It’s no suprise that lawyers for suspended Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi are calling a recent poll biased. The poll, paid for by a group of local women, many of whom have been in the forefront of the efforts to remove Mirkarimi from office, found that 61 percent of people wanted the sheriff ousted. More significant, it broke the results down for the supervisorial districts where there are contested elections; the goal, of course, was to put pressure on the supes to support the mayor’s removal efforts.
But nobody has published the actual questions in the poll — although I got a call from Greg Kamin, a San Francisco resident who was among those contacted by the robo-poll, and he said it was unusual, to say the least.
“In a normal push poll, they ask you your opinion first, then give you information to see if it changes your view,” he told me. “In this one, there was just a barrage of negative information first, before they asked a single question.”
One question went more or less like this: Which factors would most convince you the sheriff should be removed — the fact that he pled guilty to false imprisonment, the fact that the Ethics Commission ruled against him, the fact that he was involved in domestic violence, or the fact that he’s on probation?
“There was no way to answer the question that didn’t say you wanted him removed,” Kamin said.
Given the way the poll was structured, Kamin told me, “it’s surprising Mirkarimi got as much support as he did.”
Worth considering.
Also worth considering: For all the talk about domestic violence and zero tolerance and the need to remove the sheriff, there’s been very little discussion about the impacts on the people in the county jail — who are overwhelmingly African American and Latino. It makes a difference who the sheriff is. Someone who really believes in rehabilitation and wants to treat inmates in a decent, humane way can change lives — and radically improve public safety in a state with a 70 percent recidivism rate.
Again: Just something that ought to be part of the discussion.
Ours was another SUMMER OF BASS. I love it, of course — who doesn’t like their buns to get a rumblin’ in the club? As an SFer I’m spoiled with low-low riches, and have amazing access to the very first and best in post-dubstep, moombahton, trap, and spooked. And when it comes to more driving, esoteric UK bass house? Oh, I have a very special secret weapon. A very special Scottish secret weapon.
Ay, it’s DJ Deevice, aka Martin Collins, host of the excellent Gridlock radio show on Radio Valencia (www.radiovalencia.fm), 87.9 FM, Thursdays noon-2pm. The weekly playlist is a veritable feast of cheat sheet for those of us looking for the latest hypnotic bass sounds rolling out of London, Brooklyn, and other woofer-blowing capitals. Here’s his latest radio show podcast:
And here’s an excellent bouncy mix he recently put up:
I’ll be profiling Deevice in the paper next week, where you’ll learn much more about him (and listen to his show tomorrow for some great tunes!). But I wanted to post his current top 10, which doubles as a good “best of summer 2012.” I also asked him to share a couple juicy stories from his long experience as a DJ and international player, which you’ll find below.
DJ DEEVICES TOP 10 FOR SUMMER 2012
1. Makoto “Another Generation” (Apollo)
2. Om Unit “Ulysses” (Civil)
3. Ave Astra “More L (Original Mix)” (Filigran)
4. John Tejada “When All Around Is Madness” (Kompakt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCeiyz-5yk
5. Sarrass “A New Day (Original Mix)” (Third Ear)
6. Steve Huerta “Take Me Closer” (Amadeus)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzoeTy233C4
7. Ripperton, “Let’s Hope (Bicep Remix)” (Mugpie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdceMV92Yxw
8. Ghosts On Tape “Nature’s Law” (Icee Hot)
9. Volor Flex “About You” (Apollo)
10. BWANA “Baby Let Me Finish (Black Orange Juice remix)” (Somethinksounds)
>>COCKTAILS WITH STACEY
“In about 1995, I was doing a party at the Sub Club on Thursdays, a weekly house-techno night I did with another DJ, his name was Mark Ryal. And back then, we were playing pretty much everything that was coming out of Detroit and Chicago, all the stuff on Balance, Prescription, all the Ron Trent, all the Chez Damier, plus all the techno that was coming out on Underground Resistance, Robert Hood, you name it — basically if it came from Chicago or Detroit, we played it on Thursdays. It was really one of the most popular things that was happening at the the time and it was every Thursday on Jamaica Street in Glasgow.
“We were bringing in guests like Derrick May, who played a bunch of times. The Slam guys (Soma Records), Ralph Lawson, Darren Emerson, Dave Clark and Mark Broom were all playing. And then there was this one time Stacey Pullen was playing the Sub Club for the first time, on a Friday or Saturday and the management of the club asked me to take him around, shopping for vinyl for his set, since I knew all the good spots.
“It was Glasgow, and definitely not exactly the nicest day in the world. I suggested after we’d been to a couple of record stores, ‘Do you want to go get a drink?’ And we went to this place off Great Western Road — nothing special, just a typical Glasgow bar. So we went up to the bar and I asked Stacey what he wanted to drink. What you have to understand is, this was like the worst foggy day in San Francisco, but 10 times wore than that and all rainy and horrible and in Scotland. And here I was with Stacey Pullen from Detroit, the Kosmic Messenger, “Forever Monna,” etc…. in this hole-in-he-wall in Scotland on a shitty day.
“And I kid you not, he said ‘I’ll have a pina colada.’
“Needless to say he didn’t get a pina colada.”
>>BANNED FROM THE DJ BOOTH
“A couple years back, I played an all-night party, it was a friend’s birthday. We were up still and we had been partying, so a bunch of us decided to go to the End Up. It was me and maybe eight to 12 other people. We pulled up in separate cabs and I got out of my cab right in front of the End Up, and I had two bags of records with me. The door staff were really, really nice, as nice as nice could be, which really kind of shocked me a little bit.
“They were like, ‘Hey, how are you doin’?’ and asking me all these questions, ‘How’s things’ and everything. And I was, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.” And they asked me ‘Are you on your own?’ and I said, ‘No, I’ve got a bunch of people with me.’ So basically, we all just rolled in for free. And I thought, ‘That was nice of them!’
“So I’m coming in the door and going by the DJ booth, and the guy who’s spinning — this is a Saturday morning — says, ‘You’re early!’ It was only then that I realized what was going on — they thought I was the replacement DJ.
“So I answered, ‘Yeah, I suppose I’m a bit early!’ I went out on the patio and hung out with some of the people I came with and told them, ‘Hey, I’m actually going to go on in 15 minutes’ — they were stoked, and said they’d keep the party going.
“I ended up going on, played for half an hour, 45 minutes — and then the guy turned up, and he was pissed at the fact this was happening. He was late, so who cared. Basically what happened was I wasn’t banned or escorted out of the club.
“But I’m banned from the DJ booth. Not from the club — they still managed to get a lot of money from me at the bar, but I’m apparently banned from the DJ booth. For impersonation.”
We’re underway with our endorsement interviews for the November election, and I’ll be posting the full sound file of all the interviews as we finish them (and as I have time to upload them). First up: Community College Board member John Rizzo, who is running for supervisor in District 5.
Rizzo told us he has the political experience to take on the district’s, and the city’s, tough problems. Among other things, he wants to eliminate the fund that developer pay into for affordable housing and require market-rate builders to construct affordable units on site. He discussed a “scientific approach” to managing Muni and wants a closer audit of the $600 million the city gives to nonprofits providing public services every year.
Localized Appreesh is our weekly thank-you column to the musicians that make the Bay. To be considered, contact emilysavage@sfbg.com.
As is often the case these days, the Seshen grabbed attention with a video. The Bay Area band’s first official music video – for its song “Oblivion” off the self-titled LP released earlier this year – has gained more than 10,000 views since it went up in June.
The black and white clip is like a mini art film, with a fuzzy countdown clock ticking off cerebral scenes of shadowy figures, singer Lalin St. Juste in an abandoned alleyway, and close ups of blinking eyes.
And then there’s the song itself, a beat-driven pop song, with these echoing, soulful vocals, bouncy keys, and hypnotic layers of electro effects. Given all those harrowing echoes, you could picture the song (which has a sort of Little Dragon meets Erykah Badu feel) featured in horror flick, as the heroic female lead tears away from the chaos, running to safety.
This week, the Seshen plays for a good cause in Oakland: a fundraiser for the Women’s International Fund for Education (W.I.F.E).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkubxzD4gY
Year and location of origin: March of 2010 in El Cerrito, Calif. We all met or re-connected at Aki (bass player and producer)’s and his girlfriend Lalin (lead singer)’s house parties in El Cerrito. Lots of like minded musicians jamming in their basement led to the first incarnation and lineup of the Seshen.
Band name origin: Egyptian for blue lotus, a symbol of the sun and creation or rebirth. That, and it also sounds like “session”.
Band motto: In the absence of an official motto, we’d say “Roast Beef”.
Description of sound in 10 words or less: Beat driven electronic music that balances pop and abstraction.
Instrumentation: Vocals, keyboards, bass, drums, percussion and samples. Almost everybody has some kind of MIDI device or effects pedal in order to reproduce the layered electronic sounds of the studio album in a live situation.
Most recent release: Our self-titled debut dropped on February 28, 2012. It streams for free here. Best part about life as a Bay Area band: Eclectic audiences, amazing musicians, great venues, different scenes (East Bay vs. San Francisco).
Worst part about life as a Bay Area band: Trying to be heard and remembered amongst all the other awesome musicians the Bay produces.
First album ever purchased: (Aki) I think the first album I purchased was Green Day’s Dookie, which I got in the 5th grade.
Most recent album purchased/downloaded: (Aki) The last album I downloaded was TNGHT by Hudson Mohawke and Lunice.
Favorite local eatery and dish: In the year and a half it took to record the first album, we ordered the large veggie from Americana Pizza and Taqueria in San Pablo probably a million times. Honorable mention to the multiple bottles of Sriracha we topped them with.
Seshen With Fast Piece of Furniture, DJ Black Fundraiser for Women’s International Fund for Education Fri/24, 9pm, $10-$20 sliding scale Geoffrey’s Inner Circle 410 14th St., Oakl. www.wifeducation.org
Bromance was in the air Sunday night as Braid took the stage at Slim’s. The on-again, off-again band recently reunited after a seven-year hiatus just in time to play its 600th show, and the members seemed genuinely grateful for the opportunity. On the final stop of their West Coast tour, these Illinois post-hardcore trailblazers thanked their fans by playing through their beloved and influential 1998 album Frame & Canvas in its entirety.
Awash in a sea of stripes and plaid, each step in the transformation between the emo kid of yesteryear to the hipster of today was visually represented in the crowd, from checkered Vans and studded belts to highwaters and Sperrys. Slim-fitted band tees were rampant, most touting obscure bands from the early Aughts. Aside from skinny jeans and thick-rimmed glasses, the only clear unifier of the group was an air of excitement and an incredible familiarity with the slurred lyrics of Braid’s back catalog.
The overwhelmingly-male audience showed their appreciation not by singing every word back to the band as expected, but by animatedly singing them to each other. I felt as if I had stepped out of a rock concert and into a boys’ club on Nostalgia Night.
Frame & Canvas, a masterpiece of early emo, was transformed by the audience from a diatribe of love lost and anguished youth into a shout-along tribute to the glory days. What the band lacked in bravado and the audience lacked in numbers was made up for in full by earnestness, wide smiles, and an overpowering sense of camaraderie.
Mosh pits turned into group hugs, and group hugs turned into a giant circle of fans with arms draped around each other’s shoulders. The heartwarming spectacle caused singer Bob Nanna to pause and declare, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen” before jumping offstage and into the circle, where he took his time hugging audience members before jumping back onstage to finish side two of Frame & Canvas.
The feelgood mood of the night endured through Braid’s entire set without falter. Even when guitarist Chris Broach was extremely unsuccessful in his attempt to crowdsurf, his failure seemed not pathetic, but endearing. If Braid hadn’t stolen our hearts already, Broach certainly sealed the deal when he later declared with a smile, “you guys kicked LA’s ass!”
UPDATED AND CORRECTED BELOW It wasn’t surprising to read Randy Shaw’s misleading praise of Mayor Ed Lee for appointing Rodrigo Santos to the City College board. Much of Shaw’s salary comes from the city contracts that his Tenderloin Housing Clinic administers, so he has turned his Beyond Chron mouthpiece into the equivalent of Pravda in touting the party line of Lee and his supervisorial apparatchiks.
For that blind loyalty, Shaw has been handsomely rewarded. On July 31, the Board of Supervisors even approved a Lee-proposed balloon payout of $91 million to THC for its contract administering the Mayfair Hotel that was retroactive all the way back to 2009. Can anyone imagine another nonprofit that could dig so deeply into city coffers, for work that has supposedly already been done, who wasn’t giving a little something back to these ambitious politicians who sponsored it?
But apparently Shaw – who used to have some progressive credibility before so blatantly selling the movement out a couple years ago – doesn’t need to even get the facts right in his propaganda posts. When I asked him at yesterday’s Lee/Santos press conference whether and why he supported Santos – a villain in most progressive circles – he argued Santos was needed to help win support for Prop. A, the parcel tax for City College.
Shaw said the measure needed a two-thirds vote to be approved, a claim he also made in today’s piece. That didn’t sound right to me, and the Elections Department confirms that it isn’t: Prop. A needs only a simple majority to pass. [[8/23 UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Ernestine at the Department of Elections told me yesterday Prop. A needed only a simple majority, but she called back today to say she was mistaken and that it does indeed require a two-thirds vote.]] Shaw also claimed a couple weeks ago that the Board of Supervisors would delay the Mirkarimi decision until after the election, which also wasn’t true: the Charter requires the board to act within 30 days of receiving the Ethics Commission recommendations.
I sent Shaw a message asking about whether his erroneous beliefs affected his analysis, and to explain the basis for THC’s $91 million kickback, and he hasn’t responded to the questions, as usual. But when you’re a poverty pimp feeding off of political patronage, you’re probably golden as long as you get the politician praise right. Cha-ching!
A black whorl navigated by a rowboat. A luscious pair of pink lips, gaping wide. Earmuffs, a box of muffins, a crawling rodent and a wide-eyed kittycat. All at once. Such is Anthony of New York City’s intrepretation of female genitalia. Gay men draw the darndest things! Writer Shannon O’Malley and photographer Keith Wilson — the same team behind the macabre-beloved Apocalypse Cakes — have cobbled together a whimsical Tumblr of such images, donated from around the country. Plus, they invite all comers to draw vag imaginings of their own at Dolores Park Gay Beach art parties (the next one is Sept. 2, fyi.)
Why is this happening? We emailed the two to find out.
SFBG: Why are you having the gays draw vaginas?
Shannon O’Malley: I want to know what they think of vaginas. No one really knows. Sometimes gay guys say they are afraid of them. But some of them revere the vag. It’s all so complex. It’s neat to tease out all this convoluted psycho-sexual-cultural stuff through drawing. We’re collecting lots of vaginas and putting them all in a book called Gay Men Draw Vaginas, which we are self-publishing by the end of the year. We are already enthralled with the drawings we’ve collected thus far, so I can’t wait to see what the entire collection is going to look like.
Keith Wilson: As a gay myself, I wanted to see what other homos thought about the lady part that baffles us. Aside from some amazing visual insights into the vagina, it’s also led to some entertaining (and important!) conversations about the vagina versus the asshole and how one is gross but the other is to be worshipped. Sometimes they turn into heated arguments about gay men’s disrespect for women’s bodies and gay male social power blah blah blah. Awesome.
SFBG: Where have you held the drawings?
KW: I hold them between my legs.
SO: Recently, we held a mass public collection at Castro and Market one Sunday. And we’ve had one at my house. That was a party that happened to be full of a lot of guys, so I put pens and markers in front of them and asked them to whip up some vaginas. But spontaneous vag art can happen at any time, at any place.
SFBG: How would you characterize the vagina drawings you’ve seen?
SO: A lot of them attempt to visually replicate a vagina. But a minority are more conceptual. We have several dentatas. Lots of flowers. Some are on the rag.
KW: The drawings so far have been way more diverse than I thought. As we build our inventory, I see some categories of inspiration emerging: animals, Georgia O’Keefe, the all-pink palette, floral, and gestural.
No film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival festival encountered as much controversy as Craig Zobel‘s Compliance. At the first public screening, an all-out shouting match erupted, with an audience member yelling “Sundance can do better!” You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Every screening that followed was jam-packed with people hoping to experience the most shocking film at Sundance, and the film does not disappoint. (Beware: every review I have happened upon has unnecessarily spoiled major plots in the film, which is based on true events.)
Compliance aims to confront a society filled with people who are trained to follow rules without questioning them. Magnolia Pictures, which previously collaborated with Zobel on his debut film Great World of Sound (which premiered at Sundance in 2007), picked up the film for theatrical release (it comes out Fri/24 in Bay Area theaters); if you dare to check it out, prepare to be traumatized as well as intellectualized. You’ll be screaming all the way home about one of the most audacious movies of 2012 — and that’s exactly why the film is so brilliant.
San Francisco Bay Guardian I have attended Sundance since I was 11 years old, and there have been a handful of particularly volatile screenings in which audience members passed out, threw up, stormed out of the theater, or berated the filmmakers during the Q&A: Bryan Singer’s Public Access and Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog in 1993; Mary Harron’s American Psycho and Kim Ki-Duk’s The Isle in 2000; Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible in 2002; and Johan Renck’s Downloading Nancy in 2008. Now, you’ve joined the ranks of the infamous Sundance elite. Were you prepared for how vulnerable your film Compliance was going to make audience members?
Craig Zobel Absolutely not. It really caught me off guard.
SFBG People became quite angry at you at the first screening’s Q&A, correct? How did you adapt in the subsequent screenings and are you prepared for people’s reactions once the film gets released?
Zobel I did not try to make a movie just to piss people off. I’m picking movies to make that are like, “I’ve never seen anyone doing that as a movie.” If I saw this movie I’d say, “Whoa, I want to have a conversation about what that director was trying to do.”
When I was writing Compliance, I had been attached to make a studio comedy and some other things, and for one reason or another all of the other projects weren’t happening. And I wanted to make a film right [then]. Which, if you look at the landscape of independent movies that get [made] these days, they seem to have the kind of money and star caliber as a studio film. There are all these 20-something relationship films that are basically just romantic comedies. I would rather watch a romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock, who will at least give me what I want from the genre, while these other ones aren’t really satisfying to me.
So I wanted to make something that [didn’t] just feel like light entertainment.
SFBG The film seems to be taking its toll on audiences due to how relentless the experience is, though it’s not a long film at all.
Zobel I originally wanted to make the film 85 minutes. That’s what I hung on the wall. The script is 80 pages long. It ended up 90 minutes, but it has a lot of momentum that helps make the film not feel boring. I was trying to make sure that every 10 minutes a major thing would happen. We would do something once and that would be enough. We broke it down into a five-act story instead of a bigger three act structure.
SFBG The film exposes so much about each audience member that experiences it. When I saw it at Sundance, the woman sitting behind me was nervously texting every few seconds and so we all could hear her iPhone confirmation dinging over and over and over until ultimately she stromed out in a huff. The guy next to me was laughing yet fidgeting so much that the person in front of him had to tell him to stop.
You force us the audience to be stuck in the same predicament as the characters we are watching which leads me to kind of an odd question: what kind of student were you?
Zobel In high school? A good one! [Laughs.] I wasn’t the guy yelling at the teacher all the time. Maybe a little bit when I was in college but recently I was able to teach as an adjunct for a directing class at Columbia. It was really interesting and fun and I now have so much more respect and admiration for teaching. But I wasn’t that student who constantly had questions for the teacher.
SFBG I don’t think your film is trying to push people’s buttons just for the hell of it. And this is why I compared it to Psycho, not only because of the film’s intelligent yet deeply disturbing exploration of our society, but how each character is given some seriously mind-melting dilemmas. Without spoiling anything from the film, how did you pull out such haunting performances?
Zobel A lot of it was casting. And in some ways it was even easy to cast because the people who came in to the casting room were as curious about it as I was. It just made sense very quickly. All of the actors were running into situations during the shoot where they would go, “I can’t understand how this character could do this but it sounds hard and I am curious to try and think about it more.”
I think they all gave amazing performances by virtue of the fact that they were in it for the exploration. They were all fascinated with the type of story we were trying to tell and made sure to not make anything just black and white. Also, we shot more takes of a scene than I thought we ever would, not because anything was wrong, [but because after] a few takes we would say, “Well, what are the other ways or what other attitudes or possibilities can we try?” So in the editing room, we had the opportunities to dip into that one for a line here and maybe go back to the initial take.
SFBG I have read online how a few audience members are proud of walking out of the film, and it seems pretty damn ironic for people to leave before the conclusion. They literally do not want to confront or even try and figure out what it is you are attempting to explore. You’ve got philosophy behind this picture, and I feel like you’ve got an exciting future ahead.
Zobel I really appreciate that. I do know what I am trying to do next, which is a screenplay that I previously wrote; it’s very close to happening and I’m very excited about it. It’s also based on a true story — it’s about this Swedish mafia member who becomes a technology executive. I get to explore money and why people decide to devote their lives to seek that stuff.
Jesse Hawthorne Ficks teaches full-time as the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University, curates/hosts MiDNiTES FOR MANiACS, a film series that showcases underrated, overlooked and dismissed cinema in a neo-sincere way and can be contacted at: midnites4maniacs@gmail.com
“Tough decisions and reform are what City College needs at this time,” Lee said at a press conference this afternoon, calling Santos “someone who shares my vision of reform and will support the tough decisions ahead.”
Although Lee said Santos “is committed and passionate about education,” Santos hasn’t been active on education issues before running for this office. His passions seem to lie mostly with advocating for developers and opposing government regulations in front of the Planning Commission and other bodies, where he regularly testifies, and in helping fellow conservatives gain power on city boards and commissions.
“I join an institution that must be saved. I am absolutely committed to that goal,” Santos told a press conference in the Mayor’s Office. He said that he will work to “achieve consensus” around solutions to the troubled institution’s problems, while also declaring, “We must support the interim chancellor, Pamila Fisher.”
But rather than someone who seeks political compromise, Santos’ reputation is as more of polarizing and ideologically conservative firebrand who regularly criticizes government and progressives as part of the downtown alliance that includes Plan C, Committee on Jobs, Building Owners and Managers Association, the SF Chamber of Commerce, and the Board of Realtors PAC
“I actually find him to be pretty divisive in trying to work on issues at [the Department of Building Inspection],” Debra Walker, who served with Santos on the Building Inspection Commission. “He always seems to come into a situation attacking and I hope he doesn’t bring that to this board.”
Walker, a longtime progressive activist and former supervisorial candidate, said that she and her political allies have long endured nasty attacks from Santos and his CRG bretheren.
“They spend all of their time attacking progressives and he gets pretty intense about attacking rather than working with people,” she said. “CRG is about getting people elected who are conservative, that’s their whole reason for existence, perpetuating the real estate industry’s impact of city policies, which has had a negative impact on the middle class.”
Asked about that reputation by the Guardian, both Lee and Santos denied it and refused to answer follow-up questions. Santos said CRG has a “diverse membership” and told us, “I don’t know why you would cast that as polarizing.”
Yet its board is made up almost exclusively of real estate and development interests who have shown themselves to be politically ambitious, winning key mayoral appointments to the Building Inspection and Small Business commissions and working with mayoral staffers to hold onto key leadership positions, edging out supervisorial appointees in the process.
Sup. John Avalos, who was targeted by a CRG independent expenditure campaign in 2008, said that he researched Santos’ background on education issues and was a little surprised not to find anything. “More than anything, the appointment says more about Lee’s pro business leanings,” Avalos told us.
It was also telling that Lee included two of the most conservative CCSF trustees in his press conference, Natalie Berg and Anita Grier, but that more liberal trustees Chris Jackson and John Rizzo were neither consulted nor notified directly about the appointment. “I’m sorry the mayor didn’t involve us more or let us know,” Rizzo told us.
While Rizzo didn’t endorse Santos – instead backing Jackson, Steve Ngo, and Rafael Mandelman (who Rizzo said “really does have the best interests of the district at heart”) – he didn’t want to offer an opinion on Santos, saying that he wants to work constructively with him to solve the district’s problems: “I welcome him to the board and hope he will welcome the work we’ve been doing.”
Santos told reporters that he starts every work day with an “open house” at his office from 5:20-8am, discussing various issues with anyone who wants to stop by, before getting into his engineering and administrative work for his firm, Santos & Urrutia. “I will bring that same commitment to City College,” he pledged.
A few good bills have emerged from the madness of the end of the Legislative session in Sacramento — including measures by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and Sen. Leland Yee — and now we have to wait for the governor, who isn’t thinking much beyond Prop. 30.
Jerry’s always odd and unpredictable, but this year, I’m told, he’s focused almost entirely on getting his tax measure approved. He’s told everyone in the state how much everything will suck if we don’t vote Yes, and he’s made it something of a referendum on his leadership. If it goes down, he’s facing almost unthinkable cuts to education and public services — cuts that will make him hugely unpopular. When class sizes go up and UC rejects qualified students and cops get laid off, the voters won’t blame themselves for rejecting Prop. 30; they’ll blame the guv. And Jerry knows it.
So he’s gone all in on this one — and he’s viewing everything he does, including every bill he might sign, through that lens.
Which leaves some very worth legislation up in the air — or rather, since it’s Jerry Brown, up in the ozone.
Ammiano managed to win approval for a measure that would allow the news media to interview inmates in state prisons — something that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has blocked since 1996. Right now, the only way reporters get access to the inside of prisons is on special tours that CDCR sets up — and the jailers get to decide which “random” inmates can talk to the press. It’s pretty basic — In San Francisco, the Sheriff’s Department allows reporters to talk to any prisoner who consents to an interview, and nothing bad has happened. We spend so many billions of dollars on prisons, and we know so little about where it goes. Even the prison guard’s union (Jerry’s BFFs) supports this. Jerry? Who knows.
Another Ammiano bill, AB 889, would require that domestic workers (people who do child care, housecleaning etc.) get basic labor rights, including lunch breaks and overtime. Seems like a no-brainer (and no, it doesn’t apply to your casual high-school babysitter). Lots of support, and it’s hard to see what this has to do with tax policy, but nobody’s sure about the guv.
And everyone’s really unsure what will happen with Sen. Leland Yee’s latest attempt to give juveniles who are sentenced to life without parole at least some opportunity to get out of prison before they die. SB 9 is pretty moderate — it states that a person convicted of a crime as a youth who has already served 15 (FIFTEEN) years can petition a court to reduce the sentence to 25 (TWENTY FIVE) years. Nobody’s getting out without serving some long, hard time, but since someone who is an accessory to murder at 15 almost certainly doesn’t have the brain development of an adult, and no other industrialized nation in the world allows LWOP for anyone under 18, and since there are only 300 people in the who state prison system who would be eligible for sentence changes under this law, I can’t imagine anyone opposing it. Seriously, Jerry. Can you veto something like this? The Jesuits would go batty.
Workers at Castlewood Country Club in Pleasanton, represented by UNITE HERE Local 2850, received a favorable decision from Administrative Law Judge Clifford Anderson of the National Labor Relations Board on Monday. He found that the club owes all 61 union workers two years of back pay– and their jobs back.
“For the workers it feels like a relief to be believed in some way,” said Local 2850 organizer Sarah Norr. “The workers have been saying for two years that Castlewood was not really trying to reach a compromise.”
The food service workers and janitors of Local 2850 at Castlewood haven’t worked in two years. Instead, they picket the club and march. But they’re not on strike– they would love to go back to work. They’re on lockout.
In Feb. 2010, the club tried to hike up their health care costs, significantly increase the hours per week that would be considered full-time, and cut pay. After heated negotiations, the club refused to allow workers to return to their jobs and hired non-union replacements.
Negotiations have continued since, but according to Norr, they haven’t been productive. In Aug. 2010 the management presented a new set of proposals, which Norr called worst than the first. It would have allowed for the club to keep on the temporary workers that had replaced the union workers during the lockout and do away with seniority in scheduling and layoffs, as well as allowed for increased subcontracting. That was when the union filed a complaint with the NLRB.
In Aug. 2011, the General Counsel of the NLRB issued a decision that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Castlewood for violating federal labor law. After hearing nine days of testimony for various stakeholders on both sides, Judge Anderson ruled that the alleged violations had occured.
He found that the lockout was illegal, and recommended that the NLRB order Castlewood to reinstate the locked-out workers and pay them two years of back wages and benefits.
Jerry Olson, Castlewood Country Club’s general manager, told us that the club hasn’t decided yet if they will be complying with the judge’s order.
“We just received the ruling today in the mail, and we’re considering all our options,” Olson said Aug. 21. “We certainly respect the administrative law judge.”
“We were surprised,” said Olson. “We expected to win the case.”
“It’s important for folks to understand that this doesn’t guarantee that its all over,” Norr said. “Castlewood does have the option of asking for a review of the case from the NLRB in Washington, DC.” Such a review could take years, prolonging the lockout but also increasing the amount of back pay the club would need to pay if they lose.
Workers plan to picket the club Aug. 22 at 5pm, celebrating their victory and demanding that the club comply.
“We’re thrilled about the decision, but we know we could still have a long fight in front of us,” said Castlewood janitor Francisca Carranza in a press release. “We’ll be here for as long as it takes to get our jobs back and win a fair contract with health care for our kids. We know people in the community will stand behind us, just like they always have over the past two years.”
Here are a few highlights in photos of another SF Chefs, San Francisco’s food, wine, spirits “classic” (aka week-long festival in tented Union Square), a whirlwind of excellent bites, drinks, wine, demos, and parties.
There are highpoints every year, but no party has yet been as memorable as this year’s Late Night Cocktail Adventure/Campari after party on Saturday, August 4. The Redwood Room at the Clift Hotel was as magical as it was meant to be outfitted for the South Seas by way of Milan with Afrolicious providing the addictive, live reggae-funk soundtrack of the evening we couldn’t stop dancing to. Drinks were high-caliber, including a brilliant rum and passion fruit punch by Steven Liles (Smuggler’s Cove), and rum, coconut milk, and kaffir lime beauty by Brooke Arthur (formerly of Wo Hing, now House Spirits’ Director of On Premise Outreach and Education).
It wasn’t too long ago that shopping locally meant hitting up your neighborhood Safeway. But seemingly overnight (in retrospect), farmers markets sprung up like healthy tomato plants. A weekend doesn’t go by during which I don’t see someone toting their re-usable canvas bag down the street to fill up with fresh produce from local growers.
This is just one sign of a big revolution that is happening in the food world. Having visited night markets across the globe, from Taiwan to Morocco, I’ve always wondered when the States would figure out their own version of these late-night-snack shindigs. Lo and behold, this weekend night markets hit our soil. The Street Food Festival hosted its first night market to eager eaters on Friday the 17th at the Alemany Farmers’ Market. The happily matched location housed live music, dancers, hot toddies (a useful weapon for battling the chilly evening fog) and of course, delicious street food. Night markets often highlight grilled meats and one-bite-wonders for foodies who want a little taste of it all. This night was no different, with a food-filled dream of delicious dumplings, tiny tacos, and pork sandwiches sprinkled with chicharones. The greasier, the better, thank you very much!
It wasn’t until I was lying on an office park lawn just south of Jack London Square yesterday, staring back at the Transamerica Pyramid-studded fog bank that currently consitutes our city, that I could acknowledge that Seasonal Affective Disorder is effectively ruining my life and most likely, everyone else’s in San Francisco these weeks.
Thankfully, that epiphany was quickly followed by a visit to the antidote, the Post-Car Travel Agency. It’s easy for city-dwellers to forget, but it is possible to access sunshine, san automobile, whenever one has the saddlebags to do so. The pop-up agency has popped up on Shotwell Street at the Storefront Lab, where it will be offering bike trip planning know-how, way-flash pannier bags in Bay-inspired colorways handmade by Seattle’s Swift Industries, more park guides than you can shake a stick at, and a photo show by Eric Jensen everyday through Fri/24. They also had PBR on my trip to the shop’s daily happy hour from 6-9pm yesterday, because any good bike tourist knows malty beverages make the road less rough.
Pardon the pun, but the shop is geared towards beginners. “There’s some people who need help getting into this,” says Post-Car tour agent Kelly Gregory, who along with Kristin Saunders applied to Yosh Asato and David Baker when they learned of the couple’s plans to open an experiment in neighborhood storefronts on Shotwell. The Agency is the space’s second tenant (there will be eight total), after Deep Craft Atelier and its handmade longboards. The idea was based on the Post-Car Press guidebooks written by Gregory and Justin Eichenlaub, which we profiled in last year’s Summer Guide.
So what did I find to remedy my fog hangover at the shop? Four ready-made bike trips, each encapsulated in a helpful brochure and neatly displayed next to a steed that would be perfect for the adventure. My personal favorite was the 106-mile “Big Sur to Boot Camp” trip, whose pamphlet included information on public transit to and from the Big Sur area, directions to nearby hot springs, local foraging tips, and notes on the Fost Hunter Ligget Hacienda, a guesthouse ($50 for the “cowboy room”) located inside an active military base that has both a bar and a bowling alley on premise.
Other trips included “The Lush,” a mosey about East Bay wineries, a trek between Tahoe and Yosemite, and “The Down and Dirty,” which takes riders over Planet of the Apes Road (yesterday’s Highway 1, and a convenient option for those looking to dodge the nasty, shoulder-lite bits of that particular thoroughfare) to Half Moon Bay. Each $10 brochure includes a helpful packing list, map, and info on rad side trips for those looking for the scenic route. Combine a trip guide with a PCTA patch and Swift Industries tool roll for $37, the so-called “Tender Spoke Getaway.”
All you need to get started, really. For those looking not just for biking tips but biking buddies to boot, the women of Post-Car Travel Agency will be leading a group ride to Samuel P. Taylor Park (and it’s bike-in campsites tucked beneath massive redwood trees) on Sat/25. The four-hour, 30-mile ride will be just great for breaking out of this dismal cloud cover.
Post-Car Travel Agency at StoreFrontLab
Open 6-9pm through Fri/24; ride to Samuel P. Taylor State Park departs Sat/25, 2pm
There have been a lot of really stupid members of the esteemed House of Representatives and the United States Senate. I’m talking real morons here — not just people who are dumb because they disagree with me and I’m always right. In fact, there are quite a few before Todd Akin who have promoted the Magical Vagina Power theory that says women who are raped can’t get pregnant. Jezebel has a handy-dandy guide here.
(The guide also notes the insanity of distinguishing “legitimate rape” from … what? Sorta, kinda rape? Is that like being a little bit pregnant — which might be what happens from a little bit of rape? Seriously?)
There’s a nice list here of the ten dumbest members of Congress, but a lot of that’s political: Rand Paul bellieves a lot of stupid things, but he’s not dumb. Not like Akin.
Counterpunch gave the honor to Rick Santorum, a “vacuous boob.”
Esquire lists the worst members of Congress, but they aren’t all dumb. Some are just, you know, crooks, liars, and sleazeballs.
We could go on — and all of these lists are current. Go back a few years and you’ll find plenty more.
So help me out here — is Akin the dumbest Congressman ever? (There have no doubt been dumb Congresswomen, but I think in this category the guys have it.) Who else belongs on the list?
Local sludge-metal duo Black Cobra just released its first video off last year’s Invernal. The video for “Crimson Blade,” which is mostly based in ominous shadows with snippets of the story flashing along with the beat, was directed by Greg Downing, of San Francisco bands Glitter Wizard and Buffalo Tooth.
Conceptualized by the band and Downing, the video is centered around a man as he “devolves to a previous state of humanity and resorts to cannibalism in a post-apocalyptic world.” During filming, the actor Landon Bates accidentally cut himself, so yes, that blood is real.
Remy Charlip was born on January 10, 1929 in Brooklyn, NY. He died on August 14, 2012 in San Francisco. The following windy Sunday afternoon, he was lowered into the bone-dry ground on one of the ridges of Marin’s Mount Tamalpais. His woven wicker casket had been blanketed with earth, flowers, and farewells. A solitary hawk circled overhead as soft chanting wafted across the valley. He would have loved it.
Remy took with him over 60 years of making poetry in dance, writing, drawing, painting, and theater. When he moved to San Francisco in 1989, he had a major part of his life behind him with untold accolades and honors. He had helped shape the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Living Theater, the Paper Bag Players, and the National Theater of the Deaf. For decades he had choreographed, designed, performed, and directed for theater and dance, and he had become a much beloved author of some extraordinarily inventive books for children that respected their individuality and enlarged their imaginations.
He also had created over 100 of what he has become best known for in dance: Air Mail Dances, in which a performer follows a sequence of images but individually realizes the transitions between them. When choreographers die, often their works die with them. Remy’s Air Mail Dances won’t. Perfectionist in everything that he was, he set them up strongly and then he set them free. He gave them a life of their own.
In the Bay Area — though he would have smiled at this label — he quickly became an older statesman for a generation of dancers, much younger, very different from him and each other, such as Krissy Keefer, Anne Bluethenthal, Jules Beckman, and Keith Hennessy. For Oakland Ballet he choreographed a charmer, Ludwig and Lou, an homage to composer and former partner Lou Harrison. He watched over and delighted in the performance of some of his Air Mail Dances by, among others, Joanna Haigood, June Watanabe, and AXIS Dance Company.
As a performer he thrilled us in Meditation — a simple dance of walks, turns, and stretches — to what must be the gooiest of concert pieces from Massenet’s opera, Thais. But perhaps he reached the pinnacle of his performance career in 2001 when in A Moveable Feast, on a commission from the Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival, he was carried, swooped, and sailed across Z Space in the arms of a bevy of nude male dancers. It was his idea of heaven. And to boot, as music he had chosen the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Perhaps most remarkable about Remy was his gentle spirit and sense of wonder. He was deeply living in this world and yet he wasn’t. How was it, we kept wondering, that an artist and a man, of yes, extraordinary accomplishments, but also much pain, rejection and losses, could keep his spirit so buoyant, generous, and uncontaminated? When he received the Guardian’s Lifetime Achievement Goldie in 2001, he said (as he often did), “I feel that my work includes all the elements I practice.” At the core of his being Remy knew exactly who he was. It kept him in the world and out of it.
This is not a drill, film fans: Paul Thomas Anderson’s highly anticipated new film, The Master, will be screening at the Castro tomorrow night. In 70mm. Not gonna lie: as soon as word of similar “surprise” screenings in other cities (Chicago, Los Angeles), I was crossing my fingers and toes that we’d get one here. Especially since not everyone can make it to the various film festivals where it’s been programmed (Venice, Toronto) … and The Master‘s theatrical release isn’t until Sept. 21 in the Bay Area.
Get thee to TicketWeb now and spend $10 (plus the expected fees and whatnot) to benefit the Film Foundation. The Castro is a huge theater, but film nerds are gonna be all over this one. Like me, for instance. There will be popcorn!
On one end of the spectrum, there are the exquisite singer-songwriters such as Eleni Mandell and Dana Falconberry; on the other end, there’s massive metal mayhem aboard the USS Hornet, at an event dubbed Slaughter by the Water. And then there are the Go-Going-Gone Girls, go-go dancing in between the disparate acts.
Let your mood ring guide you this week. Here are your must-see Bay Area concerts this week/end:
Dana Falconberry Texas-based singer-songwriter Dana Falconberry just premiered a new video for the lush orchestral folk-pop track “Lake Charlevoix,” off her forthcoming Antenna Farm Records LP, Leelanau. And then there’s her pinch-your-cheeks cute ditty “Petoskey Stone.” If all the tracks are this dreamy, and wide-eyed innocent in nature, Leelanau could just be the soundtrack of fall. With Emily Jane White, Night Hikes Tue/21, 9pm, $8 Hemlock Tavern 1131 Polk, SF (415) 923-0923 www.hemlocktavern.com http://vimeo.com/46158541
Night Beats So-called masters of the “perfect three-minute” pop song, Seattle’s Night Beats go further and fuzzier than traditional pop purists, and layer on psychedelic guitar work, a lo-fi garage aesthetic, plenty of reverb, and bluesy soul (a la former tourmates, the Black Lips) – making a sound that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hunter S. Thompson-created drug trip. With Terry Malts Thu/23, 9pm, $7 Thee Parkside 1600 17th St., SF (415) 252-1330 www.theeparkside.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQwu3EmaJ3k
Eleni Mandell Eleni Mandell is another singer-songwriter (recently described as “honey-throated) with sophisticated arrangements, though her insouciant persona is deeply rooted in the warm asphalt and beachy breezes of Los Angeles. While she’s known for a gentle and laid-back approach, she recently gained more responsibility. Her eighth and most recent album, I Can See the Future, is an ode to her experiences picking out a sperm donor and giving birth to twins, solo. Thu/23, 8pm, $14 Café Du Nord 2170 Market, SF (415) 861-5016 www.cafedunord.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cH_ELG2Obw
The Very Best “The Very Best’s latest album MTMTMK represents the first time the band recorded as a duo, following the departure of original member, Parisian producer Etienne Tron. If anything, Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and London-based producer Johan Hugo have turned up the intensity, setting an uplifting tone throughout the album. Mwamwaya alternates between English and his native Chewan, and his ascending vocals provide a sharp contrast to Hugo’s quick and bass-heavy club beats.” — Kevin Lee With Seye, Palner, Miles the DJ Fri/24, 9pm, $15 Mezzanine 444 Jessie, SF (415) 625-8880 www.mezzaninesf.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE7c0WYIAJs
Slow Club Here’s one surefire way to get eyeballs on your music video: nab Harry Potter to star in it and to lip-sync along to your soulful harmonies. The charming (non-obnoxious) boy-girl British indie pop duo knows how to cause a stir. Side note: Slow Club is also one of two bands on this list (the other being the Very Best) that is playing the totally sold-out “Gentlemen of the Road Stopover” in Monterey this weekend. So, lucky us. We get ’em first and there are still tickets available at press time. With Echo Twin Fri/24, 7:30pm, $10-$13 Brick and Mortar Music Hall 1710 Mission, SF (415) 371-1631 www.brickandmortarmusic.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0tTp25txOE
Slaughter by the Water “Hosted by Testament’s Chuck Billy, Slaughter By The Water 3 features Bay Area thrash legends Exodus, along with Autopsy, Impaled, Philm, Fog of War, Severed Fifth and more, all performing on the USS Hornet, a World War II era aircraft carrier that is now a museum in Alameda.” — Sean McCourt Sat/25 Pier Stage: noon-9pm, free Main Stage: 5:30-12:30am, $35–$45 USS Hornet 707 W. Hornet Ave., Pier 3, Alameda www.slaughterbythewater.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u95JTXzyHyA
Go-Going-Gone Girls, the Boars, and the Aquamen It’s hard to beat a raucous 1960s-esque girl group with matching outfits, high hair, and noisy garage-punk fits (backed by guitarist Klaus Flouride of Dead Kennedys fame). But if anyone can raise the bar to threat level chaos, it’s likely primal surf rock’n’rollers, the Aquamen or ”’60s-style frat rockers” the Boars. Let this be a battle to the head-banging, hip-swiveling death. Sat/25, 10pm, $7 El Rio 3158 Mission, SF (415) 282-3325 www.elriosf.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFRlARZ2zfg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c4uniNLNF0
I read Player Piano in high school, when all of us were suburban kids were discovering Vonnegut. (We were also discovering Herman Hesse, for reasons I will never understand, and we talked about Slaughterhouse Five and The Glass Bead Game as if we were some sort of intellectuals. I read a couple of the Hesse books and found them dry and pointless. I loved Vonnegut, particularly God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.)
At any rate, even in the 1970s, Player Piano didn’t seem that far away, and it was one of the formative books of my crazy political consciouness of the time, and it got me thinking, years later, about unemployment. When I was first out in San Francisco, all of my friends were busy — and not many of them were working for pay at a traditional job. And I thought, as the nation went into a deep recession and everyone talked about creating jobs, that what people really needed was money, not jobs. For almost everyone I knew — people involved in politics and art and theater and writing and troublemaking — a job was just a way to pay the rent. And if we didn’t have to work to make ends meet, so much the better. We all had a lot to do, much of which would never earn us any money; get rid of the damn jobs and we could do it all a lot better.
Yes, as Vonnegut made very clear, people got, and get, a lot of their self-worth from what they do for a living, particularly if it’s skilled work. But maybe that’s not the way it always ought to be — particularly if the day when robots take over almost all manufacturing is rapidly approaching.
The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.” In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.
The “debate” can go on as long as you want, but the reality is that a lot of what we now call “work” will soon be done by machines — sooner than a lot of us think — and that will mean, if nothing else changes, a nightmarish society where the gap between the rich and poor is even worse and the middle class is in a free-fall collapse. Consider:
In one example, a robotic manufacturing system initially cost $250,000 and replaced two machine operators, each earning $50,000 a year. Over the 15-year life of the system, the machines yielded $3.5 million in labor and productivity savings.
So who gets that $3.5 million? Not to be all Marxist or anything, (heaven forbid), but right now, under modern industrial capitalism, none of it goes to the displaced workers. In theory, the robots could allow them to do something else with their lives — teach, or mentor kids, or paint, or learn to speak a couple new languages, or build a new house to retire in, or whatever. The robots don’t need to be paid, and that “productivity savings” could go directly to the wealth of society as a whole, making life better for all of us. But it won’t — the whole $3.5 million is kept by the factory owner, and the displaced worker gets nothing — except depression, a lower standard of living, and the opportunity to scramble for a job that takes less skill and pays less.
If we’re going to survive as a stable society, two things are going to have to happen. We’re going to have to accept that “work” in the traditional sense is not going to be the only, or even main, source of people’s income — and that’s okay. And the only way that’s going to work is if we mandate that the saving from more efficient technology go to everyone, not just the elite.
Pretty radical shit, huh? I must be out of my mind. Kind of like that ol’ Commie Kurt was in 1952, when he saw this coming.
Though he never achieved the critical-darling status of his Oscar-nominated brother Ridley, Tony Scott’s contributions to that most entertaining of movie genres, the popcorn blockbuster, cannot be overstated (unsuprisingly, many of his films were produced by the like-minded Jerry Bruckheimer). Herewith, a tribute in trailers. Explosions ahoy!
The Hunger (1983): vampires David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve sink their fangs into ingenue Susan Sarandon. “A modern classic of perverse fear” (and sunglasses. So many sunglasses … so awesomely ’80s).
Top Gun (1986): Speaking of awesomely ’80s, do you feel the need … the need for speed?
Days of Thunder (1990): This is the movie where Tom Cruise (as a NASCAR driver named … Cole Trickle) met Nicole Kidman (playing … a brain surgeon). Plus, Robert Duvall as The Gruff Trainer/Coach Dude Who Makes All The Inspirational Speeches.
True Romance (1993): Scott directs hot new thang Quentin Tarantino’s gritty script about lovers on the run (Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, never better), now a classic. A highly enjoyable, highly imitated example of edgy 1990s style, with a killer supporting cast. (Brad Pitt playing a couch-dwelling stoner at the height of his early hunk-dom = brilliant.)
Crimson Tide (1995): Speaking of QT, Scott’s hugely successful submarine thriller (starring Denzel Washington, who would go on to star in many more Scott films) featured uncredited script-doctoring by the then-hottest talent in Hollywood. Gene Hackman is the other lead. Also, nukes! Missile keys! Mutiny!
Enemy of the State (1998): Hackman returns in this Will Smith vehicle. Smith was post-Men in Black (yeah!) but pre-Wild Wild West (noooo!). Contains the ultimate action-movie line: “You’re either incredibly smart, or incredibly stupid.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dvvLzNC3hE
Man on Fire (2004): Washington again, as bodyguard to precocious kidnap risk Dakota Fanning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s_-O4HglGI
Deja Vu (2006): Washington yet again, in maybe Scott’s most mind-bendy movie. The government totally has time-travel technology, y’all.
The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009): Denzel returns, this time in a remake of the 1974 subway thriller, with John Travolta as the baddie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIYGrhXg0aI
Unstoppable (2010): Scott’s last completed film stars, yes, Denzel, and Chris Pine as hero conductors tasked with stopping a runaway train (which is actually A MISSILE THE SIZE OF THE CHRYSLER BUILDING!)
Ok, and just for fun: 1991’s The Last Boy Scout (early-period Bruce Willis FTW) and 1987’s Beverly Hills Cop II. RIP Tony Scott.
The building where activists, some from Occupy Oakland, created a free library and garden August 13 was raided by police that night. But that was Monday, this is Friday– and the Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez, or People’s Library, is still in full form.
The books and garden have moved from the building, which was built in 1918 in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, to the sidewalk. But it’s still a lively scene. Books are shelved the block in front of the old library’s entrace, and around the corner participants have built gadren beds. In the sidewalk library and garden, children browse books, play chess, dig holes for seeds, water plants, ride bikes and scooters, and casually work on the fence around the building with pliers.
The building at 1449 Miller was donated to the city of Oakland as part of a grant from Andrew Carnegie, and functioned as a library until 1979. It was one of eight libraries closed by the City Librarian following the passage of Prop 13, according to Harry Hamilton, City of Oakland public information officer. It was subsequently used for the Emiliano Zapata Street Academy, an alternative high school that now operates on 29th street. It was owned by the Oakland Redevelopment Agency, whose members allocated money to it in their 2005 five-year plan, but no redevelopment of the building had begun when redevelopment agencies across California were dissolved last fall. It is now owned by the the Redevelopment Successor Agency housed within the City of Oakland’s Office of Neighborhood Investment, and, for all official purposes, remains vacant.
On Monday morning, activists entered the building, intent to revitalize it themselves. Empty wooden bookshelves covered the walls, and the floor was strewn with trash. A few mattresses indicated that the officially vacant building certainly hasn’t been.
Those building the People’s Library brought in brooms, sponges and trashbags. A few hours later, the place was cleaned up and hundreds of donated books lined the long-empty shelves. Neighbors came in through the open doors, helping to clean, checking out books, and reading to their kids. In the backyard, kids and adults built raised beds and started planting in them.
At 6:30, there was a potluck and a poetry reading. Most families had wandered off by 10pm. At 11:30, about a dozen people remained. That’s when 80 police arrived, blocked off the street for two blocks in all directions, and told them that they had 15 minutes to gather their books and exit the building, or risk arrest.
The creators of the Victor Martinez People’s Library did as they were told. But they didn’t go far. The next morning, they set up the library again, this time on the sidewalk outside the now-boarded up building. The kids and families came back. Police did, too, but they stayed in cars on corners around the building, watching.
Now, it’s been a week, and what organizer Jaime Yassin calls “the only 24-hour library in the US” is still here.
“That was on their agenda, at some point, to do this. What the people are doing now,” said Emji Spero, a poet who heard about the action from people invovled in Monday’s poetry reading. “But instead, they’re spending money on police to come shut it down. Someone said to me, I can see the dollar signs floating off the police cars as they run their engines.”
“This is the social reform that the city is supposed to be doing,” said Khalid Shakur, another Oakland resident who was involved in setting up the library.
On Wednesday Yassin, who had been researching the building’s history, sat down with me on a couch by the library. He explained that the clean sidewalk where the couch now sits was an unofficial garbage dump days earlier, covered in old clothes, drug paraphenalia, and other trash.
Yassin showed me a 2005 report from the Urban Ecology 23rd Avenue Working Group. the plan, a result of focus groups and surveys of people in the neighborhood of the People’s Library, includes a plan to “rehabilitate Miller Library” as a top priority for beneficial development in the neighborhood.
“Renovation, however, will be expensive and require the city’s help,” the report reads. “the city-owned library needs seismic reinforcement, repair to flood damage, asbestos removal and handicap accesibility improvements.”
As I spoke with Yassin, a 10-year-old who had been gardening and playing on the sidewalk scooted up. He handed some scissors, just retrieved from his home a block away, to one of the people making signs to organize the library.
“I never saw nobody use it using it since I got here,” he said when I asked him about the building.
“I liked it when you guys came,” he added to Yassin, smiling, before racing off on his scooter.
Juan Delgadillo, who owns Plaza Automotive, a business across the street from the library, said he plans to borrow some books from the People’s Library. “It’s a very good idea,” said Delgadillo. “I support it.”
The group has been holding nightly potlucks, and is planning to host a community barbecue tomorrow (August 18) at 2pm.
