Bay Guardian Archives

Private revolution

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS I found out on Christmas Day morning that I was a nihilist. Cool. I had always wondered what that meant, and now I didn’t have to wonder anymore and could move on to something else. Nihilists are witchy, weird chicken farmers who love everyone, hate every single thing that anyone believes in, and would much rather lie down in pine needles and watch the way bugs move than fight oppression.

I learned this from a real live anarchist, a kind of political hero of mine, when I tried to express my discomfort with anarchy because it has way too many rules for my liking. It was the sort of conversation that tends to end in only one way: with both parties bonking each other on the head with suitcases — generally speaking, of course. In some instances there aren’t any suitcases handy, so they have to use fireplace pokers or cookware.

So I felt astronomically lucky to be walking away from such talk with our just-friendship — not to mention my cranium — intact. Gastronomically, I was not so lucky. It was lunchtime, but it was Christmas, and I wasn’t raised by wolves, much as I might wish it otherwise, so I couldn’t help knowing that it was Christmas, and what that truly meant: restaurants would be closed.

No one was out on the streets except for homeless people and nihilists. I walked down 16th Street, lost in thought and dazzled by the abundance of available parking spots. The streets seemed surreally wide, and if my little body hadn’t been all tangled and tucked into scarves, sweaters, coats, gloves and hats, I might have sworn I was in Tucson. Instead of … what? Chicago? Cleveland?

It’s a wonder anyone ever recognizes me this time of year — I’m such an overdresser. Or maybe that’s how they recognize me. In any case, I turned the corner onto Guerrero, and there were my friends J and J, and they somehow knew me under all my Great Lakes–wear and greeted me warmly with big smiles and hugs.

"I’m a nihilist!" I said.

"We’re going to get Chinese food," they said. "Are you hungry?"

Am I hungry? Does the pope poop in the woods? I’m starving. Always. For everything. (Without mayonnaise.) Even if I’ve just eaten a whole ham by myself and am lying on the floor, comatose, I’m hungry. I just don’t know it just then is all. And another thing is that I’ve always wanted to eat Chinese food on Christmas.

"Where are you going?" I said.

"Big Lantern," they said. "It’s open."

I’d just walked past it and hadn’t noticed it was open because I was so lost in thought and clothing and deserty amazement. So I turned right around.

Big Lantern! I already knew it was my new favorite restaurant even before I bit into one of their succulent shrimp dumplings from the dim sum menu and slurped my first spicy slurp of hot and sour soup and made love to my favorite dish of all, on a table of favorite dishes: the ginger and onion lamb. I knew it was my new favorite restaurant because I was eating there. On Christmas Day! With friends.

Earl Butter gets takeout from Big Lantern, and he’d told me it was great. But J and J said you have to eat it there. They’ve gotten it to go, they said, and it sucked. So … you see why I write like this?

I don’t believe in hyperbole any more than, say, critical thinking; but I do find it a fun and friendly alternative to intelligence. And I don’t think I ever said so here, explicitly (or maybe I did), but my New Year’s resolution last year was for every place I ate at to be my new favorite restaurant. I did it!

Be warned though that 2007 is another year. If I don’t say that a place is my new favorite place, that doesn’t mean it isn’t. It just means I was distracted from food and ambiance by the bathroom.

I have learned to love indiscriminately. Now, in order to impress my fellow revolutionaries and hopefully make them love me back and let me lick them, I am going to shake off the pine needles and take an actual political stand: in the bathroom, of course. We choose our battles, and this is the one for me, because more than anything right now I need to pee.

Does your restaurant have safe, comfortable, unisex bathrooms? Big Lantern does! *

BIG LANTERN

Sun.–Wed., 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Thurs.–Sat., 11 a.m.–midnight

3170 16th St., SF

(415) 863-8100

Takeout and delivery available

Full bar

MC/V

Quiet

Wheelchair accessible

>

Emily Postfeminist

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

Recently, my boyfriend and I were at a strip club and bought a lap dance. My experience has been that, as a girl, the hands-off rule generally doesn’t apply to me. However, out of respect for the girl, I don’t touch until she invites me to. This one invited me to touch her. Caught up in the moment, my boyfriend asked, "Can she touch your pussy?" I was a bit shocked because I assumed that was off-limits, but she said, "She can, but you can’t." So I started touching her on the outside of her G-string. I got a little braver and went under her G-string but still stayed outside. She moved a certain way during her dance, and my thumb kind of slipped right in. A few seconds later, she stopped it. She was nice and hugged me and told us to come back anytime. Did I go too far? I feel guilty that I may have made her feel like a hooker. Or is it really no big deal? I’m embarrassed to go back, and I’ve asked my boyfriend to not make that request in the future. How often does this sort of thing happen to a dancer?

Love,

Thumbelina

Dear Thumb:

Just what we needed, a new set of ethical dilemmas and moral failings to keep us awake and tossing on those long dark nights of the soul that tend to hit around this time of year. I really don’t think this is the sort of thing that used to bother people before half the female grad students in the country started stripping and writing books and doing performance art (oh, so much performance art) about it. For that matter, I don’t think other girls used to feel either as permitted or as obligated to go grope those girls for money at their places of work. I’m not entirely sure that what we’re seeing here is really an accurate demonstration of human sexual behavior in the wild — there are too many layers of politics and performance in there to tell what’s really happening — but I’m confident we’re at least seeing some genuinely new situations and their accompanying etiquette issues in play.

I’ve known any number of posteverything strippers, hookers, and dominatrices, but one in particular comes to mind. She’d been working at a womyn-owned crunchy organic peep show, but — surprise! — she could barely make her rent, so like so many before her, she’d given up her ideals and gone where the money is. Hired on at the grimy mainstream porn theater and Olde Lappe Dance Emporium, she was coming home with her pockets and God knows what else stuffed with 50s every night but complained to me that some guy came while she was wiggling around on him and ew, ew, gross, yuck, how dare he? I commiserated at the time because I’m a wimp like that, but honestly, isn’t this an occupational hazard? If you’re going to be a sex worker, you deserve to be treated with respect and decency, of course, and what you say goes as far as who’s allowed to touch where with what and so forth, but come on. Into each stripper’s life a little semen must fall. If that’s absolutely not going to work for you, dance behind glass (for lower tips) or, hey, get your Realtor’s license or something.

Most of the female sex workers I’ve known have been at least passingly bisexual, but even those who really aren’t seem quite genuinely enthusiastic about female customers, both prospective and actual. There are elements of novelty to the appeal, I’m sure, just as there are elements of safety and sisterly enthusiasm. What there ought not to be, and what you ought not to worry about, is an expectation that female customers aren’t really customers at all, that is to say, are not paying the sex worker for sex. While many women who go to strip clubs or book time with a dominatrix may be doing it to please a (male) partner or as a learning experience or a lark or just to make a statement of some sort, it would be pretty silly for a sex worker to be surprised when a customer, male or female, appears to be interested in having some sort of sex with her.

Your dancer granted you access. Maybe she liked you (or likes girls in general) or maybe she was milking you for tips, but whatever, she said yes. She has a sense of how sturdy or flimsy a barrier her G-string presents to curious fingers and was probably not surprised when you got where you got. Most tellingly, she invited you back whenever, which she was certainly under no obligation to do. I think it would be fine to go back there and fine to whisper "Sorry I got fresh last time" and fine not to. It would also be fine for her, in turn, to refuse you service, but I bet she doesn’t.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea Nemerson has spent the last 14 years as a sex educator and an instructor of sex educators. In her previous life she was a prop designer. And she just gave birth to twins, so she’s one bad mother of a sex adviser. Visit www.altsexcolumn.com to view her previous columns.

Tears and Happyness

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OPINION I’m not sure why the new movie The Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith, based on the life of previously homeless Chris Gardner’s rise to millionaire, is so hard to write about. I am rarely at a loss for words, especially about poverty, homelessness, and racism. Perhaps it’s because this movie made me so sad that even as I try for the 40th time to write this, my eyes well up with broken tears. Not tears for the amazing Horatio Alger, old-school, pre–New Deal, up-by-the-bootstraps, 1930s-esque, blind-to-flagrant-racism-and-classism story.

No, instead my tears are deep and blood-filled for myself and my mama, homeless in a broken-down car for years upon years on the bitter cold streets of Oakland; for fellow poverty scholars and formerly homeless welfare queens and Poor Magazine staff members; for Jewnbug and her mama, Vivien and Jasmine Hain, Laurie McElroy and her son, and all the other unseen children, adults, and elders who subsist homeless in America, barely holding on through countless overnight stays in the sidewalk hotel. Tears for the fact that homelessness can happen with the regularity that it does, that every year Sister Bernie Galvin from Witness for Homeless People mourns the loss of hundreds more people who have died on the streets of San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the world.

Or perhaps they are only tears for Gardner, a poor man of African descent who was so driven to "make it" in this capitalist reality that he didn’t see the tragic paradox of his own situation — his continual denial of the rampant racism in his Dean Witter internship. Tears for a man who came so close to not making it in that palace of oppression, as he and his son slept on the floor of a bus station bathroom.

Or maybe they’re just tears for the myth of the bootstraps and how there is no place for that lie in the 21st century as more and more people locally and globally hover on the dangerous precipice of homelessness, wrongly believing it’s just about working hard enough and anyone can achieve what they want.

Or maybe they’re tears of admiration — for an amazing and dedicated father who no matter what was there for his son, like so many of us poor mamas and papas.

Or maybe the tears are because Gardner, when asked on a radio show if he believed that there was an essential problem with him and his son being homeless in one of the richest cities in the world, replied with a resounding no: it was just about working harder, and anyone can achieve anything they set out to do.

Or maybe they are in fact tears for my son, who watched his mama cry from depression and the reality that no matter how hard you pull up your threadbare bootstraps and pound the pavement and pinch pennies and beg your landlord and stand in food lines and look for jobs and affordable child care, you still won’t make it. *

Tiny

Tiny, also known as Lisa Gray-Garcia, is the author of the new book Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, published by City Lights Foundation, and the founder of Poor Magazine.

Free wi-fi for everyone

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EDITORIAL Basic municipal infrastructure — roads, water and sewer pipes, train tracks, airports, that sort of thing — has traditionally been owned and operated by the public sector, and for good reason: private experiments with toll roads, profit-motivated water companies, and even city rail companies have typically been disasters. The fundamental building blocks that hold a city together are public goods, paid for by tax dollars, for use by all, either free or at the lowest possible cost.

We’ve argued for years that electricity ought to be in that category, and San Francisco is finally taking some cautious baby steps toward public power. But city officials are about to turn what could be the single most significant new piece of infrastructure in our lifetime — broadband Internet service — over to a private consortium. It’s a mistake, and the supervisors shouldn’t go along with the deal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has made free universal wi-fi a key part of his political agenda, but through a process that’s been secretive and flawed from the start, he has chosen Google and EarthLink to put forward a proposal. As Sarah Phelan reported last week ("Selling Wi-Fi," 12/27/06), the two big tech companies are taking their road show around the city, trying to convince residents and businesses that their plan — which calls for limited free access combined with a fee-based system — will envelop the city in a wi-fi cloud, allowing anyone with a laptop to get instant Internet access anywhere in town, at no cost to taxpayers.

That may be true — but in the process, the city will be giving up a huge part of its future.

Ten years from now, maybe sooner, universal broadband will be as much a part of civic infrastructure as roads are today. Consumers will demand it. Businesses will insist on it. Public education will require it. Providing quality service to everyone — everywhere in town — will be an essential service. Why would we want to leave it to the private sector?

There are all sorts of problems with the Google-EarthLink proposal, starting with its lack of real universal access. Sure, everyone gets a connection — but at 300 kilobytes, it won’t be terribly fast. If you want to be able to quickly download music, videos, or large business files, you’ll need to pay by the month for an upgrade. Low-income folks, in other words, will be stuck in the slow lane. That’s not terribly fair.

It’s also not terribly surprising: these companies are out to make money. And over the years, their bottom line will drive the entire program.

There’s absolutely no need for that to happen. The city’s hired a consultant to look at creating a citywide network of fiber-optic lines under the streets, which is a fine idea, although it would take a few years to build. But even according to the Google-EarthLink consortium’s own estimates, the universal wi-fi network will cost only about $10 million. For a big-city public works project, that’s nothing. Almost every election, we approve another $100 million or so in bonds — for schools, community college buildings, libraries, parks, and police stations, all worthwhile projects. The city’s annual budget is more than $5 billion, and the cost of maintaining the network would run at about $2 million a year. This could turn out to be as important as anything the city ever builds — and it’s chump change.

The supervisors need to put the private wi-fi proposal on the shelf and immediately start plans to place a bond act on the next ballot to build a city-owned wi-fi and fiber-optic system that will offer true universal, free, high-speed broadband access for all. *

Toward a sustainable San Francisco

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EDITORIAL When you decide to buy your vegetables at a local grocery store, not at Safeway, or when you buy your books at the neighborhood bookstore instead of Barnes and Noble, or when you buy hardware from a store down the street, not from Home Depot, you’re actually doing something profoundly radical. You’re challenging the predominant paradigm of economic theory — and you’re helping make the San Francisco economy a whole lot healthier for a whole lot of people.

That’s what a detailed new report by a group of small business leaders and advocates for a sustainable economy argues. The coalition, led by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, makes a powerful argument — and the San Francisco supervisors ought to make it official city policy to follow the report’s proposals.

As Jeff Goodman reports in "Localize It" on page 11, in some ways the report is a critique of globalization: it argues that an economic system that encourages Bay Area consumers to buy cheap goods made by near-slave labor thousands of miles away and shipped here to be sold in giant chain stores whose workers can’t even afford health insurance and where all the buyers arrive in individual automobiles isn’t good for anyone. The economic displacement, the environmental impact, and the human cost are all unacceptable. And yet globalization (and so-called free trade) is the accepted principal of almost all national and even statewide policy.

But cities like San Francisco don’t have to go along with that. Jane Jacobs, the urban economist and planner, noted more than 30 years ago that cities are the true engines of national economies — and that the healthiest and most successful cities are the ones that have diverse, locally controlled economies and that, as much as possible, replace imports with local products. That’s what the new report calls for — and on a policy level it’s not terribly complicated.

For example, a citywide policy calling for a sustainable local economy would strongly discourage any new chain stores in the city (such as a Home Depot on Bayshore Boulevard) on the grounds that they violate all the basic principles of what the coalition calls localization. Economic development decisions would have to pass a strict test: Does this encourage locally owned businesses? Does it help replace imports? Does it keep money in the economy? Land-use decisions would have to be evaluated in part on their economic merits (but under a new sort of standard); a high-end housing development that displaced local industry wouldn’t make the cut. Purchasing decisions would have to take into account localization issues: Does the food come from the region? Is it possible to buy the goods locally?

It’s impossible in the modern economy to completely avoid globalization — and it’s not necessarily a good idea either. The new report hardly calls for economic isolation. But it does offer a very different policy vision. The supervisors should hold hearings, bring in the authors of the report, and move to create a formal policy that sets sustainable local economics as a standard for all city business. *

The coalition’s report is available at www.regionalprogress.org.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Every time I have a problem with my cable TV service, I’m reminded how much I hate Comcast and why the city ought to be running its own municipal cable system.

The latest saga: a couple days ago, late in the afternoon, I was hanging out with my kids, and I noticed that we’d lost the signal on the TV. Yes, I am a terrible parent — the kids don’t need to watch TV at all, certainly not in the afternoon on a weekday. But I wanted to watch a football game (which doesn’t count against the ban on weekday TV), and Vivian, who is 4, wanted to watch the cheerleaders, which is my own personal nightmare, but what can I do? The damn tube didn’t work. I called Comcast.

A service tech told me that someone needed to come out to the house and look at the connection and set up an appointment for the next day, between 4 and 8 p.m. I hate these four-hour service windows, and the repair people are badly overworked and always late, but whatever: I rearranged my entire afternoon and evening schedule and sat at home waiting for the knock on the door. It never came.

Around 7 p.m. it occurred to me to call and see what was up. A computerized voice told me there was no scheduled service appointment at my address. Three times I tried to connect to a human being; three times I heard "please wait" over and over before the line disconnected.

I finally got through to someone by choosing sales instead of service (they always come to the phone to sell you stuff), and a nice sales staffer promised to route me to a service rep. Ten minutes later the line went dead again.

Hanging up on customers is not good, and blowing off a repair call without so much as a phone call when someone is sitting at home for four hours waiting is pretty lame. I don’t give up easy, so I went to Comcast.com and found a way to get a live chat with a tech (it’s not easy to find, but it’s there). Someone named Jennifer came on, accessed my cable box remotely, and — after 30 minutes of back-and-forth — told me it was broken and that I should go get a new one. No shit. Thanks, Jen.

Even in this world of high-end broadband, live chat on the Internet is slow and clunky. Jennifer and I spent half an hour accomplishing what would have taken about 45 seconds on the phone. Why couldn’t I speak to a live human being? Why won’t anyone at Comcast answer the phone?

Comcast spokesperson Andrew Johnson told me that the storm and power outages had messed up Comcast’s call centers, which is understandable. But this isn’t the first time this has happened to me (or, judging from the sorts of calls I get, to many of you).

Meanwhile, I really look forward to dealing with EarthLink and Google over wi-fi problems (see "Free Wi-Fi — for Everyone," this page).

We don’t have to put up with this shit. Cable and broadband are rapidly merging, and they’re part of the city’s basic infrastructure. San Francisco can run its own system, make enough money to pay for the operations many times over, cut rates — and be a whole lot more accountable when things go wrong.

What are we waiting for? *

Is Nancy Pelosi up to it? Here are some telling details

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (B3)

“PELOSI TO BE PUT TO THE TEST,” trumpeted Tuesday’s Chronicle front page lead story.
The Guardian has been down on Pelosi ever since she led the campaign to privatize the Presidio
and then refused to debate the issue at the time or in subsequent campaigns. But
she is now in a key leadership spot, at a critical time in U.S. history with the crises of Iraq and Bush,
and we wish her well. We hope she rises to the occasion and at minimum satisifies her hometown dailynewspaper, if not the Guardian on the other end of town.
But there are many telling details, as I like to call them, that raise some doubts.

First, Maureen Dowd’s lead comment in her Dec. 20th New York Times column.
Dowd wrote, “The only sects that may be more savage than Shiites and Sunnis are the Democratic feminiist lawmakers representing Northern and Southern California.

“After Nancy Pelosi and Jane Harman had their final catfight about who would lead the House Intelligence
Committee, aptly enough at the Four Seasons hair salon in Georgetown, the new speaker passed over the knowledgeable and camera-eager Ms. Harman and mystifyingly gave the consequential job to Silvestre Reyes of Texas.” Dowd then polished off Reyes by pointing out that Reyes, when questioned by a reporter for Congresssional Quarterly, didn’t know whether Al Quaeda was Sunni or Shiite (he is “profoundly Shiite,” as Dowd said) and didn’t seem to know who the Hezbollah were. “‘Hezbollah,'” he stammered. “‘Uh, Hezbollah. Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish?” He couldn’t answer in either English or Spanish.

Second, Steve Lopez from the Los Angeles Time found a few days later that Pelosi’s office was annoyed when Lopez called her Washington office and asked if Pelosi was going to “correct her blunder and reverse the appointment” of Reyes, as Lopez put it in his Dec. 27th column. He quoted Jennifer Crider, the Pelosi spokeswoman,as asking why Lopez was still interested in the story.

“Well,” Crider wrote, “partly because the committee has the name INTELLIGENCE in it. And partly because I’m still embarrassed as a Californian to have a San Francisco representative pick the one guy fom Texas who seems to know less than Bush. Lopez continued, “Couldn’t Pelosi reconsider, I asked Crider, even if Pelosi and Harman have their political differences?” Crider replied that Reyes “misspoke.” Lopez wrote that, “in the interest of national security and in the Christmas spirit, I’m sending Reyes a book I found at Amazon.com. It’s called ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Middle East conflict.'”

Third, Pelosi and her local and Washington office refuse to respond to the entreaties of the supporters of Josh Wolf, the journalist jailed on orders of the Bush administration for refusing to give up videotapes he took of a demonstration in San Francisco. She and her office refuse to meet with Josh’s mother and supporters and she refuses to respond to questions about the case from the Guardian beyond saying through a spokesperson that she can’t interfere because it is a “legal matter” (which is nonsense, it is a political hit on journalism and San Francisco by the Bush administration). Pelosi does say that she does support a federal shield law for reporters, which is fine as far as it goes but it is not on her first l00 hour agenda or any other visible agenda. Josh, let us emphasize, is a constituent of Pelosi’s, and he is the only journalist in jail in the U.S. for refusing to give up material to the government, and soon will have been in jail longer than any journalist ever’ Question: If Pelosi refuses to even meet with Josh’s mother on such a serious journalistic and public policy issue, how can she be expected to effectively lead the charge against Bush and the war?

Fourth, Pelosi gives every signal, publicly and privately, that she won’t be leading a strong charge against Bush and the war and the sudden surge and acceleration of more troops into Iraq. She has already made it clear she won’t use the only real levers of power the Democrats have (impeachment proceedings and the the power of the budget to defund the war) or even the bully pulpit of her new office. As her constituents in San Francisco and the voters in the last election have made clear, there’s a misbegotten war on and they want it stopped and they don’t want Bush to be following fellow Texan LBJ in Vietnam by sending in more troops, more troops, more troops, to surge and accelerate in Iraq. They want U.S. troops out of this relentless descent into civil war maelstrom.
So: keep the pressure on Pelosi to try to insure she represents the real San Francisco values. That starts with peace and dissent on the war and Bush. B3

Postscript: Meanwhile, the New York Times reports Tuesday in a story headlined, “A Party, with Pelosi Front and Center,” that her party schedule is a splash of “Pelosi-palooza.” Anne E. Kornblut writes that “In a three day stretch of whirlwind events beginning on Wednesday, Mrs. Pelosi will celebrate her heritage (at the Italian Embassy), her faith (in a Roman Catholic Mass), her education (at Trinity College), her childhood (in Baltimore) and her current home (in a tribute by the singer Tony Bennett of ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco fame.'”) Okay, okay, but the tantalizing question remains: Pelosi can throw a party but is she smart enough and tough enough to go up against Bush and the war gang at this critical juncture and represent the real San Francisco values of her constituency? Follow along at the Guardian, at sfbg.com, and on the Bruce blog.
B3

Cute and cuddly crime statistics

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By G.W. Schulz

Sorry to piss on everybody’s parade, but a slight drop in the homicide rate isn’t exactly an excuse to break out the coke and booze. Then again, it doesn’t take much to get the frat brothers in the mayor’s office amped up for a party. Bro.

With murders down slightly in 2006 compared to the previous year, Gavin Newsom is preparing for a walk down Divisadero with Police Chief Heather Fong, an area where cops say crime has dropped. The event surely will include a healthy dose of media coverage, and going into an election year, Newsom needs all the flashbulbs he can get. In 2004, he melodramatically proclaimed that voters should recall him if the homicide rate isn’t brought down, so technically, he’s safe for now.

But a buried paragraph in the Chronicle’s front-page story from today reveals a key facet of crime statistics that should be taken into account when considering street-level violence and its effect on a city.

“Richmond Police Lt. Mark Gagan said homicide numbers tell only part of the story in Richmond, where a total of 280 people were shot last year. ‘I don’t think just the homicide rate alone is the way to determine whether violence is up or down,’ Gagan said.”

Executions are gruesome shit

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By Tim Redmond

If you haven’t seen the truly grim footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, you can view it here. Luke Thomas posted it on Fog City Journal, but I don’t think any of the other local sites have links up.

I understand why people avoid this sort of thing: It’s really nasty to look at. But there’s a reason Americans should see it, and (with the advent of cell-phone cameras, and soon, little cameras hidden in all sorts of other gadgets) footage of executions, including California killings, is going to become more and more common.

The United States has tried hard to make executions seem almost clinical: The electric chair and the gas chamber have been replaced with lethal execution, which is supposed to be painless. We know that isn’t always true; in fact, killing someone is never pretty and is never going to be pretty.

And if the state is going to do the killing, the public needs to know what it’s paying for.

In this case, we paid for a hanging. Don’t kid yourself — your tax dollars paid for that rope and those gallows. And the United States, which controls virtually every move the Iraqi government makes, was happy to alllow this to go forward.

God bless America.

Our suit (LINKS)

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SFBG ONLINE: Opening the secret files – Guardian, Media Alliance file legal motion to open key Hearst-Singleton newspaper-merger records

View a PDF of the filed motion here

A new “golden age?”

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By Tim Redmond

The bloggers are having a bit of fun with The Chronicle’s front-page New Year’s Eve assertion that San Francisco’s Golden Age is here again. I have to agree with Beyond Chron — the story was an embarassment that quoted only conservative, wealthy San Franciscans and ignored much of the city.

Yeah, reporter Carl Nolte, who is a good guy (and my neighbor in Bernal Heights) made the point that there have always been problems in San Francisco, including today. But his overall theme — that all this new development and soaring housing costs are somehow good for the city — is a crock.

I’m always the optimist, and I think that 2006 was a great year for local politics. But a “Golden Age?” No: what’s happening in the local economy is that San Francisco is becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. We are building housing for people who don’t live here, and destroying jobs for people who do.

I’ve argued in the past that in a boom-band-bust city, the busts are often better than the booms. That’s because the single greatest quality-of-life issue for most people (the non-rich) in San Francisco is the cost of housing. This boom is only golden for a very few.

Apple knowingly falsified documents. And that is a crime.

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By G.W. Schulz

So let’s get this straight. In 2001, Bay Area-based Apple Computer Inc. gave 7.5 million stock options to its CEO, Steve Jobs. The options were approved by the company’s board of directors at a meeting that never actually happened. The company also now admits that documents related to this imaginary meeting were fudged to make it appear that the necessary board approval had taken place.

The special committee formed by Apple to investigate the matter (which includes Al Gore) says no current member of management was aware of the falsified records. Jobs, the committee insists, was innocent, and as the public is often told during such controversies, the top exec was ignorant of the manipulation.

Steve Jobs sure gets paid a lot of money for a man who’s clueless.

From the Chronicle:

“Apple said Jobs was aware of some instances of backdating and even recommended favorable dates to grant options. But, the company said, Jobs did not financially benefit from these grants and did not understand the accounting implications.”

That’s sort of like arguing that a casino patron who got caught counting cards didn’t make a dime off it and had no idea how badly the hired muscle would kick his ass once they got him outside. He was still counting cards.

Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is mad as hell and won’t take it any more. He writes, McClatchy’s profit-and-loss statement: They profit, we lose

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

For months now, as the Knight-Ridder/McClatchy/Hearst/Singleton/Gannett/Stephens debacle has unfolded, I have been looking in vain to see if a staff member on any of the papers of the nation’s biggest chains (reporter, columnist, editorial writer, editor, union spokesperson, ad salesman, letter writer, blogger, anybody) would beallowed to blast away at this deal of ultimate toxicity in their papers, on their websites, or in their blogs. (Note my postscript to the newspaper unions to this effect in my previous blog.)

The closest I have seen is an excellent First Amendment column by Thomas Peele in the Contra Costa Times/Singleton, raising the right issues about why his owner/publisher had moved to seal the court records in the Reilly vs. Hearst antitrust case in federal court. (See my earlier blog.) James Naughton, former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a K-R stockholder, and a gang of former Knight-Ridder staffers, mostly retired or off staff, also published online a sharp letter rebuke to K-R Chairman Tony Ridder and the K-R board for rolling over and refusing to fight it out with the dissident private equity stockholders.

Now, two days after McClatchy tossed the Star Tribune into the snow banks of Northern Minnesota, columnist Nick Coleman on Thursday wrote a classic column that ought to go into the journalist textbooks at the University of Minnesota and everywhere else. He lays out in a snapshot of what happens to the Twin Cities when McClatchy and Knight-Ridder conspire in a misbegotten deal that leaves St. Paul with Singleton and Minneapolis with, gulp, a one-year-old New York private equity group firm with no newspaper holdings nor experience. Ironically, perhaps the reason the Star Tribune ran his column was because McClatchy was beating it out of town, fast, at full gallop, and the paper was suddenly thrust under the new ownership of Avista Capital Partners, which hadn’t gotten the knack of monopoly press control and censorship. Chalk up one good mark for the new owner.

Coleman flashed his sword in his lead paragraphs: “When the McClatchy Co. got the keys to the Star Tribune in l998, McClatchy’s patriarch hailed the merger. James McClatchy called it a wedding of two newspaper traditions that shared “‘a deep-rooted commitment to building a just society.’

“You are now permitted to laugh derisively.

“Eight years later, hardly anyone in the newspaper business talks about anything other than building profit margins that would choke a robber baron.

“Mercifully, McClatchy passed away in May and did not live to see the Sacrmento-based company that bore his name disgrace his legacy by dumping its largest newspaper–the most important one between Chicago and the West Coast, the one that serves 5 million Minnesotans and that can be a conscience, a scold, a cheerleader and an interpreter of life on the tundra.”

Coleman ended with a scathing flourish: “McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt did not bother to come to Minnesota on Tuesday to say he surreptitously had sold the paper and to kiss us goodbye.

“But McClatchy brass gave us some nice parting shots from afar, complaining that the Star Tribune had lost value (and proving it in a secret auction at fire-sale prices), calling the flagship a drag on profits and sayiong McClatchy would have shown a one-percent increase in ad sales if the Star Tribune weren’t included. One per cent Huzzah!
Sound the trumpets!

“There’s the market for you: the Star Tribune held down ad sales one percent. So One-Percent Pruitt axed his best newspaper. Brilliant.

“‘The Star Tribune is one fo the best newspapers in this country,'” Pruitt said in l998. “‘The Twin Cities is one of the most attractive newspaper markets in the country. And it was a near perfect fit in terms of values and traditions.’

“We didn’t change. But you, Mr. Pruitt? We don’t recognize you anymore. So long.

“Don’t bother to write.”

I like that, and I’ll bet a lot of Minnesotans will like that. I can speak with authority because, as a native of Rock Rapids, Iowa, situated five miles from the Minnesota state line just south of Luverne, Minnesota, I grew up with the Star Tribune and its sister paper, the Des Moines Register, both highly respected papers who looked upon the entire states of Minnesota and Iowa as their beats. They were owned at that time by the Cowles family, who lived in Minneapolis and Des Moines, and cared deeply about journalism and Minnesota and Iowa. I spent many a Sunday morning back in the late l940s riding about town proudly delivering the Sunday Register. Everybody, it seemed, in Minnesota and Iowa, read and lived by the Star Tribune and Register. They were our friendly hometown papers.

Coleman has set the standard: The least newspaper owners can do these days of monopoly mayhem is to allow their staff members and readers to write openly and honestly as appropriate in their papers and websites about the way they and their communities are being treated by their owners and publishers. In the meantime, I toast with a Potrero Hill martini Nick Coleman and his editors who passed his story into print. Bravo! keep it up!

Lingering question: Why didn’t Tony Ridder fight like hell to keep his family heritage chain of papers? And why didn’t the Knight-Ridder board, or his key executives, push him privately or publicly to put up a fight. Every Knight-Ridder executive I run into, I ask the question: how in the world did this happen and why didn’t Tony and Knight-Riddger put up a fight? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer. I kept reading Tony’s comments at the time to the effect that he had no choice and that a sale would keep the peace and minimize the tumult in his chain papers.

How could there be more tumult and more damage than there is now? Did Tony and his board really think that McClatchy could swallow their entire chain of papers and not peddle any of them off in fire sales? Why didn’t they get solid pledges from McClatchy that would at minimum save their best papers (Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury-News, Contra Costa Times, St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Minneapolis Star Tribune et al)? I believed then, and i believe now, that Tony and the Knight-Ridder people made a bad mistake by not putting up a big public fight and talking publicly, not just about its respectable 20 per cent profit margins, but also about its reputation for quality journalism, community involvement, the prestigious Knight Foundation, and major First Amendment and public access advocacy.

Moreover, while much of the mainstream press was marching us into Iraq and practicing stenographic reporting of the Bush administration, Knight-Ridder and its Washington bureau regularly did some of the most critical news reporting and editorial writing on Bush and the war of any of the major media. I assure you, Dean Singleton and Avista Capital partners aren’t about to pick up the slack, hit hard on Bush and the war, or even try to develop much original Washington and foreign news coverage. Alas. I hope I’m wrong. I refer you to Brugmann’s Law: once you damage quality papers like these, it’s tough as hell to bring them back. Alas. I hope I’m wrong.

Stay alert–we will keep running the major stories that the Hearst/Singleton monopoly papers refuse to print. B3

Nick Coleman: McClatchy’s profit-and-loss statement: They profit, we lose

Alexis Tioseco’s Favorite SEA Films of 2006

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Alexis A. Tioseco, editor-in-chief of the superb site Criticine, contributed a manifesto/essay to the Guardian’s 2006 film issue. He’s also compiled an annotated list of favorite films from Southeast Asia, which cites a number of emerging filmmakers, including the intriguing Edwin. Here’s Alexis:

With the space limited to me, I’d like to run my list a bit differently, writing strictly about Southeast Asian cinema (lord knows it gets overlooked enough), and listing a feature, a short, and an older work for each major SEA filmmaking country: Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore (I cheat with Malaysia but that’s ok).

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Still from A Very Slow Breakfast, by Edwin

More reporters facing jail

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Josh Wolf may soon have company: Two more reporters have been ordered to testifyin a court hearing, and neither one of them seems about to give in

Sarah Olson, an Oakland freelancer who writes for Truthout, and Dahr Jamail, who has done some amazing reporting from Iraq, both received subpoenas from Army prosecutors, who want them to testify against 1st Lt. Ehren Watadam who is charged with refusing to accept orders that he deploy in Iraq. He has been quoted as saying that he thinks the war is illegal, and prosecutors want the reporters to confirm their interviews with him.

Not likely.

Computers for nothing

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By Steven T. Jones
Scott Beale from Laughing Squid was one of many bloggers given a free laptop by Microsoft as part of a PR stunt to promote its new Vista operating system. And it came in a Ferrari computer, no less. Well, after the blogosphere lit up with controversy and introspection, Beale (ever the standup guy, in my humble estimation) has decided to sell his machine on E-Bay and to donate the proceeds to the Electronic Freedom Foundation. Atta boy!

Guillermo Del Toro on eggs, ghost sightings, lucid dreaming, Catholicism, the “supranatural,” uterine imagery and more

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Now is the time to see Pan’s Labyrinth — and to read Sara Schieron’s interview with the man behind the movie, Guillermo Del Toro.

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Guillermo Del Toro

Gleamy-eyed as Santa Claus and every bit as generous, Guillermo del Toro recently visited SF to discuss his latest film, Pan’s Labyrinth. Already seen by droves of festivalgoers, Pan’s Labyrinth is worthy of profound praise. Both Del Toro and his movies have developed a reputation for converting skeptics to affectionate believers – perhaps this has something to do with his genuine (and apparently altruistic) interest in the world. He’s disarming in his curiosity. (Note: Had Del Toro not said, “Don’t chicken out,” the personal bits that follow would so have been cut.)

DVD-Arrr! Jason Shamai’s Mexico City Pirate Diary…Uncut!

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One highlight of this week’s 2006 Film opus is Jason Shamai’s tale of DVD buying and watching in Mexico City. Here it is, sans the cuts required for it to fit into the newspaper:

When I got to Mexico City’s main ceremonial drag, where national parades and military marches are flanked by the Art Nouveau-style Palacio de Bellas Artes and the most striking Sears department store building you will ever see, it had transformed into a full-on tent city: blue tarp, camping tents, and thousands of political cartoons (ranging from the dryly satirical to the scatological) flowed east for at least half a mile and filled the Zócalo, the city’s vast central plaza where people had already been camped for weeks. Just a few days before, Mexico’s highest electoral court had confirmed National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon as the country’s next president. His opponent Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who challenged the cleanliness of the election that had him losing by a little over half of a percentage point, had asked that his camped-out supporters stay right where they were until they could force a vote-by-vote recount. The recount had been denied and Calderon was now certain to replace outgoing president Vicente Fox, but AMLO’s supporters were still there in their virtual city within a city.

Scent as identity: A conversation with Perfume director Tom Tykwer

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Tom Tykwer’s film version of the cult novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer hits screens this week. Sara Schieron recently talked with the director:

Peter Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer has inspired a lot of musical adaptations. German band Rammstein and Portugese band Moonspell have both called the book an influence, and Kurt Cobain, who named the book as his favorite, wrote the song “Scentless Apprentice” in reaction to it.

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Tom Tykwer directing Perfume

The novel’s musical associations in mind, it’s not just coincidence that put Tom Tykwer in charge of the film adaptation. A composer as well as a writer/director, Tykwer is most recognized in the US for his techno-paced action drama Run Lola Run. His newest film, which takes place in 18th century France, follows a pace better suited for the Berlin Philharmonic. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a chiaroscuro painting set to music. As much about love and identity as it is about legend and fame, it inspires questions. Tykwer let me ask him a few — beginning with one that provoked a high-pitched, giddy laugh.

No reprieve

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By G.W. Schulz

The most recent newsletter from the Tenderloin police station shows yet again what has been one of California’s worst criminal-justice problems – recidivism.

California has one of the highest recidivism rates in the country, an ongoing crisis that has remained a vexing political issue for the governator. We love putting people behind bars over and over again, and nowhere in San Francisco is that more startlingly clear than in the Tenderloin, which alone boasted 4,200 arrests last year, the highest in the city. Of the over 20 arrests that took place in the district between Dec. 15 and Dec. 21, almost every single one of them involved both drugs and repeat offenders.

NOISE: James Brown is dead – long live James Brown

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Whoa, I go crazy – James Brown in his casket. Who would have thought it could happen? To the hardest working of us all?

Newsday reports that a gold casket carrying the Godfather of Soul’s body, drawn by two white horses, arrived at the Apollo Theater today as thousands of fans lining the street erupted in chants.

james brown.jpg
Died on Christmas day. Courtesy of AFP

McClatchy sells the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to a New York venture capital firm with no newspaper experience. It’s sad for the staff, for the state of Minnesota, and for the newspaper business

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Bu Bruce B. Brugmann

It’s yet another WLSB, another wimpy little story in the business section of the Hearst/Singleton papers, except this time it was not even in the business section of the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst.
And it was just a couple of paragraphs boiled out of an Associated Press story in the business digest of the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, and the San Jose Mercury News (all Singleton papers).

Why? This was probably because the latest McClatchy sale was the most embarrassing media monopoly story of them all: it showed yet again how the nation’s big chains were tossing newspapers around like drunks toss cards in a monopoly game in a waterfront saloon. This time, in a most unexpected development, McClatchy announced that it was selling the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, one of the great newspapers of the country, for less than half of the original purchase price of $l.2 billion that McClatchy paid in l998 to buy the Star-Tribune and its local Cowles Media parent company.

And it sold its largest paper to a one year old NewYork venture capital firm named Avista Capital Partners with no newspaper holdings and no newspaper experience.

Word came as a shock to the newsroom in Minneapolis, reported the New York Times Thursday. Employees received an e-mail message aet 3:5l p.m. saying that there would be an important announcement at 4:00.

“You should have seen the look on our faces,” said Nick Coleman, a metropolitan editor for the paper. “It was like, who? Everyone knows the whole industry is in play and that just about anything could happen, but nobody thought we could get sold. There’s a real sense of betrayal.”

Coleman said the paper was sold in a “fire sale.” He continued, “At a fire sale, people get discounted so we’re very concerned, worried and anxious.” On the other hand, he said, “maybe it takes someone from outside the newspaper business to see the way forward.”

Dean Singleton, the new owner of the competing St. Paul Pioneer Press, was astounded and was quoted in his own paper as saying he would never have expected McClatchy to sell the paper at such a large loss. “How often does a newspaper company sell its largest paper,” he said. “It doesn’t happen.”

For those of us who grew up with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Des Moines Register (both owned by the Cowles family), this is a terrible shock. It was bad enough when the Gannett Company took over the Register and turned a splendid statewide paper into a mediocre Des Moines metropolitan paper. I remember the precise moment when I knew that Gannett was ruining the Register. I was back visiting my parents in Rock Rapids, Iowa, and I stopped in to the Rexall store, as I always did when I was in town, to buy the Register from Jim Roeman, a high school classmate who ran the store. He didn’t have any and explained why: the Register had hiked the price so that the more papers he sold, the more money he lost and so he (and many other outlets outstate) stopped carrying the Register. And that was the Gannett strategy, to gradually cut back circulation and coverage to outer Des Moines and ruin a proud state paper.

It was worrying when McClatchy, a California paper, bought the Minneapolis Star but at least it was strong editorially and had solid management. But now, McClatchy sold to an unknown venture capital firm with no credentials and no track record and it did so even though McClatchy’s chainwide profit margin through September of this year was 25.2 per cent, according to Gary Pruitt, McClatchy CEO. Then Pruit coyly added without giving specifics, “Without Minneapolis, the profit margin would be higher.” Higher? That’s higher than most U.S. corporations are doing.

Even newspaper analyst John Morton, who rarely sees a newspaper sale or a merger he doesn’t like, told the Sacramento Bee that the sale was “a disappointment.” He said McClatchy is known as an operator of high quality newspapers and is giving up on a paper with a good reputation. “This is a shock,” he said.

Colby Atwood, an analyst at Borrell Associates, a media research firm, gave a chilling financial analysis to the New York Times. “The turbulence of equity holders trying to rebalance their portfolios and newspapers are properties to be bought and sold,” he said. “They’re buying cash flow and tax benefits. It’s not the sort of religious commitment that you hope to get from newspaper owners.”

The Star Tribune laid out this new form of “religious commitment” in its Wednesday story by Matt McKinney and Susan Feyder, who were assigned that uneviable job in journalism of covering the transgressions of their own paper. Here is their snapshot lead of how the nation’s second largest chain unloads its biggest newspaper:

“The Star Tribune’s new chairman is a Wall Street investor who says he’s driven by public service. Chis Harte is also a resident of Texas and Maine and a former newspaper executive who’ll be advising an investment group that has never owned a daily newspaper.

“A day after McClatchy announced the sale of the Star Tribune to a New York private equity group, there are more questions than answers about how the deal will reshape the newspaper and its community, and whether it will serve as a template for an industry in transition.

“Harte says he’s still trying to figure it all out himself.

“‘This whole transaction came together so fast, really in just the last week or so,'” Harte said. “‘At this point we just don’t know about things like my schedule.'”

The heads on the story synopsize the point about reshaping the newspaper and the community: “Twin Cities will lose Star Tribune Foundation” and “Sale could reset the bar for newspaper deals–lower.”

Well, we can get a little idea right here in the Bay Area about this kind of “reshaping” and “religious commitment.”
Only by reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, and the many stories on Chain Links, the online network of the Newspaper Guild, (some links below), can you find out much of anything about this sorry deal. Not by reading the WLSBs in the local Hearst/Singleton press. And so once again we urge you to sign up for Chain Links and get the stories the local monopoly papers won’t print.

Full disclosure: we want to get the documents of collaboration of Hearst and Singleton and the other chains in the Bay Area monopoly deai (McClatchy, Gannertt, Stephens), and shed as much light as possible on the march of the Galloping Conglomerati. That’s why the Guardian and the Media Alliance, represented by the First Amendment Project, went into federal court last week to try to unseal the documents in Reilly vs. Hearst et al, the only real impediment remaining to unraveling the Hearst/Singleton deal and the fallout from the Knight-Ridder sale to McClatchy. Wish us luck. B3

P.S. I sent an email over to Ken Howe, editor of the Chronicle business section, asking him why the Chronicle did not run a story on the McClatchy sale. He had not responded by blogtime. I am sending a copy of this story (and the Nick Coleman column) to Hearst corporate in New York via Chronicle publisher Frank Vega and Editor Phil Bronstein. Will they comment? Will Hearst ever allow a Nick Coleman-type column in its paper or website SF Gate or its blogs? Will they allow David Lazarus to get to the bottom of it all in his excellent business column? Or Phil Matier aand Andy Ross…Or?…Or?…

P.S. 2: Note to the newspaper unions: the stories you are running on Chain Links are owner oriented stories, with almost no quotes from people from the community or journalism or law professors or union spokespeople. Do the unions have any comment or stories of its own that it can pass along? Any more Nick Coleman type columns?

ChainLINKS
The Star Tribune
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
The New York Times
Editor & Publisher

The P-U-litzer prizes

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Competition has been fierce for the fifteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes. Many can plausibly lay claim to stinky media performances, but only a few can win a P.U.-litzer. As the judges for this un-coveted award, Jeff Cohen and I have deliberated with due care. (Jeff is the founder of the media watch group FAIR and author of the superb new book “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.”)

And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2006:

“FACT-FREE TRADE” AWARD — New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

In a press corps prone to cheer on corporate-drafted trade agreements as the key to peace and plenty in the world, no cheerleader is more fervent than Tom Friedman. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in July, Friedman confessed: “I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown, in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA,
the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.’”

(Friedman may not have read even the pact’s title; CAFTA actually stands for the Central America Free Trade Agreement.)

LOCK UP THE FIRST AMENDMENT PRIZE — CNN’s William Bennett

Soon after being hired as a CNN pundit, Bennett went on his radio talk show and offered his views on freedom of the press — and on reporters who broke stories about warrantless wiretapping and secret CIA detention sites “against the wishes of the president, against the request of the president and others.” Bennett fumed: “Are they embarrassed, are they arrested? No, they win Pulitzer Prizes. I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award — I think what they did was worthy of jail, and I think this investigation needs to go forward.”

BROKE-BRAIN MOUTHING AWARD — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

As the movie “Brokeback Mountain” (about a relationship between two cowboys) was gaining attention and audience in January, Chris Matthews appeared on the Imus show to hail “the wonderful Michael Savage” and the talk-show host’s nickname for the movie: “Bareback Mounting.” Matthews and Savage had been MSNBC colleagues until “the wonderful” Savage was fired — after referring to an apparently gay caller as a “sodomite” and telling him to “get AIDS and die.” Now that’s hardball.

CASUAL ABOUT CASUALTIES AWARD — Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch

Echoing an Iraq war talking-point heard regularly on Fox News, owner Murdoch said on the eve of the November election: “The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute.” As FAIR noted, U.S. deaths in Iraq exceed those in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War, not to mention the combined U.S. deaths of all this country’s other military actions since Vietnam — including Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan.

FRONT-PAGE PUNDIT AWARD — Reporter Michael Gordon and The New York Times

With many voters telling pollsters that they want U.S. troops to leave Iraq, the Times front-paged a post-election analysis by Michael Gordon — headlined “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” — quoting three hand-picked “experts” who decried the possibility of troop withdrawal. Gordon didn’t tell readers that one of his “experts,” former CIA analyst Ken Pollack, had relentlessly promoted an Iraq invasion based on wildly false claims about an Iraqi threat. Gordon took off his reporter’s hat that night on CNN to become an unabashed advocate for his view that withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to “civil war” (as though civil war weren’t already underway).

“PROVE YOU’RE NOT A TRAITOR” PRIZE — CNN’s Glenn Beck

In November, Beck — an Islamophobic host on CNN Headline News — launched into his interview with Congressman-elect Keith Ellison, a Muslim American, this way: “I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’” Beck then added: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” Is it possible that primetime bigots like CNN’s Beck have something to do with the prejudices “that a lot of Americans feel”?

GROUNDHOG DAY AWARD — Ted Koppel

One role of journalism should be to help the public learn from past government policy disasters in hopes of preventing future ones. But in a New York Times column on Oct. 2, former ABC News star Koppel wrote that Washington should tell Iran it is free to develop an atomic bomb — with a Mafia-like warning: “If a dirty bomb explodes in Milwaukee, or some other nuclear device detonates in Baltimore or Wichita, if Israel or Egypt or Saudi Arabia should fall victim to a nuclear ‘accident,’ Iran should understand that the United States government will not search around for the perpetrator. The return address will be predetermined, and it will be somewhere in Iran.” In other words, no matter what the evidence, Koppel urged our government to attack a predetermined foe, Iran. Didn’t that happen in 2003 with Iraq?

Hold your nose and prepare yourself for 2007.

Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

New Year’s Eve ill

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER You gotta love the Bay Area, which so often sweeps in the new year with the wet, wild kiss of stormy weather. Blecch — too much tongue. Still, I succumb to the call of fun: I can’t count how many times I’ve vaulted over gushing gutters, minced down streets that have morphed into streams, danced between the raindrops, hopped between soggy cardboard sheets in backyards that have turned into miasmas of mud, and jabbed firework gawkers with the bad end of an umbrella. Outta-hand winter waterworks seem somewhat fitting for our kooky, multitentacled, many-flavored assortment of New Year’s Eve entertainment offerings. So here’s a selected guide to live sounds for all persuasions, preferences, sizes, and sicknesses (we’re not even going to go into the sans pants warehouse show) — let’s see what’s out there on the blessed night all those in the so-called biz dub "amateur night," the evening when most everyone feels compelled to get out and brave the puddles pooling around their doorsteps.

ROCKING LIKE A HURRICANE


Don’t bother knockin’, because the yacht-rockin’ good times are sure to be had when Portland, Ore., one-man party machine Yacht meets Oakland one-man party machine Hawnay Troof at 21 Grand; Blevin Blectum, High Places, and Bronze tan it up too. Kid606 will be swinging from there to Rx Gallery, where he performs with French beat blurters DAT Politics, delay-pedal ditherers Lemonade, and Kontrol with Dirtybird. It’s not plus tard, ‘tards! After catching the LA band eves ago at the Make-Out Room and dancing our Khmers off, we’ve got a Dengue Fever for the flava of Cambodian garage rock — this year it’s at Rickshaw Stop (www.rickshawstop.com). The Lovemakers get busy with Honeycut at Great American Music Hall. At the Fillmore (www.ticketmaster.com), My Morning Jacket stoke the flames of Southern rock. Breakout ska punk critters the Aggrolites open for Hepcat at Slim’s (www.slims-sf.com). Harold Ray Live in Concert do unspeakable — and delightful — things to an organ at Annie’s Social Club (www.anniessocialclub.com). Balazo Gallery (www.balazogallery.com) finds Goldie faves Trainwreck Riders living it up with La Plebe. Birdmonster scare up the good times along with art-punk Boyskout at Bottom of the Hill (www.bottomofthehill.com). Crane your necks at the Stork Club (www.storkcluboakland.com) as bits of the Bobby Teens and Gravy Train!!!! come together and costume-ize for the customized Dinky Bits and the Lil Guys. Rube Waddell revamp their "Live at Leeds" — or shall we say "Sexy at Sketchers" — show at a wanton belly dancing, cabaret, and brass happening going down at Amnesia (www.amnesiathebar.com). And for those with hair that needs a band, there are LA Guns (playing with the curiosity-piquing Infamous Choke Chain) at Roosters Roadhouse, Alameda (groups.msn.com/roostersroadhouse). And why Y and T at Avalon, Santa Clara (www.nightclubavalon.com)? Y not?

TICK-TOCK, HIP-HOP


Zion I, Lyrics Born, and Crown City Rockers put together the rap show to beat at the Independent (www.theindependentsf.com), striking trepidation in the hearts of bouncers with no-holds-barred rhymes and an all-night open bar (line up the Henny, honey). But don’t count the Coup out: so soon after the group’s recent bus crash, in which they lost all their belongings and several members and tourmates were injured, the Bay Area band gets back onstage alongside Les Claypool and the New Orleans Social Club at Claypool’s New Year’s Eve Hatter’s Ball at Grace Pavilion, Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Santa Rosa (www.harmonyfestival.com/nye/nye.html). Also, booty, bass, and all the b’s will be bumpin’ back when Spank Rock boomerangs to 280 Seventh Street (upcoming.org/event/134159).

GROOVES AND ALL JAZZ HANDS ON DECK


Piano legend McCoy Tyner is the monster headliner at Yoshi’s (www.yoshis.com). Washing up on Anna’s Jazz Island, Berkeley (www.annasjazzisland.com), Yoruban priestess and Afro-Cuban soul stirrer Bobi Cespedes and her trio work their magic. Soul and funk trumpeter Oscar Myers blows out 2006 with Steppin’ at the Boom Boom Room (www.boomboomblues.com). Bimbo’s 365 Club (www.bimbos365club.com) wink-winks, nudge-nudges with the New Morty Show and Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums. Vocalist Kim McNalley urges you to party like it’s 1929 at her Jazz at Pearl’s (www.jazzatpearls.com); Jesus Diaz and his Bay Area Cuban All Stars light a fire under La Peña Cultural Center (www.lapena.org). And OK, everyone dug Eddie Murphy more in Dreamgirls — don’t x out Jamie Foxx; he attempts to fill Oracle Arena, Oakland, accompanied by Fantasia Barrino (www.ticketmaster.com).

A YEN FOR YUCKS


Our favorite unfunny funnyman, Neil Hamburger (and former SF storage container dweller, or so he says), throws pop culture on the grill, sweats profusely, and jubilantly rolls around in a trough of bad taste for two shows at the Hemlock Tavern (www.hemlocktavern.com); astrology nut Harvey Sid Fisher ushers in the ‘Burger meister. Patton Oswalt blew that whiny David Cross off the stage when he opened for him at Cobb’s way back when — now the prince of King of Queens headlines two rounds on New Year’s Eve (www.cobbscomedyclub.com).

Just remember, ya can’t stop the rain. Don’t fear the reaper. Stay metal, and be sure to strap yourself in for 2007 — because judging from the way we roll, it could be a bumpy ride. *

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