› tredmond@sfbg.com
There are people at the daily newspapers around here who bristle when I accuse them of ignoring important local stories, particularly ones involving powerful political, business, or social figures (and most particularly, involving the newspapers themselves). No representative of the Hearst Corp. stands in the newsroom door announcing that stories about management will be sent to New York for prior censorship. Nobody tells the Chronicle’s reporters that they can’t cover a pressing story.
And I believe all that. I really do. I know it doesn’t work that way.
Carl Jensen knows that too. When he started Project Censored back in 1976, he knew he’d get a lot of criticism. “Censored” is a pretty strong word; it evokes a mirthless military guy with a pair of scissors and a big black pen, preventing real news from emerging out of a pressroom bunker somewhere.
But what Jensen has been trying to say for years is that the stories cited by Project Censored represent choices made by editors and publishers about what’s important in today’s world. That’s what the front page of a newspaper is — a set of choices. Is the confession of the purported killer of JonBenet Ramsey more important than the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping of millions of Americans? Is the latest news about Brad and Angelina more important than the latest news from Iraq? Is one man’s quest to take control of every daily newspaper in the Bay Area worth more than a first-day story and a few tiny news briefs?
Editors are paid to make those decisions — and the ones who want to keep their jobs know what the rules are. That’s why some stories get more coverage, more play, and more attention and some get deeply buried or published in one place and never picked up by anyone else.
Anyone who reads political blogs knows about stories like the ones on this year’s Project Censored list (see page 15). Nobody blacked out the news with a big rubber stamp; it just never got reported in the first place.
For a Sunday afternoon on a Labor Day weekend, it was truly impressive: I counted at least 300 people at the Delancey Street events room for the Sue Bierman memorial. Just about everyone on the local left seemed to be there, along with a few luminaries like John Burton, Gavin Newsom, and Willie Brown, who were Bierman’s friends even when they were wrong and she was right.
Newsom, who was often at odds with Bierman, looked out over the crowd and made the point succinctly: “This is what happens,” he said, “when you’re nice to people.”
There were many funny and moving stories. Burton, who showed up in his usual sartorial splendor (striped sweatpants and an untucked shirt, which makes me respect the guy as much as anything he’s ever done in politics) talked about how Bierman always, always enjoyed herself, even in the most boring political drudgery. It was wonderful to see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren there (and wonderful for them to see how many people were part of Bierman’s San Francisco community).
Calvin Welch, her Haight Asbury neighbor, friend, and longtime comrade in arms, reminded us all that Bierman “created the neighborhood movement in San Francisco” — and that she did it in her own style, always believing that “fun is important.”
A lot of people go to political funerals because they have to; most of us went to this one because we wanted to. Thanks, Sue. SFBG
Bay Guardian Archives
EDITOR’S NOTES
Saving women from themselves
OPINION In the name of protecting sex workers, a few San Francisco activists have adopted the rhetoric of antiprostitution advocates and taken their case to the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women (COSW). The commission, following this lead, has adopted a controversial strategy — opposed by the vast majority of dancers, activists, and sex educators — to close down VIP rooms, private booths, and private areas in adult clubs and repeal “encounter studio” permits, claiming that privacy in commercial sexual contexts must be stopped because it causes prostitution, sexual assault, and AIDS.
For starters, the AIDS claim is wrongheaded: starting 30 years ago, activists around the world have explained that the way to address sexual health is not to drive people further underground through this exact sort of repression.
Beyond that, the legislation put forward by the COSW echoes contemporary moral panic. This law uses terms that have historically been used to curtail our freedom under the guise of protecting women. For example, the proposed bill claims that prostitution is “coerced” — but that depends on how you define coercion.
Forced labor and coercion are serious crimes in the legal framework. But economic coercion is the motivation for many types of work, and the fact that women are coerced or forced into this work is being used to justify prohibitions that affect all sex workers. The term “sexual exploitation,” which also comes up in the legislation, has been used to describe (and curtail) the voluntary commercial activity of sex workers.
The commission claims it based the proposal on testimony from dancers but omits the fact that the vast majority of dancers rejected the approach, showing up in droves at hearings. Of course, dancer and sex worker rights activists support some strategy to address complaints about unfair labor practices, exorbitant commissions, safety concerns, and harassment — but no effort was made by the COSW to find a consensus.
The campaign developed by the COSW places dancers in closer alliance with management as both dancer options and management options are being threatened. This phenomenon is part of Sex Worker History 101. The current dancers are further alienated and discouraged by this dynamic from organizing to improve working conditions. Unraveling this dynamic is necessary to further labor advocacy in this industry. The issue of private booths distracts from the problems of illegal stage fees, contractor versus employee labor issues, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations.
Other parts of the plan include allowing COSW representatives to inspect the workplace and to “notify the Commission on the Status of Women when they make any change to the compensation schedule.” Now there’s a great idea: put the classy female elders of San Francisco in charge of working-class women in the sex industry.
This legislation sets some very troubling precedents. Solutions to problematic working conditions in clubs should be developed by the workers, with assistance from labor experts. Given the level of polarization this proposal has created, that could take some time. SFBG
Carol Leigh
Carol Leigh, author of Unrepentant Whore: The Collected Works of Scarlot Harlot (Last Gasp), is dean of academic studies at Whore College.
To read the legislation, go to www.whorecollege.org/badlegislation.
Vashti’s progress: More than just another diamond night in San Francisco
Vashti Bunyan is giving a concert at Great American Music Hall this week. To give an idea of how rare this event is, Bunyan has played fewer shows here than she has released albums, and she’s released exactly two long song collections: 1970’s justifiably adored Just Another Diamond Day and last year’s equally exquisite Lookaftering. With a little help from a calling card, I spoke with Bunyan recently about her not-so-hidden current bond with Devendra Banhart, her rather more secret past kinship with Francoise Hardy, the artistic leanings and pilgrim’s progress of the Bunyan family bloodline, the making of a Diamond Day movie, the cruelty beneath Swinging London’s fun, the wonders of home recording, and some friendly coincidences.
Guardian: I just ran up a hill to buy a calling card. How are you?
Vashti Bunyan: I’m fine. I’m comfortably at home at Edinburgh, [Scotland].
G: Have you been living in the same place for many years?
VB: Yes, we’ve been here for 12 years, which is the longest I’ve been anywhere in my life. I keep thinking, “Maybe it’s time to go?” But yes, I’m back in the city after many years of country living.
Eureka! Here comes even more Eurekaism! (part 3)
Hearst was last seen covering the big Hearst/Singleton deal via Reuters out of New York. Now it is blacking out the story completely. A tale of two footnotes tells all.
By Bruce B. Brugmann
Just in time to update our annual Project Censored package, the Hearst/Chronicle demonstrated yet again how the galloping Conglomerati are covering the big story in Eureka (where the MediaNews Group/
Singleton are competing headon with a local upstart daily) — and blacking out the much bigger story in the Bay Area where Hearst and Singleton are destroying daily competition and forming a regional monopoly, aided and abetted by the McClatchy, Gannett, and Stephens newspaper chains.
The major new development: The federal judge in the
Clint Reilly/Joe Alioto lawsuit against the deal okayed an agreement between lawyers from both sides to fast-track the suit and set a trial date for Feb. 26.
Obvioiusly, this is a major local news story. Josh Richman, a staff writer for the Singleton’s East Bay group, wrote a story dated Saturday, Sept. 2, headlined “Newspaper suit put on legal fast track.” The story quoted Alioto as saying on Monday Sept. 4 that he and Reilly “are grateful that the court has ordered an expedited trial date in this very important antitrust case which seeks to prevent the monopolization of newspapers in the Bay Area.”
The story quoted MediaNews president Jody Lodovic as offering “no comment except to note that the case was accelerated by mutual agreement. Hearst spokesman Paul Luthringer (B3 note: who he? where he? New York? ) said his company wouldn’t comment.” It is always great sport, of course, when publishers under fire say “no comment” to their own reporters.
Hearst’s last story on the deal came from the Reuters New Service out of New York (which it butchered, see my earlier blog.) This time, the Chronicle simply blacked out the story completely. The Singleton story left out a key point: that Hearst had invested $399 million in the deal and that the two major chains were becoming jolly good business and editorial partners in creating an unprecedented Bay Area newspaper monopoly. Both chains are sweating mightily to create the impression this is no big deal, there isn’t much of a story here, that Justice and the AG have cleared it, and Clint Reilly is just, well, Clint Reilly, and there is nothing to the lawsuit, and certainly nothing for anybody to worry about. Peace!
However, there is a deadly time bomb in the deal and it is hidden in a tiny footnote in Hearst’s July 25 filing in the suit. The footnote disclosed that Hearst is a major potential major investor and partner with Singleton. Here’s how it works: Hearst has stated repeatedly that its $299 million equity investment in MediaNews will be based on what is known as “tracking stock.” In other words, the value of the MediaNews stock will rise and fall depending solely on the performance of MediaNews businesses outside the Bay Area, which was a legal structure set up presumably to help the deal survive anticipated antitrust scrutiny.
However, Hearst admitted in the footnote that in the future the “tracking” stock “will be convertible into ordinary MNG common stock.” Hearst added that any such conversion will require additional antitrust review. Federal Judge Susan Illston picked up on the significance of this footnote in her own footnote in her ruling knocking out the Reilly request for temporary restraining order. She stated, “Although Hearst’s proposed interest in MediaNews does not include MediaNews Bay Area publications, Hearst implies in its filings that it will seek permission at a future time to convert its interest in MediaNews into MediaNews common stock.” (See the G.W. Schulz story in the current print and online Guardian).
Voila! In this mysterious tale of the two footnotes, the closely held secret is finally revealed: Hearst and Singleton are working hard to be partners, cheek to cheek, jowl to jowl, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. And this fact, among many others, demonstrates in 96 point Garamond Bold why they have employed Eurekaism and censored a big local story about newspaper monopoly, the local censored story of the year, while going hellbent to cover the story about Singleton’s competition in Eureka.
Stop the presses: Frances Dinkelspiel, in her Wednesday Aug. 30 blog (see link below), spotted a juicy Eureka and posted it under the head “Newspaper Coverage in the Bay Area is Shrinking.” Her lead: “the latest evidence of media consolidation in the Bay Area screamed out all over the front pages on Wednesday.”
She pointed out that the four major papers in the region (Hearst/Chronicle and the Singleton/Contra Costa Times/San Jose Mercury News/Oakland Tribune) all prominently displayed the same story–the story of the motorist who deliberately drove his car into l4 pedestrians, killed one man in Fremont, and injured l3 others in San Francisco.
“On Wednesday,” she said, “instead of four distinct stories on the region’s front pages, there were only two—one from the Chronicle and one from the MediaNews group.” (Merc reporters did the story for the three Singleton papers.) She concluded, “That’s a huge loss for Bay Area readers. Competition improves news coverage. What will readers miss out on in the future? What will readers miss out on in the future? This was just a police story; imagine the impact when the big story deals with corruption or another important, but less easily reported event. If fewer reporters are tracking the story, there will be fewer revelations.”
Eureka!
Postscript: Let’s keep the Eureka exercise going. Anybody who spots a Eurekaism, an example of the galloping Conglomerati censoring a local story, please send it along to the Guardian and the Bruce blog and any of the handful of independent voices left in the Bay Area. B3
$20 million to spy on the press
By Tim Redmond
This lovely little gem dropped Friday afternoon, just before the Labor Day weekend, when much of hte nation was’t paying attention: The Pentagon is looking for bidders on a $20 million contract to monitor news media coverage of Iraq I could save the generals and admirials some money:
Get a clue, folks. The once-fawning news media is turning strong against the war.
You can make the check out to me.
Summertime snow
By Kimberly Chun
It’s trippy but true: if you feel nostalgic for snow in the middle – or well, the tail end – of summer, you should head up to Lassen Volcanic National Park, north of Sacramento and chock-full of geothermal drama like boiling rivers, gurgling mudpots, and jagged rock formations. When I headed up with my veteran camping pal D, the campgrounds were relatively unpopulated; purple, yellow, and pink wildflowers were abundant; and dang, but wasn’t there an amazing amount of snow and ice on the ground – still dirty and frozen and seeded with pine needles at 7,000 feet. And ready to be fashioned into summer snow poodles (with thumbs, to boot).
Frolick in the snow in late August. It’s possible at certain altitudes, dudes.
Crikey, it’s over
I can’t lie. I was bummed — if not 100 percent totally shocked — to hear the news about Steve Irwin. Yeah, there was the thing with his infant son and the crocodile a few years ago. And he was definitely putting himself in danger every time he went toe-to-toe with whatever latest vicious creature he decided to feature in any of his Animal Planet specials (always with commentary that cheerfully belied the danger at hand: “Here’s the spitting cobra — deadly accurate! What a little beauty!”) When he came to San Francisco in 2002 to promote his feature film, Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, I had to take advantage of the opportunity to talk to him, just to see if he was actually that hyper and energetic and hopped up on animals all the time.
Ammiano’s coup
By Tim Redmond
Matier and Ross reported Sunday what everyone on the San Francisco left knew was coming: Sup. Tom Ammiano is formally announcing his run for State Assembly in 2008. Aside from the fact that Ammiano would make an excellent state Assembly member, here’s the political brilliance of the move: The only other person remotely rumored to be considering running for that seat is Sup. Chris Daly. In fact, behind the scenes, a lot of local players have been saying that state Sen. Carole Migden would suport Daly, even in a run against Ammiano.
But Daly is up for re-election this fall, and obviously can’t announce a run for Assembly (if he’s even interested) until well after November. That means for months to come, Ammiano will be the only game in town — and he can start lining up endorsements. According to M&R, Migden has formally endorsed Ammiano, as has the incumbent in that seat, Mark Leno.
Daly would also be an excellent member of the state Assembly — but if he wants to run, he’s already way behind and will have the challenging task of explaining why he’s better than Ammiano, particularly when they generally agree on all the issues.
Volume as a religion
By G.W. Schulz
Meant to blog a while back on a stack of records I’ve picked up recently. I’m only going to write about a few. I don’t articulate myself very well when it comes to music. I’m a reporter. But these records, I thought, deserved a mention. Below the jump is a list of the others.
5ive
“Versus”
(Tortuga Recordings)
Tortuga is a blood relative of L.A.’s Hydrahead Records (formerly of Boston) created several years ago by the singer of Isis, Aaron Turner. Both labels have always specialized in droning, deep volume, but there have been big rock, up-tempo releases in the past. 5ive falls within two of Turner’s ongoing obsessions: brutal stoner rock and dark ambience. The band is made up of just two guys – drums and guitars – but the way they calmly build into colossal crescendos has always struck me as remarkable. There isn’t necessarily a deep chug in the guitars, but the grime that replaces it is, as Nate Denver might say, “satisfying.” This is their fourth and newest record. I’ve owned both “The Telestic Disfracture” and “Continuum Research Project” for some time now, and I still enjoy each of them. Now’s the part where I admit that I’ll buy pretty much anything with Aaron Turner’s name even remotely connected to it. I’ve followed his career for years, and 5ive is another addition to what I’ve always believed was a great group of bands.
$70 million
By Tim Redmond
Assemblymember Mark Leno has gotten one of the most important bills of the year through the state Legislature, and if the governor signs it — and he might — it could bring an additional $70 million to San Francisco, enough (for example) to wipe out Muni’s structural budget deficit.
The billl would allow San Francisco the option of imposing a 2 percent fee on motor vehicle registrations — the same fee that every car owner in California paid for years until Gov. Schwarzenegger summarily repealed it, leaving the state with a $5 billion budget deficit.
If the city voters approved it, the fee could be assessed on cars registered in San Francisco. The city would pick up desperately needed cash for public transit, and car owners would be no worse off than they were under every governor in the past 25 years (except for this one).
Congrats to Leno for making this happen — and if it becomes law, the supervisors should move immediately to implement it.
Bailed Wolf worries proposed federal reporter’s shield laws won’t protect independent press
By Sarah Phelan
Like a mole emerging from a hole, bespectacled freelance journalist Josh Wolf squinted into the September sunlight, as he stood on the steps outside the U.S. Court of Appeals 9th Circuit building on Seventh Street in San Francisco. It was the 24-year-old’s first taste of freedom after a month-long stint inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute for refusing to give a federal grand jury video outtakes of an anarchist protest turned violent.
During his stretch at Dublin, Wolf was only able to breathe fresh air for an hour each day, and he looked as if was relishing the feeling of the sun on his skin, as he voiced his belief that what should have been a SFPD investigation into an assault on an officer, turned into a federal witch hunt, which so far has involved the FBI, the Joint Taskforce on Terrorism, a grand jury—and the thousands of tax payers’ dollars to prosecute and jail him.
As Wolf, who’d traded prison dudes for black jeans, blue shirt and white sneakers, began to speak, jackhammers went off across the the road, as if some evil mastermind was making a last ditch effort to censor the truth. The crowd of camera wielding, microphone-holding paparazzi pressed closer, as Wolf expressed his hope that the 9th Circuit’s decision to grant him bail was a positive sign. (A month earlier, District Court Judge Alsup denied Wolf bail, calling his case “a slamdunk for the federal government.”)
“The late Senator Paul Wellstone once said that significant social change comes from the bottom up,” said Wolf, who hopes his case will ultimately help cement the rights of the independent, as well as those of the traditional, media. Expressing concern that the federal shield laws that are currently on the table “do not encompass people who meet my criteria,” Wolf critiqued the proposed laws for only protecting those who are employed by or under contract with an established media outlet.
‘There should be a common law to protect journalists,” he said, voicing the belief that anyone who is involved in gathering and disseminating news and information is a journalist, whether they are paid for their activities or not.
“I am a journalist, I have a website, I’ve sold footage, including to MichaelMoore.com,” said Wolf, who worries that proposed federal reporter shield laws will create two classes of journalists, those that report and get paid, and those that do it out of volition. “It will create a corporatocracy in which only corporations are media,” he said. “It goes against the idea of a free and independent press.”
He also critiqued what he saw as an increasing abuse of grand juries, which were established to protect the rights of those accused, but increasingly appear to resemble military tribunals and are used so the feds to secretly coerce and investigate targets.
“There is no means that any extended stay in jail is going to bring about a coercive effect,” said Wolf, who believes the case of former New York Times journalist Judith Miller, as well as those of the two BALCO reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle who still face jail time, helped publicize his plight, as well as the blogosphere.
‘It’s egregious that the feds took up an investigation into an assault in a SFPD office,’ said Wolf, who believes that the alleged arson to a SFPD car was used as a hook, simply because SFPD receives federal funds.
“In my tape you hear someone yell, ‘Officer Down!’ That’s the extent of it,” said Wolf, in reply to the question of what interest the feds could possibly have in his clips on the cutting room floor.”
“I don’t want my case to be a reason why people don’t get involved in grassroots journalism,” he said,a cknowledging that his case shows there are risks, “An individual can decide what’s important and truly change thw world we live in,” he said, comparing that freedom to the restrictions imposed on journalists who work for corporate media.”
To help freelancers, Wolf would like to see more information out there on what independent journalists should do if they are subpoenaed. “Know your rights and how to protect them,” he advised.
By the way, when was the last time that an assault on a SFPD triggered a federal investigation, involving the FBI, the JTTF, a grand jury and a reporter doing jail time?
Bailed Wolf worries federal shield laws won’t protect independent press
Like a mole emerging from a hole, bespectacled freelance journalist Josh Wolf squinted into the September sunlight, as he stood on the steps outside the U.S. Court of Appeals 9th Circuit building on Seventh Street in San Francisco. It was the 24-year-old’s first taste of freedom after a month-long stint inside Dublin Federal Correctional Institute for refusing to give a federal grand jury video outtakes of an anarchist protest turned violent.
During his stretch at Dublin, Wolf was only able to breathe fresh air for an hour each day, and he looked as if was relishing the feeling of the sun on his skin, as he voiced his belief that what should have been a SFPD investigation into an assault on an officer, turned into federal witch hunt, involveing the FBI, the Joint Taskforce on Terrorism, a grand jury—and the thousands of tax payers’ dollars to prosecute and jail him.
As Wolf, who’d traded prison dudes for black jeans, blue shirt and white sneakers, began to speak, jackhammers went off across the the road, as if some evil mastermind was making a last ditch effort to censor the truth. The crowd of camera wielding, microphone-holding paparazzi pressed closer, as Wolf expressed his hope that the 9th Circuit’s decision to grant him bail was a positive sign. (A month earlier, District Court Judge Alsup denied Wolf bail, calling his case “a slamdunk for the federal government.”)
“The late Senator Paul Wellstone once said that significant social change comes from the bottom up,” said Wolf, who hopes his case will ultimately help cement the rights of the independent, as well as those of the traditional, media. Expressing concern that the federal shield laws that are currently on the table “do not encompass people who meet my criteria,” Wolf critiqued the proposed laws for only protecting those who are employed by or under contract with an established media outlet.
“There should be a common law to protect journalists,” he said, voicing the belief that anyone who is involved in gathering and disseminating news and information is a journalist, whether they are paid for their activities or not.
“I am a journalist, I have a website, I’ve sold footage, including to MichaelMoore.com,” said Wolf, who worries that proposed federal reporter shield laws will create two classes of journalists, those that report and get paid, and those that do it out of volition. “It will create a corporatocracy in which only corporations are media,” he said. “It goes against the idea of a free and independent press.”
Wolf also critiqued what he saw as an increasing abuse of grand juries, which were established to protect the rights of those accused, but increasingly appear to be used by the feds to secretly coerce and investigate targets.
“There is no means that any extended stay in jail is going to bring about a coercive effect,” said Wolf, who believes the case of former New York Times journalist Judith Miller, as well as those of the two BALCO reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle who still face jail time, helped publicize his plight, as did the blogosphere.
‘It’s egregious that the feds took up an investigation into an assault in a SFPD office,’ said Wolf, who believes that the alleged arson to a SFPD car was a hook, allowing the feds in simply because SFPD receives federal funds.
“In my tape you hear someone yell, ‘Officer Down!’ That’s the extent of it,” said Wolf, in reply to the question of what interest the feds could possibly have in his clips on the cutting room floor.
“I don’t want my case to be a reason why people don’t get involved in grassroots journalism,” he said, acknowledging that his case shows there are risks involved. “But an individual can decide what’s important and truly change the world we live in,” he said, comparing that freedom to the restrictions imposed on journalists who work for corporate media.”
To help freelancers, Wolf would like to see more information out there on what independent journalists should do, if they are subpoenaed. “Know your rights and how to protect them,” he advised.
Small Town Living
by Amanda Witherell
I just returned from ten days on an idyllic island in downeast Maine. For the seaside hamlet from whence I hail, it’s local custom to leave your car keys in the ignition so you don’t lose them and your front door unlocked, or even wide open, so the cat can come and go while you’re at work. After a few days of openly worrying about my friends’ unlocked bicycles, I settled back into the local population and the comfortable human trust they maintain, where everyone is innocent until proven guilty.
Welcome back to San Francisco, where a Honda Pilot is the new street weapon of choice and the annual murder rate is climbing to fresh heights. Scan the daily headlines and it’s easy to believe the streets are not safe and no one is watching your back. Again and again I hear people say San Francisco isn’t like other cities. It’s small for a metropolis and each neighborhood is like its own little town taking care of its own, clustered among dozens of others on a peninsula that acts more like an island.
Well, if that’s true, then in the Guardian’s hood, all hail the New Portrero Market. A couple days ago I ventured up the hill to buy a bottle of water and inadvertently let $60 fall out of my wallet. I’m not really in the financial position to be so cavalier with money and I was dismayed by the loss. I figured it was payback for my preadolescent penchant for the five finger discount, and let it go. Who the hell tries to track down the owner of sixty bucks?
But I was thinking about it today on my lunchbreak and stuck my head into the market, just to see if maybe there’s an honest soul out there…
Well hell yeah! There are two. As I made my meek inquiry, Marwan punched the “No Sale” button on the register and immediately handed me my wandering Jacksons. Mike, who I’d been chatting with while I wasn’t paying attention to my wallet, had found them after I left the market, and Marwan had tucked them under the drawer for safekeeping should I ever return for another bottle of water. I’ll be certain to now. Hooray for the small town neighborhoods we still have in this city!
The Village Voice, 1953 to October 2005 (the date the New Times purchased the Voice), RIP
The hitman cometh
There’s a key phrase in this morning’s New York Times account of the Mike Lacey massacre at the Village Voice (“Village Voice Dismisses 8, including Senior Arts Editors, a ‘reconfiguration’ leaves the critic Robert Christgau unemployed”). Click here
It followed the standard boilerplate press release that always accompanies what a former Voice press critic Cynthia Cotts called “the signature New Times bloodbath.” The boilerplate: Village Voice Media/New Times/Mike Lacey described the layoffs as an effort to “reconfigure the editorial department to place an emphasis on writers as opposed to editors.” The company added: “Painful though they may be in the short term, these moves are consistent with long-range efforts to position the Voice as an integral journalistic force in New York City.”
Then comes the standard line that is widely known to all of us who have tried in vain for years to get Lacey, the editor in chief of VVM/NT and the l7 paper chain from Phoenix, Arizona, to respond on the phone or by email to legitimate news issues:
Lacey “did not return calls seeking further comment.”
Lacey is a colorful editor. After New Times purchases a paper, he loves to ride into town and shoot up the saloon
and massacre the staff and the paper. He did this in San Francisco when the New Times bought the SF Weekly and he did it with the Voice in New York. He loves to whack away at me and the Bay Guardian with long screeds (his latest, a 20-pager of high volume vitriol up on the web somewhere, with the head, “Brugmann’s Brain Vomit, cleaning up the latest drivel from San Francisco’s leading bullgoose looney.”) It full of marvelous stuff and is one of my prized possessions.
But Mike and the New Times folks have a fatal flaw: They love to hit, run, and hide.
That’s how I started guerrilla blogging awhile back. The local version of Lacey’s journalistic ethics, the SF Weekly, would through the years blast away at me and the Guardian and our issues with a distinct pattern: they rarely would call for comment before publication. When they did call, they would get the quote wrong or out of context. And, when we would write a letter to the editor to correct the quote or get our point out, they would refuse to run the letter and would not explain why.
So I started doing some guerrilla blogging and sending my points by email to the SF Weekly/New Times people-and, of course, to Mike safely hunkered down in his foxhole in Phoenix.
The classic was when the SF Weekly/New Times/Lacey gave me a Best of award in 2003 for “Best Local Psychic.” It read: “Move over, Madam Zolta, at least when it comes to predicting the outcome of wars, Bruce-watchers will recall with glee his most recent howler, an April 2 Bay Guardian cover story headlined ‘The New Vietnam.’ The article was accompanies by an all caps heading and a photo of a panic-stricken U.S. serviceman in Iraq, cowering behind a huge fireball. The clear message: Look out, folks; this new war’s gonna be as deep a sinkhole as the old one. Comparing a modern U.S. war to Vietnam-how edgy! How brilliant! How original! And how did the prediction pan out? Let’s see now: More than 50,000 U.S. soldiers got killed in Vietnam vs. about l00 in Iraq. Vietnam lasted more than l0 years; Iraq lasted less than a month (effectively ending about two weeks after the story ran.) Vietnam destroyed a U.S. president, while Iraq turned one into an action hero. Well, you get the picture. Trying to draw analogies between Vietnam and Iraq is as ridiculous as Brugmann’s other pet causes. Scores of reputable publications around the nation opposed the Iraq war, but did so in a thoughtful, intelligent manner. Leave it to the SFBG, our favorite political pamphlet, to help delegitimize yet another liberal cause. Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft send their sincerest thanks, Bruce.”
Three years later, the war drags on, “reputable publications” all over the country are calling it another Vietnam–and Lacey and his Best of writers and editors look like fools and we still don’t know what the Lacey/New Times position is on Bush, the war, and the occupation. But this is vintage Lacey and vintage New Times politics distilled into their publication run largely on a centralized format out of Phoenix. The key point: the article was not bylined and I tried, again and again by guerrilla email and phone calls to Lacey and his SF Weekly editors, to get someone to say who conceived, wrote, and edited the item. Nobody would fess up. But I was told reliably that the writer was the cartoonist Dan Siegler and the editor was John Mecklin, then reported to be Lacey’s favorite editor and hand-picked by Lacey to take on the Guardian in San Francisco. I confronted them with emails, asking for confirmation or comment. I have not gotten any to this very day.
Alas, that in a nutshell is the political and journalistic and ethical policies that Lacey and the New Times have imposed on the Voice. No more liberal politics. No more James Ridgeway in Washington. No more Press Critic Syd Schanberg and no more press clips columns. No regular section criticizing the Bush administration and the war. No more editorials and no more endorsements and no more legendary Voice thundering away on the major New York and national issues of the day that cry out for a strong news and editorial voice from the Left.
And, according to the Times story, Voice layoffs and firings that “decimated the senior ranks of its arts staff,” including theater editor Jorge Morales, dance editor Elizabeth Zimmer, senior editor in charge of books Ed Park, art director Minh Uong, and Robert Cristgau, 64, who as a senior editor and longtime pop musit critic “helped put the Voice on the map,” as the Times put it. Cristgau had been with the Voice off and on since l969 and is quite rightly known as the dean of the Voice.
No more Village Voice as we have known it through all these years.
Instead, the Voice has Mike Lacey. I last ran into Mike at the annual business meeting of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) in Little Rock in June.
I held out my hand for a handshake and said, in a friendly way, “Mike, how are you doing?”
He stopped, looked at me, and said, “Bruce, Go fuck yourself.” And he turned and scampered off, never to return to the meeting and never to come near me again.
Mike, get out out of your bunker and give people a chance to ask you some questions. Start a blog.
P.S. We had fun with the Best of issue. We did a counter Best of, a full page ad, titled “Best Premature Ejaculation,” a special award to the editors of the SF Weekly/New Times.
We ended with this note: “Sorry, folks: WE wish the war in Iraq were as neat and tidy as you, Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft would like to think it is. But you, um, spoke too soon.”
Our postscripts drove home the points about Lacey’s style of hit and run journalism.
“PS: The real mystery of the city: who wrote the SF Weekly piece? Who assigned it? Who edited it? We’ve been calling, writing, e-mailing, and faxing the local office and corporate headquarters in Phoenix, but nobody will tell us.”
“PPS: Gee, what’s the New Times position on the war, anyway. We can’t seem to figure it out.”
And, let me add in retrospect, what was their position on Bush’s reelection? Well, as far as I can tell, the only endorsement published in any New Times paper came at the end of their syndicated sex column by their gay sex columnist Dan Savage just before election day. Dan, bless his heart, came out for Kerry and is now pushing publicly for impeachment. Where’s Mike? Mike? Mike? B3
A final PS point: If any one at New Times is still wondering about their pretty little month-long war that turned a president into an action hero, check out This nice item from the NY Times. We’re still at war, Mike, and kids are still dying. In case you hadn’t noticed.
‘Voice’ Staffers To Be Crying Into Their Bongs Tonight?
Josh Wolf leaving jail
By G.W. Schulz
Josh Wolf is finally on his way out of jail. An appeals court ruled that his argument against being required to turn over video he captured from a demonstration last year is in fact not frivolous.
He could still see more jail time, however. Another panel will review the contempt order, which a federal judge previously slapped him with, and if it’s ruled as legit, he could go back to jail until next July. For now, he’s out on bail.
Wolf, of course, was hit with a subpoena commanding that he testify and turn over his video to a grand jury that’s investigating an alleged attack by anarchists on a cop and a patrol car during an anti-G8 protest. Wolf insisted journalist’s privelege protected him from having to do so. The feds and the SFPD, for their part, appear to be on little more than a fishing expedition.
So what will Josh do first? We hear he’ll probably being getting to a computer as fast as he can to circulate a message to his supporters.
By the way, when was the last time law enforcement in the Bay Area put this much energy into solving homicides?
NOISE: Love Snowglobe, love their album
May I just say that Memphis band Snowglobe‘s second full-length, Doing the Distance (Makeshift), out earlier this year, is one of the finest unhyped sleeper-type recordings of 2006 thus far? Hip-hip-hooray for weird, whirling orchestral prog-pop by musicians who obviously listened to far too much AM pop in the ’70s.
Where have these guys been all our lives? Why haven’t they played here? Why does their My Space page list an SF show on Sept. 3 but no deets? Can I stop punching the question mark key any time soon?
The Wow of Joao: A talk with Two Drifters director Joao Pedro Rodrigues
“People are crazy here, no?,” director Joao Pedro Rodrigues half-asks over the phone from LA, where he’s making a brief visit to promote Two Drifters (aka Odete), which opens in the Bay Area this week. His words bring to mind a certain observation by a Hollywood starlet that then became a Rex Reed book title. But in Rodrigues’s case the remark might partly be inspired by the star of Two Drifters – the person whose apartment he’s visiting, Ana Cristina de Oliveira, who has since gone on to a role in Michael Mann’s Miami Vice remake. De Oliveira plays a volatile character in Two Drifters, and some swear words delivered loudly by her bring this interview to an abrupt end.
Guardian: You’ve used the same bold red font for title credit in both of your features. Can you tell me a bit about deciding that?
Joao Pedro Rodrigues: I like it. I like red, it’s like blood. It’s like something that’s inside you.
Clupdate
It’s another brief club weekend update, courtesy of your eternal Guardian club whore Marke B. I don’t know if you’re saving your wad for the long weekend Sunday night (I’ll be outta town, alas!) — but don’t. Go to my friends Ryan R$obles and Juantita More’s fab new club Playboy at the MANsion, er, The Stud — check it out.
gogo boy xtravaganza! lewd and lascivious fashions! lots of kooky musiks! and look — sexy jesse who just turned 30 is on the flyer wearing acid wash! you have to go now, don’t ya …
PLAYBOY
Saturday, Sept 2
10pm-4am
at the Stud.
it’s scary fun! it’s wild! I think …
Supervisor Burning Man
By Tim Redmond
I’ve been around a long time in city politics, and seen a lot of strange things, but even by my standards, it’s pretty darn wierd to see the Bay Area Reporter, a queer community paper, taking issue with the fact that a candidate for supervisor dresses in (mildly) outrageous clothes at Burning Man — and (gasp!) admits she might have even taken drugs at that annual desert party. Lordy, lordy, she even calls herself a “freak.”
Nice to see that Robert Haaland, who had endorsed Dufty, agrees with me that it’s “distasteful to hear politicos make snide remarks about her, about her attendance at Burning Man, and about her fondness for freaks.”
Has District 8 become so straight that the folks there can’t handle a “freak?” Even in these uber-gentrified days, that’s pretty hard to imagine.
NOISE: O, we come in praise of those random acts of music
Yes, Virginia, there’s much to catch up on since last week.
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Mars Volta for two, last Thursday at Oakland Arena. The scene was dumpy out in the parking lot before the show — doesn’t this look like the SUV pooped tin? Yeesh, clean up after yourselves, jerks.
Sloppy tailgaitin’ Pepper-heads. All images by Kimberly Chun.
We got inside just in time to see the start of Mars Volta’s set. Cedric was swiveling around like a mini-James Brown and the entire band got down admirably for some rad psych-prog jams despite the always-lousy arena sound. Nice pseudo-Satanic backdrops and occaisional sax skronk. For the finale the sax dude put his horn aside, sat behind a kit, while another player started wailing on a set of congas. Groooooovy.
As for the Chili Peppers, well what can I say? They are my guilty pleasure – I secretly love their pop hits and give them their props for being the first punk-funkers on the block. Yet why do all their other non-hit songs sooo similar. Despite the musicianship on Flea and Frusciante’s part, I must admit I was downright bored for most of the show – must they jam endlessly on the most mundane riffs? Must Anthony Keidis cavort like a graceless goblin? His voice seemed just fine but his dance moves paled after the agile MV. I’d much rather read his recent, strangely fascinating autobio (which memorably kicks off with an injection by a sexy nurse).
Next up, Friday night: 7 Year Rabbit Cycle with XBXRX and Murder Murder. I’m sorry I missed XB but I got there early enough to see a new lineup for Guardian contributor Paul Costuros’s Murder Murder, with Sic Alps’s Matt Hartman and Comets on Fire’s Noel Harmonson joining Costuros on sax and Ches Smith on vibes. Noise -and two drummers – t’was compelling.
Paul Costuros gets down with Murder Murder.
Then 7 Year Rabbit Cycle came on – and dang, did they tear it up. Ches Smith on drums has sort of become the centerpiece of the band, propping his foot up on a snare to reach a China cymbal, rattling and shaking, as everyone – partner Miya on bass, Rob on guitar, Kelly on vocals, fellow Xiu Xiu member Jamie Stewart, and Guardian contributor George Chen clustered around. Powerful stuff. Appreciative audience. Who could ask for anything more?
7 Year Rabbit Cycle don’t go through the motions – they’ll impress the fur off youse.
I took a break to head up north to Lassen volcanic national park. Awesome bubbling mud pits and cute bluejays. But then last night I was back to see Jean-Jacques Perrey – protege of Cocteau, Piaf, and Disney and Incredibly Strange Music star – play a special RE/Search event at Asphodel Records’ Recombinant Labs in SOMA. Perrey fan Jello Biafra introduced the man.
Here’s your Jello.
Perrey was a hoot – loved his jams particularly on “Mame” and “The Typewriter,” his tribute to Spike Jones. I dare anyone not to crack a smile once during a performance.
Jean-Jacques Perrey shook his lil’ stuffed pal along with the beat.
The man oozes infectious glee while pounding his beloved Ondioline, an early synthesizer – hard to believe he made so many of the sounds he creates with tape records, scissors and the sheer urge to splice. The much-sampled “EVA” was his closer – pure hip-shaking mod fun.
At 77 years young, Perrey proves you’re never too old to mug for the camera.
Enchanté
› paulr@sfbg.com
“You’re not getting older, you’re getting better” is one of those things you say to someone who’s getting older and not better and is sensitive to the decline because of yet another birthday. (Birthdays beyond the 30th are at best memento mori, at worst a cumulative curse. After 30, one should count them by 10s.) Yet y-n-g-o-y-g-b is not just a mollifying phrase to be found on a Hallmark card; sometimes it is actually true. Many of the grander wines improve with age, up to a point, and so does the occasional well-conceived restaurant, particularly if the restaurant is a bistro.
“Bistro” is a much-abused term in our gastronomic idiom. Its meaning has been pulled and stretched to cover all manner of restaurants, bound together perhaps by just the faint suggestion of casual hipness. But even in America, where language is treated as cavalierly as food additives and war, words do retain core meanings, and the core meaning of bistro remains French. A proper bistro is quintessentially a neighborhood restaurant, well established and appealingly scuffed, with a brief menu of mostly traditional (French) dishes at moderate prices.
Le Charm is a proper bistro, though it is in San Francisco, not Paris, and when it was opened in 1994 by Alain Delangle and Lina Yew, its neighborhood was a little iffy. The SoMa of that time was already beginning to don its new Loftland identity, but the donning was uneven, and large swaths of the area were still grubby and gritty enough to make opening a nice restaurant a bold proposition. These days … well, SoMa is far more residential than a decade ago, and in that sense le Charm, the neighborhood restaurant, now has a neighborhood to belong to and neighbors to serve.
The wait has been kind to the restaurant. Although the space was recently remodeled, it has a look of woody permanence, with golden oak trim, cinnamon-colored walls, and a trellised garden set with tables. My basic impression, from years ago, was clatter, but while the restaurant now is hardly quiet, steps seem to have been taken to curb the noise. The floor is carpeted, and this alone makes a big difference.
Le Charm has been, from the beginning, a prix fixe haven, and while today’s bill of fare is fitted out with a full complement of à la carte choices, the prix fixe — $28 at dinner for three courses — continues to fascinate. Usually I succumb to this fascination, since the latter menu is full of the sort of earthy standards that make French food approachable and even lovable, from onion soup to blanquette de veau, and the fixed price means you need not worry about the bill, unless you go nuts with the wine. (Le Charm’s wine list is brisk, moderately priced, and surprisingly tilted toward California bottlings.)
But I do not always succumb, particularly when in dessert-forswearing mode, as we all must be from time to time. I was, moreover, interested in the mosaique ($8), an à la carte offering that turned out to be a kind of chilled vegetable terrine, wrapped in a skin of leek and cut into large, roughly triangular flaps. The terrine consisted of snow peas, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, and shiitake mushrooms, while the leek skin was tender enough to be cut with an ordinary knife.
I also wanted lentils, and that meant the boudin blanc au foie gras ($19), stubby lengths of mild white sausage cut on the bias and given a Stonehenge arrangement around a moody hillock of Puy lentils, with interpolations of peeled, seeded tomato quarters.
Across the table, another story was unfolding, a $28 tale in three chapters that opened with a salad of cubed red beets set in tatsoi greens (decent, but more about looks than taste) and ended with an orange crème brûlée topped with slices of mandarin orange. In between there was a plot twist: the restaurant’s justly famous chicken-liver salad substituted for a selection from the standard, and weightier, main courses, with a corresponding discount of a few bucks. (I was surprised to see the possibility of duck confit passed over by someone I had long understood to be an insatiable duck-confitista.)
The chicken-liver salad — buttery chunks of meat with the mildest breath of liver flavor, scattered like boulders across a meadow of mixed greens — might work a bit better at lunch, when less heft is desirable, at least for those who need to remain conscious for the remainder of the workday. (A friendly warning here: the garden, in good weather, provides an al fresco experience you might have some trouble pulling yourself away from.) I was disappointed to find no croque monsieur on the midday menu, but quiche lorraine ($9.50), an egg tart stuffed with ham and cheese, wasn’t a bad substitute and was also served whole: a disk the size of one of those personal pizzas you can get at Roundtable.
Tart lovers of the sweet tooth variety will appreciate the tarte tatin, which at $4 is something of a steal and is also excellent — not the usual state of affairs for restaurant tartes tatins, too many of which have runny caramel and mushy apples. Le Charm’s version features shapely hemispheres of firm fruit, bronzed and slightly translucent, as if formed from amber, along with viscous caramel and flaky pastry. The formula is simple, really (tarte tatin is much easier to make than ordinary, American-style apple pie), yet a well-made one never fails to charm. SFBG
LE CHARM
Dinner: Tues.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.; Sun., 5–9 p.m.
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.
315 Fifth St., SF
(415) 546-6128
www.lecharm.com
Beer and wine
AE/MC/V
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Breema karma
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS This Cheap Eats restaurant review is a thank-you note to a guy named John. He bought all the tokens for a Thai temple brunch for me, Bernie, and Laura last Sunday. And technically it should have been the other way around, me tokening him, because he’d just breema’d me.
If you don’t know what breema is, I don’t know what to tell you. They bend, push, and dance on you, kind of like a massage, only you’re lying on the floor and it’s all very musical. Then you’re hungry and all relaxed and shit. I love it and am lucky to have two friends, Bernie and Laura, who are practitioners. And now John. Three friends.
If you don’t know who John is, he lives in Oakland, used to have chickens, still has a Ping-Pong table, two cool kids, couple watermelons on the counter, a big empty room with pillows along the walls, and lots of rugs. I think he might be the Big Cheese of Breema, because 1) he’s crazy good at it, and 2) he taught Laura, who I think taught Bernie, who used to practice on lucky me.
I have no interest in learning anything per se (like Latin), but I do like to receive. Massage, breema, packages, sensory information, tokens … At a Buddhist temple in Berkeley on Sunday mornings, you turn these tokens into Thai food. It’s a madhouse. Lines out the yinyang, no more meatballs, no more fish balls, nowhere to sit, general confusion … and still you gotta love it.
Know why? Because it’s different. It’s something else. It’s outside. The food’s pretty good, and at a dollar a token, five tokens for a big bowl of noodle soup, the price is pretty reasonable.
The soup line was way shorter than the meat line and the vegetarian line, and anyway soup seemed really really good to me. So that was where I stood. They had three different choices of noodles: wide, skinny, and skinnier. But they were out of everything else.
“No meat,” the serverguyperson said when I came to the counter.
“Fish balls,” I said.
“No fish balls,” he said.
I was just about to think I was in a Monty Python sketch when he gestured toward the adjacent vegetarian buffet and said, “Vegetable only. Fifteen minutes for meat.”
“I’ll wait,” I said and stepped to the side. But I’d already been waiting in lines and wandering between them like a lost little chicken farmer, and the next couple people behind me conceded to vegetable soup, and I had to admit that the noodles, the dark broth with the little load of color on top, looked dang delicious.
After this I was going to play at a block party barbecue in Albany for food and tips, and then after that I was invited to another barbecue back in the city. I did the math. Meat plus meat equaling meat meat meat, I broke down and went with veggies for brunch.
So now I had this nice bowl of steaming vegetable soup and no idea where all my friends were. In the process of looking for them, wandering around like a lost little chicken farmer, I discovered on a remote fringe of the mayhem a no-line-at-all fried chicken station, and the chickens looked great, but I was all out of tokens.
Also found: a stage with colorfully dressed musicians playing traditional Thai stuff to tables and tables of happy eaters. No friends and no room for me and my soup, not there, not in the main part of the pavilion, not in the alley …
My soup was starting to get cold. I was dying of hunger. Buzzards were circling. I looked at the sky, looked at my feet, kicked the bleached bones and tumbleweeds out of my path, and pushed on.
Here they were! Sitting cross-legged on the grass and sidewalk out front, eating stuff. Although I tasted some of everything, and everything was good, I think my favorite thing (because I’d never had it before) was this little fluffy doughy doodad cooked with coconut milk and stuffed with green onions.
But Bernie, bless him, had scored one of the last fish ball soups, and I managed to mostly eat that. Thank you, Bernie. The fish balls were wonderful. SFBG
WAT MONGKOLRATANARAM
Sun., 9 a.m.–2 p.m.
1911 Russell, Berk.
(510) 849-3419
No alcohol
Credit cards not accepted
Noisy
Wheelchair accessible