store. They’re completely destroyed,” Falcioni said. “My toes look like little Vienna sausages. But my calves are rocks.”

The second obvious question: Come on, did he really wear high heels the whole time?

Falcioni laughs. “No way! There are ascents up to 10,000 feet and sometimes I felt afraid for my life in hiking shoes. Plus, often ‘trail’ is a relative word — it’s not like clicking down a paved sidewalk. But I wore them when I could, and I strapped them on my backpack for all the other hikers to see when I couldn’t.

“They were there to keep me inspired and add a little spark when the trail got so monotonous it was like sensory deprivation — like, ‘if I see another Ponderosa pine I’m going to go insane!'” With the heels it all became a outdoor runway.

“The pumps really opened doors, too,” Falcioni continued. “People I’d encounter on the trail would ask about them and that would help along a conversation. Or when I’d go into town… One of the ways you survive the trail is to mail food ahead for yourself. (You learn little tricks, like mixing spicy ramen with a spoonful of peanut butter equals Thai food!) So I’d have to go down into towns to pick that up, and I hadn’t bathed in a week — same shirt, same pants, covered in dirt and smoke. But showing off these huge pumps.

“That not only got the attention of the Trail Angels — people who dedicate themselves to opening their homes and helping out PCT hikers — but of random strangers, too. I made so many real friendships, had so many actual conversations about real things in these places of enormous beauty. Not to mention some free showers.

“It was an incredible experience to just put yourself out there at the mercy of nature, other people, and even yourself. I’d urge anyone to do it, giant man-heels or no.”

Nevertheless: Hey, Rupaul — I think we have your next location for Drag Race.

Where’s my car?

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

8

By Rebecca Bowe

rebecca@sfbg.com

There’s a great scene in The Big Lebowski that my friend reminded me of when I lamented that the San Francisco Police Department didn’t seem to care that my car had been stolen.

Of course they don’t, silly, this friend responded with a hearty laugh. It’s like when The Dude asks a Los Angeles cop whether there are any “leads” on the whereabouts of his stolen car (along with the briefcase full of money inside).

“I’ll just check with the boys down at the crime lab,” the cop responds, a grin spreading across his face. “They’ve got four more detectives working on the case. They’ve got us working in shifts!” Then he bursts into peals of laughter.

When a San Francisco police officer arrived to take a report three hours after my initial call reporting a stolen vehicle, he seemed sympathetic. And he was totally honest: “We’re not going to look for it,” he assured me. “But we’ll let you know if we find it.”

Fair enough, I thought. It was a Saturday night in San Francisco. The SFPD probably had bigger problems on its hands, like shootings or armed robberies or naked acrobats. Clearly, the last thing SFPD was going to focus on was ferreting out my poor little mid-’90s Honda Civic.

Car theft, it turns out, is extremely common in San Francisco. Crime stats provided by SFPD show that from March 1 to Aug. 31 of 2013, a grand total of 2,784 cars were either stolen or almost stolen in San Francisco (the stats include attempted theft). The Ingleside District was the most heavily impacted, while the Mission and the Bayview weren’t far behind.

Why do people drive off with other people’s cars? “Suspects that steal cars have used them for other crimes,” SFPD spokesperson Gordon Shyy explained. “There are also suspects that steal cars simply to ‘joy ride.'”

Another lesson learned the hard way: If you think your car will not be stolen just because it looks like crap, you are mistaken. Shyy said that, nationwide, Hondas made in the 1990s are the most stolen vehicles.

“The reason being that the ignition is worn out over time, and a shaved key or other similar apparatus can be used to start the vehicle easily,” he explained.

Becoming a victim of car theft was an eye-opening experience. For one, it appears that the closed circuit cameras blanketing my neighborhood were basically functioning as seagull perches, taken out of commission the day before for maintenance. So those expensive-looking security cameras served neither as a deterrent for car theft, nor a crime-fighting tool. At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that Big Brother has not, in fact, been recording my every movement.

SFPD stats show just 139 vehicles were stolen and recovered from March 1 to Aug. 31, roughly 5 percent of the total stolen (or almost stolen) in the same time frame. I got lucky, mine was recovered.

SFPD gave me just 20 minutes to retrieve it before calling for a tow truck, notifying me that my Honda had been located as I was on Muni. Looking for an exercise in futility? Promise that you’ll be somewhere in 20 minutes, and then rely on Muni to get there.

But here’s where faith in humanity was restored. Not only did the officers agree to accommodate me by staying put until I could get there, but a random fellow bus passenger — by the name of Carma (for real!) — offered me a lift.

And just as I got to the place where my Civic had been found, a neighbor who lived in an apartment just above the street popped his head out the window to ask if it was my car. I told him it was, and he said it had been sitting there abandoned for days, so he’d phoned the police. Lesson learned: Forget surveillance cameras. If your car gets stolen, just hope somebody out there is paying attention.

Waiting for BRT

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

18

By Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez

joe@sfbg.com

You’re on Muni’s underground line, the train stalled just shy of your stop, just stuck there, the light at the end of the tunnel right in front of you. It’s a frustrating feeling, right?

With more than six years worth of delays in three major transit overhauls — the Van Ness, Geary and Geneva Bus Rapid Transit Projects — it’s beginning to feel just like that.

The projects are designed to speed up the most trafficked transit routes in the city by making the buses run like trains. For the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit, the 47 and 49 would drive in dedicated bus-only lanes shuttling riders north and south, reducing travel time by a third, according to project estimates.

Van Ness BRT was initially announced in 2004 with a planned unveiling of 2012. Eight years later, the new debut is set for 2018. The Geary Project is even worse, with a completion date slated for 2020.

The Van Ness BRT is finally getting its wheels turning this month, with the Environmental Impact Report set to be approved by a number of governmental bodies: the Van Ness BRT Citizen’s Advisory Committee, the Transit Authority board, and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.

Why the hell has this bus project taken nearly a decade to start its engine? As is customary in politics, fingers are pointed at all sides.

At a citizen’s meeting for the Van Ness BRT on Sept. 4, two angry factions gathered in the Old First Church Fellowship Hall on Van Ness. The SFMTA’s spokesperson for the project, Lulu Feliciano, wrapped up her presentation to the crowd of about 100, and that’s when they pounced.

“Van Ness’ three lanes will be limited to two, but it’s a highway, isn’t it?” asked Carole Holt, owner of Russian Hill Upholstery. “Why do cars have no consideration?” She told the Guardian she worried her customers from Marin would have trouble getting to her store.

Another Polk Street activist, Kelly Gerber, walked right up to Feliciano’s face and gestured with his hand like an angry schoolteacher. “Why has no one ever heard of this?” he bellowed, telling us he opposes the loss of parking spaces.

Ironically, transit planners say car traffic would move faster, partially because of the elimination of all left turns along Van Ness except Broadway.

“They’re just angry and zooming in on every little detail,” Mario Tanez, spokesperson for the SF Transit Riders Union, said of BRT’s opponents.

The mostly younger crowd of transit activists showed up in equal force to counter the Polk Street merchants, hoping to stem the tide of NIMBYism.

“We’re the generation that will actually see these improvements,” Teo Wickland told us. He’s an urban planning student who hopes to see Muni running on time.

Feliciano said the project was complicated by having to coordinate multiple city agencies, all with their own goals.

Instead of digging up the same stretch of concrete a dozen times in a decade, San Francisco tries to include as many agencies as possible when cement is broken in any part of the city, she said. Since the Van Ness project is a two-mile stretch between Lombard and Mission streets, many are involved.

Graphic by Brooke Robertson

Peter Gabancho, the project manager for Van Ness BRT, said that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission will put in new water lines, institute a rainwater catch system, and do sewer work. The Department of Public Works plans to repave, and the SFMTA will replace overhead bus lines and light poles.

When asked how much the city would save by combining work, he couldn’t give an exact dollar amount but said it was in the tens of millions, at least.

He also said that the process requires community meetings at many steps in the process. City officials visited Mexico City to see how they planned and built its BRT in just three years, and Gabancho said it’s because that city didn’t really consult the community.

“We can’t do business like that in San Francisco and I don’t think we want to do that in San Francisco,” he said.

All of that governmental insanity had a member of the Geary BRT’s Citizen Advisory Council calling it quits in a fury — he even wrote about it in his blog.

“What I’ve seen in the past six years has been a severe disappointment during which I have lost trust in America’s regulatory framework to enact effective transit improvements,” Kieran Farr, the CEO and co-founder of VidCaster, wrote. He described the process as fraught with starts and restarts, slips and delays, mostly due to a lack of leadership. And that’s the rub: There is no point person on this project with strong political will, according the SFTRU. “The mayor is not saying this is high priority,” Tanez told us. “He’s at all the Central Subway events, but getting political clout behind this by writing to our supervisors is the only way to do this.” The Van Ness project runs through the districts of Sups. Mark Farrell and David Chiu, who were both unavailable at press time. The SFMTA is slated to approve the Van Ness BRT EIR on Tue/17 at 1pm in City Hall, Room 400.

A bridge so far

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

46

By Steven T. Jones

steve@sfbg.com

Pedaling onto the Bay Bridge over the weekend, I was suspended between our industrial past and sleek present. But my ride into the future was abruptly stopped just before I reached the island.

All the experts say we should all just be happy with the world’s longest bike and pedestrian pier, and it certainly is a wondrous thing to behold, this spacious and beautiful two-mile path that pasted big grins on the dozens of faces that I rode past on its sunny first Friday in operation.

But just as the duality of riding between the old Bay Bridge and the new invoked myriad metaphors, so too did the fact that my fellow taxpayers and I just spent $6.4 billion on a bridge from Oakland to San Francisco built almost exclusively for the private automobile.

Is this the future we’ve embraced? Are global warming, economic equity, and collective responsibility such distant abstractions that we can fill this beautiful new bridge with people sitting alone in expensive, deadly, polluting, space-hogging machines?

I looked into their work-weary eyes as I rode my bicycle out from Oakland with a few of my friends during rush hour, on a path wide enough to facilitate conversations among a pair of cyclists in each direction and strolling pedestrians, six abreast. It was lovely, like we had finally arrived in the civilized, people-powered present that we Guardianistas have been working toward for decades.

And then it ended, a vivid reminder that we’re not there yet.

SHARING THE ROAD

The past is blocking our progress, literally and metaphorically, at least for now.

The old Bay Bridge stands between the stubbed-off end of the new bike/pedestrian path and its intended touchdown spot on natural Yerba Buena Island, the conjoined twin of the artificial Treasure Island, where developers dream of building high-rise condo towers buffered against the rising sea.

Officials tell the Guardian that the path will likely be completed in early 2015, after the old bridge comes down. Then, we’ll be able to ride our bikes onto the island and cruise our way to the west side, with its beautiful views of our beloved city, San Francisco, shimmering just out of reach.

Next month, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission will release its latest study of how to complete the ride/walk, examining the placement of pathways balanced on either side of the Bay Bridge’s western span, their added weight compensated for with lighter decks for the cars, all at a cost approaching a billion bucks, with a capital B.

“Everything about this is going to be hard,” MTC spokesperson John Goodwin told me when I asked about allowing cyclists and pedestrians onto the Bay Bridge’s western span, citing an array of engineering, financial, and political obstacles.

“It’s a 10-year project even if a local billionaire decides to put up the money,” Goodwin said, noting that there is no public funding identified for the project except for maybe raising automobile tolls again, which would be a tough sell to voters for a bike and pedestrian project. “It’s an uphill climb and I’m not sure it will ever reach its intended goal.”

But completing this journey is really only as difficult as we make it. Just ask local activist/author Chris Carlsson, who says that he and some of his buddies could fix the problem in a day for a few thousand dollars. All we need to do it take the righthand lane, install some barriers, done.

“The bridge is more malleable than people treat it as and we need to have this discussion publicly,” Carlsson, a founder of Critical Mass and author of Nowtopia, told us. “Let’s solve this problem today. The idea that they would open this bridge without completing this path is insulting.”

To Carlsson and others of his radical ilk, this is an equity issue, and the opening of a car-only bridge is symbolic of our societal myopia. To believers in the automotive status quo, the idea of giving up one of five traffic lanes for the final, two-mile-long descent into San Francisco makes their heads explode.

“That’s just wildly unrealistic,” Goodwin said of Carlsson’s idea, even instituted on a temporary basis, noting that the Bay Bridge handles more than 270,000 cars per day, by far the busiest state-run bridge in California.

To many modern minds, automobiles are essential to our personal freedom and economic vitality — bikes are toys, public transit is for the poor, walking is what you do in your neighborhood or on the treadmill at the gym — but San Francisco is a voter-approved “transit-first” city that supposedly gives each of these modes priority over cars.

“The idea that the five lanes of automobile traffic is inviolable is ridiculous,” Carlsson said, calling it a relic from the days before the freeway revolts of the 1950s and ’60s, when San Franciscans rejected the conception of The City as just another stop along the fast and efficient interstate highway system.

In fact, it was that cars-first vision — before it was rejected by a populist revolt — that helped lead officials to remove the passenger trains that operated on the lower decks of this New Deal/WPA bridge for its first 17 years of life, turning the whole Bay Bridge over to cars, trucks, and the occasional bus.

The era of unfettered automobility had begun, and the idea that capitalism/industrialism and the health of our world might someday, somehow come into conflict with one another also seemed wildly unrealistic.

BRIDGING THE GAP

The Bay Bridge was my bridge growing up in the East Bay, our link to the big city that I traversed while safely cocooned in the backseat of my parents’ car, windows up, car filled with what we’d later call secondhand smoke, buffered against the wilds of West Oakland as we launched over the bay.

Today, my perspective has changed and so has my access through the old industrial waterfront, which has been opened up to all by a pair of new paths leading bikers and hikers to the bridge, both short rides from the West Oakland BART station.

One starts on Maritime Street, near the Port of Oakland and the remnants of the old railyard on what the Realtors have started calling Oakland Point; the other starts on Shellmound Street right across from Ikea, best accessed from West Oakland along 40th Street, where crews were in the process of placing tall cones to protect the bike lane as we rode past.

After the trails merge, it proceeds past the yards for the government agencies set up to serve the motoring public: CalTrans and its freeway maintenance facilities, and the California Highway Patrol, which has doubled its local bicycle brigade (which had worked just the Golden Gate Bridge) to police the new path.

“Best job in the world,” a smiling Officer Sean Wilkenfeld told me as he arrived at the end of the Bay Bridge path, where a couple dozen people stood watching the new Bay Bridge and the old, which took on a ghostly feel as we hovered next to its newfound lifelessness.

Personally, I really like the new Bay Bridge, with its elegant modern architecture and unobstructed bay views. But some of the friends and strangers that I chatted up there at the end of the line disagreed, singing the praises of the old, industrial, seismically unsound original.

“The new bridge is beautiful, but in some ways I like the old bridge better because you can see its functionality,” Joel Fajans, a physics professor at UC Berkeley, told me.

Conversation among the cyclists turned to our beautiful new path and its untimely end. “What a dream come true to have a bike path on the Bay Bridge. I already wrote to my representatives about completing the route to San Francisco,” said Kurt Vogler, a 47-year-old environmental consultant from Oakland who rode the bridge with Fajans.

That was the phrase that everyone used, this notion of completion, conveying the sense that we’re somehow stuck between where we were and where we should be, suspended between the old and the new, waiting to catch up.

“I think it’s beautiful. It’s an engineering marvel, a miracle,” Garris Shipon, a engineer from Berkeley, said halfway through his bike ride on the Bay Bridge. “I’m glad they launched with a bike path at all, and I hope they finish it because I’d love to ride all the way across.”

TWO BRIDGES

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges were built at the same time, started in 1933. But the Bay Bridge — the industrial, utilitarian bridge connecting The City to its biggest, most diverse nearby population centers — was done first. The tall, pretty one — with its Art Deco flourishes and tourist appeal — took longer.

On its opening day, the Golden Gate Bridge was filled with pedestrians, while the Bay Bridge hosted its first traffic jam as it was unveiled, “with every auto owner in the Bay Region, seemingly, trying to crowd his machine onto the great bridge,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

It’s been the same story ever since, with cyclists and walkers crowding onto the Golden Gate daily, salty winds howling through their hair, while travelers on the Bay are caged behind steel and glass.

But not anymore. In fact, it’s far more pleasant to ride on the Bay than the Golden Gate, where the bike path is narrow and cluttered. Now, it’s the golden one that seems to belong to another age, with the Bay Bridge designed to be personally experienced.

“It’s really a spectacular excursion,” Renee Rivera, executive director of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, told me. “I was taken by surprise by what fun it is to be on a bike on that bridge.”

But the stirring sensation of riding or walking the Bay Bridge only accentuates its main shortcoming; at least the noisy, harrowing Golden Gate Bridge goes all the way across.

“We just spent $6 billion on that,” Fajans said, gesturing to the new Bay Bridge, “and you’re saying we can’t spend a little more to complete the bike lane? That’s not fair.”

Goodwin and others say that motorists paid for the new Bay Bridge with their tolls, but Fajans calls bullshit, noting that BART passengers pay more than drivers for a round trip across the bay without buying exclusive access in the future.

In this age of austerity, with government funding for transportation projects drying up and people reluctant to raise their own tolls or taxes, it’s hard to do what’s needed. That’s one reason cycling advocates take what they can get, such as an expensive western span proposal with one of two paths reserved for maintenance vehicles to smooth the automotive flow.

“If we have to sell it to the public to increase tolls, we’ll have to show that it benefits everyone,” Rivera said.

Completing this path, somehow, is a top priority for the cyclists.

“It was a little tough to get people’s attention on the western span for the last couple years, but now is the time,” Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told us.

Neither director seems willing to embrace Carlsson’s radical approach of simply seizing a lane.

“Like Chris, we feel strongly about equity on the bridge,” Rivera said. “At the same time, it needs to function smoothly as a bridge and I would be concerned about it bottlenecking at Treasure Island.”

Carlsson rejects the neoliberal approach of begging for scraps as we ride into a future that simply can’t continue to be dominated by automobiles. He says the Bay Pier must not rest there for another decade.

“Both bike coalitions have a resistance to appearing anti-car,” Carlsson says, “so they aren’t willing to say the obvious thing.”

Carlsson talks about the Bay Bridge as part of the free Shaping San Francisco lecture series at 7:30pm, Sept. 11, Eric Quezada Center for Culture and Politics, 518 Valencia, SF.

The Performant: Mean Streets and Matchsticks at the Vancouver Fringe

Sue Vaughan

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September 10, 2013

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The Performant: Mean Streets and Matchsticks at the Vancouver Fringe

Here in Vancouver, the Fringe Festival has been in full swing since Sept. 5, and its early bustle has come as something of a welcome surprise. Shows have been selling out right and left, including those by the five-woman sketch comedy team Strapless, and the manic SNAFU Dance Theatre‘s survivalist romp Kitt & Jane. The buzz hangs as heavy in the air as the morning humidity. It’s interesting to compare the rowdy carnival atmosphere of the Edmonton Fringe, complete with sideshow attractions, tireless street performers, and mountains of cheap fried food and the people who eat it, with Vancouver’s more refined approach and oddience. The Vancouver Fringe is the biggest theater festival in town, I’m told, and therefore attracts a fairly large percentage of mainstream theater-goers.

But despite the fact that each show begins with an overly complicated spiel about sponsorship opportunities, the shows themselves have run the usual fringe-y gamut of content from heartfelt to hilarious, edgy to educational. Here are some of the standouts I’ve seen so far.

One of the bravest shows of the 2012 San Francisco Fringe was not actually a theatre piece at all, but an educational talk entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Circumcised, complete with video footage of infant (male) circumcisions that was decidedly not for the faint of heart. I see a lot of similarity in Tasha Diamant’s equally brave The Human Body Project, because when she takes the stage, naked and unscripted, the audience is immediately forced to examine their own reactions and assumptions around the act, the artist, and the body in general, leading to a tangibly cathartic yet thought-provoking collective experience.

Speaking of San Francisco Fringe, homegrown clown Summer Shapiro, whose Legs and All charmed at the festival in 2009, is here in Vancouver with a fun, interactive work, In the Boudoir; it’s a mostly silent comedy of a first date gone terribly awkward. In the same venue, the wry magic of Travis Barnhardt astounds in his mentalist routine Unpossible, during which he confesses several times that he hasn’t quite mastered the art before revealing that he clearly has.

Canadian storyteller Andrew Bailey, whose show Limbo I enjoyed in Edmonton, knocks one out of the metaphorical ballpark with his smart, compelling The Adversary. Matchstick, a two-person musical centered around a troubled, International love affair with political implications, impresses with its quick wit, inventive staging, and dynamic duo, despite some silly lyrics. Solo clown show Butt Kapinski follows a diminutive, speech-challenged “Pwivate Eye” down the mean streets and aisles of the small theater space, filled with cruel tenements, corrupt cops, and a bevy of working girls and murder victims (all unsuspecting oddience members), while the aforementioned Kitt & Jane wows with its energetic portrayals of a pair of angsty high school misfits who have one hour to save the world from itself.

Still looking forward to so much more, including Little Pussy, Model Wanted, Preacher Man, Kuwaiti Moonshine, Radio:30, The Cruelest Phone Book in the World, Against Gravity, Fools for Love, and 6 Guitars so I’d better get cracking. So little time. So many shows.

Smartphones trigger rise in crime rate as new iPhone features a fingerprint lock

Sasha Cuttler

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September 10, 2013

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Smartphones trigger rise in crime rate as new iPhone features a fingerprint lock

Violent crime is on the rise in the Bay Area and the San Francisco Police Department chalks it up to smartphone snatchers, a trend that is being countered by an initiative from the District Attorney’s Office and today’s announcement by Apple of a new iPhone that requires the owner’s fingerprint to unlock.

The FBI’s 2012 Uniform Crime Report, released in June, documented surges in crime in cities across the Bay Area, including Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, and Richmond. In San Francisco, violent crime increased 7.5 percent in 2012 and property crime spiked 18.3 percent. In 2013, those figures have climbed another 10 and 12 percent, respectively.

Asked for an explanation of the recent trend, SFPD spokesperson Tracy Turner told us that it’s due in large part to “increases in the theft or robbery of cell phones.”

“I can’t think of any other expensive item that people walk around with in their hand in public,” she said. “They’re more available to everybody and yet they’re slightly more expensive.”

Turner also cautioned that it’s not just iPhones that thieves go after, but all types of smartphones and also, more recently, tablets. “Those are the kind of items that people are absorbed in while they’re in a public place and they’re easy targets,” she explained.

Nathan Rapport, a resident of the Lower Haight, had his iPhone, iPod, and wallet stolen shortly before midnight last Wednesday as he approached the intersection of 14^th and Sanchez on foot.

“I sent a text probably a block away. Who knows if they saw the light down the street,” he speculated of the pair of thieves who drew a gun on him and demanded his possessions less than a minute later. The responding officers remarked that similar altercations often escalate, ending in physical harm to the victim.

“They said that they were surprised that it wasn’t more violent based on what they’ve been seeing lately in the neighborhood. It’s not usually just a snatch. You get pistol-whipped or there’s something else attached to it,” commented Rapport, who felt fortunate that, in his case, the incident “was strictly a business transaction.”

In San Francisco, “over 50 percent of daily robberies have to do with smartphones and up to 67 percent of robberies include mobile devices of any sort,” said SFPD Officer Danielle Newman.

District Attorney George Gascón has taken these statistics to heart in a newly crafted crime reduction strategy. He is co-chair of the Secure Our Smartphones Initiative, which has been endorsed by law enforcement agencies in 17 states.

In a June press release, the coalition wrote, “It’s time for manufacturers and carriers to put public safety before corporate profits” and he called on them to implement a “kill switch,” which could remotely disable phones reported stolen.

“Unlike other types of crimes, manufacturers and carriers have the ability to end the growing number of smartphone thefts with a technological solution,” the statement continued. A purloined phone’s value “would be equivalent to that of a paperweight. As a result, the incentive to steal them would be eliminated.”

At a hotly anticipated product launch this morning in Cupertino, Apple unveiled two new iPhone models. One, the 5C, is a budget design developed mainly for distribution in overseas markets and the other, 5S, includes fingerprint scan technology in the home button as a security measure. Industry analysts have been abuzz for weeks with speculation as to whether the newly impregnable button would be an innie or an outie.

As expected, the flashy new feature resulted in a minor anatomical change to Apple’s most popular product. Its rollout will have an even broader impact, however, as it alters the distribution of security across different countries and socio-economic classes. In its next major product development, perhaps Apple will take a cue from Gascón and put as much effort into democratizing safety as it does to democratizing its brand.

Heads Up: 6 must-see concerts this week

Tony Robles

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September 10, 2013

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Music can serve to fit your specific mood. If you can pinpoint an emotion you wish to heighten, you have the ability to explode the senses with a band or musical act playing live that night. You’re just that special.

This week, if you want to feel creepy, go to Death in June; for feel-good grooves, try Jimmy Cliff; to feel cultured, take in Julia Holter; to intensify a sense of ecstasy while engaging with the full scope of hip-hop today, grab passes to Rock the Bells.

Here are your must-see shows:

Bleeding Rainbow
“Bleeding Rainbow has seen several incarnations since its 2009 formation as Reading Rainbow. Its third album, Yeah Right, includes two added band members, a new name (allegedly provoked by a remark from Carrie Brownstein), and as one would expect with a move from “Reading Rainbow” to “Bleeding Rainbow,” added shades of something sinister. Despite the changes, though, its signature sound remains: Out of the fuzzy noise of reverb and distortion emerges sweet pop melodies from Sarah Everton. The band’s transformed, but between the noise, the darkness, and the pop, it still promises a good time.” — Laura Kerry
With the Love Language
Tue/10, 8pm, $12
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell, SF
(415) 861-2011
www.rickshawstop.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL2uSm19aEU

Jimmy Cliff
“At age 65, reggae legend Jimmy Cliff is experiencing perhaps one of the greatest bursts of artistic productivity in all of his five-decade-long and counting career. He’s inspired countless other musicians over the years, including Bay Area punk rocker Tim Armstrong of Rancid and Operation Ivy, who was brought aboard to produce and perform on Cliff’s newest album, last year’s excellent Rebirth. The record includes an outstanding cover of the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton,” which references Cliff’s movie and song “The Harder They Come” in its lyrics — bringing the music full circle, as it were. Don’t miss the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer when he hits the Fillmore stage tonight.” — Sean McCourt
Wed/11, 8pm, $39.50
Fillmore
1805 Geary, SF
(415) 346-6000
www.thefillmore.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGE4dnrPPZQ

Julia Holter
Julia Holter’s newest release, this month’s string-and-horn laced Loud City Song, is like the Weetzie Bat of music: a quirky, instantly classic retelling of the modern LA story. The chamber-pop multi-instrumentalist’s calling card is weaving lush, experimental compositions with her own dramatic vocals, creating compelling narratives and backstories through sound (previous records have focused on Greek mythology and French New Wave films). It’s charming to see the light, noise, and gossip of Los Angeles through the Holter lense.
With Nedelle Torrisi
Thu/12, 8pm, $16
Great American Music Hall
859 O’Farrell, SF
www.slimspresents.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzzpkDPetZU

Death in June
“Extremely depressing neofolk band Death in June is stopping by San Francisco for its long-awaited US tour. Initially starting as a post-punk, industrial project in the 1980s, the band shunned pretty-boy rock ideals, often donning ghoulish masks and costumes on stage. Death in June has given influence to plenty of contemporary bands such as metal band Agalloch and darkwave horde Faun…And the group released Snow Bunker Tapes, guitar-backed versions of Peaceful Snow, on Neuropa this year. Get sad, get creepy, and slump over to the Mezzanine.” — Erin Dage
120 Minutes with oOoOO, DJ Omar, CHAUNCEY_CC
Fri/13, 9pm, $30
Mezzanine
444 Jessie, SF
(415) 625-8880
www.mezzaninesf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myzNWd-Pp2g

Magic Trick
“If there’s anything supernatural about the band Magic Trick, it’s in frontperson Tim Cohen’s seeming ability to be in several places at once. Between the Fresh & Onlys, solo projects, and work with other bands, his prolificacy makes you wonder. But more than witchcraft, magic tricks usually involve sleight of hand. With Cohen’s signature deep voice and romantic songwriting, Magic Trick at times directly echoes the Fresh & Onlys. Don’t be fooled: With three added band members and a minimalism that makes the music more contemplative and a little stranger, Magic Trick surprises.” — Laura Kerry
With the Range of Light Wilderness, Pure Bliss, Cool Ghouls
Sat/14, 9pm, $12
Chapel
777 Valencia, SF
(415) 551-5157
www.thechapelsf.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xj9mNkXD8U0

Rock The Bells
“The country’s pre-eminent hip-hop festival is coming to the Bay Area this Saturday and Sunday, bringing a large and diverse crew of rap acts. There’s something for every kind of hip-hop head at this festival. For fans of weird rap, there’s Danny Brown, for fans of ratchet rap, there’s Juicy J, for the homers, there’s a E-40-Too $hort duet and IamSu!, and for fans of hologram rap there will be performances from hologram Eazy-E and ODB. For those you taking Caltrain from the city, remember that the train only runs once a hour and takes more than a hour to get to Mountain View.” — George McIntire
Sat/14-Sun/15, 11am, $65–<\d>$239
Shoreline Amphitheater
One Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View
(800) 745-3000
www.rockthebells.net
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0boHcBFSR0

Grouplove talks Haight love, the Seesaw Tour, and spreading rumors

Tony Robles

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September 10, 2013

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Grouplove’s existence is a strong argument for fate. In 2009, Hannah Hooper and Christian Zucconi met on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Feeling an instant connection, Hooper invited Zucconi to an artist residency in Greece on the island of Crete, which she was heading to just a few days later, and he said yes. At this residency, in a remote mountain village, the pair formed a fast friendship with three other musicians. Within the year, Grouplove was formed.

Two years after that, the band exploded into the music scene with its cheekily titled, megacatchy album Never Trust a Happy Song. Touring constantly since its inception, Grouplove is still going at full sprint, with its second album, Spreading Rumors, coming out Sept. 17, accompanied by the ambitious Seesaw Tour, in which the band will spend two nights in every city at intimate venues, playing one electric and one acoustic show.

I caught up with Hooper during one of her rare moments of semi-downtime (if that’s what you call standing on a busy street corner waiting for Zucconi) to chat about hometown shows, Haight Street, and (group)love:

SF Bay Guardian I saw you play in San Francisco almost exactly two years ago to a nearly empty Bimbo’s, and it was an absolutely amazing show. There was this incredible energy and because there was a sparse audience, it felt truly special to be there. Now you’re playing to much bigger audiences and selling out two nights in a row in SF. How do you feel about this change in dynamics?

Hannah Hooper It’s really exciting! It’s kind of surreal in a lot of ways. When we get to play a show we’re excited no matter what, so the scale of it blows our minds. With the Seesaw Tour, we’re kind of underplaying and getting to actually see our fans again. And we’re playing the Independent, which is one of the first venues we played in SF.

We personally love playing any size, but there’s a level of intimacy that’s hard to capture [in a bigger venue]. It’s a very special thing. As a fan, I love to see high-energy bands in small venues. That’s what we want to do before we gear up to do a bigger tour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x1wjGKHjBI

SFBG How did you come up with the idea for the Seesaw Tour? Why this format?

HH We were talking about bands. I love the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I’m a big fan, but I’ve never had the opportunity to get close to them. I’m always in the back behind like thousands of people. I had this vision of how cool it would be to see them play one night electric and one night acoustic.
It will be a challenge for us because we’re definitively an electric band.

SFBG Grouplove has a very vigorous touring schedule. How do you keep from getting burned-out?

HH That’s a good question! We stopped to record our album that’s about to come out, which is really the first time we’ve stopped touring in three years. But recording is not that different from touring — we still are living in tight quarters and spending all our time together.

If you stay in motion you don’t notice how exhausted you are. Even when you’ve traveled halfway around the world and you’re like, “are we going to be able to do this?” When you get up on stage, you just respond to the audience. It’s a back and forth. When you see people there screaming your name, you just have to bring it. It’s so fulfilling to give all that you have every time you get on stage. We just get into a trance friendship mode.

SFBG Do you all really love each other as much as your name and your live show suggests?

HH We do! We really love each other. We have this ability to share this crazy experience together; we’re vulnerable and we’re funny together; we’re stronger together than we are separate. It really works.

There was a freedom when we first got together because we didn’t know each other. We all got to be exactly who we are. We met at a really special time and our friendship really shows that. We write a lot of songs on the road and we genuinely go out together…You have to want to make it work. This is our dream, this is what we want to do. It’s an outlook that we all quietly agreed to have.

SFBG There is a unique pressure associated with sophomore albums. Have you felt a need to prove that you’re not a one hit wonder with this record?

HH Coming from a painter background I didn’t really realize the “pressure of the second album.” We had this catalogue of songs we had written on the road and we basically drew straws to see which songs made the album. We’re really lucky. We make a point never to combine fear of success with making artwork and writing songs. There’s nothing you can do — you can’t predict whether people will like the songs. All you can really do is be genuine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGvHnDeS12o

SFBG What does the title of the album Spreading Rumors mean?

HH We’re kind of bringing it back to the way that people used to talk about bands and spread the word before the Internet. Despite all of the Internet attention we got for [2011 single] “Tongue Tied,” people were also telling their friends about us and our live shows. The rumor that keeps spreading…we really are this crazy bunch of wild animals let loose.

SFBG Since you’re playing two nights in a row here, you’ll have some time to spend in the city. Any special SF plans?

HH Well, my brother, sister, mom, and dad live here. I grew up in Upper Haight. I really miss SF. I just like walking down Haight Street. Thrift stores in SF are the best. I can’t tell you how much I love San Francisco.

[Playing here is] like playing a hometown show which is always secretly the most nerve-wracking. It’s always funny to see people you’ve known your whole life in the audience. You really get a sense of how far we’ve come. I’ll probably get emotional up there.

SFBG Anything else you feel that people need to know about Grouplove? Any parting words?

HH [I’ve learned] through all this touring and meeting all these bands that everyone has their own flavor. We have love, heart, honesty, and passion. Our goal is to have people see that there’s no bullshit up there [on stage] and leave feeling happy. We’re not trying to be cool or sexy. We want to inspire kids to not to care what they look like or whether they’re cool and just be themselves.

Grouplove
With the Rubens
Sat/14, 9pm, $20
Independent
628 Divisadero, SF
(415) 771-1421
www.theindependentsf.com

Grouplove (acoustic)
Sun/15, 9pm, $22
Chapel
777 Valencia, SF
(415) 551-5157
www.thechapelsf.com

The NSA made the most boring and controversial Tumblr in the United States; also, best news reads on spying

Erica Hanna

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September 9, 2013

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The NSA made the most boring and controversial Tumblr in the United States; also, best news reads on spying

Tumblr is a hub for social media literate millenials, a magical place for Doctor Who animated GIFs, reblogged Instagram photos of your lunch and an endless sea of porn. But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has a new use for it: boilerplate press releases meant to stem the tide of negative news against the National Security Agency’s spying practices.

Here’s an excerpt from their Tumblr blog addressing their bad press:

“While the specifics of how our intelligence agencies carry out this cryptanalytic mission have been kept secret, the fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news. Indeed, NSA’s public website states that its mission includes leading ‘the U.S. Government in cryptology … in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies.'”

Well of course it’s not news that the NSA spies on folks, that’s their purpose. But when the federal government can read the emails and digital records of ordinary citizens without so much as a constitutional please-and-thank you, something is definitely wrong. And thanks to a bombshell dropped by The UK Guardian, the New York Times and Pro Publica partnering to release Edward Snowden’s newest leak, we now know that the NSA can decrypt just about anything on the internet.

And sometimes the NSA uses it to spy on their love interests.

Luckily, there are folks who are on this. The Electronic Frontier Foundation just achieved a major victory by suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA, to get their hands on documents related to the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law the NSA has used to justify searching through the digital lives of Americans.

The EFF is based in San Francisco, which of course means that there is a video of them at Comic-Con.

And the EFF even outlined ways citizens can help:

“Faced with so much bad news, it’s easy to give in to privacy nihilism and despair. After all, if the NSA has found ways to decrypt a significant portion of encrypted online communications, why should we bother using encryption at all? But this massive disruption of communications infrastructure need not be tolerated. Here are some of the steps you can take to fight back:

Sign the petition to stop NSA spying. Let Congress know that It’s time for a full accounting of America’s secret spying programs—and an end to unconstitutional surveillance. If you are not in the US, please take the time to sign our international petition.
In addition to signing our petition, take the time to call your elected representative using the dedicated call line: 1-STOP-323-NSA (1-786-732-3672) to voice your opposition.
Use secure communications tools (read some useful tips by security expert Bruce Schneier). Your communications are still significantly more protected if you are using encrypted communications tools such as messaging over OTR or browsing the web usingHTTPS Everywhere than if you are sending your communications in the clear.
Finally, the engineers responsible for building our infrastructure can fight back by building and deploying better and more usable cryptosystems.

The NSA is attacking our secure communications on many fronts and we must oppose them using every method we have at our disposal. Engineers, policy makers, and netizens all have key roles to play in standing up to the unchecked surveillance state. The more we learn about the extent of the NSA’s abuses, the more important it is for us to take steps to take back our privacy. Don’t let the NSA’s attack on secure communications be the end game. Let it be a call to arms.”

Get educated, and bone up on the most recent news on the NSA’s spying tactics and policies:

Pro Publica, New York Times, Guardian UK

Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption

Electronic Frontier Foundation

NSA Spying on Americans, Full timeline of events

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

Guardian.co.uk

The NSA Files — All UK Guardian stories on the NSA spying program

http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

And until everything gets better, I’m going to keep using Tumblr the way it was intended: reblogging GIFs of the best Doctor, David Tennant.

Gary Numan: dark music done right at the Oakland Metro

Tony Robles

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September 9, 2013

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From Metallica to This Mortal Coil, there’s a sense of canned melodrama about most “dark” music that I’ve long found goofy and unconvincing. On that note, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine has always struck me as dark music done right, leaving the angsty ostentation behind, in favor of casually luring the listener downward into its imposing dungeon of groove.

As Gary Numan took the stage in Oakland last Tuesday night, the British artist displayed a similarly nuanced sensibility of what makes dark music work, delivering a relentlessly groove-based set of songs that brooded and seethed with total conviction.

Setting foot inside the Oakland Metro Operahouse (a dimly-lit, converted warehouse with the vibe of a joint operation between the Addams Family and a pack of steampunk welders) I felt the same tinge of skepticism that I did before Nine Inch Nails took the stage at Outside Lands last month; does Numan really have a purpose at this point in his career, aside from reliving old times and peddling out the reliable hit(s)? Surely enough, Numan took the stage with disarming panache, writhing up and down the stage with deft control as he treated the crowd to a stunning 90 minutes of punishing industrial rock.

Despite Numan’s one-hit-wonder status (his 1979 single “Cars” topped the charts in both the UK and the US) the British artist is revered in smaller circles for bridging many seemingly isolated developments in the pop world, from Kraftwerk’s stiff electronic propulsions, to Prince’s new-wave synthpop experiments, to Nine Inch Nails’ consolidation of industrial music with the rock mainstream.

Those mainly familiar with Numan’s early, synth-driven work, though, might’ve been taken aback by the physicality of Tuesday night’s set, in its commitment to the guitar-heavy, riff-based, Trent Reznor-indebted approach he initiated on records like Exile (1997) and Pure (2000).

Dressed in black, head to toe, like a sizable chunk of the enraptured audience, Numan and his four-piece backing band delivered forceful renditions of some recent tracks, namely “Haunted,” “The Fall,” and “Everything Comes Down to This,” dominated by relentlessly fuzzed-out guitars, as those reliably frosty synths provided rich textures and filled in the empty spaces.

“I Am Dust,” from the forthcoming LP Splinter (Songs From a Broken Mind) fit seamlessly into the surrounding material, making a strong case for Numan’s creative future, while beefed-up, modernized variations of older songs, like “Films,” and “Down in the Park,” were impressive in their unpredictability and ambition, refusing to merely replicate their studio counterparts.

Numan’s career has taken many twists and turns, from prickly, proto-synthpop, to industrial filth-rock, yet his touring band refracted it all through their single-minded, distortion-laden aesthetic, intuitively connecting the old and the new.

Numan might be 55 now, with nearly 20 albums under his belt, but his stage presence and vocal delivery were remarkably vitalic, never once suggesting the washed-up burnout illustrated by those VH1-hit-wonder specials. Few AARP qualifiers can rock eyeliner and spiky black hair convincingly, yet Numan completely pulled it off, prancing across the stage with yogic control, and a glammy flair for presentation.

More importantly, his vocal ability hasn’t diminished in the slightest since the late ’70s, as he hit all the high notes on “Cars,” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric,” without hesitation.

Numan’s voice, strongly reminiscent of David Bowie’s, fit harmoniously with the backing instrumentals, letting the band do most of the heavy lifting, as he deftly avoided the whiny/screamy/growly vocal contrivances that end up derailing so much “dark” music into self-parody mode.

The restraint of Numan’s vocals, combined with the dubby, trip-hoppy, disco-inflected headiness of his backing band’s grooves, resulted in a tightly controlled balancing act; much like Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, Numan’s set succeeded by keeping things at a constant simmer, yet never boiling over. Dark music done right, indeed.

Judging by his seasoned stage presence, and his undeniable influence on the greater music world, it seems that in an alternate universe, Numan could’ve become one of those Prince-y household names, shaping pop culture as well as the music within.

Yet, unlike Prince, who’s lately found himself grasping beyond his reach in hopes of channeling past glories, or countless other new wavers who were relegated to novelty status long ago, Numan has maintained his relevance by powering forward creatively, and smartly avoiding any attempts to relive the ’70s and ’80s over again.

It might’ve been reasonable to expect a phoned-in performance this deep into his career, yet as Numan authoritatively proved on Tuesday night, his icy grooves remain as fresh and involving as ever.

Campos urges SF to explore using Richmond’s eminent domain plan

Erica Hanna

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September 9, 2013

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Campos urges SF to explore using Richmond’s eminent domain plan

Sup. David Campos is urging the board of supervisors to explore using eminent domain to save San Francisco resident’s underwater mortgages, a plan pioneered by the city of Richmond and its mayor Gayle McLaughlin.

The plan uses the power of eminent domain to seize underwater mortgage loans from banks and investors, saving homeowners from being booted out onto the street when they’re behind on their ballooning payments. The plan is controversial and under attack by Wells Fargo and other Wall Street interests, which we explored in last week’s cover story, “Not For Sale.” They say that the plan puts money into the pockets of Richmond and Mortgage Resolution Partners, the group that engineered the plan.

Campos plans to introduce his resolution at tomorrow’s board meeting, but importantly it only asks The City to explore whether or not the plan could work in San Francisco. The resolution would not enact a plan at this point in time.

At a press conference this morning, housing activists and Campos trumpeted the plan as a way to save the homes of San Franciscans. Often those targeted with predatory loans have been people of color, they noted.

“Our strategies have been, lets be honest, ‘Let’s see what the federal government or the banking industry will do to help these folks,’” Campos said at the steps of City Hall. “We’ve waited long enough.”

Campos rattled off surprising numbers, saying 58 homeowners in his district alone had underwater mortgages at risk of foreclosure, and that 16 percent of homeowners in neighborhoods like Visitacion Valley were underwater.

Bernal Heights homeowner and activist Ross Rhodes was there supporting the action.

“Dave (Campos) helped me save my home when I was getting nowhere with the banks but frustration,” Rhodes said.

He was making his payments which were up to $3,500 a month, but while on disability and going through a divorce, it was tough. Campos got Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office involved, and they talked to the banks on his behalf. In the end, he finally got a principal reduction and what he calls a “real good” modification. “I’m not asking for a handout, I’m asking for help,” he said.

Now his payments are $1,600 a month. “It just shows the banks can do what they want to do, they control it all, they can work with if you if they want to.”

SF supe David Campos announces support of Richmond ED plan https://t.co/iZdIQcT4lz

— Joe A. W. Fitzgerald (@FitzTheReporter) September 9, 2013

Campos’ resolution also proclaims San Francisco’s support for Richmond’s eminent domain effort.

The bank asked him why he went to Pelosi and Campos for help, instead of going through them. He was incredulous, as he’d been fighting for a principal reduction on his own for two years. “I’ve been trying to work with you for months,” he told them. “It took that political muscle to get you to move. I went through five different loan agents.”

The victory made him a convert, going to rallies and speaking to help others suffering with their loans.

The hounds are coming for Richmond though, and the political muscle needed to enact the controversial plan is at risk.

Wells Fargo already filed suit against Richmond over its use of eminent domain, saying the plan puts money in the pockets of the city and would put a chill on investments. A Richmond bond with an A- rating was already rejected by Wall Street, finding no financiers, putting Richmond in a possible bind when it comes to public works projects.

In response, Richmond councilmember Nathaniel Bates has a resolution for tomorrow’s Richmond city council meeting to stall the plan. If it’s voted in, Richmond will withdraw all the offers to buy underwater loans and withdraw the plan to use eminent domain to seize them.

If Bates’ resolution is approved, the whole plan would tank.

A petition from the Home Defenders League to sand with Richmond’s eminent domain effort has over 7,000 signatures.

To contact Wells Fargo’s CEO yourself, follow the link here.

The Guardian wrote to the Mayor Ed Lee’s office to see if he is in support of Campos’ plan, but didn’t hear back before press time, which was admittedly quick.

Update 2:20 pm: We asked supervisor Campos’ aide Hilary Ronen if San Francisco would be at risk for a lawsuit from Wells Fargo, similar to Richmond, if the city enacted an eminent domain plan. In response, she said “All that we’re doing is asking the city attorney’s office as well as the budget and legislative analyst, ‘if we did something similar, what does it look like? What are the financial risks for the city?’ This way we can make an educated assessment. After having that information he’ll have to balance what the risks are. We’re not there yet.”

Feds force pot clubs to deal in cash, then ban use of armored cars

Sasha Cuttler

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September 6, 2013

22

In the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s latest attempt to smoke out medical marijuana dispensaries in the United States, the federal government agency made the decision to ban the use of armored cars by marijuana providers. Compounding that problem, over the last year banking companies, under pressure from the feds, have been refusing to do business with dispensaries, forcing them conduct all-cash transactions.

Dispensaries and their employees all around the Bay Area are being needlessly endangered by this decision. Businesses such as Oakland’s Harborside Health Center — which brings in about $30 million a year, according to co-founder and executive director Steve DeAngelo — stand to take a big hit.

“This decision puts my staff and I at risk,” DeAngelo told us. “People have been known to stake out the property, and having unarmored transport without a secured professional to the US Treasury makes the job even more dangerous.”

DeAngelo declined to comment on how his dispensary will transport money without armored cars. Others, such as Diane Goldstein, a retired lieutenant commander of the Redondo Beach police department and member of the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, finds the decision to be downright unethical.

“It’s unethical in the sense that the DEA made the decision without considering the collateral damage that could be caused,” Goldstein said. “It endangers the people that have to transport large sums of money unprotected, law enforcement, and the community at large.”

But there is a glimmer of hope: the Department of Justice issued a memo last week that was a step forward in support of the federal government respecting states like Washington and Colorado where even recreational use of marijuana has been made legal by state ballot initiatives. The DOJ memo outlines enforcement policies such as not selling to minors or having revenue from dispensaries go to gangs or drug cartels.

“There is hope with the new memorandum released,” Dan Goldman, community liaison for the Green Cross in San Francisco said. “Though it does not directly apply to states where marijuana has not been legalized, it is a step forward.”

DeAngelo and others decried the memo as vague, but ultimately counted it as progress that may support a “large increase in momentum” in the plight for further legitimacy in the medical marijuana business.

But this clearly isn’t the first or last time DeAngelo and many other dispensaries have had the legality of their business questioned. Harborside has been locked in court battles since U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag made the move for a forfeiture proceeding for the businesses’ Oakland and San Jose properties last July. Last month federal magistrate Judge Maria Elena James granted a temporary halt to the forfeiture proceedings.

Is DeAngelo worried? “We’re in a holding pattern for the next two to two-and-a-half years,” DeAngelo said. “I’m positive that our business will continue to thrive just as it always does.”

In the meantime, US Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has invited Attorney General Eric Holder to testify at a Sept. 10 hearing regarding whether the feds should be respecting state marijuana laws.

Supervisors to grill Mayor Lee over CleanPowerSF sabotage

Sasha Cuttler

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September 6, 2013

112

Supervisors to grill Mayor Lee over CleanPowerSF sabotage

Mayor Ed Lee will be on the hot seat for his unqualified support of Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and his related opposition to the CleanPowerSF renewable energy program, which his appointees to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission are trying to sabotage, when he shows up for the monthly mayoral question time at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday.

Hopefully the boring, scripted question time format that Lee created in collaboration with Board President David Chiu will finally give way to what the voters intended when they required the mayor to engage with the legislative branch: an actual, substantive, back-and-forth policy discussion meant to illuminate issues of public concern.

Because that’s what’s needed on this important issue. After more than a decade in the making, the board last year cast a historic vote to create the project on a veto-proof 8-3 vote. But the SFPUC is now refusing to set the maximum rate for the program, which should be a fairly technical and pro forma action, instead raising unrelated issues that the supervisors have already considered. In other words, unelected mayoral appointees have decided to veto a hard-won democratic gain, creating something akin to a constitutional crisis in a city that values public process and input.

So for the first time ever, all the of the supervisors scheduled to ask questions (it rotates because odd- and even-numbered districts each month) have focused various aspects of a single important issue. Even though Lee has mastered the politicians’ dark art of speaking without saying anything, this one should still be a doozy as supervisors ask the following questions:

1. Mayor Lee – As you know, San Francisco has set ambitious goals to combat climate change. In many ways, the City is making great strides in this direction, from increasing bicycling, to pursuing zero waste goals, to hiring a new, excellent environmental policy advisor in Rodger Kim who has a strong background in environmental justice and community engagement. However, the Public Utilities Commission has repeatedly failed to set rates for CleanPowerSF, the most impactful local proposal yet designed to curb carbon emission. This program was adopted by the Board of Supervisors, the legislative body of the City. However, there are some allegations that your office is stalling its implementation. What specifically are you doing, as the City’s head executive, to implement this policy in a timely fashion? (Supervisor Mar, District 1)

2. Mr. Mayor, can you please outline your objections to the CleanPowerSF program as approved last year on an vote 8-3 by the Board of Supervisors? (Supervisor Chiu, District 3)

3. Recognizing the constraints imposed by state law, particularly with respect to opt-out provisions, how would a clean power program need to be structured in order for you to support it? Are you willing to work with the Board of Supervisors, and have your staff and commissioners work with the Board of Supervisors, to revise CleanPowerSF so that you can support it? Can we come to the table and make clean power a reality without any further delay? (Supervisor Breed, District 5)

4. The Board of Supervisors has been very supportive of CleanPowerSF. Do you think it is appropriate for a City Commission to go against the policy the Board of Supervisors set when it approved CleanPowerSF? (Supervisor Campos, District 9)

5. Days after the one-year anniversary of the 2010 PG&E San Bruno pipeline explosion, you called PG&E a “great local corporation” and a “great company that gets it.” However, the examples of PG&E’s immoral, illegal, and greedy behavior are legion:

– PG&E avoided admitting fault in the San Bruno explosion, failed to cooperate with the investigation, fought against paying a fair fine, and hopes to make ratepayers pay for the fine.

– PG&E’s current electric mix is only 20% California-certified renewable.

– Outages of PG&E-owned streetlights have increased over 400% in recent years, and PG&E wants to increase by $600,000 a year the amount it charges the City for streetlight maintenance without committing to improved service.

– Despite the fact that PG&E already has some of the highest electric rates in the country, PG&E is seeking to further increase rates in each of the next three years.

– While PG&E has proposed a new Green Tariff program, it remains only a vague proposal and there is no guarantee that it will ever be implemented.

– PG&E’s previous green campaigns-such as ClimateSmart and “Let’s Green This City”-have proven to be short lived and ineffective public relations stunts. Multiple public surveys conducted by the PUC to gauge the level of support for CleanPowerSF have all found that a substantial number of San Franciscans want the opportunity to pay a slight premium for a 100% renewable alternative to PG&E.

Why does your office continue to oppose providing City ratepayers with an alternative to PG&E’s monopoly by implementing CleanPowerSF? (Supervisor Avalos, District 11)

Action franchise junkie Vin Diesel returns … and more new movies!

Sue Vaughan

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September 6, 2013

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Action franchise junkie Vin Diesel returns … and more new movies!

Who dares to challenge the box-office supremacy of Vin Diesel, who returns yet again to play the titular night vision-gifted (but really socially awkward) escaped con in sci-fi actioner Riddick?

For masochists, there’s Brian De Palma’s latest, Passion, which checks in for a brief Castro run (Dennis Harvey gets bored talking about it here); there are also a couple of docs, a MILF drama, and a South Korean disaster-by-numbers flick about a disease that, shockingly, doesn’t spawn zombies, just bloody coughs and rapid death. Read on for our short takes (and take note of your best-bet new flick: “charming seriocomedy” Afternoon Delight).http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KWyEbmKHsY

Adore This glossy soap opera from director Anne Fontaine (2009’s Coco Before Chanel) and scenarist Christopher Hampton, adapted from a Doris Lessing novella, has had its title changed from Two Mothers — perhaps because under that name it was pretty much the most howled-at movie at Sundance this year. Lil (Naomi Watts) and Roz (Robin Wright) are lifelong best friends whose hunky surfer sons Ian (Xavier Samuel) and Tom (James Frecheville) are likewise best mates. Widow Lil runs a gallery and Roz has a husband (Ben Mendelsohn), but mostly the two women seem to lay around sipping wine on the decks of their adjacent oceanfront homes in Western Australia’s Perth, watching their sinewy offspring frolic in the waves. This upscale-lifestyle-magazine vision of having it all — complete with middle-aged female protagonists who look spectacularly youthful without any apparent effort — finds trouble in paradise when the ladies realize that something, in fact, is missing. That something turns out to be each other’s sons, in their beds. After very little hand-wringing this is accepted as the way things are meant to be — a MILF fantasy viewed through the distaff eyes — despite some trouble down the road. This outlandish basic concept might have worked for Lessing, but Fontaine’s solemn, gauzily romantic take only slightly muffles its inherent absurdity. (Imagine how creepy this ersatz women-finding-fulfillment-at-midlife saga would be if it were two older men boning each others’ daughters.) Lord knows it isn’t often that mainstream movies (this hardly plays as “art house”) focus on women over 40, and the actors give it their all. But you’ll wish they’d given it to a better vehicle instead. (1:50) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQpXyke3VC4

Afternoon Delight It takes about five seconds to suss that Kathryn Hahn is going to give a spectacular performance in Jill Soloway’s charming seriocomedy. Figuring to re-ignite husband Jeff’s (Josh Radnor) flagging libido by taking them both to a strip club, Rachel (Hahn) decides to take on as a home- and moral-improvement project big-haired, barely-adult stripper McKenna (Juno Temple). When the latter’s car slash-home is towed, bored Silver Lake housewife and mother Rachel invites the street child into their home. Eventually she’s restless enough to start accompanying McKenna on the latter’s professional “dates.” Afternoon Delight is a better movie than you’d expect — not so much a typical raunchy comedy as a depthed dramedy with a raunchy hook. It’s a notable representation of no-shame sex workerdom. It’s also funny, cute, and eventually very touching. Especially memorable: a ladies’ round-table discussion about abortion that drifts every which way. (1:42) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQlWgnerTRc

Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story Fairy tales really do come true — even when they’re as strange as the one lived by Hans Christian Andersen Award-winning illustrator, writer, and activist Tomi Ungerer. As a child, he was torn between Nazi Germany and occupied France, growing up in the Alsace region; as an artist, Ungerer possesses a creative fire fueled by the trauma of war and a bisected identity — his native Strasbourg, as he paints it with archetypal vivid colors, “is the sphincter of France. When France has indigestion, we’re the first to feel it.” In keeping with that free spirit, director Brad Bernstein playfully, beautifully captures Ungerer’s early years, from the artist’s preteen renderings of Nazi horrors, to his formative artistic inspirations, to the outpouring that followed during NYC’s golden age of illustration. In Big Apple, children’s classics like Crictor (1958), Adelaide (1959), and The Three Robbers (1961) inspired colleagues like Maurice Sendak (here in one of his last interviews) and Jules Feiffer. No niche branding and self-censorship for Ungerer, who happily fed the midcentury’s appetite for his drawings; imbued his kids tales with absurdity, fear, and his lifelong fascination with death; and created powerful anti-war posters and iconic illustrations reflecting the struggles of the ‘60s (and very adult “Fornicon” erotica as well). The latter finally ushered in a kind of closing chapter to Ungerer’s American success story, when word spread that the “kidso” favorite also did porno and his children’s books were blacklisted from libraries. Bernstein generally hastens through the decades of “exile” that followed — staying so far from some of Ungerer’s personal particulars that we never even get the name of his wife (or is it wives?) — but the time he takes to give the viewer a sense of the witty, quirk-riddled artist’s personality keeps a viewer riveted. (1:38) (Kimberly Chun)

The Flu As a shipping crate stuffed with illegal immigrants creeps into a ritzy Seoul suburb, one poor soul within stifles a cough; before long, everyone’s dead — save a crusty-eyed youth who’s apparently resistant to the disease yet still capable of kick-starting a devastating epidemic. Can the headstrong doctor (Soo Ae) save her sassy tot (Park Min-ha) from certain, blood-spewing death? Will the cocky EMT (Jang Hyuk) be able to help her, and win her heart in the process? Will the muckety-mucks in power get their shit together in time to prevent mass panic and a global outbreak? Zzzzz. Save some gnarly third-act visuals (you won’t believe what the government does with the bodies of the afflicted), this disaster movie from writer-director Kim Sung-su fails to innovate on the template laid down by films like 2011’s Contagion or 1995’s Outbreak. Also, for all the gory drama, the central storyline (re: the sick kid and the nascent couple) is completely devoid of tension, trudging for two hours toward the most predictable ending imaginable. (2:00) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od8DhL1hyfw

I Give It a Year This glossy feature writing-directing debut from longtime Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator Dan Mazer has been called the best British comedy in some time — but it turns out that statement must’ve been made by people who think the Hangover movies are what comedy should be like world-wide. Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall play mismatched newlyweds (she’s stiff-upper-lippy advertising executive, he’s a manboy prankster novelist) who worry their marriage won’t last, in part because everyone tells them so — including such authorities as her bitchy sister (Minnie Driver), his obnoxious best friend (Stephen Merchant), and their incredibly crass marriage counselor (Olivia Colman). Also, they’re each being distracted by more suitable partners: she by a suave visiting American CEO (Simon Baker), he by the ex-girlfriend he never formally broke up with (Anna Faris). This is one of those movies in which you’re supposed to root for a couple who in fact really don’t belong together, and most supporting characters are supposed to be funny because they’re hateful or rude. There’s plenty of the usual strained sexual humor, plus the now-de rigueur turn toward earnest schmaltz, and the inevitable soundtrack stuffed with innocuous covers of golden oldies. Some wince-inducing moments aside, it all goes down painlessly enough — and Mazer deserves major props for straying from convention at the end. Still, one hopes the future of British comedy isn’t more movies that might just as well have starred Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston. (1:37) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTw4OHsh9so

Riddick This is David Twohy’s third flick starring Vin Diesel as the titular misunderstood supercriminal. Aesthetically, it’s probably the most interesting of the lot, with a stylistic weirdness that evokes ’70s Eurocomix in the best way — a pleasing backdrop to what is essentially Diesel playing out the latest in a series of Dungeons & Dragons scenarios where he offers his wisecracking sci-fi take on Conan. Gone are the scares and stakes of Pitch Black (2000) or the cheeseball epic scale of The Chronicles of Riddick (2004); this is a no-nonsense action movie built on the premise that Riddick just can’t catch a break. He’s on the run again, targeted by two bands of ruthless mercenaries, on a planet threatened by an oncoming storm rather than Pitch Black’s planet-wide night. One unfortunate element leaves a bitter taste: the lone female character in the movie, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), is an underdeveloped cliché “Strong Female Character,” a violent, macho lesbian caricature who is the object of vile sexual aggression (sometimes played for laughs) from several other characters, including Riddick. (1:59) (Sam Stander)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbSUyYXH8hs

Spark: A Burning Man Story A few months after kicking off DocFest — and mere days after the flames of Burning Man ’13 were extinguished — doc Spark: A Burning Man Story opens for a theatrical run. With surprisingly open access to Burning Man’s inner-circle organizers, San Francisco filmmakers Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter chronicle the organization’s tumultuous 2012 season, a time when the group was forced to confront concerns both practical (a stressful ticket-sale snafu) and philosophical (why are they selling tickets in the first place?) Spark doesn’t shy away from showing the less-graceful aspects of Burning Man’s exponential growth and transformation, but at its core it’s a fairly starry-eyed celebration of the event’s allure, reinforced by subplots that focus on artists who view “the playa” as their muse. (1:30) (Cheryl Eddy)

Live Shots: Asteroid #4 and the Richmond Sluts at Brick and Mortar Music Hall

Tony Robles

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September 6, 2013

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By Brittany M. Powell

Brick and Mortar Music Hall may have had some noise complaint troubles with the San Francisco Sound Commission earlier this summer, but that hasn’t kept the venue or Kymberli Jenson, of Kymberli’s Music Box Presents, from putting on great shows. Last Saturday’s bill included the Asteroid #4 and the Richmond Sluts. It was a handful of loud rock’n’roll bands that blasted us back through the decades with sounds echoing 1960s and ‘70s psychedelia and punk, but also hints of the late ‘90s and early 2000s , when these bands were fresh on the music scene.

They’ve all been around the block, or as frontperson-guitarist Scott Vitt of the Asteroid #4 put it, these are all “old heads” and “mainstays” at this point.

The Asteroid #4, which recently transplanted to the Bay Area from Philadelphia, released its first EP in 1995. Its music is a blend of classic psychedelic rock, with a little melodic folk and shoe gaze tremor, and strong influences from late ‘60s psych rock bands like Love, and early ‘90s British bands like Spacemen 3.

When I asked Vitt how he felt living in California was influencing his band’s sound, he responded, “living and breathing the natural beauty, the mountains, the forests and, of course, the ocean, first-hand, I think it’ll be very evident on our next record that we’ve become a California band.”

And the group sounded plenty at home on Saturday night, as if the packed music hall was its own cozy living room. The set was vibrant and full of the precise kinds of melodies and riffs that can only come from a band that’s been playing together as long as it has — and is more than comfortable in its own skin. When asked about this, Vitt quoted Miles Davis, “you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

The Asteroid #4’s set included personal favorites, “Hold On,” which seems to have a Brian Jonestown Massacre influence, “The Unknown,” and “I Want to Touch You,” a Catharine Wheel cover. For the final song, Joel Gion of BJM joined the band on stage for “Into the Meadow.”

After the Asteroid #4, the Richmond Sluts went on, which was an excellent transition into an upbeat set closing out the night.

The Richmond Sluts formed in 1998, in the Richmond District. Imagine the NY Dolls on LSD, with a little bit of the Cramps and the Rolling Stones thrown in to keep it both weird and glammy. I have vague memories of hearing this band play at a few parties back in the day, but I have to say I don’t remember it sounding nearly as tight as it did the other night.

Frontperson Shea Roberts also looks nothing like the Stiv Baters (of the Dead Boys) gaunt 20-year-old look-alike I remember either. While the Sluts don’t really have the same excuse for playing trashy, angsty, garage rock about sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll as their post-pubescent selves did back in the late ‘90s, it doesn’t really matter, cause their talent has matured enough to take the material to whole other level.

Said Shea, “I know some of the lyrics are a little goofy sometimes and the stuff I’m writing now tends to be a bit more serious…but they were all sparked by some emotion I was feeling at the time and I’m OK with that. Maybe we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.”

We shouldn’t. Not when we can rock out to music like this to keep it in perspective.

Their set included tracks like “Sweet Something,” “Sad City,” and “Paddy Wagon” off their 2001 self-titled release. Shea says that he hopes to keep playing with the new Sluts and that’s the plan “until it’s not fun anymore.”

The big Hardly Strictly roster reveal

Tony Robles

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September 6, 2013

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After weeks of teasers, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass released its full 2013 lineup this week, and it boasts some fresh young artists and a great many cross-generational acts.

The free weekend-long festival in Golden Gate Park will feature appearances by Nick Lowe, Conor Oberst and friends (including First Aid Kit), Gogol Bordello, Natalie Maines, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Bettye LaVette, Allah-Las, Father John Misty, Steve Martin and Steep Canyon Rangers (featuring Edie Brickell), and Bonnie Raitt, among dozens of others.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass takes place Oct. 4-6 in Golden Gate Park, SF.

Here’s the full roster:

Mike Farris & The Roseland Rhythm Revue

The Brothers Comatose

Mike Scott & Steve Wickham of The Waterboys

Loudon Wainwright III

The Handsome Family

Jesse Dee

The Jerry Douglas Band

Alison Brown

Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside

Justin Townes Earle

The String Cheese Incident

Sonny & The Sunsets

Buddy Miller

The Deep Dark Woods

Pieta Brown

The Flatlanders featuring Joe Ely

Jimmie Dale Gilmore & Butch Hancock

Shovels & Rope

LP

Gogol Bordello

Mark Lanegan

Steve Earle & The Dukes

Supermule

Natalie Maines

Evolfo Doofeht

Calexico

Robert Ellis

Chris Isaak

Conor Brings Friends For Friday Featuring: Whispertown, The Cave Singers, The Felice Brothers, The Evens, First Aid Kit, Conor Oberst

Nick Lowe

Low

The Warren Hood Band

Della Mae

Martha Wainwright

Robert Earl Keen

Holler Down the Hollow: A Hardly Strictly Salute to the Masters

Kieran Kane, Kevin Welch & Fats Kaplin

Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale

Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell

The Time Jumpers featuring Brad Albin, Larry Franklin, Paul Franklin, Vince Gill, “Ranger Doug” Green, Andy Reiss, Dawn Sears, Kenny Sears, Joe Spivey, Jeff Taylor & Billy Thomas

Spirit Family Reunion

Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers

Steve Martin and Steep Canyon Rangers featuring Edie Brickell

Poor Man’s Whiskey (Friday morning middle school program)

Trampled By Turtles

G. Love & Special Sauce

Ryan Bingham

Patty Griffin

The Devil Makes Three

Kat Edmonson

Peter Rowan Bluegrass Band featuring Yungchen Lhamo

Paul Kelly

Dry Branch Fire Squad

Bonnie Raitt

Laurie Lewis & The Right Hands

Boz Scaggs

Seldom Scene

Tumbleweed Wanderers

Manchester Orchestra

Elvin Bishop

The Go To Hell Man Clan

Richard Thompson

Tift Merritt

Jon Langford & Skull Orchard acoustic / FREAKONS

Father John Misty

Billy Bragg

Bettye LaVette

Allah-Las

Tim O’Brien with Bryan Sutton & Mike Bub

Sturgill Simpson

Freakwater

Dave Alvin with Greg Leisz

Moonalice

MC Hammer (Friday morning middle school program)

The Forest Rangers with Katey Sagal

The Wood Brothers

Los Lobos Disconnected

Kate McGarrigle Tribute with Martha & Sloan Wainwright & Special Guests

Jesse DeNatale

Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott

Joy Kills Sorrow

For more info, see www.hardlystrictlybluegrass.com.

California prisoners end hunger strike after Bay Area legislators call hearings

Sasha Cuttler

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September 5, 2013

9

California prisoners end hunger strike after Bay Area legislators call hearings

Bay Area legislators Tom Ammiano (D-SF) and Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) — who chair the Assembly and Senate Public Safety Committees, respectively — played pivotal roles in today’s decision by California prison inmates to end their hunger strike after 60 days.

The legislators last week called for legislative hearings to consider implementing some of the reforms that the prisoners and their supporters have been calling for, including changes to solitary confinement policies that critics say amount to illegal torture under international law.

“I am relieved and gratified that the hunger strike has ended without further sacrifice or risk of human life,” Sen. Hancock said in a joint public statement with Ammiano. “The issues raised by the hunger strike are real – concerns about the use and conditions of solitary confinement in California’s prisons – and will not be ignored.”

“I’m happy that no one had to die in order to bring attention to these conditions,” Ammiano said. “The prisoners’ decision to take meals should be a relief to CDCR and the Brown administration, as well as to those who support the strikers.”

The question now is whether the legislative hearings, set for next month, can persuade the executive branch to finally take action, despite the fact that both Gov. Jerry Brown and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have taken a hard line on prison issues, even resisting federal court orders to reduce the population in the severely overcrowded prison system and to improve substandard health care.

Ammiano spokesperson Carlos Alcala told the Guardian that the end of the hunger strike could help end that stalemate: “Mr. Ammiano is hopeful that CDCR’s intransigence has been directed at negotiating under the hunger strike pressure, but that they will now be open to making some changes that are meaningful.”

CRCR head Jeffrey Beard issued a public statement saying, “We are pleased this dangerous strike has been called off before any inmates became seriously ill.”

Issac Ontiveros of the Oakland-based California Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity group said the hunger strike generated international attention and support, waking the public up to horrific conditions in the prisons and putting pressure on the CDCR to implement reforms.

“Their demands are legitimate and they are pointing out human rigths violations in California’s prisons,” Ontiveros told the Guardian, noting that Amnesty International and a long list of other groups are putting pressure on California to reform its prison practices. “What made them call off the strike was the political gains that they made…It was a thoughtful civil rights strategy.”

This latest hunger strike was called for and organized by prisoners in the “secure housing units,” aka solitary confinement cells, at the maximum security Pelican Bay State Prison, many of whom have gone years without meaningful human interaction. Court filings indicated that more than 400 prisoners have been locked up in solidary for more than a decade, despite the psychological harm that experts say such confinement causes.

The prisoners today issued a long statement announcing the end of the hunger strike, which includes this excerpt: “To be clear, our Peaceful Protest of Resistance to our continuous subjection to decades of systemic state sanctioned torture via the system’s solitary confinement units is far from over. Our decision to suspend our third hunger strike in two years does not come lightly. This decision is especially difficult considering that most of our demands have not been met (despite nearly universal agreement that they are reasonable). The core group of prisoners has been, and remains 100% committed to seeing this protracted struggle for real reform through to a complete victory, even if it requires us to make the ultimate sacrifice. With that said, we clarify this point by stating prisoner deaths are not the objective, we recognize such sacrifice is at times the only means to an end of fascist oppression.

“Our goal remains: force the powers that be to end their torture policies and practices in which serious physical and psychological harm is inflicted on tens of thousands of prisoners as well as our loved ones outside. We also call for ending the related practices of using prisoners to promote the agenda of the police state by seeking to greatly expand the numbers of the working class poor warehoused in prisons, and particularly those of us held in solitary, based on psychological/social manipulation, and divisive tactics keeping prisoners fighting amongst each other. Those in power promote mass warehousing to justify more guards, more tax dollars for “security”, and spend mere pennies for rehabilitation — all of which demonstrates a failed penal system, high recidivism, and ultimately compromising public safety.”

Questions raised by staff cutbacks at the Exploratorium

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 5, 2013

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A round of recent layoffs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco has taken museum staff by surprise and sparked questions about the institution’s focus going forward, an unexpected turn of events on the heels of the institution’s splashy reopening at its refurbished 330,000 square foot facility along The Embarcadero.

In mid-August, just a few months after the Exploratorium opened the doors of its LEED-certified space at Piers 15/17, some 80 full-time-equivalent positions were eliminated without prior warning. The cuts included 35 layoffs, 35 positions that went unfilled, and eight reductions from full time to part time, according to spokesperson Leslie Patterson, a 14-year Exploratorium employee who was among those affected. The total staff is comprised of 290 full-time-equivalent positions, according to its website.

Roughly three quarters of the impacted staff members are represented by SEIU Local 1021, and union members are now gearing up to launch a social media campaign in response to the sudden staffing cuts. They’ve created a graphic depicting founder Frank Oppenheimer (above), and are posting to Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #ourcommunitymuseum.

Officially, the cuts were made to solve for a budget shortfall created when attendance at the new facility failed to reach anticipated levels, making actual revenues lower than what consultants had projected. “They had very, very aggressive projections for attendance,” noted Eric Socolofsky, an exhibit developer who has been representing unionized museum staff at the negotiating table.

“We worked so hard to get in these doors and open this place,” Socolofsky said of the new waterfront spot. “People have given so much,” but in the weeks since layoff notices were issued without warning, “there’s a lot of disillusionment.”

Yet Patterson, the museum spokesperson, emphasized that “our crowds have grown” since the new facility opened, despite the uncertain financial picture. June attendance was triple that of June in the previous year, she said, but the overall attendance figures still failed to hit necessary targets. “We needed to reduce the workforce to offset a budget gap,” she said.

Revenue generated by museum visitors is separate from the money raised to relocate the Exploratorium from its previous home at the Palace of Fine Arts. That effort was bankrolled by a capital campaign, which has collected $290 million of its $300 million goal so far, according to Patterson.

Meanwhile, several museum employees expressed to the Guardian that there is more to the sudden staff reduction than just solving a simple budget gap. There appears to be a reorganization effort afoot to promote business development, Socolofsky said, and that has some staff members concerned about a shift in priorities that could detract from efforts geared particularly for Bay Area patrons.

Socolofsky said more energy had been going toward “client services,” or contracting with outside institutions to build exhibits, and rent or sell portable exhibits developed at the Exploratorium.

And even as the layoff notices have been issued, the Exploratorium is hiring for a dozen or so new positions. “Whatever positions are available are being opened to people who were laid off,” Patterson said. But when asked how the museum could possibly afford be hiring at a time when it was cutting staff to balance the budget, she said she didn’t know the answer.

“One of our concerns is that it’s moving toward a profit model,” Socolofsky said, adding that it was his understanding that some positions had been eliminated because they did not fit into the new organizational structure.

In some ways, it seems odd that the celebrated 44-year-old institution, which lists its budget online as $58.6 million for 2012-13, would be facing financial problems. Its board of directors includes representatives from prominent businesses including Google, Twitter, eBay, Bechtel, Disney, PG&E, and a host of prominent venture capital firms with investments in the tech sector. Amid speculation that the museum could be changing course, some observers have hinged on the fact that Exploratorium Board Chairman George Cogan is a director at Bain & Company, Inc., a firm that specializes in restructuring, which gained notoriety during the 2012 presidential election due to GOP candidate Mitt Romney’s history of involvement there.

David Barker, a graphic designer with the Exploratorium’s Institutional Media Group who was forced into an early retirement as a consequence of the staffing cuts, echoed Socolofsky’s assessment that a reorganization effort seemed to be driving staffing cuts in part. But at the same time, he said the museum had to do something to adapt to a new climate in which funding sources are drying up.

“It just seems like the pendulum has swung more toward the business aspect,” he said. An employee for more than 30 years, Barker lamented that the staffing cuts could dampen mentorship opportunities for younger artists and designers.

Barker was dismissive of the idea that the reorganization was somehow linked to Cogan’s role at Bain & Co., saying, “There’s no person who is more dedicated to the museum.”

Amid the unanswered questions, impacted and unaffected staff members alike emphasized in interviews with the Guardian that the Exploratorium staff continued to feel like a kind of family. “I think it’s kind of extraordinary,” said Pamela Winfrey, a senior artist who started working at the museum in 1979 and just had her hours scaled back. “I think there are new directions in the wind as well as a budget shortfall,” Winfrey said. “It’s a complicated picture.”

And across the board, she added, the Exploratorium must contend with the fact that there’s a steadily eroding pool of funding for arts and science. “Funders are really having to think about whether they want to feed starving children,” she said, “or feed the mind.”

Psychic Dream Astrology: September 4-10, 2013

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September 5, 2013

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ARIES
March 21-April 19
Don’t give up, Aries! If you strive to live up to your own code of ethics then your problems will have a clear strategy embedded in them. Do what you believe to be right, not just for this situation, but in your most elevated value system. Be the person you want to be and don’t devolve into reactions this week.

TAURUS
April 20-May 20
Build foundations that support your material needs, but not at the expense of your feelings. There is no way to be truly effective without incorporating your emotional needs, Taurus. True wisdom encompasses the management of all your parts; when you leave out pieces of yourself they eventually come back demanding attention, pal.

GEMINI
May 21-June 21
Love has a transformative effect on everything. By pouring care, hope and delight into your relationships and circumstances you will see everything flourish. Practice it and see what happens this week. Kindness heals! Just don’t confuse loving kindness with niceties; be authentic, Gem. Compassion heals but BS doesn’t.

CANCER
June 22-July 22
The key to your success this week is in the hard stuff. You’re in a great place to be actualizing your goals, but as you do, don’t forget that all light casts a shadow. Do not fear your “dark” side; show yourself the compassion you need to integrate it in a healthy way. Seek the purpose in all things, Moonchild.

LEO
July 23-Aug. 22
If you move too fast you will create a heap of trouble. Don’t let your enthusiasm push you in over your head this week. Allow your self to feel excited without making any promises based on those feelings, Leo. Let things change without forcing your will on them or rushing them along. Let yourself be surprised as you see where your relationships take you.

VIRGO
Aug. 23-Sept. 22
Don’t let your worries convince you that things are dire, Virgo. This week you are being called on to make the most delicious lemonade that you can with the lemons you’ve been served. Nothing is set in stone, and you can change them if you stop wasting energy over thinking things. Trust your instincts, but not your fears.

LIBRA
Sept. 23-Oct. 22
You may find yourself obsessing on ‘whys’ this week, but there’s no sense in it. Instead of lamenting a past that can’t change, look expectantly towards your future from this very moment, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. Once you get out of your own way you will find that the road before you is not worth dreading, Libra.

SCORPIO
Oct. 23-Nov. 21
You’re OK, Scorpio. You’ve worked hard to get where you’re at, and you and finally, totally, OK. The trick this week is to not rest in this place. Use it to reflect on what you’re hopes and goals are, or you may turn around sometime in the future and not know how you got where you are. Be intentional.

SAGITTARIUS
Nov. 22-Dec. 21
If there is a way to trust in your security, you need to find it now, Sagittarius. This week obsessive thinking threatens to turn your world upside down for no good reason. Pay attention to the difference between fear of unpleasant circumstances, and actual problems! Don’t create the things you wish to avoid.

CAPRICORN
Dec. 22-Jan. 19
It’s easy to shine when circumstances are going your way; it’s what you do when the shit hits the fan that matters, though. This week you need to surrender your will. Accept what isn’t working and let it teach you a new way of seeing things. Major change is before you and fighting it will only make things worse.

AQUARIUS
Jan. 20-Feb. 18
Don’t add anything new to your to-do list, Aquarius! This week should find you balancing responsibilities and tidying up loose ends. You are in a great position to secure your world, but it won’t happen unless you make it happen. Focus your intentions and follow through with your goals.

PISCES
Feb. 19-March 20
Its time to let go, Pisces. You can’t control the course of things, and the sooner you make peace with that, the better. Strive to have a healthy ego without being attached to getting your will executed in any particular way. Participate in the reality you’re stuck in, for better or worse this week.

Jessica Lanyadoo has been a Psychic Dreamer for 19 years. Check out her website at www.lovelanyadoo.com to contact her for an astrology or intuitive reading.

Kim calls for hearing on how SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities UPDATED

Sasha Cuttler

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September 4, 2013

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Kim calls for hearing on how SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities UPDATED

UPDATED In the wake of revelations of shoddy and insensitive police work related to the Aug. 14 death of 24-year-old bicyclist Amelie Le Moullac, who was run over by a commercial truck driver who turned right across her path as she rode in a bike lane on Folsom Street at 6th Street, Sup. Jane Kim today called for a hearing on how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalities.

The issue has lit up the Bay Guardian website with hundreds of reader comments after we wrote a series of blog posts and our “Anti-cyclist bias must stop” editorial, including our revelation that the SFPD failed to seek surveillance video of the crash even as its Sgt. Richard Ernst showed up at an Aug. 21 memorial to Le Moullac to denigrate cyclists and make unfounded statements about the fatal collision.

Police Chief Greg Suhr later apologized for Ernst’s behavior and the flawed investigation and said that surveillance video unearthed by cycling activists led to the conclusion by a police investigation that the driver who killed Le Moullac was at fault, according to Bay City News and SF Appeal, which also reported on Kim’s call for a hearing.

As we reported, motorists are rarely cited in collisions with cyclists or pedestrians, even when there’s a fatality involved and the motorist didn’t have the right-of-way, which appears to the case in Le Moullac’s death. The District Attorney’s Office, which did not immediately return a call from the Guardian, is considering whether to bring criminal charges in the case.

UPDATE: We just heard from DA’s Office spokesperson Stephanie Ong Stillman, who said, “The San Francisco Police Department has delivered a preliminary investigative package and we are in the process of reviewing it to determine what additional investigation is necessary.”

UPDATE 9/5 5pm: San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Leah Shahum says she welcomes Kim’s hearings, which are long overdue. “We’re really thankful to Jane for bringing this forward,” Shahum told the Guardian, saying she hopes the hearing results in changes to how the SFPD investigates cyclist fatalilties. “We want to make sure there is ongoing accountability.”

She also said the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has indicated to SFBC that it is working on near-term and long-term improvements on both Folsom and Howard streets, where cyclists in bike lanes must regularly contend to drivers cutting them off. The city does seem committed to a significant pilot of better bikeways there.”

Meanwhile, as the San Francisco Examiner reported today, Le Moullac’s family has filed a civil lawsuit against the driver who killed her, Gilberto Oriheaula Alcantar, as well as the company that he was driving for, Daylight Foods Inc., alleging that he was negligent in driving too fast and failing to pulled into the bike lane before making a right turn from Folsom onto 6th Street.

The Rim Fire and climate change

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee

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September 4, 2013

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The monstrous blaze that swept through Yosemite and burned 237,841 acres was a record breaker. According to the latest statistics from Cal Fire, the Rim Fire was the fourth highest in the history of California, with a $77 million price tag. Thanks to the efforts of more than 4,000 firefighters and support personnel, the blaze was 80 percent contained as of the latest update on Sept. 4.

While the exact cause remains a mystery for now, it’s worth pointing out that the Rim Fire could not have reached such epic proportions if it hadn’t been for the dry conditions in place when the smoldering began. And as climate change continues to alter weather patterns across the Western United States, projected declines in precipitation and higher average temperatures will lead to more of the same conditions that give rise to hot destructive infernos.

Daniel Berlant, an information officer with Cal Fire, noted in a recent telephone interview that summers have been longer and hotter over the past decade, a trend that has coincided with a spike in wildfires.

According to Cal Fire statistics, there were 5,135 fires in California from January 1 through August 31 of this year. Over the same time span last year, there were 3,731 fires recorded. The five-year average is even lower, at 3,638.

Another troubling statistic: Seven out of the 10 largest wildfires in California history occurred in the last decade alone.

“What we’ve been seeing here in this past decade is longer summers – seven to eight days longer than normal,” Berlant explained. “There’s a correlation between a longer summer and more wildfires,” he continued, and when rainfall finally does arrive, it comes in at record lows, Berlant explained. Meanwhile, “The high temperatures evaporate more of the rain.”

Brush and vegetation that take in moisture from rainfall have a better chance at withstanding a fiery blaze, Berlant noted, but when things stay bone dry, the plants act as kindling that causes the blaze to burn hotter.

So as climate change continues to transform the natural landscapes of the West, costly raging wildfires might be what Californians have to look forward to. Find that depressing? Here’s a captivating YouTube time-lapse video to distract you.

Still secret

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September 4, 2013

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news@sfbg.com
A high-profile local civil rights ordinance passed last year to shine light on the San Francisco Police Department’s joint activities with the FBI has been undermined by the SFPD’s refusal to disclose its surveillance activities. This comes at a time when the public is learning more than ever about the federal government’s intrusion into the privacy of law-abiding US citizens.

In May 2012, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance, which Mayor Ed Lee signed in a photo-op ceremony with Police Chief Greg Suhr and the activists who supported it. They claimed the board’s passage of the ordinance ushered in a new era of transparency over the SFPD’s previously secretive work with the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“The ordinance basically requires three things,” Nasrina Bargzie, a civil rights attorney at the Asian Law Caucus who worked on the measure, told the Bay Guardian. “The first part requires that the Police Department work with the JTTF has to follow the California constitutional rights of privacy, so they’re not following the lax standards of the [US] Department of Justice. The second part is that they can no longer enter into any secret agreements with the FBI; it has to go before the Police Commission in a public setting. The final part of the ordinance exists to make sure the rules are being followed, so there is a requirement for a yearly report.”

At the time of its passage, activists told the Guardian that the ordinance was only as strong as the SFPD’s willingness to disclose its activities (see “Mayor Lee signs watered-down limits on SFPD spying,” 5/9/12). But the SFPD’s refusal to disclose even minimal, basic information calls into question the ordinance’s value.

After the release of multiple reports earlier this year that activists called inadequate, Suhr is now maintaining silence regarding the JTTF, while claiming the department is in full compliance with the ordinance. According to Bargzie, Suhr told her the FBI is barring him from disclosing the requested information.

Following multiple efforts by the Guardian to get a comment out of SFPD about the ordinance and whether the department was indeed taking a subservient role to the FBI, SFPD Sgt. Dennis Toomer told us, “We’re not talking about that at all.”

LACK OF RESPONSE

Activists have sparred with Chief Suhr over implementation of the ordinance and its required annual report since at least the beginning of 2013.

Deputy Chief John Loftus presented the first report to the Police Commission on Jan. 23, which claimed the SFPD was in “full compliance” with the ordinance without providing any details. Activists and the public quickly demanded a real response.

“The commission presented this short oral report, which was a little short of two minutes long,” Bargzie told us. “There was no data that we were not already aware of. It was just basic statements claiming that they were complying with the ordinance.”

Suhr apologized for the omissions while stating his department was still in compliance with the ordinance’s guidelines, pledging to be more forthcoming. At this time, SFPD Sgt. Michael Andraychak told the Guardian: “The Chief’s Office is in the process of scheduling meetings with Nasrina Bargzie [of the Asian Law Caucus] to develop a report with more detail so those concerned and the public can be as informed as possible. Chief Suhr is committed to remain in compliance with the ordinance.”

The Coalition for Safe San Francisco, an activist group consisting of Muslim Legal Fund of America, Asian Law Caucus, and dozens of other groups, met with Suhr to discuss setting up a template for the reports.

Suhr then released a second report, which contained more relevant information, stating that SFPD officers did not act as informants in 2012 and three full-time SFPD officers were assigned to the JTTF.

But the report still omitted key oversight information, such as whether any prosecutions resulted from JTTF and SFPD investigations, which would allow the Muslim Legal Fund of America and other groups to determine who the SFPD is arresting and why.

Last year, Suhr told a San Francisco Examiner reporter that his officers followed up on 2,000 tips regarding counterterrorism activities. However, this information curiously did not make it into the official report.

“We contacted the chief to let him know we were not okay with this. We had another meeting with him and he said he’d think about it and get back to us and now he is claiming he cannot honor a basic component of the ordinance,” Bargzie told us. “He asserts in writing this is because the FBI will not let him share the basic information.”

WEAKENED LEGISLATION

The weak efforts behind the implementation of the SSFCRO date back to Mayor Lee’s veto of a stronger ordinance in April 2012, which would have codified privacy protections and given the Police Commission more power to stop FBI-SFPD activities that did not comply with Department General Order (DGO) 8.10, the 1990 policy aimed at protecting First Amendment activities. After Lee’s veto, the Board of Supervisors passed a weaker version. Both were sponsored by Sup. Jane Kim.

John Crew, a former police practices expert with the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union, raised concerns to the Guardian about the weakened legislation. “It is a step in the right direction, there’s no doubt it’s progress,” Crew told us at the time. “But whether it’s real progress depends on the implementation. Ultimately, it will come down to political will at the Police Commission to enforce privacy protections.”

Much of the ordinance’s failure stems from the apparent lack of real intent to disclose what the activists sought. Critics painted the SSFCRO signing ceremony as a hollow symbolic act, a way for Mayor Lee and Chief Suhr to publicly promote civil rights and progressive ideals with an ordinance they purposefully weakened.

“My sense is that [the SFPD] is not taking this seriously,” Bargzie told us. “I think they probably believe that they are providing as much information as the FBI will let them and Chief Suhr thinks it’s fine that the FBI can tell him to share what they tell him to.”

The lack of transparency regarding the JTTF’s work with the SFPD requires the public to trust the federal government to safeguard civil liberties. But in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leak exposing the expansive surveillance system by the National Security Agency and the SFPD’s notorious history of illegal surveillance and racial profiling, the public has little reason to trust the authorities.

HISTORY OF SPYING
The passage of the SSFCRO is the latest effort to counter a long history of racial profiling, spying on radical political groups, and other constitutional violations, episodes that have been followed by progressive reforms in San Francisco.
Prior to the passage of DGO 8.10 in 1990, the SFPD notoriously participated in the surveillance of non-criminal, pacifist political organizations. During the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the SFPD carried out surveillance on law-abiding organizations and, throughout the 1980s, it created files on civil, labor, and special interest groups in the Bay Area, revelations that led to the adoption of DGO 8.10.
But even after that, disclosures surfaced showing that the SFPD was blatantly violating its own rules. They included then-Police Chief Tony Ribera admitting that files on non-criminal political activity were not destroyed (as required by the ’90s reforms), the selling of confidential intelligence material to foreign governments and private entities, and the actions of SFPD Intelligence Officer Tom Gerad, who informed on local political groups for the FBI.
In the subsequent years following the Gerad scandal, San Francisco sought to strengthen DGO 8.10, requiring more transparency and oversight. But this progress was undercut in 2007 when the SFPD secretly signed a secret JTTF Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) undermining DGO 8.10.
San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission held hearings in which the community voiced concerns over illegal police and federal surveillance. In response, the SFPD said they were unable to discuss arrangements with the JTTF without the permission of the FBI.
In 2011, the previously secret MOU was unearthed by the ACLU (see “Spies in blue,” 4/26/11), prompting Suhr to issue Bureau Order #2011-07, which reinforced that SFPD personnel were under the jurisdiction of local and state privacy protections and did not spy on law-abiding groups. SFPD Public Information Officer Albie Esparza said the order reversed the language of the 2007 memo.
Part of Suhr’s amendment to SFPD policy at the time included the necessity of a predicate offense in all SFPD investigations. Thus, the SFPD could not investigate or spy on those who were not suspected of violating the California Penal Code or federal law.
Activists wanted those protections enshrined in city law, which resulted in last’s vetoed ordinance and passage of the watered down Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance in 2012, which activists now say they feel duped by.
“We have been extremely disappointed at the lack of information that has been included in the reports,” Summer K. Hararah, Regional Director for the Greater San Francisco Area Muslim Legal Fund of America told us. “If the SFPD is going to violate rights of Arab-Americans, the police chief has a responsibility to stand up to the FBI.”

POST 9/11 WORLD
Lax federal guidelines for counterterrorism have been building since the Bush Administration began implementing emergency measures after 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In San Francisco’s case, the FBI has subjected local law enforcement to these rules.
Since 9/11, both the ACLU of Northern California and the Human Rights Commission have publicized cases of racial profiling and surveillance of pacifist, non-criminal Muslim and Middle-Eastern groups in San Francisco. A 2007 FBI memorandum illustrated a prominent instance of this profiling in which FBI agents attended Ramadan Iftar dinners in San Francisco purportedly as part of the FBI’s mosque outreach program. Under this guise, the agents collected data on certain attendants, including names, the content of conversations, and other information covered by the First Amendment. According to the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the JTTF is permitted to conduct surveillance of this nature, by identifying “locations of concentrated ethnic communities in the Field Office’s domain, if these locations will reasonably aid in the analysis of the potential threats and vulnerabilities, and, overall assist domain awareness for the purpose of performing intelligence analysis.” These policies directly contradict SSFCO, DGO 8.10, and the California Constitution’s privacy protections. In Portland, Ore., the local government successfully fought this issue by bifurcating local law enforcement from the JTTF after the public and the ACLU raised concerns over similar constitutional violations and racial profiling. This Portland model is now a precedent for activist groups nationwide, seeking to end the lack of oversight permeating their local police departments. “Portland has been a great model,” Hararah told us. “When the FBI began to interview Muslim men in mass after 9/11, Portland was one of the few that said ‘absolutely not.'” But in San Francisco, Lee (whose office also didn’t respond to our request for comment) and Suhr’s symbolic promotion of civil rights has diminished into a case of them basically bullshitting the public. “Civil rights is not a symbolic issue,” Hararah told us. “The mayor backed this legislation and we want to see that the commitment is put forth with global insurance. The first step is having info about what the JTTF is doing to be sure it abides by human rights protections and is appropriate.”