The lawsuit that seeks to stop the monopolization of daily newspapers in the Bay Area isn’t just a business dispute. Real estate investor Clint Reilly argues that he would be personally harmed by the deal (which gives him standing to sue), but in reality, this is about the future of mainstream news media in one of the nation’s largest and most politically active markets. If the Hearst Corp. and Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group have their way, it’s entirely possible one corporate entity could effectively control every single significant daily paper in San Francisco, southern Marin, the East Bay, the South Bay, and the Peninsula. And since TV and radio news stations tend to take their cues from the daily papers, that means one corporate entity would decide, to a great extent, what sort of local news will be available to several million people.
It’s more than a legal issue. It’s a major public policy issue — and that’s why the papers shouldn’t be allowed to fight this out in secret.
On Dec. 21 the Guardian and Media Alliance, a nonprofit media activism organization, filed a motion in federal court seeking to intervene in the Reilly lawsuit and asking Judge Susan Illston to unseal the key records in the case. Our point: this is a huge national story, and the public interest in knowing what the biggest and most powerful newspaper chains in the country are planning for the Bay Area is clear and overwhelming.
But the way the big chains have set things up, there’s no way for the public to find out much of anything — except what Hearst and MediaNews want us to know. Under the terms of a court order the chains wrote and got approved, anything — evidence, briefs, depositions, even legal motions — the newspaper barons want to mark secret is automatically sealed. Of course, the newspaper lawyers can decide to publicize anything they want to put out to bolster their side of the story. In other words, the newspapers — which, after all, are accused of trying to violate antitrust laws and create a media monopoly in the region — have complete control of what information does and doesn’t come out of the trial. That’s exactly how they want it — and exactly how things will go if they get away with their merger plans.
It’s hard to fight the big chains. Almost every experienced media lawyer in town works for or has partners who work for one of the chains, so they all have conflicts of interest. The news media organizations, like the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the California First Amendment Coalition, and the Society of Professional Journalists, all have board members who work for the chains.
And of course, the big newspapers themselves, which love to fight to unseal court records in other cases (like billionaire Ron Burkle’s divorce case), are all either involved or have allies who are involved, so they won’t touch the case.
So it’s fallen to the Guardian, an independent paper, and Media Alliance, an independent activist group, to work with the First Amendment Project, an independent public interest law firm, to promote the public interest in unsealing the records.
We know there’s a lot of information that ought to be out in the light of day. Already, one document discussed in open court shows that Hearst, which owns the Chronicle, has discussed ad sales, printing, and distribution deals with Singleton’s group — which is supposedly a competitor. What else do these companies have planned for the Bay Area? Will Hearst and Singleton wind up in some sort of joint operating agreement? Is this the end of daily newspaper competition? Will one billionaire publisher be able to put a conservative spin on all editorial coverage in the region? The public has a right to know.
Court documents are presumed public, and the newspaper chains have shown no reason why anything other than a few narrowly defined records should be kept secret. Judge Illston should revoke the secrecy order and open up the key documents in the Reilly case.
PS Where is the federal Justice Department? Where is outgoing state attorney general Bill Lockyer or incoming AG Jerry Brown? We haven’t heard a word from any of the public officials who ought to be intervening in this case. At the very least, they should support our efforts to open the records.
PPS: If Hearst and the big chains get away with sealing these documents, it will set a terrible precedent for future cases in which business interests want to keep secret information that ought to be in the public domain. How can any of these big media companies ever go into court in the future (as they have done in the past) to push for unsealing court record when they have gone to such lengths to seal their own records?
PPPS To see our legal brief, press release, and links to media coverage, go to www.sfbg.com.
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Margaret Cho’s Good Vibes XXX-Mas striptease
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Powell, Baker, Hamilton — Thanks for Nothing
When Colin Powell endorsed the Iraq Study Group report during his Dec. 17 appearance on “Face the Nation,” it was another curtain call for a tragic farce.
Four years ago, “moderates” like Powell were making the invasion of Iraq possible. Now, in the guise of speaking truth to power, Powell and ISG co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton are refueling the U.S. war effort by depicting it as a problem of strategy and management.
But the U.S. war effort is a problem of lies and slaughter.
The Baker-Hamilton report stakes out a position for managerial changes that dodge the fundamental immorality of the war effort. And President Bush shows every sign of rejecting the report’s call for scaling down that effort.
Meanwhile, most people in the United States favor military disengagement. According to a new Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll, “Seven in 10 say they want the new Congress to pressure the White House to begin bringing troops home within six months.”
The nationwide survey came after the Baker-Hamilton report arrived with great — and delusional — expectations. In big bold red letters, the cover of Time predicted that the report would take the White House by storm: “The Iraq Study Group says it’s time for an exit strategy. Why Bush will listen.”
While often depicted as a rebuff to the president’s Iraq policies, the report was hardly a prescription for abandoning the U.S. military project in Iraq — as Baker was at pains to repeatedly point out during a whirlwind round of network interviews.
Hours after the report’s release on Dec. 6, Baker told PBS “NewsHour” host Jim Lehrer that the blue-ribbon commission was calling for a long-term U.S. military presence: “So our commitment — when we say not open-ended, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to be substantial. And our report makes clear that we’re going to have substantial, very robust, residual troop levels in Iraq for a long, long time.”
Baker used very similar phrasing the next morning in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” — saying that the report “makes clear we’re going to have a really robust American troop presence in Iraq and in the region for a long, long time.”
That was 24 hours into the report’s release, when media spin by Baker and Hamilton and their allies was boosting a document that asserted a continual American prerogative to devote massive resources to war in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. And, in a little-noted precept of the report, it said: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise.”
In short, the Baker-Hamilton report was a fallback position for U.S. military intervention — and for using Pentagon firepower on behalf of U.S.-based oil companies. But the report’s call for tactical adjustments provoked fury among the most militaristic politicians and pundits. Their sustained media counterattack took hold in short order.
President Bush wriggled away from the panel’s key recommendations — gradual withdrawal of many U.S. troops from Iraq and willingness to hold diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. War enthusiasts like Sen. John McCain denounced the report as a recipe for retreat and defeat. The New York Post dubbed Baker and Hamilton “surrender monkeys.” Rush Limbaugh called their report “stupid.”
By the time its one-week anniversary came around, the Baker-Hamilton report looked about ready for an ashcan of history. Bush had already postponed his announcement of a “new strategy for Iraq” until after the start of the new year — a delay aimed at cushioning the president from pressure to adopt the report’s central recommendations. Even the limited punch of the report has been largely stymied by the most rabidly pro-war forces of American media and politics.
But those forces don’t really need to worry about the likes of Colin Powell, James Baker and Lee Hamilton — as long as the argument is over how the U.S. government should try to get its way in Iraq.
“We are losing — we haven’t lost — and this is the time, now, to start to put in place the kinds of strategies that will turn this situation around,” Powell told CBS viewers on Dec. 17. That sort of talk stimulates endless rationales for continuing U.S. warfare and facilitates the ongoing escalation of the murderous U.S. air war in Iraq.
Powell’s mendacious performance at the U.N. Security Council, several weeks before the invasion of Iraq, is notorious. But an obscure media appearance by Powell, when he was interviewed by the French network TV2 in mid-September 2003, sheds more light on underlying attitudes that unite the venture-capitalist worldviews of “moderates” like Colin Powell and “hardliners” like Dick Cheney.
Trying to justify Washington’s refusal to end the occupation, Powell
explained: “Since the United States and its coalition partners have invested a great deal of political capital, as well as financial resources, as well as the lives of our young men and women — and we have a large force there now — we can’t be expected to suddenly just step aside.”
_____________________________
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
Is the USA the Center of the World?
Some things don’t seem to change. Five years after I wrote this column in the form of a news dispatch, it seems more relevant than ever:
WASHINGTON — There were unconfirmed reports yesterday that the United States is not the center of the world.
The White House had no immediate comment on the reports, which set off a firestorm of controversy in the nation’s capital.
Speaking on background, a high-ranking official at the State Department discounted the possibility that the reports would turn out to be true. “If that were the case,” he said, “don’t you think we would have known about it a long time ago?”
On Capitol Hill, leaders of both parties were quick to rebut the assertion. “That certain news organizations would run with such a poorly sourced and obviously slanted story tells us that the liberal media are still up to their old tricks, despite the current crisis,” a GOP lawmaker fumed. A prominent Democrat, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that classified briefings to congressional intelligence panels had disproved such claims long ago.
Scholars at leading think tanks were more restrained, and some said there was a certain amount of literal truth to the essence of the reports. But they pointed out that while it included factual accuracy in a narrow sense, the assertion was out of context and had the potential to damage national unity at a time when the United States could ill afford such a disruption.
The claim evidently originated with a piece by a Lebanese journalist that appeared several days ago in a Beirut magazine. It was then picked up by a pair of left-leaning daily newspapers in London. From there, the story quickly made its way across the Atlantic via the Internet.
“It just goes to show how much we need seasoned, professional gatekeepers to separate the journalistic wheat from the chaff before it gains wide attention,” remarked the managing editor of one news program at a major U.S. television network. “This is the kind of stuff you see on ideologically driven websites, but that hardly means it belongs on the evening news.” A newsmagazine editor agreed, calling the reports “the worst kind of geographical correctness.”
None of the major cable networks devoted much air time to reporting the story. At one outlet, a news executive’s memo told staffers that any reference to the controversy should include mention of the fact that the United States continues to lead the globe in scientific discoveries. At a more conservative network, anchors and correspondents reminded viewers that English is widely acknowledged to be the international language — and more people speak English in the U.S. than in any other nation.
While government officials voiced acute skepticism about the notion that the United States is not the center of the world, they declined to speak for attribution. “If lightning strikes and it turns out this report has real substance to it,” explained one policymaker at the State Department, “we could look very bad, at least in the short run. Until it can be clearly refuted, no one wants to take the chance of leading with their chin and ending up with a hefty serving of Egg McMuffin on their face.”
An informal survey of intellectuals with ties to influential magazines of political opinion, running the gamut from The Weekly Standard to The New Republic, indicated that the report was likely to gain little currency in Washington’s elite media forums.
“The problem with this kind of shoddy impersonation of reporting is that it’s hard to knock down because there are grains of truth,” one editor commented. “Sure, who doesn’t know that our country includes only small percentages of the planet’s land mass and population? But to draw an inference from those isolated facts that somehow the United States of America is not central to the world and its future — well, that carries postmodernism to a nonsensical extreme.”
Another well-known American journalist speculated that the controversy will soon pass: “Moral relativism remains a pernicious force in our society, but overall it holds less appeal than ever, even on American campuses. It’s not just that we’re the only superpower — we happen to also be the light onto the nations and the key to the world’s fate. People who can’t accept that reality are not going to have much credibility.”
_____________________________
Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback. For information, go to www.WarMadeEasy.com
HUDSON RIVER
Do you know where you’re going to — have you ever seen Mahogany? What am I showing you? Well, for a start, that the facsimile of the Motown story presented by Dreamgirls is phony with a capital P. By the time Berry Gordy and Diana Ross reached their particular shared impasse on the road from Motown to Hollywood fantasyland, she was almost fatally eager to fold a twiglike body into the two-dimensional shallowness of fashion. In contrast, in Dreamgirls the ridiculously sweet and naive Ross type played by Beyoncé Knowles is still wholly unaware that she’s shoving others out of the spotlight and yet also healthy, poised, and ready to share supposedly deep insights about her life. As for Jamie Foxx’s Gordy clone, the story soft-sells the producer and label head’s bad reputation — and misunderstands his genius. Most songs here may be Broadway ready, but in terms of melodicism and rhythm, they wouldn’t pass muster as Supremes B-sides.
Thank god, then, for Jennifer Hudson. The surprise of Dreamgirls isn’t that her Candi Staton–rich and deep singing steals the movie; everyone knows going in that she’s going to tell them — yell at them! — that she’s not going. But she does more than that, making good on the “you’re gonna love me” part of her show-stopping lyric with an overall performance that has more nuance and naturalism than those of the experienced actors around her. (Johnny Ray Huston)
DREAM GIRLS
Opens Fri/15
See Movie Clock at www.sfbg.com
The kitchen sink
› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com
CHEAP EATS There’s this thing in sports and therefore maybe life where you’re supposed to “act like you’ve been there before.” But how are you supposed to act like you’ve been there before if you’ve never been there? What if every single thing is news to you?
You strike out the big hitter, score a touchdown. Or let’s say you’re not into sports, so you, I don’t know, close the deal, or achieve the … thing. What do people do in life? Or what do you do if you’re me and the whole world is suddenly one big end zone? How am I supposed to not jump around and make a fool of myself, for example, while buying my first bra? At the tender age of 43.
Act like you’ve been here before, said the voice in my head. I’d never been to San Mateo, let alone Lula Lu Petite Lingerie shop.
“Do you know what size you are?” asked a voice outside my head. The only other customer had left and my tiny friend Sockywonk, the famous Godzilla artist, was already in the other fitting room, trying stuff on, so finally our friendly salesgirlperson could turn her attention to me.
I peed my pants.
Unfazed, Ms. Lula Lu whipped out her cloth tape measure. “Hold your arms out like this,” she said, making like an airplane.
I asked if I could do Superman instead because airplanes wig me out.
“Like this,” she said. The airplane. I closed my eyes and tried to think of it as doing Jesus, and that was a little better. Jesus being fitted for a bra … eerie look on His face, like He knows what’s being foreshadowed, oh shit.
Forty inches, that’s the circumference of My chest. The cup size, well, I don’t think there are enough As in the alphabet to describe my cup size. But I do have boobs, I swear.
And so does Sockywonk, and they’re beautiful, I’ve seen them. She can’t keep her hands off them, not even in restaurants. I don’t blame her.
Chemo starts tomorrow, and then, down the road, she loses one. She told me over noodles at Pho Little Saigon 3, across the street, that she’s not going to go for no chest reconstruction surgery. So this bra she’s deciding on in the next fitting room might be the last nonmastectomy one she ever buys.
The food was great! For some crazy reason it was Sockywonk’s first time eating Vietnamese. Barbecued chicken over rice vermicelli ($5.95) and a seafood combo soup with egg noodles ($5.95). We shared and slurped and swirled and it was my way of returning the favor, firstswise. Lula Lu being her idea.
Pho Little Saigon 3. You can’t miss it. It’s the only place in San Mateo that isn’t a sushi place.
When Sockywonk first found out about the cancer was around when I found out I was a witch, so naturally I promised to use all my spells and powers on her behalf, which means basically that I will write like I write and try to make her laugh and want to eat food. Those are my powers, and I think she might need them because chemo ain’t funny, or appetizing.
I love all my friends, and they’re just going to have to get used to that. But I feel like I have extra chambers in my heart right now for Sockywonk, and not just because she wanted to take me bra shopping after coming down with breast cancer. And not just because she’s a freaky and freakin’ amazing painter of monsterish beauty. And not just because she showed me her boobs, either, although of course that helped. It’s all of the above, plus she invited me last summer to that rooftop paella party I wrote about, which kind of kick-started me socially at a time when I needed a kick.
I met some of my other new friends, like Orange Pop 2, on that same roof, and these are Sockywonk’s people and they’re lively, weird, rockingly good-cooking folks. And she knows but I want her cancer to know too that it ain’t just chemo: we’re all coming after it with everything we’ve got. And I don’t mean good vibes and health food, either.
I mean, yeah, good vibes and health food — but I also mean beers and guitar solos and horn sections. Fresh eggs. Funky restaurant reviews. Funny dances, dessert, impossible hats, pretty bras, everything. Good books. Scary dogs. Strong coffee. Combat boots. Bicycle kicks. Everything, and the kitchen sink. The dirty dishes. Big slow curve balls and fast, freaky serves. SFBG
PHO LITTLE SAIGON 3
Daily, 10 a.m.– SFBG9 p.m.
147 E. Third Ave., San Mateo
(650) 685-6151
Takeout available
Beer
MC/V
Quiet
Wheelchair accessible
One word: plastics
› paulr@sfbg.com
These days it is hard to be sure if the American way is war or plastic. Probably both, and since plastic is a petroleum product, and petroleum is a perennial occasion for war, we are probably not talking about a meaningful difference. Kevin Phillips describes the United States as the petroleum hegemon in his recent book American Theocracy (Viking, 2006), and the proof that he’s right is all around us. To the extent that we make anything at all anymore, we make it out of plastic: dashboards, lawn furniture, coffee mugs, picnic knives, even clothes. Why bother draping yourself in velvet or cotton when you can swaddle yourself in Lycra spandex or Gore-tex or some other synthetic fiber spun from oil and bearing a name that ends in x?
Although I make every effort to avoid wearing petroleum-based products, I concede that plastic has its uses. In particular, I favor the plastic wine cork, which (unlike the natural kind) poses no risk of tainting the wine with fungus, or even of just crumbling to dust, while preserving (as screw tops do not) the forms and rituals of uncorking. And I am pleased to report that plastic-cork technology seems to have improved sharply in just the past year or two.
Recently I popped open a couple of bottles — of Husch chenin blanc and Gundlach Bundschu merlot — and found I could not easily tell whether the corks were natural or plastic, at least not in the midst of holiday hubbub and bad lighting. I set the corks aside for further scrutiny in the morning sunshine. I actually ended up having to cut them open with my trusty Wüsthof trimming knife to make a final determination: a kind of wine-cork autopsy.
Both corks had the springiness of natural cork. Both had natural cork’s coloration, beige with darker specklings. The principal hint that the Husch cork was manufactured had to do with its near-perfection of shape. I was almost certain the Gundlach cork, too, was plastic, until I slashed it open and found the unmistakable flakiness of real bark inside. Another clue, unnoticed until some time later, was that the bottom of the Gundlach cork was stained red from the wine; the Husch cork, by contrast, was immaculate on both ends, though it did come from a bottle of white wine — so, not quite a fair fight, maybe.
East meets West Hollywood
› paulr@sfbg.com
As you step into Roy’s Restaurant, you will notice the names of many cities stenciled in gold on the glass door — places where other Roy’s Restaurants can be found. You might feel as if you are sidling into one of the branches of a Parisian house of couture or the district office of some international brokerage firm. My eyes darted briefly to the end of the two-columned list, half expecting to see the reassuring words “FDIC insured.” I didn’t see them. But then, insurance, whether from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or some other gracious entity, isn’t really necessary at Roy’s. The place has found its feet here, and they are feet that move with a definite San Francisco style.
When our Roy’s opened six years ago, I walked through the doors into a fabulous inaugural dinner party and was disappointed. It was a lovely restaurant, yes, with innovative and well-prepared food conceived by Roy Yamaguchi, the founding chef and eponym — but it wasn’t in Hawaii, and the island magic seemed lost on the streets of San Francisco. The handful of Roy’s Restaurants in Hawaii are among the original ones, and they reflect the islands’ paradisial temper; life moves a little more slowly there, and people are less tense with the metropolitan urgencies. The Roy’s on the Big Island even has, for alfresco types, a kind of docklike deck extending over the water, and if you take a table there, you can practically hear the just-caught fish flopping around on the weathered timbers. The cooking reflects the immediacy and locality of the ingredients — seafood just minutes from the sea, beef from cattle raised on the Big Island — as well as the distinctive blend of influences, from Japan, Polynesia, and Europe, that give the Hawaiian Islands much of their gastronomic and cultural flavor.
Transport all this to a gritty and often chilly stretch of Mission Street and you have the restaurant equivalent of a heart transplant. There is no dock whose pilings are lapped by soft, warm waves, no purple sunset or palm fronds waving in a gentle breeze; there is just damp concrete and Muni buses. Even the interior decor is mostly in the urban vein: a huge exhibition kitchen and a honeycomb of wine bottles similar to the one at Bacar. If, like me, you remember Roy’s as part of the Hawaiian enchantment, you might well find the difference shocking and even disappointing. But this is unfair to our Roy’s, which in truth has become an excellent restaurant very much in the metro-California manner. If the long list of cities on Roy’s front door reveals that Yamaguchi has built an empire, it also tells us that, like the Roman Empire and its ecclesiastical successor, he has done so by adapting a core formula to local conditions, tastes, and expectations.
Roy’s core mostly has to do with the food, and its center of gravity (the menu’s term of art is “classic”) lies within the confines of the prix fixe, a $35, three-course dinner. The street signage describes the restaurant’s cooking as “Hawaiian fusion,” and for me the fusion isn’t so much East-meets-West as East–meets–West Hollywood. Yamaguchi cooked in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and he has a Wolfgang Puckish flair for boldness — grilled shrimp (part of the prix fixe first course) served with wasabi cocktail sauce, for instance, or a large, spherical crab cake ($15) mounted like a trophy on a pedestal of tinglingly spicy kimchi — sweet, hot, sour, and rich, all in the same bite.
The fixed-price dinners all open with the same appetizer trio, of which the shrimp is a constituent. Its companions include a single, but heavily meaty, baby back rib — tender as the night, Szechuan spiced and wood grilled — and a chef’s-choice item that might be a nicely crisped pot sticker. On the question of main dishes, choices open out. Here we find four possibilities, reflecting a world of influences. Large prawns in a tangle of pad thai — threads of carrot and daikon radish tossed with rice noodles — seem quite comfortably Southeast Asian, while charbroiled short ribs (of beef) are as tender and engagingly stringy as Grandma’s pot roast on a chilly Iowa night.
I was pleased that the hibachi-grilled salmon was wild king salmon presented on a molded pad of jasmine rice, though it seemed a bit late in the season for the fish to be local. The dish I found most representative of Roy’s local sensibility was a mahimahi filet, crusted with macadamia nut crumbs (a very Hawaiian touch), then sautéed and served with lobster-butter sauce (a rather French touch, I thought) and thick slices of new potatoes. The overall effect was less one of fusion than of California cooking. One minor note of discontent: the potatoes were undercooked.
Our friends, who are Roy’s devotees, urged upon us the melting hot chocolate soufflé, an innocuously cakey-looking object that was indeed filled with melted chocolate. At the touch of a fork, it oozed out like lava onto the plate. Less dramatic, but also texturally memorable, was a macadamia nut almond tart — a disk of one’s own, tasting a lot like pecan pie and topped with crumbles of macadamia nuts and a shift knob of vanilla bean ice cream. The tart was almost too sweet for me.
The devotees made a point of saying they prefer Roy’s to Boulevard. I am not sure I agree with them, but I understood their point, and perhaps the real news is that Roy’s and Boulevard can be mentioned in the same sentence these days — can be compared. The two, while neighbors, are very different sorts of restaurants, but each is a San Francisco restaurant, sprinkled with a bit of the local pixie dust. For Roy’s, member of a chain whose roots are halfway across the Pacific, that’s certainly some dust it’s glad to have. SFBG
ROY’S RESTAURANT
Lunch: Mon.–Fri., 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.
Dinner: Mon.–Thurs., 5:30–10:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sun., 5–11 p.m.
575 Mission, SF
(415) 777-0277
www.roysrestaurant.com
Full bar
AE/DC/DISC/MC/V
Moderately noisy
Wheelchair accessible
Santa’s secret
› andrea@altsexcolumn.com
Dear Andrea:
I’m a guy with a single, straight, platonic female friend in her mid-20s who could really use a first sex toy, but doesn’t seem comfortable enough with her sexuality to buy one on her own. The holidays seem like the perfect excuse to give a gift that keeps on giving. I was going to get her a gift certificate or gift from a woman-friendly online store, since she may be uncomfortable going into an adult store, and a vibrating gift under the Christmas tree might make Christmas morning a little embarrassing.
She’s the first girl I’ve ever met who doesn’t have at least one toy. I don’t think it’s occurred to her female friends to get her a toy or gift certificate, and I imagine she might be uncomfortable with me telling them she could really use a sex toy. But it’s been years since the girl’s had sex. I can see how giving a toy as a gift can be awkward because it can become associated with the visual image of the gifter. But among friends without a great deal of cash, it could also be uncomfortable for her to receive a gift certificate for $50 or $100. Is there a way around this that results in a more sexually fulfilled and less tense friend?
Love,
Secret Santa
Dear Santa:
She might be uncomfortable with you telling her friends she needs a good buzz-off? Do you think? Please, please, put down the gift certificate and back away slowly. There is no way for this to go well, and too many possible bad endings to count.
I mean, let’s say you’re right and she really has been utterly abstemious all these years, as opposed to uninterested in detailing the contents of her bedside drawer for you, her straight male friend. Even so, what could be more mortifying than a gift that says she’s hard up and in danger of drying out — and all her friends know it?
I suppose for maximum mortification you could save the gift presentation for whatever party she and all your mutual friends will be attending and let her do the stammering and blushing in public, but I’m confident that the moment would suck for her whether in public or alone with you, the friend who suddenly seems to know too much and be thinking too deeply about what does or doesn’t go on between her sheets. You’re very well meaning, and it’s nice that you care and all, but just don’t.
I see one way you could ensure that she has access to what you’ve determined she needs, but it’s both expensive and rather ridiculous: on the Romper Roomish principle that you shouldn’t bring any if you don’t have enough for everyone, pass out the gift certificates to your whole circle, whomever you’d normally be buying presents for, boys and girls alike. Then you’ll just be thought of as generous, if slightly pervy, instead of creepily overinvolved in the sex life of someone with whom you are not and will not be having sex. Unless you actually do want to have sex with her, in which case I still wouldn’t recommend buying her a vibrator.
Oy. This is very complicated. It makes me glad I’m Jewish and don’t have to buy Christmas presents for anyone, let alone receive any. It’s a minefield! Who knew?
Love,
Andrea
Dear Andrea:
We are trying to have a baby. After we have sex, the semen doesn’t stay in but trickles out of the vagina. Why does it happen, and what should we do to keep it in, so I can conceive?
Love,
Drippy
Dear Drip:
The only connection between your letter and the one preceding it is the way they produced an involuntary and audible “Don’t do that!” from me as I read them. Don’t have a baby!
Oh, relax. You can have a baby, but you should already know the answer to this, and I can’t help wondering what else you don’t know. The semen trickles out because it’s already done its job. Only a very small part of the ejaculate is made up of sperm; the rest is what would be called “inactive ingredients” if your partner were ejacuutf8g, say, toothpaste instead of semen. The carrier fluid coagulates briefly, just so it won’t run down your leg before the sperm have made their escape. Once the sperm that are going anywhere have gone, the leftover gunk liquefies and runs down your aforementioned leg to form the “wet spot” of lore. If it didn’t, you’d be carrying the leftover goo from a lifetime of sexual encounters around with you until you scrubbed it out with a bottle brush, and that’s not a pretty picture.
You’re fine. However, if your question really does reflect your general state of knowledge about these things, please get a book. Get several. Get a library card. This baby-having business is not simple, and while there is such a thing as too much information, too little information is worse.
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.
A key test for Pelosi
EDITORIAL Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s signature legislation came out of a Republican Congress. It was shortly after Newt Gingrich and his gang took control of the House that Pelosi began moving to privatize the Presidio; she argued that the GOP majority would never fund a real national park in San Francisco and the only way to prevent Congress from trying to sell off the land the military no longer wanted was to find a mechanism that wouldn’t cost any money and would be palatable to the archconservatives who were calling the shots.
When she’s criticized for the bill — and that’s been happening a lot lately — she replies, in effect: we had no choice. If we wanted to save this remarkable 1,400-acre parcel of land, we had to play the Republicans’ game. And indeed, her approach was everything that the Gingriches of the world liked: instead of using tax dollars to fund a national park (something that had been done since the birth of the National Park System), she created the semiprivate Presidio Trust, which was charged with raising enough cash through development and rents to pay the park’s own way by 2013.
Now we have George Lucas operating a commercial office building in the middle of the park and housing renting out at top market rates to wealthy tenants and a plan to turn a former hospital near Lake Street into a dense luxury condo complex — and, in general, the future of the park being driven by commercial interests.
But things are different now: Pelosi, not Gingrich, is calling the shots. The Democrats control both houses of Congress, the president is a lame duck bogged down in a war that is making him more unpopular by the day — and for the first time since the Sixth Army moved out and the privatizers moved in, there is no political reason why Pelosi can’t amend her bill and change the way the Presidio is run.
It’s clear that the current system isn’t working. The federal government keeps pouring big money into subsidizing the private ventures in the park. The Sierra Club, which initially supported Pelosi’s bill, is now demanding reform.
This is a test of how Pelosi will use her new power — and whether she was telling the truth when she blamed the privatization of the park on Republicans. She needs to introduce and push a bill to eliminate the Presidio Trust, turn the land over to the National Park Service, and manage it in the interest of the public, not private profit. SFBG
Impeachment is now the only option
EDITORIAL We can all stop hoping and pretending now: the facts are in. No matter what anyone right, left, or center says, no matter what the truth is on the ground, no matter how clear and powerful public opinion has become, President George W. Bush isn’t going to change anything about the war in Iraq.
That’s what we saw from the president’s press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair on Dec. 7 and from his statements since. He’s not going to start withdrawing troops, and he’s not going to negotiate with other regional powers.
The Iraq Study Group report has its flaws. It talks about diplomatic discussions with Iran and Syria, but it stops short of describing the real reason the United States is bogged down in the Middle East (the lack of a coherent energy policy that doesn’t rely on foreign oil). It suggests that the United States should leave the job of rebuilding Iraq to Iraqis but fails to state that the country responsible for all the problems should play a role in paying for its solutions. And it would leave thousands of US soldiers in Iraq as advisers for the long term, putting them in serious jeopardy.
Still, it’s at least a dose of badly needed reality. The report acknowledges that the Bush administration’s current policies have made an awful mess of Iraq, that the situation is deteriorating, and that continuing the current path isn’t an acceptable option. And it recommends that all combat forces leave Iraq by 2008.
That such a broad-based, bipartisan panel would reach that conclusion unanimously isn’t really that much of a surprise. Everyone with any sense in Washington and around the world these days agrees that the United States needs to set a timetable for withdrawal. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist who initially supported the war and has long argued that some good could still come out of it, wrote Dec. 8 that the group’s recommendations “will only have a chance of being effective if we go one notch further and set a fixed date — now — for Americans to leave Iraq.” Even conservative syndicated columnist George Will noted the same day that “the deterioration is beyond much remediation.”
As long as the United States retains combat troops in Iraq, they will be the target of sectarian violence and the focus of that war. When they leave, the Iraqis will have no obvious villain, and there might be an actual hope for a long-term resolution.
The notion of an all-out Kurd versus Shiite versus Sunni civil war isn’t going to make anyone in Damascus or Tehran happy, since those two governments will be caught in the middle. And a clear statement from the United States that American troops will be leaving on a specific date not too far in the future is, the majority of experts agree, the only way to bring all the parties to the table for a serious and meaningful discussion.
And yet Bush and Dick Cheney remain alone, aloof, refusing to acknowledge that military victory in Iraq is utterly impossible and that the old mission of establishing a US client state in the Middle East will never be accomplished.
The death toll for US troops is approaching 3,000. The cost is running at $250 million a day. This simply can’t be allowed to continue. If Bush and Cheney refuse to begin a withdrawal program, then Congress needs to act decisively on two fronts.
The first is to inform the president that under the Constitution, Congress has the sole power to declare war and this Congress will no longer pay for Bush’s military adventure in Iraq.
But there’s a larger problem here. Bush and Cheney have lied to the American people, taken us into war on the basis of fraudulent information, and violated their oaths of office. Back in January we called on Congress to begin debating articles of impeachment; the GOP-controlled House wasn’t about to do that. But things are different now. The voters have made it very clear that they don’t like the president’s war, and the Democrats have a clear mandate for change.
Impeachment is serious business, but Bush has left us no alternative. We can’t simply allow the war to continue as it has been, year after bloody year, until Bush’s term expires.
The only thing holding up impeachment hearings is the word of the incoming speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said during the campaign that option was “not on the table.” Well, it ought to be on the table now. Pelosi should publicly inform Democratic leaders in the House who support impeachment that she won’t block an impeachment effort. And her constituents in San Francisco need to keep the pressure on her to allow Congress to move forward on its most important responsibility in decades.
This isn’t going to be easy. Even the San Francisco Chronicle now acknowledges that Pelosi is governing like a moderate. It will take a reenergized peace movement and a huge new national mobilization to put pressure on her and every member of Congress. But the stakes are too high to wait. It’s time to start, today. SFBG
EDITOR’S NOTES
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Gavin Newsom loves to talk about the will of the voters. He put his Care Not Cash plan on the ballot when he was running for mayor — not, he insisted, as a campaign ploy but to get the voters to speak on a plan his colleagues on the Board of Supervisors rejected. Even when it was clear the plan wasn’t working, he stuck to it — because, after all, that was the will of the voters. When advocates for Saturday road closures in Golden Gate Park pushed for a six-month trial program, Newsom vetoed it, saying that while he loves the park and loves bicycles and loves the idea of road closures, the voters had already rejected a closure plan. Never mind that the plan the voters turned down was confusing and big money was spent on one side and not the other … the mayor insisted he had to abide by the will of the voters.
Fine: it’s the will of the voters, expressed in November by a 56.3 percent margin, that Newsom show up once a month at a Board of Supervisors meeting and answer questions.
That’s not such a horrible burden. In fact, it’s an excellent idea: “question time,” as Sup. Chris Daly called Proposition I, would force the mayor out of the cocoon in which he operates — where every appearance is scripted, every event carefully tailored — and give the public a chance to see Newsom and his critics actually discuss policy issues. It would be the end of a lot of Mayor’s Office secrecy: if the supervisors can demand information and documents while everyone is watching, it will be harder for the mayor to keep things under wraps.
This city has a long history of imperial mayors, who hide from critics, make backroom deals, and act as if they’re accountable to nobody. Question time could be a pretty significant check on that. And if Newsom is as confident of his agenda and programs as he claims to be, he has nothing to worry about.
But this time Newsom is openly defying the will of the voters. He announced last week that he won’t appear at the board meetings and instead will hold “town hall meetings” in various neighborhoods over the next few months.
Of course he will: he’s running for reelection. And those meetings will be tightly controlled by the mayor’s PR machine. A few members of the public will get a few questions in, but Newsom will be able to duck, dodge, and avoid the problems very easily. The meetings he’s preparing are going to be campaign events — and he would have held them anyway, whether Prop. I had passed or not.
The problem here is larger than the mayor’s noncompliance with a policy statement that he can argue has no legal mandate. Newsom needs to be more accountable and respond to some legitimate, tough questions about his programs, policies, and administration. Right now there’s no clear challenger to force those issues, and if, as many expect, he’s easily reelected in 2007, he’ll be even more isolated.
The ducking has to stop. If Newsom won’t appear for question time, I think Daly ought to come back and put it on the next ballot — this time as a charter amendment, enforceable with charges of misconduct and removal from office. SFBG
Be nice to pigeons!
OPINION Until two years ago I didn’t give a rat’s ass about pigeons. But then I began researching my book, and I was stunned by what I didn’t know. I quickly grew to admire the birds — and this coming from a guy who still prefers playing fetch with a dog to running about with a pair of binoculars chasing pretty tail.
San Francisco, it seems, is of two minds about pigeons. The city was ahead of the curve (as usual) when it banned avicides, which are used to target pigeons but indiscriminately punish all birds. That’s a great thing. Not only are the avicides cruel and difficult to control — they don’t work. Sure, you’ll see a lot of dead pigeons around. You might even see them fall out of the sky and convulse on the ground. But as they say, nature abhors a vacuum, and even more pigeons will fill the void.
San Francisco has also banned the feeding of pigeons (although songbirds still get a free lunch). The ban feels a touch cruel, but the city is on to something: too much food leads to too much breeding, which leads to too many pigeons, which leads to collections of unsightly droppings. It’s not the pigeons that are the problem, it’s that there are simply too many of them, which is why their droppings appear to pile up. Overfeeding exacerbates the problem.
But rather than banning feeding altogether, the city should consider reguutf8g the feeding. People like feeding pigeons, and there’s no law short of capital punishment that will stop them from this enjoyable pastime.
Many European cities have had success with a humane pigeon control policy that drops a pigeon population by half in a handful of years. It works like this: the city places modern-day dovecotes around town and encourages citizens to feed the pigeons there and only there. Pigeons like dovecotes and choose to lay their eggs there. At the end of each week, a park’s employee can cull the eggs.
Wildlife can be inconvenient. But does that mean we need to brutalize it? The pigeon has athletic abilities and an unparalleled history nothing short of astounding. Pigeons are the world’s oldest domesticated bird — Noah’s dove was a pigeon. They have been utilized by every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States. It was a pigeon that delivered the results of the first Olympics in 776 BCE and a pigeon that first brought news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo some 2,500 years later. Nearly a million pigeons served in both world wars and are credited with saving thousands of soldiers’ lives. They have served us loyally for aeons — and look upon us as their guardians.
Pigeons don’t carry any more diseases than we do, and they are only as filthy as our own cities. The queen of England doesn’t consider the birds dirty. Rather, she owns racing pigeons. Many of us forget that pigeons are really just doves (rock doves), which we view as a sign of purity. Picasso’s doves? He was painting pigeons. In fact, he named his daughter Paloma, Spanish for pigeon.
It’d be great if America’s most progressive city were to develop a humane pigeon control program that the rest of the nation could then copy. Not only would it be great publicity for a great city, it’s the right thing to do. SFBG
Andrew D. Blechman
Andrew D. Blechman is the author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird (Grove Press).
Dreamboys
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Never mind whether or not this is the year of Dreamgirls. I mean, forget the musical if you can — it’s not possible here in Los Angeles, where it’s taken over the town — although dreams never go out of style. What I want to know is what category does it fit in? New music? Reissued with a twist? Covers? And, for old folks who remember 1982, was the original sort of a reissue? (It is the story of Motown, after all.) Or just a memory — fond or otherwise? (See the movie if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)
In any case, my year-end begins and ends with “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” — Jennifer Holliday’s 1982 original kicks off my Top 10 chart, and Jennifer Hudson’s take on the tune, from the just-released movie, closes it. It’s a great song: Holliday’s version is simply out of this world, but that’s only a small part of why I love it so much. The real reason is the killer, utterly surreal ending, when both women are pouring it out, singing, “And you, you, you, you’re gonna love me, yeah!”
Ask yourself, what’s wrong here? For instance, in Dreamgirls, do you think she succeeds in making her man love her? Of course she doesn’t. Do the Iraqi people love the US Armed Forces just because George Bush wants them to? Life doesn’t work that way.
So while my wife apparently loves me, for reasons I do not understand, what I spent the entire year doing was trying to get my daily parade of hits to do the same — to find new music that reached out and grabbed me, knocked me on my ass, obsessed me to the point where I drove down Sunset Boulevard with my iPod blowing out my eardrums, feeling like I was 16 again. It didn’t happen. I gave Snow Patrol more than the time of day. I fell in (and out) of love with Gnarls Barkley. I dove headlong into Jay-Z. I downloaded more singles from iTunes than you can possibly imagine, and I’ll say this for all of them: not bad.
Still, the most important aspect of a year in music is finding the center of gravity — one’s personal ground zero — and proceeding from there. And in years past that’s meant locating a scene, a band, or an album that somehow says it all. Not this year, not for me. As far as I’m concerned, music 2006 was anchored by a parade of fabulous reissues and by one live performance — in Bangkok, Thailand, no less. It was so stunning that I need only think of it to feel good all over.
On Aug. 1, many thousands of miles from home, former Guardian music critic, boho baseball commissar, and one-time coolest guy in San Francisco Mike McGuirk cut loose with a karaoke version of Procol Harem’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Not only did he stun the house, he finished by pouring a pitcher of beer over a noisy limey sitting at the bar. And he lived to tell the tale.
I know that to be true, because a week later I had a two-hour visit with McGuirk, whom I picked up at LAX and drove to a strip mall in nearby Ladera Heights. We traded stories until I ran out and he had the floor all to himself. He spoke of life in Southeast Asia, about being mistaken for Superman — black frames being what they are in a land where all white guys look alike — and about the pain and glory of leaving it all behind. McGuirk, when all was said and done, radiated a glow that I could only dream about. If that ain’t rock ’n’ roll, I don’t know what is.
See you next year — and hang on to your hat; things look like they could get rough. SFBG
TOMMY TOMPKINS’S TOP 10
(1) Jennifer Holiday, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Dreamgirls (1982 Original Broadcast Cast) (Decca US)
(2) Byrds, There Is a Season (Legacy)
(3) Various artists, What It Is! Funky Soul and Rare Grooves (1967–<\d>1977) (Rhino)
(4) Clash, The Singles (Legacy)
(5) Various artists, American Music: The Hightone Records Story (Hightone)
(6) Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, This Is a Journey … into Time (Liaison/Raw Venture)
(7) Pretenders, Pirate Radio (Rhino)
(8) Waylon Jennings, Nashville Rebel (RCA)
(9) Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Legends of Country Music: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Legacy)
(10) Jennifer Hudson, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Dreamgirls (Music from the Motion Picture) (Sony)
Rock in a hard place
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Who cares what I have to say? I just review video games and write lies about music for pay. You don’t want to read about what kind of “meaning” I gleaned from my experience with music that “really mattered” in 2006, do you?
It’s 4 a.m. I ran out of money one week ago. I ran out of cigarettes at exactly 2:10 this morning, and until I get paid again — in approximately eight days if I’m lucky — I will be eating only things you can prepare by adding hot water. I don’t care about music. I hate music. I hate everything.
Well, I guess I don’t hate AC/DC, especially “Down Payment Blues,” which I think I listen to every day. I used to care about music — a lot, I suppose. I don’t anymore. The only new stuff I listened to this year with any real loyalty — and enjoyment — was a pair of singles from a band I have always hated: “Photograph” and “Rockstar” by Nickelback.
First of all, “Photograph” struck me because I thought it would make an excellent song for a new country dude to cover and have a huge hit with. I elect Tim McGraw to do it, as it sounds enough like “Where the Green Grass Grows,” which is probably what gave me the idea in the first place. This kind of unknown guy Dwayne Wade could do it too. Wade is cool — he’s like the return of John Stewart, who sang “Wild and Blue.” Wait, did I write Dwayne Wade and John Stewart? Ugh. I mean Dallas Wayne and John Anderson. Dwayne Wade is a basketball player. He’s on the Jets. Stewart — I have no idea where that name came from. Sorry, this is what happens when I don’t have cigarettes. I am actually crying right now.
Anyway, I also like the sentimental quality of the lyrics in “Photograph.” I guess I am supposed to quote something here, but I don’t feel like it. Just go listen to the song. You’ll see what I mean. You will also undoubtedly disagree with me. I liked “Rockstar” because it’s funny and also has a big chorus you can sing along with after listening for approximately one second.
One thing that hit me this past week about music in general is that indie rock won’t fucking go away. I don’t understand this. How can people still care about Cat Power or Jacket or Envelope or whatever those lame-ass bands are called? I don’t think there is anything more irrelevant, except maybe college football.
And after hearing this Chromatics EP, Nite, tonight, I also realized the neo–no wave thing is alive and well and suckier than ever. Man, that shit needs to die. What are they putting in the water in Seattle anyway? Anus? I read something about Nite in which the guy said the band was playing a sort of Italo-Euro pop. Is this the new thing, ripping off Italian pop or esoteric European styles that no one likes or cares about? Jesus Christ. I hate America.
With my limited knowledge, I think the only truly interesting and innovative things happening in music are in metal, but writing that is pointless because no one really actually cares about metal — besides those 50 metal fans. So 90 percent of the people who read this will just go back to listening to Arctic Monkeys. Even if they checked out Lamb of God, they wouldn’t like it. I don’t like Lamb of God that much myself — it’s just that they are a mainstream death metal band on a major label and they don’t wholly suck. Also they are not Christian, like seemingly every other “death” metal band right now, which is another disturbing trend today. This is happening because the Christians actually want us all dead. They are trying to bring about the end of the world. The government is helping them. Holy Jesus Lord, I want a cigarette. SFBG
MIKE MCGUIRK’S TOP 10 AC/DC SONGS HEARD WHILE WATCHING STRIPPERS IN THAILAND
(10) “You Shook Me All Night Long”
(9) “Whole Lotta Rosie”
(8) “Let Me Put My Love into You”
(7) “Back in Black”
(6) “Money Talks”
(5) “Stiff Upper Lip”
(4) “Fire Your Guns”
(3) “Safe in New York City”
(2) “Thunderstruck”
(1) “Hells Bells”
The best show I never saw
› duncan@sfbg.com
My daughter, Dolores — otherwise known as Dolly, though only to family, as she’s getting a little too sophisticated for nicknames — is a born rocker. The first music she heard, pipin’ hot out of the womb, was London Calling by the Clash. Now that she’s five, she wants more of the same when her father, mellowing in his old age, tries to catch the news on NPR on the way to kindergarten: “Dad, what is this? I don’t want talk…. I want rock.” When I inevitably cave to the pressure of the younger and cooler, the air guitar and air drums start right up.
Beyond rocking out in the car, Dolly fronts a semi-imaginary band called the Rock Girls, featuring a rotating lineup of her cousins Chloe and Abby on bass and drums, respectively, and Katie Rockgirl, Lisa McCartney, or Veronica Lee Mills (Dolly’s stage names) on — what else? — vocals and lead guitar. Now, I realize every parent in the world thinks their kid is somehow more gifted and magnificent than the common rabble of paste-eating snot noses, but I’m serious here: she’s got some intense, Tenacious D–style talent at coming up with extemporaneous rock lyrics, from her early punk hit “Step on a Pigeon, Yeah!,” made up on an evening stroll through the streets of Prague a few years ago, to her current repertoire, which is leaning lyrically toward the inspirational power ballad (“I can do anything in the world, yeah!”), and exhibits an intuitive grasp of song structure and phrasing. Beyond this, the kid’s got serious moves. She takes ballet and tap classes, both of which influence her Rock Girls routines, but lately she’s been working in flamenco-type flourishes and bounce-off-furniture, Martha Graham–meets–the Solid Gold Dancers modern dance maneuvers.
And while she’s seen the Sippy Cups during a matinee at Cafe du Nord and her namesake, Dolly Parton, at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, she hasn’t really seen any show-shows. You know, shows that happen after dark, with mosh pits and people in leather jackets drinking bourbon and acting cooler than they actually are. So I decided to take her to see Radio Birdman at the Great American Music Hall on Aug. 31. Why not? It was an all-ages show, I had an extra set of headphone-style ear protection left over from my days of shooting guns, and besides — she was born to rock.
As we walked down O’Farrell on the way to the show, we came to one of those sparkly sidewalks. Dolly has a rule: when there’s a sparkly sidewalk, you’ve got to dance. Doesn’t matter where you’re going or what you’re doing, sparkles equal boogie. This stretch of sparkle motion lasted half a city block and included a new move, the likes of which Britney Spears can only dream about.
“Did you see that, Dad? Did you see the DJ thing?”
She showed me again, cocking her head to the side as though holding headphones in the crook of her neck and doing an exaggerated Jam Master Jay–style zip-zip-whir scratch. I don’t know where she got it, but she’s got it.
We arrived at the hall around 9, and openers the Sermon had already played. I ran into my friend Brett from back in the day — he’d ridden his motorcycle from Denver to see Radio Birdman. It was a good night for Dolly’s first real show. Radio Birdman, who’d formed in 1974 in Sydney, Australia, broke up in 1979 and, despite occasional reformations, had never toured in the United States until now. They were in their 50s; Dolly was midway through five. The torch was about to be passed, rock ’n’ roll–style. The Black Furies came on with, “Fuckin’ fuck yeah! We’re the fuckin’ Black fuckin’ Furies from San Fran-fuckin’-cisco, motherfuckers!” I’m not sure how much Dolly caught from the balcony next to the lighting booth, where former Guardian intern K. Tighe hooked us up with the primo seats and free Cokes. Dolly’s had a few more cherries than mine, but I’m not one to hold a grudge.
Dolly had been talkin’ about rockin’ all day, from when I dropped her off at kindergarten at 10 to 8, to when her mom picked her up. We made sure she caught a nap after dinner, but it was a little shorter than planned, as she was superexcited to see the show. Halfway through the Black Furies, however, her eyelids started drooping, and she leaned into Pops, sleeping right through the Furies’ continuing flurry of fucks. I asked her if she wanted to go home, but she didn’t want to leave without accomplishing the mission.
She had a slight rally between sets. We did a little call-and-response in the bathroom:
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“Yeah!” she shouted.
“Ready to what?”
“Ready to rock!”
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. We walked around the floor for a bit, which kind of freaked her out because it was dark and there were a bunch of punker types dressed in black. Plus, when you’re five, your eyes are level with most people’s butts, which has to be a drag. Then we went outside, where we spotted another kid with shotgun earmuffs. Went back upstairs to the lighting loft. My friend Heather stopped by and tried to chat with Dolly, who looked at me and said, “I want to go home now.”
I’m not going to lie to you: I was disappointed. But not all that much, strangely enough. I mean, if it’d been a date and my date was, like, “I’m not feeling this,” I’d have said, “Here’s a 20. Catch a cab.” But I’ve seen a lot of rock bands, and none of them are as cool as my kid. I’m sure Radio Birdman will come around again in the next 30 years. We’ll see them then — and I’ll be the one to fall asleep.
It’s not about me anymore, and I find that comforting. During the first six months of Dolly’s life, I found it terrifying, depressing, and just plain weird. I no longer played the lead role in my own life. I went through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of death over that fact: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And that’s where I am now: acceptance. Not a grudging but a welcoming acceptance. Hertz may have you believe that “when you’re number two, you try harder,” but the fact of the matter is, when you’re number two, you can finally relax. SFBG
DUNCAN SCOTT DAVIDSON’S NOT QUITE TOP 10
• Radio Birdman (sort of) with Dolly, Great American Music Hall, Aug. 31
• The Melvins and Big Business, Great American Music Hall, Nov. 29. The Melvins killed rock. Rock is now dead, and all the other bands can unplug, go home, and stop pretending.
• Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and Rykarda Parasol, 12 Galaxies, Oct. 20
• Hot Mute, Hot Mute (Hot Mute)
• Easy Action, Triclops!, and Red Fang, Parkside, Nov. 10
• Viva Voce, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out (Barsuk)
• Bronx, Priestess, and Riverboat Gamblers, Independent, Jun. 24
• Bronx, The Bronx (Island)
• Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City)
• Rykarda Parasol, Our Hearts First Meet (Three Ring)
• Rocky Votolato, Makers (Barsuk)
• Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti-)
• Islands, Return to the Sea (Equator)
• Favourite Sons, Down Beside Your Beauty (Vice)
• Heartless Bastards, All This Time (Fat Possum)
A sound proposition
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There are huge, expensive, city-sponsored monuments to the arts lined up on Van Ness Avenue, opposite City Hall, and I’ve seen some of the best music in the world performed there.
The formidable San Francisco Symphony took a run at Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Davies Symphony Hall years back — a feat not dissimilar to juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle along a plank over a pit of alligators — and pulled it off with both precision and gusto. And more recently, the San Francisco Opera made me, a lifelong doubter of wobbly-voiced wailing, an instant convert. The occasion was a spectacular staging of Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s great tragedy of miscarried justice as hauntingly rendered by Benjamin Britten.
The opera and the symphony — though deriving much of their revenue from foundations, corporate sponsorships, and ticket sales — also enjoy considerable subsidization from government. According to the SF Symphony’s IRS Form 990, it received almost $800,000 in government grants in 2005 alone.
These subsidies are good, but there needs to be a lot more of them — and they need to serve all citizens of San Francisco much more effectively. It could not be said, for example, that a typical Friday night at the SF Opera is either affordable or appealing to a significant portion of the city’s residents.
And it’s certainly not true that there isn’t enough music and art in San Francisco for all its citizens. This place is bursting at the seams with creativity. You could put on a live performance by a local band or DJ crew in Justin Herman Plaza each week for a solid year and not run out of talent.
In fact, that’s not a bad idea! Why not, as a matter of city policy, support the staging of one free, live, outdoor musical performance per week year-round? We can keep it cheap. Once you bring things inside, it gets a bit expensive, stops being DIY, and starts meaning forms, insurance, and union-scale wages — all substantial barriers to entry for your local experimental jazz combo. The space would, in fact, have to be donated — not impossible, but not always likely.
So outdoors it is. Rain or shine. Bring your own PA. Do your own flyering. According to Sandy Lee of the Parks and Recreation Department, the nonprofit rate for using any outdoor musical facility is $500 for as many as 1,000 people. If you want to do one show weekly for a year, that’s $26,000 total. I’ll wager that San Francisco’s major arts funders could easily cover that annual fee through a matching grant program paid directly to Rec and Parks.
That’s a bump on a log in the world of arts funding, and such an arrangement isn’t unprecedented. San Francisco’s Hotel Tax Fund picks up the user fee for the Golden Gate Park Band, which has a regular Sunday gig April through October in the unremodeled band shell in the newly remodeled Music Concourse.
So we’re certain just about everyone will agree that more free live music outdoors would also be pretty much awesome. Now we get to program 52 weeks of free live music in San Francisco. Booking, or perhaps curating is a better term, would be done democratically, ethically, and, of course, pro bono by volunteers called up from the performance and presentation community. Local venue and club bookers, noncommercial and — ulp! — pirate radio DJs, festival programmers, musicologists, and the like. Remember, we have 52 weeks to fill, so there’s room for everyone.
At this point it’s clear that there would be hang-ups to unhang. There would be the danger of favoritism and payola in the booking — underpaid musicians and bookers are often hungry and desperate. There would definitely be aesthetic disagreements. Where, for example, will the punk and metal bands play? The thumping DJ crews? Lee noted that the department is “very sensitive” to NIMBYs opposed to amplified music.
Nevertheless, she said, the city is full of outdoor venues for amplified music, all available for the $500 nonprofit use fee. These include McLaren Park, the Civic Center, Mission Dolores Park, Union Square, Justin Herman Plaza, the Marina Green, and Washington Square. In Golden Gate Park the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival has sprawled magnificently across the Speedway, Marx, and Lindley meadows; both Reggae and Opera in the Park regularly occupy Sharon Meadow; and the band shell, a.k.a. Spreckel’s Temple of Music, is also back in action after being closed for three years during the de Young reconstruction.
“The band shell is open to any group that wants to perform there,” Lee said, and that’s a great place to start.
Get city backing for a pilot program and set up a spring-to-fall season similar to that of the Golden Gate Park Band, whose musicians are volunteers. Shoot for radical diversity in the booking to get a true cross section of the city’s ethnic, cultural, contemporary, and historic musical palette. Schedule performances opportunistically: during lunch hours downtown, at 2 p.m. on a sunny Saturday in the park. Stage local music showcases on weekends or holidays for full afternoons of free music. Pick the lively bands for fog season so folks have a reason to jump around. Switch venues each week to keep the NIMBYs off balance. And remember that commercial radio stations would have to pay the commercial user fee of $5,000 if they want to get in on the game. This will keep things focused on the grassroots.
We must create an expectation for this kind of low-cost local arts subsidy. It’s true that music and culture thrive like weeds in the cracked cement of oppression. But keep in mind that $26,000 for a year of venue-user fees for local music is 3.25 percent of the symphony’s government subsidy. The city can take an unprecedented step in support of genuinely accessible, relevant arts programming. At a time of gutted arts funding around California and the nation, San Francisco could set an example for pragmatic, affordable, nonelitist, human-scale public arts for the entire community.
The only thing stopping us is cultural elitism, NIMBYs, and acres of bureaucracy. Piece o’ cake! SFBG
JOSH WILSON’S TOP 10
•Project Soundwave’s experimental, participatory music showcase
•Godwaffle Noise Pancakes at ArtSF and beyond
•Resipiscent Records release party, Hotel Utah, Oct. 20
•Sumatran Folk Cinema and Ghosts of Isan, presented by Sublime Frequencies at Artists’ Television Access, July 14
•William Parker Quartet, Yoshi’s, May 24. Jazz wants to be free!
•Experimental music showcases staged weekly at 21Grand
•Deerhoof! Castro Theatre, April 27
•Gong Family Unconvention, the Melkweg, Amsterdam, Nov. 3–<\d>5, featuring Steve Hillage playing his first rock guitar solo since 1979, Acid Mothers Temple with the Ruins guesting on drum ’n’ bass, and local guitar superstar Josh Pollock invoking the spirit of Sonny Sharrock with Daevid Allen’s University of Errors (a truly explosive combo including ex-local DJ Michael Clare)
•Hawkwind, the same weekend as the Gong Uncon, in nearby Haarlem, full on with alien dancers, lasers in the stage fog, and Dave Brock announcing the encore: “If fuckin’ Lemmy kin play ‘Silver Machine,’ we kin fuckin’ play ‘Motörhead’!”
•Noncorporate radio in San Francisco: KUSF, KPOO, Western Addition Radio, Pirate Cat
The nu sincerity
› a&eletters@sfbg.com
James Taylor’s early-’70s status as the king of sensitive male vocalists is mere VH1 countdown fodder now. Yet in 2006, more than a few male artists seemed to have recollected being reared in Taylor’s soft rock FM heyday or at least had some of his sunny-voiced sincerity channeled down to them by sonic osmosis. I am no JT disciple — and the Isley Brothers did the best version of “Fire and Rain” (Free Ron!) — but these ears have been grateful for his example this twelvemonth because the “sensitive man” paradigm has yielded the first masterpiece of the digital age: Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere (Downtown).
To be sure, Justin Timberlake worked overtime this season to bring the sexy back, but other pop artists, as varied as the Coup’s Boots Riley, Chris Stills, and Ray LaMontagne, labored to achieve a semblance of organic authenticity in their work — King Solomon Burke went to Nashville, and even Hank III went straight to hell. While their female counterparts — go Natalie Maines, Bitch, Lily Allen, and posthumous Nina Our Lady of Myriad Reissues! — raised hell and exploited bad-girl tropes, many of the men (if not purely saccharine crooners) got raw via their interior landscapes rather than external provocation. From the Southland, see Centro-Matic’s Fort Recovery (Misra), Bobby Bare Jr.’s The Longest Meow (Bloodshot), and Sparklehorse’s Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Astralwerks) for the wide-screen, psych-twang versions of this impulse. In this, the boys of ’06 heralded the arrival of another sensitive phase in pop music.
No pop star embodied the nu sincerity more than this year’s key Grammy winner, John Legend. Exploiting the goodwill fostered by the 2005 smash hit “Ordinary People,” Legend took to the woodshed with cream collaborators — including Californian producers Craig Street, Raphael Saadiq, and will.i.am — and the result was Once Again (Sony), the autumn’s most significant release. Onstage and in personal appearances, Legend worked his charm as a nice, discreet, well-groomed church boy made good. Meanwhile, the marrow of Once Again’s song cycle dealt with cuckoldry, lust, longing, and the sorrow of life in wartime — all riding on a complex sonic bed recombining classic soul, “easy rock,” AM pop, bossa via Burt Bacharach, and the myth of the era’s leading crooner icon, Jeff Buckley. From the Buckley homage “Show Me” to the yearning cries of “Where Did My Baby Go,” Legend waxed lyrically vulnerable and rendered himself the prime man for all our seasons of discontent.
All in all, it seems no accident that Legend’s hero Marvin Gaye got key DVD reissue treatment this year: Live in Belgium 1981 and The Real Thing: In Performance 1964-1981 (featuring a heartrending live version of “What’s Goin’ On”); is he not the ever-fruitful father of all late-modern, ambitious, sensitive popcraft? And another angsty politicized black man, the Dears’ Murray Lightburn from north of the border, dropped the fine, woeful Gang of Losers (Arts and Crafts). Lightburn appeared to walk a tightrope between Morrissey and metasoul prophet Seal on “Fear Made the World Go ’Round,” “I Fell Deep,” and “Bandwagoneers” — plus the wryly scathing “Whites Only Party.”
The great New Orleans Christian rock crossover quartet Mute Math seem to be after arena glory rather than the somewhat hermetically sealed cloister Lightburn’s music suggests, but these groups share a tacit commitment to revitalizing rock’s lyrical and sonic palette.
Jonny Lang did an effective reverse of Mute Math’s sonic journey, from blues and pop rock categories to inspirational, on the uneven but great Turn Around (A&M). Lang espouses the open, clean, lighthearted benefits of living the Christian life. Mercifully, the sermonizing and sentimental treacle are kept to a minimum. Featuring guests such as new grass master Sam Bush and yacht rock’s last crowned king of soulful sincerity, Michael McDonald, Turn Around kicks Timberlake’s narrow white-negro hips to the Amen Corner and back via blazing guitar licks and true Memphis grit. Lang also goes further than any other nice guy in this gallery by letting his wife play God on “Only a Man.”
Adopting an inevitable singer-songwriter vein, considering his country-rock-confessional-chansonnier heritage, Chris Stills’s album title said it all: When the Pain Dies Down — Live in Paris (V2). Referencing Buckley’s keening as well on “Landslide” and covering Americana’s most revered purveyors of sincere music, the Band, en Français on “Fanny (The Weight),” Stills strums his way simply and soulfully into the hearts of the Studio du Palais audience and any listeners tolerant enough to separate him from his famous parentage.
On the urban front, Robin Thicke transmuted Stills’s blue-eyed soul crooning in a less twangy and more radio-friendly direction. While Beyoncé was declaring a false state of independence this fall and assuming Diana Ross’s mantle with finality, Thicke was telling the fellas you don’t always have to be hard, that thug love has had its day, on The Evolution of Robin Thicke (Interscope). Besides the boilerplate sagas of escape from music biz demigods and monsters and an interesting cod-reggae interlude (“Shooter”), Thicke strove to bring the love back instead of the sexy. And the vulnerability on display in “Would That Make U Love Me” and “Everything I Can’t Have” versus the robotic rump-shaker “Wanna Love U Girl” seems to suggest that’s more disturbing.
Even 1970s and ’80s relic Ray Parker Jr. got in on the singer-songwriter act, dropping I’m Free (Raydio) independently and attempting to bum-rush a perhaps nonexistent market for a horndog sepia Jimmy Buffett. And, up to the moment, “freak folk” pied piper Devendra Banhart and his Hairy Fairy boyz posed in dresses for the New York Times Magazine, the black-and-white images meant to invoke both old-fashioned guileless authority bootlegged from the prewar era and the liberated power of hirsute girly men brave enough to transcend gender boundaries. These New White Savages might be too bohemian to actually cook and change a diaper — yet, as with their ’70s profem forebears, they’re unafraid to let their lady muse wear the mustache in the relationship and concoct weird sonic utopias of her own.
Utopias of any kind eluded the musician refugees dispossessed by Katrina: to wit, beautiful bleeding-heart releases like The New Orleans Social Club: Sing Me Back Home (Burgundy) and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s reprise of Gaye’s antiwar masterpiece What’s Goin’ On (Shout Factory). These discs are suffused with sincere calls for peace, love, understanding, and an end to greed and environmental destruction that no listener in 2006 could refute or afford to ignore.
What’s happening, brother? Gnarls Barkley’s landmark release of St. Elsewhere in the spring encapsulated the 2006 response to Gaye’s eternal query and signaled a subtle yet seismic shift in pop possibility. Sensitive singer-songwriter, soft rock poster boy, Hip-Hop Nation troubadour — Cee-Lo was all of these personae, armed with poetic confessional lyrics and complex, distinctive melodies. Soundwise, courtesy of brilliant Danger Mouse, St. Elsewhere is a very liberated recording, trumping ATLien superstars OutKast and their problematic Idlewild (La Face) in the act of aesthetic and racial revolt. Although enigmatic and evocative lyrics abound (especially moving are the title track, “The Boogie Monster,” “Online,” and of course, “Crazy”), my favorite song is “The Last Time.” What’s more sensitive and sincere than: “Under an endless sky/ Wish I can fly away forever/ And the poetry is so pure when we are on the floor together”? (Even if nothing rivals the Chi-Lites’ twangy begging throughout the classic “Oh Girl,” surely that’s in the wings for next year?)
With all its grating and grillz, hip-hop has reached its end point and become not a revolutionary social force but a genre full of sucka MCs I cannot relate to. Cee-Lo and Boots (via Pick a Bigger Weapon’s humorous sociopolitical commentary) have taken their stands at a very crucial moment. Above all, St. Elsewhere is a vital sign of the times.
That the war and a multitude of social ills have not frozen any of the artists cited above seems miraculous. That they foregrounded introspection and personal transformation in their work rather than simply abdicated as fugitives from the turmoil of these dark days is as close as any damsel in distress is likely to get to emotional rescue in 2006. Yes, with politicians masked and callow and other art forms muted by material glut, these knights in sonic armor are just about the only effective soothsayers for the way we live now. SFBG
KANDIA CRAZY HORSE’S CRAZY TOP 10:
•Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere (Downtown)
•Solomon Burke, Nashville (Shout Factory)
•John Legend, Once Again (Sony)
•Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror (Back Porch)
•The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon (Epitaph)
•Bobby Bare Jr.’s Young Criminals Starvation League, The Longest Meow (Bloodshot)
•Dears, Gang of Losers (Arts and Crafts)
•Karen Dalton, In My Own Time (Light in the Attic)
•Cassandra Wilson, Thunderbird (Blue Note)
•Centro-Matic, Fort Recovery (Misra)
Frag the dinfo
› marke@sfbg.com
I.
Choices! You’ve got choices. And you better make them wisely. In cyberspace your tastes define you. It’s your space, your tube, your shared pod. You’re all your bandwidth allows. Be all you can feed. After that OCD-chosen primary photo, it’s all “about me.” But hit that select button carefully. Get those lists exactly right. Not too few favorites, not too many — just enough to embrace your current unique user’s criteria, to pique his or her browsing interests. You’re just one click away from rejection.
Eclecticism is the new aphrodisiac. And yet it’s a tightrope. One wrong combination of favorite musical selections and — next! The perfect come-hither “Interests: Music” DNA — one part wacky unheard-of-yet indie, one part sentimental oldies, some classic Brazilian or Afro-Caribbean, a stream of your friend’s bedroom electro, something involving damaged hair, a wild card from inner space — and voilà, instant Top Viewed. Too bad this list is copyrighted. You’ll have to get your own.
But how? How to pick and choose your nimble-footed way through the Internet audio wilderness? How to fragment the flood of dinformation into listenable chunks, to find the very perfect swells among the aural whirls that represent yourself to others? There’s just too much, it seems.
It’s a challenge that many of us face — some better than others. Already the enormous freedom of musical choice is having negative effects. Certain individuals — your friends, your coworkers, maybe even you — may be suffering from what psychologists are now calling streaming audio archival decision disorder, or SAADD. SAADD manifests itself through a combination of various symptoms: lack of updated profile, aversion to Pitchfork and Pandora, obsessive list sharing. Sometimes, victims of SAADD can disappear completely from your Friends List, deleted by a site’s inactive-user bot.
We here at Bristol-Meyers-Squibb-Def-Jam want to help. That’s why we introduced Klikemol this year, to help combat the growing number of SAADD diagnoses among the general population. Klikemol is a mild anti-agoraphobic that allows people to once again wade bravely into the streaming music marketplace and begin to reconstruct the online personality they were born to inhabit, to reach the maximum gig space in their lifePod. It also gets you high if you snort it, so at least you can post some funny shit on your Interests list. Maybe that vid of the Chihuahua on fire playing piano.
If you’ve stopped enjoying music because there’s too damn much available, maybe Klikemol is for you.
II.
“OK, fine. We give up,” the major record labels announce in a widely ignored teleconference. “We’re folding up the shop.” What were they making anyway, like a penny a download? That could hardly keep them in town cars, darlings.
Suddenly, major recording artists everywhere are left to fend for themselves. What are they to do? They could self-release, but that would put them in the same boat as their former labels: no one buys CDs anymore, and as everyone knows, recording artists need a lot of town cars. Cashing in on live performances and swag is no way out — anyone can watch their performances on cell phones for free, and unless they can project themselves back into Def Leppard, no one covets their T’s.
So they do the only thing they can and begin recording and releasing commercials. Fans don’t mind, since these artists’ songs had basically been about nothing in particular to begin with. Love, blah blah, betrayal, blah blah, I want/hate you, blah blah. In fact, the former arena acts’ embrace of well-known and emerging products in their new ditties actually gives them a fresh resonance, a contemporary sense of purpose and connection.
Soon these “jingle-singles,” called “prod-casts” in the vlogosphere, fill up iPods everywhere, and the artists walk away with affirming paychecks, courtesy of such cultural megoliths as Depends and Love’s Baby Soft. The airwaves are ads; the streets become walking commercials. The ascendancy of this new popular art form is clinched when Kelly Clarkson releases a top-downloaded iTune that packs a grillion product name checks into one helluva pop wallop — Orbitz on the verse, Go-gurt in the chorus and, at the end, a heart-stopping trademark melisma: Ri-co-laaaaa …
Ever attuned to a comic opening, “Weird Al” Yankovic releases a jingle-single for iPod itself, titled “iCod” and sung loosely to the tune of “Dear God” by the British pop group XTC. In it, a sassy urban contemporary-sounding fish (think Mo’Nique with fins) climactically links “a menu wheel, an electric eel/ Turning on its heel just to zap you in the ear” and asks humans to “save the waves and steams of Earth/ We’ll choke, if you don’t net the last of us first.” The joke here is that fish can’t sing. It becomes a top-selling ringtone and scores a coveted Googlie for Best Practice: Unique Penetration.
Have you got it yet? SFBG
MARKE B’S TOP 10 GUILTY PLEASURES
•Downy the Anti-Queen
•DJ Bus Station John’s Manhattan
•Whodat and Bugo, Housemusique, Netmusique.com
•The Cowbell Project
•Quentin Harris and Monique Bingham, “Poor People (Saxy Dub)” (Syam US)
•Leela James, “My Joy (Timmy Regisford Shelter Mix)” (Restricted Access)
•Claude VonStoke, “Beware of the Bird,” Beware of the Bird (dirty bird)
•K-Fed on The Teen Choice Awards
•Steve Reich’s 70th birthday
•Gladys Knight, “Love Is on Your Mind,” Still Together (Buddah, 1977)